Dinlos and Skilldos

Don Quixote cover designs

2012-01-25T10:18:00.002Z

Just had the cover design for Don Quixote Volume II approved. It was my first idea. Last time I went through loads of ideas before settling on one. Here are some of them...

Doctor Who does Narnia

2012-01-07T12:29:00.004Z

Happy new year folks. Sorry about the lack of bloggery here. Hope you had a good christmas. I finally caught up with the now traditional Christmas Doctor who (opinions on twitter as ever). Amusing to see the TV version do a Narnia style story exactly a year after Johnny Morris's Narnia christmas strip that I drew which featured in the Magazine. I realise there is no connection, the writer never reads the comic strips.

Here's the first 7 pages of our strip The Professor, The Witch and The Bookshop (sans lettering). It serves as a reminder that the DWM comic strips will be collected in Graphic Novel form again this year, starting with the Crimson Hand written by Dazzling Dan McDaid.

Russia. RESPECT. And other Gypsies.

2011-12-22T13:35:00.012Z

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Tilting at windmills...

2011-09-14T12:35:00.003+01:00

Apologies for the lack of blog posts, I have been blogging over at the SelfMadeHero site, so go read. If you've missed my rambling nonsense, that is...

Are we nearly there yet?

2011-08-12T11:12:00.006+01:00

Tempting fate to talk about finishing something before it's over, but I probably won't get chance on Monday to post anything and I wanted to put this panel up because it's the first panel of the last chapter of Nelson. Truth is I've struggled to get the last chapter done due to an obligation I had to self destruct through June and July. The worst of that seems to be behind me and at last I'm enjoying drawing again. And I'm pretty confident this will done over the weekend in time for Monday's big Nelson pow wow.

This book was my daft idea in the first place and it's kept me company for the past 8 months, rather like a backseat full of screaming kids on a 10 hour car journey. But I absolutely love this book and everyone who has contributed to it. You'll all get to see it soon enough, it is rather amazing.

I owe a special debt to my co-editor Woodrow who has really taken it on his shoulders as I've floundered in the bottom of a whisky glass. Cheers mate. Nearly there now.

Lightnin' Hopkins

2011-06-18T15:21:00.002+01:00

Did this yesterday at lunchtime. It's based on the cover to Walkin' this road by myself, the Lightnin' Hopkins LP. If you have the misfortune to follow me on Twitter you probably saw me posting images of it as I went along. Started out as a tiny thumbnail sketch (below) then got dragged into Manga Studio, which I prefer now to Illustrator for creating these kind of sans line images. I may have a go at turning it into a 'proper' painting on some kind of wood paneling (or whatever I can chor from a skip).

Don Quixote - Broken Hearts and Broken Minds

2011-06-13T11:40:00.006+01:00

Finished. Volume One of Don Quixote is in the bag. I finished it a couple of weeks ago, but it's taken me this long to get over the loss and the separation and move on. Hmmm... I'll start again... That was a piss poor attempt at making an oblique reference to the fact I marked the end of Quixote by separating from my wife and moving out of my home with her and the kids. Quixote wasn't in any way responsible for what happened, but I found much in the book that echoed my state of mind and my situation.

If you're not familiar with the original book you may be surprised to learn that it contains eternal truths about love and loss as well as madness, delusion and goats. But love is to some extent the ultimate madness and delusion, it's the quixotism we all indulge in (not sure where the goats fits in, but each to their own, eh). Maybe the best way to appreciate the idealist, the impulsive, the rash romantic that is Don Quixote is to think of madness as love, then his crazy exploits don't seem any more ridiculous than our own. (Hmmm... how long can I stretch this analogy...?)

I'll switch from discussing it in general terms and instead use some synchronistic examples from recent weeks.

The day of the Royal Wedding was a particular low in my life, the point in this particular marital breakdown where events spiraled out of control into the kind of nightmare-scape that I'd always dreaded. On that day I did this panel:

For Don Quixote love is as unrequited and sweet as a teenage crush.

Everything he does is for the Lady Dulcinea del Toboso, a figment of his imagination, a deep, lasting love he has projected onto a peasant girl in the village.

Nothing like a teenage crush to make you act like a fool, you might not have dressed in armour and fought windmills, sheep and cats to prove the validity of your own imagined love, but it will probably have found a way to make a fool of you I'm sure.

It's in the stories within stories from the people he meets on the road that we get a more realistic picture of how men and women inflict their madness upon each other in the name of love.

They're simple morality tales with a cruel twist and a wicked sense of humour.

Cervantes saves the best for last in Volume One - an entire novella within the novel. In my version this is crushed down to just four pages. 'The Novel of the Curious Impertinent' paints a painful and hilarious picture of what happens when monogamy and curiosity collide.

Now I'm not trying to belittle the complex states of insanity that afflict folk by comparing them to love anymore than I'm trying to turn anyone's idea of love sour; I'm interested in the mechanisms of fiction and how close those mechanisms echo sanity and love. I don't expect to understand these things, it's just handy to leave a few breadcrumbs on the path as you go in so you can find your way out again.

2D Festival Derry 2011

2011-06-07T11:33:00.005+01:00

I've attended a lot of comic conventions and arts festivals over the years, I think the 2D festival in Derry might just be my favourite. Granted, I am writing this in the hazy after glow with a crooked smile on my face, but this event was everything I would like to see from a comics' festival.

The whole festival seemed to be about getting artist to actually give something back rather than sit and receive their fans like royalty. There was no reaching into your pocket from artists or punters and yet everyone went away so much richer for the experience.

I spent a weekend in great company that included my boyhood hero, a host of brilliant artists and writers and so many people from Derry who all seemed to become instant friends.

Saturday was spent sketching all day, and I mean ALL day. No one charges for sketches and whilst you get some people who want you to draw 'what you do' (I did a LOT of Daleks and Matt Smiths) you get a whole bunch of people asking for anything under the sun (I have now drawn Wonder Woman, Wolverine, the Joker etc etc). Most of the people were kids. I got handed sketchbook from a 6 year old that contained zombies by Glen Fabry, Spiderman by Phil Winslade and Tank Girl by Rufus Dayglo mixed in with the kid's own drawings from the day before. "What would you like?" I foolishly asked. "A robot squirrel," he said.

I spent the day sat next to the genius that is Mick McMahon and his wife Chrissie. They were great company and the nervous quaking that should have wrecked me in his presence was dispelled by the fact he's a such a nice bloke. We spent a lot of time together and talked A LOT of comics.

Here's a couple of sketches he did for me:

Dredd done in my sketch pad with my pen and...

Spikes Harvey Rotten. And here's the man himself busy drawing countless sketches for everyone. I had so much stuff with me it spread all across his table too.

Eventually the kids go off to bed and the adults head to Dino's bar for the panels. I was on the first panel on the Friday night with Rufus (Tank Girl) Dayglo, Denise (crime writer) Mina, David (Bulletproof Coffin) Hine and Mark (Vice president of DC comics) Chiarello.

From L to R David, me, Denise and Mark. Photo by Rufus.

Below is the bar filling up ready for the panel.

Once again 2D was a great leveler as artists, fans and locals all mixed in. The discussions from the panels filtering out onto the street and vice versa. This is what a festival should be like and David Campbell who puts it together with the help of, yet another new mate of mine, Gary (Marvelman) Leach deserves all the praise he will get from us in the coming weeks. I don't know how he does it, but anyone else putting together a festival like this should give him a ring and find out. I want more.

I learnt a lot, had a lot of fun and made a lot of new friends. I think that was true of everyone who came.

Thanks David. Thanks Derry.

NELSON

2011-05-05T19:20:00.009+01:00

Scan of the brush and ink drawing I did for the Nelson cover.

Finally the cat's out of the bag. I'm terrible at keeping secrets and having a big secret like this to carry around for the past few months has been a real challenge.

The 'secret project' I've been working on since December last year is called Nelson, it's an anthology of UK comics done as a novel, find out more about it here. A UK comics anthology that embraced all types UK comic creators from the Beano to 2000ad, from small press to those working Marvel and DC, from Newspaper strips to Web comics seemed like a good idea, I thought it would be even better if all of those different comic creators were working together on the same story.

I had the idea last year and with the help of Woodrow Phoenix and Blank Slate books it is becoming a reality. The idea was a simple one - tell a person's life by picking one day from each year of their life and use a different comic creator for each year. I started it off in 1968 the year the character was born and passed it on to Woodrow who did 1969 and passed it on to the next creator for 1970 and so on. Because I want this to succeed as a novel I've worked as editor, with Woodrow as co-editor, to oversee, occasionally guide and always help. It's been a honour to work with so many amazing talents and be a part of their creative processes.

I could say so much about this book, but I need to hold off until nearer publication for fear of peaking too soon. All I can say is that it is exceeding my expectations already and it has a life all of it's own. At times I feel about as in control of this book as a surfer is in control of the sea.

So next time someone asks you if you know who or what is Nelson you'll be able to tell them.

A panel from my opening 1968 chapter

Mark E Smith and the Ramones

2011-05-02T08:27:00.006+01:00

I don't know whether you have the dubious pleasure of following me on Twitter, if not you probably won't have seen these scribbles. Comics' savant, Dan Berry, invited fellow twitterers to produce high speed sketches of first the Ramones then Mark E Smith without using reference, these are my results. Mark E Smith is a character so ingrained on my consciousness that it felt like cheating. Alongside Mick McMahon, Mark E Smith helped shape my world view growing up, for better or worse.

The Ramones one included some guesswork, Johnny, Joey and Dee Dee were fixed in my head but 'the other one' was guesswork. I used the remaining ink for a 'drawing without reference' idea of my own, the Samuel Beckett below. Probably has to rank as the quickest drawing I've done, took about 20 seconds I suppose.
As you can see below I did it on the inside back cover of my sketch pad because it was shiny and would resist the ink. I may do something wild and inky in the near future, these were a lot of fun to do.

Me then.

2011-04-26T18:05:00.002+01:00

These are eight self portraits. They're all in order bar the first one. So clockwise from top left they are: 1990 drawing of me as a 14 yr old, 1984 first drawing at college, 1984 first ever oil painting, 1986 oils and compass, 1986 oil and pencil on paper, 1992 watercolour, 1996 oils (I was drunk when I painted it) and 1999 oil sketch.

Don't know if you learn anything from these, other than I got better at drawing, just thought I'd post them anyway.

Letting the puppet strings show.

2011-04-05T09:26:00.014+01:00

"Why did you draw it like that?" you ask. Well, regardless of whether you ask that or not it's the question I'll try to answer in this post. Obviously I draw in a number of styles so the one I chose for 300 pages of Don Quixote was for a specific reason.

Firstly here's the glib answer for people who are afraid of talk about art (y' big babies!):

The reason I did it this way is because it's quicker and I need to do 6 pages a week to pay the bills.

What follows is the 'speak your brains' version, or 'the truth':

A phrase you'll hear a lot when people discuss the styles of comic artists is "Raw or Cooked", it's self explanatory really - Raw is unpolished, as it comes and Cooked is polished to 'perfection'. The traditional process for making comics has helped create these schisms. Most comic artists to this day still work in pencil stage and ink stage and the distinctive comic art look, so shakily mimicked by Roy Lichtenstein, is a result of the process. It was necessary for a hard black line in early comics due to the poor quality printing and so the art of 'inking' was born. As was the job of 'inker', something that is still entrenched in American comics. Despite the process driving the artist naturally towards the 'cooked', some inking let the brushwork say more about energy and texture than simple tracing. Better printing techniques gave artists even more opportunity to move over to the 'raw' side of the spectrum. Now we have comic art that's stretched the spectrum as far as it can go, just look at a book by Joann Sfar next to one by Chris Ware.

I use these two as examples because they are both successful storytellers, there are examples of both approaches where the style, regardless of how wonderful it looks, detracts from the story. Neither approach is guaranteed to tell the story better than the other, but it's important that telling the story is the intention in choosing an approach.

No prizes for guessing which side of the raw or cooked spectrum my Don Quixote work sits.

I imagine most artists' roughs look a bit like this, I want to retain some of the that manic energy in the final art.

The final line work is still very rough, but hopefully it masks some degree of sophistication.

I knew from the start that I would be looking for something ragged enough to reflect the setting, the characters and state of Don Quixote's mind. And coming back to the unclever reason, I did need to make the haste with which I'd be turning the book around work for me rather than against me. I dispensed with ink altogether and decided to scan my pencils.

That hasty, raw, pencil work was perfectly suited to the story, but as with all art there was a deception at its heart - there's no way I could put together whole pages of characters interacting in one continuous mad scribble, there is a lot of penciling just as with any comic art.

To prevent me from tightening up and polishing the line work unintentionally I draw onto a lightbox set up in such a way as to ensure I can't see the roughs too clearly, this means I'm never tracing, I'm looking to make definitive, if occasionally clumsy, marks.

Sometimes I'll switch to a stubby B pencil and work away from the lightbox to introduce shadows and texture.

I imagine it's obvious why the ragged look suits a rustic setting and characters, it may not be quite so obvious why that look reflects the state of Quixote's mind. Exposing the workings in a drawing has a long history in the 'fine arts', I still bear the scars of being taught by products of the Slade School where the process of building an observational painting is left on the surface for the viewer to see (the famous measuring ticks and crosses*).

This amounts to the artist showing us the puppet strings, it is telling us that it is a painting whilst another part of our brain is shouting that it's a person. That schism was explored in art long before the meticulous Slade painters arrived and in literature it was being explored over 400 years ago by Cervantes in the pages of Don Quixote.

Here the design is resolved digitally. It's about using negative shapes, so I'm roughing in colour. I do this a lot on Quixote. Don Quixote often becomes a squiggle, a kind of signature when he's in the background of a panel.

Here's the final art of that panel with the quick lines and fixed design working together.

How can we believe in a character from the pages of a book? How can we believe in a person who is just lines on a piece of paper? Cervantes knew this madness and pulled countless readers into it. It isn't really possible to adapt Don Quixote, it's an adaptation from a translation of a history of someone who is made up, all we can do as readers is join Cervantes inside this madness. And that's all I can do as writer and artist.

*See painters like Coldstream or Uglow for examples of this.

The Lovecraft Anthology

2011-03-03T10:37:00.004Z

Reblogging the above image because I just received my copy of the Lovecraft Anthology, published by SelfMadeHero. And it is a really beautiful and creepy looking book! SelfMadeHero should be applauded for their choice of artists on this book, by using the cartoon stylings of artists like Mark Stafford, Shane Oakley, D'Israeli and Ian Culbard they have set themselves apart and given their anthology a distinct vision. It reminds me of the halcyon days of 2000ad in the late 70s and 80s seeing such strong, idiosyncratic styles together in one title. Funnily enough, current 2000ad favourite Leigh Gallagher also draws a story as does David Hartman (a new name to me, but another with a strong cartoon sense to his storytelling) and Alice Duke, whose painterly work has some magical touches in it. The book employs the writing talents of Ian Edgington, Dan Lockwood, David Hine, Leah Moore & John Reppion and, of course, me.

Just to be clear, I didn't draw anything in this book, and I couldn't have drawn my story, The Dunwich Horror, as well as Ian Culbard has anyway. If you're a fan of Ian's work you're in for a treat, I think this is his best work to date. If SelfMade ask me, and if time permits, I'd certainly like to draw in a 2nd Lovecraft Anthology. The above image was just done quickly for my own amusement. It's a picture of young Wilbur from The Dunwich Horror. If you don't know who he is then you should rush out to your local bookshop/comic shop and get a copy of this anthology. If you do know who he is then I imagine you've already got your coat on and are on your way to the shop.

Doctor Who meets Miss Havisham

2011-02-24T08:38:00.004Z

A page from the 'Time of My Life' from Doctor Who Magazine (reprinted in the Widow's Curse book), written by Jonathan Morris. Putting this up as another reminder that I'll be at the Cardiff Expo this weekend with Doctor Who wares (and a sketchbook). Hopefully I'll see you there.

The Immortal Emperor

2011-02-15T17:11:00.007Z

This a comic strip form the Doctor who Storybook 2009, I drew it in May 2008. It's a fun story written by Jonathan Morris. Its significance to me is that it was my return to drawing comics professionally after a lengthy hiatus. There are some rusty moments in there, but I also had a lot of fun with it and I think that shows.

Beaten Up!

2011-01-30T11:58:00.008Z

Don Quixote and Sancho Panza get beaten up a lot in this book. I'm starting feel like I may be a bit punch drunk myself with it. I've done the losing your mind section and now I'm into the relentless beatings. It's funny, because that sounds like the plot for the story of many comic book heroes, especially Superheroes. Although, if this were a superhero story there would be a need to indulge a prepubescent wish fulfillment and have Quixote defeat the bad guys, plus Quixote would probably look a bit more like the victim of steroid abuse.

Needless to say this isn't that kind of book, even if it does lay down a story format that so many Superhero comics have picked up over the years. It's not fair to compare the two, but interesting none the less. In many ways Cervantes' genius can be seen in the way his view of the hero and the madman was framed in his mind alone and published in 1605 whereas it took the collected minds of many great writers 70 years to come to the same end-story in comics. In other words what Alan Moore did to 60+ years of superheroes, Cervantes did to his hero from page one. 400 years before.

Ah, but comics were never meant to be seen as great literature, I hear you say. Neither was Don Quixote. It was a popular entertainment, an amusement. It was read by the everyday Spaniards in streets and villages and read aloud to those who couldn't read.

This is not to say that I expect my comic book to turn out something on a par with Kirby, Moore et all (God, I wish!), no this is just to help communicate the idea of what Don Quixote was in the context of its time, and perhaps help people understand why it is so lauded.

As in the panel above, Quixote and Sancho spend a lot of time on their backs moaning. If there is something to admire about them physically it's their almost 'rope-a-dope Ali' ability to soak up pain.

There are a few more beatings in store for our heroes before Cervantes' story spreads into something wider, so I better pick them up so I can knock them down again. I feel their pain.

Influence Map Mark II

2011-01-27T16:45:00.003Z

Here's a variation on that Influence Map meme. I tried to replace my influences with images by me that showed that influence. I say 'tried' because it wasn't very straight forward as it turned out. I could have chosen virtually anything I've done to illustrate the influence of Mick McMahon, for example, what I chose is something from 1986 (a strip called Brother Grimm) to show how far back his influence goes. And in places I just looked for a kind of symmetry.

Anyway, hopefully it's still of some interest.

Cardiff Expo

2011-01-26T11:45:00.006Z

In my first outing of the year I shall be attending the Cardiff International Comic Expo in the company of many other Doctor Who comicsy folk. I'll have a new batch of those big yellow Doctor Who prints for sale and will be sketching and signing for anyone who wants me to. I'll have some other Doctor Who stuff to sell and original art. The above has been turned into some rather nice cards. I'm short of time to do a new piece for Cardiff, but I did consider adding Doctor No. 11 to the above image and turning it into a print. Would anyone want one if I did? Be a bit like this rough design below I guess (with the addition of a Matt Smith scene bottom right of course).

Anyway, if you're there come over and say hello, I'll either be on the Doctor Who table with Dalek and TARDIS or at the Blank Slate table.

What shall we do in 2011?

2010-12-29T12:56:00.005Z

Let's not, eh. It would be a waste of comics, and there is much comics to be made and much comics to be read over the next 12 months. My schedule is filled with Don Quixote until May when I'll take on a few other smaller projects before tucking into Quixote Vol. 2. I also have another project on the go that I'm acting as editor on. It was 'just an idea' a month ago and had anyone said:
that would have been the end of it. Someone didn't, in fact someone thought it was a good idea and now I'm committed to it. There will be announcement in a couple of months and you will all be duly excited. Unless you already know, in which case you'll probably say, "not that again...!"

That's the book making side of things, there is also the book reading side of things:

That's right, there will be books from me you can take home. There will be two books from SelfMadeHero that I've worked on out next year: Quixote Vol. 1 (of course) out in the Autumn and The Lovecraft Anthology, out in May, featuring The Dunwich Horror written by me and drawn by the irrepressible Ian Culbard.

It certainly is a strange tale, but then that's Lovecraft for you, he was a strange chap. The ear in question belongs to our friend Alonso Quixana.

Ouch!

All these illustrations, with the exception of Ian's, come from Don Quixote. The funny looking, green ones at the top are from the stories within stories that are a big feature of Quixote. No doubt I'll blog about that next year.

For now though I need to get my head down and draw. In that respect at least 2011 will be much the same as every other year.

Inside Soap

2010-12-27T21:12:00.003Z

Here are some of the soap cartoons I've done over the past year for Inside Soap magazine. If you don't watch soap operas this probably won't mean a lot to you. Actually I don't watch them myself but I'm always well briefed by my editor, Gary Gillat. Most of the images are his ideas.

These pics are vaguely in the right order and you can see the point where I tried something different (the axe one), Gary liked it so much we changed approach from there on and ended up with images that are more interesting and often quite surreal.

Christmas Doctor Who!

2010-12-13T20:47:00.002Z

December's Doctor Who Magazine is out in the shops today (or tomorrow depending on where you live). It contains a new comic strip written by Jonny Morris and drawn by me, called The Professor, The Queen and The Bookshop. Jonny and me have a good track record for bringing the best out in each other and this one certainly stretched me at times. I won't give away anything about the story, but both script and art are full of hidden treats.

The above image is page one sans lettering, the image below is from the last page.

I have to give a big thanks to Geraint Ford for his brilliant work on the colouring - painstaking flatting and ever patient with me and all my demands.

Who Wrote Don Quixote?

2010-12-03T13:26:00.005Z

Hang on! If this fella is translating Don Quixote, whose words

are in the caption? Or is that what he's writing?

There's much sleight of hand and obfuscation around the authorship of Don Quixote, not like the conspiracy theory stuff that surrounds Shakespeare, the deception in Don Quixote is Cervantes' own. It's one of the reasons why adapting this book is far from the hollow task that some adaptation presents. I've become bound up in the metafiction and realise as I go forward how often the tools of comic storytelling lend themselves well to the overlapping narratives that Cervantes created.

Look at this fellow, for example. He's the unnamed translator of most of the book, for all we know he could have made it up. We rely on him to give us the true origin of the book and name its true author:
It's that kind of book. One minute you're wrapped up the crazy adventures of the two hombres next minute the whole notion of fiction collapses around you and it's your own sanity that comes into question.

Deception is an art. Art is deception, and everyone connected with Don Quixote, including Cervantes, Don Quixote, Sancho Panza, me and you are part of that deception. This crazy old man wants to be like a knight-errant; knight-errants only exist in books; Don Quixote makes himself like a book; Don Quixote is a book; we make him real; Cervantes makes him real; he outlives Cervantes and you and me...

Maybe I've been overdoing the Night Nurse or maybe this book has got to me. OR... Maybe this book has to get to me otherwise I'll never pull off the deception.

Things to buy at Thought Bubble

2010-11-14T11:33:00.011Z

Long post this one, and unusually it's mostly about other people's work. This weekend (all being well) I'll be at Thought Bubble comic con in Leeds and hopefully I'll see lots of you there. I will be selling posters and postcards and original art again, but this time from the Blank Slate table which will be at the end of the big ol' Forbidden Planet table. The only new addition to the posters I had for sale at BICS is the Solipsistic Pop 3 poster above. Here are the others:

If I'm not at the Blank Slate table you may find me at the Solipsistic Pop table helping give the Solipsistic Pop 3 book it's official launch. There's a long shot that I may be lurking around my own publisher's table because SelfMadeHero will be there with their increasingly excellent list of titles. I won't be adding to the list until next year, but my friend and inspiration Mr Ian Culbard will have his new adaptation of At The Mountains of Madness by HP Lovecraft on sale and will be sketching and signing at the event.

Ian's adaptation is perhaps the best of his SelfMadeHero books. Here "Britain's answer to Darwyn Cooke" works in double page spreads and uses the broader space to give us snowy vistas, frozen oceans, alien cityscapes and vast mountain ranges. The writing is stripped down and the book zips by, in stark contrast to the heavy going Lovecraft texts. All is rendered in Ian's trademark style, a kind of Yves Chaland/Frank Robbins lovechild.

As I know from struggling through my adaptation of The Dunwich Horror (which Ian has drawn and, in my opinion, is his best strip work yet!), voice overs are pretty inevitable in Lovecraft comic adaptations. Here the best sequences are where Ian shakes off the voice over and lets the characters play off one another or the action move seamlessly. If I have any criticism of the book, it's really a criticism of the source material - and that's the characterisation. I didn't really care about them. Lovecraft's characters are flat; he's all about ideas and the characters too often become cyphers. What Lovecraft excels at is spiking the imagination with his poison and enveloping the reader with a sense of menace beyond our ken. Ian's version loses non of that. You won't buy a better Graphic Novel or comic at Thought Bubble, don't hesitate to get it.

So when you've got you Solipsistic Pop 3, some of my posters and At The Mountains of Madness what else can you spend your pennies on....? Well, seeing as you'll be standing at the Blank Slate table I suggest you buy as many of their books as you can because I can't think of a comic publisher with a higher hit rate. All things going to plan I will be adding to their list with something of my own, something I'm so excited about I need to move on before I blurt. What there will be on the table is the standard Blank Slate excellence in the shape of Oliver East's books (Oliver's work is truly unique, check it out), Psychiatric Tales by Darryl Cunningham (the comic book that even mum's love!), books by the brilliant Mawil and the hilarious Speenal by Nigel Auchterlounie, (check them all out here) plus the two newest editions: Sleepyheads by Randall.C and The Girl and the Gorilla by Madeliene Flores. Buy both!

Sleepyheads is a quite beautiful object. It's drawn in a style I instantly fell in love with: flat, tattered, desaturated colour swatches for panels and wonderfully realised characters scrawled across the pages with deceptive ease. I could eat a book like this. The question is would the story match up? Well, a story about dreams with characters strolling from one dreamscape to the next could have been a real let down - how do you relate to characters in a story like this? Why should you care what happens when you know that it will end with every kid's favourite first story ending "then I woke up and it was all a dream"?

By coincidence I read this at the same time I was reading Sleepyheads. Any comic about dreams will always make me think of Little Nemo and Bill Watterson's comments ("I can’t read the strip without thinking how much more enchanting Slumberland would be if the characters, rather than the backdrops and costumes, advanced the story") in that piece had me questioning what made Nemo work for me. The answer is that sometimes a comic or book just has a feeling to it that you can only reach via reading that piece of work. Perhaps we shouldn't let our tastes and biases make demands upon what comics should be, they're still in their infancy I think, we don't know that answer.

So back to Sleepyheads, what does it offer? Well, strangely enough it offers more than most comic books I've read this year. The dream logic means the strip morphs from one thing to the next, but there is a real structure as the story flits between the two characters trapped in a dream and two Russian sailors stuck on a desert island. The book has an inescapable intrinsic logic of it's own and asks questions about perception that might spring open a few minds. The chapter about the Senoi and whether their perception meant the Spanish invaders were invisible to them is an anthropological idea I've always been in love with and underpins a lot of my own ideas about perception. If I have a criticism of the book it's just that I don't see why it had to be framed as a dream. I would have preferred it with the going into and out of the dream chopped off and let the reader be the dreamer. Who's to say though the balance between crediting the reader with intelligence and going over their heads is always a tricky one.

Girl and the Gorilla is a simpler story in a sparser style told on bare white pages with deftly described figures that I followed faithfully from the first page on. The story is a 'through the looking-glass' affair in which a fed up girl called Aurelie is transported to a world of creativity where books roam free like wild animals, buildings are constructed of a writer's words and there's a newspaper reading Gorilla who acts as a kind of spirit guide for writers. The Girl and the Gorilla is an all ages book that reads like a kids book adults can enjoy, I was reminded of The Phantom Tollbooth. The great success of this book is that it makes storytelling not just its most important aspect but its very reason to exist.

Back to Thought Bubble, I haven't seen the programme for the Saturday, but I believe I may be listed in the programme as signing and sketching at 10:30 to 12:00. I won't be there, I've told you where to find me and if you want a signing or sketching I will of course oblige. The good news is my ridiculously talented friend Simon Gane will be signing and sketching on that table instead, so get him to draw you a girl. He draws great girls. He's even better at drawing street scenes but that would be a bit of an unfair request.

Right, sales pitch over, normal service (me talking about me) will resume next week.

Observer/Cape Graphic Short Story Prize

2010-11-08T08:13:00.005Z

First time I've reposted something. I won't make a habit of it. I always planned to repost this after the 2010 Observer/Cape prize was announced mainly because I've connected with more followers via Twitter and the blog and I thought you/they might like to see it.

As it happens this year's winner is one of the people who commented on the original post and someone I have real admiration for (his comment seems quite ironic now). You can see Stephen Collins' winning entry here, although it worked best in the full spread of the Observer Review section yesterday. Hopefully this exposure will lead to a Stephen Collins book, something I'd happily pre-order now.

The style of Stephen's strip is a kind of metamorphosis/magic realism that I've always loved, a style I will always associate with the short story Axolotl by Julio Cortazar. As I said to him via Twitter yesterday it also reminded me of Dylan Thomas's Map of Love. Literary allusions aside what makes this so great is that it is a comic strip and it could only be a comic strip. It's in a different league to previous winners and gives the prize a genuine credibility many felt it lacked.

There's a suspicion among many UK creator's that Observer and Cape have a fear of comics and feel the need to throw an arty or literary veil over comics to give them credibility. This ignores the real quality of great literature and art - they are of their own form and are often great precisely because they are aware of their own form. A comic strip that could only be a comic strip. Stephen Collins' strip is precisely that - what it is not is a 'Graphic Short Story'.

It's comic strip, and it's a bloody good one.

Autobiographical comics

2010-11-04T10:27:00.006Z

Press copies of Solipsistic Pop 3 have gone out, the launch party is next week, and my mind has taken a break from Quixote to go through that wonder-what-people-will-think-of-it phase about my contribution to SP3 (just like everyone else no doubt). This is a bit like a flashback to 1989 and the first issue of SLANG. I'm pretty thick-skinned about most of the published work I do, but my SP3 strip is probably my first autobiographical work to hit print since SLANG.

Autobiographical comics are the oxygen of the small press, in many cases they reflect the mundanity of the everyday - the minute details of personal hygiene and tiny fissures in personal relationships. There are of course some wonderful examples of this and some that are eye-curlingly bad. Mine tend to be slightly veiled, 'semi'-autobiographical sort of stories that deal with the more traumatic aspects of my life.

Back in the late 80s my main strip for SLANG dealt with much of the same stuff that you'll find in The Torturer's Garden (that's the SP3 strip). In a way things have come full circle. At the top of this post is a panel from The Torturer's Garden and below is a panel from SLANG No 2.

Damaged youths in bovver boots, and there's that Dennis the Menace jumper. It may not look like most people's idea of an autobiographical comic, but my thoughts about it are the same as anyone who has done this kind of comic are - have I exposed too much of myself? will people be judging me rather than the art? etc etc

You know, the good thing about this anthology is that I'm in such great company, it really does contain some of the most talented and original creators working in UK comics right now. Even if my approach and/or subject matter isn't to people's liking there are so many other approaches to comics on show here that, if you love comics, you will love this book.

Don Quixote and the Truth of Colour

2010-10-30T10:54:00.017+01:00

Quixote sneaks out first thing in the morning, so early the sky is green.

I'll start with a mammoth digression (hang in there):

My good friend/Landlord/illustration mentor, Mike Charlton, and I once spent an entire lunch break arguing about truth in colour. We sat on his porch looking out over sunny Salisbury with him taking up his post-war rationalist opposition to my post-acid arty position, we pointed out shadows and highlights and bickered about their true colour. The conclusion he drew, in his usual acerbic manner, was that I either had a visionary eye for colour or I was just making it up. Now we weren't arguing about the existence of fairies or aliens, but the insinuation was the same - his argument was that the colours you see in Van Gogh are not what he sees they are an invention of the imagination. My argument (and yes, Mike, I'm still here making it!) is that art is about learning how to see so you let other people see too.

Hmmm... you can see the weight of Mike's case about me being full of shit - he's the one who made me see art as a job rather than some airy fairy mission to understand. The irony is Mike would use colour in a visionary way, but he'd just say he was doing what worked best for the picture not what the world really looked like to him.

I can't help wondering how much the arrival of photography impacted on how we see and what we believe about 'how things really look'. It is an aspect of seeing (with one-eye) that tells us so much, but not everything.

What has this got to do with cartooning, you ask, is he about to launch into a tirade against comic artists who trace photos for a living? Well, no, this is just a preamble to me showing you a few panels from Don Quixote Volume One. And the thing that you'll probably notice is the colours are a bit wangdoodle.

I've long found myself with a foot in both camps when it comes to drawing comics - out and out cartooning, with its possibilities for the pictures becoming graphemes, on one side and more 'realistic' action comic art, with its attraction of turning the mechanics of light and shade to schematics on the other. But with colour I don't see that dichotomy. Hopefully the drawing doesn't show the constant wrestling between cartoony and realisticy as a problem.

Don Quixote has given me the opportunity to put all of my ideas into practice - the book is all about perception and deception after all - I may well fall flat on my face like Quixote does, but I love the idea of being either a visionary or full of shit. Comics let you do that, and there's an audience for both.

This follows the big panel at the top of the post. It's later in the morning on the same day. the heat is in the land already, but the sky is still waking up.

It's late in the day when he arrives.

That night at the inn and Quixote gets in a scrap. The night in this case is ochre, I wanted the night to feel warm.

Daft idea this - I tried to mix my colours of warm night with my green morning to give a symbolic lighting. It's a portentous moment and I borrowed the composition from those famous knight getting dubbed illustrations of yore. Of course the pomposity of the whole thing undermined somewhat.

And off he trots. It's another day and another green morning.

This last one is representative of the whole of chapter two where all the backgrounds are bright yellow. It's a hot day, ok? I have a feeling the look of this chapter may have been influenced by the old Kia-Ora ad.

Solipsistic Pop Launch

2010-10-21T09:36:00.009+01:00

Solipsistic Pop 3 is printed, the free gifts and stickers are ready and the date for the Launch party has been announced. Tom Humberstone has done an amazing job putting this together, I have pdf of the book and I think it's the best British anthology I've seen.
The stories are varied, but with a central theme built around being readable to all ages and having the flavour of D.C.Thompson comics of the past. My own effort (two images above) is a fairly dark autobiographical thing, but all the stories have a different tone without ever clashing.

Something I've come to realise since starting this blog and joining Twitter is just how many ridiculously talented cartoonists there are in Britain, many of them unpublished, and this book reflects that. I'm just glad I'm around and making comics now.

Below is the flier for the Launch Party, it features some artwork from David O'Connell's strip (yes, the book is that good!). I look forward to meeting the other contributors and other jolly comics' folk.

British International Comic Show

2010-09-30T10:04:00.007+01:00

I'll be at the British International Comics Show in Birmingham on the 16-17th of October. On the Sunday I'm sharing a table with Warwick Johnson Cadwell and selling my wares. I've designed this Doctor Who poster to sell and will also be selling posters of some other work I've done in the past year (see below). I've had some Doctor Who postcards and greetings cards and other goodies printed up, plus I'll have original artwork from Doctor Who, Roy of the Rovers and Judge Dredd for sale. Hopefully I'll see you there!

The A2 Doctor Who posters are £15, the A3 prints are all £10 plus P&P on both.

Skinhead

2010-09-28T12:03:00.003+01:00

I realise I'm not blogging as often at the moment, partly that's because I'm busy and partly it's because I'm mainly writing rather than drawing. However watching This is England '86 the other night I was reminded of some Skinhead strips I was working on in the early 90s. Can't find the original artwork, but I found this Jpeg I did for a folio at some point with a character from one strip superimposed on a one-off short. Must have used my own Doc Martins to pose for that pic judging by how old and battered they look.

Graphic Novel Within A Novel.

2010-09-23T10:25:00.013+01:00

I set myself 144 comic pages in which to fit the 500 text pages of Don Quixote part one. I had a few tricks in mind to compress certain elements, and of course the dialogue would have to be reduced otherwise every speech bubble in a conversation between Quixote and Sancho would fill a page. Even with all the sleight of hand, pictures speaking for words and shortened dialogue I still need to cut something. What to cut?

Within those 500 pages of part one there is a short novel (40 pages) called The Novel of the Curious Impertinent* which most adapters see as prime candidate for the chop. Many argue it has no place in the Don Quixote in the first place. It's the story of a man who wants to put his wife's fidelity on trial and in doing so creates the very thing he fears.

Well, I'm keeping it. It's key to my reading of the book. What we see in the Novel of the Curious Impertinent is a scientific search for truth in love, but it's like a quantum experiment where the viewer affects the results. This is in perfect contrast to Don Quixote, who sees what he wants to see. Including the Novel of the Curious Impertinent sets Don Quixote the character into sharp relief, helps bring him to life. And it's part of the alchemy of the book watching the fiction come to life.

So what does get the chop? Well, there's a lot of hullabaloo at the inn towards the end of the book that puts a great strain on many modern readers' credulity. I'm paring it down right now. Hopefully I can lose a couple of events that have no bearing on what comes before or after. I can already feel the Cervantine Scholars lighting their torches and marching on Blandford Forum.

Oh, yeah, the picture above - that's an attempt at designing a cover for Volume One. Emma and I decided to go for something else which you'll see in good time. This cover is illustrative of the book as a whole in a quite literal way - it shows the two friends jabbering happily away to one another in a featureless landscape. The new cover will be a tad more dynamic. And it will feature sheep! What more do you want?

*The novel also has been translated as "The Man Too Curious For His Own Good" and other variations.

Don Quixote Volume One.

2010-09-12T10:02:00.014+01:00

I'm 12 days into my allotted 8 month adaptation of Don Quixote Volume One. Before I even started drawing a pitch or writing scenes I had a few basic ideas that would define my adaptation, one of these was that we should split the book back into its original two volumes for publication. There's no reason why the two volumes can't be anthologised in the future, but for my sanity the books will come out a year apart. The originals came out ten years apart so be grateful for small mercies. It's worth noting that the end of Volume One was the end of the story and not a cliffhanger or unfinished work, so there is a natural break. I have also written an additional scene to the end of volume one that will hopefully make it seem implicit that this is a standalone book.

It's not entirely true to say I'm doing it as two volumes to save my sanity (that ship sank without survivors some time ago), there are more important reasons for doing it like this. The gap between the two original books is part of the life of the novel and is a big part of the story in Volume Two. People Quixote meets in Volume Two have read Volume One. Don Quixote lives as a book and I really don't want to create an adaptation that treats it like a revered monument, I want to demonstrate that it still lives. Or maybe that should be: the two friends Don Quixote and Sancho Panza still live.

Yeah, yeah, enough with the blather, I hear you say, we only come here to look at the pretty pictures. These are two images from the pitch. The top one is a slice of a panel, and is one of the earliest images of Quixote that I was content with (terrible pic of Sancho though). The one below was about working out his clothes (still unresolved, although Martin Brown has invited me round to look at his doublet), it then became about unusual colours of night. Realistic but seemingly impossible colour palettes fascinate me.

This post has covered one of the 'basic ideas that would define my adaptation', I'll blog about the others in the coming weeks/months, they include "Why there won't be any giants", "Thou, thee, you, ye", and "What to do with novels within novels". If you've read the book you can probably guess at some of the hurdles facing the diligent adaptor.

Right, must get back to the writing, I left our valorous knight and his squire chasing phantoms in the dark woods.

Influence Map

2010-09-07T16:27:00.002+01:00

I succumbed to the 'influence map' meme. I'm sure I could add a few more or do a whole other one given the chance, but here it is. It's all artists, although I've sneaked in some writerly skills through the back door.

Roy of the Rovers 1993

2010-09-07T07:41:00.003+01:00

Found a decent-ish scan of this page from Roy of the Rovers monthly #1 whilst sorting out this morning. Stuart Green, the writer, editor and co-conspirator on the plan to Watchmen-ise Roy, kept the original and this is the best version I have of it. Some of it is atrocious, but it was a long time ago and the blatant mix of bravado painter and struggling cartoonist has produced a scruffy mongrel of a page that I'm quite fond of now.

Here's The Deep Hereafter

2010-09-02T07:32:00.006+01:00

The Graphic Novel collection featuring mine and Dan McDaid's Doctor Who story The Deep Hereafter will not be available for the foreseeable future. As I've been asked by a number of people if they can see the strip I'm putting these low res files on here for the time being. Credit to Dan for such a brilliant script and credit also to Roger Langridge for his Abe Kanegson font and to James Offerdi for letting me redo the colours the way I wanted them. So, without further ado here is THE DEEP HEREAFTER...

The Original Selfmadehero

2010-09-01T14:10:00.007+01:00

This is my reworking of the Selfmadehero logo. Given the nature of Don Quixote as the hero who invents himself it's hard to imagine a more aptly named publisher.

Today is my official start date on Don Quixote and I have been writing most of the day. The opening scene is one of the trickiest to adapt. There's no dialogue or character interaction, it relies heavily on the author's voice. Just need to decide who the author is really...

The Doctor and Amy Pond

2010-08-30T09:33:00.004+01:00

I've finished the inks for the Xmas Doctor Who Magazine strip and handed over to Geri for colours. I tend to be very hands on about colour work and I must be a nightmare to work with. Fortunately, Geri and I have been friends for 26 years and he puts up with me as well as anyone. I don't want to give away too much about Jonny Morris's wonderful story, so here's a brief glimpse. Above is the first panel.

This a screen shot of something from the middle of the story. Can see what it is yet?

And this is from the last page. I finished the inks for this late last night, I have the whiskers and red eyes to prove as much, and I just need to check I haven't missed anything. After a bit of a tidy up I can start work writing the script for Don Quixote Volume One...

DON QUIXOTE!

2010-08-20T09:21:00.007+01:00

I'm very happy to announce that, as of September 1st, I will be adapting Don Quixote for SelfMadeHero. I'll be writing and illustrating the books. This was key for me as I want to bring a complete vision to Don Quixote.

I'll be fascinated to know what people's opinions are of Don Quixote, most people I've spoken to know the book, know that it is regarded as a cornerstone of western literature, but haven't actually read it. I have heard it described as 'the greatest book ever written, that no one reads'. That's a bit of a tragedy really. Even if you don't accept it's the 'greatest book ever written' it's hard to argue that it isn't the father of all novels (and I include Graphic ones!). I realise that it's a daunting book to tackle - a thousand page book written in the late 16th/early 17th century, most of us swallow hard at that kind of challenge, but it is worth it!

If I'm going to remain faithful to Cervantes' genius text I will need to make a graphic novel that is laugh-out-loud funny, painfully tragic, profound, surreal, constantly reinventing itself and featuring some of the most well-rounded characters in literature... no big ask then!

I can't wait to get started and I will post developments on this blog as I go.

Above is a sample from some of the pages I did as a pitch. I'm really glad Emma at SelfMadeHero has bought into my vision for this project and I look forward to working with the SelfMade team over the next 18 months.

Drawing Matt Smith

2010-08-11T12:28:00.004+01:00

With my Solipsistic Pop story done I am back on the inks for the Xmas Doctor Who Magazine strip. Having fun/nightmares doing the new Doctor, Matt Smith. Likenesses are always a bit tricky and the more information you put down on paper the more lines there are to get wrong and the less chance you have of a likeness. Unless you want a tracing a photo of course, but that has it's own inherent problems - the characters tend to look like mime artists or wax dummies rather than real people.

I've scratched about a bit with Smith. Any successes I had with the last Doctor came from finding a 'silhouette', a shape that I could use to make him a cartoon character. I'm still searching for that with Smith, although I can see him clearer now than when I started - his hair's a puzzle that takes some thought. And for someone with a long face he has a very short face. If you know what I mean (!?).

We'll, I've given him a long face now even if he doesn't have one. One of the reasons I needed to find that cartoon shape for him is so as I can have him doing extreme faces like the one below. I'd never find a photo of him doing that.

Solipsistic Pop strip

2010-08-10T22:07:00.004+01:00

I've just finished my strip for Solipsistic Pop 3. The book is due out in November, the official launch will be at Leeds Thought Bubble festival. I don't want to give away anything about the strip or about the book for now. I can't wait to see everyone else's strips, there's a lot of very talented folk working on this book.

When we were six

2010-08-02T14:25:00.005+01:00

My eldest son James is my step son, he's thirteen and I've brought him up since the age of 3. Nowadays we are just father and son, no need for the step thing, but it's been a long road we've travelled together. 7 years ago when I was on the dole and he was approaching his sixth birthday life was pretty tough and I was still insecure about our relationship, so one day when he and I were dragging bits of wood out of a skip to recycle as shelves I had the idea to recycle some of his toys along with the wood and make a 'thing' that included lots of stuff we'd enjoyed together. There's no way I could compensate for absent genes, but if it was possible for an out of work cartoonist suffering a breakdown to build a gene replacement step fathering device then this was probably it.

I built it for his sixth birthday and it's lived on his bedroom wall most of the time since. Currently it's in my studio awaiting repairs. The Fiffer Feffer Fef* (2nd in from top left) has long gone and it needs a bit of work.

It ended up looking very Peter Blake. Many parts of it function - there's a lever for Jerry to pop in and out of his hole, the tiny Earth spins, the football is on a spring, the racing driver helmet visor lifts to reveal my son's face, the target is two opening doors, the guitar (that I made from cardboard, match wood, fusewire and fishing tackle) does actual strum etc..

Hope it's of some interest to you folks.

*He had trouble reading and this was the first thing he learned to read, thank you Dr Seuss.

(and if it looks a bit odd and wonky it's because I pasted together two old photos of it a photoshopped them a bit to try and show what it actually looked like.)

For Sale

2010-07-24T12:28:00.003+01:00

I'm putting artwork up for sale in the coming months. I have some original art for sale and hopefully I'll be doing some prints of any popular pieces I've done. If there's anything you want to buy as original art (that includes the Doctor Who, Roy of the Rovers and Judge Dredd stuff as well as any paintings you see on the blog) or if there's something you'd like a print of (obviously much of my recent work has been done digitally) then contact me and let me know, either through the blog comments or via email. Above is a jumble of some of the images I've stuck on this blog in the last year or two.

The Seven Crystal Balls

2010-07-14T09:05:00.007+01:00

The Forbidden Planet International blog asked for drawings of favourite French comic characters, so I thought I'd have a go at a very un-ligne claire Tintin cover (yes, I know he's Belgian, but it's in French for heaven's sake). Seven Crystal Balls is a favourite of mine and contains one of the rare but brilliant spooky moments in Tintin's adventures when Rascar Capac, the Inca mummy, slips into the room of the sleeping boy reporter. I thought it might be fun to render the story as a gothic horror and Tintin as a grittier character. Using the Mignola Gothic-style covers as inspiration I took a few of the scribbles from the sheet below, pasted them together in Photoshop, printed them out as blueline and inked them up.

Actually the sheet below is the nearest I get to a sketchbook, I've never kept one and don't know what to do with them if I'm given one. There are three unpaid jobs on this sheet fighting for my attention, in the centre is a sketch for an article I've just written for Vworp Vworp! magazine about Mick McMahon's Junkyard Demon art (I'll post the final image at a later date) , on the left is as far as I got with my Absinthe Frappe image and the rest is Tintin scribble.

Something old, something new...

2010-07-03T11:37:00.008+01:00

Another excellent season of Doctor Who ends with a big ol' finale-doodah and I'm drawing my latest Who strip. Happy days. Above is an image I did for the beeb of one of my favourite finales - that whole Doomsday-Doc-and-Rose-on-opposite-sides-of-reality thing. Below is a pic of new Doc Matt Smith from my latest roughs for the DWM Xmas story. Had to ditch this image as it didn't flow so well in the scene (see that's comics' professionalism for you).

I started drawing strips for DWM in 2008 (I'd been writing for them since 2006), my first task was to design a strip version of Donna, played by Catherine Tate, for the two strips I was going to do - Immortal Emperor and Time of my Life. Here's what I sent over:

The next job was to design a terrecotta android version of Chinese Emperor Qin. Here are a couple of those designs, more of these feature in the commentary at the back of The Widow's Curse Graphic Novel.
And that's one the pages of pencils I did for that strip. I pencil in photoshop for strips like this. Below is one of those step by step things showing a page go from from roughs, to pencils, to inks, to colour. The inks here are done in the traditional pen and paper method.

The Angel Gang

2010-06-23T13:13:00.005+01:00

More old stuff I'm afraid, this is the Angel Gang from a Gordon Rennie story that featured in the Judge Dredd Lawman of the Future summer special (I think!). I guess this was from 1996. WJC recently did an Angel Gang image and I felt inspired to do one myself, unfortunately I haven't got the time and seeing as I had to draw them for the comic all those years ago I dug out some of the old pages. I've done a quick colouring job on them to spruce them up a bit. Quite shocking how Mick McMahon-esque these are. In fact, it was partly the feeling that I was walking McM's shadow that put me off wanting to do anymore Dredd for the next 15 years. And in those days anyone who was doing Dredd in anything other than the full acrylic body-builder sheen was probably frowned upon, especially someone doing a cod McM style. The cod McM style had it's day in the sun though in the end.

It's the World Cup (1994)

2010-06-17T10:39:00.011+01:00

Why didn't I think to blog about the World cup??? Because people who like comics don't like football and vice versa. Thankfully there are some exceptions (me included) otherwise this post would be a waste of time. 16 years ago I was still drawing Roy of the Rovers for the monthly and we embraced the world cup in the USA in our usual controversial style. England didn't qualify for that world cup, but Roy of the Rovers was represented at the World Cup by 'Delroy of the Rovers', Paul Ntende, who opted to play for his father's home nation Nigeria over his country of birth.

I don't know that I explained last time I blogged about Roy of The Rovers how the strips ran weekly in Shoot Magazine between each issue of the Monthly (this meant the only way to get the full story was to read both). This strip below is a two page strip from Shoot (9th July 1994). Hopefully Titan books will eventually collect all of these stories together.

Looking at these pages again after all this time I can see that I was trying to capture the colourful summery-ness of the World Cup and the blazing light. The panels I like here though are the crowd shots (I didn't realise I'd drawn Captain America before! I think that was my crude way of saying this is America, which in turn stems from my primary associations with America which come from Roy Castle's Record Breakers and the La-la-la la-la-la America scene each week which featured a cartoon of the Cap.)

Digging through the drawers of old stuff I also unearthed this spread from Roy of the Rovers Monthly No17. It has a kind of World Cup theme as it's about Melchester Rovers signing Brazilian World Cup star, Malandro. Again in typical Monthly style we used the arrival of the Brazilian to do a flashback to his upbringing in the Favelas (contrasting with his English counterparts). Malandro's story includes wife beating, drug addiction and the Capoeira - the dance of the knives.

Things of note here are the shift in art style and the sense of unreality, this entire spread is drawn in pencil and oil pastels and I think I was trying for a kind of magic realism (very South American) because this life is a world away from ours and the events in it (murder and violence as daily occurrence) are impossible for anyone to accept without some kind of schism.

Really odd and powerful stuff to be putting out in a comic for kids. Stuart Green (writer/editor) said recently of the ideas in the comic that 'we were ahead of our time', (classic excuse for not selling enough comics). I'm not sure whether that's true or not, but the chances of a comic like this being made for children now is more unlikely than ever.

Books!

2010-05-29T11:37:00.006+01:00

Once upon a time publishers sent us illustrators copies of the books we had worked on as a matter of duty, these days the complimentary copies are less forthcoming. This may well be down to publishers being understaffed and overworked rather than some conspiracy, of course. Luckily I have Wendy Dye of the Art Agency to hunt down the books I've worked on, and this morning something I did four years ago finally arrived in book form. Well done Wendy!

Before I get to that here's some other books that have turned up. The Merlin books I've blogged about a few times here are pictured above and below. The designer did a nice thing for the chapter headings, chopping my illustrations. Below you can see the scattered mix of text, comic strip and straight illustration that I was playing with. It's a shame this series got cancelled (due to some supermarket deal rather than the reception to the books I'm told) as I would have liked to continue the experiment.

Another set of books I blogged about turned up recently as well. This is a series of 'junior spy adventures' called The MI Five. This was my first experiment with manga Studio, I tried to use the tight deadline and new tools to give a real 'drive-by-illustration' speed and frantic feel, working without pencils and drawing free hand over thumbnails. In fact the second image here with the bashful boy and girl was my first ever attempt at using Manga studio.

And below is the book that turned up this morning. At the time I did it I had no work and was prepared to turn my hand to anything. Despite the terror that blazed in my head when I was offered a 3-D pop-up, natural history book to be done 'realistically' in water colour, I still said yes.

Each spread required four A3 watercolour paintings with areas that could be removed to reveal the image beneath. I had to work with a paper engineer who had some kind of masterplan I was only partially aware of. I'm not someone who paints with watercolour, so it's fair to say I felt totally out of my depth on this project.

My daughter loves this book now it has arrived, so I'll give it to her. Makes it all worth while.

The Third Policeman

2010-05-28T08:34:00.003+01:00

Wish I could put up the cover design I'm working on right now, but I can't. Hopefully I'll be able to reveal all in the next week or two. In the meantime here's something I did under the influence of red wine and sunshine in an attic in Salisbury in 1997. It was intended as a cover illustration for Flann O'Brien's the Third Policeman. I was reminded of the book the other day when watching the finale of that, almost distracting, BBC thing, Ashes to Ashes; both had a similar ending/reveal. Strangely enough, the approach I took for this illustration, sort of Picasso-esque, is representative of the story inside.

I'll try and put up something new next time.

Solipsistic, Norris, adaptions and the FA

2010-05-18T08:48:00.014+01:00

This is one of those 'here's what I've been up to' posts. The top image is from the-thing-I-can't-talk-about-yet, not until it goes tits up or gets the final thumbs up from the publisher. The plan with this book is to scan the pencils and shift the levels rather than ink it. I know some people do this very effectively, so if any one has any tips I'm all ears.

I've also just finished a series of strips for the FA. I know I said I'd never draw another football strip after 6 years of doing football comics, but I needed the money and they asked nicely.

I completed the Lovecraft adaption I was writing and the script is winging it's way to the artist.
And this is my bread and butter these days - a weekly cartoon for Inside Soap magazine. This one is from a couple of weeks back and shows a switch to something a bit more design-y and atmospheric.

Next up I have four Horrible Histories covers and a comic strip about the TT, then I start work on a rather wonderful Doctor Who story by Jonny Morris I've just received which will appear in the Christmas edition of Doctor Who Monthly. After that I will be contributing a strip to Solipsistic Pop 3.

Solipsistic Pop 2 is available here. It's a beautifully produced book that smells wonderful and has a gorgeous cover by the very talented Luke Pearson. The whole thing is put together by another talented comic creator Tom Humberstone. The stories are intimate, funny and peculiar. The book introduced me to a number of talents I was shamefully unaware of like Stephen Collins, Kristyna Baczynski, Anna Saunders and Jack Noel plus others I'd heard of but hadn't read like Adam Cadwell and Marc Ellerby.

Contender for my favourite comic ever is Eightball by Dan Clowes and this collection reminded me of the joy there was to be found in Eightball.

Jumble Sales are Holy and Sweet Mystery were probably my favourite stories in Solipsistic Pop 2 - one features Freddie Mercury and his wolves and the other has people weeing on sweets - that's my kind of read.

Mum

2010-05-10T13:25:00.004+01:00

Did this drawing of my brilliant Mum today. It's based on a photo of her when she was 17. A giant version of the photo used to sit in the window of Hartley's Photographers on Poole High Street in 1963, much to my Mum's embarrassment. From Hartley's the Photographers to Dinlos the blog, hopefully she won't be embarrassed by this version.

Captain America

2010-05-08T15:17:00.003+01:00

Something I fiddled with between jobs today. This is Captain America as seen in the early TV series rather than the Marvel comics version. I'm no expert on the superhero genre, and I doubt anyone will ever offer to let me draw a superhero story given that this is how I choose to see them.

Black and white Dredd

2010-04-27T11:19:00.002+01:00

Think I might prefer the uncoloured version of this Dredd pic. Here it is, make your own mind up.

Judge Dredd

2010-04-26T21:06:00.005+01:00

I was wondering aloud on Twitter why Dredd ended up with his squat bodybuilder physique today and that prompted me to want to draw the Judge again (the way I see him). It's been a long time, but I really enjoyed doing this. It's so imprinted on my brain. If Tharg happens to see this, now would be a good time to ask me draw Judge Dredd. Mind you, I'd imagine there's quite a queue.

Doctor Who meets The Beatles

2010-04-21T10:06:00.008+01:00

Donna Noble (Catherine Tate) meets John Lennon with the Doctor looking nervously on.

Donna asks for John's autograph:

John: Is it for your daughter, missus?

Donna: No, it's for me mum y'cheeky sod!

Time travel gag. I wrote that. Well, I thought it was funny. Moving on.

These are some inks from the Doctor Who strip Time of My Life written by Jonny Morris. He's working on another script for me to draw right now which should appear at Christmas. This will be the 4th script by Jonny I've illustrated and I like to think we work together pretty well. Time of My Life featured the Doctor taking Donna to the Cavern club to see the early Beatles. This was probably the hardest page in the whole strip. (Click to enlarge!)

The Doctor drags Donna away from the pre-Ringo Beatles

And there's Pete Best on Drums. The Doctor and Donna are far right.

Comic art geek fact: all these inks were done with an Edding 1800 0.3 and 0.1. I used so much black in this strip it made it very difficult to colour. Actually I wanted the Beatles page to remain black and white.

After there visit to the Cavern Club the Doctor and Donna whizz off to some future dystopia populated by vampire goths.

This next story I'm doing for Doctor Who Magazine will be my 8th Doctor Who strip, I've written three and this will be the fifth I've drawn. It will be my first attempt at an 11th Doc strip. I'm looking forward to drawing Matt Smith, but I have to say I quite enjoyed drawing David Tennant. I always felt that he looked right as a comic character. In fact, the more 'realistic' the representation of him was the less it looked like him.

Last panel from Time of My Life.

Old stuff

2010-04-17T08:52:00.003+01:00

Can't put any new stuff on the blog at the moment due to the nature of the commissions I'm working on, so here's some more old stuff. This is from my time with the Inkshed agency. All three were from the period where I would draw freehand on the wacom into Illustrator with the pencil tool set to zero. It was less like drawing and more like cutting shapes out of coloured paper and pasting them together. I didn't really have a clue what I was doing and knowing when to stop was a real problem. The choppers pic was a promotion thing (I seemed to do more 'folio' work that actual paid work in those days). The chilli pic below was part of a calander I think. And the last one was for FHM magazine. I think it was to illustrate an article on race issues in US prisons. Well, that's what it look like.

SLANG part 2

2010-04-16T08:39:00.004+01:00

Here's a page from SLANG issue 3. By the time we got to the third issue of SLANG in 1991 both Sean and I had developed our obsession with the 1970s into a complete approach to comics. You still see this in my Dinlos stuff today. Although there was nostalgia to what I was doing my thinking then as now was that the 1970s was a bit like a modern costume drama - a contemporary and yet strangely alien looking time that makes for a great setting. Something many films and TV series have realised since then. The Robbers was a bit uneven but reading it again I can see ideas I'm still interested in now; the power of the liminal spaces - the half seen, the misunderstood.

In other places the cultural references crept in too much (see the Ogron on the cover), but this was before the internet and just drawing things from another time gave them a kind of power. Now all of these images are at our fingertips and retro is so pervasive.

SLANG issue 4 never really happened, shot in the paddock, though I think we had planned to do an issue without my Dad on the cover. I was trying some madly ambitious stuff before being dragged kicking and screaming into the real world to draw comics for money. Below is an example - it's part of a page of music (yeah, I know). This is The Jam playing something from Setting Sons and/or Sound Affects by the looks of it.

And finally the ultimate synthesis of my obsession with 1970s culture was The Watermen, the story of three miniature Dennis Watermans who smoke fags and do 1970s stuff. It's very silly. I coloured it on a mate's computer in the mid 90s.

SLANG 1989-1992

2010-04-15T16:25:00.012+01:00

My cover for SLANG No.2. The kitchen sink scene painted on a canvas the cartoon characters and logo drawn on paper and glued on. This was the days before computers!

This may be a form of career suicide putting up artwork from 21 years ago, but here goes. SLANG is where it all began for me and my compadre Sean Longroft, we finally published our own comic after talking about it since we were kids. When we were kids we would have imagined our own comic as something full of sci fi guns and robots and all that gubbins; what we actually published reflected more about out lives as 20 yr olds and the only remnant of Sci Fi featured on the cover to Issue 1. There were no adventure or Sci Fi stories in Slang just the emotional outpourings of two drug-addled young men.

We got this cover screen printed at the printers where were doing our Employment Training in Boscombe. I rather enjoyed mixing up the colours, but as you can see screen printing isn't the easiest way of putting colours on a comic book cover.

One furious reader in Oxford returned his copy of No.1 to Comics Showcase on the grounds that there was nothing like the 2000ad-ish stuff on the cover inside. There wasn't. The whole thing was an LSD-drenched journey through mundane suburbia.

Derek was a proper 'does what is says on the tin' style comic character.

Most of what we did was heavily autobiographical (I mean, christ! my Dad was our cover star!). Issue 2 featured my musings on my errant teens and my parents collapse into mutual, general and self destruction. The whole thing was filtered through a psychedelic looking glass and was completely incomprehensible to most readers.

Our protagonist is haunted by the place that used to be home.

Dad in his pants in the garden at night.

Again a sense of being haunted by home.

We had no idea what to do with it once we'd printed it (we printed 1000 copies of Issue 2), we weren't really aware of other independent comics at the time and didn't have a clue about distribution. We managed to part fund it by hand drawing advertisments for local record shops, comic shops and head shops. Copies found their way to the strangest places, some even made it to the US. A friend of mine took copies over and gave them to a comic shop, he asked the the shop owner if there was anything like it in the states that they could give him in exchange and he was given a copy of Eightball issue 5. Needless to say we were blown away by it.

We ran out of money before we could print more than a couple of copies of Issue 3 (I'll stick a couple of pieces from that up at some point). One of the few decent things the Tories ever did was the Enterprise Allowance Scheme which enabled us to get the first two issues out, when that came to an end we were back on the dole. Until, that is, Stuart Green and Frank Plowright got a copy and offered us work on their new football comic Glory Glory.

Finally here's a delightful little strip from issue 2 by Sean, he'll hate me for putting this up but he is taking this piss out of me in it. Actually Sean's drawing is much more together than mine. Like I said career suicide, I'm not even the best artist in the thing!

The Ratcatcher

2010-04-06T09:26:00.001+01:00

Here's a screen shot of the job I'm working on at the moment. Can't say much about the project as it's in early stages, but it's something suitably gruesome for the kiddies. I guess this is sort of how Horrible Histories would look if my style consumed Martin's. I'm particularly fond of the dog in this picture.

LOVECRAFT

2010-04-01T11:49:00.002+01:00

In between drawing I've been working on an adaption of an H.P. Lovecraft story. Can't say much about the project yet, but as this is a writing gig for me I couldn't resist producing a Lovecraft illustration. Here's this morning's effort.

The Dalkey Archive

2010-03-30T09:01:00.003+01:00

I'm unable to put up any of the work I've done recently. I'm still in negotiation over a book deal and it wouldn't be right to publish the pitch on a blog. So, in the meantime, here's something from the psychedelic depths of the mid-nineties. This is an illustration from the The Dalkey Archive by brilliant Flann O'Brien. This is the bit where mad scientist De Selby meets Saint Augustine in an underwater cave somewhere near Dublin.

This represents my early attempts at getting away from comics and into illustration. This was the only picture I ever did in this style. But there is something about it. I'm particularly fond of De Selby's diving suit.

Sancho

2010-03-12T12:37:00.005Z

Like one of those befuddled marathon runners staggering about embarrassingly on the home straight, I am approaching the finish line on the Horrible Histories book and looking forward to the foil blanket and Lucozade. Next on the to do list though are two things I've been looking forward to, one is the Don Quixote pitch and the other is a short story adaption I've been asked to do. Above is a panel from the most famous scene in Don Quixote. I'm trying out 4B pencils instead of inks. Good fun doing stuff on paper again, although I have a nasty habit of hitting cmd Z to 'undo' any mistakes.

Good Dog Bad Dog

2010-03-05T15:20:00.008Z

Dave Shelton's Good Dog bad Dog strips have been collected and released as the first book from the DFC library. As a celebration of the book's release on World Book Day I've done my own pulp novel pastiche cover of Good Dog Bad Dog. The kind of thing you might find in a charity shop for 10p or on eBay for £30. Meanwhile Dave's book is available from all good booksellers for a reasonable price. Well... what are you waiting for?!?

Beep the Meep

2010-03-04T13:09:00.003Z

This month's Doctor Who Magazine, No 419, features my illustration of Beep the Meep from the Tom Baker Doctor Who Weekly strip 'The Star Beast' written by Pat Mills and John Wagner and drawn by Dave Gibbons. Tom Spilsbury (DWM editor) asked if I could do it in a Gibbons style (to which the answer is 'no') so I tried to at least make it a bit Gibbonsy.

Watch out Merlin!

2010-03-01T08:37:00.005Z

The knife is sharpened for Merlin...

Looks like Random House have shelved plans for future Merlin adaptions. I only came onto the project for books 5 and 6 in the series which won't be published for another month or so, but had planned to work on books 7-10. It's a shame because I've enjoyed working on these books and as I've said before I think the approach that we've taken has real benefits for kids who are uneasy with chapter books.

Below are two more examples of how my hasty line work fits around a spread. I hope to modify this approach and use it with some of my own kids' fiction.

An action sequence from Merlin which mirrors the drama of series better than a single still image

These strips hopefully draw kids into the book, get the blood pumping, but you still need to read the text to get the full picture.

Don Quixote

2010-02-24T11:29:00.004Z

These are a few sketches of Don Quixote I did this morning. I did them in Manga studio using a mid-tone ground and then working in a black layer and white layer on top. This is all for a pitch I was working on a while back that may yet have legs.

Something I rarely give myself time to do properly is design a character, I tend to work them out on the page as I go. Below is a page of designs I did earlier for Don Quixote. I really enjoyed the process and I've been allowing myself a another bash at the Don as a reward when I finish some of the less fun work I have on at the moment. That makes me sound like a drawaholic... which is probably true.

iComics and Mycomics

2010-02-15T07:58:00.011Z

This weekend I finally got round to playing with the Mycomics app for the iPhone which allows you load a zip file of any comic strip you happen to have lying around on your computer onto your phone. It's very simple (you just drop the file into an application called Jivaro or use your internet browser). Something of a vanity project so far for me (I've loaded up my own Deep Hereafter comic done for Doctor Who Magazine), but it's handy to be able to show someone what you do at the drop of a hat. I've often been in the pub trying to describe a comic strip I've worked on wishing I could magic up the pages and just hand them over. Hey Presto!

A double click with your finger allows you to zoom into a panel, but clearly it's impossible to read an entire page at once.

Like any other sentient comic creators out there I'm very interested in the potential for comics in the new digital media. While most comic creators are salivating over the prospects on the iPad I'm still fascinated by the possibilities of comics on the iPhone. It seems to have been dismissed by many people already, the obvious objection being the size of the screen. The reasoning here is that comics are about seeing a number of panels on a page at once, therefore iPhone fails and iPad wins. Because the medium has to be tailored to suit comics, right? I'm not so sure. This may be the kind of thinking that has got comics into the mess they're in.

Most comics in sold in the past 20 years have been sold via specialist outlets to 'comic buyers'. For some this kind of niche, even if it grows ever smaller, is the ideal situation. I've never been comfortable with the idea and have always veered towards comics that sell in newsagents to 'anyone' (even kids!!!).

Once upon a time when comics were young they lived inside a parent publication called a newspaper, they were read by lots of people (and were frankly brilliant), they grew and like all kids found there own feet. But the good thing about their life in the newspaper was that everyone household had a newspaper and so every child had a comic, the genius of Windsor McCay, Cliff Sterret, E.C. Segar etc was exposed to everyone.

These days even newspapers are dying out, but there is a form of communication that everyone has, in fact that everyone carries with them everywhere - their phones. That's why it seems the obvious place for comics to seek a new home, to reacquaint themselves with the world. My son and his mates are forever swapping text gags, horrific youtube clips and bizarre information via phones in the playground. This should be the breeding ground for comics - in the grubby mitts and fervent imaginations of kids.

I'm sure the iPad offers enormous potential for comics to reinvent themselves, but there is also the possibility that the same people will be making comics for the same people, everyone preaching to the converted. The iPhone offers comics the first chance for reinvention and looking beyond the existing readership. There have been some efforts - including Lewis Trondheim who's seen the potential and produced the daily delight, Bludzee, Darkhorse have done pretty good job chopping up Hellboy and we have seen (God help us) motion comics, but too many comics people seemed to turn their backs on the biggest potential readership because it wouldn't 'look like comics anymore'. Is that really a bad thing...?

Mind the Gap!

2010-02-11T09:47:00.005Z

Work in progress on page one of The Inverted Coma

Every freelancer's nightmare is approaching me - a gap in the schedule!! Best way to deal with this is to panic, start digging up old science fiction stories and draw frantically. Well, that's my way of coping. Since I found out I had a dreaded 'gap' approaching I've been drawing this page above in my spare time, if all else fails I'll send the finished story to people and hope to get some work. In the meantime I'm sending out old stuff like this:

Murderous Maths covers

2010-02-03T10:08:00.008Z

I've done a few of these covers now (ten, I think) and worked on a full colour book with Kjartan, providing illustrations and strips throughout, Amazon says that book is out in April. I'm not the world's most natural cartoonist as my instinct is to 'draw' rather than 'cartoon'. That inconsistency runs through these images - cartoon schematics clashing with attempts at 'figurative' anatomy. It's a difficult balance to strike. There some very successful cartoonists/comic artists whose work has the feel of real people wearing cartoon masks which sometimes bothers me. Hergé of course solved this dichotomy with an even line weight throughout and of course delicately chosen and placed cartoon features.

I'll keep working on the cartooning because I have so much to learn and much of what I want to achieve with my writing involves cartooning well.

The Brush Tool

2010-02-01T20:48:00.007Z

Baron Kazam returns!

Fitted in a new HUZZAH!!, you can go and see it here. One of the things that I gain from doing HUZZAH!! is that it gives me chance to experiment. On this occasion I decided to do the whole thing using the brush tool in Manga Studio on a light setting. Not an ideal drawing tool really and I wasn't happy with the finished page. I quite like these close up screen shots of the work in progress though. In a sense looking at these images at this size (click on them for full size!) it's like removing the illusion that these marks are real brush marks and instead showing the digital nature of the marks.

General Kvar

Durante

We need to fix a name for this giant blue baby of indeterminate sex. We can't keep calling him/her the Gestalt Heir.

Man Out Of Time (Zuda strip)

2010-01-28T16:56:00.007Z

This is a strip I wrote and drew for Zuda, but I never quite finished it (page 6 is only half done). So anyway here it is for you all to read.

Actually, page six shows how organically these pages were made (I really don't like what there is of page six though). There was very little pencilling as I was drawing them straight into manga and keeping the improvisational feel to it. I had an idea of where it was all going, but I wanted to give it some the HUZZAH feeling of not knowing what was coming next.

More Merlin

2010-01-20T09:26:00.005Z

I've been tearing through another Merlin book this last week. As I've said before the essence of these is all about speed and simplicity, combining heavy black with comic storytelling (that's Graphic Novel storytelling for those in the publishing business allergic to the term comics).

I tend to rough all these out whilst watching the DVD of the episode, occasionally pausing to take a screen shot, plot out a scene or compare the text of the book to the TV version. Then it's over to Manga Studio for 'ink don't think' approach.

The idea is to decorate the pages with dramatic storytelling that draws in early readers and retains the attention and focus without detracting from the text. Below are a few spreads from the past week that hopefully will do just that.

The Big Eye-Am

2010-01-17T16:44:00.006Z

Here's another character from Dinlos, his name is Uriah Eye-Am and he's a young cyclops with a high opinion of himself. As you can see. This is from page one of the Big Eye-Am and will eventually be at the very beginning of the Dinlos book. The plan was to do the full page (there are three panels more to come in this installment), but I've run out of time with Merlin, Horrible Histories and various Soap characters all vying for my attention. Still, Dinlos inches ever forwards.

Vengeance of Voldar

2010-01-05T09:34:00.006Z

And HUZZAH!! book two The Vengeance of Voldar is under way! Read the intro page for a summary of what went before or better still click on 'The Story So Far" and read the whole of 2009's HUZZAH.

These two creatures above are Ambulas, sort of giant frog-like modes of transport, poised to dive into the depths of Voldar in search of treasure. They've been 'borrowed' from a museum by a couple of Belamite Treasure Hunters eager to explore the newly uncovered Voldar. Along for the ride (kidnapped?) is the museum's curator, an elderly Bhahiri woman. I designed these ambulas during an experiment whereby I attempted to sit and draw whilst child minding. these are a couple of the sketches I produced. One just got lifted wholesale to the final art.I actually wrote two pages, but didn't have time to draw both. That's probably a good thing as it leaves what happens next more open for the next contributor.

And talking of contributors, we have a stella list this year. On top the usual crowd, Ian Culbard, Dave Taylor, Faz Choudhury, Colin Fawcett, Paul Harrison Davis, D'Israeli and me, there's PJ Holden, Si Fraser, Warwick Johnson Cadwell, Geraint Ford and Sean Longcroft.

A few new HUZZAHers there. My advice from doing it last year would be - don't think about it, just jump in early, panic for a while and then work out what you will do. The longer it goes on the harder it gets to do your first HUZZAH. The most important thing about HUZZAH though is that the only person who knows what will happen is the artist who is doing the current HUZZAH, soon as it leaves their hand the next person to HUZZAH takes control.

Devil or Angel

2010-01-01T22:52:00.005Z

Happy new year! And happy new HUZZAH!! Just put two new pages up on HUZZAH!!NOIR. It's been crawling along through the second half of 2009 but hopefully the next four months will see the story build at pace.

With Sleepy Jackson already established it's now the turn of his lost wife Rosalie (or is that Véronique). The best Noir Femme Fatales often have a checkered past and the same is true of Rosalie. I like the idea of her as being a total enigma - she could be either devil or angel. This is epitomised by mine and Ian's pictures of her from Chapter Two. In one she is a killer in the dark, in the other she is a nurse, a saviour in the light. We don't know which is the real Rosalie. We don't know who she is or why she's doing what she's doing. That makes her all the more interesting for me.

The Family Factory

2009-12-17T16:04:00.002Z

Finished my mountain of work for this year. The last job was this Spartans strip. Above is the art for the wrap around cover, below are coloured versions of some of the inks I posted the other day. I explained in that post that I was a bit pushed for time and therefore when it came to the colouring I needed something that would look effective without requiring too much work.
This is where the family came in. Last Sunday I had all three of my kids throwing paint around making "textures" for the Spartans strip. Some of these I would drop in as backgrounds, adjusting the colour to suit, and others I would make a transparent layer of and lay on top to texture the colours.

Here's how it works:

I start with a spread, speedily inked in Manga Studio. Notice the lack of colour...

Then get my children to make an unholy mess with paint. Here comes the colour...

here are the final pieces drying

I scan those in and then paste them all over the spread, which by now has a few flat colours added. The result is something like this.

Comic Short Cuts

2009-12-10T11:15:00.003Z

Getting short of time as we head towards the finish line on these 7 comic strips for Weldon Owen. Short of time means two things for comic artists - no sleep and no backgrounds, and if you're really pushed it can also mean silhouettes! Ah God bless you silhouettes, you are my saviour!

This last strip in the series is about those rough tough chaps the Spartans. Thankfully I chose not to write about the battle of Thermopylae (apparently some other hack has already done that) instead I've concentrated on the institutionalised bullying and abuse that goes into making a good Spartan. This means the approach I've chosen is perfectly suited to the story (just in case the publisher is reading this).

When Geri, Faz and I finish this project I'll write something about all seven stories, because it's certainly been an experience turning out all these strips whilst managing other projects at the same time.

Paint

2009-12-05T10:51:00.007Z

Last weekend I took a busman's holiday and did some painting with the kids. As many of you know this is where creativity and destruction become the same thing. Great fun.

Above is a speed portrait of Edie (3 minutes I guess) done with the worst brush and paints I've ever used and under the threat of Oby destroying/creating it at any moment. I've never been obsessed with materials the way most comic artists are, perhaps that's why I was happy to embrace digital inks. All mark making is artificial to some degree and choosing a pen or brush to make an exact mark is no different than creating a pen in Manga Studio to do the same in my opinion.

I kept all the children's paintings, the marks they make are so fresh and wild they make great textures for my own work (multiply layer in photoshop etc). The red and purple composition that Oby is working on here ended up providing texture for Gerraint Ford's cover to one of the Infinity books we've been working on. It's here, take a look.

In the past I've used Edie's painting to create textures for Kackernory, H.G. Smells and Family Pet (click the labels for examples).

Mother Of Pearl

2009-11-30T11:22:00.005Z

This is page one of Mother of Pearl from Dinlos and Skilldos. You may have no idea what Dinlos and Skilldos is or may just be wondering why it takes me so long to get on with it. Here is my first ever blog post explaining. The only thing that has changed is my opinion of the term Graphic Novel which I can live with now. If you click on the label Dinlos below this post you can see the rest of the book so far.

I finished Merlin Book 5 on Friday and did this page on Saturday and Sunday night. The script was written about two years ago, and as with other Dinlos scripts it has been sat waiting for me to find the time draw it and/or stop procrastinating about how to approach the artwork. Each character in Dinlos has their own colour to help with switching between story threads. As I've mentioned before, the idea here is to use the structure of an old Fleetway annual like Whizzer and Chips as the structure for the novel.

I'd like to say the second page will be up soon, but I have six pages of wrestling Spartans, six pages of Galileo and some covers to do in December. I'll try and squeeze it in before xmas if I can.

Spinning plates

2009-11-17T12:10:00.006Z

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

2009-11-10T23:45:00.009Z

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

2009-11-09T15:40:00.002Z

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

Congratulations Vivien McDermid

2009-11-01T10:55:00.006Z

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...

2009-10-30T11:15:00.005Z

...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

2009-10-19T07:28:00.009+01:00

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

2009-10-16T08:41:00.003+01:00

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!

2009-10-13T09:05:00.004+01:00

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...?

2009-10-10T22:47:00.005+01:00

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

2009-10-09T10:41:00.005+01:00

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

2009-10-06T12:01:00.005+01:00

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)

2009-09-28T08:40:00.010+01:00

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.

Englishman, Irishman, Scotsman and Welshman

2009-09-16T12:43:00.004+01:00

This was a commission for Mindgames magazine and the brief asked for an "Englishman, Irishman, Scotsman and Welshman attending a pub quiz with each nationality represented by the national tipple to which they are partaking - Englishman has a lukewarm bitter, Scotsman has a scotch, the Irishman has a Guinness and the Welshman has.... is there a national drink of Wales? Could he be holding a leek?" A leek?!?! Jeez, how crap would that be? Anyway I just did him getting the answer. Here's a couple of tiny spots from the same magazine.

easy as ABC and You'll kick yourself...

I didn't say it was funny!

I'm putting these up because I found them the other day and because I can't blog about what I'm working on for the time being.

Matt Smith as the Doctor

2009-09-11T08:36:00.005+01:00

I had a go at drawing Matt Smith as the Doctor back in January when news was first announced and yesterday I got asked if the image could be used as part of a project to celebrate the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip. Looking at the original drawing I decided I'd have another go this morning. Hopefully they'll prefer this one now I've done it.

10 ways to stay busy

2009-09-04T08:44:00.012+01:00

Ordinary folk I meet when I venture out of my shed ask me how I manage to earn enough money drawing pictures to support my three children. I'm the only wage earner so I need to stay busy. Here are my 10 ways to stay busy as an illustrator:

1.Get a good agent.

The picture of the jazz man at the top was done for an agency 'brochure'. I had to pay to go in the brochure. Nice little picture. Got me sod all work. Agents that operate like that are not much use unless you want an illustration hobby rather than career. If the agent isn't offering you work every month it's either the wrong agent or you're crap.

2.Get paid to pitch.

A good agent will get you a fee to pitch for work. The image below was for an Aztec book. The publisher prefers to use 'realistic' styles in information books but wanted to see what I'd do. They decided against using it, but I got paid and got to try something out.

3.Do Anything for money.

There are a few illustrators who have a "style" and it's the "style" that you pay for. I had a "style" for a while, but my "style" earnt less money than a part time shelf-stacker in Tesco. The Yosser Hughes, "I-can-do-that" approach, is the one that pays my bills. Somebody was going to get paid for drawing sharks that look like photographs, as I was totally broke I thought it might be nice if it was me.

4.Every magazine needs illustrations.

Sometimes this may require hypnotising the editor, but MAGAZINES DO NEED ILLUSTRATIONS. Below are some things I did for the unlikely and short-lived BBC puzzle magazine Mindgames.
5.Pretend you're someone else.

If Osprey are looking for an Angus McBride type watercolour, figurative, historical illustrator then pretend you are one. Actually ignore that. I didn't get the gig anyway.

6.Come up with a quick style

Illustration work is really badly paid so it makes sense to work fast. If you're clever you make it look as if knocking-them-out-ten-to-the-dozen is your "style". This dandruff picture was done for Tall Tree Books.

7.Always say yes.

When that nice Ben Sharpe, editor of the DFC, asked me if I had any stories to pitch I said "yes". And then ran away to quickly come up with something. Below is one of the stories I pitched that day - Geronimo. I think it's best to say yes to pretty much everything, means you spend less time thinking and more time drawing and writing.

8.Don't think Twice.

The knack to drawing stuff quick is to draw faster than you think. These monkeys are a prime example. They were done for a book about puberty for Parragon. They didn't take much longer to draw than they do to look at. Your drawing is a product of a whole life of looking and thinking, no need to waste time thinking about it when you're drawing it.

9.Pretend you understand Da Kidz

Essential given that most illustration is for children. Even if you are a miserable old git in your 40s it's best to make out you're in-tune with the kids. These pics were also part of the Parragon puberty books.

10.Find somebody really successful and make them look good

I make more money pretending to be Martin Brown than I do being me, that's because he's very successful and I'm not. Most of the Horrible Histories books will have pictures inked and coloured by me on the front and many are filled with my pictures too.

10a.... or find somebody really successful and jump in their grave

The other option is to take over from somebody successful. I now do Philip Reeve's old job illustrating Murderous Maths. In fact Kjartan and I have a giant Murderous Maths of Everything coming out next year. Fortunately I don't have to do it all in Philip Reeve's "style".

There you have it, that's how I support my three children (and my comic career). I know, I know I'm a total slut.

The Deep Hereafter

2009-08-24T07:42:00.007+01:00

Dan McDaid's brilliant Doctor Who Noir story The Deep Hereafter, drawn by me, can be found within the pages of Doctor Who Magazine 412 and is available in your local newagents right now!

The story is DWM's tribute to the Spirit comics of the 1940s. This meant I could pretend to be Will Eisner for a few weeks (more taxing than you might imagine, and I don't think it looks much like Eisner anyway). I wanted to go the whole way on this strip - taking 10 pages of Doctor Who Magazine back in time with me. I was reined in somewhat (perhaps wisely) as there were concerns that Eisner and The Spirit may not be known to DWM readers and making the pastiche too absolute (old printing effects and newsprint texture etc) may lose the reader. Some of my ideas survived including the "Action, adventure, Time travel" banner thing across the top of the first page (see above).

In the end James Offredi was patient enough to let me interfere with his colour work( Gawd bless yer James), re-paintbucketing panels to fit my vision and then aging all the colour to ensure that the reader knew this was from another time.

Below is one of the process things showing the stages, I haven't included James original colours. This is one of my favourite panels, not just because it features the Doctor and Madge's fine behinds, but because it's just not the sort of panel I wouldn't have thought of unless I was aping Eisner.

I roughed all the strip directly into Manga Studio so I had total control over the amount of black (I don't usual get my roughs this spot on by the way)

inks in Manga

my recoloured panel - paintbucketed in Photoshop with no modeling or effects

Final stage - I used a sepia-yellowish 'multiplied' layer over the top to age the colours.

I must also mention Roger Langridge who made an Abe Kanegson font (Abe was The Spirit's letterer and one of the best letterers there's ever been) and I should also say thanks to Scott Gray, whose original idea it was to do a Doctor Who / Spirit story and who tolerated my constant interference with every aspect of the strip's development.

Storybook 2010

2009-08-15T15:51:00.010+01:00

The Doctor Who Storybook 2010 is out now and amongst other delights it features Space Vikings! a strip written by Jonny Morris and drawn by Ian Culbard and me. I was originally commissioned to do the whole strip, but due to workload I'd asked Ian to do the colour. I did the layouts for the strip then got ill and realised that I wouldn't have time to pencil up all the pages. I asked Ian to help me out and take over pencil duties which he did and from there began a weird game of comic strip tennis as we batted the strip back and forth to such a degree that working out who did what is virtually impossible. Ian changed some of the layouts, I changed some of his pencils when I inked the pages, he changed some of the inks as he coloured and just for good measure I changed his colours around several times until I was happy with it.

Below is an example of how things evolved from layouts to pencils to inks and then a colour version.

My wild roughs, thankfully Ian could understand them - the script was lacking rhythm so I added the little viking-ish motifs to punctuate it (I did a Drashig in one actually, and Ian managed to get the TARDIS in this one)

Ian' delightful pencils

...which I then scrawled over with my inks. I adjusted small things here and there because I like a more angular 2 dimensional feel to composition (especially when it comes to positioning scrawny Mr Tennant). Things like that incredible ceiling that Ian did I just painstaking traced - even my mad obsessive approach allows me to realise when someone has done something infinitely better that I could.

This was Ian's first colour version. Nice, but I didn't like the orange

This was my version replacing the orange with red - which Ian hated

and this was the winner - we both liked the blue!

Each page went through this bizarre back and forth process making this a true collaboration and something both of us can be proud of without any trace of arrogance. You see, I don't know who drew this strip because it doesn't look like it was either of us.

Danza

2009-07-13T22:33:00.004+01:00

Here's another drawing from the Doctor Who strip I'm doing. There are a lot of characters in the strip. This fella may look a pretty standard Noir character, but as with all the players in this story there's a twist. It will appear in Doctor Who Magazine issue 412, out in August, so all will be revealed then.

KZZOWW!! KZZOWW!! KZZOWW!!

2009-07-07T11:16:00.004+01:00

Here's the strip I'm working on at the moment. This is just a colouring experiment to see how it would look given a 1940s newspaper strip look. Can't give away anything about this other than to say it's the Doctor Who story Dan McDaid has written and it's a lot of fun.

Murderous Maths

2009-06-24T14:47:00.004+01:00

Here's an image I finished last week for Murderous Maths. This chap is Urgum the axe wieldingbarbarian, created by the brilliant Kjartan Poskitt. Not sure what kind of style I've ended up with for these covers - I think I started out trying to do an approximation of Philip Reeve's original stuff for this series, but I now seemed to have moved a long way from that.

With that out the way I'm now doing layouts for a 10 page Doctor Who comic strip that will be a bit of a tribute to a true comic genius. Dan McDaid has written me a mad little story full of genius characters. I'm also juggling two other comic strips with the help of Geraint Ford and Faz Choudhury. I'm trying not to keep using the word busy in all my posts, so I'll just say that I'm... fully occupied.

Space Vikings and Spy Kids

2009-06-19T07:59:00.006+01:00

Here's some examples of what I've been doing over the past month. The top image is from the Doctor Who Storybook strip which Ian Culbard and I have been doing together. I will do a lengthy post to try explain how this worked once the book is out and I don't risk spoiling the story - the basic idea was that Ian would take my layouts and thumbnails and turn them into pencils before I inked them and he coloured. Got a bit more complicated than that, but was a lot of fun to do and I know I've learn a lot from doing it. Aaaand most importantly - the strip looks good.

Below are some examples from the two M.I.Five books I've been illustrating. Sort of Famous Five meets Spy Kids. The still was all about being able to do them quickly in Manga Studio and give them a dynamic feel that had a mix of old school book illos and comic art.

The top three were done before Space Vikings and are much looser, the two below were done after Space Vikings and the effect the tightening up of the inking for that strip had on my approach shows in these illos. Think I prefer the quicker looking stuff

His Mother's Eyes

2009-06-18T06:25:00.004+01:00

Managed to do a quick HUZZAH!! last night. HUZZAH!!'s been gathering dust as the main players have got too busy to contribute, the same is true of HUZZAH!! NOIR. Although I've finished my strip for the Doctor Who Storybook 2010 and am nearing the end of my work on the MI Five books and Murderous Maths, I have to launch straight into a new 10 page strip for Doctor Who Magazine plus I have to do The Death of Caesar strip, so not much time to HUZZAH!! on the horizon.

My latest HUZZAH!! makes the main characters appear like children caught in the middle of a hostile divorce, pawns in a game. It also tells us that at some point in the past there was at least one night of passion between the woman with no eyes and the man we never see.

Who's that meant to be?

2009-06-08T11:18:00.006+01:00

Too busy to blog. I've been inking pages for the 2010 Doctor Who Storybook. I can't put more than a tiny peek up here before it hits the shops. I've had some expert assistance with these images, more on that when I can write a full blog post about about this strip. So here's a glimpse of the inks - one face you will hopefully recognise and another you probably wont.