Happy New Year

No New Years resolutions or looking backs at 2006, I know what was good in '06 and what I want to do in '07 so I'll just try and get on with it.
Hope you all had a good Christmas and all the best for 2007.

Here's to you Clarence

Christmas is almost here, but working in a shop and preparing for Christmas insanely early (and I'll be there tomorrow (Christmas Eve) after we close up putting the Sale in, gah!) makes it sort of fade to the back of my mind.
My favourite moments still happen, the cheese/biscuit/port on Christmas Eve tradition my wife and I started a few years ago. Opening presents early Christmas morning and looking to see if there's a channel showing Laurel and Hardy, or any good b&w film. Crisp cold nights in town/city centres, people wrapped up, twinkling lights and stars and the promise of snow.
Christmases to come will have the added bonus of enjoying it all through our daughter's eyes and that will be the best gift of all, work or not.
And so, as tiny tim observed "God bless us, everyone!' Merry Christmas to everyone who's ever dropped by, I'll be raising a festive glass (got a present that looks suspiciously like a bottle of single malt) to you all!

Good for you sir!

It's the kind of bold, moral and possibly mad move that impresses the hell out of me (it's why I love Bill Watterson), an independant children's author has asked amazon to remove his book from their site as he would rather support indie bookstores. Read a bit more about it here.

What have I been up to?

As Peter points out, I've had an out of character bout of no posting.
Time's been taken up with Olivia, work (retail + Christmas=AAARGH!!!!), getting back into exercising again (great timing I know) and roughing out artwork for a story in the upcoming AccentUk Zombie book.... sneak peaks artwise coming as soon as there's something peakworthy. Been catching up on some reading too, but nothing particularly great as it turned out and I don't want to be negative about other people's work. I do have a proof of Joe Hill's upcoming book to read which I'm hoping will be good. Thanks to the new age of information the big secret that he's Stephen king's son wasn't a secret for long (nice to hear it was as much a surprise for his publisher, although I bet it now makes it's way onto the marketing!)
Better get back to things.

Did you know the last post was no. 400?

Well I had to squeeze it in on the odd spare minutes, but I’ve managed to finish the first pass at a new comic script called ‘Wedding Bells’, and I’m quite happy with it. It’s the first time I’ve tried just plotting something. My usual method is to make it up as I go along and then rewrite, fiddle, procrastinate, scrap, cut, paste and generally worry the thing into submission. Plotting doesn’t feel like proper writing, it’s still making it up as I go along, but without actually trying to write prose. Now I’ve got a full(ish) plot I see the wisdom. There’s the framework of a story that I can easily mess about with and there’s still enough room to add new stuff so I hopefully won’t feel like I’ve stifled off any possible future creativity.
It still sort of bugs me that Burgess made up Clockwork Orange as he went, but then if I start talking about my writing and Burgess I’m onto a bit of loser aren’t I:) And, y’mow, whatever works for you.

oh wow

Hope you've all been following the links on the right, if not you might not have seen Kazu Kibuishi's new incredible elephant illustration on Bolt City and your life will be much sadder for it.

Pens and pencils and bears oh my!

If there's one thing I love it's interviews with comic folk, seriously, I've got loads of TCJ as well as other comic magazines and have reread the interviews many times (including the massive Charles Schulz interview!) TCJ's interviews are amazing, long indepth and insightful, but one thing they do lack (apart from when Dylan Horrocks mentioned it) that I've always found utterly fascinating is 'tool talk', so I'm dead chuffed to see a blog devoted entirely to tool talk. Hurrah!

*** edited to fix links and ease Peter Bangs pain:) ***

One for the ladies

Don't know how true it is the this'll be the first of it's kind, but it is good to hear that DC are launching a new line of graphic novels, called Minx (wonder if they'll be 'minnie'?) aimed specifically at girls. A group of good and interesting creators and some nice ideas means that once again girls comics look better than boys. Don't think this would've been the case in the US as much (mainly romance titles there), but in the UK there was a quite a tradition of good girls comics.... that may be an exaggeration, but there's been enough of them. I've got a whole bunch of Jinty comics with some top stories in them and if it wasn't for the ridiculous price they go for on Ebay I'd be trying to get back issues of Misty (I really should pick up the fan produced Halloween special - esp. as Garen worked on it), a comic I remember borrowing off my cousin way back when.

Bugger

Bloomsbury returned my manuscript today. Disappointing getting a form rejection after the positive response from Orion. Unfair of me really, can't expect publishers to take time out to critique every manuscript they receive.
Few more publishers to try though before I let Simian rest and see if I can interest someone in something new.

Rolling up my sleeves

As mentioned in the comments on my previous post I've decided to dig through my old stuff in a effort to get working. I'm going to call this not wasting decent ideas rather than see it as running out out of new ones:)
First up is a 5-8 year novel that I never could come up with a name for. Reading through what I still have of it (lost the finished version, but I do have about 2/3's of it), it was my first go at prose and pretty bad ( hope I've improved!), but what really lets it down is a some terrible plot contrivances to move the story on. Not sure how I'm going to sort the plot out just yet, but it's good to have to do a bit of work on it instead of just cranking it out.
Plot is quite hard I think. When it comes to reading I like good prose and interesting characterization and could care less about plot.... until I started trying to write. Once you write a bit you realise that it's the plot that ties everything together (like a good rug!), I mean, you've got to give the characters something interesting to do and react to.
Over at Jeff Smith's blog there's sample art for the (not soon enough) upcoming Shazam, knowing I'll never be that good is a reason to keep trying harder!
Oh, and the Moomins comic collection is out adn I've bought it, so should EVERYONE!

Big Sigh

Back to work tomorrow, and I can quite honestly say that I do not want to go. Nobody likes going back to work after time off but I'm really struggling with the idea of leaving Olivia for over eight hours a day. Didn't think I'd find it this hard.
Slow going but I'm trying to get back into the (my own) work. The two biggest problems I face with writing and drawing is that I don't spend enough time doing it and I never send it off anywhere to try and get published. Best change that then.
It's going to be hard going but I'm going to try and knuckle down with the various projects I've got half finished barely started and not quite forgotten. There's also a couple of new things I'd like to do, I've not tried to do any picture books for years and I love them so I'm going to try very hard to come up with some ideas - the hardest part for me, picture book writers everywhere, I salute you!
The subtext here is that I'd much rather be working at home with my daughter than anywhere else without her:)

For Mr Glazebrook

Man this one took longer than it should've! I fiddled about far too much with the placing of each zombie to try and give them a decent outline but still look like a big jumble of DEATH!
Obviously this scene doesn't quite appear in Return of the Living Dead, but I'm gonna call artistic license if that's ok.

It had to happen

Quiet new born baby becomes actual baby and cries shocker! I guess Olivia couldn't stay quiet for too long. It's tough hearing your child cry and not always know what to do, feeding, holding and rocking and all the other tricks tends to work but quite often it's a short term solution. Checking up in books, websites and asking around it's nothing worrisome at all, just regular baby grizzliness.
Weirdly the crying is a lot less during the night (although fairly late), not that it helps as the evenings are draining enough.
There is something amazing about managing to calm down a crying baby though, it's a fantastic sense of achievement.

Sapphire and Steel

This one's for Danny, hope you like it fella.
Obviously it really needs some checkerboard/spiral/Steranko/Pop arty background, but I didn't fancy drawing that and I don't really have any artpackages.

What was I thinking?

Mix boredom, obsessiveness, bizarre sleeping hours and new beta blog account and you get me wading through my old blog posts. Which is weird, and scarily enlightening. Lot’s of posts about plans for things that haven’t happened, morose musing and not enough actual work.
Glad I got a lot of that out of my system:)
Found some interesting comics as I wasted valuable sleeping time, Zombee by Miles Gunter and Victor Santos sounds like fun; samurai, ninja, zombies? Yeah, I’m buying that.
I’ll also be buying Chickenhare. There’s preview pages here and the Bone influence shows pretty heavy, which is fine as it also has it’s own flavour.

Captain Kronos vampire Hunter

Welcome to anyone wondering here from the Forbidden Planet blog!
Thanks to a little help from Danny I've finally upgraded to beta which means I can tag all the various randomness.
Anyway, here's the skinny about the latest pic. Before Buffy, there was Kronos, and he was one seriously cool chap!
For those who don't know Kronos was a Hammer film and was written and directed by Brian 'Avengers' Clemens. It's one of the best Hammer films (which is saying something) and has some brilliant touches.
As I mentioned before I faffed about with the background, mainly out of guilt for the lacklustre Phibes background earlier. It's not the most detailed of bgs but I think it works at least.

Sulking..... not really:)

Ever since I started using sitemeter I've become obsessed with seeing who has been visiting... well, guessing, it doesn't say 'who'. Mostly it's the people who comment but I also get the odd visit from random searches, having mentioned that I enjoyed the Raconteers CD I seem to get visits for that and I get a fair few visits because of the Batgirl meme last year. What those hits have in common is that the visitors never look at anything else, fair enough about the CD but I get a little pet lip that the Batgirl visitors never look elsewhere, are they unimpressed? Dunno. Hope not.

Yaaaawn

Bit tough last night with Olivia being unsettled from the evening on. Cranky and hungry is not a good mix for a baby, they want to feed but are just too fed up to do it, so now we know.
We're both dog tired, with Rebecca obviously having to shoulder the worst of it, but at least Olivia's being a bit more cooperative today.
The latest issue of Neo magazine reviews Best New Manga and on the whole is pretty positive, with reservations mainly due to the 'is it manga' aspect. The first review on amazon is less that complementary and although very little is mentioned about individual strips I can't help feeling a little put out as it seems to be a petty and cursory reading of the comic at best and at worst is quite arrogant in it's assumptions. I never realised the 'is it manga?' thing would be a... 'thing'. Like Bush I guess it shows what I know. Shame about the uncharitableness shown to new creators too - even if not all are that new. Oh well, can't please everyone.
Bulldog: Empire artist Neill Cameron is writing and drawing his own comic, Thumpculture and it's shaping up to be top stuff indeed, Neill's a great artist and his writing's a lot of fun too.

Inevitable baby post

Good thing about sleeping babies is how still they get, perfect for drawing. The biro drawing was done when Olivia was a day old, the pencil one late last night when I was giving Rebecca a chance to catch up on some sleep. I'm still a bit rubbish with likenesses, luckily these are recognisably 'baby'!

Long post

(Edited to fix links.... hopefully)
Normal life is resumed, or gone forever depending how you look at it. Rebecca is finally out of hospital and last night was Olivia’s first in her new home, and therefore my first night of interrupted sleep - luckily Peter was right, having Olivia lying on my chest easily balanced out being woken.
Nonbaby stuff now.
Last Saturday was the Lancaster Comic Con and I managed to get an hour off work to have a look, which was a good move as although the con was unsurprisingly small it was perfectly formed. Catching up with Solar Wind creator Paul Scott was nice (even if he had forgotten me! And after I’d contributed to Solar Wind 2. Mind you that was 3 years ago so fair enough) and getting a stack of Solar Winds was an added bonus.
Talked to small press mogul Jay Eales about our contributions to Best New Manga and I picked up an issue of the Girly Comic, edited by his Partner Selina, and very good indeed, as well as a couple of issues of the top Violent!, including the last one I contributed to (for the excellent strip Flatworm)
A quick chat with Colin Mathieson of AccentUk might mean I’ll be doing a short strip for their next anthology, it may even be written by Jason Cobley, which would be great as it’s a long time since we’ve worked together. The ‘could’s’ are due to dwindling time on my part, but it’s a zombie anthology so frankly I’ll just have to make time!
I also picked up The Faceless from the very friendly Adrian Salmon, which I highly recommend you check it out (it’s available on amazon if you’re comicshopless) The artwork is beautiful and I love the story as it’s set in the 60’s, involves a secret society, monsters and the main character as well as being a two fisted monster fighter is also a super cool seducer of women and director of horror films for a studio that bares more than a passing resemblance to Hammer)
A few more nice chaps and comics rounded out my flying visit and then it was back to work. I hope that the con proves to be an annual event and that it grows from it’s very respectable beginnings.
Even with the big new happy responsibility I hope to get working on stuff. Instead of feeling like writing and drawing is even less likely than before I really feel like doing stuff. I hope to take a look at the various things I’d been writing and see if I can’t make sense of them. Drawing wise I’m not sure what I’ll be up to, some more spot illos when I can think of something and possibly a comic strip or two - I bumped into John Freeman of Down the Tubes yesterday, he was still feeling excited from the Lancaster con and was thinking about channelling that into something, which might give me something to aim for - I don’t necessarily produce my best work to deadline, but I do produce more!