I Bring You Arse

It wasn't everybody's cup of tea, but I thought Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon's comic Preacher was a real breath of fresh air in the gloomy-as-shite Vertigo lineup. I think just about every comic should have plenty of jokes, and that goes double for Vertigo. Anyway, my friend Tim Pilcher has written a book called The Preacher Bible, and there's a bit in there where other people get to show off their interpretations of the cast. Here's mine.

Lord of the Rich Tea Biscuits

I'm a New Zealander, albeit 12,000 miles away from the place, and one of the reasons I prefer not to live there is because their pathological patriotism terrifies me. One gets the impression (as a casual visitor, which is all I ever am these days) that saying you thought Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings was overlong and badly written will get you chased down the main street, covered in tar and feathers, sodomised by rabid dogs and lynched, possibly not in that order.

I offer the following as a peace offering to my former countrymen, then. From when Ian McKellen did a guest-starring role in Coronation Street earlier this year.

Hallelujah!

I sometimes get roped into doing things I have no business doing, and this illustration represents one of those times.

In 1992/93 I was sharing a studio with a very talented artist named Martin Emond, who was much in demand for things like record album covers. A band called the Hallelujah Picassos had recently asked him to do a cover for them. Martin seemed to think that the only thing holding me back from having all the record album cover work I could handle was that I was too diffident to just point-blank ask for it, so he basically emotionally blackmailed one of the band into asking me to do an illo for the CD booklet. Here's the never-used result.

Not sure why they never used it. I think it may have been as simple as making their todgers too small.

What a difference ten years makes

Here's some before-and-after for you. The first picture is the cover of Zoot! #5 from 1993. The second picture is a digitally redrawn version I did in 2003 for a Spanish anthology called Buen Provecho, who asked me to do a Fred the Clown-related cover featuring food and I couldn't think of anything better. You'll notice that the 2003 version is inferior in every way to the original. I love computers.

More Whoness

I'm posting another Doctor Who illo today. This was my first attempt at the Christopher Eccleston incarnation from earlier this year. I'm sorry if you're not a Who fan... neither am I, especially, but you have to understand that if you live in the UK or any other country in the Commonwealth, Doctor Who is part of our folk heritage. You can go through your entire life never having seen an episode, but "Dalek," "TARDIS" and "Time Lord" are a part of your vocabulary regardless. I suppose it's like the original Star Trek is for Americans in that respect.

Anyway, I just watched the latest episode last night (taped from Christmas day; the first with David Tennant, who was unexpectedly terrific in the role) so it was the first thing I thought of.

This May Not Work, Herbie

I don't know if Blogger will allow me to upload this thing at a readable resolution, so consider it an experiment. If not, well, you ain't missing much. It's a thoroughly silly bit of fluff which I did purely so I could write some dialogue for Grover and Herbie from Sesame Street.

Merry Christmas!

This year's Christmas card, which I diligently produced and then completely failed to mail to anyone. Drawings courtesy of my daughter Tamsin, just turned three.

A something

Haven't had time to scan the thing I wanted to post today so here's something plucked at random from my hard drive.

Who, Me

I discovered yesterday that this blog was given the "Go, Look" treatment by Tom Spurgeon's Comics Reporter site, which means I'm probably getting more than the six hits a day I was expecting; we may even be as high as fourteen now. Which means I should probably refrain from posting any work that's too recent in case I get on the wrong side of any of my lovely clients.

In that vein, here's one of my earliest illustrations for Panini UK (formerly Marvel UK)'s Doctor Who Magazine, which I've been contributing to for about six or seven years now, although not for much longer. (I'm about to drop a few of my lower-paying regular gigs, including this one, to buy myself some time for more personal projects.) There are about 60 or 70 of these which I'll drip out gradually over time.

Horribly Historical

For a good long while, I was doing illustrations for a magazine called Horrible Histories, an educational rag based on the bestselling line of children's books. The remit was to bury your own style in favour of that of the books' illustrator, Martin Brown, which wasn't as much fun as it sounds a lot of the time. Anyway, here's the Battle of Waterloo a la Brown.

EastEnders

I don't watch soaps -- never have, never will probably -- which makes it kind of odd that doing caricatures of the stars of EastEnders, Coronation Street et al. for the magazine Inside Soap is my main source of income. They send me the photos, I turn the job in on time, everybody's happy. Anyway, here's the most recent one -- EastEnders, and that's about all I know. The rest you'll have to work out yourselves.

Scribbler's Ruin

When I'm not drawing funnybooks, I'm drawing illustrations for national (and occasionally international) magazines. So, from now on, I'm going to post those jobs here. Partly because I want them to be seen, and partly because I want to convince myself I'm not as lazy as the nagging voice in the back of my head thinks I am. Here's one I finished a couple of days ago for Nickelodeon Magazine. (Apparently, 3D whiz Ray Zone is going to turn this one into 3D, which should be a hoot.) If you click the picture once, it gets big. If you click it twice, it gets very big indeed.