Brum Brum!

My almost-three-year-old son Thomas started going to nursery recently. It's been two short weeks from screaming, sobbing abandonment trauma to essentially telling me to piss off after I take him through the door. Oh, and he's in love with a boy called Stanley, apparently.

This coming weekend I will be attending my first Birmingham International Comic Show. I'm going to try to have a new Doctor Sputnik minicomic ready, but I'm not making any promises. Sleep might take priority. Otherwise, expect more of the usual from me -- sketching, selling books and artwork, and showing off photocopies of anything vaguely recent to anyone who's interested. I'm skipping the Friday Night Launch (mainly because nobody told me there was one until after I'd booked my hotel) but I'll be there Saturday and Sunday. And, after my shameful display of hangover at the Bristol Comic Expo earlier this year, I will attempt not to vomit in front of any more children.

Currently finishing off the Time Out piece (four pages to colour today, wish me luck) and writing a six-page Captain America all-ages story set in World War Two. Interestingly, being all-ages, I'm not allowed to use the word "Nazi". I'm not sure pretending they never existed is the best approach, but it does mean my focus is less on the front lines and more on home front saboteurs and plucky girl reporters (I'm calling her Rosalind Hepburn!) and such stuff. Starting to come together, anyway. If I get my druthers I'd like to have the splendid Rob Davis on board as artist -- not sure Marvel will go for it, but I'm fighting. I'm fighting! I'm writing with him in mind.

Lastly, for no reason, here's a page from an abandoned project that will probably never see the light of day otherwise. That's what blogs are for, I guess.



Right. Birmingham!

Monster Johnson Pig in Space

On Saturday I got together with Scott Gray to throw some ideas around for more Fin Fang Four stories. We didn't have any shortage of them, as it turns out, although whether Marvel will be interested in them is another question; if they'd prefer me to draw them, they might have to wait a while. But we definitely came away from our brainstorming session with the feeling that we still had a ton of stories to tell.

Currently working on a comic project for Time Out's Four Feet From a Rat comic supplement (second issue sampler available here), a one-off bit of satirical fluff featuring London's Wodehousean cartoon Mayor, Boris Johnson, as a 30s-style pulp adventure hero, beating the crap out of communists and other undesirables. (I say Wodehousean -- there is a sense in which you think Boris has stolen Hugh Grant's stammering act -- but at the same time you can't help thinking he'd have no hesitation in having every one of us lined up and shot.) Not my own script, but funny stuff nonetheless, and full colour as well. And it's Time Out. Worth having that name on the old resume.



Just finished writing a Pigs In Space two-pager for the new Muppet comic this morning. I'm really happy with it, especially for a first draft. It's the first day since I started writing the Muppets again where I felt everything click. Hopefully there'll be more of those days to come.

Treading Treacle

Officially, The Rough Guide to Graphic Novels came out in the UK yesterday (I believe it's been out for a while in the US). This is the book by Danny Fingeroth that I illustrated 30-odd pages of in "graphic novel", i.e. comic strip, format. It's the longest bit of sustained comic bookery I've done for a while, my comics tending to be of the 7-to-10 page variety lately.

Apart from that, on the face of it, I'm exactly where I was last week -- one page left to go on "Jailhouse Crock", a good chunk of the first Muppet issue still to be scripted. Getting there slowly, an hour or two every morning before I start working on whatever else I have scheduled for the day.

On the Muppet front, I can tell you that the first issue will feature the Planet Koozebane, the Swedish Chef, and Kermit playing the banjo. I'm working from a fairly tightly-constructed subplot, and inserting sketches between the character bits which I'm making up on the spot -- an attempt to give Disney something to look at and approve/alter at the plotting stage while a the same time trying to keep an element of spontaneity. Harder than it sounds! Disney occasionally asks me to insert a degree of sentimentality that is, shall we say, outside my comfort zone. I'm finding ways around it that keeps everybody happy so far, but it's a tightrope I'm walking here...



Here's a half-page from "Jailhouse Crock" to whet your appetites (click on it for a closer look). Before you ask, no, I have no idea where or when it's going to appear. But all the Fin Fang Four shorts will eventually be collected (at least, that was the plan when we signed on to do them last year). So look out for that some time before the Second Coming.

Morning Owl

Today sees the beginning of my new Mugwhump strip on the Hotel Fred site. Reaction at the strip over at Act-i-Vate so far has been overwhelmingly positive, so I warn you that today's strip threatens to be a terrible anticlimax.

Right now I seem to have slightly more coals in the fire than I usually do, which is something I'd be churlish to complain about. In the last week alone, I've been asked to write some more stuff for Marvel and I've received a script for a very funny three-pager I'm drawing for a supplement in London's Time Out. This is good, as I enjoy being busy, but I think I'd enjoy it slightly more if I didn't have to get up at 5.30am in order to fit it all in. Filling my days at the moment are the script for the new Muppet Show book and inking the last of the Fin Fang Four shorts, "Jailhouse Crock", featuring everybody's favourite robot mailman, Elektro, and a rogues' gallery of old villains from the Hostess Twinkie ads from the 1970s. It's a hoot!

Preee-sentinggg... MUGWHUMP THE GREAT!

Today I'm beginning a brand-new web strip, and if you're wondering why all you can see on my website is Fred the Clown, that's because the new strip is making its debut at Act-i-Vate.com. It's called Mugwhump the Great, and for the handful of you who have come to rely upon the Hotel Fred's WebComicsNation-powered RSS feeds and syndication features (whatever they are -- speaking as somebody who doesn't have a mobile phone and fondly remembers the old wooden computers), fret not! For Mugwhump will appear at the HotelFred.com with a one-week delay starting September 9th, a contrivance developed to satisfy Act-i-Vate's requirement for exclusive content (although you can already read the older Mugwhump material here). The black-and-white approach is the result of a conscious decision on my part to separate my personal work from my work-for-hire stuff, which these days is invariably computer-coloured. I thought it was time to draw a line in the sand somewhere and, for aesthetic, economic and scheduling reasons, colour seemed as good a place as any.

In other words, I'm expecting never to make any money from this and to have to print the damn thing myself eventually. Just like old times!

And another thing...

I'm very good at forgetting things. I'm a champion forgetter. I could forget for England if they didn't already have people who can do that much better than I can. So I should mention that I forgot to plug the new Tripwire Annual, which has a new(ish) Fred the Clown strip contained within -- actually a redrawn and recoloured old web strip, but don't tell everyone. You'll recognise the cover because it's got Doctor Who on it, which I'd be tempted to call a coincidence (on the basis of my association with Doctor Who Magazine) if it weren't for the fact that I don't think I know anybody these days who isn't occasionally involved with Doctor Who in some capacity or another. My longtime collaborator and friend Cornelius Stone discovered a missing William Hartnell episode a few years back; Scott Gray of Fin Fang Four wrote the strip for yonks. And it turned out that my son's godfather worked on The Runaway Bride and set fire to the Tardis on his first day. I don't know if they asked him back.