Sketch Fiesta 3

I've just posted a new Sketch Fiesta on Flickr! This one features my romance stylings, Arch-Duke Christmas and "failure scrimshaw" amongst many others

Here's a bonus blog sketch for the blog faithful.

The king's shilling

I was quite pleased with this banner for the Scary Go Round archive (that tells you, the blog reader, nothing you did not already know).

I very rarely drew the Winters sisters together. I could do a much better Erin now.

Thought Bubble Final

If you are coming to see me at Thought Bubble (and come one, come all I say), here is what I will have for sale in ascending order of price:

Flyers (free!)
Badges and stickers
A small quantity of "Erin Winters And The Bone Throne Of Bones" that I found today
Ghosts book
We Will Do Our Best prints
Chucacabra prints (see below)
Sketch postcards
One (1) tote bag(I ordered some but they have not arrived, FOR SHAME)
Whitby Ghost Party and Red Riding Hood giant gloss-o prints
Scary Go Round collections 4 through 7

If you want a print, PLEASE BRING YOUR OWN TUBE for the love o' Mike. I have none!

If you cannot find me, my table is a living tribute to Mr Blobby, I have three inflatable Mr Blobbies acting as a kind of Beamsley Beacon (yeah local knowledge check it out). There's no way they will take up the whole table and infuriate me.

Loads of my talented friends will be bringing their A-game on Saturday, it is well worth the trip to Jimmy Saville Land.

CHUPACABRA PRINT:

Custom artwork - holiday deadlines

At this time of year a lot of people like to buy personalised books, custom prints and Scary Go Round sketches for close friends and loved ones (with exquisite taste). If you're outside the UK and you're planning on getting any of these things, please order by December 1st to ensure timely delivery.

This year I will be doing single-character Scary Go Round/Bad Machinery/Bobbins A4 drawings (about 8.3x11.7") for £25 in B&W and £40 with marker colour, please email john@scarygoround.com with the subject "SGR COMMISSIONS" to arrange payment as I only have time to do a limited number and do not wish to disappoint anyone. (Here's an example).

I will post up holiday deadlines for buying non-custom items at the weekend.

A Wednesday trianglesworth

Here's the final art I will go with, a classic Allison pencil, pen-and-ink wobbler* unsullied by Dr Wacom's futuristic ways.



*Where charm supposedly substitutes for accuracy

High up, up in the sky

I am designing flyers for Thought Bubble, or trying to. It's harder to make flyers for something that has people in it than for, say, a comic about a wicked good robot. I try to make the text surrounding the pictures amusing. I figure, what's the harm, eh? What's the harm. I'm not sure any of these four illustrations are any good for my flyer items, I may go a little nuttier, but it's a cobweb clearing exercise and those do no one any harm. Seriously, what's the harm?

Going places

On a few occasions over the eight years I've been exhibiting at comics conventions, I have been lucky enough to have work given to me by new artists who obviously had something special. I can still remember receiving James Turner and Vera Brosgol's formative photocopied efforts, their eager young faces yet to be jaded by the years and the wine.



At SPX I was given a pamphlet by a young artist called Abby Boeh who has a distinctive, funny and deeply pleasing style. Here's her blog, check it out. I hope she'll make comics in earnest because the ones she gave me were really something.

Looks Brains/Blame/Skellington sale

A few weeks ago I said I was going to have three weekly sales of my remaining copies of the early, out of print books. Unfortunately, the person who bought two of the books in the first sale is proving difficult to reach and I don't want to hold another auction until I've been able to make a second chance offer, if needs be. Hopefully this will be resolved in the next week or so.

ADDENDUM:

The proudest man

I just wrote a piece of code all on my own to make old links to archived Scary Go Round strips (on message boards and blogs and the like) work again. If you knew how feeble I am at programming, you'd be proud of me too. You'd be renting a float and a marching band. Five lines of PHP is stretching it.

SEE IT WORKS [LINK TO THE FIRST SCARY GO ROUND]

Please tell me if there is a way to break it.

Victory Centre #6 - "A Crinkly Bottom"

I'll be busy preparing for Thought Bubble in Leeds this week so the Victory Centre will appear only when necessary. But come on, let's hear it for Mr Blobby. Talk about your Ray Davies of the Kinks, or Andy Partridge from XTC, Blobby is right up there with the British hitmakers.

Yes, some scorn him for his association with creepy beard-wrong Noel Edmonds, but I consider him one of the most important artists of the last decade. The film below ranks, for me, up there with Coppola's "The Conversation" and the best of Bunuel or Truffaut. Mesmerising.

Badgeman cometh

New badges for Thought Bubble next weekend! I took five t-shirt ideas that didn't really turn out (although I imagine that any of these would have proved more popular than poor old Enviro-Cat) and made dang old durn tootin' buttons from them. I like their simplicity!

Crisis Centre #5 - "I Feel Woozy"

Kate Beaton is a fine person and, like the late Tommy Vance, "a walking continent of common sense". She tells me to be sensible and stop being nutty and I tell her to make the top half of her website a big link to mine and then the phone line goes dead. She was the big believer in Bad Machinery right from the earliest planning stages so, you see, I have to plough on.

Administering the dart is Miss Lynn Allingham, the only assassin who sells their services via Etsy.

So Crisis... I mean Victory Centre will return next week. Thank you everyone for your supportive and helpful comments this week. They have focused my mind and made me feel better about life on this old circular dirt-world.

Crisis Centre #4 - "That Man You Like"

MISS ION ACCOMPLISHED. MISS ION ACCOMPLISHED!!! DO YOU SEE? DO YOU SEE? THE GREATEST JOKE OF MY CAREER!


Wise words to bolster my flagging spirits from Joe List of the Annotated Weekender today. I think this comic paints him in a bad light. I have airbrushed out the four straight hours one day where I explained that I thought Comic Sans was brilliant just to annoy him and even sang a song about it with a passing marching band.

As for the cowboy man, I don't really care one way or the other.

Crisis Centre #3 - "The New Way"

Warning: today's Crisis Centre contains a controlled burst of bad language, but it's not directed at anyone in particular. It's just out there, cussing up a storm.



Yes! Today's guest star is my great friend Jeffrey Rowland. Jeff and I have been friends for a decade. We've been giving each other terrible, non-applicable advice for most of that time. There were about two years where we just argued about the use of fonts.

Crisis Centre #2 - "Woe Is He"

The crisis begins! I'm not sure that Robot Friend can help me this time. But he's going to try. I'll get by with a little help from my imaginary friends.

Crisis Centre #1 - Prologue

Blog #3, better for you, better for me

Today I unleash my new comic, Crisis Centre! It will follow a pretty regular schedule until the current crisis is averted, whereupon the series will end. Another episode tomorrow.

Blueberry jam

BLOG #2 AS THE LUNCH BELL DO RING

In tribute to my favourite foodstuff, jam, here's a jam comic I made with Mr Joe List.

An untitled project

I will be blogging three times today, three times. The blog bell will toll for breakfast, lunch, and dinner so you had better be looking.

First up: UNTITLED ESTHER PROJECT

There were lots of mooted replacements for Scary Go Round other than the one I decided to make. You've seen Destroy History of course, but I considered almost every permutation and even did character designs for some of these series. Here's "untitled Esther University Project".



Can you imagine what kind of comic this might have been from these rough scrawls? Yes. A very derivative one.

MORE BLOGS LATER

Tastes just like "the holidays"...

...which is to say, it tastes like the corporate obliteration of something "special"? I can't tell. But I certainly felt sick, and that was after a small one.

Fortunately the British Pin Council (BPC) are on the case.

Batly Commission

An Esther commission! I don't know why she's wearing giant bat wings but Esther is pretty skinny and doesn't really fill a piece of paper horizontally.

SGR NEWS Nov 5th

Apologies for posting this on the blog as well as the site, it's just until I fix the news on the SGR RSS feed.



New poster-sized print for sale in the shop! Fill acres of wall space at once. Signed and numbered run of 100.

Google Reader

Thousands of people now subscribe to my comic via Google Reader, but it strips all the newsposts out of my RSS feed and only displays the comic. This means I can't publicise my appearances, or new things I'm selling, or nuthin'. Essentially, it is as bad as one of those "comic ripper" sites from 2004. Is there any way to get around this? I am extremely eager to know.

EDIT: I am not angry at Google or people who read this way, I'm annoyed at my own failings as a web man.

Riding through the glen

I've been working on a new poster today. It was meant to be Robin Hood but he is on the backburner as I attempt to do justice to all his "Merrie Men" (Monk Man, Jimmy Red-shoes, Lady Madonna etc) so in the meantime, I made a poster of the second most famous hooded story. I have to finish up the trees then I suppose it will be ordering time!

Sketch Fiesta 2!

I've uploaded a second batch of sketches to Flickr. They might just amuse you.