Popeye

Happy new year! I'm so busy right now that I'll struggle to get much Dinlos work done this month. In the meantime here's a quick Popeye doodle in the scribbly style I'm using for the book I'm currently illustrating. I've had to borrow my wife's fountain pen as the pens I ordered haven't turned up yet. She's had the pen all her life and as a result it's shaped to her writing style and in my hand has a mind all of its own.

Popeye is, of course, out of copyright in the EU as of today. If you're looking for something to spend those Christmas book tokens on you could do worse than Fantagraphics' collections of Segar's early Popeye strips. Good stuff.

And I'm also telling all and sundry to get a copy of Gus and his Gang by Chris Blain. It's published by First Second and is one of the best of the 'new wave' French Graphic novels. It's basically a bunch of macho romance stories about cowboys and their troubled love lives punctuated with brief bank jobs and train robberies, all drawn with a gunslinger-quick swish of the nib. One of the best things I read in 2008.