When, as one of the Bristol 2008 artists (me? An artist? Cool!) I was asked to work on a comic with illustrator Simon Gurr, I decided to do a story involving some characters from the city's history and mythological past.

Comics are a uniquely adaptable medium. They can provide the sort of spectacle that only big-budget Hollywood films can do, but at a fraction of the price. They're also ideal for supernatural, fantastical or futuristic storytelling because the pictures enable readers to pick up what's going on a lot more quickly and easily than words.

For a writer, the other exhilarating thing about them is that you can tell a story in shorthand; you can cut out thousands of words and use pictures instead. I'd always wanted to write a comic because of the challenge of telling the story visually, of deciding what each frame should look like.

(In the end, the process was a lot harder than I'd imagined, but also a lot more fun. Much of this was due to the excellent working relationship Simon and I had.)

In choosing a story about the city's myths, we were playing to what I think is one of Bristol's great strengths in the Capital of Culture contest. It's older than most of the other contenders. A lot older. A town in Anglo-Saxon times, the second most important city in England by the middle ages, Bristol has a lot of history, and where you get history you also get myths.

On the opening page of St Vincent's Rock we have one of the characters saying;

  "History can tell us many little truths. But myths are more important.
  "Myths are the big lies that tell us big truths."

Now that's a character talking. History is more important than myth. Studying facts, rather than folk-tales, is usually going to tell us more about how we got here. But myths can tell us a lot as well, and the thing about Bristol is that it's been around so long that it has accumulated some intriguing ones.

It was some of these that I wanted to examine in St Vincent's Rock. One or two, for example the tale of how the city was built by the kings Brennus and Bellinus, had to be omitted for reasons of space.

The idea was to tell a story set in the present day in which various creatures from the city's 'subconscious' return.

Because it's a comic and because of necessary constraints of time and resources, the story had to be pretty short and straightforward. The challenge was to come up with an interesting cast of characters and a tale that would be interesting visually. Because this was a work of public art intended to help with the 2008 bid, or at least be a modest addition to the city's cultural stock I also decided the story would have to be accessible to people of all ages. Good clean family entertainment, as it were. It would have been something of a wasted opportunity if we'd just done something aimed at, say, children or intellectuals.

It would also need a strong theme; every story needs a moral. The two main characters are Ben and Ruth, a pair of sixth-formers who may or may not be an item. In my original notes it says that they are, but this is never stated explicitly in the comic. In the end it doesn't matter to the story whether they are or not. In comics, it's often nice to enable the reader to participate in the story by filling in the gaps for themselves.

Both of them are on a week's work experience. Ruth is interested in being a journalist and so is spending the week following an Evening Post reporter around. We have her working for the Post partly because it's necessary for plot purposes and partly because working for newspapers (or magazines) is, in my humble, much more interesting than working for local TV or radio news. Print reporters get around a lot more.

Ben fancies himself as a salesman and is spending his week working for Sunshine Shares, a holiday timeshare company run by crooked businessman Kevin Marsh.

Marsh is a villain out of central casting. He's just there to be bad. He's involved in dodgy timeshares, murder/manslaughter and is suspected of burning down a (fictitious) building that's part of the city's 'Bristol Byzantine' architectural heritage. The timeshares thing came to me after taking the third phone call in a week from some sales drone telling me I'd "won" a "free holiday". Yeah, right. Not all timeshare people are crooks, of course. It's just that everyone thinks they are.

On her first day at work, Ruth is told by a Post reporter that Marsh is a crook that no-one has yet been able to get any evidence against. When, at the end of the day she finds out that her friend Ben is actually working for Marsh, she dreams of getting the story that will put him away. Enter our mythological characters to lend a hand ...