Knox in Stocks

Oops! I forgot to post yesterday! The rot is already setting in...

Here's a piece I did a few years back for a New Zealand-based project called Nga Tupuna (which is Maori for "Ancestors"). The brief was to do a one-pager involving stocks and a character called Ralf the Red. Plagiarising Doctor Seuss was entirely my own terrible idea.

Sketch off

I don't sketch much because I never seem to be able to find any free time, but whenever I go to a convention I usually fill a pad or two and give away the doodles. Gives me something to do with my hands, and it gives punters an excuse to slow down and look at my wares without feeling like I'm intimidating them into buying stuff, which usually makes them run a mile.

Here's a montage of a few I did at some recent show or other which I didn't manage to foist off on anybody.

Quizmaster Gump

One of the previously-unpublished Art d'Ecco stories that will be going in the collection (now coming out in time for the San Diego Comic Con, I believe) is Quizmaster Gump, my brother Andrew's first comic script for about a decade. The illo below was quickly cobbled together a few months back from a pencil sketch of Artie and the Gump, plus the background picture I used in the strip itself, to make a hasty cover for a convention-only minicomic version.

Art has white trousers in the picture for important story reasons. (Or unimportant ones, I forget which.)

Photosoap

Here's an Inside Soap illustration from last year. A scene from EastEnders, I believe.

I often miss the days when I did everything by hand, even though it was usually more time-consuming, because I'm an old-school old fart and I like having black fingers and paint up my nose. But every so often I'm incredibly grateful to have Photoshop to get an effect it would have taken me forever to get by hand, and probably wouldn't have looked as good anyway. This is one of those times.

Wake up, it's 2006

There's a bit of argy-bargy going on at the moment about British comics' venerable organ, 2000AD, offering to publish first-time contributors without paying them anything.

There are a whole bunch of reasons why this stinks, the main one being that if you're good enough to publish, you ought to be good enough to get paid. I do my fair share of work for free, but I keep the rights to the work when I do that so I can exploit the material at a later date if I want to -- in this instance, there's no sign that this will be the case. Rebellion, the owners of 2000AD, are really only in the comics business in order to develop intellectual properties for their computer games line. There are no shortage of young cartoonists who will willingly agree to these terms, unfortunately; the grizzly cynic inside me thinks this is just the thin end of a very long wedge.

Anyway, here's something I did for the Judge Dredd Megazine in 1991, a pinup for a strip I drew called The Straitjacket Fits, which I take a perverse pride in telling people was, according to reader votes, the least popular strip they ever ran.

Even so, I was paid for it.

(Update: About five minutes after writing this, I was informed that cartoonists will, indeed, retain their rights to the work. Very glad to hear it. My righteous indignation and I will be in the bar if you want us.)

Legar Not My Uncle

"Legar Reuths" was a style I mucked about with in the early 90s, based on a misremembered early pseudonym used by Siegel & Shuster before they created Superman ("Leger and Reuths" was their version). He had his own website for a while. Anyway, here's a page he did.

The style evolved from being given a brush pen as a present and not having a clue how to get a decent line out of it. In the end, it seemed simplest to invent a new style and blame my ineptitude with the infernal instrument on that.

The Dog Ate My Homework

My daughter's been home sick with a cold today; consequently I've got no work done all day and thus today's perfunctory post, randomly plucked from the Horrible Histories folder, so I can get a few hours in before bed. Sorry, but console yourself with the thought that it's all free.

Déjà Vu

Today, it's Doctor Who and a pirate. No, really. I think it's from a CD audio play, this one (which is why Colin Baker looks so thin -- everybody looks great on the radio). The pirate was played by Bill Oddie.

Everybody Wins!

I haven't posted a Doctor Who picture for a week or so, so here's another one (I've got sixty more of these to get through, so prepare yourselves). This one's got pirates as well. So don't say I never do anything for you.

The International Brotherhood of Secretly-Alive Ventriloquists' Dummies

I used to work on a book for DC in the 90s called Gross Point, sometimes as inker, sometimes drawing the whole thing. The deadlines were usually pretty grim, so there's a lot of stuff I did for it that I'd prefer not to think about. Occasionally, though, I did a piece for it that I'm still quite proud of. This is one of them.

You can compare it to the printed version if you like.

Sick as a What?

The expression "sick as a parrot" is apparently something to do with football, and more than that I can't tell you. (When it comes to football, I get that there's a ball and some feet involved, but after that it all becomes a bit hazy, apart from the homoerotic aspect, which is crystal clear.) This is a book cover from the days when I used paint and stuff.

I've never actually seen copies of most of the books I've done covers for, incidentally. Point of interest.

Grimshaw Schrimshaw

Here's a really stoopid strip I did as a one-off for some magazine or other, I can't even remember what it was now. I think it was the dummy for a new thing that somebody wanted to launch. Anyway, they never came back to me for another episode.

The script isn't mine; I've no idea who the perpetrator is.

Hello Mister Silly!

I discovered this when I was scanning the Art d'Ecco material a few days ago. I'd completely forgotten this ever existed. It won't be going in the book because there's a black and white version knocking around already.

I vaguely recall cobbling this together for my portfolio in 1990 when I realised that UK publishers were getting into full-colour artwork in a big way. I suppose you could say it's from my "didn't know what the hell to do with colour" period.

Infernal Hypodermy!

I haven't posted an illustration from Inside Soap for a few days, so here's one. I won't make any comment on it, except to say that the briefs I get are sometimes really, really strange.

Foom me senseless

I've posted this here and there before (on the Comics Journal boards, I think), but this is the original cover concept for Fin Fang Four which Eric Powell later redrew for publication. I had vaguely considered trying to buy Powell's original until I found it on the web and saw what the dealers were asking for it. Eep.

Oo Arr

Everybody loves pirates. These ones were for an issue of Horrible Histories.

Apparently one of my ancestors had a duel, a real old-fashioned pistols-at-dawn affair, with a character called "Digby the Pirate", according to family legend. Nobody ever heard from Digby again, but his duelling pistols are now owned by some cousins of mine, I believe. And we call that "murder" nowadays. Crazy!

Homely on the Range

While scanning artwork for the Art d'Ecco collection today, I stumbled across this little long-forgotten gem. The art's terrible, but the timing is immaculate. This one will almost certainly be going in the book.

Bobby Davros

Another Doctor Who picture for you. Suffer!

Grawk! It's 'Orrible!

Anybody out there remember Frankie Stein? When I was a kid I remember reading the Robert Nixon incarnation of the strip in Shiver & Shake every week and thinking it was kind of amiable... then I stumbled across a book reprinting the original, bonkers weirdness of the Ken Reid version and falling in love with it. Reid's world was ever so slightly sleazy and ramshackle (compared to Nixon's, which you could only really describe as "cuddly"). Frankie's "dad" and creator, the nervous wreck Professor Cube, was constantly trying to kill his "son" in horrible ways which always backfired. Terrific premise, although not as terrific as Reid's great lost strip idea which he was never allowed to use, that of a character who tries to commit suicide every week -- hilarity ensues! (Actually, being Ken Reid, it probably would have.)

Anyway, this is my take on Frankie a la Reid, done for a charity deck of cards, hence the card theme. More on Reid here and here.

Whatever Happened to Patrick Mower?

Emmerdale happened to Patrick Mower, apparently. It's the show where old film stars go to die or something (Patsy Kensit being the most recent example). Another of my Inside Soap illustrations. Mower is the one on the right.

For those who are thinking (like I was when I got the brief) "where do I know that name from?", Patrick Mower appeared in films like The Devil Rides Out and was once tipped to be the next James Bond (after Sean Connery). Here's his filmography.

Anyway, Mr. Mower earns a place in my pantheon of Decent Chaps because, to date, he's the only soap star I've done who said he liked the way he was drawn.

Densa

This is a job I did for Nickelodeon Magazine last year -- the gag is that it's an organisation for dimwits called Densa, and you're supposed to find all the things in the picture that have the sound "duh" as a part of their names. Watch a man in his late thirties panic when he realises he has absolutely no idea who Hilary Duff is.

Fin Fang Failures

Last year's Fin Fang Four one-shot for Marvel was originally pitched as a four-issue series, which explains why the final book was pretty dense, plot-wise. One of the things we had to throw out in order to bring the book in at 28 pages was a story involving The Ringmaster and his Circus of Crime, some of the cheesiest baddies to grace the Marvel Universe (which is why my co-writer Scott Gray and I wanted to use them, of course). This pencil rough was included in the original submission. I'd be quite happy to write an entire series around these guys.

Goon with the Wind (brrp)

A few years ago I had the unusual privilege of re-inking the work of the extraordinary Mr. Hunt Emerson, when the Goon Show Preservation Society decided that the black-and-white, heavily crosshatched Emerson-drawn logos they'd been using for umpteen years were in need of an overhaul (at least in part because, through various changes of committee hands, they were now using twentieth-generation photocopies). So they asked me if I could do it, I asked Mr. Emerson if he still had good versions in his files (he didn't) and if it was all right for me to re-ink and colour them, he said yes, and this is the result. Ta-dah.

More Book Covers for the Slower Reader

A job I did a few years ago for a line of children's books which were aimed at those with a less than stellar grasp of the written word. The stories were quite good fun, if not especially imaginative.

There were an awful lot of PC hoops to jump through, I seem to recall -- I'd make a character Asian and then be told to make them look Asian instead of whatever it was they thought I'd drawn. I knew they'd freak if I exaggerated any ethnic features, so I usually just resubmitted the exact same roughs. Seemed to keep them happy.

Hollywood or Bust

My first stand-alone illustration for Doctor Who Magazine was to illustrate an article about the pros and cons of making (a) a new TV series and (b) transferring the franchise to the big screen. The guy in the centre is supposed to be Paul McGann ("And I" from Withnail and I), who played the Doc quite nicely in the otherwise pretty crappy 1997 TV movie, and was somehow the BBC's "Official Doctor" for a few years by default, even though he wasn't actually playing him at the time.

Slow learning

I used to do an awful lot of work illustrating educational textbooks for schools. Here's one from the days when I used to splash acrylic paint about with reckless abandon. I have absolutely no memory of what it was for, apart from a vague awareness that the snail was supposed to be demonstrating some sort of mathematical principle. Or why you should avoid certain kinds of chemicals, I'm not sure.

Anyway.

My Night with Manga

Quite a few years ago, after I'd done a couple of slight things for Dark Horse, the editor of their Blade of the Immortal repackaged Manga editions asked me to do a pinup for the back of one of their comics. Thankfully they sent me a stack of reference, because I'd never heard of the dude. Anyway, this is what I came up with. The composition is completely ripped off from Hal Foster.

The pinup was published in Comic Afternoon in Japan at some point. That little tidbit has gone on my resumé ever since.

Corrie's Angels

Here's another Inside Soap illo. This one's from Coronation Street earlier this year.

I kind of think of this gig as being for my Dad. I've been self-employed as a professional cartoonist for sixteen years and have been nominated for several major comic awards and he doesn't really give a shit, but the moment I told him I was drawing characters from Coronation Street he was telling everyone he knew. It's almost worth doing the job just for that.

Abbey Normal

I had to draw Westminster Abbey for an issue of Horrible Histories a while back. The brief was to draw the inside of the cathedral in its full length, so you could see both ends at the same time, and to draw the ghosts of a whole lot of dead kings and queens and so forth walking around inside, big enough to be recognisable. Short of changing the laws of physics, this couldn't be done (unless you have a talent for recognising ants), so there was a bit of argy-bargy and this elegant compromise was reached.

I'm quite pleased with the ghosts.

d'Ecco Quicko

Bit of a hasty post today; occupied with family stuff, I'm afraid... here's the cover to the Art d'Ecco book coming out from Fantagraphics later in 2006, collecting a bunch of old stuff and a bit of new.