Find biographies of current Engine Comics contributors below.
NORRIS BURROUGHS- Artist/Writer: VOODOO MACBETH
Norris Burroughs was born in Harlem, New York in 1952. He grew up in the North East Bronx, which when he was a boy was an ethnically mixed neighbourhood, mostly Italian, Irish and Jewish. In 1967, he returned to Harlem to attend the High School of Music and Art as an Art student, at a time when all sorts of political and social revolutionary stuff was happening at the nearby City College campus.
Upon graduating, he moved to Manhattan and started hanging out in Greenwich Village, working as an artist and musician. His primary hangout was a club called Max’s Kansas City, witnessing the birth of Punk led by the New York Dolls, which Malcolm McLaren strip mined to create the Sex Pistols. Then it was on to the mid Seventies at CBGB’s with more seminal Punk beginnings ala The Ramones, Television and Blondie. In 1979, he dated a hungry modern dance student named Madonna Ciccone. Upon breaking up with her, he became ensared in her myth, when he introduced her to the guy that was to form her first band.
Norris continued to work as a freelance illustrator and played and sang in various bands throughout the Eighties, including Kraze, which had an international music hit called The Party. They toured Europe for the next year soaking up the early acid house scene until the hubbub subsided. In the NIneties, he pretty much retired from music to focus on art exclusively. He did scifi paperback covers for the likes of Blake’s 7 and Philip K. Dick among others, and began to focus primarily on sequential art storytelling. He states Jack Kirby and Alan Moore as his chief influences, and is a regular contributor to the Jack Kirby Collector Magazine.
BARRY RENSHAW- Publisher/Editor/Writer/Artist
Barry Renshaw is a UCLAN graduate living in the North West of England, a writer and artist working in comic book illustration, storyboarding and concept design using a mix of traditional and digital tools. Previous clients include Topps, Upper Deck, Dynamite, Rebellion A/S, Showmasters, and others on multiple properties as diverse as rock legends KISS and The X-Files, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Stranger Things, the Alien franchise, and Star Wars franchise.
A long time activist in the UK comics scene, his artwork can be found in a number of independent publications from Accent UK, FutureQuake Press and others, as well as providing material for Judge Dredd The Megazine, The Official UK Star Trek Magazine, Comics International and Multiverse Magazine. From 2000 to 2009 he edited and published the Engine Comics line of comic books and the independent comics news magazine REDEYE. He has chaired panels on independent publishing and hosted cartoon workshops for children and adults, and provided dozens of articles and interviews for publication (see CREDITS). Most recently he provided fully painted art for the four issue US Format miniseries called Lytton, the launch series from Cutaway Comics, scripted by the legendary Doctor Who writer and script editor Eric Saward.
He has storyboarded numerous short films and features, most notably the theatrically released Splintered (2010) directed by Simeon Halligan, the critically acclaimed Judge Dredd inspired film Judge Minty (2013) directed by Steven Sterlacchini, and the short film The Box (2015), directed by Shaune Harrison, which was entered into the 2015 Cannes Film Festival Short Film Corner. He also storyboarded the 2017 Search and Destroy: A Strontium Dog Fanfilm.
He has resurrected the Engine Comics label for 2022 with Ace Renshaw’s comics Transistion and Run, and is providing art for Troy Martin’s Aphelion, coming December 2023.
He lives with his long suffering partner, incredibly smart offspring and an indifferent cat. He likes tea of various origins and to be surrounded by vintage Star Wars toys.
TROY MARTIN – Writer
I grew up reading British war, sci-fi and horror comics, back in the days when the local newsagents had an entire wall of comics to choose from and a weekly anthology comic was a similar price of a packet of Monster Munch crisps. I dabbled with both drawing and writing comics in my late teens and got the standard rejection letter from Tharg for my first Future Shock submission to 2000AD.
Sometime during the late 90s, or early 2000s I lost interest in comics for a variety of reasons. During this time, I became first a lifeguard and swimming instructor and then a free-lance personal trainer and the self-published author of Sleep Lift Eat: A no B.S. guide to healthy living. It was, in fact, myself-employed work that eventually led me back to comics. As a way of helping me to switch off from the trials and tribulations of running TM Fitness, and as an
excuse to get to bed earlier on a more consistent basis, I started re-reading some old Judge Dredd graphic novels on Kindle. My nightly reading habit reignited not only my passion for comics, but also my passion for creative writing. In this time, I joined friend John Sellings and the actress/model Dani
Thompson to become part of the collective Sweet Nightmares. Initially our plan was to make short horror films, but the pandemic put paid to that. So creative efforts turned to other mediums of story telling which resulted in the horror e-zine Sweet Nightmares, which contains comic strips, pros fiction and interviews with fellow creators.
Meeting Barry online was one of those universal singularities where the planets and the stars align. After seeking his advice on how to go about creating an indie comic based on one of the Sweet Nightmares characters, the Aphelion project was born. Writing this alongside Baz was a great learning experience for a new writer and has led to me being on the verge of not only being published by Engine Comics but also, in a couple of anthology comics coming up in 2023. In addition to my small press work, I am also looking forwards to seeing my first mainstream published work by DC Thompson for Commando comics with the one-shot story ‘Leg Before Chindits’ some time in
2023.
The future is bright, which is the exact opposite of Aphelion, but you’ll have to read that to know what I mean.