Axe Me No Questions

There's a thread going on at the moment on the message boards of the rather wonderful Art & Story podcast about sharing your early work, so in the spirit of that, here's something I did more than 20 years ago, around the time I was just starting to get published in student rags and fanzines. Script is by my brother Andrew. I seem to recall that "Axe of the Apostles" was meant to be a catch-all title for an occasional series of short pieces, but in the end we only did two. Only one of which was ever accepted for publication. By a magazine which was immediately cancelled.

A little microcosm of the following two decades, had I but known it at the time.

Legar Not My Uncle

"Legar Reuths" was a style I mucked about with in the early 90s, based on a misremembered early pseudonym used by Siegel & Shuster before they created Superman ("Leger and Reuths" was their version). He had his own website for a while. Anyway, here's a page he did.

The style evolved from being given a brush pen as a present and not having a clue how to get a decent line out of it. In the end, it seemed simplest to invent a new style and blame my ineptitude with the infernal instrument on that.

Hello Mister Silly!

I discovered this when I was scanning the Art d'Ecco material a few days ago. I'd completely forgotten this ever existed. It won't be going in the book because there's a black and white version knocking around already.

I vaguely recall cobbling this together for my portfolio in 1990 when I realised that UK publishers were getting into full-colour artwork in a big way. I suppose you could say it's from my "didn't know what the hell to do with colour" period.

Homely on the Range

While scanning artwork for the Art d'Ecco collection today, I stumbled across this little long-forgotten gem. The art's terrible, but the timing is immaculate. This one will almost certainly be going in the book.

This May Not Work, Herbie

I don't know if Blogger will allow me to upload this thing at a readable resolution, so consider it an experiment. If not, well, you ain't missing much. It's a thoroughly silly bit of fluff which I did purely so I could write some dialogue for Grover and Herbie from Sesame Street.