The Angel Gang

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)

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Judge Dredd

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

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

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

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.