THOUGHT BUBBLE 2014

I'll be at Thought Bubble comics festival this weekend in Leeds, Saturday 15th to Sunday 16th November .

Dan and I will be on table 62 in the New Dock Hall, along side our fellow Great Beasts Adam Cadwell, Marc Ellerby, Rachael Smith and John Cei Douglas. Here's where we are on the map. Rest assured that we will be much happier to see you than Gwillum looks here.

We'll have copies of Hitsville UK 3 hot off the press as well as copies of 1 & 2.

We'll also have A3 and A4 Hitsville prints and I'll be selling my AOI-award winning graphic poem  Capital City.

Come and say hi if you're about!

COMICA COMIKET

I'm dead chuffed that Capital City features in the book of Comics Unmasked, the current exhibition at The British Library.

The exhibition finishes this weekend, and on Saturday 16 August I'll be taking part in the Comica Comiket, from 10.30 until 4.30 in the public foyer of the British Library itself.

It's a great chance to meet comics creators and buy comics and prints from the artists themselves. I'll be selling and signing Hitsville UK comics and prints as well as copies of Capital City.

Full details on the event here: http://www.comicafestival.com/index.php/comiket/

AOI Illustration Awards

I'm currently living in a small igloo made of half-drawn comics pages, but I thought I would crawl out from under the Bristol board for a few minutes to write about the AOI Illustration Awards.

I won the New Talent (student and recent graduates) prize for the Editorial section with two pieces from my MA project Capital City. Here's an excellently composed picture by Sally Kent to prove it.

Tuesday night was the awards night so Sally and I went along to Somerset House to hobnob with other illustration types and I picked up my certificate from John O'Reilly, editor of Varoom magazine.

We had a great time and met some lovely people, including Edd Baldry, who won the Professional prize in the same section as me, Anna Cattermole, who won the Professional prize in the Self-Initiated section for her beautifully observed drawings of boat building, and judge, cartoonist, illustrator, author and new dad Stephen Collins.

It was all a bit of an enjoyable blur and as ever with private views I was too busy talking to people to properly take in all the art. My two pictures are in the first room, sharing wall space with Anna's afore-mentioned boat pictures and some striking digital collages illustrating The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat by the sartorially impressive Nate Kitch (he's the one who loos like Jarvis impersonating Elvis Costello in the picture below). I only got a chance to have a quick whiz round beyond our room, but I saw enough to tell that it's a well put together exhibition in a beautiful space, and (as you'd hope) there's a fascinating variety of approaches to contemporary illustration on display.

We're going back to have another look at the weekend and I'm really looking forward to it. Below is a picture of all the winners taken by Sara Thomas. As ever, I appear to be arseing about!

More info on the AOI Awards to be found here and here.

Right, I'm off to draw comics again. The long awaited Hitsville UK 2 is on its way!

AOI Awards

I'm delighted to report that I've won an AOI Illustration award!

I won the New Talent Award in the Editorial and Social Comment section for these two pages from my MA project Capital City, a graphic poem about the City and the financial crisis.

Here's what the judges had to say about my work: "We really liked the sense of narrative and social comment in this work. The words are written by the illustrator and so the text and image work together rather than illustration responding to a text. It is a very impressive piece of work, the spreads are stunning. It has real impact and has a lot of atmosphere. "

I'm very excited about being part of the exhibition at Somerset House 2-27 October, and I believe there will be an awards ceremony shindig, for which I may buy a new shirt.

You can read more about the AOI Illustration Awards here http://www.aoiimages.com

Strike!

I have a couple of pages in the Spring edition of the brilliantly titled STRIKE! magazine.

These are exerpts from my MA project Capital City, a phantasmagorical take on the City and the financial crisis.

I'm dead keen on STRIKE! This is only their second issue but it's a compelling publication so far. It wears its lefty politics on its sleeve but it's not po-faced about it and it chucks interesting, provocative ideas about rather than preach a party line. It's also wittily and beautifully designed and has attracted an impressive collection of writers and artists so far, including Ralph Steadman, Mark Fisher, Alain de Botton and Stanley Donwood as well as less famous names, myself included.

The Spring edition includes articles and polemics on Blair and Iraq, Indian cotton farming, the Occupy movement and anarchist economics, all accompanied by brilliant illustrations, including this terrifying Tony Blair by Edgarr.

I'm still getting to grips with a lot of the stuff in this issue and this is what I really like about STRIKE! For only a quid an issue you get a hell of a lot of food for thought for your buck.

You can see a list of stockists or order issues 1 & 2 from the STRIKE! website http://www.strikemag.org and find them on Facebook here

10 minutes with...

...Moi?

I spoke to Chatham House's current affairs magazine The World Today about my graphic poem Capital City. See below for a (hopefully legible) scan.

Thanks to Agnes Frimston for being interested, asking great questions and making the piece look so nice.

You can buy Capital City at my online shop.

New Statesman

Capital City has been featured on The New Statesman website.

http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2012/10/beautiful-comic-illustrates-ugliness-capitalism

This basically makes me the George Orwell of illustration, right?

Capital City

Capital City was my big project that I made for my Illustration MA at Camberwell. I never seem to be able to leave William Blake alone and this was inspired in particular by his 'Prophetic Books'. In the same way as Blake explored the big issues of his day, eg the American Revolution, I decided to try to tackle the big, ugly mess of our current economic cock-up in a phantasmagorical, pseudo-mythological narrative. This involved reading and trying to understand some books on economics, writing poetry (bring me my flouncy blouse) and figuring out a new aesthetic, less indebted to my previous comicsy-style and more rooted in messy paint, pastels and ink.

I'd like to do a much longer version of Capital City in which I could get to grips with the central themes in greater detail, but at the moment, appropriately, I am skint, so I'm hoping that a broadminded publisher might come to my aid.

I've decided to put up the current twenty-page version on issuu here and below are some work-in-progress shots that give you an idea of the techniques behind the artwork.

You can buy a print copy of Capital City over at my shop.

(Weirdly, I actually know the person pictured in the newspaper here).

Ink and tea are my two favourite liquids.

Me and my print at our final exhibition at Camberwell.

It lives!

I have created a monster, and here it is, on the floor of my living room.

This is my MA project, Capital City, a graphic poem about The City and the financial crisis. It's even more fun than it sounds.

If you want to see more of this kind of madness then come along to our MA Illustration final exhibition at Camberwell College of Arts from Thursday 6th September to Thursday 13th September. Here's the invite and our group website at http://www.camberwellillustration.co.uk/