Batwoman

I drew Batwoman. That is probably a bottle of Lambrini that she's holding, I don't know. Batwoman is a woman who likes bats? It's confusing. I need to read up on these things before I take them on. You can see a lot more Bat-related imbroglio at Project Rooftop!

Careers Centre Finale / The Beach Boys Prints

Prior to the SEASON FINALE of Careers Centre, an important message:

I designed some Beach Boys prints for the London show a few weeks back and I have the leftovers for purchase
in my shop. It was a run of twenty and quite a few have gone already, so make haste!



NOW ON WITH OUR FEATURE ITEM, "CAREERS CENTRE" SEASON FINALE

When last we saw poor Shelley she was escaping the evil ministrations of Jeffrey Rowland and his Topatoco...



Careers Centre is sponsored by Derek's Wines of Sutton-in-Craven. Wine you can really pour down your neck.



Good old "Our" Stevens! Now listen guys, Shelley and I have a difficult relationship but we are friends for life and that is how it has to be. I raised her from a scrawl. I'm sure that she will return at some future date!

Careers Centre part 4

Yes, just another cruel day for the employees of Topatoco, run away Shelley, skate for your life! If you're a big fan of Malki!, don't worry, he wasn't dead, he got better.

BONUS BONUS

I'm working on a Batwoman for Project: Rooftop's latest reinterpretation celebration, here's an early draft which I have neglected to colour.

Careers Centre part 3

Things take a sinister turn at this point as Shelley is handed over to Jeffrey Rowland, the business baron behind Topatoco. I hope that his associate David Malki can save the day. You might consider today and tomorrow's comics as a kind of "expose" by someone "in the know"; don't believe the cuddly Topatoco propaganda, they all went feral there years ago.

Careers Centre part 2

How do you solve a problem like Shelley? I think the best thing to do is to ask a professional like my good friend Kate Beaton to look after her. For cash. I am sure that this situation will work out fine, just fine. Careers Centre returns tomorrow.

Here's a bonus, a picture I did for a commission yesterday:

T-shirt workshop

Not sure if I'll make either of these but I did a couple of music maverick tshirt designs today. Syd Barrett, and Serge Gainsbourg/Jane Birkin. The colours are scratch colours, if I made them I imagine they would change.

Easter Monday bonus: The Venerable Bede

We were taught about The Venerable Bede at school but due to the paucity of my history education (I do remember one good year under the genial Mr Doug Grant) I can't remember why we were taught about him. He did, supposedly, have a wife though. And he was always monkeying around with the position of Easter in the calendar. So, I give you, The Venerable Bede.

Careers Centre Part 1

Here it is, the first of six parts of "Careers Centre". Careers Centre is of course the follow-up to "Crisis Centre", a somewhat similar six-part comic that I drew last November. I hope that you enjoy it! There's another episode up tomorrow.

ADDENDUM

While I was looking through my referrers I was amazed to find that David Gaddis links to me. He is not what you would term prolific, but he has incredible skill and his 'Piercing' comic a few years back was a real bar-raiser for good comic art on the web. You can read it all here. I post this link as I lower the bar to floor-level.

UK Thing Review

First of all I would like to thank everyone who came to see me at the UK Webcomix Thing. It is always a pleasure to meet my readers and this year some people had come a huge distance, which was hugely flattering (I assume I wasn't just a diversion on the their way to get a "pickup only" armoire they had purchased on eBay).

Stuck as I was behind the table all day, I wasn't able to get around as many exhibitors as I would have liked. But I saw some great work by the likes of Warwick Johnson Cadwell, Dan Berry and Rob Jackson. I wish I had been able to see more. And I was sitting between Naniiebim and Philippa Rice, both of whose stylings rather showed up my own work.

But it was clear that the breadth of work coming out of the UK continues to grow and I am thrilled to see it.

The show was a little less busy than it has been in previous years. I think that, despite the eccentric manner in which it is run, the "UK Web And Minicomix Thing" has been the closest the nascent UK scene has to an SPX or MoCCA. The MCM Expo and Thought Bubble, while excellently run, are hybrid events which put off some indie comics readers. That said, I think they are improving year-on-year. (Conventions like BICS are inevitably horror shows for indie artists.)

The church fete atmosphere, central London position and tiny admission fee of the Thing offer few barriers to entry, and that usually makes it one of the year's most successful shows for me.

I do wonder though if some of the organisation's eccentricities are beginning to harm it. Regular exhibitors will be well familiar with the stream of passive-aggressive emails that accompany your attendance at the show. And I've seen foreign exhibitors bemused at being asked to man the ticket booth and "tuck shop" for an hour. There were no major foreign exhibitors this year and one has to ask if this isn't part of the reason that attendance seemed a little flat.

Since the event is not publicised in any fashion other than by the exhibitors, a few more big names would benefit everybody exhibiting. It may be that a little organisational flair is required in the next few years to return what is, astonishingly, a blue chip UK comics event, to its prior rude health. With similar London events beginning to appear in the calendar, it may have begun to fade naturally.

But given that it is largely down to the Herculean efforts of one man, I'm grateful to have had the opportunity to have this day out with you all for the last six years. Hopefully I will be back next year.

Unsold bits

I have four A4 watercolour drawings unsold from the UK Webcomix Thing (how nice not to have to mention that awful nerd-baroque name again this year). They're all pictured below. Price £42 (incl. £2 shipping), please email me if you would like one and I will tell you where to pay. First come first served!

Charlotte & Shauna - SOLD - £42



Shelley Boots - SOLD - £42



Esther Prancing - SOLD - £42



Zombie Shelley - SOLD - £42

Thing bits and Thing bobs

I'm sorry for the lack of blogs this week but I've been busy making things for the UK Webcomix Thing in London on Saturday the 27th! Here are some previews:

Watercolours

Beach Boys 1969 print

More to come!

The Hairy Boys

I recently collaborated (my half of the collaboration was some smudgy sketches and the most inept "turnaround" ever) with the amazing Feltmistress on some wendigos! Rising several feet above the call of duty, she provided not one but two takes on the beloved hairy boy.



Louise and Jonathan recently filled the window of fancy boutique Start in London with an astonishing array of critters. I feel lucky to have had the benefit of her mastery of needles and pins.

Art day truncated

Today was meant to be a super day of art and drawing, painting and creativity, but sadly I had too much to drink on Friday (bacchanalia fans: sadly we are not talking about very much at all here) and the part of my brain that deals with drawing is the first to shut up shop and the last to reopen. I did three A4 drawings though that you are welcome to email me if you'd like. They're £30 each, first come first served (email me here). ALL SOLD

DERANGED 4 U - SOLD


WATERING CAN - SOLD


YELLOW CUP - SOLD

Commissionaires' Carlotta

Hey commissionaires! I realised that a contemporary pen and ink drawing by me is kind of a hard thing to know what looks like. Here is what it looks like. It's not far off what comes out of the Sketch Fiesta. Here's where I sell these things if I have answered your question.

New Sketch Fiesta

Shelley wisdom
Originally uploaded by scarygoround

I've uploaded loads and loads and loads of drawings to a new Sketch Fiesta on Flickr! This might just be... the best batch yet.

Joanies

I had a whole spare afternoon today so I decided to paint Joanie from Mad Men. Wholesome fun. Here's my sketch and then my finished Joanie! It was a rare outing with the brush, I had a lot of fun, I will do more brush and watercolour pics when I have time.

A prisoner of the past

I've been thinking about my old books and reprinting them again. I worked out how to do it. My plan is to assemble books 1&2 into one volume, and 3&4 into a volume when 4 is out of print. I can't assemble 1, 2 and 3 together for fairly obvious format reasons.

It's difficult to gauge demand for reprints like this and the books would be, due to their 400+ page counts, more expensive to produce than my usual books, which means more cash up front. But I do feel like it would be responsible of me to put them into print again - I think I frequently lose sight of the fact that someone might have discovered my old work last week, to them it is engaging and new.

I can't start looking at this until the last of the Scary Go Round books has broken even, as that is where all my money is right now. Maybe I should apply for an Arts Council Grant! But I think the Arts Council frown upon rascals like me.

Annotated Weekender 1st Birthday

Yesterday I attended a party for the first birthday of Joe List's Annotated Weekender, the blog that draws all over the Guardian Weekend magazine! It's one of my favourite websites and I was delighted to be able to attend this select gathering.

Here are a few of my favourite drawings I did, I've put up all 22 on my Flickr with explanations if you like these.

Young REM, meet old REM:



Syd we need you man, Meddle is boring:



Self explanatory:



Blowhards 1: Moore



Blowhards 2: Coulter



Sooner or later Bob, Columbo is going to find out:

uStream Friday!

I'm drawing live on uStream right now (Friday afternoon GMT)! Come see me scrawl, hear some eclectic jams from the sonic underground.

UPDATE

After I was done with the comic I took quick sketch requests and people wanted me to draw the old SGR characters as kids, so I did them! These are in the order they were requested. (Sadly the images of goblin birth and Len at Wigan Casino in his vest were accidentally saved over).

Like old times

I have been working on a new tea towel, these were something I enjoyed making and they are actually useful, which I find cheering. I think what I drew is all right, it seems innocuous enough, no one is going to take offence and call the cops. It's just some dames gassin', man, just gas-baggin'.

Captain Scott

Just a quick piece per a request.

Book 8 runs into a problem

Here is my hilarious tale. My comic files are coloured in photoshop in RGB, then placed in an RGB Illustrator file to get they balloons on, then I stick em up on the web. When I do a book, I just open the illustrator files in photoshop, convert to CMYK make some tiffs, stick em in InDesign and go away rejoicing. It's not a perfect way of doing things of course(it's not very professional). But on this occasion, the same printer who was happy for me to do this twice before has told me that the panel borders and text have to be 100% black (not the loony rich black that working in RGB gives you). I think they figure that it might not register perfectly. They managed it fine before but I imagine they were cursing me the whole time.

I can open up the RGB Illustrator files (with their placed, unlettered PSDs) in Photoshop, convert to CMYK, and convert all the blacks in the file to 100% with relative ease, but that leaves me open to trapping errors. I can't use the BPelts trapping plugin to fix this because I use a lot of rich greys that confuse it. As far as I can work out, I am going to have to individually edit every single file, probably by selecting the text in the balloons and the borderlines and painting over it with 100% black.

I don't see a way to rectify this that doesn't involve days of work. Just writing about it was complicated!

Ha ha ha! Aaaargh. This is particularly infuriating because this the the printer that did such a good job of books 6 and 7 at a pretty unbeatable price.

Decisions Decisions

I'm writing the end of the current Bad Machinery story and I have to decide what to do next. I can either plough into another one immediately or do one of my other projects for a bit while I work out another complicated 100-page arc. The only other project that is fit for purpose is "Esther Project", let me dig out the piece of scrap paper again...



Yes you see the scrap of paper is still in rude health. I think I accidentally already used Daisy Minter's hair on another character though so I will have to work out a new look for this highly developed character.

While Bad Machinery has not been to everybody's taste (and has proved thus far to have a more selective appeal than some of my earlier work), it has turned out how I wanted it to and I wanted to thank people who have written in support - here, on Twitter and via email, it has really helped me to not go too mad, especially early on when ratings were tumbling.

Small commissions gallery

I've posted some of my pre-Christmas '09 small commissions up on Flickr. Click away!

Hourly Comic Day

Here's my hourly comic for John Campbell's Hourly Comics Day. I found making it quite exhausting! I feel glad that today is not an hourly comic day. Yesterday was quite hourly enough.










I apologise that it was rather a dull day, but Mondays are always like that, I get through the boring stuff so the rest of the week has space for thrills and spills. Whatever day of the week it is, you can plot my circadian energy curve based on this day.