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.)

The Thirteenth Floor

(UPDATE: I've just been informed that there's a problem delivering to the United States - no idea why. I'm looking into it. My apologies if you've been thwarted in your ordering attempts - I hope to have this resolved shortly.)

So... in the late 1990s I did a graphic novel. (I say novel; it was 70 pages plus change. A big comic, really... but then, aren't they all?) For various reasons, but mainly because it didn't quite work as a story, it's been sitting in a drawer since then.

But digital publication wasn't an option back then the way it is now, and what I'd feel odd about printing and selling for the full retail price of a book, I feel okay about charging £3 (that's around $5 for the Americans, I think) for and offering as a download. So here it is: The Thirteenth Floor, folly and curiosity.

There are a couple of options: you can buy the PDF here, or the CBZ format here. Both the same price, both roughly 40MB. (There was going to be a third option of a ZIP file containing a couple of other formats as well - epub, mobi - but I don't appear to have enough space on the Pulley account I set up last night, so they'll have to wait. If you buy any format and you'd like one of those, though, just e-mail me and I'll fix you up.)