Salons, Scripts and Stories

First, those of of you in the New York area might like to know about the ACT-I-VATE Salon this Thursday - details below, or follow the link.


This week I was asked by Marvel to write a four-issue series for their Marvel Adventures line. This is exactly the sort of thing I gave up my magazine illustration work to be able to do more of - it's just where I think the biggest challenges are for me creatively right now - so I said yes, and now I have to figure out how the hell I'm going to do it. The brief is to do a big cosmic thing starring the Avengers and Thanos, loosely based on an old story in the Marvel Universe proper which I'd never heard of. Go on, lemming, over the cliff...

Quick recommendation: Art & Story, the podcast on the craft of creating comics. Right now they're in the middle of a series called "Your Comic from the Ground Up", where the hosts, Mark and Jerzy, discuss just that - how to build a long-form comic story from scratch. Really good stuff, especially to someone like me, who's way more comfortable in the "3-minute pop-song" end of comics.

Drink the Wind

Mugwhump's back on ACT-I-VATE! Go check it out here -- as before, there'll be a one-week lag before it appears here at the Hotel Fred, but appear it shall. Most exciting.


Here's something that happened a couple of days ago between me and my son Thomas -- I had a Soppy Dad moment and had to get it down on paper. It'll probably make anybody without kids cringe. Tough, I say, tough! The boy has a way with a poetic turn of phrase, what can I tell you? He'll be four next week.

All this to look forward to

One week until Mugwhump is back on your computer screens! I'm really looking forward to doing something non-corporate for a change - the Muppets are great fun, but they'll never be mine-all-mine. Here's a teaser - pencil art for the first installment, which will essentially be a recap since I've been away from it for so long.


This morning I had my next couple of Muppet plots given the go-ahead from Boom!, though there's still Disney to hear back from - but, all things being equal, you'll soon be seeing human guest stars (at least for a few issues) and the return of some characters who haven't appeared in the comic up until now. Yes, I'm teasing you. Tee hee.

Throwing Peanuts

Back to some proper drawing this week. Feeling rusty after only occasional doodles for a few weeks, but my scripting schedule is completely back on track now and ideas for the next couple of Muppet Show story arcs are falling into place. So I'm feeling on top of things for the first time in a while.

Hey, I received my copies of the first Muppet Show collection in the mail this week - not bad! I was expecting the dimensions to be smaller, more digest-sized. This looks about perfect to me - my originals are drawn pretty close to printed size, so a small amount of reduction actually flatters the work considerably. There's a weird printing error on one page for some reason - the resolution on one of the Pigs in Space pages is all screwed up - but apart from that it's everything I could have hoped for. And I'm really, really pleased to see my old Disney Adventures strips published in the back at last.

Also received a copy of The Widow's Curse, the Doctor Who graphic novel which features a nine-pager by Jonny Morris and me, "Death to the Doctor!", plus a bunch of sketches and notes about the story. (And lots of other goodness besides, of course.) The Tenth Doctor strip really started to find its legs around this period.


And now, for no reason whatsoever, here's something I did years ago for a Schulz-themed exhibition organised by my friend Brad Brooks - not quite the last time I tried painting anything, but pretty nearly. Ah, computers, you've ruined me.