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!

Death

Dear readers,

I thought I was getting better yesterday but I wasn't. I got worse. Now I am in bed all day. It is probably all over for me.

I am going towards the light now... goodbye... goodbye!!!

Sincerely,
John

PS The mini-market is only four doors down, am I allowed to go in my dressing gown and pyjamas?

Droplet infection

The blog is ill-tended this week as I have a particularly virulent cold. It is hard enough to draw when you are wracked by coughs, let alone string a sentence together. I am on the mend now I think but it may be too late for my body, which is wan and weak. I intend to travel into the city this afternoon and one whiff of diesel may end my days.

The best cold I ever had was when I got a sinus infection. Once the malaise had passed, I would blow my nose and about two minutes later warm, thin, bright custard yellow goo would gush forth from my nostrils and have to be staunched mid-flow. Yes ladies and gentlemen, it was my brains leaking out which is why I am not allowed to marry, vote or drive a car any more.

This particular malady occurred after I spent two weeks in Brooklyn, which says plenty about the fine air quality in that neck of the woods.

What's the worst thing that's ever come out of your nose?

Simultaneously bushy and sparse

If you'd said to me that this would actually work as a piece of graphic design, I would have said "you are crazy like a fox." But guess what? Another hot nugget that you voted for from the Carnival Of Ideas!

Crowy considers

Here is a sneak preview of a new print I'm working on. I haven't decided whether it will be a limited canvas for the UK webcomix thing, or a longer run poster, but it is another in my Oz series. I will post up a finished version once it is coloured in.

Fop Chaser Problem Time

Oh dear oh dear.

Red onions at the "folk art jumble sale"

I wanted to write and say that I am really moved by the comments on my "state of the onion" post. I didn't write it to fish for compliments or to tease you with impending doom.

I was also very impressed by the standard of grammar, spelling and punctuation in those comments. I didn't realise that I had cultivated such an audience of upright citizens. I have issued each of you with a gold star.

I tried to address any questions when they were asked but I will answer the most frequently asked ones again.

Q. Will you reprint books 1, 2 and 3? Or do PDF collections like Diesel Sweeties did?

A. I just can't afford to. I only print 1500-2000 of my books at at time and it takes three years to get through a run. This is as true of original stuff as the reprint books. I don't want to make PDFs when you can read the whole archive on the website anyway, it doesn't make any sense to me - plus the bandwidth consumed would be huge.

Q. What about print on demand?

A. Print-on-demand means very high book prices and/or next to no profit for me. I typed in the specifications for "Blame The Sky" into Lulu.com's price calculator. The manufacturing cost was a very reasonable £37. I would aim to have it retail at around £100. I take credit cards.

Q. How about a top publisher such as Farrar, Straus & Giroux reissuing the early volumes?

A. Publishers lose interest when they find out that my ouevre is as visually consistent as a folk art jumble sale.

Q. Why don't you offer premium content on the website and charge people for it?

A. I put the fullness of my faculties into the daily comic and have little left over to generate phantasmogorias of walled-off content. Every time I work out a nice little ensemble for Esther, that is your premium content.

Q. (This was more of an accusation and it was not all that frequently asked) You dump characters all the time and introduce new ones! This spoils my enjoyment.

A. Sorry.

Q. Is the end nigh?

A. No.

State of the onion

First the bad news: from next week there only be four comics a week (M-T-Th-F). I need a bit of breathing space to avoid burn-out. I'm sorry if anybody is disappointed.

Over the last few weeks I have been trying to make some decisions about Scary Go Round and where it is going. This is not meant to be some terribly dramatic news post where I bleat on about how hard it is to make a comic in the comfort of one's home day in day out.

I consider myself very lucky that tens of thousand of people read my comic every day. But it is a sad fact of long-form, story-based comics like mine that it is hard, after a certain point, to add new readers. The perception is that they carry a lot of history - even when like mine, the creator has been burning the history books every couple of years in order to survive.

In the last year or so I have tried to make the stories as stand-alone as I can, but the fact is that you lose readers over time and if you don't get new ones to replace them, slowly but surely you will go the way of all flesh! There are already a few webcomic ghost ships out there, long sunk by the weight of history. I am not keen to join them!

After 7 years it is probably time to replace Scary Go Round with something new. I have a pretty good idea about what to do next. But I still have a lot of SGR stories to tell and I don't really know what to do.

Raising your game

Yeah sure, Scary Go Round was all right, but I think this new project is the zenith of where I am going artistically.



Many thanks to "Pops" Alluvium.

Fop Chaser returns

Fop Chaser is still hunting fops. How sad that I cannot convert her antics into money. But you know, some genies are best left in the bottle I say.

Vest zest

I was testing drawing on a smaller screen today as one day I might have to make my comics on it, so I redrew an old comic at random. I post it here for fun. I have to practice practice on different devices as I get thrown really easily by change, leading to gangling arms, mad proportions and big nutty heads. Even the above is barely consistent, I will have to do a dozen or more before I am actually comfortable.

Also today, enjoy the fine stylings of Katie Hanratty and Chris Doherty. Talent in the community.