Zoot Lives!

Been a bit quiet on the blog recently. Time for a catch-up. There are a few things of note to report:

 • The new Zoot! arrived from the printer this morning and it's a beauty – forty pages of black-and-white comic-bookery under a painted cover. It's now available from my web store. (I will also have copies for sale at Thought Bubble in September and at the Nottingham Comic Convention in October.)

• I've just turned in a short story for Archaia's Labyrinth 2017 Special. It's sort of a David Bowie tribute. That should be in stores in November.

• Criminy, a Max Fleischer-inspired project which writer Ryan Ferrier and I have put together, has found a home with a major US comic book publisher. More on that in a while, once some of the details are worked out. Suffice to say it's all rather exciting. A few sample pages from our pitch document are shown below; Ryan showed these on Twitter a month or so back, which led to the project finding a publisher.

 

The blog should become a bit more active in the near future, as I'm about to start working on a run of commissions that have been waiting in the queue for far too long.

Kirbyesque

It would have been Jack Kirby's 100th birthday today. I'm a huge fan – especially of his 1970s work, which is as personal and unique as anything the underground comix were coming out with at the same time. So, to mark the occasion, here are a bunch of Kirby-themed sketches and commissions I've done over the past few years, all in one place.

Happy 100th, Mr Kirby, wherever you are.

Zoot!

So, Zoot's coming along. The contents are drawn (toning the last pages now) and the cover is done. Here's a first pass at the cover design – I'm undecided whether or not to continue the original numbering, as there's an element of confusion around it, inasmuch as Andrew and I worked on a seventh, unpublished issue which was incorporated into the Zoot Suite collection (which, itself, is essentially the real #7, I guess). I'll have to make that call in the next day or two. Feedback welcome.

Anyway, work in progress.