I received a very nice e-mail and this awesome picture the other day from a girl called Astrid, who bought my Viva La Robolution print from Etsy. I've never framed or hung one before so it was super cool to see it on the wall - and in an already cool-looking space at that!
Hello,
I've been hard at work for the last day or two finally knuckling down on The Big Bang Issue Two after a big hiatus while I moved house and various other excuses. The second issue is going to feature some envelope-pushing on the format side of things, the nature of which I'll not get into just yet - but suffice to say that when myself and Alexi Conman realised that such a thing was doable, my excitement was enough to put the plain old comics drawing on the back-burner until I brought the thing into existence. A preview of artwork featured within can be seen below:
I've taken my blog for a make-over. It now looks like <-- this --> I like it better now, but that might just be because it's different to how it was before and sometimes it's nice to have a change. I kind of wish I had more to report than that so this post was a bit more flashy but I'll just let the blog do the talking. Go ahead blog, you handsome devil you.
I just picked up my 24 Hour Comic John Henry Split My Heart from the printers, and it's looking rather delicious. I've cropped it so it's about 2cm shorter and 1cm less wide than A5, mostly because my stupid PDFs left mysterious black lines as if to say "crop me" but it was a welcome mystery because now the book feels just that little bit more substantial to hold in one's hand. Here's a couple of photos I just snapped:
Hello,
I have three things to report, in chronological order:
1) I finished the covers and inside front/back pages for John Henry Split My Heart, which is now available to buy from my Etsy Shop, despite the fact that I still haven't printed any physical copies of it yet. I will be getting a batch done up either tomorrow or early next week though, and if I do sell 500 copies all of a sudden it won't be hard to print on demand...I hope.
2) I listened to the pilot episode of North East Geek Feast, which is a podcast created by comics cohorts Daniel Clifford and Lily Daniels. It features a documentary about the Paper Jam Comics Collective that I'm always blathering on about and that I'm sure at least the majority of you, the readership, have no idea about - if you need more reason to listen, it also has reviews, interviews and a heart in the right place. You'll even get to hear my radio-unfriendly barritone mumblings crashing through the niceness like a miniature wrecking ball.
3) I finished my submission to the forthcoming History...and that comics anthology, by aforementioned Paper Jam Comics Collective. My strip is rather gothically called "Anna & The Absence of God" and it's two pages of melodramatic speculative fiction based on a real person who existed in a real place during a specific time. It's taken from a book/film that I'm quite hopelessly obsessed with and if I had to rate it, I would say it was... adequate. Here's a panel:
Father, it's been over a month since my last blogfession, my only sin being precisely that. Otherwise, I've been a relatively normal, functioning member of society, and even got a lot of artwork produced too. But before all of that, I'd like to share with you the single greatest achievement of my professional career. A moment that not only inflated my ego to way past its bed time but also validated my existence and the amount of said existence I've wasted toiling away at comics. I got an e-mail from my all-time favourite creator and single biggest source of inspiration and awe... Mr. F. C. Ware himself.
The e-mail wasn't to tell me he thought I was the next big thing, or that he was emotionally floored by my work, but it was encouraging, helpful and substancial, and above all - CHRIS WARE READ MY COMICS! Gods of pen and ink be praised.
In other news, I did a 24 Hour Comic as part of the P.R.E.S.S. event at the Tyneside Cinema and I intend to put it out in a book, I've written an introduction and produced a front and back cover, so as soon as the last bits are done and I have two pennies to rub together it'll be in my Etsy Shop and on the shelves at Travelling Man. Here's a peak:
