Get outta bed, your son needs to be let out to take an eight foot crap

Another shamelessly recycled strip, and another shameless plug for the Something Wicked omnibus from FutureQuake Press - containing 140 pages of terrible tales of terror to terrify for two pounds - to go with it.

Hashtag the Hell out of him

I didn't want to run this bit of filler for reasons that I would hope would be plainly obvious to those with functioning eyes and a basic knowledge of how things like art and lettering are supposed to work, but I don't have anything else to run in its place so here we are.  Written by Al Ewing before he started slumming it writing Judge Dredd and Avengers comics for money so he could finally do all those things he'd dreamed of like eating each day, if I had half an ounce of sense I'd try and pass off my contribution as the result of this being done back in 1978 or something, but instead I must cop to it being a more recent 2007-ish vintage so you can at least believe I've wised up a bit.
Should you against all reason still want to see artwork by the person who committed the above, it can be found in the Something Wicked omnibus from FutureQuake Press for e-readers and tablets, and which includes much-better illustrated stories written by Al, such as personal favorite The Big If, a neat alternate history tale for anyone with a passing knowledge of the American comic book scares of the 1950s, though it also works just as well if you know Fanny Adams about such things.

Who better than an accupuncturist... TO KILL WITH ACCURATE PUNCTURES?

Another old strip - also scripted by writing machine Lee Robson - just to keep the Halloween thing going.
If you liked this, why not buy some more of its ilk from FutureQuake Press?  We promise we won't hold it against you if you do.

If I cannot forget that, I shall not be able to sleep again

 

I haven't actually posted this before, so this is likely the first of many appearances it will make: presenting another spooOOooOOooky tale for Halloween, The Thing in the Window was written up by my writing mule Lee Robson when I was between drawing gigs, and is so frightening it made me never want to use Adobe Photoshop for art ever again.  Okay, admittedly that might have had just as much to do with the fact that Manga Studio has some purdy line correction options built into the pen tool for use with vector layers that practically draws things for you and makes mistakes look like part of your artwork - you can see the attraction of that from my point of view.  This is the story that killed bitmaps, I guess, but if you liked it and would like to see more from Lee and myself , check out the Something Wicked omnibus collection for e-readers like iPad and Android - though I guess it'll work on Kindle, too, as long as you don't mind contributing to the destruction of digital comics distribution, the bullying of authors, tax dodging, and the erosion of workers' rights.

We both know I'm borderline creepy

My recycling old strips as blog filler is something regular readers are well-used to by now (yes, I do have regular readers - I'm likely more surprised at this than you are), but on this occasion it's all in a good promotional cause, as FutureQuake Press have released a Something Wicked omnibus for digital readers, featuring artwork such as that above - that I would rather never have seen the light of day ever again but hey at least it's not the werewolf story - and also some much more assured contributions from others too numerous to copy and paste here, many of whom went on to stuff like 2000ad and some monthly with the word "Avengers" in the title put out by indy auteurs Marvel leaving their lazier small press comrades like me scratching our bollocks and wondering where we went wrong in our lives.
140 superhero-free pages of original content for 2 pounds could only be better value if they were giving it away, but we aren't communists yet so dig deep and help support independent comics this Halloween!  Alternatively, anti-democratic tax-dodging slave-driving multinational Amazon probably have some Batman graphic novels you could buy for around the same price, which I am sure is exactly the same thing.

Johnny talks big, but the worst thing I've ever seen him do is strangle a horse

Originally appearing in FutureQuake's 15th issue in 2009 (long since sold out and not available for digital download, sadly) alongside stellar work from up-and-comers like George Coleman, Gibson Quarter, Mark Howard and Adrian Bamforth, Dan Hill's Edge of Creation was around the time I was finally twigging that photoshop's many grey tones, filters, and the burning/lightening tools were not my friends and I needed to learn to draw better in black and white.  Clearly I didn't quite manage a clean break until much later, and I think the lettering is eye-strainingly small - there are other pages on my old pc which seem slightly different and I think I actually did the lettering even smaller - so I did at least learn to use a larger font size in future even if it left much less room for the art, though I got lucky with FQ's larger A4 format pages and these were perfectly legible when they saw print.
I think I just went "eff it" with some of the art, too, particularly background details in the medieval panels, so not my best work, but a helpful learning experience.  Thanks as ever go to FQ's commissioning editors and hetero life partners Dave "Birmingham is a real place" Evans and Richmond "I smell the blood of human beings" Clements for making it happen.

Saturday 12th September 2009

Searching my pc for the damned elusive files of previously completed pages of the GN, I came across the roughs for a FutureQuake strip I recently drew (and which appears in screen-grabs in some of the blog's earlier posts if you check them out), but which got bumped from the next issue for space reasons - no biggie to me, it means the FQ lads at least have a surplus of material. It shows the rough working process I'm trying to stick to at the moment:
1) a rough thumbnail of the page layout and any details I might need to remember come the scribbling stages (textures to sample, lighting effects to use, visuals to reference, etc). This went to the writer Dan Hill and he was happy enough with the layout, so I sent him a rough version of--
2) the lettered page (as I was doing the letters, too). Dan suggested some changes in caption placement and breaking down the bigger boxes across larger panels, so I went away and somewhere along the line came--
3) the finished art. There was a lot more to this part of the process, actually, as I scribble the page a couple of times, first as thumbnails, then as rough art. I wouldn't call it the 'pencil stage' as I don't have the room to pencil a full A3 page at home at the minute - space has always been a bother in that regard - and instead do the rough 'pencils' entirely on the PC. I'll maybe do another pass over that stage of the work, then a final version, wiping out the older versions once I'm done with them as any files over 30mb tend to make my PC agonisingly slow and prone to crashing - I probably should upgrade to something decent. Then--
4) I just bung a copy of the line art onto the separate file I did the letters on earlier. You can see the changes Dan suggested in this final version of the page, which is what went to FQ - sans credit box, which is dropped onto the pages by comics-producing machine Dave Evans, who does so much for the small press that I feel guilty if I don't personally letter anything I send his way so he doesn't have to waste time on it himself.

Strange but true - the rough layout and attendant note on the last panel is possibly the only example in recent memory of me doing a lower-case letter 'i' without doing the dot like a little circle and making myself look like a total girl.

Sunday 26th July 2009

Watching: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Smackdown

Saturday 25th July 2009

Watching: Dark Blue, Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle: Red Button Extras, the Philanthropist, Hung, the Brave and the Bold, Kamen Rider Decade - RX is in the trail! FANGASM NAO!
Listening: Perfect Circle, Ramones, Jackson 5
Reading: Alan Moore's Complete Wildcats

Thursday 24th July 2009

Ah, bollocks to the research. 13th century muslims should really have taken more photographs for my convenience, but in the absence of access to their Myspace galleries, I'm just going to go with what looks vaguely right.
Watching: Secret Life of the American teenager, You Have Been Watching, 10 Things I hate About You, Rescue Me, Weeds, TMNT S5, Galaxy Rangers, Smackdown
Listening: A Perfect Circle, Tori Amos, Stabbing Westward, Motorhead, GO!GO!7188