Asturias & Avilés

Though I can't exactly boast a jet-set lifestyle, one advantage of being a comic artist is it's a very portable job; at the moment I've ported it to Asturias in the north of Spain, where I'm staying with my old mate Mark Buckingham before we go on to the comic festival in Avilés.

Left: at an outdoor café, Mark Buckingham draws layouts for Fables while I do thumbnails for Stickleback (foreground).

Sharing a studio with Bucky is a nostalgic experience; my first ever commercial work was helping him out with the inking on Hellblazer back in the late 80's, filling in backgrounds for him in his somewhat-chilly bedsit in Stoke (I still remember being both astonished and appalled by his ability to put in 20-hour days while suffering from a fearsome fluey cold).These days the surroundings are considerably more upmarket, and I'm bashing away at Stickleback for 2000AD on my laptop while Bucky pencils Fables for Vertigo. It's not precisely a holiday, but it is good to catch up with an old friend, and sharing a studio makes a pleasant change, especially as Bucky's latest work is gobsmackingly terrific; twenty years on the job and the talented swine is still improving.
We do also see daylight time to time; since we both had page layouts to do the other day, we took our sketchbooks down to the harbour and sat at an outdoor café to work. Life could certainly be worse :-)