Now, Here's the Thing...

I spent yesterday getting ready for the UK Web and Mini-Comix Thing this weekend - London's finest (and possibly only) small-press comics show. Oh, such treats! As well as printing up another batch of my usual old mini-comics, I'll have a brand new mini-edition of Mugwhump the Great collecting the web strip to date which will be making its debut at the show. This one clocks in at a stonking FORTY! PAGES! - and that's only Chapters 2 and 3; Chapter One is in a separate mini which I put together this time last year (also at the show this Saturday - so you can get the whole thing if you want). Terrifying in its own small way.

If you've seen the latest Mugwhump strip, you'll be aware that I'm taking a short break from the strip. Still a bit vague about when I'll be picking it up again, but I'm thinking it'll be a couple of months. During the gap, I'll still be updating the blog, so do keep checking in, won't you?


Here's an oldie. My brother Andrew and I did a comic called Zoot! for a couple of years in the early 90s. Zoot! #7 is a comic that never happened - most of what was intended to go into it was eventually collected in Zoot Suite, and I used a re-done version of the cover as the back cover to that book, but this actual version of the cover has never been published. I've often considered starting up Zoot! again as an online project, releasing it as a PDF every so often or something, right before looking at my schedule, falling off my chair and laughing.

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.

A Box of Frogs

I love the expression "mad as a box of frogs". No idea where I first heard it, but whoever came up with it - well done.


Here's the cover to Zoot #6 from years gone by, photoshopped to remove the text, for reasons which escape me now - I think I just wanted to see if I could do it. On reflection I thought it might make a good cover to the hypothetical Zoot collection I floated last week (thanks to both of you who thought that was a good idea, by the way). Especially since I don't have a spare day to do a new one. Not saying it's going to happen tomorrow or anything, but it's another piece of the jigsaw falling into place.

Oh, Yoko!

Turned in the script for my X-Men story this week. Well, I say X-Men story -- what it is is, for all intents and purposes, a roll call for the never-quite-actually-formed Legion of Substitute Mutants. All good clean fun, which is why I'm going to have to think of another character to replace Holland's mutant hero, Dykefinger.


Here's a strip written by my brother Andrew for our long-forgotten comic, Zoot!, based on a never-used idea for a film conceived by Yoko Ono, in which every character experiences time at a different speed simultaneously. This was in my "I Don't Know What I'm Doing" phase of painted colour, where I'd basically fix everything with coloured pencils after I'd botched them in watercolour. Circa 1992 I think.

I've been thinking lately that I should sort out some kind of Best of the Rest Zoot! collection, a companion volume to Zoot Suite (Zoot Brut? Zoot Cheroot?), maybe on a print-on-demand basis -- I can't see any real publisher taking a gamble on something so relentlessly anti-commercial in these troubled times. Tell you what, I'll keep you posted. Might be one for the Bristol show in May, if I can get my junk together.

The 20th Century: What Nearly Happened

Sometime in the mid-nineties I was asked to illustrate a book which (they said at the time) was intended to be a rival to Horrible Histories (oh, the irony!). I assume it tanked, because I wasn't asked to do any more. Anyway, this is the cover, which was far and away the best illustration I did for it. The briefs were a bit odd - sometimes they were incredibly (impossibly) detailed and I'd have to simplify it to get the illustration down to the size of a postage stamp; other times it was along the lines of "Do something funny about Agent Orange". (Which I'm pleased to say I managed to pull off!)

Q-nuts

I was rummaging around for something interesting to post and I came across this, which I'd completely forgotten I'd done.



Also, not related to anything at all but just so you know if this is your sort of thing, I've updated my Art For Sale page for the first time in a while, so if you'd been wondering when I was going to put some new stuff up there, the answer is yesterday. Apologies for the slim pickings there lately.

Head Missing - One Careless Owner

Here's an old book cover, back from the days when I actually painted all this stuff by hand. Perry Homes is a Boy Detective and the missing head is a head teacher who goes missing. Sorry.


Inside Soap day today! (And tomorrow, because I spent the morning trying to be a Good Dad. I'll be doing the old long hours again tomorrow to catch up...)

Wake up, it's 2006

There's a bit of argy-bargy going on at the moment about British comics' venerable organ, 2000AD, offering to publish first-time contributors without paying them anything.

There are a whole bunch of reasons why this stinks, the main one being that if you're good enough to publish, you ought to be good enough to get paid. I do my fair share of work for free, but I keep the rights to the work when I do that so I can exploit the material at a later date if I want to -- in this instance, there's no sign that this will be the case. Rebellion, the owners of 2000AD, are really only in the comics business in order to develop intellectual properties for their computer games line. There are no shortage of young cartoonists who will willingly agree to these terms, unfortunately; the grizzly cynic inside me thinks this is just the thin end of a very long wedge.

Anyway, here's something I did for the Judge Dredd Megazine in 1991, a pinup for a strip I drew called The Straitjacket Fits, which I take a perverse pride in telling people was, according to reader votes, the least popular strip they ever ran.

Even so, I was paid for it.

(Update: About five minutes after writing this, I was informed that cartoonists will, indeed, retain their rights to the work. Very glad to hear it. My righteous indignation and I will be in the bar if you want us.)

Sick as a What?

The expression "sick as a parrot" is apparently something to do with football, and more than that I can't tell you. (When it comes to football, I get that there's a ball and some feet involved, but after that it all becomes a bit hazy, apart from the homoerotic aspect, which is crystal clear.) This is a book cover from the days when I used paint and stuff.

I've never actually seen copies of most of the books I've done covers for, incidentally. Point of interest.

Slow learning

I used to do an awful lot of work illustrating educational textbooks for schools. Here's one from the days when I used to splash acrylic paint about with reckless abandon. I have absolutely no memory of what it was for, apart from a vague awareness that the snail was supposed to be demonstrating some sort of mathematical principle. Or why you should avoid certain kinds of chemicals, I'm not sure.

Anyway.

Hallelujah!

I sometimes get roped into doing things I have no business doing, and this illustration represents one of those times.

In 1992/93 I was sharing a studio with a very talented artist named Martin Emond, who was much in demand for things like record album covers. A band called the Hallelujah Picassos had recently asked him to do a cover for them. Martin seemed to think that the only thing holding me back from having all the record album cover work I could handle was that I was too diffident to just point-blank ask for it, so he basically emotionally blackmailed one of the band into asking me to do an illo for the CD booklet. Here's the never-used result.

Not sure why they never used it. I think it may have been as simple as making their todgers too small.

What a difference ten years makes

Here's some before-and-after for you. The first picture is the cover of Zoot! #5 from 1993. The second picture is a digitally redrawn version I did in 2003 for a Spanish anthology called Buen Provecho, who asked me to do a Fred the Clown-related cover featuring food and I couldn't think of anything better. You'll notice that the 2003 version is inferior in every way to the original. I love computers.