D'Blog of 'Israeli

Happy New Year!

2012-01-04T12:00:00.000Z

The Lowlife "Hokusai" Cover for 2000AD Prog 1752
Dirty Frank © 2012 Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Dirty Frank/Lowlife created by Rob Williams and Henry Flint.

I was delighted to discover that the Dirty Frank "Hokusai" cover for 2000AD Prog 1752 has won Cover of the Year 2011 on the 2000AD Covers Uncovered blog. Thanks to everyone from Covers Uncovered, ECBT2000AD and the 2000AD messageboards who voted. It's been a corking year for 2000AD, so competition was stiff, and I'm proud to have placed in a field that included Greg Staples, Cliff Robertson and Henry Flint (no less than 3 times!)

Thanks where thanks are due: Tharg-in-Residence Matt Smith came up with the idea of basing a cover on a Hokusai print, and also approved what is a very radical take on Dirty Frank. 2000AD design stalwart Simon Parr also deserves thanks for his ever-sensitive design work. Thanks, gentlemen.

Finally, and at the risk of turning into Richard Attenborough, thanks to Pete Wells of 2000AD Covers Uncovered for his ongoing work showing the time and effort that goes into the cover art for the Galaxy's Greatest every week.

Lowlife The Deal Part Eight: My Hand Nearly Dropped Off

2011-10-28T13:59:00.004+01:00

Lowlife: The Deal part eight pages three and four. A flashback scene rendered with lots of hatching as a tribute to the works of Carlos Ezquerra and Henry Flint.

Lowlife created by Rob Williams and Henry Flint.

Pages three and four of the current Lowlife episode gave me a new appreciation for my fellow 2000AD art droids. Although I like to pack loads of detail into my pages, I've always used a relatively simplified art style that made drawing all those details fairly quick and easy (even the seemingly-elaborate faux "paint 'n collage" technique of Stickleback is a kind of sleight-of-hand in terms of effort put in for detail on the page.)

But for this particular flashback sequence, I thought it would be nice to borrow a trick from 2000AD titan Carlos Ezquerra, who used to drop out the solid blacks in favour of blocks of hatching to indicate a flashback sequence:

A flashback scene by Carlos Ezquerra from Judge Dredd: The Apocalypse War.
Note the use of hatching to replace solid blacks.
Judge Dredd © 2011 Rebellion Developments/2000AD.
Judge Dredd created by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra.

I'd not really been intending it, but with some of the darker areas (such as Frank's coat on page three panel four) I ended up using a sort of denser scribble that is closer to what Henry Flint was doing in his early Lowlife work:

Henry Flint draws Big Frank's first appearance in Lowlife: Paranoia.

Lowlife created by Rob Williams and Henry Flint.

I've got to say, it's the first time I've ever done a page, looked at the result, been really pleased , and straightaway said, "Never again!" Why? Because my bloody hand nearly dropped off doing all that hatching, that's why. It took ages. Full kudos to Messrs. Ezquerra and Flint; guys, you are hardcore and I but a mere lightweight. I don't know how you did it, you must have wrist muscles like a bull's neck.

Respect due.

Lowlife: The Deal Parts Four to Six - If You Knew Kaiju Like I Knew Kaiju

2011-10-14T17:51:00.000+01:00

Some crave superbly crafted stories, for others it's wonderful acting or beautiful cinematography. But when I sit down for a bit of cinematic entertainment what I'm really looking for is two Japanese stuntmen bashing into each other at random while a load of fireworks go off around them. Yes, I'm a devotee of Kaiju, Japanese rubber-suit monsters, and the last few episodes of Lowlife: The Deal have given me the chance to scratch that particular itch in public.

Frank's avatar, based loosely on Hedorah, the Smog Monster (from Godzilla vs the Smog Monster, Toho studios 1971). I described this creature to Rob Williams as "a giant ambulatory turd," which seemed a perfect alter ego for Dirty Frank. The little doodles top left are me working out his rough body shape.

The two monsters from the initial sparring session in part three. The one on the left is based on regular Godzilla bit-part player Anguiris (a name that derives from the Japanese difficulty with saying Ankyllosaurus, first appearance Godzilla Raids Again, Toho 1955)). The one on the right is half-Godzilla, half Spinosaurus Egypticus (the crocodilian head), half jigsaw set (in the strip, I extended the jigsaw pieces all over the body too, making me glad I only had to draw him for one episode).

This guy is based on non-Toho star player Gamera the giant turtle (first appearance Gamera The Giant Monster, Daiei 1965, most notable appearances in three revival films Gamera Guardian of the Universe, Gamera II: Attack of Legion, Gamera III: Revenge of Iris, Daiei 1995-1999) . His burning claws are a kaiju-nerd reference to the "flame hand" used by Gamera to kill the monster Iris at the end of Gamera III: Revenge of Iris (Daiei, 1999). But why the little glasses, moustache, white loincloth and (in the finished version) spinning wheel symbol on his chest? Because he's Ghandi'd Gamera, that's why.

No giant monster slug-fest would be complete without the prettiest monster of them all - giant three-headed golden dragon King Ghidorah (First appearance Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah, Toho 1964, most notable appearances Invasion of the Astro Monster, Toho 1965, Destroy All Monsters, Toho 1968, Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah, Toho 1991, Godzilla: Final Wars, Toho 2004). KG is a difficult one to pastiche because his profile (three heads, bat wings, no front legs) is so distinctive. My eventual solution was to turn him into a Chinese dragon - which then gave me the idea of him using the 'pearl' (Chinese dragons are traditionally shown chasing a pearl) as an emitter for his death-ray.

This guy appears briefly in the background of a couple of panels in episode 6 (he's really just there to make up the numbers). Why a robot dinosaur with a cup of coffee for a head? Because he's Mochagodzilla, naturally (see Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla, Toho 1974).

This final one isn't from Lowlife at all - it's an old sketch from 2001 showing my long standing love of giant monster puns. Behold - Rodin the flying monster!

Lowlife: The Deal Part Three: After Hokusai

2011-09-20T14:51:00.003+01:00

Cover to 2000AD Prog 1752, based on a print by Hokusai
© 2011 Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Dirty Frank Created by Rob Williams and Henry Flint

I didn't have that much so say about this week's episode of Lowlife: The Deal, but, luckily, Prog 1752 is the one that gets my Hokusai-derived Dirty Frank cover, which has been getting a lot of nice feedback, so I'll blat on about that instead.

Tharg-in-Residience Matt Smith sent me a very loose brief - a shot of Dirty Frank "done in a Japanese, Hokusai-style." Luckily, as a fan of the graphic works of Japanese print-master Katsushika Hokusai, I already had plenty of reference for his work to hand, so I set about searching for compositions with figures who were bowing, bending or otherwise inclining - ones that could easily be adapted to make a slump-postured Dirty Frank.

"Musahshi Goro Sadayo Dies in Battle at the Age of Fifteen" (right)
was the source for the figure of Dirty Frank.
From the Illustrated Book of Heroes of China and Japan in the Style of Katsushika.

To give you an idea of what I was looking for, here's the source material for the final cover, from the Illustrated Book of Heroes of China and Japan in the Style of Katsushika. I realized that the dying Samurai on the right-hand page could be easily turned into Dirty Frank striding along holding a staff.

I came up with three main possibilities, which I worked up as roughs on a 2000AD cover grid:

Three cover roughs - in the end, I only submitted the centre one.

The first is Dirty Frank and a stylized Aimee Nixon (the symbol of Frank's quest in Japan). The second is Frank on his travels, striding towards Hondo-Cit . The third is a Warrior Frank looking out over the city.

After thinking on it a while, I decided the second image was so much stronger than the others that I'd just submit that one, keeping the others in reserve. Luckily Tharg-in-Residence Matt Smith liked it, so away we went.

I wanted the backgrounds to have the correct flavour, so I borrowed the countryside portion of the background from this print, Aoigaoka Waterfall at Edo from A Tour of Japanese Waterfalls. I flipped the image left-for right to fit the composition, omitting the figures to focus attention on Dirty Frank.

There being no Hokusai prints of Hondo-Cit skyscrapers, I just made that bit up, using a sort of rough orthographic projection to match the not-quite-but-nearly perspective that Hokusai employed in his drawings.

A close-up of the lines in Dirty Frank's
coat, showing the lines created by
Manga Studio's brush tool.

The Samurai I was using for reference was wearing armour, and I wanted a "Hokusai-i-fied" version of Frank's normal outfit, so I copied the folds in the cloth from other Hokusai prints. I also noticed that Hokusai was using a brush for his cloth folds - the lines are more irregular that the ones on, say faces and hands, which I'm guessing are drawn with a bamboo pen - luckily I was drawing this in Manga Studio, a Japanese program which has analogues for the sort of Sumi-E brushes you'd need to get this effect. I can't say I controlled the lines all that well (see left), but it helped to give verisimilitude* to the drawing.
*I've always wanted to say that, "give verisimilitude."

The final stage was to export the drawing to Photoshop for colouring. Since I was imitating the effect of woodblock printing, I used flat colour with no modelling or shading, just a couple of gradients (an effect Hokusai produced by mixing inks on the printing blocks). I opened the file in Corel Painter and "mussed up" the gradients a little using a blender brush to stop them looking too mechanical.

Hokusai printed his work in lovely bright colours, which have subtly faded over time. To get the character of the colouring right, I sampled most of the key colours from scans of Hokusai's prints, filling in with a few colours of my own as needed. The final stage was to add a subtle texture over the whole image - appropriately enough, one I made myself from a photo of the weathered paint on the back door of our local Chinese grocers. This gave the impression of paper texture and helped to break up the too-perfect flat Photoshop colouring a little.

So, after all that effort, do you have anything more than a big cold swipe? Well, I made sure to sign the cover "After Hokusai," the standard artist's way of crediting the person who's work is being quoted (thanks to the guys at 2000AD for including this in the cover credit). For those who already know Hokusai's work, it'll hopefully be an amusing pastiche, a fun way of summing up the themes of this series of Lowlife. For those who haven't heard of Hokusai before, hopefully it'll be a way of spreading the word; and if you'd like to know more, his Wikipedia page and this Google search aren't a bad place to start.

Lowlife: The Deal Part 2: Details, Details

2011-09-16T20:01:00.001+01:00

My version of Hondo Cit from Lowlife: The Deal Part Two.
Lowlife/Hondo Cit © 2011 Rebellion/2000AD
Hondo City Created by Robbie Morrisson and Frank Quitely
Lowlife created by Rob Williams and Henry Flint

No workee
No eatee
No pay mortgage
Sleep on streetee

-The Freelancer’s Lament

So, the problem with making comics - one of the many problems with making comics - is time.

I spent most of 2010 living in Greece, which is a lovely place, friendly people, terrific climate, but a bastion of the Protestant Work Ethic it is not. Where the Spanish are famous for saying “Mañana,” (wait till tomorrow), the Greeks say “Theftera,” (wait till Monday). And while I find it hard to decry a philosophy that always gives you the weekend off, it did make it hard to concentrate on the distant Anglo-Saxon notion of deadlines, especially when there were so many nice cafés to try within a one-mile radius of our apartment. At the time I was working on Lowlife: Hostile Takeover, which I’d been told needed to be done by October 2010, with no intervening deadlines set. A blissful state of affairs, I thought at the time, except it turns out I need the Fortnightly Fear to keep me motivated.

Coming back to the UK in August last year to find myself tight on time and low on funds, I settled down and started dragging myself back onto the fortnightly schedule usually allowed for 2000AD episodes. All went pretty well until the start of December, when I was meant to start work on SVK. A whole set of unfortunate circumstances - schedule clashes, Warren being unwell, me being unwell - plagued production, and a deadline that had been pencilled in for mid-February ended up being pushed back till early April.* Aside from the loss of income that involved, I also received my biggest-ever tax demand, based on the year I’d received a big wodge of royalties for the Absolute Sandman: Kindly Ones.

*Thus causing series 4 of Stickleback to be delayed, if you were wondering where that had gone.

So, when I started Lowlife: The Deal, I was climbing back once again onto the episode-a-fortnight wagon, and financially running on empty, so I pretty much just had to get down to it. The result is that the first few episodes of Lowlife: The Deal were done in, not exactly a rush, but at the limit of my recovering stamina. And under those circumstances, something has to give.

What usually goes first is not drawing quality, but thinking time; that extra half-day to mull on an idea, find the best angle on it, the spare hour in the schedule to re-draw a panel or add some neat extra detail you’ve just thought of. When I look at Part Two of Lowlife: The Deal, that’s what I see; the missed opportunities.

Mick McMahon's double-page splash panel of Texas City from Judge Dredd: The Judge Child
Judge Dredd © 2011 Rebellion/2000AD
Judge Dredd created by John Wagner and Carlos Sanchez Ezquerra

Take that big splash panel of Hondo-Cit on page two; in a lot of ways I’m pretty pleased with it. I wanted to come up with a singular vision of Hondo; my solution was to swipe an idea from Mick McMahon’s* classic double-page spread of Texas City from the Judge Child saga; incorporate symbols of the culture into the architecture. So my Hondo-Cit has buildings in the shape of Samurai warriors, Geisha girls and Samurai swords; a buddhist temple and pagoda-shaped towers. I also recycled my unused Christmas-tree style VTOL airport design from Lowlife: Hostile Takeover. I think the drawing does a fairly good job of getting across the scale of the city, and the fact that it’s not Mega-City One. Where it falls down a bit is on what I call significant detail.

*To be fair, McMahon drew it, but I don't know if he or writer John Wagner came up with the idea.

A densely-detailed cityscape from Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira
© 1988 Katsuhiro Otomo/Akira Committee

What’s the difference between significant and non-significant detail? The easy way to explain is by showing. Take a look at this first panel, from Akira by Katsuhiro Otomo. It’s a beautiful piece of work, densely packed with detail, but the detail is all impersonal; buildings, windows, no people, no signage. Manga is designed to be read quickly; the idea is to give you a strong impression of dense urban clutter and the on to the next panel. This detail isn't intended to slow down the eye or be studied in itself - therefore it’s non-significant.

From Geof Darrow's Comics and Stories
© 1986 Aedena & Geof Darrow

Now take a look at this panel from Comics and Stories by Geof Darrow; although Darrow is an American, this book comes from the Franco-Belgian storytelling tradition, one in which the stories are generally much shorter (and/or slighter) than in Manga, but the pace of reading is meant to be slower. Here the detail is on a human scale, more personal, with lots of figures, each one an individual and remarkable character with their own actions going on, legible posters on the wall, and in-jokes such as the train with the front-end of a 1950's American automobile. Detail is used to make the eye linger, with rewards for those readers who return for a second look. This is significant detail.

I did manage a bit of significant detail on that Hondo-Cit splash; there’s a little tribute to Osamu Tezuka’s Tetsuwan Atomu (Astroboy) in the advertising figure atop the building bottom left, and down at the bottom panel you can see a Godzilla-style monster chained to a truck on the highway. But I didn’t have time to go through my Manga collection and collect cool buildings from the worlds of Katsuhiro Otomo and Masamune Shirow to drop into the backgrounds. I’m still kicking myself for not having the Phoenix from Science Ninja Team Gatchaman/Battle of the Planets or Battleship Yamamoto landing at the airport. And most of all, I lacked the time to contact any of my Japanese-speaking friends to supply joke text for the Hondo-Cit signage. As it is, all the Japanese text in the first five episodes is taken from Basho’s famous Haiku The Frog:

An ancient pond
A frog jumps in
The sound of water

But I didn’t come up with that particular wheeze till after I’d finished the page.

And that’s the nature of the beast, as a comic artist; do the page then let it go, there’ll be another one along in a minute. Not that I wouldn’t backtrack to fix a major error (like the time I forgot my main character had lost an arm), but overall? Let it go. Living with a certain level of disappointment comes with the job; I think of the great comic artists who’ve influenced me, and it’s true for them, just as much. I once read an interview where Mike McMahon dismissed his classic Judge Dredd stories as cluttered and difficult to read; in another, Euro-Comics titan Jean “Mœbius” Giraud could find nothing better to say about his strip-that-literally-changed-my-life Les Yeux du Chat than “there was some good architecture in it, I suppose.” I have heard stories of the great John M Burns sorting through piles of his gold-standard comics pages, despairing of finding anything good enough to put in his portfolio.

Baggage retrieval at Hondo-Cit
Airport: I was quite pleased
with this panel.

If you’re going to make a living in commercial art, the ability to draw is just part of the story. If you’re to have any sort of peace of mind in the world of regular deadlines, you have to have the confidence to believe that the odd failure is part of the mix and won’t matter in the end (and sometimes the thing you’re embarrassed about is someone else’s favourite bit). There’s no relationship between actual talent and the level of self-belief; if anything, the better an artist, the more likely they are to be tortured by self-doubt. This explains two phenomena common in the world of comics; the brilliant artist who only churns out an issue once every three months, and the apparently dreadful artist who inexplicably gets tons of work - the latter because he can always hit his deadlines. To all brilliant guys who are held back by self doubt, I can only say how thankful I am; I’d never have established a career in comics if you’d been able to churn it out.

If this is all starting to sound a bit grim, I’d like to end on a positive note; when I was looking back over episode two for this blog there were a few pleasant surprises; the facial expressions on page one, the scribbly flashback effect on pages three and four (which worked better in print than on screen) and the robotic luggage carousel (and porter robots) on page three. It’s just very difficult to judge your own work per se, more so when you’re still so close to it.

Ask me in a couple of years, I’ll probably give you a different opinion.

See you in the funny pages.

Lowlife: The Deal Part One - So What’s The Deal with Dirty Frank?

2011-09-03T17:34:00.001+01:00

Dirty Frank in Uniform in part one of Lowlife: The Deal
Dirty Frank/Judge uniforms © 2011 Rebellion/2000AD
Judge uniforms created by Carlos Sanchez Ezquerra
Dirty Frank Created by Rob Williams and Henry Flint

I’ll never be rich and here’s why; the big money in comics lies in drawing handsome muscular guys and cute muscular girls in Lycra, and that just nain’t my strong point, not nohow. Sure, I’ve drawn characters like Judge Dredd and Batman, but with questionable success; where I’m really at home is at the less glamorous and more outlandish end of the character spectrum. Think Lazarus Churchyard (depressed stinking plastic junkie), think Lament from Leviathan (sagging middle-aged bloke with drink problem), think Stickleback (venomous 70-year-old with atypical spine placement choices).

Think Dirty Frank.

Dirty Frank looking
surprisingly restrained
(From Lowlife: Hostile Takeover)

I was lucky to be offered the chance to draw Frank at a pivotal point in his career. In his previous solo appearances (drawn by the estimable Simon Coleby) he’d mostly been a bit of comic relief, a way of doing Lowlife as a palate-cleanser from the seediness and corruption of the Aimee Nixon stories. But my first series, Lowlife: Creation, delved into Frank’s back story, turning him from a lovable but rather stinky cartoon character into a more rounded personality, a man whose flights of madness sprang from a deep past trauma. As the tone darkened further in Lowlife: Hostile Takeover, I found myself working harder and harder to capture the different sides of a character who was a babbling street-bum one minute and a steely-hearted Mega-City Judge the next.

One effect of drawing this back story was that it subtly changed the way I drew the present-day Dirty Frank. My concept sketches for Frank were based very closely on Simon Coleby’s version, and my first episode reflects this; but as I thought more about the young, handsome Judge Frank we see in the flashbacks, the more I toned down the caricature elements; my Frank ends up quite good-looking under all that hair and grot.

Dirty Frank looking
unsurprisingly unrestrained
(From Lowlife: Hostile Takeover)

With each new series I undertake, I try to find some area of my work to change, improve, or approach differently. This is partly for my own sanity (I’ve been drawing comics more-or-less six days a week for the past ten years, so I need some way of ringing the changes every now and again) but also as a bulwark against staleness, which creeps in unnoticed if you sink too deeply into comfortable habits. In the case of Lowlife: Creation, I made some radical changes to the way I constructed my figures at the preliminary drawing stage. This was part of a process that had started with me bringing the characters more to the fore in the first series of Stickleback.

By happy coincidence, this change to my basic drawing made it much easier for me to give the characters’ body language a greater range and subtlety. Put simply: their “acting” improved. When Rob Williams came back to me to do Lowlife: Hostile Takeover, I assumed it was for my big-scale portrayals of the city; I was happily shocked when he said what he most valued was the degree of expression I could get into the characters. From then on, I really started concentrating on character “performance” (years ago, when I was a tiny wannabee artist-thing, Gary Leach once told me that a comic artist is the director, cameraman and entire cast of a movie all rolled into one; I’ve thought of drawing character expression as “acting” ever since). I think Hostile Takeover contains some of my best “acting” to date.

This new series provides new challenges. We start with Frank back in uniform - cleaned up, hair trimmed, stooped straightened to the best of his ability; wild behaviour reined in, so no extreme expressions. Finding a way to hold on to the essential “Frank-ness” with most of his props gone made this one a fascinating episode to draw. I don’t suppose it’s too much of a spoiler to say we’ll soon be dirtying Frank up again - though the new Frank won’t quite look the same as the old one…

Frank's Long Walk parade is supervised by Judge Lola, from the
Judge Dredd time traveller stories I did with Ian Edginton.
Lowlife/Judge uniforms/Judge Lola © 2011 Rebellion/2000AD
Judge uniforms created by Carlos Sanchez Ezquerra
Lowlife created by Rob Williams and Henry Flint
Judge Lola created by Ian Edginton & Me

2011-01-18T11:00:00.002Z

The cover to Timularo Edtion 45 for Page 45 comic shop, Nottingham

Following the ripping success of last month's signed and sketched Page 45 Special Edition of Timularo, those fine folk at the Page 45 comic shop in Nottingham have come back for more with Timularo Edition 45, a limited run of 45 copies, each signed and sketched-in with a special cover (above) and additional interior plate (left) to frame the sketch.

This edition is strictly limited and available on from Page 45 in Nottingham, and also available through their website at page45.com. Don't hang about, though - the first edition sold out within one minute of going on sale!

Leviathan TPB Announced!

2010-12-06T23:02:00.000Z

Rebellion have announced the new edition of Leviathan will be available from Thursday 9th December - this 2nd edition will be a trade paperback, formatted to match the rest of the Rebellion TPB line.

Ads in 2000AD are pointing readers at Tharg's Future Shop, though it isn't listed on the site as of today (6th Dec); you can also pre-order from Amazon.co.uk, though they say they won't have stock till 14th December.

Leviathan © 2010 Rebellion Developments/2000AD.
Leviathan created by Ian Edginton & Me.

Word's Getting About!

2010-11-26T14:00:00.000Z

Thanks to everyone for retweeting and generally passing on the word about the Timulo collection.

From Jim Campbell, there's a kind piece of (in his own words) "bloggery-pluggery" at Jim Campbell: Man of Letters.

Thanks also to Joe Gordon at the Forbidden Planet blog for his extensive post with page samples.

Cheers guys!

2010-11-26T11:46:00.000Z

Cover to 2000AD Prog 1713 - for a Dredd story written by Brendan McCarthy
Judge Dredd © 2010 Rebellion Development/2000AD
Judge Dredd created by John Wagner & Carlos Ezquerra
Colour scheme for this image based on one devised by Brendan McCarthy

There'll be some scarred retinas amongst the Squaxx this week - this is my cover for Prog 1713, based on Brendan McCarthy's amazing psychedelic Dredd story that's running at the moment. Brendan's a bit of a hero of mine, so doing something that would live up to his work was a real challenge. Matching his positively electric colour palette took quite a bit of time and thought. I haven't seen the finished article in print yet, and I'm still a bit nervous about whether it'll turn out alright.

If you're interested in seeing how this cover was put together, there's a full step-by-step demo on Pete Wells' excellent 2000AD Covers Uncovered.

Timulo is Go!

2010-11-25T11:12:00.001Z

Cover to Timularo: The Collected Timulo Strips from Deadline Magazine
Copyright © 1984-2010 Me.

As of this morning, Timularo (The Collected Timulo) is available to buy on Lulu.com. For more info, check out "D'Books of 'Israeli," which gives info on all the stuff I'm putting out myself (up there on the right, below the header, see?).
Also, preview pages from Timularo in this post (scroll down a bit).

(These reprints have led a number of people to ask the old question, "Does Molly Eyre really exist?" Well, I'd not seen her for a while, so I rang her up today, asked the question straight out, and sure enough, she confirmed that she doesn't exist. Hope that clears it up.)

Thought Bubble 2010

2010-11-21T23:12:00.001Z

Back from yesterday's Thought Bubble convention in Leeds, lots of sketches done, lots of copies of Timularo sold (thanks to Dave for being my first customer!). Lisa and her team were a model of great organization, Saville Hall remained startlingly temperate and the day went as smooooth as silk.

To everyone who came to get a signature or a sketch, it was a pleasure guys, and thanks for queuing so patiently.

Click the pic to see the set on Flickr.

(I asked permission to Blog these photos, but if you'd rather your picture was taken down, just let me know and I'll remove it.

Apologies to Dave (same one!) for not getting your sketch done all day, to John and Leah for not getting to chat, and to the three guys I only managed quick scribbles for right at the end. But thanks to Lee Gallagher for being such a cheery neighbour, and for all the doughnuts!

Thought Bubble Art

2010-11-19T01:07:00.001Z

Andy Diggle's and my strip for the Thought Bubble auction this Saturday. Sorry for the yawnies - it was after midnight by the time I got it done.

Alongside my first-ever collaboration with Ian Edginton, God's Little Acre*, the joint-biggest comic artwork I've ever produced, and definitely the largest in colour. Also, the first comic I've drawn in years without the aid of a page grid!

*Reprinted in Kingdom of the Wicked.

D'Freebies of 'Israeli

2010-11-18T00:42:00.001Z

Due to changes in the Me.com services, D'Freebies of 'Israeli download page is no longer functioning. Setting this back up will take a little time and thought as Me.com won't let me make another download page - I can set up download links to individual files, but I'll have to put them together manually and with the preparations for Thought Bubble I'm just out of time right now.

More recent individual downloads - such as my 2000AD page grid for Manga Studio - aren't affected as they were made post the changes to the service.

Blasts from the Past

2010-11-16T11:00:00.002Z

Left: Timularo (The Collected Timulo)
Right: Odds and Sods (For Comics Bods)

To celebrate my 21st anniversary as a professional comic artist, I'm releasing two collections of material from my archives for sale from Lulu.com:

Odds and Sods (For Comics Bods) is a sixty-four page collection of little-seen and out-of the way pieces - private commissions, convention pieces, illustrations, test pieces, and 17.5 pages of comics including two experimental colour strips never before published in the English-speaking world!

BUY NOW from Lulu.com

Timularo (The collected Timulo) not only brings together all 49 pages* of the original Deadline strip for the first time, it includes the 32-page sequel Consequences, concept sketches and character designs for both strips, Who Me? the 10-page first draught of Consequences, first-ever Mark E.D'Sade strip A Fistful of Fingers, samples of Timulo-precursor strips Az!muth and The City Hall Job, a three-page taster of the long-delayed Consequences sequel City of Night, and more, in a tasty 168-page volume, all in glowing black & white.
Normally I'd announce all-new cover artwork or some such, but such was the volume of additional material I produced for Timulo, I've been able provide covers and additional illustrations using unpublished material from the early 1990's.

BUY NOW from Lulu.com

I'll be releasing both books into the wild† at Thought Bubble in Leeds this weekend - they'll be selling at a special convention price with bonus postcards.

Once the hurly-burly of preparations for Thought Bubble is out of the way, I'll be making these books available via print-on-demand; watch this space for details.

*The final four-page episode of Timulo, originally presented in colour, is collected in black & white in this edition.
†Copies of Odds and Sods were sold in a test run at the 2-D Festival in Derry in 2009, the last UK convention I attended.

Pages from the original Timulo strip (1989-90) first published in Deadline magazine.
Timulo © 2010 Me.

Consequences, the sequel to Timulo, also collected in this new edition.
Consequences & Timulo © 2010 Me.

Lowlife: Hostile Takeover - The Dog Ate My Homework

2010-11-15T23:04:00.001Z

Apologies for the lack of bloggery-pokery the last few weeks - I've been so hammered by deadlines on the last episode of Lowlife: Hostile Takeover (and a subsequent job, about which more soon) that I haven't had time or energy to post. I have some half-finished posts about the last episodes of Lowlife which I will make the effort to finish, as they're mostly about my switchover to working in Manga Studio anyway.

In the meantime, here are some of my character sketches and concept designs for Lowlife: Hostile Takeover.

All characters and designs from Lowlife: Hostile Takeover by Rob Williams & Me
Lowlife © 2010 Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Lowlife Created by Rob Williams and Henry Flint.

Lowlife: Hostile Takeover Part 6: A Rod for my Own Back

2010-10-02T20:21:00.001+01:00

Judge Sniper design for Judge Dredd: Master Moves
(Megazine 216, April 2004, design produced November 2003)
Judge Dredd © 2010 Rebellion Developments/ 2000AD
Judge Dredd created by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra

One thing I always admired about certain Dredd artists was the consistency of their world-building; Ron Smith, for example, was pretty good at working out fixed designs for things like H-Wagons and then sticking to them.

So when I saw a sniper team mentioned in the script for Lowlife: Creation part 6, I thought it would be great excuse to dig out the Judge-Sniper design I came up with for my first ever Dredd story (Judge Dredd: Master Moves, Megazine 217, April 2004). Unfortunately for me, I did that design in a fever of enthusiasm at getting to work on Dredd, as an answer to something that had always bothered me as a reader of 2000AD: if Judge Dredd's uniform is covered in eagles, and his bike has a dirty great eagle on it, why then do all the ancilliary Judges (teks, med-teks, forensic guys etc) always have plainer uniforms without eagles on them?

Judge Sniper from page 9 of Judge Dredd: Master Moves
(Megazine 216, April 2004)
Judge Dredd © 2010 Rebellion Developments/ 2000AD
Judge Dredd created by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra

Blindingly Obvious Answer: drawing the eagles is a pain in the arse. Any sane artist will never draw more eagles than he has to.

And that's fine except... when it came to it, I really did want to do something special for my first Dredd, so I ended up with a design the had eagles on both shoulders (I also did a Sector House Chief with double eagles in the same episode). And given that I only had to draw the sniper a couple of times, that was fine.

So six years later, I dig the old design out, and somehow I can't make myself let go of the whole double-eagle thing, even though this time round I've got crowds of the buggers to draw. I must be mad.

Massed Judge Snipers from Lowlife: Hostile Takeover part 6
Lowlife © 2010 Rebellion Developments/ 2000AD
Lowlife created by Rob Williams and Henry Flint

Lowlife: Hostile Takeover Part 3

2010-09-18T19:51:00.002+01:00

Roughs for Lowlife: Hostile Takeover part three page one.
Original version (left) and revision (right).
Lowlife © 2010 Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Lowlife created by Rob Williams and Henry Flint.

Slightly belated post for Lowlife: Hostile Takeover part three. This episode fought me a bit regarding the Dirty Frank execution tableau in panel six - my first try (left) seemed to me insufficiently dramatic and also possibly a bit unclear. I decided to go instead for a slightly more diagrammatic angle, with a clear view of the sword descending towards Frank's outstretched neck, and everyone is slightly more dynamic poses. To help the storytelling flow I also flopped panels 3-5 left-for-right. This is just the kind of correction you can make by hand with tracing paper and a light box, but by gor it's quicker and easier on computer.

Pencils for Lowlife: Hostile Takeover part three page one, with revisions.Lowlife © 2010 Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Lowlife created by Rob Williams and Henry Flint.

Here are the pencils for page one - as you can see, I got to the pencilling stage before deciding to change panel six. These pages were done in Adobe Illustrator, which allows you to work on the area surrounding the page - so I could shift the roughs and pencils for panel six out onto the surround for safety in case the new panel design didn't work out (3). The same is true of the first try at drawing the right-hand Samurai in panel one (1). And because Illustrator has no Page Rotate Tool, it was easier to draw Aimeé's head the right way up off-page and then copy and rotate it in place in panel one (2).

Roughs for Lowlife: Hostile Takeover part three page two.
Original version (left) and revision (right).
Lowlife © 2010 Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Lowlife created by Rob Williams and Henry Flint.

Roughs for page two: Aimée's knock-kneed pose in panel two risked looking silly, and Frank was obscured by the foreground Samurai. The revision (above right) tidies the composition up, with all the characters in more dynamic poses to boot. The change of angle between Aimée and the Samurai meant I also had to re-draw her hand blocking the sword in panel one - the blade slicing down between the fingers had slightly more "ouch!" factor too.

Panel four (the close-up of Aimée looking down) is one of those shots that look dodgy at the rough stage, but polish up quite well at the pencilling and inking stage. Despite a lot of time spent tweaking it, the apparently-simple shot of Yakuza boss Yamaguchi in panel five never quite came right. I re-did this panel three times and he still ended up looking like a Kubrick. The sort of thing that makes me wince when I see it on the printed page, but with deadlines to meet, after three tries, you let it go.

The One-Eyed Cat is Dead, Long Live the One-Eyed Cat

2010-09-08T09:00:00.000+01:00

Lucky the Half-Face Cat (?-2009), RIP

Since I first saw him back in 2003, each year's first appearance of Lucky the Half-Face cat has marked the start of Official D'Israeli Springtime. Each year has seen him looking a little frailer than the last, and though I spotted him once in 2009, he didn't appear again before we went away to Greece, so I feared the worst.

On returning from the shops the other day, I spied two new cats asleep in the front window of Lucky's house, suggesting that both he and is sibling Intactikin (AKA Intractikin as he'd never come near me) have shuffled off this mortal coil and joined the choir invisible. I'll miss him; he had that rare combination of facial mutilation and a funny meow that was always guaranteed to raise the spirits of a sick f*ck like myself. Between the huge dent in his head and his increasing frailty, every new sighting felt like one in the eye for mortality.

What's funny is that one of the replacements is also one-eyed; whether it's pure coincidence or whether the owners adopt from somwhere that specializes in mis-shapes I have no way of telling. Or perhaps there's just someone in the house with a cocktail stick and a quick hand.

Anyway, though Lucky could never be replaced, D'Blog of Israeli wouldn't be D'Blog of Israeli without a facially-crippled cat for a mascot, so I say to you, behold… NICK FURRY, AGENT OF S.H.I.E.L.D.

Lowlife: Hostile Takeover Part Two

2010-09-04T13:40:00.001+01:00

Aimee gives Frank a lift
Lowlife: Hostile Takeover part two, page four
© 2010 Rebellion Developments/2000AD

Part two of Lowlife: Hostile Takeover was where my now well-documented dissatisfaction with Adobe Illustrator came to a head. While I'd been drawing part one I'd become more and more aware of how slow Illustrator was; it really was choking on all the little Carlos Ezquerra-style rendering lines I was putting into my pages. Illustrator stores every line as a separate, adjustable object, which means that rendering or hatching really does clog it up pretty quickly.

I hadn't got to grips with Manga Studio at this point, so I decided the try laying out and pencilling the pages in Illustrator, then see if inking them in Photoshop would be faster. Illustrator's various geometric vector tools allowed me to lay out panel borders, lettering and building perspective grids with much more flexibility than Photoshop permitted, but since I keep my roughs and pencils as simple as possible, Illustrator would still run pretty quickly for me.

Casino scene from page one of
Lowlife: Hostile Takeover part two
© 2010 Rebellion Developments/2000AD

So I jumped in at the deep end with this big panel - starting with the solid blacks and adding outlines afterwards. The solid black stage was already proven - I use Photoshop to add those when I'm drawing Stickleback - but inking the outlines proved trickier than I expected.

The problem was the pressure-sensitivity of the Photoshop brushes - with the default settings on my Wacom tablet, they tended to suffer from a "jump point" where the lines would suddenly jump from thin to thick when a certain level of pressure was reached, something that fiddling with the controls in both Photoshop and the Wacom preferences could improve but not fix.

Worse still was that all the brushes were what I call "heavy" - they'd produce their thickest line unless the stylus was held off the tablet all the time. I'd expect to have to do this for Photoshop brushes that were mimicking real-world brushes, but the effect prevented me from ever mimicking the feel of working with a dip-pen, which is springy but which can be allowed to rest on the paper. Again, fiddling with Wacom and Photoshop settings didn't solve the problem.

On the plus side, having a page rotate tool was a big relief, and being able to straightforwardly erase things was lovely (I know Illustrator now has an eraser tool, but using it on variably-stroked lines can cause some weird effects). Being able to subtract via selection was handy, and having layer masks which allow me to reversibly erase into black areas was superb - something I wish Manga Studio could emulate.

But, in the end, it came down to this; the "heaviness" of the brushes meant I couldn't draw any quicker in Photoshop than in Illustrator. For the next few episodes I hit on the compromise solution of doing the bulk of the inking in Illustrator and then adding rendering (and, as I always have, texture) in Photoshop afterwards.

I'll be interested to see if anyone can see a difference in the appearance of this episode.

A quick word about the bikes in this episode: for Aimee's bike I wanted something a bit different and futuristic. Inspired by the bodywork of a BMW prototype, I came up with the idea of a fly-by-wire racing bike with a saddle, fairing and control assembly that floated clear of the engine and wheels. This allows for computer controlled stabilization and steering override to help the rider cope with Mega-City One's 200mph+ traffic speeds.*

The Samurai assasins' monocycles were inspired by Ben Gulak's Uno bike.

*Source, Judge Dredd episode 1, 2000AD prog 2.

Finally, here are a couple of panels I was quite pleased with that mostly got covered in lettering. I knew they would too; I just have too much fun drawing backgrounds.

The back alleys of the Lowlife
Lowlife: Hostile Takeover part two, page four
© 2010 Rebellion Developments/2000AD

Lowlife: Hostile Takeover Part One

2010-08-31T14:42:00.004+01:00

Jon Davis-Hunt's trulys scrotnig* cover for 2000AD Prog 1700
© 2010 Rebellion Developments/2000AD

2000AD Prog 1700 is upon us, and with it the first episode of Lowlife: Hostile Takeover. This one's a real roller coaster ride - there's gang war in the Lowlife as the Yakuza make a move on the Big Man, but can Dirty Frank stop them when he can’t even trust his own Wally Squad colleagues anymore? Part one finishes with a real bang and the story doesn't let up from there. I'm drawing episode nine of ten right now, and I can't wait to see how it ends.

Heavy Metal Kids from the Judge Dredd: Robot Wars storyline, Progs 10-17
Art by Mike McMahon
© 2010 Rebellion Developments/2000AD

For Lowlife: Creation, I had fun re-creating a classic Carlos Ezquerra H-Wagon. This time round, I delved a bit further back into Mega-City history for the design of Trev the Robot. Keen-eyed long-time Squaxx** may spot that Trev is a slightly-modified Heavy Metal Kid, the demolition robot that formed the backbone of Call-Me-Kenneth's army in the Judge Dredd: Robot Wars storyline (Progs 10-17). He was meant to be old, second-hand and tough enough to break into bank vaults, so the fit was perfect.

Cross-Dressing Trev the robot, from Lowlife: Hostile Takeover part one.
© 2010 Rebellion Developments/2000AD

*For non-2000AD readers: "scrotnig" is a compliment.

**For non-2000AD readers: "Squaxx" is not an insult.

Manga Studio Template for 2000AD Pages

2010-08-27T01:48:00.001+01:00

Unexciting but useful: my 2000AD page template with panel grids for 2x2, 3x3, 4x4, 5x5, 6x6

Following an exchange with Ian Culbard on Twitter, I've had a couple of requests for my 2000AD template with page grid in Manga Studio format.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD TEMPLATE .

Clicking the above link should auto-download the file; it's stored on the server as a zip archive, but may download as an ordinary folder depending on your OS and what utilities you have installed. Inside the folder, double-click the file "2000AD Page Grid.cpg" to open it in Manga Studio, make any changes you want, then use File: Save As Template... to turn it into a template file.

Manga Studio's New Page Dialog Box (Mac OS Tiger)
1) Page Templates tab 2) User folder 3) Page template file

To access your template, go to File: New: Page… (or click Cmd/CTRL+N) and when the New Page dialog box opens, click the Page Templates tab and then click on the folder marked "User." Your template should be in there.

I like lots and lots of layers (including lots of different layers of outlines and spot blacks), so you may want to simplify the layer structure to suit your own way of working.

Drawing from Scratch in Manga Studio

2010-08-17T19:28:00.005+01:00

Roughs - most of the straight lines are snapping automatically to the perspective rulers

Rough Pencils - these are mostly drawn freehand on layers over the roughs,
using the Page Rotate tool where helpful

Last week I finished an episode of Lowlife: Hostile Takeover in Manga Studio for the first time, but that episode had been pencilled in Illustrator; with episode 8 I'm trying to draw the whole shebang from scratch in Manga Studio.

I decided to jump in at the deep end with an elaborate perspective shot; I wasn't sure how easy it would be to draw in perspective in Manga Studio, and if it wasn't going to work I needed to know straight away. In Illustrator I'd have to generate perspective grids and draw along them without the benefit of a Page Rotate tool; Manga Studio's Perspective Rulers allow me to draw straight lines that automatically snap to the vanishing points (top image). The Page Rotate tool helps the process along.

Rough Pencils without the underlying roughs - there's still some tidying-up to be
done here, but much of the page will be inked straight from these.

Result? This doesn't look much different from what I was doing in Illustrator, which is the point, though perhaps the drawing has a slightly more lively, gestural quality to it (something I like). I think this went more quickly, mostly because of being able to lay down lines rapidly in Manga Studio - in Illustrator the lines have to be drawn a bit more slowly and carefully as they "jump" into a very slightly different position when finished; quickly drawn lines often fail to complete properly.

D'Website of 'Israeli Go Bye-bye

2010-08-13T11:42:00.003+01:00

The official D'Israeli website has lain neglected for several years since my web-based activity moved over to D'Blog, so this year I've decided to let the disraeli-demon.com domain expire.

Since I do still get emails from people saying they find information on the site useful (especially the stuff about colouring in Photoshop) I'm putting an archive of D'Website up on http://homepage.mac.com/matt_brooker/Sites/dizzy/index.html.

Be warned, the navigation on the site is a bit odd, and the mail link goes to a dead address. I can't fix any of this for the rather lame reason that I don't have an HTML editor right now, and my web-fu isn't up to editing pages without a WYSIWIG app.

Barely Seeing Daylight

2010-08-10T00:56:00.000+01:00

Badly behind on Lowlife: Creation Part 7 so at the moment my days are spent working like THIS!

Sweets for the Sweet and a Tweet for Me

2010-08-05T16:04:00.000+01:00

With some reluctance I signed up to Twitter a while ago - I haven't posted about it before as I wanted to check I'd stick with it before making a fuss.

If you want to follow me, the account is disraeli_demon and at the moment I ar mostly bangin' on about Manga Studio and Alberto Breccia, but I'm sure there'll be something about Daleks in there at some point :-)

Snapped Like a Twig!

2010-08-03T23:17:00.001+01:00

Panel from Lowlife: Hostile Takeover Part 7 inked and greytoned in Manga Studio EX
Lowlife © 2010 Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Lowlife Created by Rob Williams and Henry Flint

Okay, so getting back to the UK and faced with several days submerged in inking for the already-week-late Part 7 of Lowlife: Hostile Takeover, I threw caution to the winds and just started blasting away in Manga Studio EX. Nothing like New Toy Frenzy to keep me at the drawing board.

It's already paying off as I can noodle away doing fiddly backgrounds like this much faster than in Illustrator (and, surprisingly, Photoshop too). The final version will have extra grit and texture added, but this is what came out of MSEX.

Click on the pic to see it big.

Manga Studio EX

2010-08-01T09:00:00.000+01:00

Tanks for the Memory; sketch produced in Manga Studio EX 3 to test the Perspective Rulers feature.

So, a couple of years back I picked up a copy of Manga Studio EX, a Japanese graphics app designed especially for drawing comics, and ported into English. Several people I knew were using it, but after playing with it for a bit I let it drop; the translated documentation was rather sparse and I'd not been able to figure out how to get some of the cooler functions to work. On top of that, it rendered greys by default as patterns of dots, a feature many people love, but which I find inflexible and potentially problematic (my first sketch produced in Manga Studio came out of my laser printer with horrible moiré patterning because the default dot screen clashed with the printer's output resolution). None of these things was beyond fixing, but somehow after I put it aside to deal with "later" I never got round to it again.

Then the other week I got round to watching the video of Dave Gibbons' "webinar" (horrible word) in which he demonstrates drawing in Manga Studio, and suddenly all became clear. Re-enthused, I went back to my old copy of the app, and within an hour I was starting to get to grips with the features I wanted, plus curbing some of the habits I didn't like - including figuring out how to rid myself of those pesky dot-screens.

Sketch of Dirty Frank produced in Manga Studio 3; no dots please very thankyou

Dirty Frank created by Rob Williams and Henry Flint.

This pic was the first result - I still had a few things to figure out at this point, but it got me fired up to try more.

Since then I've started learning how to use the amazing perspective rulers (which among other things, give me the ability to do brush ruling digitally for the first time - see the sky in the pic of the giant tank), and I'm starting to figure out the 3D import options (though whether that will actually prove more efficient than placing renders from Carrara into my pages only time will tell).

Where's this coming from? Well, aside from the love of new toys, I've been getting more and more disenchanted with my current drawing app, Adobe Illustrator, for several years. The last two updates have failed to provide either a page rotate tool (It's now the only serious graphics app without one) or, more importantly, improvements in speed. Worse still, one of the most useful tools, the Selection Lasso*, was removed a couple of versions ago and shows no sign of returning. Despite the name, Illustrator is really a designer's tool, and there's no percentage in Adobe developing or supporting tools solely for the tiny number of us who draw freehand with it.

*That's the former-alternate Lasso Tool with the black arrow, not the formerly-default-now-only-one Direct Selection Lasso with the white arrow, which is still with us.

Changes in my own work haven't helped; working for 2000AD has pushed me to do grittier inks with more rendering, which puts a real strain on a vector program where every line is a separately-memorized editable object. Things have got so bad that I currently add most of my hatching in Photoshop after the main drawing is completed in Illustrator. I've tried inking everything in Photoshop, but it's somehow clumsy and surprisingly slow; Manga Studio, on the other hand, was designed for the task, and feels like it.

I've had to refer to the manual a few times while playing with Manga Studio, but on the whole I've been able to figure out things on my own (the interface follows many of the conventions of Photoshop so it's quite intuitive to use). There are a few things I find a bit odd; I'd like it to be easier to draw in opaque grey, and I wish you could globally disable that damned dot-screening, but on the whole the app's what it should be; a quick, intuitive tool designed for the task I'm trying to perform. What makes it all the more impressive is that I'm using a legacy version (3), which is running on Rosetta on my Intel Mac, but it's still fast and stable. It'll be a while before I switch for professional work (I want to be more practised before I trust deadlines to it) but if I end up using Manga Studio to earn money, the $120 upgrade to version 4 will be a no-brainer.

CAPTION 2010

2010-07-24T19:33:00.001+01:00

My bit for the CAPTION 2010 auction - theme: "Mad Science"

Sorry to say I'll be missing the CAPTION Small Press convention in Oxford this year. We're heading back to the UK from Greece that very weekend, so spare us a thought as we lug our luggage across the country.

For those who don't know it, CAPTION is an event for those who make and enjoy self-produced ("Small Press") comics. I've written about it on this blog before; it's a great, relaxed, inclusive fun weekend, and I thoroughly recommend it.

This year's event will be at the usual venue, East Oxford Community Centre, on the weekend of 31st July/1st August.

More details from caption.org and the CAPTION Facebook group.

OM NOM NOMINATION! 2000AD Covers Uncovered!

2010-05-24T06:30:00.009+01:00

The cover to 2000AD Prog 1631, nominated for a 2010 Eagle Award
To see a step-by-step demo showing how this cover was made, click here.

Dirty Frank/Lowlife © 2010 Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Lowlife created by Rob Williams and Henry Flint

Delighted beyond words to be nominated for a 2010 Eagle award for the cover to 2000AD Prog 1631 ("Stained Glass Frank"). Serious thanks to everyone who voted for the nomination. I'm really pleased by this because covers have always been a bit of a weak point with me - I'm much better at tying together lots of single images to make a comic than I am making one image that sums a whole story up (if you see what I mean).

Credit where credit's due; Tharg-in-Residence Matt Smith was the one who came up with the stained glass window concept, and of course, without Rob Williams' amazing character Dirty Frank there'd be no cover to start with. Simon Parr's excellent design work (for example integrating stained glass into the 2000AD logo) really added the finishing touch that helped make this one a winner. Plus, apologies to the unknown 14th-Century stained-glass artist whose composition I nicked for the window design ;-)

2000AD Covers Uncovered

While I'm at it, it's well past time that I bigged-up 2000AD Covers Uncovered, Pete Wells' amazing blog devoted to step-by-step demos by a whole passel of 2000AD creators showing their different working processes. It's a fascinating read for anyone interested in the process of making artwork, a tribute to the time and effort put in by the creators of 2000AD, and a great resource for nicking ideas from.

Pete kindly did an extended Easter Special on "Stained Glass Frank," check it out here.

Finally I'm waaayy behind on thanking the members of the 2000AD message board who voted "Stained Glass Frank" Cover of the Year 2009 on 2000AD Covers Uncovered's poll. I was ill around Christmas and missed Pete's original email notifying me of the result, and since then I've been scurrying to catch up on deadlines and D'Blog has ended up being rather neglected. And the dog ate my homework.

Cofix Event Tonight!

2010-04-22T12:39:00.000+01:00

Just a reminder to comics fans in and around Thessaloniki that I'll be doing a talk followed by a signing and sketching session at the Cofix Bar from 8pm tonight. The event accompanies my exhibition at CoFix. All prints from the exhibition are available for sale.

CoFix Bar, Lori Margariti 11 Thessaloniki

Tel: 2310 250011

ComicDom Colouring Talk & War of the Worlds Link

2010-04-21T08:23:00.001+01:00

Me, banging on yet again about something-or-other at Athens Comicdom 2010.

For those of you who sat patiently through my colouring talk on Saturday at ComicDom, here's the link to the War of the Worlds web comic I used as an example. There's also a permanent link in the sidebar of the blog.

A panel from Ian Edginton's and my War of the Worlds comic, still available online at www.darkhorse.com

Thanks to everybody at ComicDom for a truly wonderful time - I'll be posting properly about the weekend soon, but right now I'm late late LATE with work, so I must get my head down for a bit!

ComicDom 2010 and CoFix Exhibition

2010-04-08T23:16:00.002+01:00

I'll be a guest at Comicdom Con 2010 (Ελληνικα) in Athens on April 16th-18th. Living just "up the road" in Thessaloniki, I'm a cheap date for them, of course. I'll be signing, sketching and doing a class in comic colouring* over the weekend.

*already fully subscribed!

I've also discovered, much to my surprise, that there's a Greek edition of Leviathan (Λεβιαθαν) - though I only found this out when I went into a bookshop with Dr. F. and she spotted a copy on the shelves. ::UPDATE:: Today I was informed that I should have copies of Λεβιαθαν to sign at ComicDom.

(For UK readers: I believe Rebellion are planning a re-issue of Leviathan in English, in the new standard 2000AD TPB format. More news soon.)

I've also got a modest exhibition running at the CoFix comics bar in Thessaloniki until the end of April. I'll be signing and sketching at a special event at CoFix on 22nd April. The pages on display are all digital artwork from Leviathan (Λεβιαθαν), The War of the Worlds, Scarlet Traces and Scarlet Traces: The Great Game. All prints are for sale, €15 for A3 single pages and €30 for A2 double page spreads.

CoFix Bar

Lori Margariti 11

Thessaloniki

Tel: 2310 250011

Bristol 2010

2010-04-08T21:24:00.000+01:00

Sadly, I won't be attending Bristol International Comics & Small Press Expo 2010 because I'll still be out in Greece all through May.

Good luck with the Bristol show and I hope everyone has a great time.

Stickleback: London's Burning 2nd Cover Step-by-Step

2010-03-22T09:00:00.002Z

The 2nd cover for Stickleback: London's Burning (2000AD Prog 1676)

Stickleback created by Ian Edginton & Me

By popular request, here's a "clean" copy of the 2nd cover for Stickleback: London's Burning. Below is a step-by-step demo of the process used to make the cover. You can click on any of the images to see a much bigger version.

The cover was drawn directly into a computer using a Wacom Intuos 3 A5 graphics tablet, and three different applications; Adobe Illustrator for the initial drawing, Adobe Photoshop for the textures, and Corel Painter for the painted-looking finish.

1) In Adobe Illustrator

1a) Roughs

The first step is to generate a rough drawing of the cover concept for approval by Tharg-in-Residence Matt Smith. The idea is to generate a drawing that's clear, but without putting in too much work, as it might well be rejected.

As per usual, I did some very rough doodles in my sketchbook, then drew the roughs on the computer using a Wacom tablet and Adobe Illustrator. 2000AD issue cover artists with a special template file that shows how much space to leave for the title block (though note a small blue semicircle where the drawing can overlap the titles). I've placed this PDF into an Illustrator template, so when I do the roughs I know I'm working to exactly the correct proportions.

Often, Matt Smith will supply the cover concept for 2000AD, but this time I was free to pick a scene from the final episode. I came up with two ideas - one a wounded Stickleback falling through the air with The Mistral exploding above him, the other a duel between Stickleback and Countess Bernoulli. Matt picked the duelling scene, so off we went.

1b) Rough Pencils

This is exactly the same drawing as the previous one, just coloured light blue to act as rough pencils. The light blue dates from when I worked on paper, and would use a light blue pencil (which is not picked up by the reproduction process and so doesn't need to be erased) to rough out the drawing before pencilling with an ordinary graphite pencil. Nowadays, I do my drawing on different layers in Adobe Illustrator, so in fact any pale colour would do.

1c) Pencils

On a new layer, I do a more refined drawing in grey using the Pencil Tool set to stroke only, making sure that details are worked out and that proportions are correct. I don't bother with shading as that's established on the rough pencils.

1d) Blocking Out

The later stages of the process will take place in Photoshop and depend on working inside selections - masked-off areas of the drawing - so to make that easier I break the whole drawing down into chunks of colour while still working in Illustrator. It doesn't matter which colours I use as long as they separate adjoining or overlapping areas one from another. I make the pencils layer transparent (select all, opacity to Multiply) and then use it as a guide to make the blocks on several layers underneath, using the Pencil Tool set to fill only.

This is the blocked-out drawing with the pencils layer hidden. Once I've reached this stage I want to take the drawing out of Illustrator and into Photoshop, so I use File: Export and export as a 400dpi RGB Photoshop document with layers intact but WITHOUT Anti-Aliasing. I export the pencils and rough pencils layers as well as the colour blocks.

2) In Adobe Photoshop

2a) Texturing

In this stage, I open the file in Adobe Photoshop and work on it using three main tools; the Lasso Tool (with Anti-Alias unchecked), the Magic Wand Tool and the Paint Bucket Tool. I use the Lasso and Magic Wand to select areas, then I apply textures using the Paint Bucket Tool, which is loaded with a set of my own home-made textures (culled from digital photographs of things like crumbly stone walls, concrete and tree bark). The texture layer is set to Multiply so that the whites are transparent.

I use the Rough Pencils layer as a guide to drawing shading; the textures go on their own layer. The quick way to do this is to trace the shadows with the Lasso Tool on the textures layer using the Rough Pencils as a guide, then hide the Rough Pencils layer and fill using the Paint Bucket Tool set to the required texture and with "All Layers" checked in the control bar - this means that both the selection (which is on the same layer as the fill) and the colour blocks (which are on an underlying layer) will constrain the Paint Bucket fill. What's the advantage? Well I could texture-fill all the pleats on the Countess's skirt in two goes, by first doing all the lighter blue pleats and then all the darker blue ones, without having to painstakingly trace around the edges of each pleat; the colour blocks handled that for me.

2b) Greys

Once I've got the textures done I make a layer between the texture and the colour blocks and fill it with white; then I make another couple of layers and fill certain parts of the background with grey, sometimes using the paint Bucket Tool, sometimes the Brush Tool with certain texture brushes of my own. I also use Select: Layer Transparency to make a selection that exactly matches the contents of the texture layer, then fill with a mid-grey on an underlying layer to beef up the textures a bit. I make a second fill on a layer above the textures and fill it with white, then set the layer to Multiply so the white becomes invisible. I name this layer "Blacks."

3) In Corel Painter

I open the Photoshop file in Corel Painter. You can choose to convert to Painter's native RIFF format or not. Painter will work with both, I usually convert because RIFFs save a lot faster, just remember you'll have to save a copy in TIFF or Photoshop format for Photoshop to open the file afterwards.

Remember that weird "Blacks" layer full of invisible white? I pick that layer, click "preserve transparency" on the Layers palette and paint into it in black using the Digital Watercolour Brushes. Because those invisible white pixels exactly match the shape and position of the textures in the layer below, and because "preserve transparency" only lets you paint where there are already pixels, I can shade over the textures very quickly, without ever having to worry about "coulouring outside the lines." This trick works with Photoshop too.

After that, I also do some painting with the same Digital Watercolour Brushes on a new layer to soften up the edges of shadows a bit and add a bit of modelling to the whites. On some pages I also add more texture with Chalk, Sponge and Spatter brushes, but here's that's not needed.

Then I save out in Photoshop format and finish off.

4) Tidying Up in Adobe Photoshop

I open the file in Photoshop and do a quick check for overall tone and contrast (Photoshop has a better rendering engine than Painter so you can't really see how the page will print till you see it in Photoshop). I might add odd bits of shading or highlights to make sure the drawing is clear and you know what you're meant to be looking at - though here the drawing is simple enough that I don't need to do that.

The final step is to make two duplicates of the file (Image: Duplicate with "Duplicate Mereged Layers Only" checked to produce flattened files). I convert one to Greyscale (Image: Mode: Greyscale) and save it as a TIFF file. This copy is then put up on the 2000AD FTP server, where it will be used to print the cover. The second copy is reduced to 72dpi and saved as a JPEG for mailing to Tharg-in-residence Matt Smith for approval.

Stickleback: London's Burning Parts 11 & 12 References

2010-03-17T15:59:00.003Z

Stickleback Part Eleven

Original roughs for Part 11 Page 2 (left) with the finished article (right).

Note how the last three panels of the roughs give Black Bob his missing arm back.

Stickleback created by Ian Edginton & Me.

It's funny what can slip past you when you're working full-tilt; Ian sent me the script for part Eleven which had gone through various drafts, been checked by Tharg-in-residence Matt Smith, and had got as far as my reading it twice, roughing it out in a sketchbook, repeating the exercise on computer, and starting the rough pencils before any of us noticed that the sequence where Black Bob kills Fiery Jack includes lines such as "Bob reaches out for Jack with both hands…" and "Bob tightly clamps his hands either side of Jack’s head." The problem being that we'd seen Bob lose an arm two episodes before. Still, it all got sorted easily enough… and I can't exactly point the finger because last time it was me who forgot that a character has a severed arm.

Page Five: "Steely Punctuation"

Stickleback's lines come from Hamlet:

“Now cracks a noble heart. Goodnight, sweet Princes.
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.”

Horatio, Act V Scene ii

Stickleback Part Twelve

Page Two: Lifeboat

Based loosely on the design of the old RNLI lifeboats.

Page Seven: Mister Estebez's Transformation

Mister Estebez final transformation is meant to reveal him as an agent of pan-dimensional nasties, just like the false Buffalo Bill in Stickleback: England's Glory. The goat-like facial transformation harks back to the character of Wilbur Whateley from H.P. Lovecraft's 1928 short story The Dunwich Horror.

Page Eight: The Mistral Explodes

Having grown up watching various Gerry Anderson televisions series, I'm a bit of a connoisseur of pyrotechnics, and I knew what I wanted for this shot. The obvious reference would have been the wreck of the Zeppelin Hindenburg in 1937, but that was really a sudden and all-consuming conflagration whereas I wanted an out-and-out violent explosion. My source of inspiration was the truly prodigious pyrotechnic and breakaway model work overseen by special effects director Shinji Higuchi for the 1999 film Gamera 3: Iris kakusei (Gamera 3: Revenge of Iris).

Page Eight: N. Penney, Waterman for Hire

A brief cameo for the crusty old river rat from our War of the Worlds sequel Scarlet Traces.

Page Nine: Stickleback's Harness

There's a hint that Stickleback's deformity is a prosthesis as far back as Stickleback: England's Glory Part Eleven.

Page Ten: The White Lotus Empress, her son, and Miss Scarlet

The White Lotus Empress (who is our female equivalent of Fu Manchu in the Stickleback universe and the only human being Stickleback seems to be afraid of) first appeared in Stickleback: England's Glory Part Twelve, when she came to the rescue with her giant dragon. Her son - the product of a union between herself and Stickleback - was mentioned briefly in the same episode.
The Empress and Miss Scarlet have some history, since Miss Scarlet was tasked with requesting The Empress's help in Part Six of the same story.

Stickleback: London's Burning Parts Eleven and Twelve References to be Delayed

2010-03-05T22:02:00.005Z

Episode 11 contains such a dramatic twist, it was difficult to find a single panel that didn't contain a spoiler.

Stickleback created by Ian Edginton & Me.

Given the dramatic nature of events in parts eleven and twelve, I'll not be posting references for either episode until after both have been published, to avoid any possibility of spoilers.

Stickleback: London's Burning Part Ten References

2010-03-01T21:00:00.005Z

Page One: Sanderson's Department Store and The Burleigh Theatre

Both major landmarks of "Everytown," the fictional city seen bombed to ruins in an air raid in William Cameron Menzies' 1936 film Things To Come, which was based on H.G. Wells' 1933 novel The Shape Of Things To Come.

The air raid scene is compellingly realistic, which is all the more impressive because the first saturation bombing of civilians from the air did not occur until a year later in 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, when the Basque town of Guernica was bombed by the German Luftwaffe and Italian Fascist Aviazione Legionaria on behalf of the forces of Generalísimo Francisco Franco .

Page One: "War Tubas"

These strange-looking devices (which can also be seen attached to the telescope on page one of this episode) are based on now-obsolete but nevertheless real devices called acoustic detectors, essentially giant ear trumpets which were designed to give advance warning of hostile aircraft in the years before radar was invented.

Page Three: Gatling Guns

Invented in 1861 by Dr. Richard J. Gatling, the Gatling Gun is probably the most famous precursor of the modern machine gun, and is instantly recognizable by its characteristic rotating cylindrical barrel.

The ones on the Mistral are very large scale, firing small-bore artillery shells instead of bullets.

Stickleback: London's Burning Part Nine References

2010-03-01T20:57:00.004Z

Page One : The Mistral's Engine Room

Inspired by childhood visits to the two-storey River Don Engine at Kelham Island Industrial Museum in my native Sheffield.

Page Two: Maintenance Robots

Hands up; we're riffing on the spider-style machines from Scarlet Traces with some of this stuff.

Page Three: Sic Transit Gloria Swanson

Ian's instructions regarding the Countess's body language in this sequence was "I see her as going a bit Gloria Swanson, all silent movie arm movements and the like!" It made sense to make her body language big and bold, in the style of the more expressive silent film actors, since her masked face couldn't show expression.

Stickleback: London's Burning Part Eight References

2010-03-01T20:55:00.007Z

Page Two: Breeches Buoy

Potts's emergency device is based on an old piece of marine rescue kit called a breeches buoy. The device was essentially a pair of trousers stitched into a lifesaver, with ropes running up to a pulley. It was used to extract personnel from ships wrecked near shore by allowing them to be hauled over the water using a line fired from a short-barrelled cannon called a Lyle Gun.

Page Three: The Mimsie Ascends

When I drew this I had in mind the magnificent night-time above-the-clouds scenes from Hiyao Myazaki's 1986 animated film Tenkû no shiro Rapyuta (Laputa the Flying Island/Castle in the Clouds).

Page Four: Black Bob's Arms

I case you've forgotten, Black Bob's arms were both severed in combat with the false Buffalo Bill during the last episode of Stickleback: England's Glory, and we saw Miss Scarlet stitching them back on in the final page of that episode.

Stickleback: London's Burning Part Seven References

2010-03-01T20:50:00.009Z

Page One: Stickleback's London

This view is accurate in terms of the locations of landmarks and the positioning of the river bends in perspective; however, at the altitude necessary to take in this sweeping view, the individual landmarks would be vanishingly small, so I bumped their sizes up by a factor of five or so to make them visible.

As well as real landmarks such as Hyde Park, Buckingham Palace, Trafalgare Square, The Houses of Parliament, The Tower of London and Tower Bridge, we included the following planned or imaginary buildings:

1) The London Eye - a giant Victorian Ferris wheel, placed, like its 21st Century counterpart, opposite the palace of Westminster.

2) The Crystal Palace - here still occupying its original site in Hyde Park.

3) William Thomas's proposed giant pyramidal cemetery - designed to hold up to five million dead Londoners!

4) The proposed mausoleum for Sir Isaac Newton (the smaller pyramid with the sphere on top). We used this building as the new Greenwich Observatory (where Spry's office was located) in Scarlet Traces, but here it's been moved off Greenwich hill, to make way for:

5) John Flaxman's 200-foot-high statue of Britannia, proposed circa 1800 but never built.

Page One: The Mimsie

Though balloons using actual boats as gondolas is a common steampunk trope, the design of the Mimsie is meant to echo certain characteristics of that fine four-fendered friend, Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang, for reasons that will become apparent in the next item.

Personally, I couldn't help but think of Noah and Nelly.

Page Two: Potts

Inspired by the inventor hero of Ian Fleming's 1964 novel (and subsequently 1968 film) Chitty-chitty Bang-bang. Our Potts has been having a hard time of it, and is indebted to Stickleback to boot.

Stickleback: London's Burning Part 6 References

2010-02-26T09:22:00.010Z

(Sorry for the delay in posting these references - I've been caught up with finishing the last episode of Stickleback: London's Burning. Will try to catch up on the posts ASAP)

Page One: Bedlam

In Stickleback's world, the secret HQ of the British Secret Service. See the references for Stickleback: England's Glory Part 2 for a history of the Bethlem Royal Hospital.

Page One: Herbert George Sewell

The time traveller created by Ian Edginton and myself for a series of Judge Dredd stories. In Stickleback: England's Glory we saw him being dragged into Bedlam; here he's cutting his way out, but a pair of wily warders have their eye on him.

Page One: Ashenden's Office

As it appeared in Stickleback: England's Glory. The large mirror behind the desk is one way, and allows the head of the secret service to monitor events within.

Page One: Mister Scudder

Successor to the unfortunate Ashenden, who was peeled alive by the false Buffalo Bill at the end of Stickleback: England's Glory. Scudder's appearance was inspired by the veteran British actor Sir John Mills.

Page Three: The Man in the Chair

The image of the hidden villain, identity hidden by a high-backed chair, is one taken from the way the character Ernst Stavro Blofeld was introduced in the 1960's James Bond films. Our man lacks the signature white persian cat, though.

Page Four: The Arnolfini Portrait

The composition of this panel is borrowed for Jan Van Eyck's 1434 painting known as The Arnolfini Portrait (sometimes The Arnolfini Wedding). It's particularly striking since the "bride" appears to be heavily pregnant.

Our version features two of the earliest figures in computing, Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace.

Charles Babbage (1791-1871) was a mathematician and mechanical engineer who came up with the idea of the programmable computer. He designed a wholly-mechanical calculating device, the Difference Engine, which was capable of returning results to 31 decimal places. Though it was never completed during his lifetime, a Difference Engine built in 1991 did indeed work successfully.

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace ("Ada Lovelace" 1815-1852) was the only legitimate child of Lord Byron, and a mathematician who took an interest in Babbage's Difference Engine. He notes on the subject include what is recognized as the first algorithm designed to be processed by a machine. Thus she is often regarded as the world's first computer programmer.

Page Four: The Arnolfini Dog

Drawn pretty much as it appears in the original painting. Given the near-photographic accuracy of the rest of the painting, this clumsily-drawn dog seems like a bit of an anomaly. Either Van Eyck was no good at dogs, or possibly the fluffy little bastard wouldn't keep still.

Page Four: Count Bernoulli

The name is a reference to Dutch-Swiss mathematician Daniel Bernoulli, who is best known for his work in fluid mechanics and his pioneering work on probability and statistics. Bernoulli's theorem (put simplistically as "moving air has less pressure") explains, among other things, how spray guns work and how aircraft wings generate lift.

The character of Count Bernoulli, as shown here, was inspired by actor Ferdy Mayne, who is probably best remembered for the role of Count von Krolock in Roman Polanski's 1967 film The Fearless Vampire Killers.

Venice

In the script, no location is specified for this portrait of the young Countess - but since she was meant to be in Italy, I thought where better than Venice, home town of that most romantic of Italian comic characters, Hugo Pratt's Corto Maltese?

The Veil

This particular way of drawing a veiled face (using blocks of shading to hint at the features beneath the veil without showing them) is borrowed from Marc Hempel's drawings of the Gorgon women from Sandman: The Kindly Ones - which I had the pleasure of inking back in 1994.

Stickleback: London's Burning Part 5 References

2010-01-31T12:06:00.015Z

Colour and black & white versions of my 9th cover for 2000AD, complete with a little tribute to my late friend Steve Whitaker (click on image to see larger version). Can’t believe I missed putting in a "fishpaste" reference, though.
Stickleback © 2010 Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Stickleback created by Ian Edginton & Me.

I did a trial version of this cover in colour, exploiting the colour masking technique I use for setting up the texture effects, but Tharg-in-Residence Matt Smith decided that a migraine-inducing cover might be a bit much for the Squaxx dek Thargo. Lucky for you, but a pity for me: colour covers pay better :-)

Page One: Carfax Abbey

A key location in Bram Stoker's seminal vampire novel Dracula, Carfax Abbey is one of the London properties purchased by the Count from Jonathan Harker. Ian and I have "borrowed" Carfax abbey a couple of times now - the first being for our steampunk graphic novel Scarlet Traces - and this version is based on the abbey at Whitby, the seaside town which also features in Dracula.

Page One: Effigy of Steve Whitaker

This effigy is a little tribute to my late friend and teacher Steve Whitaker, who was, among many things, an extremely gifted comic artist and colourist. He's probably best remembered for his colouring on Alan Moore and David Lloyd's dystopian tour-de-force V for Vendetta, though Steve also played a minor role in 2000AD history; he contributed colouring to a number of Brendan McCarthy's Judge Dredd stories, including The Judda from the Oz storyline.

The effigy shows Steve with his trademark long coat and umbrella. Thanks to Ian Edginton for suggesting the tribute.

Page Two: The Picnic

Supplied by two of the great London department stores; Fortnum & Mason was founded in 1707 and built its reputation on supplying high quality foods, and is world-famous for its luxury picnic hampers and branded loose-leaf tea. One of the founders, Hugh Mason, was a servant of King George III and helped to nurse him during his famous period of madness (as described in the play by Alan Bennett). When George recovered, Mason was paid off, and he used the money to go into trade.

Harrods started in a small way in 1834, as a wholesale grocery store in London's East End. In 1851, the owner, Charles Henry Harrod, moved the store to Knightsbridge, to take advantage of trade from the Great Exhibition. His son Charles Digby Harrod took the one-room shop and by 1898 had built it into a business employing more than one hundred people and sporting the UK's first escalator. Harrods Food Hall is world-famous. The store is currently owned by Egyptian businessman Mohamed Al Fayed, whose fifth son Dodi died alongside Diana, Princess of Wales in a car crash in Paris in 1997. The Harrods brand now extends to a bank, an estate agents and an aviation company.

Page Three: The Countess's Mask

Greek theatre dates back as early as 550 BCE, evolving, it's believed, out of fertility rites for the god Dionysis. Masks were used in Greek plays to define the different characters; as few as 2-3 actors might be involved in a play, but more characters could be introduced by having the actors change masks.

The masks had exaggerated features and facial expressions, and this led, by Roman times, to the idea of the "Tragic" and the "Comic" mask (a pairing which symbolizes theatre in the West to this day). The Countess's mask is a "Tragic" type.

Page Four: Philo Thynne's House

Revisiting the setting of the fake seance from the first-ever episode of Stickleback: Mother London, drawn back in September 2006 and published in December that year.

Page Five: Discarded Robots, Three Years in the Making

In the script for the first part of Stickleback: Mother London, Ian Edginton asked for various classic robots from old British comics to appear in Thynne's lair. At the time, the demands of layout prevented me from showing this, but three years later, the discerning reader might just possibly be able to recognize Robot Archie and Togo from The House of Dollmann in this pile of old robot parts.

Page Five: The Futurists

If this seems a little League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, it's worth remembering, dear reader, that all of us who play this kind of tune are riffing off Philip José Farmer.

From left to right:

Phylo Thynne
Our own invention, the creator of malign automata from Stickleback: Mother London.

Rotwang
Mad scientist C.A. Rotwang will be best remembered as the creator of the Art Deco "Maria robot" in Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou's silent movie SF-classic Metropolis. The character was played by actor Rudolf Klein-Rogge, upon whom my version of Rotwang is loosely based. Despite the apparent "oo-err vicar" double-entendre for English speakers, the name Rotwang is actually pronounced "roat-vang" and probably means "red cheek." ("oo-err vicar")

Captain Mors
Also known as the "Air Pirate," Captain Mors was the hero of the snappily-titled Der Luftpirat und sein Lenkbares Luftschiff (The Air Pirate and His Steerable Airship), a German dime novel that ran for 165 issues from 1908-1911. Captain Mors' adventures took him out into the Solar System, so that in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1993), Frank Rottensteiner wrote that "There is a case for calling this the first sf magazine." The author(s) of the series are unknown, though writer Oskar Hoffmann is cited as a likely possibility both by ESF and Heinz J Galle in his 2005 POD reprint of selected Mors stories.

Robur
Aeronaut and anti-hero of the Jules Verne novels Robur the Conqueror and Master of the World (Published 1886 and 1904 respectively).
For more information, see the entry Page Ten: The Mistral from Part One References.

The Countess
Since revelations about the Countess are an integral part of the plot, I'll avoid giving any spoilers. Suffice to say, if she spent her youth hanging around experts in robotics and aviation, it's no surprise we find her now living on a dirigible manned by automata!

Stickleback: London's Burning Part 4 References

2010-01-24T09:31:00.005Z

Stickleback and the gang in action
Stickleback © 2010 Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Stickleback created by Ian Edginton & me

Not much in the way of references this week, so I thought I'd throw in an unlettered copy of this panel; of all the shots I've done of Stickleback and the gang to date, this one's probably my favourite.

The Centurion

Unfolding from a single block of metal, the Centurion has a certain amount in common with 80's toys-cum-90's film stars the Transformers. Side panels that fold out and back like wings reinforce that Japanese mecha feel. The twin Gatling-gun "arms" borrow from Robocop's ED-209, and the rotating magnifier for the eye lenses adds a certain Dalek-y vibe.

Since this is meant to be Victorian technology, I wanted to follow the look of early trains, tanks and traction engines, where everything is functional but not really styled - there's no attempt to round off hard lines or make shapes more aerodynamic.

To avoid confusion with The Traction Men from England's Glory, I used a tilted cube for the Centurion's torso and added animal-style back-slung knee joints to give the legs a different shape.

Oh, and by the way, the folding-out is all a complete cheat; the gaps in the cube body don't remotely match to the folded-out panels on the limbs. I just tried to make it complicated enough that no one would notice.

Stickleback: London's Burning Part Three References

2010-01-11T21:56:00.015Z

Page One: The Alley Containing The Silver Ring Club

Hardcore fans of Gerry Anderson's 1967 puppet series Captain Scarlet might just recognize this as the alley that features in the show's title sequence. It's the first shot in each show, where the camera tracks down the alley to Ed Bishop's honeyed tones ("The Mysterons - swworrn enemies of Earth!") just before someone steps on a cat and the camera whip-pans round to show the good captain himself getting machine-gunned to no ill effect.

The sign for the Silver Ring Club is based on the painting Portrait présumé de Gabrielle d'Estrées et de sa soeur la duchesse de Villars ("Portrait presumed to be of Gabrielle d'Estrées and her sister the Duchess of Villars"), dated about 1594, artist unknown, which hangs in The Louvre.

Page One: The Silver Ring Club

The interior of the club contains various tips of the hat to Andrew Davies' violently-throbbing 2002 television series Tipping the Velvet*, in particular, the names of the performers Kitty and King.

*Tipping the Velvet is an adaptation of the novel by Sarah Waters, but I've only seen the TV series.

Page One: Kitty and King

Ian's script describes this panel as follows: "Kitty is swooning in King’s arm and he’s using the cane he’s holding in his other hand to lift Kitty’s skirts to get a glimpse on her front bottom."
Although Simon B. Davies had successfully slipped a huge purple willy (ooh, missus) into the last episode of Stone Island back in 2008, I thought it best to check with Tharg-in-Residence Matt Smith as to whether Furry Front Bottoms would be acceptable (see pencil image, right) - word came back that 2000AD really wasn't That Kind of Comic so I fitted Kitty out with a pair of bloomers with a picture of a pussy on them (oo-err vicar).

"Rache"

Stickleback's use of the German word "Rache" ("revenge") is a reference to the Sherlock Holmes story A Study in Scarlet (which Ian has been busy adapting as a graphic novel with our good mate Ian Culbard.)
I believe the reference to Holmes may hint at a possible origin for Stickleback... perhaps more will be revealed in time.

Incidentally, Stickleback must mis-pronounce the word, since the door(wo)man hears it with a long "a" and an English "ch"as in "Rachael," but in fact it has a short "a" and the guttural "ch" of "loch" - to an untutored ear it would sound more like "racker."

The Crais

Named (in a fashion) after Ronnie and Reggie, the infamous Kray twins who ruled London's underworld during the 1960's. Ronnie Kray was rumoured to have had sexual relationships with both Labour MP Tom Driberg and Conservative Lord Boothby, which may have led to a lack of political will in stamping out their criminal activities.

Our Ronnie is based on the famous image of a young Marlene Dietrich in a tuxedo.

Gene Colan Tribute

The composition and lighting in the panel are a bit of a tip of the hat to veteran comic artist Gene Colan (whom I remember fondly for his runs on Marvel Comics' Daredevil, Iron Man, Captain Marvel and Howard The Duck).

The Centurion

When I was drawing this panel, I couldn't help but think of the puzzled ape-men regarding the alien monolith in Stanley Kubrick's trippy 1968 tour-de-force 2001: A Space Odyssey (even if the proportions of the block are wrong).

The Centurion Unfolds

Naturally enough, a reference to 80's-toys-become-2000's-movie-stars Transformers. What it folds out into, you'll see next episode.

Stickleback: London's Burning Part Two References

2010-01-11T20:43:00.005Z

Page One: Mister Peepers and Mister Lug Suddenly Appear

In my previous post I described how I'd forgotten to include Peepers and Lug with the rest of the gang - this episode they suddenly appear in the pit with everyone else. But what Tharg doesn't notice won't hurt him.

Page Two: Hardenbrook The Notary

Is named after the character played by veteran British actor Michael Gough in Tim Burton's 1999 film Sleepy Hollow. Ian asked me to make the character look like Michael Gough, but I'm not very good at likenesses, and luckily the demands of page layout meant the panel he appeared in was so small you couldn't make out his face anyway.

Page Three: "Hargreave"

Mr. Tickle's Christian name is a nod to Roger Hargreaves, creator of the Mister Men and Little Miss books.

Stickleback's Revolver

This unlikely-looking weapon is a LeMat revolver, an American Civil War side-arm that features a standard .42 or .36 revolver mechanism with a secondary 16 gauge barrel capable of firing buckshot (in other words, it's a big pistol with a small shotgun built into it).

The Countess's Boudoir

Since we wanted it to look futuristic (for the 19th century) the Countess's boudoir borrows from the design aesthetic of German Expressionist movies such as Fritz Lang's Metropolis.

The skull-shaped stand for her masks was inspired by the work of early 2000AD stalwart and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen artist Kev O'Neill.

The Countess's Mask

Surprisingly (since it appears more beautiful than monstrous) the Countess's mask here is based on the Medusa Rondanini, a famous marble sculpture of the Medusa's head. It is probably a Roman copy of a Greek work dating from the 5th Century BCE .

Xronia Pola!

2010-01-01T11:44:00.006Z

The Greeks use a ship as their symbol for Christmas; this one is on Aristotelou, Thessaloniki's main drag

(Belated) Merry Christmas and a happy new year! I'm just back from a trip to Xanthi in the far north of Greece. My belovèd, the polyglot Dr.F, taught English there in the 1990's, so we went up to spend Christmas with friends and to visit some of her old pupils. I have to say, I've rarely experienced such wonderful hospitality, and thanks are due to everyone who looked after us during our stay, particularly Sirmo and Niko, who put us up, ferried us around, and were incredibly patient with my minimal, stumbling Greek.

The picturesque old town of Xanthi

Situated up near the Bulgarian border, Xanthi normally suffers freezing winters, but this year it was unseasonably warm; this gave us the opportunity to alternate visiting friends and eating way too many kourambiedes with sitting outside cafés and eating way too many kourambiedes.

The shrine at Porto Lagos, just outside Xanthi

It's been so mild that we could comfortably sit out after dark; here I'm marking up the script for Stickleback part 11 at a café in the town square

The day before we left, it was so clear that you could see down to the Aegean from the mountains

Spekulatius

2009-12-21T15:31:00.002Z

The Germans call them Spekulatius, the Dutch and the French Spéculoos; poetically, we call them "Spiced Ginger Biscuits"

A quick reminder; if you have a Lidl supermarket anywhere near you, keep an eye out for Spekulatius (aka "Spiced Ginger Biscuits"). They're only available around Christmas, and they're absolutely delicious.

Stickleback: London's Burning Part 1 References

2009-12-13T19:33:00.016Z

Meet the gang 'cause the boys are here - Stickleback: London's Burning
Stickleback © 2009 Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Stickleback created by Ian Edginton & Me

Well, what goes around comes around, and after nearly two years, here comes the third series of Stickleback. As long-term readers of this blog will know, I put up a blog post for each episode of Stickleback, listing references and in-jokes that Ian and I pop into the backgrounds.

For anyone joining us for the first time, it's worth checking out my posts on Alberto Breccia, whose collage work inspired much of the unique look of Stickleback.

Page One: H Shand Butcher & Meat Packer

Harold Shand was the character played by Bobo Skins in John Mackenzie's epic 1982 gangster flick The Long Good Friday. In response to attacks on his business interests, Shand kidnaps a number of likely suspects and strings them up in an abattoir.

Page One: Damien Hirst Cow

The half-cow in the background of panel 4 is a tip of the hat to that most prominent of the Young British Artists, Damien Hirst, who is probably best known for his series of dead animals preserved in formaldehyde. As well as a cow, Hirst also created work using a sheep, and, most famously, a 14ft tiger shark.

Page One: Where's Mister Peepers & Mister Lug?

In the group shot on page one, I forgot to include Mister Peepers and Mister Lug. Watch them spring out of nowhere next episode!

Page Two: Wide Duchesses

Stickleback's cheery "Front and centre with the Wide Duchesses!" refers to the magical world of British roof slate sizing. Different sizes of slate (still measured in inches!) are given different titles; Duchesses, Marchionesses, Viscountesses and Ladies, often available in "wide" and "small." Check out this list for the full range.

Page Four: "Grouty"

Doubtless an ancestor of "Genial" Harry Grout, who by 1975 was running H. M. Prison Slade in Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais' classic BBC sitcom Porridge.
Played in fine menacing style by actor Peter Vaughan, "Genial" Harry Grout remains one of the best-remembered characters in the series, despite appearing in only three episodes.

Page Six: Mister Tickle Lives!

In the original plot outline for the previous series (Stickleback: England's Glory), Mister Tickle was slated to die horribly at the hands of the false Buffalo Bill during the final battle in Hyde Park. He survived only because both Ian and I forgot about him entirely, and by the time he was due to peg out it was a bit late to drag him in out of left field. We settled for cutting Black Bob's arms off instead.

Page Seven: "A Tug and a Tuck"

Although Ian does own dictionaries of archaic slang, he tells me that many of the fruitier turns of phrase (including this one) come off the top of his head.

Page Eight: Robo-Doxy

Anyone remember the exploding Robo-Cow, created by the late Professor Philo Thynne, in the second-ever episode of Stickleback: Mother London? Any similarities between that explosive ambush and this one are, shall we say, far from coincidental...

Page Ten: The Mistral

A slightly complicated one, this; our dirigible The Mistral is loosely based upon Robur's "rotorcraft" The Albatross from Jules Verne's 1886 novel Robur the Conqueror. That story follows much the same pattern as the better-known 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, except that Robur is an aeronaut rather than a submariner. In the book, The Albatross is a heavier-than-air craft supported by multiple propellers (a sort of early helicopter) with two large propellers front and back for propulsion. Early illustrations show it looking like a clipper ship with propellers on its masts instead of sails.

In 1961, the story was filmed as Master of the World, starring Vincent Price. Here The Albatross looks more like a standard dirigible, but with banks of rotors on the top side (and it is still described as being heavier than air). And just to complicate matters, Master of the World was also the title of Verne's 1904 sequel to Robur the Conqueror, in which The Albatross does not appear at all.

A curious aside: Wikipedia also records the supposed 19th-Century phenomenon of "mystery airship" sightings, similar in tone to the various waves of UFO sightings from the 1950's onwards.

Our Mistral is a dirigible which uses additional rotors for manoeuvrability and to support the weight of the huge mirror panels which can be rotated to make the ship virtually invisible from a distance. The notion of invisibility via mirrors is a lovely poetic conceit, but in practice, covering a dirigible in mirrors would turn it from a Big Obvious Thing into a Big Shiny Obvious Thing - assuming it could fly at all with the additional weight.
The wonderfully erudite Jess Nevins informs me that the concept of rendering things invisible through mirrors goes right back to the early pulp magazines:

"R. & C. Winthrop’s At War With The Invisible (Electrical Experimenter, Mar-Apr 1918) was set in the future–vicious Martians, sexy Venusians. The human narrator’s Venusian girlfriend has a bracelet whose tiny mirrors reflect light & create invisibility.
Frank Paul’s The Secret of Invisibility (Science and Invention, May 1922), featured wacky elderly inventor Dr. Hackensaw, who creates invisibility with mirrors.

Electrical Experimenter was widely read among sf fans and writers during that era, but Dr. Hackensaw was hugely popular (43 stories spread over four years), so it’s a toss-up as to which created the trope."

My guess is that Ian and I picked up the trope third- or fourth-hand from comics or TV series made in the 1960's - though specific examples escape me.

Bar-Bar-Bar, Barbarian

2009-10-01T17:29:00.012+01:00

Megalopolis: Thessaloniki, 2nd largest city in Greece

Matt the Barbarian, that's me.

Now, I know that probably paints a picture of me in horned helmet and loincloth, axe in hand, chain-mail-bikini clad vixen by my side. Fortunately, (or possibly unfortunately if you have very strange tastes) I'm merely a barbarian in the original sense of the word; one who does not speak Greek (literally, one who goes "blah-blah").

My new, enchantingly-lit workspace

The reason this arises is that I'm writing from our new apartment in Thessaloniki, in the north of Greece, where my belovèd, the polylinguistic Dr.F and I will be living until next July. Yes, we're off on another one of our jaunts (long-term readers of this blog will remember our stint in Edinburgh in 2006-7). We have high-ceilinged rooms with shuttered French windows that make the place look as if it was lit by Ridley Scott. We have oddly random light switches and the hot and cold taps in the kitchen are reversed. We have a container full of possessions in transit, so we're sort of camping out right now, but there is a bougatsa shop by the entrance to our building, a tiny gecko under the fridge and feral kittens living six stories below the rear balcony, so we don't care. We are in Greece.

The tiny gecko from under the fridge

Feral cats in the back yard

This is why I've been off the radar for a bit; we've had more than a week of Packing Hell (plus two days of travel during which we got about four hours sleep). I'll be doing my best to catch up soon, with emails, blog and yes, work Oh Mighty Tharg, but for the moment I thought I'd just check in from my sun-drenched eyrie and well... crow a bit.

Our first Greek coffee and the terrible nose-staining consequences thereof

Of course, I'm not a complete barbarian, since I've been taking classes to pound a little Greek into my poor 43-year-old brain (if you live in or around Nottingham and need to learn Greek, I thoroughly recommend studying with Larri Sideris), but at the moment my International Comedy Foreigner Skills are doing much of the work (unaided, I've succeeded in ordering food; buying bread, mobile phone top-up cards and a kettle; and persuading a fellow resident of our block that I'm not German!)

And anyway, Dr.F reminds me that in modern Greek it's "varvarous." So there you go, not a barbarian, just barbarous.

I'm off for some bougatsa. See you in the funny pages.

CAPTION 2009: Ten Years in the Digital World

2009-08-27T21:00:00.002+01:00

Nuala from Sandman: The Kindly Ones, a convention sketch for CAPTION 2009
Sandman © 2009 Vertigo/DC Comics
Sandman created by Neil Gaiman & Sam Keith

CAPTION has been and gone for another year; it's the 18th one, and it had its own cake to celebrate its coming of age (see my photos on Flickr).

Left: Digital "pencils" printed out in blue and (gasp) real inks! How very analogue!

Every year I produce a sketch for the CAPTION auction. These sketches are one of the few times each year I still produce finished artwork on paper, though even for this I "pencil" digitally and print the drawing out in pale blue for inking by hand. The fact that CAPTION has become a last outpost of my real-media output is really rather ironic, as ten years ago it marked my first steps into the world of pure digital production.

Back in 1999 I was working as a colourist for 2000AD using my rickety old Power Computing Mac clone. I'd been on a real shoestring budget when I bought that first computer kit, so I was forced to postpone buying a graphics tablet; I can't believe now that for my first eight months as a professional colourist I did everything with a mouse. By May 1999, I was doing well enough to consider getting a tablet, but wasn't sure if it was worth the outlay.

My first-ever try at drawing with a Wacom tablet - thanks to Jeremy Dennis for letting me play with her toys.

Luckily for me, my good friend, the small-press cartoonist Jeremy Dennis, owned exactly the model of Wacom tablet I was thinking of buying, and was willing to let me give hers a try. When you first try using a tablet, the business of having your hand down on the tablet, but whatever you're drawing appearing up on a screen in front of you, is very awkward and distracting (above, you can see one of the test scribbles I made at the time). I quickly dismissed the idea of doing precision drawing with the tablet, but reckoned that, with a little practice, it would be useful for adding highlights and shading when colouring. I bought an ADB Wacom Intuos I A5 tablet soon after, and within a few days it was starting to pay for itself in improved productivity and quality of work.

First attempt at inking, in Illustrator, over a scanned drawing (in red, on the left hand version).

After a few weeks of using the tablet on a daily basis for colouring, I was starting to become comfortable with it, and I decided to revisit the idea of drawing.
It occurred to me that previously I'd made the mistake of assuming I could just do a finished drawing straight off - without the equivalent of pencils - something I certainly couldn't do with an ordinary pen and paper. My first thought was to do a pencil drawing and trace it by laying it on the tablet (the translucent plastic cover over the working surface of the Wacom tablet even lifted up to help you do this). However, because the tablet was set to map its full area to the full area of the screen (and the screen had different proportions to the tablet), the resulting tracing was rather distorted. I could have fiddled with the mapping settings, but a better idea occurred to me: scan in the pencils, that way I could zoom in to the drawing for better control when inking fiddly fine details (see above). This worked so well that I started to realize I didn't need the scanned pencils - I could just do my "pencils" with the Wacom tablet too.

Mister Wingéd Frog here is my first attempt at a finished Wacom drawing - and done entirely in Illustrator from beginning to end.

My first all-digital drawing, shown here (left), was finished less than half an hour later. Daft as it looks, it was my first step into a new way of working. My professional life was about to change forever.

SpaceCAPTION:1999: The Frightwig Factor - three-page comic strip for the 1999 CAPTION small press convention booklet. This was the first complete strip I ever drew entirely on computer, using Adobe Illustrator 7 and an A5 Wacom Intuos 1 graphics tablet. Click on the pages to view a readable version on Flickr.

By the summer of 1999, I'd been playing around with drawing in Adobe Illustrator, and my co-ordination with the tablet was improving with every drawing. With the new millennium coming up, there was very much a sense of living in the future (at least the future presented to us in our childhood TV shows). With that in mind, that year's CAPTION small-press comic convention was christened SpaceCAPTION:1999 (in honour of Gerry Anderson's 1975 TV series Space:1999 in particular and all things retro-futuristic in general.) I decided it would be fun to contribute a short strip that mixed the real contributors to CAPTION with the fictional world of Space:1999. And in the spirit of futurism, I'd make it my first all-digital strip.

Left: this part-finished page includes my first attempts at building perspective grids using the blend tool in Adobe Illustrator.

So off I set, armed with my trusty tablet, a copy of Adobe Illustrator 7, and a grim determination. I was working all day every day on colouring, so I'd get up an hour early to do a panel or so each morning before work. My main memory of the strip is sitting in my workroom with a flood of early morning sunshine filtering through the drawn curtains, feeling this sense of intense excitement, of new possibilities opening up before me as I drew.

The alien spacecraft, constructed in Ray Dream Studio 3D. I returned to this technique 5 years later for Scarlet Traces: The Great Game and still use 3D models for reference.

What surprises me, looking at these pages again, is how much of my computer-drawing technique was in place from day one; the rough pencils for page three (above left) shows me already trying to build perspective grids using Illustrator's Blend tool. On page two the Eagle spacecraft was traced from a scanned photo from an old annual (I was on a 28k dial-up Internet connection in those days, so no Google image search!). On page one panel four the alien spacecraft was assembled a 3D application (Ray Dream Studio, the grandaddy of the Carrara application I use today), rendered and placed beneath the page for tracing (see above).

Ten years on, with over 700 pages of digital art under my belt, it does me good to remember the excitement I felt in those early days. I keep trying to shake things up and find new ways of working, but for me there'll probably never be another such revolutionary shift in working methods.

I'm not and never have said "this is the future" for everyone; working digitally solved and awful lot of problems for me, many of which were to do with poor hand-to-eye co-ordination; most other artists will never have need of the solutions I found. But it's wonderful to think of the things that are still out there to explore, and exciting to see the discoveries others have made on the way.

See you in the funny pages.

Congratulations!

2009-08-05T14:56:00.007+01:00

"Os-cul-ate! Os-cul-ate!"
(Dalek styling by Dr. F.)

Many of you out there will know my old mate Jeremy Dennis as a talented comic artist, a tireless supporter of the UK small press scene, and one of the founders of the CAPTION comic convention in Oxford. Well this weekend she wed the lucky Mr. Tim Day in a ceremony that included page boys in dinosuar outfits and a cake in the shape of that never-built masterpiece of Russian Constructivist architecture, The Tatlin Tower.

I wanted to wish the happy couple all the very best, and say thankyou for inviting me to photograph the event. I'm desperately processing the shots between work and posting them to my Flickr account.

MacFormat and the 25% Kirby Palette

2009-07-31T19:27:00.010+01:00

One of my illustrations for the article "Macs of the Future" in this month's MacFormat magazine.

I'm pleased to announce that I've got some illustrations in this month's MacFormat magazine (Issue 210, July 2009). I have a real soft spot for MacFormat, as it was through their reviews section that I picked all the gear for my original Mac set-up back in 1997. The illustrations, for an article called "Macs of the Future," are intended as a pastiche of all those great old Jack Kirby "cosmic" comics, with a mix of retro 50's-style design and stuff made of Mac components (the spaceship top left of the illustration above is made of iPods, Mighty Mice and one of the old dreaded "hockey puck" mice from the late 90's (hated by many but which which I personally loved).

To help enhance the retro feel I used a home-made Photoshop swatch set based on 25% increments of yellow, cyan and magenta - for the non-technically minded, this gives you 125 colours to play with, the same ones that were available to the colourists at Marvel in the 1960's and 70's. I set myself the rule of only using colours from this palette, no mixing allowed (though I may have cheated with the "colour hold" (coloured outlines) on the astronaut's helmet.)

125 sounds like a lot, but actually, if you want, say three different pale greens, your choices are strictly limited. The funny thing is, the smaller number of options was liberating; without eight different pale greens to dither amongst, you just have to get on with what you've got. The result is, I'm going to try using this palette as the basis for my next colouring job (though I will allow myself to mix colours where necessary.) That may be a while though; at the moment I'm firmly rooted in black & white-ville, working on Stickleback.

Meantime, for anyone who fancies trying it, I'm making the 25% palette available for download. All the colours in the palette are print-safe, and, except for the set of greys on the first line, contain no black, so they will leave the black channel clear if used in a CMYK document.

Mac have withdrawn the option to make or edit download pages, so to download use the following link:

25% Palette.aco download

If you don't know how to install Photoshop swatch files, follow these instructions:

1) In Photoshop go to the Swatches Palette (use Window: Swatches if it's not visible). Click on the drop-down list icon at the top-right of the palette.

2) From the drop-down list, pick Load Swatches... and navigate to the 25_Comics_Swatches.aco file on your hard drive. Pick it and click OK.

This will add the new swatches to the end of your existing swatch set (you may have to scroll down to find them). If you want the new swatches only, you can use Replace Swatches... but note that THIS WILL OVER-WRITE YOUR EXISTING SWATCH SET. If you're using Replace Swatches I thoroughly recommend saving your old swatch set first (using Save Swatches... naturally.)

Finally, if you want to get rid of individual swatch tiles, or move them around, try using the Preset Manager (visible in the list just above Reset Swatches...). Don't forget to save your swatches after you've made any changes - otherwise you'll lose the work you've put in if Photoshop crashes.

Asylum 10th Anniversary Signing

2009-07-21T19:48:00.007+01:00

Asylum Books & Games, still with the "temporary" shop sign I painted onto the window back at the opening in 1999.

Just back from a trip to sunny Aberdeen for the party and signing to celebrate the the 10th anniversary of my old mate Mike McLean's shop Asylum Books and Games.

Left: Mike & Marie McLean. The yellow suit is nicknamed "The WMD."

Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with Mike from his various cameos in my comics; he's turned up in everything from Lazarus Churchyard to Stickleback, and even had his own Tale of the Leviathan in 2000AD. We've been mates for the better part of 12 years now, despite my drawing him as everything from a seedy strip-club punter through alien sex fiend to bomb-wielding anarchist!

Anyway, thanks to everyone for a whale of a time, and for coming up with such interesting stuff to draw (Storm from X-Men as a guinea pig is still my favourite, narrowly pipping Blood-soaked Budgerigar).

Storm from X-Men as a Guinea-pig. Freakish and wrong, but I did it anyway.

Click on the photos to see the set full-size on Flickr.

I asked permission to Blog these, but if you'd rather your picture was taken down, just let me know and I'll remove it.

2-D Festival, Derry

2009-06-29T14:10:00.009+01:00

Derry seen from the river Foyle

Thanks to David Campbell and everyone else at Derry for the marvellous week I spent at the 2D comics festival. 2D was organized on a European-style pattern; there were classes, workshops and lectures during the week, with a more familiar UK-style comic event (with traders and guests sketching) at the weekend. The pace was relaxed, the hospitality excellent, the ice-cream beyond belief; there was even random dancing in the street when the evening got a little chilly (though sadly, no photos thereof).

I missed quite a few people this trip, but here are (top row) Aaron with Lazarus Churchyard, Aaron with Batman, (bottom row) Eddie with a bear from Kingdom of the Wicked and Paul with a Death from Sandman.

I asked permission to Blog these, but if you'd rather your picture was taken down, just let me know and I'll remove it.

Reservoir Dogs: guests Gary Leach, Rufus Dayglo and Declan Shalvey all argue over who gets to be Mister Black while organiser David Campbell looks on. Meanwhile, I walk backwards into a bollard.

Gary Leach & Rufus Dayglo sifting the hundreds of entries for the 2D schools competition.

The guest artists sketching for the crowds on the Saturday.

I struggle with a particularly thorny problem of anatomy while sketching.

2D included activities for children, such as the Monster Drawing Wall

The event was covered by BBC radio and documentary film makers.

2D is a relaxed, informal event in which fans get the chance to mix with creators - even international stars such as Bryan Talbot and David Lloyd - in a way not possible in the bigger mainland events.

Mike Collins explains to Bridgeen Gillespie and Bryan Talbot how he once nearly had the Cosmic Cube in his grasp.

"You won't put that on your blog, will you?"
"No, no Declan, of course I won't."

The full set of photos from 2D is available to view on Flickr.

Torchwood: Rift War Signing at Forbidden Planet London

2009-06-29T13:32:00.004+01:00

A mere two months late I bring you photos of the Torchwood: Rift War signing at Forbidden Planet on April 25th. This was a big deal for me in two ways; first, it was my first signing at the London FP, a store I remember from its first incarnation on Denmark Street in the early 80's. Second, it was wonderful to be signing alongside such luminaries as Simon Furman and Paul Grist.

From left to right: Simon Furman, Brian Williamson, Paul Grist, Me, Ian Edginton
Photo by Joel Meadows.

Someone brought in a copy of my earliest professional strip, from Heartbreak Hotel (1988)

Defacing Bruce's copy of Absolute Sandman.

And then there was Bruce. Bruce has to be mentioned. There's a fine line between bravery and foolhardiness, and that's where Bruce lives, right out on the edge. Yes, Bruce got me to sketch in the flyleaf of his copy of Absolute Sandman - in ink.

Bruce with his defaced copy of Absolute Sandman.
Tiene cojones de acero, mis amigos.

Back From The Void

2009-06-25T18:45:00.000+01:00

Back at last - though I've had plenty to post about, I've been distracted from the old bloggery-pokery by a combination of the following:

Starting Stickleback series 3: London's Burning.

The new series is, I believe, due to premier this December in Prog 2010. I'm (bunking off) drawing part 4 of 12 as I write.

Mike Collins & me, cruisin' the M25

Travellin' About

I've been a guest at the 2D Comics Festival in Derry, Northern Island, and also just come back from London, where a group of us were marking the passing of comics polymath Steve Whitaker.

Black Straw Snoot Grids: They're a kind of sickness with me

Making Black Straw Snoot Grids

In theory this will one day help me photograph Daleks better, but in truth it's just compulsive displacement activity. I think I've got it under control now.

Rotring Art Pens: Getting Them Going

2009-05-17T17:35:00.005+01:00

One of my sets of Rotring Artpens, marked with red electrical tape to show they're loaded with permanent ink.

I really love Rotring Artpens, albeit in a Platonic way; I've used them as my main tool for sketching and page layout work for more than twenty years. I like them so much I own two full sets of the drawing nibs (EF, F, M and B) - one set filled with permanent Rotring Artpen ink, the other with ordinary non-permanent fountain-pen ink.

My one bugbear with Artpens (aside from the fact that the caps on the new ones no longer plug onto the end of the barrels, leaving them wandering about to get lost while you're drawing) is their tendency to dry out. I'm not a complusive sketcher by any means, so I can easily go six weeks between sessions, and a common experience on breaking my Artpens out after such a period of inactivity was to find at least one of them hopelessly dried out. Bringing the pen back from the dead would usually mean half a swearing-hour* spent running hot water through the nib and then endlessly blotting to try and get the dried ink out.

Imagine my delight-crossed-with annoyance when, after twenty years of such tomfoolery, I discovered a simple answer to the problem; just dip the end of the nib in water for a few seconds until ink starts to pool in the water, then scribble on a piece of paper to get the pen going. The ink will come through highly dilute at first, but will soon darken to black. A really recalcitrant nib might take two or three goes, but on the whole, I can get any one of my pens running in under a minute.

You don't even need much water for the operation; old bottle-caps take just the right amount, and are handy to carry if you're sketching on the move.

Originally, I wasn't going to bother publishing this discovery, as it seemed so obvious I assumed I was the only one who had missed it. However, at Bristol I got talking to a group of fellow artists, all of whom had this trouble with Artpens and none of whom knew this method., so I hope it's worth mentioning.

*Swearing-hour: measurement of the time spent trying to get anything to work. Most often applied to new pieces of technology or software. Other units of time may also be employed to describe longer or shorter periods; as in "my first computer took two full swearing-weeks to set up, but the new one took only five swearing-minutes!"

UPDATE: though I haven't reied this myself, an anonymous poster tells me that Noodler's Ink is supposed to be very good for Artpens, being both black and non-clogging.

Change to Blog Comments

2009-05-13T19:15:00.002+01:00

I've been having a lot of spam comments recently (mostly ads for online gaming with a few porn links thrown in), so with some reluctance I'm moving over to moderating comments in advance. I feel driven to it after losing the better part of an hour rooting out spam, and I'm still nowhere near getting all of it.

The change will slow down how quickly comments appear (especially when I'm away from home), but it should allow me to prevent this stuff clogging up the comments pages.

Thanks in advance for your patience.

Sketches From Bristol

2009-05-12T14:53:00.004+01:00

The Ramada Plaza Hotel, site of Bristol Comics Expo 2009

Just back from the Bristol Expo; a fantastic weekend, tiring but real fun, and wonderful to see so many familiar faces despite the credit crunch and the scaling back of this year's event. Thanks to everyone who came to get a sketch; this year for the first time I made more from paid sketches than I did from sales of books. Sleep proudly in your beds, o sketchees, knowing that you've helped to secure a crust or two of my imaginary starving orphaned children.

I'll post more photos from Bristol in the next few days.

I think this is everyone except for one girl I missed, just after Richard, the lad with the Nightcrawler sketch. Click on the photos to see the set full-size on Flickr.

I asked permission to Blog these, but if you'd rather your picture was taken down, just let me know and I'll remove it.

I've titled the photos based on names (if I know them or can read them from the dedications) or, failing that, the subject of the sketch. If you spot an error, leave a comment of the photo page on Flickr and I'll sort it out.

Adrian Kermode RIP

2009-05-03T12:48:00.007+01:00

Adrian Kermode at Bristol in 2001, the night before he won a National Comics Award

I've just received the terrible news that Adrian Kermode has passed away. A comics writer and regular of the UK comics scene in the early 2000's, "Ady" will be remembered by his friends for his warmth, wit, and ribald sense of humour.

Ady is probably best known for his collaboration with artist Terry Wiley on the series Petra Etcetera. A sequel of sorts to the highly-regarded series Tales of Sleaze Castle created by Dave McKinnon and Terry Wiley, Petra Etcetera cut out the fantasy elements of Sleaze Castle, concentrating instead on real-world characters and settings. Ady's writing style fit the material perfectly, so that Petra Etcetera won the National Comics Award for Best Independent British Comic in 2001, and was nominated again in 2002. He was also a contributor to Selina Locke's anthology title The Girly Comic.

Left: Cover to Doctor Sorrow: The Crystal Skull Caper (art by me)
Right: Cover to Deadman & Hyde (art by Kieran McKeown, colouring by me)
Doctor Sorrow © 2003 Adrian Kermode & Mike Juniper.
Deadman & Hyde © 2004 Adrian Kermode & Kieran McKeown.

Following his success with Petra, Ady's interests turned towards the horror/action genre. I was lucky enough to work with him twice during this period, producing a publicity image and a cover for Doctor Sorrow: The Crystal Skull Caper (2002) and colouring the cover art for Deadman and Hyde (2004), both published under his own Charaydis Press imprint.

Sadly, in the last few years the demands of Ady's civil service career effectively put an end to his writing. He'll be sorely missed by his many friends. Our sympathies go out to his family, his partner Debs and her daughter Frankie.

Spring Is Sprung!

2009-04-21T18:49:00.003+01:00

Lucky the Half-Face cat from 2004

This year's first sighting of Lucky the Half-Face Cat means it's officially the first day of spring here on D'Blog of 'Israeli. I spotted him asleep on top of a car in the drive of (what I think is) his home while on my way to the shops. He was a bit too distant to photograph, so here's a shot of him from 2004.

Lowlife: Creation Part Eight Cover: It's The Little Things That Count

2009-04-17T10:19:00.003+01:00

Cover for 2000AD Prog 1631 by me, with design work by Simon Parr
Lowlife characters and 2000AD logo © 2009 Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Lowlife created by Rob Williams and Henry Flint

I'm running late anyway, but I want to wait a bit before writing about the last episode of Lowlife: Creation to avoid spoilers; besides, I have something else I want to talk about this time.

I'd like to pay tribute to designer Simon Parr, whose work (credited to editorial droid "Pye-01") has been gracing 2000AD for some years now. For an artist, 2000AD is a bit of a dream job as far as covers go anyway - they have a policy of fitting cover text to the drawing, meaning that they'll leave out text if the cover design fills the space (so you're not having to leave blocks of random space in the drawing for cover text), and the logo's quite small and neatly tucked away, too - but a good designer still makes all the difference to the finished product.

Take the above cover - a stained-glass window motif suggested by Tharg-in-residence matt Smith. Simon requested a sample of the stained-glass background pattern I'd used in the illustration, applying it not only to the main 2000AD logo, but also dropping it into the red areas of the small 2000AD badge (top left) and behind the text on the issue number box (top right). Neat little touches like that really help to pull the design together; the smart use of the stained glass texture helps the whole cover to feel like a stained glass window without affecting the legibility of the small text.

So next time you look at any comic cover, take a moment to appreciate the effort that's gone into it, not only by the artist but also editor and the designer. The editor usually supplies the basic cover idea, and the designer's job includes choice of fonts, positioning of text, colour schemes that match or contrast with the illustration, and careful use of masking (effectively "cutting out" bits of text or logo so that parts of the illustration seem to fall in front of them). All these things take time and thought, and can have a big effect on the impact of the finished product.

Myself, I never find cover designs easy, so I find it incredibly helpful to have positive guidance from my editor and the support of a good designer. I've been very lucky to find that at several times in my career (I've previously thanked editor Dave Land and designer Amy Arendts for their sterling work on the graphic novels Ian Edginton and I produce for Dark Horse), and I'm glad to have it at 2000AD. Thanks for making me look good, guys.

Lowlife: Creation Part Seven: Work-Life Balance

2009-04-08T18:05:00.005+01:00

One of the perks of the job: I do my page layouts in the local café

I've talked before about loving the lifestyle of a comic artist. You certainly wouldn't do it just for the money, at least not at my end of the market. Not that I'm complaining about how much I make relative to others in comics, it's just that from a financial point of view, almost any other form of illustration pays better for the number of hours worked.

So why do it? I love storytelling, I love world-building, and yes, I love the connection with an art form that's captivated me since childhood. Comics are cheap to produce and so offer the creator the possibility of total control. I used to say I could spin a whole world out of a few pounds worth of paper and ink; these days a Mac, a Wacom tablet and the necessary software pushes that budget up a bit, but still, the principle holds. Even on high-profile work for 2000AD, I enjoy a surprising amount of control over what I do; as an artist I have to follow the writer's script, but within that I'm free to make decisions about page layout, framing and viewpoint. 2000AD editorial has always been very hands-off - unlike many other publishers, they don't demand to see roughs or pencils; they just send me the scripts and I deliver the artwork.

The various stages of a comic panel. I know exactly how long I should be taking on each of these steps
Lowlife: Creation © 2009 Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Lowlife created by Rob Williams and Henry Flint

One great thing about the freelance life is that no-one cares how, when or where you work, so long as you deliver the goods on time. It does require a certain discipline, though. I always keep careful track of each job, sub-dividing it into different tasks (roughs, pencils, inks etc) and giving each task a sub-deadline within the overall schedule. So when I start work each day I'll know how much I should have completed by the time I break for lunch, and how much needs doing in the afternoon and evening. This kind of breakdown has a further benefit; it means I never need look more than a few hours ahead, which is useful when I'm starting a long project. If, at the start of the first episode, I'd really thought about the amount of work required to finish Lowlife: Creation, I'd have found it more than a bit off-putting, even with twenty years experience under my belt.

Something I've started looking at recently is the timing of my day. When I first began life as a comic artist I was dependent on my family to help support me, and one strategy for persuading them I was serious about my bizarre choice of career was by starting my day at 6am. Though there's no real logic to it, there's an unbreakable association between hard work and starting early. When you get up for work and discover your offspring has been up for a couple of hours already, it creates a strong positive impression.
The problem came once I became established; there was no longer a need to impress anyone, but despite my hatred of early starts, I was hooked on them - at least, I found I didn't get anything done if I woke at a more reasonable hour. Winters were horrendous because I'd get up every morning to 2-3 hours of cold and blackness. Also, even starting at 6am, I found I couldn't get to sleep before midnight, limiting me to 6 hours sleep a night, which I had to augment with siestas to keep myself going.
Finally, I took myself in hand, largely because I was feeling permanently tired, and now that I'm past 40, living in a constant state of sleep-deprived stress was seeming more and more like a bad idea (the number of comic artists from earlier generations who pegged out at their drawing boards in their 50's is truly frightening.)

So, starting in January I made a concerted effort to shift my day round to a schedule that suits my body clock, and to get eight hours sleep a night. I now get up between nine and ten every day and work until at least 1.30am. Much to my surprise, I'm keeping on top of the work, and feeling much better for it (in January I was losing an hour's daylight by getting up later, but the morale-boosting effect of getting up in daylight was incalculable). There are a few drawbacks - losing another two hours a day to sleep constrains activities like blogging and Dalek photography, and it's not that much fun going back to work at 11pm when your body's telling you to go to bed - but still, I feel better in myself and there is a deep satisfaction, after twenty years, in finally getting to live the bohemian lifestyle :-)

Lowlife: Creation Part Six: They'll Need A Crane

2009-04-06T10:29:00.001+01:00

Lowlife: Creation part six page one. This panel contained a couple of tricky compositional problems.
Lowlife © 2009 Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Lowlife created by Rob Williams and Henry Flint

One of the best compliments I've ever received was when Rob Williams told me that he'd ramped up the scale of the action in Lowlife: Creation once he knew I was onboard as artist. A tribute to my mighty powers, I preened to myself, before it dawned on me this actually meant Drawing Lots Of Difficult Stuff.
Now, before I get too far into the business of bitching about the difficulties of drawing, I want to make a couple of things clear; first, I do appreciate how mind-buggeringly lucky I am to make a living doing the thing I love, so I'm not in any way trying to plead that I have a hard life being made to do drawy stuff of any kind.
The second thing is that a good comics writer will play to an artist's strengths and push them farther. In some ways it's like the relationship between coach and athlete - the coach can push the athlete to heights he'd never reach on his own. Given my interest in world-building, that usually means that a good script will involve drawing something very complex - a whole cityscape, say - or present a technical challenge in terms of perspective or storytelling (or both). Some the best-remembered pages in my career have come from pages of script that made me say "Merde alors!* How the hootin' heck am I going to draw that?" on first reading.

*Yes, I really do say "Merde alors."

Pencils for panel one showing duplicated angels
Lowlife © 2009 Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Lowlife created by Rob Williams and Henry Flint

With panel one of part six, the problem was the host of angels in the sky. Rob's script had them hanging there "spaced out evenly," which is a bit trickier than having them in flocks. It did sort out the question of viewpoint, though. If the angels are all floating up on roughly the same plane, we have to be up there near them, otherwise you won't be able to tell what they are (the scale of Mega-City architecture is so great that they'd just look like glowing pinpricks from close to the surface of the water).
I decided to have one big panel where you get a really good look at the angels. That would be the reference shot, and after that I could exploit the scale of the city and just show them as a grid of squiggly dots in the sky. The first drawing decodes the later ones.

Drawing Multiple Angels in Adobe Illustrator

1) Pencil an angel

2) Duplicate and scale to make smaller background figure

3) Duplicate background figure

4) Use Free Transform tool to add perspective

5) Use Blend tool to create intermediate figures
(To make this work at home, before using the blend tool you must first select the two outer figures individually and group the lines within each of them (but don't group the two outer figures together!). If the angels aren't grouped, the Blend Tool will just blend between a single line in each angel (or fail to work at all). You must also click on exactly the same point on both angels when using the Blend tool - picking a wingtip or other prominent point is the best bet.

To speed up the process of drawing multiple angels, I "pencilled" the closest one in detail on a layer in Illustrator. I put two copies of this figure onto an underlying layer and scaled them down a little, positioning them on opposite sides of the page. Then I used Illustrator's Free Transform tool to distort them slightly to obey the perspective grid for the panel (see illustration above). I repeated this process several times, generating five layers of angels, each one smaller than the one above, each one with two figures at the far left and right of the page. I made sure they all lined up to the perspective grid (for the technically minded, they all cross the eye-line at mid-thigh) so they all look like they're occupying right positions in 3D space.
The next bit was a massive cheaty cheat; using Illustrator's Blend tool, I generated multiple copies between the two angels on each layer. I made more copies of the distant angels and fewer of the closer ones. You can tweak the number of copies generated by the blend, so I played about a bit until the lines of Angels looked right.
Then I gritted my teeth and inked them all by hand, adding little individual variations and tweaking the drawing where the Free Transform distortion didn't look quite right. Technology can only do so much.

The finished version of page four panel two. The poses of the figures on the raft were borrowed from Gericault's painting The Raft of the Medusa (below left).
Lowlife © 2009 Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Lowlife created by Rob Williams and Henry Flint

The "enormo-crane" on page three was a different challenge; although it's a relatively simple shape, it's made up of complex girder-work, and I wanted that to look spot-on in perspective. The simplest solution was to build a 3D model to trace from.

Left: Gericault's Raft of the Medusa, used as reference for the figures on the raft (above)

After combing Google for picture reference, I did a few preparatory sketches, opting for a beefed-up design that was like two current-day cranes strapped side-to-side. If I'd been drawing a Mega-City construction scene I'd have gone for some sort of robot arm arrangement for lifting materials, but as we were seeing the crane without a context I opted for a recognizable design.

The "enormo-crane" modelled in Carrara 3D. I was able to quickly assemble the girder-work by drawing it in Illustrator and importing it into Carrara.
Lowlife © 2009 Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Lowlife created by Rob Williams and Henry Flint

Building such a structure wasn't as difficult as it might seem; my 3D program, Carrara, lets me import Illustrator files, so I drew the base, top, side and end of the girder-work in Illustrator and then imported them into Carrara to extrude them into 3D objects. Once I'd made one girder-work object, I just duplicated it as many times as needed (the front arms, rear arms and supporting column are all made of copies of the same girder-section at different scales). If I'd been building the model to be used in its own right, I'd have taken a more subtle approach, but since it was just for picture reference I didn't need to be too precious.
The most difficult bit for me was making the curvy counterbalancing arms on the sides. I tried using a 3D application called Hexagon for that, and it took me ages, with lots of false starts. I don't think Hexagon is that hard to use, but it was my first try, and 3D programs are notorious for their steep learning curves.

Pencils showing the placed crane render and the various perspective grids, including a special one for the angels in the sky.
Lowlife © 2009 Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Lowlife created by Rob Williams and Henry Flint

In the end, I spent most of a day on the thing. I don't think it made the drawing any quicker, but I do think it made the crane look more convincing. As with all this sort of reference, I screen-grabbed a shot from the Carrara interface, imported it into Illustrator, and used it to establish the perspective for the rest of the drawing. A tip for anyone trying this technique: when you're setting up your camera in the 3D program, have your page roughs to hand and set up the angles according to those. It saves an awful lot of false starts.
In the end, the 3D approach also turned out to be very helpful with my next problem...

The finished article. With such distorted perspective and so much detail, it was a struggle to make the storytelling clear.
Lowlife © 2009 Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Lowlife created by Rob Williams and Henry Flint

The last three panels of the strip were a particular challenge. Superficially simple-sounding (three repeat panels mean less work, right?), the problem was one of angle and point of view. The panels descriptions required being able to see straight out along the crane arm and straight down at the same time. An extreme wide-angle perspective was needed.
This isn't too difficult to construct; for three-point perspective you place the vanishing points very close to (or even inside) the panel borders, then follow the rules of perspective. This will produce massive distortions towards the corners of the frame, so the trick is to hold your nerve when the drawing starts looking weird. About half-way through, you'll be convinced the drawing has gone horribly wrong, but if you keep following the perspective, the final distortion will look believable.
Of course, I had to fit my 3D model into the composition. I was a bit worried, as I remembered that Carrara only supported cameras with a wide-angle up to 24mm (not nearly enough for what I had in mind). Happily, it turned out I was remembering a old version of the application; a recent upgrade allowed cameras down to an extreme wide-angle of 6mm. After a little experimenting, I found 15mm gave me the perspective I was looking for.

Pencils for the last three panels of page five. The complex perspective was based on a render from the crane model in Carrara (placed into panel 1 & 2 and also below left). Panel 3 is left empty at this stage as the background from panel two will be copied into it.
Lowlife © 2009 Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Lowlife created by Rob Williams and Henry Flint

I rendered the scene in two versions, both containing a deformed plane to represent the broken billboard and round-ended cylinder as a placeholder for the building supporting the billboard. The first render also had a plane representing the water-level. The plane was covered in a chequer pattern, to help me work out the perspective of the scene.

Left: 3D renders for panels 1 & 2

I placed the renders into Illustrator and built perspective grids from them. The grids were all on separate layers so I could show and hide them as needed. From these I did rough pencils of the cityscape and the figure of Frank (see above). I didn't bother filling in the background to panel 3, as I was just going to copy panel 2 into it.

Left: The last panel as it appeared in Illustrator. Frank's silhouette is actually in there, but you have to look closely.
Right: Post-processing in Photoshop included a lot of work to pull forward the figures of Frank and the guys on the raft (the small dots down on the vanishing point).
Lowlife © 2009 Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Lowlife created by Rob Williams and Henry Flint

I drew the backgrounds and the foreground figures of Frank and the guys on the raft separately. This has one big disadvantage - when I draw a figure and a background together, I automatically "thin out" the backgrounds around foreground figures, making them stand out. When the foregrounds are done separately, the backgrounds can easily overwhelm them - especially in this case, when the foreground figures are tiny and the backgrounds are very detailed.
In Lowlife, I do a fair amount of post-processing to the drawings on Photoshop, adding textures and grime. In these panels I also spent a fair amount of effort putting haloes round the figures and otherwise fading down the backgrounds so as to make the figures stand out (you can see the difference in the two panels above). A technical problem had become a storytelling one.

In the end I'm not sure about the clarity of these panels. It's one of the few cases where I've felt constrained by the low page-count of 2000AD episodes; in a 20-page US comic we'd have been able to devote a page or maybe two to the sequence and make it all much clearer.