Chained To My Desk

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For this month's Prospect magazine. This one is is sort of a confession, as I have been guilty of producing this kind of editorial wallpaper in the past. But the persistence of the 'Millions Of Zeros And Ones Flying Into A Massive Eye (It's An Article About The Internet)' school of illustration - largely funded by cheap, loveless stock photography agencies - still surprises me.

Solipsistic Pop

Hello again, long time no blog. Ah well I have been busy, you see. Partly with putting together my contributions to Solipsistic Pop.



Solipsistic what?

Ah, yes. Solipsistic pop is the attempt by a gaggle of comics artists to produce a small press comic collection with posh production standards. It's a thing made with love, full of comics, mini-comic inserts, a newspaper pullout and lots of short stories by people who make really lovely work. I've contributed a new six page short story exclusive to the book and two pages of strips (some old, some new). The print run will be limited to 500 copies. You can browse a preview PDF of the book above.

The idea is basically to make something which has an American or French approach to small press comics - ie, something that has been made with careful production values and not so much in the style of a fanzine. You can even hear us ranting on about it on Resonance FM (104.4FM) tonight at 5pm if you're in London, or streamed at www.resonancefm.com if you're not.

Ultimately we'd like it to turn into a regular outlet for alternative comics in the UK - something which you get in America and France but not here for some reason.

We're going to be selling it at the Comika festival at London's ICA on Sunday November 8th from 1pm, and we're having a launch party for the book from 7pm in the ICA bar. Do come along if you're in town!

Sunday Columnist Adventure Stories

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Here's my cartoon for this month's Prospect magazine, on shelves now. Annoyingly, last night's episode of the excellent Mitchell and Webb Sound featured a weekend-columnist-goes-to-Ikea themed joke, so now everybody will think I nicked it off that. Ah well. I hadn't heard it, cos it hadn't been broadcast, so there. (Even more annoyingly their sketch went on to make a lot of much better jokes than mine about weekend newspapers, but ho to the hum hey nonny no... At least mine has a Space Octopus in it... Everybody likes a Space Octopus... ).

I've not posted anything for while - there is an Exciting Reason for this. And that is, most of my efforts have been focused on drawing a six page comic plus new strip for Solipsistic Pop, a forthcoming anthology of British small press cartooniness. It's depressing and miserable but also hopefully a bit funny too. It's about swimming lessons and songs. But I won't post it up here because we want to sell copies of this thing when we get it published in November. I'll post notice of its availability when it's out and hopefully someone who comes here might buy it!

HALLO HALLO IT'S ME AGAIN LOOK AT MY PICTURE

Hello! It's me.

It's just you and me in here. Creepily intimate, isn't it. I've scared off all my new readers by disappearing on holiday for about twenty years. I just wanted to get you on your own. Would you like a biscuit?

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Substitute Jesus

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Right, I'm off on holiday. Hopefully I'll write lots of cartoons while I'm away. Pip pip!

S

God

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For this month's Prospect magazine.

Prospect Cover

I also did the cover illo for the magazine this month:


Oh, and I'm trying to engineer a bit of a redesign to my comics site - make it more web friendly and shareable. Less like an illustration portfolio, and more like a web comic. Previously I've had a more illustration-style approach to my work, but the weekend before last visits to my comics site increased by 7,000 per cent in the space of three days - mostly due to social bookmarking. So I thought, ah, maybe I should start doing that. See below for Digg, Reddit etc links - hopefully I'll be able to sort them out on the comics site soon. I'll also be adding a couple of the original artworks for some strips to the shop, including the Vague Scientist one.

The Thing About Blogs Are They're All Just Meme Meme Meme

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This was an idea for Prospect that hasn’t been used yet and probably won’t now, so it’s OK to post it here. It’s quite appropriate really, because I have dipped my toe into the funny world of memeland this week.

Most of my cartoons enter the great party of ideas that is the internet, find a few pals, and keep their heads down for the evening. I do my best to make them popular, ushering them in like a dad with a mutant child (“Hey look everyone, here’s my son! Look at his cool tentacles”). But generally when I go to pick them up I find that they’ve had a nice time just doing their own thing.

But last week's Vague Scientist one [below] got picked up by a couple of popular blogs and Twitterists, including Ben Goldacre's Twitter, Wired and the New Scientists themselves, and before I knew it I was getting lots of emails and tweets. NS were good sports who seemed to enjoy it, and recognised it wasn’t a dig at their mag but at people’s (ie, my) inability to retain science news after reading it. A couple of their staff said that even they do the same thing in the pub.

This was great, not just because I’m a fan of both NS and the Bad Science blog, but also because people have started sending it about the place, posting it on their blogs and linking via Twitter. You rarely get feedback as a cartoonist, so it’s been good to see that people liked it and passed it on.

(PS - I've gone on Flickr)