Spinning plates

After a short interlude for a bout of swine flu I'm back to spinning plates. Mainly alternating between 3 jobs - Merlin, a weekly cartoon for Inside Soap magazine and working my way through a series of 7 comic strips I've written for Weldon Owen. As mentioned before I'm working on the Weldon Owen stuff with Geraint Ford and Faz Choudhury, both are doing some excellent work.

As if that wasn't distracting enough I've had an offer from a rather large publisher who want to develop the "How I Built My Father" strip into a series of books. May come to nothing, but all the same it's an exciting prospect.

Above and below are some examples of Merlin illustrations. Interesting job this, the intention is to mix comic strip and book illustration to make something that will excite 'junior readers', retain their interest and get them reading.
From a personal point of view it allows me to combine two of my great loves - the stark black and white book illustrations of the 50s and 60s (see my Mike Charlton post for an example of this) with comic strip mechanics and comics' use of blacks. Really enjoying this job, but it has to be done at breakneck speed.

Below is an example of my Soapbox cartoons for Inside Soap Magazine. This is a job that Roger Langridge did for many years. Given the readership, the editor didn't want anything too weird and it's very important that the characters are instantly recognisable, so I've kept to a fairly realistic style.

Cardinal and the Nun with two guns

The Nun With Two Guns was created by Warwick Johnson Cadwell. He has possibly the best illustration blog on the net, he's a very clever chap. Anyway, I was rather taken with his nun and thought I'd do a version of the Egon Schiele painting 'Cardinal and the nun' with the NWTG. Here's the real deal below.

Just noticed that I commented on WJC's blog at 21:25 and posted this at 23:45 which is an exact record of the time it took between having the idea and posting the final art.

Matt Smith version 3

Had another go at the new Doc, think I'm getting there. Slowly.

Congratulations Vivien McDermid

and Joff Winterhart (what a great name!) on 1st and 2nd place respectively in the Graphic Short Story Prize. Unusual choice for a post from me, but there's quite a lot of traffic coming through my blog this weekend and I don't want my previous post to seem like a slight on the true winners or their strips. You can read the winning story on the Guardian Gallery page or fork out for the Observer and read it there. It's a story about the difficulties of parenthood and loss of liberty, I could relate to some of this after struggling at home on my own with my son through unemployment and trying to build a career as an artist and writer. And most of my 'art' in those years went into creating worlds for my son and I to play in which often resulted in wrecking the house, much to my poor wife's despair upon returning from work.

Looking at the reaction to the previous winners I saw a surprising amount of criticism of the strips and the competition itself, so another reason for this post is to distance myself from anything like that. Of course I think I was 'robbed' (I imagine that's what you feel if you lose a competition - this is my first) and it's great that so many people like my story. One 'A' level student liked it so much she asked if her literature class could use it to discuss what constitutes a story, poem, picture etc. What I'm saying is that the competition makes you work up an idea to completion and therefore you've succeeded.

If there are as many entrees as I've heard then hopefully someone will put together a site to collect them all, and if it may be more constructive if, instead of aiming resentment at the judges or the winners, people take a moment to write why they entered in the first place.

I entered because although I have managed to earn money from drawing and writing (see the 10 Ways To Stay Busy post) I have a lot of ideas about what is possible with comics/graphic story telling. I'm never going to get a brief that says "Rob, can you do something we've never thought of" so I needed a focus to get the ideas down. I'm happy enough with what I've done, it's a glimpse of what I feel I can do and I think I was hoping that if people 'got it' or 'liked it' then I could justify giving up some of the paying jobs and putting more time into my own projects.

And the winner of the 2009 Observer, Jonathan Cape, COMICA Graphic Short Story prize is...

...not this.

The winner is available to see on the Random House page if you want to compare and contrast and play at being a judge. I shall crawl back to my sick bed and debate the merits of different approaches to comic storytelling and what comics can achieve another day.

"How I Built My Father" is dedicated to the memory of Brian Head. A lovely man and a brilliant Dad.

Zoot, Mook and Kook

from left to right - Kook, Mook and Zoot

I put another Huzzah!! page up, page 50 would you believe! Anyone need an update on what's going on...? Well, as far as I can work out the Space Witch, mother to the girl eaten by the giant boy who now accompanies the Baron and Durante, was killed by Durante. Unfortunately as she was dead anyway killing her has split her into three. She now plans to reek her vengeance on all who've crossed her path by affecting the fates of the Gestalt Heir (the big blue baby), Lord Tesk and his missus, and the three stooges.

My latest page deals with the three stooges. They were partly responsible for releasing the baby from Xog, so that wicked old Space Witch is using them to kill the surviving Sister who's in the protection of Bohaan Vlax. The surviving Sister shares the blame for hiding the witch's baby and cutting open Xog (accident?) by zapping Zoot as he aimed his laser at Baron Kazam.

Make sense? Waddya mean NO?!?!? Well, I tried.

Batman for Nige

I don't normally do superheroes, but a mate of mine is unwell and it was suggested to me that he would like it if I did him a Batman 'sketch'. Don't know that I've drawn Batman since I was a kid, so it took a bit of thinking about and ended up being a bit more than a sketch.

This is continuing my experiments at trying my no outlines style in Manga Studio with some aging effects for good measure. I'm no Batman expert, but I wanted to do an old style Batman with the batwings attached to his wrists and have him preparing for a dust up with some 1940s goons in a disused warehouse. I also wanted him to have an old fashioned approach to fighting, sort of 'sock on the jaw' rather than some kung fu-free running-pepsi max-matrix palaver.

Anyway, here's hoping Nige gets well soon.

What a helmet!

Here's the other panel from my last Huzzah featuring the Baron. I've often wondered how my flat colour with no black keyline style might work for a comic strip and this worked out ok. With the aging and texture added these Baron images remind me a bit of Peter Blake paintings. Perhaps the answer to making this style work for comics is to ensure my characters all have plenty of targets and lightning flashes - maybe a strip about wrestlers is in order.

Is that...?

Yes it is. It's a new HUZZAH!! page! Well, I say new... it's an ancient looking page in keeping with the dust that's been collecting on HUZZAH in recent months.

Wizard layouts

Merlin rushing off on some escapade or other

For what seems like an eternity I have been doing layouts and roughs for my latest projects. Eventually I'll get to do some finished art again. These images are from my first Merlin book for Random House, they're not far off finished looking because I wasn't sure how they'd come out myself and wanted to give the BBC folk a clear idea of how they'd look. I do a lot of roughing for jobs like this in Photoshop. It allows me to keep working over and over on the same image, cutting away at the black and adding finer black. Sometimes I rough in Manga Studio for the same reason. If I'm doing a project for myself or one that needs a bit more thought I'll scribble on paper with a 4b and scan in the resulting mess.

The Merlin stuff here all looks very tight. Below is a looser example. This is for a story about Apsley Cherry Garrard that Faz Choudhury and I wrote. Faz will be doing the lion's share of the art on this strip, but I like to stick my oar in and in this case I roughed out how I saw this panel. It was done in Manga Studio with the same cutting in and drawing over the top approach. There are 4 other stories in this series that we're currently working on for Weldon Owen, but the roughs for those are so rough as to be unintelligible to anyone but me. I shall post some examples of the later stages of those stories at some point.

Now though I have some characters from Emmerdale to draw for Inside Soap magazine. I'm livin' the dream!

Widow's Curse Graphic Novel

Sweetleaf - design for a flying lesbian from Woman Who Sold the World

Just received my complimentary copy of The Widow's Curse Graphic Novel collecting Doctor Who Magazine strips from April 2007 to September 2008, plus the Storybook strips from those years. I wrote three of the nine stories in this book: The Woman Who Sold The World, Bus Stop and The Widow's Curse and drew two others: The Immortal Emperor and Time of my Life. The book also contains great work from Johnny Morris, Ian Edgington, Dan McDaid, Roger Langridge, Ade Salmon, Martin Geraghty, John Ross and Mike Collins.

There's twenty pages of commentary at the back and a bunch of sketches, character designs and stuff. Writing for the Doctor Who strip is incredibly demanding as there are plenty of demands put upon you as writer. You're robbed of the chance for any continuity due to the show being on air and Scott Gray, the editor, has quite fixed ideas about how the mechanics of a DWM strip should work. The commentary does reflect some of this struggle, which is good. As with all creative ventures though, it's the end result that really matters. I'm very proud of my work in this book and feel I learnt a lot working for DWM.

Scene from the Immortal Emperor

I got the blues (and the purples)

I'm currently co writing 5 strips for Weldon Owen with Faz Choudhury which I'll shortly start drawing, plus I've started work on the BBC Merlin books and some caricatures for Inside Soap magazine. I've also squeezed in a couple of things for myself. Above is one of a number of colour tests I've been trying out for Dinlos (this is a redone panel from H.G.Smells). And below is a tiny peek at my 4 page strip for the Comica/Cape/Observer Graphic Short Story Prize.

They insist on printed pages rather than digital files, and I've had a nightmare reproducing these colours on paper. If (when) I lose I'll post the whole strip on the blog and you can judge for yourself. Actually, I think this competition is a great idea, I can't wait to see other people's stories and doing it has certainly given me some freedom to experiment. I feel like someone's mum saying "we're all winners", but if doing this forces you to do what you want and get it done then the prize itself is secondary.