Boris Vs Ken
Spot illustration for The Other Side magazine, which should be hitting the grim streets of London sometime this week. And it's free! Plug plug. Read the online version here. A much-needed antidote to the celebrity porn and nonspecific horror that's vomited daily onto commuters' eyeballs by the Metro/London Lite poop mill.

Back from Spring Break
Bright-eyed and bushy tailed from a fleeting visit to my love in San Francisco, so you'll have to excuse the recent radio silence. Here's a recent life class doodle, and that Steve Bissette inked version of my flea splash page (see below if you don't know what I'm on about) is due imminently. Hold thy horses.

Also got a treat for you in the form of a strip on a recent visit to a local gun show, so keep those mince pies peeled.

Parts of the Process (Part II)

Voila the inked version. You'll have to hold on for a week before Bissette's version is available to compare though.

Preliminary Plague Pencils
For those of you who I curious about the process behind producing finished cartoon artwork, I thought i'd include a before/after post about the various stages I go through for each page of a graphic novel story.

First up are the pencils - I usually work loosely in hard (3H-ish) 0.5 mechanical pencil, putting in finer detail with a 0.3 lead.

This is from a class exercise we just did on splash pages, where we were given an hour to come up with something from scratch. Bit of a tall order, but I'm happy with what I came up with.

As a spring break treat, the legendary Steve Bissette will be inking over the top of them to show us how it's done. I'll post my inked version tomorrow and we'll be able to compare our different styles.

Dancing the Tyburn Jig
Here's a first draft of a sequence from a story I'm working on involving the plague of London. It features in the first chapter and involves the popular site for public hangings, the tyburn tree (now the shopping mecca known as Marble Arch, one end of Oxford St, not to mention the hallowed place of speaker's corner - i'll let you rue that historical irony).

The two main characters are barber surgeons, discussing the relative merits of hanging criminals who have been selected to be used as specimens for dissection by the society of Barber Surgeons. They were alloted 4 bodies a year from the Tyburn tree.

The Last Page of City of Laughter
This won't make a great deal of sense to first-timers here, who (welcome, by the way) should scroll down 8 or so pages for the start of this here little short story. To the rest of yuz, voila - the denouement:

City of Laughter - the penultimate page

If you're a first-timer, scroll down for the start of the story. Otherwise, enjoy the next installment.

Next page o' City of Laughter.

Page 4 of 'City of Laughter'
Scroll down for the start.

City of Laughter, p.3
Scroll down for the start.

City of Laugter P.2
Scroll down for the start.

City of Laughter
Voila an exercise in creative constraint - we were given a random book (in my case, a National Geographic from 1945) and told to flip to 3 random pages in it. Take those three references and make a coherent strip out of them. In a week. Mine were:

1.City of Laughter (1st had to be the title)
2. A monstrous furnace
3. Silk-swathed luxury amongst the ruins.

Simple, right?

I'll post a new page up each day for the next week or so. Everything's done in brush and ink.

Waterloo
My second illo for the aforementioned history book (see previous post), this time featuring a discofied Napoleon, displaying a sizeable bit of guntage. Enjoy.