Speak Easy

It was recently brought to my attention by a close associate of mine that he wasn't able to post comments on my blog (for better or worse). I've isolated the source of the problem and I'm here to tell you that you need keep your scathing criticisms to yourself no longer! And what better way to bring you this message than with the above video. This is a trailer for "Awake, My Soul" a documentary I had the great pleasure of seeing not so long ago when I went to see local heroes of mine Cath & Phil Tyler at the volunteer-run Star & Shadow Cinema here in Newcastle. Yes, there are some scary religious people, but l i s t e n ! WOW.

A Bubble for your Thoughts

While still ever-so-slightly shellshocked from what has to have been my busiest Thought Bubble yet, I feel I should tell the tale the way I remember it. To help you imagine things in glorious technicolour, here's a picture of me behind my stall with my face turned away from the camera and towards a picture of Stalin that I'm drawing. Posed, you think? Contrived, perhaps? Well buddy, this is 100% candid camera, and a lovely chap called Paul Burrow will testify to that, since he's the generous stranger who snapped it without my knowing and e-mailed it to me later!

Here's a list of mistakes I've learned valuable lessons from this year:

• Turn Up Earlier - no, packing the night before and getting up at 5:30am is not enough. Especially when your flashy new cardboard display stand has never been taken out of its box and you have no idea how to assemble it. On-lookers were treated to the sight of a cussing yeti flailing his arms around in a barbaric display of primitive oragami as the contours of the defiant card mocked him with their malicious smiles.
  
  
• Assemble ALL Your Comics - Another wise idea of mine was to take the loose pages of my MAIN TITLE with me, as well as my long-armed stapler with probably THREE staples in it, instead of finding the time to assemble them before the show. This resulted in a panic attack in the middle of the day which found me back at Leeds station desperately groping the shelves of WHSmiths and Paperchase to find more staples.
  
  
• Take Down That Stupid Sign - I'm not Jack Kirby, and I cannot produce good drawings in five nanoseconds. So what possesed me to put up a sign saying I would draw anything you want for £2 (with the 'anything' in italics and everything) baffles even me. Don't get me wrong, it was cool drawing cosplayers as zombies, couples as pigs, celebrity portraits and Stalin's bushy lip, but MAN was I tired by the end of the day. I've only today actually finished all the requests I got, which I'll be mailing out to the people I made empty promises to on the day. Maybe up the price or lower the options? How about:
  
  "I will draw a rodent of your choice for £50"
  
  See how many takers I get on that one. Hmm.
  
  
• Embrace Capitalism - It's taken me a while to come to terms with the fact that some people don't have the time to listen to me whinge, even if I spend all of my waking life trying to turn that whinging into half-way decent comics. So why not exploit the fact that most people aren't as horribly self-loathing as me and create an alternative product to my comics in the form of punchy big prints for twice the money?! I should have brought more of these, I did not anticipate them to sell as well as they did! And despite my backwards way of expressing it, I'm really grateful to everyone who picked up one and validated the existence of the illustrator within.
  
  

• Remember Mrs. Gren - Basic human functions still apply, even at Thought Bubble. I should have gone to bed earlier the night before, I should have had time to eat some lunch and use the toilet on the day. Chewits and Chuppachups only cut it for so long.

Now here are some great things that happened, just to leave that lovely feeling in your belly:

• I met loads of great and talented people, some for the first time, including:
  
  
  Jess Bradley - ex Travelling Man chum, now internet-based comics chum with stacks of awesome art and comics (and trainers!) for you to oogle at on her website. She and her boyfriend even offered me a guided tour of Bristol should I ever drop my anchor in those lands. And I expecting GUIDING, guys!
  
  
  Magda Boreysza - the mind responsible for one of my very favourite small press titles Toasty Cats, as well as a slew of other weird and wonderful art and animations, no less!
  
  
  Paul Rainey - a machine of comics production, the creator of There's No Time Like The Present and all round splendid chap. Didn't speak to him nearly as much as I'd have liked this year but it was good to frantically cram a conversation in with him, none the less.
  
  
  
  Steve Tillotson & Gareth Brookes - of Banal Pig fame, of course. Whose latest offerings met the extremely high bar they've set for themselves at previous cons and through their immense back catalogue of gems. If you haven't already, buy the Banal Pig Showcase.
  
  
  Selina Lock - I didn't get much of a chance to speak to Selina or Jay of Caption fame, but will hopefully be introduced to them properly by Paper Jam member and comics veteran Terry Wiley when we all discuss plans to make the best con ever here in Newcastle.
  
  
  Kristyna Baczynski - who I didn't realise I was actually meeting until it was pointed out to me in the pub after the show by close comics associates Gary Bainbridge and Andy Waugh. Nor did I realise that it was the very same Kristyna the year before as I egotistically talked up my comics to her all the while being amazed by the wonderful things on her blog.
  
  
  Marc Ellerby - As he pointed out, we only see each other once a year, so it probably wasn't in-line of me to get all up in his face on a bitter, jealous rant about his insane level of success. Not least of which is being featured in the awesome CBGB anthology that the likes of Jamie Hernandez were involved with - god, I hate you, Marc.
  
  
• Paper Jam World Domination - The Comics Collective I started in Newcastle some four years ago has grown immensely during that time, and its members have unleashed unbelievable talents on the comics world. We had FIVE stalls all in a row this year, one for the Collective itself, another for me, one for Andy and Gary, another with Terry (and honourary PJCC member Selina) and a third with Paul Thompson, Daniel Clifford and Martin Newman. All of whom had amazing new things to offer which you can read about on their respective blogs.
  
  
• I Made Some Money - and was able to treat my girlfriend to some nice things on her birthday to make up for the present drought that struck the Land of Giving this year. Thanks, November, month of poverty! But non-sarcastically, thanks to everyone who stopped by my stall this year, even the cheeky little kids who justed wanted some of my free chewits! I really appreciate everyone's support and I'll look forward to seeing you all again next year!
  

One Year Later...

...and I've finally printed the second issue of The Big Bang. I've decided I might as well make its official launch at Thought Bubble, since it's only around the corner and I still need to fold and staple the whole lot. But it is available to buy from my Etsy Shop before then, where you can see further preview pictures and find out more about it. So if you're not going to be at Thought Bubble and/or can't be bothered to wait until it's in the shops after then and/or don't live in the UK, go check it out!

Covering My Tracks

The Big Bang Issue One will soon have a new friend, who I've affectionately named The Big Bang Issue Two. To generate some interest for this publication, or remind people of its existence, as the case may be, I decided to document each stage of the creation of the cover. I've been reading a lot of those artists' processes lately over on my two favourite blogs Drawn! and Meathaus so I thought I'd give it a go and maybe trick you all into thinking I'm more pro than I really am. So:

1) Materials!
Paper: 160gsm A3 watercolour card.
Pencils: 0.5 Faber Castell mechanical pencil with blue lead refills.
Pens: 0.1, 0.4 and 0.8 Uni Pin fine liners, with a Copic double-ended brush/chizel pen for bigger blocks of black.
Technology: Mustek A3 scanner, Wacom Tablet, Photoshop CS3 and the blessed iMac.

2) Pencils
In keeping with the first cover, I decided to use no human subjects on this one, and to focus on a tranquil/eerie city scene with lots of tedious architechtural details. Notice also that I employed a poor man's one-point perspective, which is about the only good thing to come from my Design Technology GCSE.

As you can probably tell, this is going to be another wrap-around cover with the vanishing point being the spine of the book. In other words, the right half is the front cover, and the left half is the back cover!

3) Inks
Once I was happy I had reached an almost finished composition I started inking over all the lines. I noticed that the windows on the left-most building were totally NOT straight, so I just fixed it when inking instead of drawing the whole thing over in pencil again. I blacked in all the little x's I'd left for myself in the pencils, which is something I stole from Doug Braithwaite and which is basically pointless in my case. Where Doug Braithwaite would then give his amazing pencils to some incompitent Marvel Monkey to ruin, I'm only drawing for myself, so there's really no need to tell myself which areas are supposed to be black given that I made that decision all on my very own.


4) Scanning
I don't bother to rub out pencil lines any more. It took me a lot of time to ween myself off that Blue Peter/smART technique, but I'm finally there. I scan in inks as 1200dpi RGB .psd files and use Photoshop's Image > Adjustments > Threshold tool to make all the blacks absolute black and all the whites absolute white. I picked that one up from this awesome RePro Guide you can download for free from Jordan Crane's website.

5) Colours
Once I'm happy with the crispiness of my lines, and once I've gotten rid of any specks, mistakes and other incriminating evidence I make sure the image is set to the right paper measurements for print and reduce the resolution to 300dpi so my computer doesn't have a fit. Once it's time to add colour, I go to the Channels tab, make a copy of my Blue layer, Invert it, use the little marching ants tool to select all the black ink lines (which are now white), go back to my Layers tab, create a new Layer and Paint Bucket black (or in this case, a dark blue) into the selected area to make a copy of all the black lines seperated from the white background. Then I can fill the Background layer with white and create an intermediate layer between my white background and my free-standing ink lines where the colours can go. For adding grey to comic pages I usually just need one intermediate layer, but for this cover I had three: one for the sky, one for the clouds and another for the buildings. And here it be:



I'll have the comic printed and up for sale at my usual outlets by the end of this month, so be on the look-out! Thanks for sharing the tedious monotony of comics creation with me. I feel better already.

The Crumpet Time Ghostly Gramophone Doodle Book

...has landed. And here it be, in all its doodlesomeness:


The idea was conceived when I realised how boring white paper was, and how changing something as minimal as the colour or texture of your paper can inform your drawings and make them look much snazzier. The item, as always, can be purchased from my Etsy Shop for a mere $4.00 which works out at about £2.50 English. Go there for more pics and info!

Wings & Things

Well then,

Big Bang progress has begun to steam along again - I can now truthfully say I'm more than half way through the second issue (only by one page mind, but still!). I've also whipped together a new product for my Etsy Shop, to satisfy both ornithological and capitalist hemispheres of my brain. Here it be:


Why, it's a birthday card centred around a very tenuous pun, of course! I realise these kinds of jokes don't aid me in my epic battle against the decline into an embarrassing Dad-type, but it did give me an excuse to draw a bird in a top hat and a monocle.

In other news, a friend of mine called Phillip Buchan has just written a novel and started a Twitter account @FrancisSobriety among other things. If you want some proof that this guy isn't a total douche (and believe me, it can be difficult proof to find) - he's responsible for some really great, really profane comics that were spewed forth onto the world along with mine in one of our earliest ventures into self-publishing with Phil Marsden, entitled Black Out. Remember? No? How about What's Inside A Girl? or Everything Is Going To Be Alright? Well, then I can't help you. I guess he'll have to speak for himself, or his novel will. His novel, which I can testify to at least being one-quarter great (since that's all I've read of it so far).

Anyway, that's all that blood-sucker is getting from me. Go check things out!

You Can't Kill What's Already a Dead Einstein's Ghost

Just saw this over at Paul Hornschemier's blog. If you can tell me what's not good about it, I'll tell you how long a piece of string is*



*answer: as long as your stupid boring face.