New Year's Revulsions

What about that 2009, eh? What about that?! Yeah, me neither. Actually, my 2009 has been all right, so I'm counting my blessings, really. I know it's been rough for a lot of people.

New Year's Resolutions:
(1) To try and get a collection of my old mini-comics and scattered one-off short stories together, probably as a print-on-demand affair for selling at conventions and through the ol' website.
(2) To produce a comic through entirely digital means that looks as much like my hand-drawn comics as possible, just to prove to myself it can be done. So far my attempts at digital artwork have been very digital-looking, and that's not what I want. So yeah, learn some skills.
(3) To get more sleep. Of the three, that's the least likely to happen.


Here's a picture I did as a commission - Waiting for Godot as performed by Laurel and Hardy, which I'd love to do one day - a straight adaptation, with the entire original text unaltered, just with Stan and Ollie as Vladimir and Estragon. It's a book waiting to happen.

Well, Ho Ho Ho to you too

It's actually starting to feel like the end of the year now - people are getting reflective all of a sudden. There's a short interview with me on ToughPigs right now where I talk a bit about The Treasure of Peg-Leg Wilson - check it out here. Also very flattered to be mentioned as part of Rich Kreiner's Best of 2009 roundup over at the all-new Comics Journal website - and especially pleased for Fin Fang Four collaborator Scott Gray, who's getting some much-deserved attention lately.

Here's a Christmas present for you all - Kevin Cross starts his new webcomic, Monkey Mod, today. Yow! Been looking forward to this for a while. If you haven't seen the trailer, go now. Now, I say! Fly like the wind!

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Pet Avengers Assemble

I was recently asked to do a cover for the Marvel comic Lockjaw and the Pet Avengers. Here's a step-by-step snapshot of the various stages, because I've recently been asked about such things.

First I did a couple of roughs...



The one selected for developing into a fully-rendered cover was the second one, so I then drew it in pencil on a piece of letter-sized paper.


Finally, I scanned the pencils and blew them up to finished art size, printed them out as a blueline (light blue lines which can be inked without reproducing, so only the inked lines are visible), and inked everything with a No 2 sable brush and a Hunt 102 dip pen.


Ta-dah! Wyatt Wingfoot's your uncle.

The Googlemeister Is In

I have been just a teensy bit obsessed with Billy DeBeck's great newspaper strip, Barney Google, lately - not so much the later Snuffy Smith-centred material, more the Early Funny Ones. Here's my one attempt to do a Billy DeBeck style, at which I think I totally failed.


The problem is that DeBeck was such a good artist - his cartooning decisions were 100% conscious and deliberate, based on a rock-solid underlying drawing ability (this is a guy who started out forging Charles Dana Gibson drawings for a living!). So his fluidity is really hard to imitate if you have a more awkward, laboured relationship with the pen and brush.

Here's an example of the real deal.


More Barney Google in print - that's what I want for Christmas.

Rhapsody in Brown

Here's a Fred the Clown strip I did for Tripwire a couple of years ago - I think enough time has passed now for me to post it here without getting anybody annoyed.

Art and Story Extreme!! had a short appearance by me last week - just a fun cameo on a call-in show, and nothing there for the ages particularly, but it was a pretty funny show once I got out of the way.

Ooh, I think that's about it. Ever so slightly behind on stuff right now (that's code for AAAARGGH) so it's a short one this week. See you in the funny pages.