Iron Duchess update, plus sundry other matters

Hello! Firstly, because I spoil you (and because I got two pages coloured this weekend), here's this week's Iron Duchess update at ZCO.MX...

Secondly, we're only a few days away from Thought Bubble (squeals like twelve year old girl)! I'll be at Table 26 in the New Dock Hall doing the usual sort of thing I do on these occasions: sketching, signing, selling books and artwork, trying to eat me sandwiches. Do come along if you're going to be in Leeds this weekend.

Thirdly, something rather splendid arrived in the mail this morning. It's a book to which I made a small contribution called Dinomania, by Ulrich Merkl, about Winsor McCay's fascination with monsters in his work and how they influenced everything from King Kong to Godzilla. My part in this book (a bit of a monster in itself; it's huge!) was to try and reconstruct a recently discovered, incomplete, previously unpublished McCay dinosaur comic strip called Dino. (No pressure, then!) Having seen the printed art for the first time today, I'm actually really, really pleased with how it came out. This one's from our friends at Fantagraphics.

One half of this page is by me, one half by Winsor McCay. Guess which is which!

More Dinosaurs

Still plugging away at the McCay forgeries. Here's another panel.

Being Winsor McCay

So I'm currently doing some creative reconstructions of some partially-lost Winsor McCay strips from 1934, the year he died, which were never finished. It's for a book on McCay's Gertie (and other McCay dinosaurs) being put together by Ulrich Merkl, who was responsible for the fabulous Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend book a couple of years back.

I'll resist revealing any of the actual McCay artwork here – it's never been published before as far as I know, so that'll be a big selling point – but here's one panel I drew, taken from the pages I'm recreating from the fragments of existing artwork and various clues supplied in the surviving pages. I'll tell you one thing, being Winsor McCay was hard work – these things are taking me an age to draw!