I'm Moving! After a good year and half on blogger, I'm moving my blog, comics and illustration updates to my new website at www.archcomix.com, so update your favourites and checkout my new stuff. Here's a taster - an excerpt from my latest comic about Burger King's exploitation of Central American workers in Florida's tomato fields.

Secrets and Lies


Here's the awesome, 5-colour screenprinted cover of the latest comics anthology to come out of WRJ, spearheaded by Cat Garza. My latest piece, "What a Whopper" is featured, chronicling the exploitation of central american tomato pickers by Burger King USA. I'll be posting up an excerpt of it on my new website, which is what I'm currently working on, when it launches next week.

The Dirty Dozen
The class of 2007/8 outside CCS, proudly led by none other than Jason Lutes.

Now then, now then



Click here for a link to one of the latest books I've illustrated, Liverpool Limericks, by Jerry Markison. It's been reviewed well by the Liverpool Echo, excerpts of which you can read here and here. Get your copies now!

Fast Approaching the Deadline

End of the school year at the Center for Cartoon Studies is Thursday, and I've got a world of pain to successfully traverse to get my project in by then, hence the relative lack of postings of late.

Try this trailer on for size instead: it's a documentary on the school that'll give all you folks not luck enough to make it to this corner of the world a sneak peek at what life is actually like here.

Hula Experiment
Pitch for a Hawaiian Dance Evening at a local arts centre in Hanover. And those things in front of the dancers at the bottom are coconuts before you ask.

For all you fans of US politics, try this delightful little test from MoveOn.org and see if you can tell Bush from McCain

Machine Guns
Yet more behind the scenes sketchbook action now, with some pics from a recent visit to the Precision Museum in cosy old Windsor, VT. Turns out this quaint little sleepy town was at the heart of the US's arms manufacturing way back when and produced the majority of arms during the War of Independence. The top pic is of a heavy lathe that made exact copies of any shape out of another material: in this case, a gun stock.

The Ladies of White River
Voila the last in the series of life class sketches, featuring the female contigent from our 2007/8 class. L-R: Liza, Lucy and Kubby.

White River Sketches
For those of you who have heard me mention some of the 2007/8 cohort at CCS, here is a cartoony identity parade from sketches done at a recent life class.

Clockwise from the top left: Jeff, Steve, Sango and Jonathan. PS All of them were 5 mins long.

Second page: Sam being balletic, and Mark and his splendid afro (artistic license inc.)

Join The Other Side!

We need to get 150 people to 'join' The Other Side website at http://www.theothersidemag.co.uk/ by Wednesday.

You just register with webjam at the otherside site above, fill in a few details, then click on 'join us'. It takes two minutes. Support your self-publishing comrades and sign up now!

As a treat, here's my latest illo for the said mag, featuring an interview with Osama Bin Laden.

Sound Effect Challenge
Can you decode the activity being performed on the sketchbook here only by its sound effects? We weren't allowed to use any of the traditional 'kaboom' 'koff' 'splat' sfx either. I'll post the answer tomorrow.

Workshops, Washes and the Other Side
It's been all go since the last post. I gave a workshop on how to create comics at the Howe Library on Thurs, which went brilliantly: see here for the pics of rapt young minds being expanded.

I know how much y'all crave the odd bit of sketchbook sniffery too, so I've scanned in the results from a recent life class where we were experimenting with watercolours. Fun.



Last but not least, the latest edition of The Other Side mag is out now! Click here to read it online. And go to p.4/5 for a certain archburgerian artwork the regular browsers of this blog will recognise.

Bird Brained
Last week saw a CCS contigent visit the Vermont Institute of Natural Science to gawk at some birds whilst they flapped, vomited and shat their way through our visit. Voila my sketches from the 15 or so minutes we had with each of our winged subjects. Bear in mind most of our avian amigos were more skittish than a speed freak being electroshocked. We did learn that Owls are mostly just feathers, that even vultures will turn their noses up at especially putrid meat (plus they can live well into their thirties) and that birds exposed to too much human contact can actually convince themselves that they are human. Called 'imprinting' apparently. So now you know.

In other news, the Olympic torch blazed a symbolic trail for freedom and democracy in London, Paris and San Francisco...by being driven through protesting crowds in a riot van accompanied by hordes of armed police officers. Kudos to the chap in London who missed it by a few inches with his fire extinguisher. And free tibet!!

Beckett
Lifted from me sketchbook after our caricature class, where I chose the shammy leathered-faced playwright as my target.

This just in: my Shakespearean caricature (see a few posts ago) won the cartoon face-off versus other doodles of the great Bard, and will be featured around the campus of Riverdale High in NYC. Thanks go to Brenda Bowen for the opportunity.

Take Me Out to the Gun Show
All based on 100% bonafide stuff overheard and seen at a gun show across the border in New Hampshire. Turns out all you need for an uzi round here is some phone bills. Go figure, as they say.

Think Like A Cow

Recent illo for Lancaster Farming Magazine for an article based on bovine ability to decide how to optimize grazing time and plan their day. And there was I thinking they just chew and have their udders yanked all day long.

Y'Bard
No, it's not a Jacobean bartender's response to a surly playwright, it's a promo poster for a book fair, big willy style.

More caricatures coming up tomorrow too.

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.

Ra-ra-rasputin
Here's what I came up with to accompany a new book project being touted by the mighty tv producer-cum-historian Pete Walter. S'all about bringing history to life without inducing a boredom-infused coma, relishing the bizarre lives of some our cherished (or infamous) icons. My main inspiration was Boney M's Ra-Ra-Rasputin for this, as the more perceptive amongst you might guess. Couple that with his oft-told refusal to cark it and his penchant for seducing anything with a pulse and you have the well-rounded sociopath we all know and love.

If there are any publishers out there, get in touch and I'll pass the manuscript along.

Drawn From Life


Joe Sacco meets Gerald Durrell in my first forray into comics journalism. Only instead of braving a bullet-strewn West Bank, I was faced down by a herd of hungry heifers. It's featuring in this week's edition of Lancaster Farming, one of the biggest agri-business journals in the US, apparently.Click here to visit their site.

Ok, so I've been a little lax with the posting of late, mainly due to being back into the breach at CCS. Behold! A poster for my work in progress graphic novel on the Great Plague of London (marvel at its inappropriate Epithet). Click on it for a larger version. And yes, I did indeed redraw a 17th century map of london. Squint and you can see some of the bloody rafters.

I've been working on some illustrations for a scouse limerick book, soon to be yanked to the presses by Beauclair books, which I'll stick up here soon by way of a premature valentine treat.

Comics at Stanford
I'm in sunny San Fran visiting Jodie at the mo', and in between venturing into the city (Alcatraz tour, taxidermists/Dave Eggers's HQ in Mission being the highlights) I got invited to sit it on the university's creative (graphic novel) writing class last night. Visit their homepage here. Not before introducing myself to the prof and sitting down in the wrong class, I might add (who'd have thought it was so easy to sneak into Advanced Neuroscience?). So a big hello to any of the graphic novel class reading this and see above for my autobio cartoon homework, which should be more legible when you click on it. It's from a photo, so bare with me til I scan it in properly next week.

Schism in the Community
Illustration for an article on the denominational divisions within the UK Jewish Community

The final page! Page 10 of 10. A new year's pressie to you all.

Happy New Year!
The penultimate page of 10. As exciting as NYE 2007 I'll bet.

page 7 of 10 (scroll down for the start)

page 6 o' 10 - you know the drill: scroll down for the start.

page 5 of 10