Albums of the year 2011 4-1

4 CHATEAU REVENGE! - The Silver Seas

"What's The Drawback?"


"Another Bad Night's Sleep"


3 FATHER, SON, HOLY GHOST - Girls

"Vomit"


"Alex"


2 DAYS - Real Estate

"It's Real"


"Green Aisles" (live)


1 THE ENGLISH RIVIERA - Metronomy

"The Bay"


"The Look"


"Everything Goes My Way" (featuring Roxanne Clifford)

Albums of the year 2011 8-5

8 ZONOSCOPE - Cut Copy

"Need You Now"


7 TRUE LOVES - Hooray For Earth

"True Loves"


"True Loves (Cereal Spiller Remix)"


6 50 WORDS FOR SNOW - Kate Bush

"Wild Man"


5 STARTING FROM NOW - Heidecker & Wood

"Right To The Minute"


"Life On The Road"

Albums of the year 2011 12-9

12 DIAPER ISLAND - Chad VanGaalen

"Peace Is On The Rise"


11 LAST SUMMER - Eleanor Friedberger

"My Mistakes"


10 HOTEL SHAMPOO - Gruff Rhys

"Sensations In The Dark"


9 PARALLAX - Atlas Sound

"Amplifiers"


"Terra Incognita"

2011 Albums of the year 16-13

16 UNDERNEATH THE PINE - Toro Y Moi

"New Beat"


15 UNKNOWN MORTAL ORCHESTRA - Unknown Mortal Orchestra

"How Can U Luv Me"


14 GLOSS DROP - Battles

"Ice Cream" (NSFW)


"My Machines" (feat Gary Numan)


13 TRAGEDY - Julia Holter

"Goddess Eyes"

2011 Albums of the year 20-17

20 THE KING IS DEAD - The Decemberists

"Down By The Water" (Live On Jimmy Kimmel)


19 VERONICA FALLS - Veronica Falls

"Bad Feeling"


18 WELCOME TO CONDALE - Summer Camp

"Down"


"Better Off Without You"


17 MIRROR TRAFFIC - Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks

"Senator"

An unmissable treat.

This year as last year, Lunge Dolphin has emerged to put a Jesustide smile on my face - and yours! Check his mood.

Lunge Christmas 2011 from Eclectic Schlock on Vimeo.

Come get drawn tomorrow, by me, at Cornerhouse Sketchomatic

MANCHESTER, UK ALERT
I will be working the portrait booth for Sketch-O-Matic at the Cornerhouse on Oxford Road tomorrow (Nov 30th) from 1-2pm. I draw you, £1. Details here!

scarygoround.com site issues

Some readers have been getting a generic (and gross) holding page rather than the usual Scary Go Round website today. From what I can work out, the domain name for one of my nameservers (the backup) lapsed so what you're seeing is some kind of spontaneously generated holding page. I don't think the DNS has been hacked, I haven't lost control of the site, or any of the other horrible things I thought might have happened this morning.

I have requested the necessary changes to fix this, so hopefully it will be sorted in the next couple of days. If you've not been able to see today's comic, have a look here.

Mr J. Allison at Leeds Thought Bubble Festival

Are you in the north of England? Then why not come and see me this weekend at Leeds Thought Bubble Festival. It's at the Royal Armouries, and I am assured that the venue will be "rammed with intrigue" and "spoiled for talent". For the first time, the show is running across two days and I will be there all day Sunday too.

I will be on a panel, "Comics Economics", from 14:30 – 15:20, in the Alea Casino Cinema Room. Come down, hoot and holler that I am "da best". Demand the hits!

I'll have the following items, many of which you can't get on the site.

* Some show-only limited Bad Machinery collections of The Case Of The Lonely One and The Case Of The Simple Soul
* A few Scary Go Round / Giant Days / Ghosts books
* Meat Means Dinner Aprons
* Knitting Is Zen totes
* A variety of limited prints, A4 and A5 size
* Stickers!!!
* The last few tea-towels
* Postcard sketches (depending how busy I am, I may do larger drawings - probably only on Sunday, but do ask if you're interested)
* Other assorted gewgaws and curios
* RAW LOVE FOR FANS / ANSWERS TO THE QUESTIONS THAT PLAGUE YOU

I really hope to see some of you there, this is my favourite UK show - it gets better every year.

Cold, Dead Fingers Dept

Much ink has been wasted on whether music as a predominantly digital format has cost us something precious, and wonderful, and irreplaceable, and why can't I stop crying &c. There have probably been losses and gains. No song ever need vanish from the catalogue, no treasure need be buried unheard, deleted. Physical formats become fun and worthwhile when produced, rather than drably essential. There need never be another CD released with a single page in the jewel case, another exercise in "why did we bother".

Sure, there's too much music to ever listen to it all, but that's like having too much dinner and remembering with a warm glow the cold hard certainty of rationing. I miss the excitement of the record shop, but not the excitement of discovering something new.

But I don't feel the same way about ebooks. I hate them. I genuinely hate them. With music, your relationship is predominantly with what is going in your ear. Yes, you may stare at the cover for Tales From Topographic Oceans by Yes for half an hour while going on a prog journey, but that really is making your own fun at its most innocent, deny that if you like.

The relationship with a book is very different. It's a tactile object relatively unchanged since the Gutenberg press. You've got to hold that thing in front of your face. It's your buddy until you're done with it. A well-thumbed, much read book is like a vile, beloved, drooled on childhood bunny, but you wouldn't buy one of those second-hand unless you had a lot of problems in your life.

Now I sell ebooks, of course I do, because people want them, and while I am sentimental, I am not mental. And I can shove in 50 extra pages that I found down the back of the sofa because it costs very little to do so. Did I think those pages were worth publishing the first time? No. There's something wrong at the heart of that, like the height of the CD era, when filling the disc to the full 74 minutes became paramount. Bloat over art.

I've seen examples of the beautiful work being done in interactive ebooks for children. They depress me. Kids are in a world of their own and we seek ever more to make concrete things that would have lived in their imagination. Any graphic work is dead on screen compared to how it looks on paper.

This is the first time I've felt like this. I love digital media. They free us from clutter, from waste. But I don't think we have to be beholden to gadget manufacturers on books. I don't think we need to enter the dismal Kindle's annual upgrade curve. Books aren't a delivery medium, they're an art form. We forget that at our peril.

The Beatles

Today heralds the US release of Kate Beaton's "Hark A Vagrant" through the auspices of Drawn & Quarterly and I commend it to you. Kate has been a friend and an inspiration since 2007. Her work has a lightness of touch and an infectiousness that makes it easy to ape but almost impossible to originate - anyone who has witnessed her brutal creative process can attest to that.

Kate's Mystery Solving Teens and Bad Machinery originated on the same day, in the same car, from the same teen-based event! I doubt I have achieved with 400 pages what she has managed in the minds of readers with ten. Now she's not perfect. Don't ever let her touch anything you own if you like its current, unspoiled condition. But if you want to follow Agent Dale Cooper's advice and "give yourself a present every day", here's todays.

Blame The Sky cover process post

I haven't blogged much lately but I thought this might make a nice little process post. Here's the process for working on the new cover for Blame The Sky, which I just added to my e-book shop. If you like e-books, why not buy it? It can't hurt, can it?

Here's my original sketch, which I did with a ball point pen while cooking some rice. It didn't take very long.

I then began to painstaking trace my original in Illustrator. Flaws in the original sketch soon become evident when you add solid colours .

Once I was done tracing, I refined and juggled around shapes until people looked like they were meant to. Tessa and Rachel are characters I've hardly drawn in the last five years, so I had to do a bit of revision in order to capture their attitude. Amy was easy. Apart from how she barely looks like she did then at all.

Here's the new cover next to the original. The original was never very good. I was capable of a lot better even back then, but I didn't know how to lay out an effective cover so I would often do something rather stiff-looking, just to get it done. 

Despite hardly drawing anything in Illustrator since 2006, I can produce a far nicer illustration from it now than I ever could back then. It's a great program to produce a sharp-looking drawing from, but fresh hell to work in day-in, day out if you want to produce organic looking comics. 

Birmingham Sketch Party

I was lucky enough to be sitting between Joe List and Kristyna Baczynski at Birmingham Zine Fair, and there are few people more able to reduce me to paroxysms of helpless mirth than those two. Any summer blues were blown askew by this kindly two. A lot of ideas hit paper, and I am able to post some highlights below. Prepare for a feast!

In the first picture I illustrated the point that what I am looking for in a girlfriend is "a really high forehead". Then, below, Joe List and Mr Dan Berry explore their love of CSI. At the bottom, Kristyna and I go "sales mad" with explosive and largely unproductive fervour

With love and marriage now firmly on the agenda, Ms Baczynski and I played a game of "Couples", where each artist has to draw half of a romance and the other creates a suitable mate. What followed was, by turns, beautiful and unutterably vile. 

Meanwhile, Joe had drawn on a large number of Post-Its, in the hunt for the ultimate idea. And below, together we created a Blind Date/Dating Game style trio of suitorettes for me. Tina Warbucks has the nightmarishly high forehead that I called for, Tessa Terabyte has glamour and plenty of external storage, while Polly Clock is sweet-natured and extremely punctual, with a kind of moving facial timepiece tattoo. Lorra lorra!

The choice... is yours (MINE).

Birmingham Zine Festival

If you live in the middle of England, why not come down to Birmingham Zine Festival on Saturday July 9th, where I will be selling books, doing sketches, and attempting to raise the nation's spirits. It's a free event! I'll be sharing a table with my friend and ally Kristyna Baczynski, whose work is a stone cold treat for the eyes and mind.

It's at the We Are Birmingham shop on King's Parade, very near New Street and Moor Street stations, here's a map! I hope to see you there.

Jack Cole's instant cartooning course

I've found Jack Cole's Instant Cartooning Course very useful on numerous occasions. It helped me a lot with hands (it shows you how to understand and get hands right with a pentagon-based system) and swiftly demystifies heads in profile.

Jack Cole was the creator of Plastic Man, he also produced many beautiful painted pictures for the then-newly launched Playboy. I took the scan above from "Jack Cole and Plastic Man" by Art Spiegelman and Chip Kidd, a fascinating overview of his often crazed, dynamic work.

Here is the text from the course - it's probably better just to buy the book but there are so many gems in here that it would be daft not to include it.

Simon Reynolds on "decor for life"

This is from the current issue of The Wire magazine. Simon Reynolds' latest book, Retromania, came out very recently and I look forward to cracking it soon.

'Underground', in 2011, means creating an atmosphere of cultural intimacy. So the most apt comparison for where do-it-yourself music is today might be Etsy, the online market for handmade and vintage items. Not only is the economic structure similar — small entrepreneurs selling their wares at fairs or through specialist boutiques but doing most of their business online — but the aesthetic sensibility overlaps. There are the same vintage materials and formats (T-shirts with pictures of old-fashioned typewriters, notepads that repurpose the covers of 1970s textbooks), the same penchant for slow unwieldy production methods, even similar iconography (lots of Etsy stationery features animals and birds, particularly owls!)

But what this analogy leads onto is the unsettling thought that underground music making is becoming a niche market, a form of hip(ster) consumerism that slots right next to distressed furniture, microbrew beer, artisanal cheese and vintage clothing. No longer art as an intervention in the battlefield of culture, but art as 'décor for life'.

I agree with Simon to a greater extent. The two questions I ask are:

1. Have uncertain times, in concert with lives led online where there is little reliable constancy, led people to embrace comforting, often infantile tropes?

2. Were the culture wars over when ever greater media divergence (across all platforms) meant that the great, abstract "water cooler moment" disappeared and one could simply ignore the culture you didn't like? Have most of the guns simply been put away?

Charlotte

Charlotte is a fun character to draw and one of my favourites to write. One of the hardest things about making Bad Machinery is drawing characters who are growing up on the page. I have to run all their parallel developments in my head at once, try to keep them in proportion and on-model, at a time when the once-trustworthy human body starts rebelling in 100 confusing ways. Lottie is perhaps the easiest because I can look at her sister Sarah in Scary Go Round, and her mother, I know where this road is probably going to end.

Please stop me thinking

At what point do outsourcing of labour and automation of repetitive jobs (particularly client-facing) begin to undermine business beyond the point where outsourcing (thereby lowering prices) and automation (lowering employee cost) can make up the shortfall? What happens to global capitalism when you make more than a certain portion of the workforce redundant because they simply aren't needed?

My initial guess is that perfecting human pyramids will become a lot more popular.

This self deprecation has to stop

On more occasions than I care to count, someone has come up to me at a comic show, pressed their little photocopied effort into my hand, and said "it's not very good". And 49 times out of 50, I manage to stop myself saying "then why on earth should I read it".

If you've taken the time to draw something, and photocopy it or have it printed, and travel to a destination, and give your work unsolicited to a complete stranger, try not to make this oft-repeated faux pas at the final moment. Your work may not be of a professional standard, it may be loose, "sophomoric", poorly lettered, imperfect - it may be flat out rotten - but you finished something, and if you finished one thing, you can finish another, and you will improve.

Here is the rub. There are people at every comic show I attend producing work that I can only describe as execrable, who stand with consummate pride next to their rotten pamphlet and sell it to all-comers - with an astonishing degree of success. Now, I know that it comes down to character. Those people are probably psychopaths.

Self-criticism is a valid exercise and a vital component of improvement. But it is not an attractive attribute to strangers. Wrestle your terrors alone in a windowless room under an unshaded bulb, with a loaded pistol and a jam jar of potent "prison screech" on the table.

Out and about, on the scene, I want to see you beaming with pride that you made it out of that room with all your teeth and most of your sensibilities intact.

ADDENDUM: If you approach me with a comic called "Sh1tty Comics", "My Crap Comics", "Cavalcade Of Rubbish", "The Underperformance Chronicles", "Awful Tales" &c, I will tear it up in front of you or shred it upon my return home.

T-shirts on the internet

Here are the 10 categories of successful tshirts on the internet

1. Pop culture recognition humour / copyright violation
2. Self-affirming message
3. Acknowledgement of under-represented group
4. Acknowledgement of under-represented pastime
5. An extremely "clever" image
6. A sensational piece of easily "gettable" wordplay
7. Unexpired meme
8. Food and drink
9. Come-on / invitation to a come-on
10. Juxtaposition/combination of items 1-9

Every time I broke these rules, I ended up with a lot of leftover shirts.

The ultimate non-expiring meme is "cats". You're welcome.