Hackneyed

As a lad I used to like to draw all the characters in the comic I was making, in a row. This legitimised the fact that I would only manage to draw about ten pages about them before getting bored. I think I liked drawing the group pictures and imagining the comic better than producing the finished item. I hadn't done this since 1999 - for fairly obvious reasons - but for some reason I did it just how. Can you guess what their super-powers are?

You heard it here first!

Sadly, it was a lie.



Sadly, so was that.

Re: reprints, print on demand, etc etc

The issue of the out-of-print Scary Go Round books has risen from the grave. Some people say "do print on demand", some say "do a pre-order, I'll buy one!" But this is a vexed issue, some might say the most vexed of my recent career.

A few nice folks have been in touch with me about different ways to do this. I was quite keen to do really cheap, junky looking black and white reprints of the early books with new, mystifying titles like "Methyl Beaks" and "A Bad Inveigler's Honky Snort" , but the early, borderless Illustrator art doesn't work in black and white. Necks join heads as one, faces vanish into walls, it's Hieronymous Bosch all over again.

I opened up one of the really early comics to see if I could fix up the old books quickly. It was like going back to homework you wrote when you were 14 years old to try and make it better. You'd just start again. You wouldn't do it once then find hundreds of other essays about aquifers to titivate.

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!

You see them everywhere

I have named a phenomenon and as a result I will probably be given the Nobel Peace Prize. I hear what you are saying, John you are nuts, there will be no prizes for you. But listen!

Around Manchester there is a kind a of man, he is perhaps 37-43 years old, he is wearing a duffel coat of some sort zipped up to his chin in the style of 1989-1998, his hair looks unwashed and there is a short fringe. Like the last remaining teddy boys in the 1960s or the tragic, dislocated British punk of 1987, they are the ghosts of a long dead movement. The man I am speaking of is categorised henceforward as ANORAKULA!

DIAGRAM TIME:



There is nothing wrong with this of course, let men be men in their own way. But has Anorakula been spotted outside Greater Manchester/Cheshire (many have migrated outwards to raise their chicks)? Are you an Anorakula?

Key Anorakulae:
Doves
All of Elbow except Guy Garvey (he wears a suit jacket)
Terry Christian

Patriot (A Single)

Pelotons have landed in the Dumbrella warehouse and are on their way to customers in North America as we speak. It will be a few weeks before I have my copies for UK and Europe and personalisations but we are on the move, lurching in the general direction of your letterbox.

Des Fish Paint

It's impossible to take a good photo of a painting in my house with my crummy camera, I have decided. But here is what I painted today, my first canvas in more than a year I think!

T-shirt workshop part 2

Contrary to every instinct I have, my "I done a murder" badges sold out in mere minutes of the MCM Expo beginning. I have listened to the market and "had a go". You may think that this design does not apply to you but remember, as was daubed on a wall near Ilkley station throughout my childhood, "meat means murder" too.



The following is something that several readers of the comic actually wrote to me and asked for! Something that probably hasn't happened since 2005 if I was being really honest. I have emphasised the vintage of this joke by drawing it in the style of the jet age.



I also messed around with Pangaea but I'm not sure I like it better. Feel free to tell me either way.

T-shirt workshop part 1

I am in the tshirt workshop today trying out some ideas. As always I will take good ideas and make them much less appealing through selective design decisions on typography and colour.

Do you remember in 1982 when Pangaea got back together? It was insane. Eurasia and Australiasia all snuggling up while North America complained that South America's feet were a. cold and b. in its ear.

The Regret Café

Today I took my Pixie and Troll notes and put them in the bin. Sometimes you can be too excited about an idea. I have a lot of good ideas which, structurally speaking, are ornate housefronts with no walls behind to support them.

There are a wonderful array of domain names I have bought over the years for projects I never made - some of them intended to replace Scary Go Round! Oh struckamidships.com, what nautical thing might you have been? Sweet sweet sanitocracy.com, you made so much sense when I was in Canada but now I can't even remember what I was talking about. Only my closest friends have been exposed to the maladroit musings behind destroyhistory.com but there are pages and pages of notes on that one.

Today I bought another domain name.

PLUS
I have been blown away by the stylings of Chip Zdarsky. Wow, he can draw.

POP FRIDAY
I never get tired of this, but I don't think I noticed Jack Black playing the trumpet before. It can't be Jack Black, this is 1986.

Lay it down, clown

I am not quite ready to post the details of Pixie and Troll but here are the drawings James Turner and I did for his Isembard Kingdom Brunel comic. Sadly this project was cancelled after we came to the mutual realisation that we knew nothing about Brunel, and what we thought we knew was a lie. Why not try to divine from the pictures below what on earth we we trying to do:



Top left is my early 1990s Image comics attempt to "pump up" the project. I while I was drawing this I kept saying "more crosshatching, MORE CROSSHATCHING"!



There is a point on the second page where I accidentally spat a little bit of best bitter onto the page. There's nothing worse than a conversational spitter, I prefer to think I was frothing at the mouth with excitement.

MCM Expo : enter Wozzlebot 3000 and Keysword

Thank you to all the people who came to see me at the MCM Expo. I hadn't done a manga-orientated show for about five years so I had forgotten what it was like to witness waves of cosplayers streaming towards you with their hastily constructed "free hugs" signs and wildly age-inappropriate paddles with "yaoi" written on them. It really was two days in a parallel universe where nothing makes sense and I will be watching back-to-back episodes of "Rumpole of The Bailey" all night tonight to recalibrate my mind.

Freed from the confines of my home, it wasn't long before I was creating amazing new concepts for never-to-be-published series. Later this week I will reveal all about the thirty minutes that I thought my future was a series called "Pixie And Troll". Pixie and Troll are amazing.

My host for this event was James Turner, who tried to set me up with an elderly woman's ghost, and forced me to eat a series of giant meals. Why not email him and tell him how much you want to read a comic about Isembard Kingdom Brunel and his talking hat "Stovey"?

And thank you to Anna and Emma and all the MCM organisers who made it a fine weekend.

Scary Go Round Book 7 now on sale

Well, the boat has sailed and Scary Go Round book 7 is now on sale after months of delay (as I fought the global currency markets). The first 400 pre-orders come with a new Erin Winters mini-comic, who can say fairer than that? And there are new combo packs with it in too. Please buy it, I can't even get my old Saturday job at Woolworths back if you don't.

Buttonman

One of my favourite things to do for shows is make new buttons. Most mystifying among this new batch is "I done a murder", which should be said in a west country accent. Conservative in my expectations, I only made six of them.



The innocent pig is of course my searing comment on Swine Flu.

MR JOHN ALLISON AT THE MCM EXPO, MAY 23-24

I have been invited to be a guest at the MCM Expo in London's Docklands! They put Shelley and Amy on the front page of their website for a whole week, do they know what they are doing? YES THEY DO I AM THE GREATEST.

Since I did a show in London about a month and a half ago, I won't be wheeling out the giant guns of commerce, but it will be very nice to see you, it is lonely behind a table. There will be books to be had, and posters, and badges, and I can probably be relied upon to draw a thing or two. Plus I will be on a panel, holding forth and jabbing my thumb into my chest to emphasise my point. WOF WOF YES YES FLEETWOOD MAC'S TUSK &ETC.

This is all I have to say on the matter. GOOD DAY.

Oh wait here is my banner, there is a good 5 minutes of hard graft in this, can you tell I am woefully underprepared?

Take good care of yourself

I have returned from All Tomorrow's Parties in Minehead a fragile man. I did not destroy my body like last year, when (as you may remember) I was forced to spend a week in bed being ministered to by a kindly nun. I would not mind such consequences if I was a furious drug monster but the closest I ever get to a hallucinatory experience is standing up too fast after kneeling.

I submit the following diagram of my current situation. The good news is that I have days off this week to allow me to recover and bring equilibrium to my mind.

Rhombus news

I am still unsure about Monday night's stringed rhombus. However, I saw another one in the new Micachu and The Shapes video so maybe you can help me with a name.

The Dø + Moriarty

Last night I had the great pleasure of seeing The Dø and Moriarty at the Deaf Institute. I went to this one on the off chance, not really knowing anything about the bands in question other than having a vague (and largely wrong) idea about what they sounded like. It turned out to be a rare opportunity to see two bands who are obviously much more successful in their country of origin playing in a very intimate venue.

I did predict prior to going that at some point The Dø would produce a mysterious triangular stringed instrument, and I was almost right - it tuned out to be a rhombus.

After many dull months I am suddenly faced with a glut of exciting releases! I am very taken with Laura Groves' Blue Roses, so here is a video straight outta Shipley.

Correction

Apparently the post below was the wrong "huge news". I was meant to post the picture below of the copies of my new book that I just got from the factory. They look wicked, I am the best. It will take a month on the slow boat from China for them to get to the shop but I will open up pre-orders once I have big boat details.



This entire misbegotten process has taken so long that I have almost finished book eight.

Huge news

I knew that putting the commissions page back up would lead to a bit of work, but no one could have imagined that I would have been asked to direct, 20 years on, the follow-up to Pretty Woman! I've been working on some concept art and I will be popping in to 20th Century Fox in Royton later today with my preliminary sketch. Readers, you get a "sneak preview" - I know you're gonna love it!

Scary Go Round drawing stream

If you want you can watch me draw! Today is a test of this "technology". You may learn a thing or two about incompetence.

Here is the link so you can watch. I am starting... NOW.

Auction auction

I found a nice piece that had for some reason lingered unsold so I've put it on eBay. Bidding starts at £1 yes £1 ladies and gentlemen. You may just have found yourself a bargain.

Stair-rods

I worked up the drawing I did yesterday as a poster. I'm not sure whether I will make it but it was a good exercise. Here it is anyway!

Shelley and a duck

A drawing! Good enough for the blog, then to be placed in a drawer. I like drawing geometric shoes!



I wonder why no one asks for commissions any more? When I drew Bobbins, people asked all the time! Draw my wife, they'd say, draw my wife. Draw a cover for this periodical! Draw "Rich Tweedy" in a hat. I guess my art has deteriorated a lot since 2000. But it is so versatile! Look! My compositional boo-boos are an open goal for opportunity!

Stylists became rich and strong

The first part of this year was pretty bad for new records, so I went through my old CDs for things I had bought in "3 for £20" deals in 1997 (to get my money's worth, you understand) or remainder bins and filed away without really listening to. I was excited to see that I had not only "Different Light" by the Bangles (with Manic Monday on it) but also their 1984 debut!

Different Light is full of mushy 80s production which I quite like but only because it is the sound of my youth, but All Over The Place still has a bit of their Paisley Underground background left in it and holds up well as a post-New Wave trifle. Maybe their only essential release is the 1983 indie "Bangles EP" but god knows where you'd get that. It has a great kitchen-sink psych-pop sound.

One thing I forgot was that Susannah Hoffs doesn't sing lead on more than half the songs. She was, however, kept busy by being very pretty all time. Now it is time for my Bangles chronological music video parade in which you can chart the 5 years in which "stylists" became rich and strong. Watch it with your seeing eyes.

"Hero Takes A Fall" (1984)


"Going Down To Liverpool" (1985) with Leonard Nimoy woah


Susannah Hoffs is so pretty in this one with Leonard Nimoy that I stapled my hand to the desk and didn't notice!

If She Knew What She Wants (1986)



Hazy Shade Of WInter (1988)



In Your Room (1988)



I'm not sure about the lyrical content of this song, I think it might be mildly suggestive of home invasion.

I have completely forgotten what I was posting about when I started this, maybe I should press 'publish' and we'll not talk about the Bangles again.

Tablet PC tips 1

One of the things I found frustrating about Tablet PCs was that I could never replicate the pen feel of my Cintiq 15X exactly. The input on tablet PCs often seemed a bit binary - there were 256 levels of pressure, but the gap between 1 and 256 is not enormous if you're using the Wacom driver! I like to lean in a little and even on the high settings it was a case of thin line thin line FAT LINE!

However, in trying to solve an unrelated issue, I found the Pen Tablet diagnostics panel! You press CTRL and "About" on the Pen Tablet Properties control panel and you get a whole new screen. Bottom right is a dropdown called "pressure offset" and if you experiment with cranking that up slowly in conjunction with adjusting the pressure sensitivity, you can get a nice pressure curve. It even gives you a numerical readout of your current pressure so you can tailor it, and it's realtime so you can doodle in the TIP, switch it up a bit, doodle again.

To get a feel like my Cintiq (and my old Intuos2) on its middle pressure setting, I set the pressure sensitivity to the second highest setting (on the right of the slider, that is) and set the pressure offset to 8.

I have a feeling the best setting varies from tablet to tablet but this made drawing varied, subtle lines a lot easier. Please let me know if this helps!

Keep on pushing

This morning I am excited about the Flaming Lips' cover of Borderline! They had worn out their welcome on me but if they can manage a few more jams like this, I will accept their welcome back with a glad heart.



Of course, nothing tops the Madonna original, one of the greatest pop songs ever



Using a slide rule, I have worked out when Madonna wore out her welcome on me. I think it was when she made that book where she was in the nack with Vanilla Ice. Robert Van "Winkle" ho ho etc.

Walls need some love

There are always more jobs around the home than I can realistically complete. I have to paint three rooms, and soon. I can't even decide on a colour for them! Yes yes I know I can paint it bone white or magnolia, but that is not the answer. I'm a decision maker and my decision, firm and true, is not to think about this at the moment.

But it is not all procrastination around my house. Today in a flurry of excitement, I drew the mini-comic that is meant to accompany pre-ordered copies of my next book. It is called "Erin Winters and the bone throne (of bones)" and it is the most amazing* thing I have ever created. To be absolutely honest I drew it the wrong way round (I tricked myself into drawing it by pretending I was just having a laugh, otherwise it would never have got done) and now I have no idea how it will be successfully placed into an envelope without being crushed by the slightly larger book it accompanies. Oh dear.



If I had made all my Erin Winters stories like this one, I'd never have written her out! It's a new lease of life for an old face.

* As amazing as something 4 pages long can be under the circumstances. It is green!

Error time

I know that there is an error with the speech bubbles in the last panel of today's Scary Go Round. Unfortunately, due to the unique way Scary Go Round is funded, I can't FTP in to change it unless I am at home, and I am not. Do not burgle me! Here is the way it should have been.

(Also due to the unique way Scary Go Round is funded, Adobe Illustrator doesn't work on this machine for some reason so it is a bit rough, sorry excellence fans).

Card Of Gold

I have spent the last couple of days trying to make my international shipping prices in the shop fairer. I think I managed it, but it is not a perfect solution. In any case, I now need a rest cure so have a good weekend.

I guess you got the world's most over the top "view cart" graphic into the bargain.

Arkwright

I am looking at my shop pages with a vexed eye today. I have had to jack up international shipping prices in line with the dollar to pound exchange rate, which is fine and good for one shirt. But because of the unique way Paypal's shopping cart is constructed, it means that international customers ordering more than one shirt are being overcharged. I have a terrible sense of deja vu as I attempt to bend this inflexible and ill-maintained shopping solution to my will, my will being that when a customer orders more than one tshirt design, the second design is charged at the lower "shipping2" price.

Paypal's cart is so ham-fisted that even if you order two of the same thing in different sizes, which is to say, the same item code, it still charges both at the full shipping price! I figured I could trick the cart this way by making all the items the same name and sticking the item code in the size variable. Well they bloody well showed me because you can't.

I didn't really care about this when $2 to £1 meant my shirts were cheap whatever. But now I have to do right by my countrymen lest I be burned alive by an angry mob. And I want to do right without having to install a whole different shopping cart solution.

(The other option is to have people add international shipping to their basket as a separate item. My experience is that a lot of people won't actually do this, or do it correctly.)

Anyway I am being transparent about this failing because I know it is not fair. I hope that someone can help!

Eternal dust is ticklish

A few months ago I staggered onto this blog openly weeping, wailing about how perhaps my comic was inaccessible to the newer reader; that I would slowly drift into obscurity read only by hardcore eyes eager for the fast-diminishing prize. Lots of people got together to rent a church basement for me at that point and I was talked down from my dudgeon.

In all honesty, that morning I had looked, for the first time in three or four years, at the website of [name of comic deleted]. Back in the day this had been an unstoppabable juggernaut, but now, despite what seemed to be still-healthy traffic, it was begging for money. It may still have been an unstoppable juggernaut, but it had failed any number of roadworthiness tests and now had a ghost instead of an engine.

After a couple of months of chin scratching, I think there is a future for Scary Go Round. Unlike my poor colleague mentioned above, I drag everything I don't want to write about any more onto the street every couple of years and set fire to it. There are certainly elements of my audience who expect me to bring old characters back, but they might as well stand on Elvis' grave and demand "Hound Dog".

One thing that this rigorous period of navel-gazing has shown me is the nature of popularity. When Scary Go Round was new, and even when Bobbins was around, I received a constant stream of reader emails and requests for interviews. These days I probably get one email from a reader every two or three days, and seldom does anyone want to know what I think about anything.

I suppose that when you're new and novel, you're like a couch that someone has just spent a lot of money on. "Come around friends and sit upon my new couch," you say, or you call the newspaper and demand that they write about your new couch and print a picture of it and you upon it. Five years on, the novelty has gone, and there really is no call to tell anyone about the new couch or to thank one's lucky stars that it exists. If it is a decent seat, the owner will still enjoy sitting upon it.

The only way that this chair would gain attention was if it were stolen and the owner was made to sit upon the floor. Which is why I occasionally start crying and demand that you tell me you like me or I will retire and become a bin man. Both greedy and needy, see?

In conclusion, I do not pay any attention to song lyrics, and hate to see them transcribed, but my favourite lyric of all time is "Outdoor Miner" by Wire.

Twitter splitter; nothing moves sprites like a blitter

I wish to report for public record my experiences with Twitter, namely writing the Shelley Winters Dr Ladysounds Twitter. The project got off to a flying start, I wrote some words and put them in the internet. It was fun! But as people started to comment on the posts I felt bad that they did not receive responses. At the same time I started to feel like some kind of cyber transvestite pretending to be a lady when I even thought about responding. It was too real. Much too real. So when an enforced break meant that I got out of the flow of posting, I could not continue. The sorry episode must be laid to rest in the cold earth.

The most exciting moment was when Chris Salt, winner of Adam and Joe's video wars competition, started following me. Chris makes amazing Lego films and I hated that all I could do was send him an in-character "direct message" in a manner that made me feel like a Bangkok ladyboy.

I think, following that last sentence, I will retire from the internet forever and become a bin man.

In retrospect perhaps I felt less like a Bangkok ladyboy and more like Hinge and Bracket but still. No more twitter, dear ladies.

Shirt shack shop snooper

Today has been a day of designs! I haven't coloured the first two yet, the third is as it will be.

I have sold hundreds of (well, a hundred) "ask me about unicorns" buttons at cons so I thought I would have a go at a shirt.



This is one my friends seem to pick out of my sketchbook every time they see it



This has been on a post-it for months

T-shirt bunker

1-800 Beard has sold like earwax on toast and will be retired shortly. I hang my head in design shame. I suppose I had better go down my list from the carnival of ideas and dig out another "winner". Perhaps I will also dedicate some time to prayer.

Nosferatu 28
What Me Pompous 16
Urchin 14
Jazz 11
Spanish Inquisition 8
1-800 Beard 8
------THE LINE OF CONSIDERATION------
Next Pope 7
Gin & Tonic Camel/Ship Of The Desert 7
Stephen Harper 7
Cat Person 7
Action Badger 7
Jelly Time 6
------ALL BELOW SHALL BURN------
Kerfuffle 5
Burgle My House 5
Whitey Sale 4
8-Bit Elvis 1
Bloody Hellfire 1

Doppelpost

I have updated the 'about' page (including a handsome new self-portrait) and in doing so started thinking about a better introduction to the comic than the current cast page. Writing a cast page that somehow synopsises more than 1600 comics worth of appearances for new readers is hard to write and impossible to maintain. Surely all anyone needs to know is that Shelley is sweet but dangerously mad, Ryan is a sort of gentle savant and Amy is brilliant but slowed down by a thick crust of expensive hair wax? It's hard to write more than a couple of meaningless lines without making spoilers. I welcome your suggestions.

NO SPOILERS SAUL

Dear reader, has it really been a week and a half since I last posted on "old bloggy"? A crime! A week and a half of Kevin Pietersen, I am so sorry. No one can deny KP's haughty arrogance at the crease but that was too long.

I should say a thing or two about the UK Webcomix Thing! The show grows every year and the mix of old hands and young firebrands is a pleasure to see. At just one day long, it can be a bit overwhelming, and after a very busy day of being "on" I find socialising afterwards difficult, but thank you to everyone who came by to see me, and everyone new who I met afterwards.

I will be back in London at the end of next month for the MCM Expo, where I expect to sell precisely three badges and nothing else to wild-eyed kids hungry for Manga and Colonel Tigh and frakking toasters. I don't know if Colonel Tigh will be there but if he is he better not do me any spoilers as I am just about to watch BSG season 4. I'm not sure what point I'm making here other than that I will be back in a month and three-quarters and therefore I had better make more badges.

Oh, I forgot, quite a few people asked me to draw characters from the Wire for them. I will practice a few more for next time.

Sports and wine

Yesterday Joe List and I reinvigorated sports, one by one, for a grateful nation. I present the evidence below.







These two aren't sporting, they're just for fun

Behind The Mask

There are many musical acts who I find personally uncompelling but whose life stories are fabulously bizarre and hard to ignore. The chances of me getting home from a hard day at the factory and putting on an Eric Clapton record are slim. So why have I spent the last two weeks obsessed with his 1987 hit "Behind The Mask"?

In this inexplicable outing, the white blues guitar legend covers a Japanese synth-pop instrumental, not a hundred miles removed from the sort of music you'd get when a C64 game was loading off a cassette. He adds some of his mega fog-horn vocals, puts on some vast shoulderpads and unleashes.



I love this song and particularly this video. It's a vision of a world as far removed from the modern musical landscape as the Beatles were from ragtime jazz. The anointed kings of the new CD format, Phil Collins, Elton John and Mark Knopfler, join Slowhand to rip it up then presumably drink money juice backstage.

Growing up in the eighties, these guys were like the Easter Island heads, they were monolithic. They were old men playing a young man's game and it's hard to imagine that there will ever be "legacy" acts, 20-year unit-shifters like these again. Part of me thinks this is for the best and that we never want to see a 48 year old Julian Casablancas and a fat, heavily bearded Jack White squeezing out a mod-ish, late period hit together in 2026. Part of me wants nothing more.

BONUS: Here's the original "Behind The Mask" by Yellow Magic Orchestra. Beep beep bip!

Erin Winters And The Bone Throne Of Bones

Well, Scary Go Round book 7 has been paid for and gone to the printers, so I must turn my attention to the accompanying minicomic, "Erin Winters And The Bone Throne (Of Bones)". The only rules of this comic are that it will comprise one sheet of A4 paper, neatly folded, and it will feature the much beloved Erin Winters, the character the public most want to see back on their screens.

What will this story involve? Exactly how small are the panels going to be? Do I really have to print 450 of them? How can the result possibly please anybody? I will report back once progress begins.

Last Night I Enjoyed...

...Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle. It reminded me of Dave Allen's old programmes in a way. Here it is on iPlayer anyway for my friends in the UK.

Update: BETRAYAL

In what I can only describe as the greatest betrayal of my professional career, the below has happened:



If you imagine the volcano under Yellowstone, then imagine that the magma is drivel and then imagine that Yellowstone has erupted, that is how things are going to be from now on.

My new corporate sponsor

I don't know why I draw these things.



About once a day someone sends me an email asking me to start a Twitter account so that they can follow me. I regret to inform the interested that I find Twitter mystifying and dull. An astonishing wave of smothering triviality! I feel like Donald Sutherland in Invasion Of The Body Snatchers saying this though and by the time we next speak I will have opened an account, my head canted to one side, eyes wide, mouth open in a terrible smile.

I'm still a Friendster man myself.

Barnaby Ward drawing

The super-talented Barnaby Ward of Sixteen Miles To Merricks and somefield.com fame sent me the picture below, isn't it fantastic? I was cock-a-hoop.



I've finished my Whitby poster, I ghosted it up a bit and now someone is coming to the party. I'll put it on sale once they're in stock.

Whitby

Having done a few fancy prints for the few, I'm working on some new posters (sold at the right price to the common man in quantity). This one's not finished yet but I thought you might like to see it. It's Whitby, the spiritual home of goths. Again, it's big enough to make a wallpaper of.



I think the ghosts are on their way to a birthday party! I realise it is more commercially viable to draw a big crazy Amy bikini beach party but I have to draw what I feel in my mind.

More cover footling

Footle on, Tom Footler.

UK Thing Print

This week I am trying to round up all the jobs I didn't do last week because I was on my death bed. First to order is my UK Webcomix Thing print for this year. I will do a run of 20 (I think) and what doesn't sell will be on the site. The only way I can gauge interest in limited items up front is if you let me know and the blog comments are the best place for that.

If you click on the image, it links to a version that is probably big enough for wallpaper needs!