Happy 100th Anniversary Spike Milligan

Spike Milligan, the greatest British comic talent of the 20th century*, would have been 100 years old today. So I thought I'd post this three-pager I did in 2003 for an anthology called Spark Generators, the theme of which was for cartoonists to draw a piece about an artist who had inspired them and their work.

It looks a bit strange, I'm afraid. This is because I was travelling around New Zealand at the time the story was due; my daughter had just been born and we were visiting my family there. In those pre-broadband, pre-WiFi days, that meant I needed to create very small digital files so I could e-mail them from an internet café, and the best way to create artwork with a really tiny file size was to use vector art. So I created the whole thing in Adobe Illustrator on my laptop, and never really got to grips with it. As a consequence, it's piggin' ugly. Consequently, this will be your last chance to see it until Spike's 200th anniversary.

(* Opinions differ, but this is the only correct opinion.)

Nottingham Comic Con Sketches III

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.