History Schmistory

On the train to Harrogate, vibrating furiously, I decided that if Kate Beaton can make history comics, with my ten years experience I can make FIVE TIMES BETTER HISTORY COMICS. You decide! I can hear her quaking in her boots.

The end, the beginning

This is a brief announcement to say that Scary Go Round will be ending in September. The eighth collection will be the last. "Goodbye" is the final story. I'm sure a lot of you had worked this out already.

If your claw-like fingers are rending your clothes to rags as we speak, I would ask you to be calm. I have a new project in mind and, like the transition from Bobbins to Scary Go Round back in 2002, it won't all be new, all different. I could probably have got away with making the change with no fanfare at all and kept the name the same. But there were a few reasons that I decided not to.

Firstly, the huge archive and long history put off new readers, and I can't afford to put all the out of print books back into print. You'll always lose readers as the novelty wears off for them, but if you can't replace them, your audience will slowly diminish to a hard core. And it's hard to have people email you saying they'd buy the new books if they could still buy all the books, but they can't, so they won't.

Secondly, while the game remains the same, it appears to have become "more fierce". Four years ago, a webcomic with a readership in the tens of thousands, a couple of book collections and a few chippy tshirts would keep you in the hay most months of the year. But now the market is oversaturated with "product" in, arguably, all three of those categories and I have to take a risk and raise my game. I've said it before but I don't want to be knocking on 40 with only a long-in-the-tooth internet strip to keep my (as yet unborn) babies in school coats and shoes.

I don't want to talk about my new project yet as it would spoil the current story, but you can rest assured that there will be plenty that you recognise about it. I'm not sure about the exact end date of Scary Go Round, and there may be something transitional in between, but expect no interruption in service.

I take great pleasure from entertaining and surprising people, writing and drawing are a continual source of joy to me and I will endeavour to do both for as long as I am able.

I Dream Of A World Without You

I should mention, for it would be remiss of me to not do so, that I occasionally post on Joe List's "I Dream Of A World Without You" faux-obituary blog along with other talented people. It gets certain things, self-evident things, out of my system.

It's entirely possible that only the men posting on there find it funny.

Fauxbituary?

Post 500 is the most mean spirited of all time

I had two extremely mean-spirited ideas for shirts in town this afternoon. The first came when I heard a loud middle-aged lady poking a friend on her phone on Facebook.



And in other news, that's so random, that's soooo random! Yeh man. EXCEPT THAT IT IS NOT RANDOM AT ALL.



They are probably too mean to make.

Drawn from memory

I became wild eyed the other day and announced that I was going to draw all the X-men from memory despite not having read an X-men comic since about 1997. The result was incredible. Can you name them all? No one can.



Sadly this drawing is in private hands so if you work for a major museum and wish to purchase it for the nation, I cannot help you.

Submitted in apoplexy

Well, I had a crack at Simon The Sentient Chimney. Do you know what the saddest thing in the world is? A t-shirt with a crudely drawn chimney right in the middle. I had to get fancy and I might have become too fancy. More soon!

CARNIVAL 2 RESULTS MACHINE

18 Swashbuckling
13 Sensitive Intellectual
13 Taft Dessert Club
13 Past My Prime
12 Badger Attack
11 Anatomy of a wasp
11 Simon the sentient chimney
10 Insect police
9 Abe Lincoln fart club
9 Not what I asked for
8 Identical car
7 Too many spades
7 Sloth
5 Gorilla hang glider
5 OCD Vacuum
4 Robot scrap
3 Mandrill fever
3 Moon quest
3 What me, pompous?
1 Frog
1 Sport

I will have a go at drawing Swashbuckling, Sensitive Intellectual and Taft's dessert club, and I will attempt Simon the sentient chimney as it looks like a five minute job. I will also try to muster up an anatomy of a wasp tote bag as this might be the place for such things.

Carnival Of Ideas 2: A Carnival Too Far?

The Scary Go Round tshirt shop continues to creak, but I am determined to prove that I have still got it. I have opened up the Carnival of Ideas once more! Red dot indicates a terrible idea, amber dot denotes one that is merely misguided, and green means that, with hours of work, there might be something here.



All is quiet as the carnival opens. Ideas thin on the ground. Some of these are not strictly ideas at all but simply a loose agglomeration of lines.



Mandrill Fever an early hit. Sloth Time has its followers. The rest don't make a jot of sense.



From the sublime to the ridiculous. Anatomy Of A Wasp probably too good for this world.



Energy levels decreasing. Appearance of bean-shaped "Judge Jules" indicates that it is time to put the pencil down.

Please feel free to add you comments; when the carnival is open, I welcome them with open arms. If you disagree with my rankings, say so!