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

...not this.

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

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

Zoot, Mook and Kook

from left to right - Kook, Mook and Zoot

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

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

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

Batman for Nige

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

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

Anyway, here's hoping Nige gets well soon.

What a helmet!

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

Is that...?

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

Wizard layouts

Merlin rushing off on some escapade or other

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

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

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

Widow's Curse Graphic Novel

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

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

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

Scene from the Immortal Emperor

I got the blues (and the purples)

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

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

Englishman, Irishman, Scotsman and Welshman

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

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

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

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.