Monday is treat day

In a recent exchange of ideas in a secluded internet zone (maybe a newsgroup or a BBS, not sure), Aaron Diaz of Dresden Codak fame used his powers on the original pencils of this panel...

...and made this!

Obviously I was very excited about this and did a kind of ungainly victory dance. BUT THAT'S NOT ALL! If you want to have a go with the same panel, you can download the pencils for it by clicking on the picture below.

Why not post your efforts in the comments for this thread? Do you have the skills of a powerful wizard? Or just want to practice? Have a go, Joe! Here's the original comic as it ran on June 30th.

Ms Tackleford Beauty Pageant

After a brief survey of whether it was "sexy" or "sexist", you can now get my Ms Tackleford Beauty Pageant poster. £7.50, as close to daylight robbery as the law will currently allow.



As you will plainly see, Esther has gone for full black metal regalia and good on her. It was fun to draw Natalie and Moon again, characters of the past! And as you can see, Erin is up to no good with her unique brand of bad-tempered hellfire. In case you are interested, Shelley won, with a brutal speech about the plight of the narwhal tipping the scales in her favour.

Everyday Guest Strip

Here's a guest "The Everyday" comic I did for my friend Adam Cadwell. Adam is a great draughtsman who encouraged me to do more closeups in Bad Machinery, something that I think has really paid off. You may struggle to detect any of my professional respect for him in what follows.



(Vimto is a sasparilla-style cordial drink that Adam may be alone in drinking past the age of 15)

Writing For Scary Go Round/Bad Machinery

I received a message the other day through one or other channel (telex perhaps), asking how I go about writing the 100-page stories for Bad Machinery. I was never the most careful plotter in the past, which lead to a lot of Scary Go Round stories that petered out or ended unsatisfactorily.

Of course, such is the nature of expectation that I'm pretty certain that any ending will be unsatisfactory that doesn't definitively terminate every single plotline you have been dealing with, and in a long, ongoing project that was very difficult. It lead to a "drift in/drift out" of stories that I didn't mind, because I enjoyed making little worlds far more than tying things up in the kind of neat bows that don't exist in real life. But I was also a lazy plotter and my best received stories were the ones that started and ended properly, with points mapped out in between.

So for Bad Machinery, I made a strict rule to rein in my bad habits - 100 pages a story, with all plotlines within self-contained enough that they could be read individually. I decided on a three act structure to help me get my timing right. This was a technique I used for my "Heavy Metal Hearts And Flowers" book back in 2004, why I never used it again is a mystery.

Before I start writing I will have had a theme in mind, a central protagonist or a location. I'll do research , draw a lot of sketches of characters, kind of get a feel for the shape of the project and get excited about it before I have to have any structure at all. In the past I would set off in a direction and after a few weeks find that I had set myself up something quite dull to write and draw. By thinking ahead in an abstract way, I can avoid making bad decisions on the spur of the moment or losing enthusiasm quickly.

Once I'm ready to write and have the jist of the story in mind, I write out all the plot points I can manage on lined paper. The first act will be very detailed with everything (narratively) I need for the next 32 comics, there will be loose ideas for the middle third, and a skeletal structure for the final part - really just an idea of the ending and how to possibly resolve conflicts.

I'm meant to write 4 comics a week, to draw the following week, but with a strong structure I can often write more, as the dialogue is the easiest and most fun part to do. During the course of writing I will add things in which occur to me during the drawing of strips and they can be expanded when I come to write acts two and three.

Finishing the plot for part three is the hardest part of the writing because I have to make sure I finish everything and balance plot against dialogue. But it's a problem solving exercise that I've come to enjoy more and more over the years.

By keeping parts two and three loose until I get nearer to them, I get the benefit of both knowing where I'm going, and knowing that I have time to deviate from that path.

Unlike drawing, where I have to sit in one place in peace and quiet, I plot and write dialogue all over the place, often when I'm out and about. Nothing stops that part of my mind like modern distractions so I try to get as far away from the Internet as possible whenever I can. I've done this more and more in the last year and hopefully the results are evident.

I'm always happy to answer writing questions if people need help.

Esther Project colour tests

Still doesn't have a title, but it certainly has HAIRCUTS.

Vector afternoon

I was getting the original Scary Go Round story, "Gas", ready for publication this afternoon. It's eight years old and hard for me to look at now - that's a lot of water under the bridge! But I found when I was making the 6-panel pages into fours that I had to make a couple of extra panels to fill gaps.

What an exercise in finding out where consistency ends and vanity begins! A lot has changed in eight years. You can see the panels below and make your own mind up. I think vanity won.

The first panel is one of the originals. The other two are new.

PIE

I'll be putting this up for sale on Monday after a weekend of sober reflection and crust-gnawing.

Pepper & Archibald

Pepper & Archibald
Originally uploaded by scarygoround

This was a commission I did for a Mr Kleman in Europe's own Sweden! It's resolutely jolly, it took me a few days to work myself up to this level of clean-lunged, clear headed decency. I hope you like it! Remember, if you want a one-off piece like this, visit my commissions desk! I'm currently taking on new work.

Wood stick, thin, then lead within

I've been getting bored with pencilling on the computer (no problem with its efficacy, just sick of sitting by a screen all day) so I've been trying to get back in touch with paper. As detailed previously, I sketch all the time, but I get a bit of stage fright when I have to draw "properly", I tend to tighten up too much and draw stiffly.

As I am planning to take a break from Bad Machinery between chapters on an as-yet-undecided project, hopefully with some room to experiment outside the 100-page youngling webcomic idiom, I thought I might try some old-school pencils. This plan may wither on the vine like so many before it but I will do some loosening up exercises over the next few weeks, just spend some time with my feelings on the matter. Here are a couple of practice pages, one is a redrawing of an old page, the second is some character design work. They're just for fun, neither is anything like perfect, they are submitted without further exposition.

HULK

Yes, who can forget my incendiary run on The Incredible Hulk in the early nineties? I was the new Todd McFarlane. Or was it the new Dale Keown? All I recall is that editor Bobbie Chase said that she had hired me "on accident" and "never wanted to see my face again". The panels below are all that remain of this acclaimed period at Marvel. The rest was destroyed in the "speculator boom".

State of the Onion 2010

Greetings friends! Summer waxes on, days stretched long like a pair of tights pulled in opposing directions by pickup trucks. All is well in the garden.

I'm just finishing up the writing of this Bad Machinery story - it doesn't actually finish until the end of September, and after that I will probably take a break from it for a month or so. I've been very pleased with this story and want to make sure that the next one keeps up the standard. For a slow, rambly comic about children's adventures, virtually the exact opposite of what the (hem hem) "webcomic audience" supposedly wants, it is doing very well and I am grateful to have been indulged.

I do think that I might have to get it published by a proper, monied publisher to get it where I want it, as it is meant for young minds as well as blog readers. But I'm not sure how to do that, and I like to go into a situation prepared.

If I decide to take a break from Bad Machinery, you won't be staring at a blank screen throughout October. I've been tinkering with "Destroy History" and it's almost ready for public consumption. I showed some early attempts here last year, but it wasn't up to scratch. I think I'm almost there now.

Destroy History is a comic about how history is a mystery and it will set the record straight using time travel techniques and NEW FACTS. It has a redhead, a robot, of course Babs McChinnery, and an unprecedented level of filth (I mean mud, not boobs hanging out). Here are some fake, possibly unrepresentative images of this "work in progress".






* Please note, "Desmond Fishman" is not involved in Destroy History, he is retired from webcomics.

Last word on X-Ladies

I've made a very limited print of my X-Ladies drawing, there are just ten, as nice as I can possibly make em. Get em here before they're gone!

Lap work vs desk work

While sketching in relaxed mode on paper is the best way, if you enjoy digital art, often you think "gracious me wouldn't it the greatest to just sit on the settee with my little Cintiq or Tablet PC and draw away". It seems like a dream proposition. But I have never found it very easy to produce decent results this way. Calibrate your screen as you may, you are never going to get your head or the device in exactly the same place twice - even from minute to minute.

I did a test where I tried to ink the same picture on the same computer screen, once on the settee, once sitting down at a desk. I made the pencils rough so I would have to make decisions about my inked lines, rather than just tracing the pencils. I find this a more interesting way to work all the time, not just when I am doing an experiment that may interest nobody at all. Working digitally gives me a lot more freedom in my inks, because I am not scared of making a mistake. Here are the results of this thrilling test-ette:

In the picture on the right, I blow a lot of lines, overshooting my mark, and I am plainly tracing rather than making decisions or trying to produce more attractive strokes. You can particularly see this in the feet, which I left very rough in the pencils. On the left, while the drawing isn't perfect, it's a lot better because I wasn't having to organise my actual physical body to keep everything in the right place.


The evidence is clear. We must all sit straight-backed and alert as we draw. Plus, laptops cook your conkers, fellas, and we have to keep the next generation safe. Adieu!

Photodons & Esther wallpaper

Following up my tablet PC post from last week I wanted to recommend Photodon screen protectors. Some tablet PCs have a glassy screen, some have slightly textured anti-glare coatings, occasionally they can be hard to get along with, and if you scratch your expensive purchase, you feel like a right plum. But I've found that Photodon's screen protectors, which are among the cheapest, give a really great drawing feel. The anti-glare is particularly nice to use, resists greasy marks, and will also often revitalise a tablet screen that perhaps looks past its best.

Two provisos: applying them is a dark art best mastered by the patient, but you should be pleased with the results. And their fees to ship outside the USA are a bit high.

ALSO:
Following "peer pressure", I did a quick Esther wallpaper to go with the Shelley one from last week, here it is, 1440x900 again.

Wondy

With all the talk of Wonder Woman and her trousers over the last few days, I have decided to draw Wonder Woman for the first time ever. I wish Babylon 5 man all the best with his run on Wonder Woman. I still think that if comic book companies want to arrest their decline, they should stop having the books drawn that way they seem to look these days, all photorealistic and gross. Comics should be fun! But that is a debate for another day, there are still many fun, exciting artists out there, plying their trade against the prevailing editorial wind.

Of course in my own mind, all comic books are written and drawn by me or idiots like me, and a typical Wonder Woman adventure is like an episode of Seinfeld with explosions.

Summer ways

I made a quick summer wallpaper this evening for Shelley likers. I draw a lot of Shellies so I don't forget how, as I really hope to do a little Shelley project sooner or later.

It's 1440x990, I'm afraid I don't have it in any other sizes but you can work it out, it's the computer age after all. Click below for the full size pic!

Tablet PCs for artists

Someone asked about tablet PCs for art yesterday and I tried to write a decent answer. With the surfeit of net slates, iPads and the like coming down the pipe, it's easy to forget that the tablet PC, Bill Gates' baby, still exists. These aren't mainstream items and there is next to nothing out there written about using them for art. Which is daft, because many models use the same Wacom technology as an Intuos or Cintiq tablet.

Because they're mostly used in business contexts and are purchased in bulk by organisations, they tend to filter back onto eBay after a couple of years and you can often find the most popular models in some number. So long as it's not a beater or ancient, put in some more RAM, a new hard drive, maybe get a nice Photodon screen protector and you will have a wholly serviceable computer for drawing and making comics on.

You need to make sure you get a model with an active, not a passive digitiser (passive digitisers just respond to physical pressure, ie your elbow, a stick etc) here's a master list of all the models that are decent for doing art on. Most tablet PCs have 12.1 or 12" screens and while there are still some models floating around with SXGA+ (1440 x 1050) screens, don't buy one if you value a. your eyes and b. the time you will spend fruitlessly recalibrating the screen to try and hit your mark. I never could. To get pressure sensitivity in Photoshop, you need a Wacom Digitiser (not N-Trig, which a few models employed).

SUGGESTED MACHINES BY PRICE!

I AM POOR (Most of these won't run Windows 7 satisfactorily due to missing drivers for video cards etc):

CONVERTIBLES:

Toshiba Portege M200
Hundreds of these out there. They all look a bit worn out. Nice to draw on. Horrible screen viewing angles. Hi-res screen might hurt your eyes.

Lenovo X60t (make sure it's a "T", the standard X60 was a regular laptop)
Tremendously robust glass screen and IBM build quality. Screen bezel a bit annoying.

SLATES:
Fujitsu ST5022, ST5032
Crappy specs, annoying PATA (hard to replace now) hard drives, really really nice to draw on. A compromise candidate for £200. Abundant.

I HAVE A FEW HUNDRED POUNDS TO SPEND

CONVERTIBLES
Toshiba Portege M400
Nicer!

Fujitsu T4210/4215/4220
Good all round drawing feel and nice screens, esp. in the 4220. All the Fujitsus come with two button pens (many tablet PCs just have one button pens that feel like they are made out of a drinking straw). Again, nice to draw on.

Lenovo X61t
A revision of the X60 above

SLATE
Fujitsu ST5112
As above but SATA hard drives, maybe a Core Duo processor, you can put Win 7 on it

I AM RICH
CONVERTIBLES
Fujitsu T5010/T900 (core i version of T5010)
This is the only 13.3 inch widescreen tablet left, I think. It's heavier to lug around but the extra screen real estate is very nice.

Lenovo X201
12 inch widescreen (like a Cintiq 12WX screen)

HP 2730/2740
Widescreen HP business machines with good build quality

There are newer models from the main manufacturers that I have not had a chance to have a go on. Of course manufacturers should feel free to send me complimentary devices.

MACHINES TO AVOID ON ACCOUNT OF "ISSUES"
Toshiba Tecra M4
Video card burns out eventually, hinge is fragile.

Toshiba Tecra M7
Oversensitive pen feel problematic in some applications (Manga Studio particularly), a lovely computer but this was a flaw I couldn't get past. In Photoshop it seemed fine though and I managed to make about 40 comics on mine while on the road - it took a bit of tweaking. The 14" screen was mega though.

Asus R1E/R1F
Great to draw on, big screen, but there was a recall of many of these because the cursor would stick in the corner of the screen.

Axiotron Modbook (kind of a cannibalised MacBook slate)
Text input via pen on a slate is important and it's excellent under Vista and Win7. The Modbook's text entry is not great. Not great at all.

TOUCHSCREENS
I would advise that you avoid machines with pen and touch or "multitouch" options. If you want to touch something, TOUCH SOMETHING ELSE. The Wacom enhanced drivers barely work on most tablet PCs, the dual touch drivers are prone to explode. These aren't mass market consumer machines and issues in this area, when addressed, have seldom been addressed well. Hopefully my list will help.

OTHER BRANDS
Every make of tablet PC I've used has had a slightly different feel to draw on. The Fujitsus are closest to the Cintiq but a combination of anti-glare screen coatings etc fogs the water even there. I've no idea about Motion Computing's slate offerings but they are supposedly very well made. I've never seen an "Electrovaya Scribbler" or an "Armor X1" so who knows.

A NOTE
When you buy a tablet PC, buy it as a drawing machine, not a laptop. This part of the market never really took off and the best machines are not always the newest. There are crazy people out there still using HP TC1100s from 2002 because they love the form factor so much, and it was never replaced. They are completely insane but I hope it illustrates my point.

I hope this helps a few people! If I've raised any questions, stick 'em in the comments.

My favourite poem of all time

My younger brother just sent me a text from Morocco with the following poem. Quite how he remembers it, I don't know. I must have taught it to him. It was written by Dominic Hardman, aged 11, in 1987, at Addingham Middle School.

Going up in a plane, gulp
Thinking about crashing, being knocked into pulp.
Try not to be worried with all my might,
I hope we land safely in Paris tonight.
Aargh, woosh, wow! We're in the sky!
Bleuurgh I just regurgitated my meat pie.

When this poem was affixed to the wall by the teacher, the last line was expurgated, rather like the meat pie. It was however accompanied by a rather nice picture of a plane.

Dominic eventually went on to a career in the financial services industry and I wish him well. But I believe that his talents were utterly wasted. This is my favourite poem of all time. It is as perfectly funny today as it was 23 years ago.

Battlemouth interview

There's a new interview with me up at Battlemouth. It doesn't really cover anything I've not talked about before, but there was one question that I didn't reply to in time to have in included, which touches on something I've been thinking about a lot lately.

"For the first four or five years I was making comics, I was working in print and web design (1998-2003). I wasn't a particularly talented designer and I didn't enjoy most of the work I did, it was doing my own stuff that kept me going. But as I was doing it in the evenings and at weekends, I wasn't exactly making amazing art. I had to make five comics a week! That's part of the reason that I took so long to develop artistically. I would backslide a lot, develop bad habits, and take years to work them out and lose them.

Fortunately, like a lot of people starting out, I didn't really have the developed design sense to know how rough my work was. I can't believe that I was paid for some of the things I did! I did loads of spots and even big two page spreads for magazines like Computer and Video Games. I did the cover for a big anniversary issue of Nintendo Official Magazine. If I was asked to do those things now, I'd have a lot more doubt about my ability to do them than I did when I was 24 and really really raw!"

****

As the years have gone by, as I've improved as an artist, my sense of what is "correct" or not has grown in parallel. You really want it to be a little behind, otherwise you'd never publish anything. To blunder through a "career", you have to be insulated from your own inadequacies or the sound of your own voice would drive you mad.

England's goalkeeper question

The answer is Emmanuel Clegg! LET HIM PLAY



Half man, half arachnid, ALL PATRIOT, why pick Cleggy and not play him?

Another Poison Ivy Monday

Here's a fancy-lookin' commission, Shelley and Poison Ivy together, at last, one time only, until the next time. I'm sure they'd get along.

RSS writer recommendations

My main machine is a Mac but I have a PC laptop, for one reason and one reason only - the Royal Mail's postal software doesn't work on the Mac, and printing hundreds of pounds of postage through an emulator was frequently unpleasant. As time has gone on, I've got used to Windows again and, if I may be so bold, I am now such a slick operator that I don't need to think about whether to press CTRL or the Apple key when I cut and paste. I love me, I'm great.

A little while ago I was looking for a piece of software to write RSS feeds on the PC that was as good as Feeder on the Mac (a very easy-to-use piece of software if you handle RSS feeds manually). No one could help. But for people asking the question on Google, here is the answer: Mirabyte Feed Writer 2.

They both have WYSIWYG editors and HTML -> XML converters, will download and upload your feed via FTP or let you write it locally, and have a some nice project-orientated features. Feeder is $40, Mirabyte is $60.

I hope this helps a few people, maybe you will get a promotion. If so, I want a cut.

Sketch Fiesta 8

Good news, friends! I uploaded a new Sketch Fiesta yesterday. More drawings from the raw, primeval soup of my sketchbook (and a couple that I bothered to colour in).

Young artists! If you aren't in the sketchbook habit, get into it. Having not come from an art school background, it took me a long time to get into the habit of constantly sketching and letting my mistakes sit on the page next to minor triumphs. My art began to take huge strides thereafter, and what's more, I can pin down the times when my art went backwards to the months where I got lazy - forensic style.

The best thing is, when you have to work something up for a proper piece or inspiration is slack, you can probably find something in your sketchbook that offers a starting point if nothing else.

Of course, they can't all be gems.

Teeshirt treatise, a treatise on tees

Over the five years of writing this blog, I don't think I've moaned more than when designing tshirts.

The moaning (and the designing) were necessary because t-shirts formed (and still form) a vital part of the webcomic moneymaking ecosystem. The combination of low order requirements/reasonable profit margin/quick turnaround/potential quasi-viral popularity outside the comic sphere made printed tees the foundation stone of making a living out of your comic on the internet.

Like all bubbles, it had to burst. And this was a bubble - in the early to mid-oughts, printed tees enjoyed a popularity that they hadn't since the seventies heyday of "I'm With Stupid". Around 2007, it got a lot harder to sell designs. And because almost everyone I know in comics had been strip mining memes for five years, there was almost nothing left to say on them! When I stopped seeing people at rock shows wearing webcomics tees or Threadless tees it was obvious that the jig was up. Ubiqity bore obselescence. The hip nation didn't want tshirts any more. They had bought big into checked shirts.

You can still sell a shirt or two if you want. Stick something a nerd recognises on it (an Ewok, the Higgs Boson particle, Omega Supreme flanked by Cindy Birdsong and Diana Ross) and there you are. But where's the pleasure in printing endless variations on "here's something you recognise"?

Now, I've got nothing against nerds, my dad worked with a nerd once and there was one in the year below me at school. And I have seen every episode of Babylon Five - twice! But I can't hoe that row. People can tell I'm not into it.

Those years of the super hit t-shirts I made - Bears Will Eat You, Books Rule etc sold and sold for years on the back of a couple of hours effort - really spoiled me. But it was a great run.

I can't tell if I quit or if I've been fired. But I've made one last shirt. Buy it if you like it.

P'IVY 2

That's quite enough Poison Ivy for one day. I found it a bit strange to discover that the most modern comic book iteration of Poison Ivy is, to all intents and purposes, naked. Such poverty of design aspiration, more sad than "sexy".

P'IVY

I'm trying to work out how to draw Poison Ivy for a commission. I never read many Batman comics so I can't work out which is the "legit" Poison Ivy costume - sometimes she's got green skin, sometimes she's kind of a 1940s vamp, and it's hard to even work out if she's tall or short. What is the answer?

Mac

Here is a comic I made on the train. The dialogue was provided by a nearby baby. It's "slice of life" I think - a bit like Harvey Pekar!



(A quick note - I'm getting so much Chinese comment spam now that I'm going to have to turn on comment moderation until Blogger work out how to do something about it. It has nothing to do with anyone who posts proper blog comments on here)

MCM Hem Hem

Just a quick note to say that I will be at the MCM Expo at the ExCel Centre in Docklands on Saturday and Sunday. This is a manga-centric "hybrid" show but there is a really nice UK indie comics presence curated by the wonderful Emma Vieceli and Anna Petterson. Also Astrid and Walter Bishop from Fringe of course, and BSG creator Ronald D. Moore who will be tapping me up for some ideas for "Caprica". I hope to see a few of you there, I will be in low-key, relaxed mode.

Caprica ideas:

1. Zoe invents a range of shoes called "Cylon slippers".
2. Lacy starts a website about pets
3. Young William Adama gets into some scrapes with his friends Ginger, Douglas and Henry as they attempt to rout the dangerous sect, the "Hubert Laneites".
4. Dennis Franz is introduced to the cast to reprise his role as "Norman Buntz" from Hill Street Blues, reigniting his wonderful NYPD Blue chemistry with Esai Morales!

Okay I had better leave it there as these ideas are a trifle "incendiary".

Blog disrepair

Blog readers! If you are wondering where I am, I am busy with all sorts of things right now. While I love to blog, write some words, post some demented drawings, complain about my lumbago, things are tight around here with no sign of loosening up.

Until I finish a vast pile of in-book sketches, I won't be taking on any new commissions. I will announce here when the floodgates can be safely opened once more.


Think of me over the next few weeks as I ship books, prepare for a big show in London (on the 29-30th of May) and weep bitter tears. In the meantime, here's my rejected design for the 2012 Olympic mascot.

A New Sketch Fiesta

With Britain mired in electoral intrigue and the future no more certain than the final resting place of a river-borne leaf, it's time for a new SKETCH FIESTA! See a plethora of new drawings tell yourself that yes, it really is worth going on.

If that doesn't work, I can't help you. Maybe no one can.

Utter desolation

Ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, I can't tell you how this fell into my hands but I believe I have acquired the most desolate image of all time. And I love it!



There is so much to enjoy in the photo itself. The smokers gather around their sage leader (I have highlighted him for your enjoyment). I can almost hear his words.

"Yeh, guys, there was a time, a time when you could smoke in the office! At yer desk even. Before meddlin' bureaucracy took away our basic pleasures."

Raincoat woman: "So you mean you didn't get to tit around outside for five minutes every half an hour?"

"Nahhh. You'd just smoke at your desk. It made workin' fun. Now I hate every minute of my life. And I hate you guys."

Woman who hasn't bothered to get out of her pyjamas and dressing gown: "You don't hate us, Stan."

Stan: "Yeh, I do. I got tattoos to that effect on various parts of my body. One for each of you chumps"

Fleece-wearing milquetoast: (thinks) "Raincoat woman hasn't spoken to me since we slept together on that team-building weekend in Ormskirk. Does her husband know?"

FIN

I'll let you enjoy the treasure trove of other little delights on this page in your own time.

Service with a smile

Following a Twitter mix-up by UK rap scolder "Scroobius Pip", my friends Joe and Lynn were briefly betrothed this afternoon. I quickly jumped into action. As you can see, I am an expert at wedding dress design and I am available for a mere four figures... when you are.

Five years of fruitless rifling

I have spent the last five years wondering where something was, the sort of thing that you do not want to lose. Today I found it, in the back of a half-used art-pad in a box of old strips. You will see in a moment why I have been so annoyed about losing it:



It's only ruddy Shelley and Amy drawn by Scott Pilgrim man-king Bryan Lee O'Malley! I must have tidied it away when jet-lagged (tidying is the only thing I can do when I'm jetlagged or hungover).

Obviously I am going to have it framed. Then I am going to put it in a BANK VAULT where I cannot lose it ever again.

Drawing bonanzette

Here's a new commission I just finished, it's Esther and the wendigo as... detectives? Detectives.



In other news, I just uploaded a new Sketch Fiesta to Flickr, although this one is a little bit smaller than normal as I haven't had as much sketching time of late! I'm going to pull on my sketch boots in the month to come and draw up a storm, it is the true way.

New deals

Two things! One, my new book "Recklessly Yours" is available for pre-order (spread the word if you like), and two, I have been interviewed by The Comics Bureau here. A pretty good interview I think!

X-Ladies '88

As requested, here are the X-Ladies of '88, from memory.



I think these designs were very interesting. Everything that followed sartorially on the X-Men books was studied and militaristic or spray painted naked ladies, but these costume designs show a very careful adherence to different mid-80s pop subcultures. Dazzler is a sort of post-disco creature, Rogue has the big hair of the Bangles, Psylocke was a sort of wafty English ballet-goth and Storm a "Voices Carry" style MTV punk! When I drew them, they looked like they were dance students loitering outside the school for gifted prancers. It's a look you see carried through all those Paula Abdul-choreographed videos of the late 80s!

Note: the X-"Men" of this era look for the most part like they are attending one of the more fringe nightclubs in New York's meatpacking district. This was the period where Colossus stuck to mostly just belt-and-underpants.

Cartoonists and comics artists pay attention now

Bill Griffiths (of Zippy The Pinhead fame) has published his forty tips for cartooning and I honestly don't think you will find more gems contained in one document. How I wish I'd had this fifteen years ago!

Read them here!

A new commission

Here's a new commission that I have just completed, it's Shelley and Joanna Newsom judging jams. It was nice, gentle subject to draw; soothing.



I am in the process of working out a new Shelley project. It's a book, and it has lots of drawings, but it's not a comic per se. It's utilitarian. What could it be?

The freedom eagle espies: Hannah Mosley

Hannah Mosley is a fantastic local artist who I met one New Year's Eve! She has a show opening in Manchester at Nexus Art Cafe on friday and some excellent stylings. I believe the show is a collaboration under the name "Artmath" and I am almost certain that if you get there between 7pm and 9pm they will shove a cake in your cakehole to make the experience double-worthwhile.

X88

I was asked after I drew Batwoman if I could draw any other superhero ladies. I said yes, I could draw all the X-Men ladies from 1988 from memory. I learned to draw ladies (or rather, I tried to learn to draw ladies) from those Marc Silvestri issues! In retrospect the masterful Bret Blevins on "New Mutants" would have been a better person to copy. Mr Silvestri was the master of a particular, peculiar "up the nose" shot that was almost impossible to replicate.

I don't reckon I'll ever be a match for those fellows, both of whom seemed on fire month after month - I always think that the work of the artists who formed Image was at its most appealing in the late 80s before things got super-stylised and baroque.

I'll draw all the 1988 X-ladies if anyone is interested, I will prove that I am the king of sort of remembering how things sort of looked.

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.