Waterpistol

Auction ends Saturday at around 4:05pm GMT.

It's 12x12" on canvas board.

Cover version

Here's the Book 8 cover!

Bubble and scrape

I have been working very hard on editing Scary Go Round book 8, which now has a title - "Recklessly Yours"! I hope to have it out in April but you know how these things slide. I've fixed dozens of pages that were either rushed or put out in a state of high vexation, cut a few pages, drawn some new ones and redrawn bits and pieces, it has been a dickens of a job. You cannot imagine how many times I had to nudge an errant eye six pixels in one direction or another.

Some pages (like the girls' various fanzines) had to go because they were full of copyrighted photos. A few pages were makeweights to pad out a week or missteps that I was pleased to cut. But I was pleasantly surprised to find that a difficult year of comics to make was a lot more together than I expected it to be.

(In a lot of the more grave cases the finished article was only about 15-30 minutes tinkering away. I think I had tunnel vision for most of the last year of the comic)

I suppose you can look forward to three or four abortive attempts at the cover next. Covers are very hard! Maybe I'll just ask Chris Ware to do it. "Recklessly" is a much longer word than "Yours". I'm going to need help... from the professionals.

Wendigo Love

One of my favourite characters I have created is The Wendigo. I draw him all the time, but he has changed a lot since he appeared in Scary Go Round a couple of years ago. He's less dribbly and vile. This was a picture I did for my Twitter page.

Rock, rock, roll, Plymouth Rock roll over

Ukes Not Nukes has been problematic to draw. the original sketch (in yesterday's post) was a red herring, as neither of the items involved are actually that shape, and hours of rearranging the real things produced nothing pleasing. But my many, many experiments to try and get it right did produce a hula cutie (left). Ain't she a darlin'? Swit-swoo!

First of the year

It's my first t-shirt workshop of 2010! I was a bit slack in this area last year but I promise that this year I will back up to scratch with some good designs.

Here are the roughs I am going to work up today. Will I succeed? Will I fail? I predict that the end result will be an exciting mixture of both.









(There was another version of this last year that proved unpolishable, but this time I think I know what to do.)

Book 8 update

Work is heavily underway on Scary Go Round book 8 now. Going through the material from August '08 to September '09, it looks like I'm going to have to do a lot to get this stuff up to scratch. I can easily spot all the work I did on weeks when I was ill (which was a lot, diseases had it in for me in 2008/9!) and there are places where the art is clearly rushed and the writing more so (there were pages where I genuinely couldn't work out what was being said - and I wrote it - I must have been completely delirious!) So i will take a few weeks to go through these comics, redraw and rewrite bits, throw out the really ropy ones, and make something that will reward re-reading.

There were several comics where I drew them a tablet PC and it just threw me completely. New equipment always takes a few weeks to warm up to. Here's one I reworked today (the original is below).

Worming up

I haven't made comics for more than a week, so I had a little drawing warm up this morning. It's "Eggy Hepburn". I used the Breakfast At Tiffany's poster as a resource, on which she is depicted as being roughly 8 feet tall with an eight inch waist. Good old Eggy, whenever I draw her she always ends up looking like Jeggy Garner.

2010 album chart of the year part 5

4 WOMEN - Women

"Cameras"



"Shaking Hand"



This scraped in, it was released in January '09 in the UK!

3 VECKATIMEST - Grizzly Bear

"Two Weeks"



"Ready, Able"



Two of the year's best videos! THE BEST

2 SIGNAL MORNING - Circulatory System

"Overjoyed"



"Woodpecker Greeting Worker Ant"



1 HUNTING MY DRESS - Jesca Hoop

This record only came out about a month ago so video is thin on the ground! Here are some wholly representative live jams from a stellar LP.

"Murder Of Birds" (live)



"Hunting My Dress" (live)



For all that 2010 seemed a thin year, I enjoyed all the records on my list a great deal and there were several others in contention right up to the end, all worthy of investigation:

ESPERS III - Espers
WOLFGANG AMADEUS PHOENIX - Phoenix
BITTE ORCA - Dirty Projectors
LIFE AND TIMES - Bob Mould
FITS - White Denim
JEWELLRY - Micachu & The Shapes
THE PAINS OF BEING PURE AT HEART - The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart