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The Book is Out!

It finally happened. After a lifetime of writing nonsense, I finally managed to focus for long enough to write a whole book. It’s still nonsense, and looks like no other book you’ve ever seen in your life…but I love it.

rum run 1

It’s based on the characters and island invented by Darrell Thorpe of Death By Heroism and The Happy Ghetto. To try and explain his ideas to the rest of the world, I dropped one of my creations from my own world onto Darrell’s island and make him write a log book about his time.

Now, thanks entirely to your pledges and donations, A Rum Run Awry has been funded and printed!

YOU CAN BUY IT BY CLICKING RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW!

I really can’t say thank you enough. Without your support, we genuinely wouldn’t have been able to print it. Our publisher went bust and all the other publishers who were interested wanted to own the copyright to the whole thing…

“We want all the benefits and prestige of having creating something new, without actually having to create anything new. You know…by buying the right to pretend we did something. Is that cool with you?”

No. Fuck off. The ‘fact’ that this is just “the way things are done” is disgusting to me on every possible level.

For all other publishers, this book was too epic. They just didn’t know what to do with it, or how to even categorise it. It’s fiction, sure, but it’s a novel’s-worth of words combined with a graphic-novel’s-worth of illustrations.

Every single one of the 300 pages looks completely different because they’ve all been individually typeset, laid out and hand-illustrated:

A Rum Run Awry Book 2

So it’s…a picture book? For who? Adults? Kids? For adults to read to kids?

Publishers seemed to believe we created this book to make money. They thought we had a target audience, or some kind of ‘plan’. Of course we didn’t. We did this for fun, because we loved doing it. It isn’t ‘aimed’ at anybody – it’s a fucking book.

So, in short, we annoyed the people in suits and had to print it ourselves – a very expensive and stressful experience. Thanks to you lot, however, it has been totally worth it!

The book is available to buy right now on our shop – just click here to whizz there.

The official description goes something like this:

Mythical adventurer, Alexander McCuba, is a burly, bearded, simple-minded man of the Guild of Adventurers. Whilst on a prestigious quest to harvest the rum of the Great Extravaganza, he attempts to fight the sea – and ends up marooned on a mysterious island.

A Rum Run Awry is McCuba’s personal diary from the island. Entry by hilarious entry, it documents his baffling experiences with the curious inhabitants of the land, their bizarre customs and his own struggles with homesickness, madness and lack-of-rum…ness.

The log book has been printed exactly as it was found, complete with all McCuba’s scribbles, sketches and stains, plus a hundred pages of glorious vibrant illustrations that immerse us in his technicolour adventure. Some pages are detailed descriptions of the new world around him; others are manic scrawls across the pages – the rantings of a man losing his mind.

This is the first time such a diary has been made publically available, and it is easy to see why. It takes a brave person to strike out into a new land; it takes an even braver person to try and understand the workings of a mind like Alexander McCuba. This isn’t a book, it’s a quest

Thanks again for giving our collective madness an outlet. Without you, we would have probably exploded.

p.s. for those who are confused, Death By Heroism is my collaborative studio with Daz. Tada!

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