Sequential City

I'm taking part in a very interesting exhibition at The Anise Gallery in Shad Thames from 6 February to 15 March.

It's called Sequential City and explores the expressive depiction of architecture in graphic novels and comics. 

I'll be showing prints of my weird cityscapes from Capital City and some of the original artwork that went into making the final pages. This means ink drawings, acrylic prints and watercolour washes and lots of tracing paper.

The Anise Gallery have attracted a very impressive bunch of artists, people who really push the envelope of comics art - namely Owen D Pomery, Alison Sampson, Hannah Berry, Tim Bird and Lando. I'm very pleased to be in their company.

The Anise Gallery is at 13a Shad Thames, London, SE1 2PU (just around the corner from the Design Museum) and there's a not so private view (all invited) on Thursday 5 February, 6 - 9 PM.

More details on the exhibition at http://www.anisegallery.co.uk/portfolio/sequential-city/

Drawing a Blank

I've drawn a comic about meditation for Nomos Journal. It's the first in a new column I'm writing/drawing for them called Drawing a Blank.

It depicts the experience of the beginner meditator – the pitfalls, pratfalls, and thoughts that drift through his head as he sits and does nothing much.

I'm trying to learn to meditate at the moment and I'm finding it an interesting but tricky business. The plan is to create a new comic strip for Nomos every few months, drawing on my meditation experiences and the thoughts that they provoke.

I've long been interested in meditation and buddhism so I'm going to try to use this comic column as a reason to get up off my arse (sit down on my arse?) and explore these areas. I'm by no means an expert on any of this, so we'll see what happens!

You can read the first comic strip in full at http://nomosjournal.org/columns/drawing-a-blank/

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!

Culture

I've started a new comic strip, Culture, once a week over on Tumblr.

It's an excuse to make silly jokes about the Arts, as seen thought the eyes (I'm not sure they actually have eyes) of two monocellular organisms in a petri dish in a lab.

It's also something of an exercise in minimalism, as a contrast to the time-consuming baroque of Hitsville UK. It's a bit like that John Lennon quote (that I can't be bothered to find properly) about having an idea at the beginning of the week and recording and releasing the song by the end of the week. Wham, bam, get it out there while it's still relevant.

I talked about Culture to Richard Bruton over on the Forbidden Planet International blog and you can read Culture itself here. This week it's on GODZILLA!

Hitsville UK from Great Beast comics

This is a belated post to announce that Hitsville UK has been relaunched by Great Beast Comics.

Appropriately we launched in the very musical surrounding of Manchester at the MCM Comic Con on 20 July, and you can now buy issue 1 as well as some classy Hitsville UK pop art prints from the Great Beast online shop. I'm really excited that for the first time you can buy an instantly download-able digital version of our comic.

You can also pick up Hitsville UK issue 1 from Gosh! Comics, Orbital Comics, Foyles books and Sister Ray Records in London, as well as OK Comics in Leeds and Gnash Comics in Devon, with more shops to follow.

(If you're a comic, record shop or indeed any shop who would like to stock Hitsville UK then please let me know.)

As some of you know we originally brought Hitsville UK out at the tail end of 2011, so it's taken us a bit of a while to get here. It's basically my fault for going off and doing an MA in Illustration after issue 1 and getting swamped by the workload. Dan and I are pleased as punch that we're getting to relaunch and continue the series with Great Beast. To those of you who have been stoically waiting for issue 2 to materialise (yes Alex, yes Camila) I promise promise promise that issue 2 will arrive in November in time for Leeds' Thought Bubble festival.

Why are we so excited to be with Great Beast?

Comics and graphic novels appear to be on the rise in blighty and beyond. Existing publishers and newer upstarts have released some great books at the artier, more literary end of the comics spectrum over the past few years. I think Great Beast could fill what has so far been a gap in the comics landscape (at least in the UK). GB's comics are intelligent, sophisticated, produced with great craft, but also crucially they are POP!

GB's founders, Adam Cadwell and Marc Ellerby have published their own comics under the imprint, notably Adam's vampire slacker comedy Blood Blokes and Marc's droll Chloe Noonan: Monster Hunter. They've also published collected editions of their autobiographical web comics The Everyday and Ellerbisms. I just finished Ellerbisms and am still reeling from the subtle but emotionally devastating storytelling contained therein!

Then there's Robert Ball's stunningly beautiful Winter's Knight. Im a bit angry about Winter's Knight. The artwork is so flipping amazing I don't actually think it should be allowed. It makes the rest of us look rubbish! Robert is teaming up with the equally talented Warwick Johnson-Cadwell on Dangeritis, which you can see taking hilarious form over on its Tumblr and which will be published in book form at Thought Bubble in November.

Just announced from Great Beast is Isabel Greenberg's Tall Tales and Outrageous Adventures, witty retellings of classic fairytales. Isabel won the Observer/Comica competition a few years ago and has a graphic novel coming out from Jonathan Cape soon. She also has a piece in the V&A's current exhibition Memory Palace, which I wasn't sure whether I would like but is BRILLIANT! (Go see it).

And then there's us... continuing the tale of Hitsville UK, the indy record company with the weirdest, coolest, freaks in pop music; the best (though possibly only) musical-pop-art-soap-opera in comic form.

Now published by Great Beast.

Which is why we're a bit chuffed.

Mud, football and Readers Digest

I just illustrated this entertaining piece for Readers Digest by James Brown about the perils of the football pitch in your late forties. I was commissioned by Martin Colyer, who was a pleasure to work with from start to finish.

This commission presented two problems: 1) the unusual shape, across two pages of text, 2) I don't know the first thing about football. However, the closest I ever got to an interest in the beautiful game was reading my brother's Roy of the Rovers comics when I was a kid, so I hit upon the idea of contrasting James' youthful footballing dreams with muddy, squelchy reality.

Thanks to Matt Dooley for the lend of the football comics book.

Below is my original sketch and how the final piece looked in the mag.

IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW THE SCORE...

...THEN LOOK AWAY NOW!
***If you are an artist working on this project who hasn't completed their entry yet then read no further.***

I have a piece in John Miers' mind-boggling Comica exhibition, Score and Script. It's on at The Centre for Recent Drawing in Highbury (down the road next to the Tube where cars emerge from and try to run you over), London until 15 December. More deets on location etc here http://www.c4rd.org.uk/C4RD/Current_Exhibition.html

30ish comics artists have responded to John's ingenious research project on the language of comics, all part of his PhD research. John drew his own one-page comic and then came up with two ways of abstracting it, 1) a minimal 'script' and 2) a terrifying 'score' that looked like this!

I agreed to interpret the score foe my entry! Each of the red boxes is an 'actor', not necessarily a sentient character but an object that in some way has an impact on the progress of the story. The blue lines show the centre of gravity or direction of movement of each 'actor'. 

I wrestled long and hard with this fiendish system...

...and eventually came up with the below. There are still some artists who are working on John's project , and as the whole point is for the results to be untempered by cross-contamination, we're not supposed to be projecting our artwork onto skyscrapers, but I hope he won't mind if I show it here.

Stoned!

Here's my entry for this year's Observer / Jonathan Cape / Comica Graphic Short Story Prize (and breathe!)

I wasn't enormously enamoured of the winner but the runner up by Banal Pig's Steven Tillotson is a corker. Read it here: http://www.banalpig.com/blog/

NUKE ROSS...

I will be selling copies of Hitsville UK at the New Cross Turn Left Comics and Art Garden Party this Sunday 24th July.

Come along and check out not only my stuff but the comics etc of an amazing selection of artists, including David O'Connell, Ellen Lindner,Gary Northfield, John Miers and Julia Scheele, who designed the cool logo above.

Things kick off at 1 PM, full details here.

HITSVILLE UK NEW ISSUE 1

So cause we like to make things confusing, we've done a new issue 1 of Hitsville UK. Last year's effort was a 12-page try-out, think of it as issue 0 like one of those baffling 90's comics. The new issue 1 is 36 pages of pop art madness, incorporating the 10 pages from last year's comic and a whole lot more.

Here's the cover...















...plus a few new pages...

We don't actually have all that many copies yet, and have to make sure we've got stock for the London Alt Press con in a couple of weeks, but if you fancy a copy send me a message and I'll put you on the list. It'll be £3.50 plus p&p to you fine people.

THOUGHT PUDDLE

Should be at Thought Bubble this week selling freshly printed Hitsville UK comics, but sadly I am not for there are no freshly printed Hitsville UK comics. What with computers self-destructing, moving house and the reduction of hours in the day to a measly 24, the birth of our full-colour, 36-page baby bastard has been somewhat delayed.

To prove I have done some work here's a sneak preview of two new pages, showing the Dreadnoughts going about the daily grind, and then moonstomping it all out on stage.

The finished article will be with you soon. Tell your friends and watch this space!

PINK NINJAS!

I've just done a picture for Martin Eden's JAPANDEX project (detail left).

Martin's the author of the comic Spandex, about a team of gay superheroes based in (obviously) Brighton. It's great, witty, poptastic stuff and you should really buy both copies available so far.

Because issue 2 was set in Japan, Martin has been running JAPANDEX, giving other comics artists and illustrators the chance to do Spandex-inspired pictures riffing off icons of Japanese and Eastern culture. Mine shows the team battling issue 2's Pink Ninjas, with a respectful tipping of the hat to the much copied, never beaten master, Hokusai.

You can see the complete picture here

Thanks Martin!

RETAIL THERAPY

I've got a shop! I've got a shop! Roody schoody boody shop shop shop!

Click HERE to check it out.

Oh go on, I'm skint. 

My liver and I had a blast at the Bristol Comics Con at the weekend, where Hitsville went down well amongst the creators whose baffled hands we forced it into. Big props to the legendary Shaky Kane who insisted on paying us the three quid for our efforts.

Thanks to the Underfire crew who allowed me to loiter on their stall. Here's a picture of some of them, including my collaborator Dan. Note copies of Hitsville UK bottom right.

HITSVILLE UK 1 IS HERE!

Fresh from the printer, get 'em while they're hot. Twelve pages of full-colour pop art depravity by me and the outrageously talented Dan Cox. £3 plus p&p to you, Sir or Madam.  Drop me a line if you want one...

MORE COMPETITIONS THAT I DIDN'T WIN

First two pics are for Nobrow's Flickr competition, People I have never met and Conversations I have never had. I have never met this Mayan God-King and this is the conversation that I have never had with him. Lots more brilliant entries (and winners) to be found on the Flickr page here

Next is my entry to Little White Lies' competition to adapt your favourite film into a six-panel comic strip. I went for the Coen bros' brilliant Barton Fink

HITSVILLE UK

Sneak preview of my new comic Hitsville UK, co-authored with the very talented Dan Cox. This is the first inked page of our five-page intro story. More to follow...

MANAGEMENT TODAY

Just had this full-page comics-tastic piece in Management Today, illustrating an article on emotionally intelligent strategy. Unintentionally I've made the woman in green look quite like my mum when she was younger. Hi Mum!