The Doctor and Amy Pond

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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...

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

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.