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Hurrah for Viviane Schwarz! She's done it again!



Here's some video footage I shot at the launch party last Friday:

YouTube link

Thanks for hosting to the fabulous indie bookshop, Review, on Bellenden Road in Peckham. Go browse their stuff, that place is full of treasures!




Good launches require fancy hats.

Editor Lucy Ingram, Art Director Ben Norland

Writer and illustrator Alex Milway arrived with brand new Monster Books, which will be part of this coming weekend's Crystal Palace Children's Book Festival. (Don't miss Viviane's event!) Professional illustrators and kids have been making monsters, all published together! You can catch a glimpse of my monster here. Head over to the festival website to read interviews with participants, including the Etherington Brothers (Monkey Nuts) Gary Northfield (Beano's Derek the Sheep and loads more!



And I just have to show off my poster again, heh. THIS SATURDAY! Don't miss it!



Alex Milway has been a busy bee, not only making his editor Ben Norland stay the latest he's ever stayed at work, but planning the festival and writing articles for the Guardian! Here's his latest, about the importance of school visits. (Woohoo! He included my robot-sheep war with Neill Cameron!) Children's authors in schools: literature's road warriors


Happy reader at Library Mice

Thanks a million to the Library Mice book blog for such a wonderful, personalised review of Vern and Lettuce! Really chuffed! I love the bit about her husband wondering why he keeps seeing the book everywhere. Read it here!

And another huge thanks to Book Zone 4 Boys for your brilliant review! Thanks for getting the word out about Vern and Lettuce, I'm really proud of this one!

And I can't remember if I mentioned it already, but hurrah for Big Issue Scotland for your review. You guys rock!

Today's the official launch date! At last, Vern and Lettuce, the comic book, has landed! Vern and Lettuce would like to mark the occasion by launching their own online magazine, set in their world of Pickle Rye. It's a town without humans, where animals get up to all sorts of shenanigans as well as going about their day-to-day lives.
...And YOU can contribute, whatever your age!



I'm going to try to make some pages (such as this one in progress), but I've love people to write and draw their own! If and when I get a few pages, I'm going to post it on my website as an online magazine that everyone can read. Go on, you know you want to! :D



**HOW TO SEND YOUR PAGE!**

Page size: A5 (That's a sheet of A4 folded in half: 148mm × 210mm / 5.8in × 8.3in)

Please include on a separate paper or in the e-mail: Your name, age, your town, and a contact e-mail or address (We won't publish your e-mail or address online).

By e-mail: Scan your page at 300dpi and e-mail the jpeg file to sarah at jabberworks.co.uk (not larger than 2 MB, please!) Put THE PICKLE in the subject heading.

By post: Send your page to:

Serge the Ferret
The Fleece Station
Old Police Station
114 Amersham Vale
London SE14 6LG
England

Unfortunately we won't be able to return pages, so send a high-quality copy if you want to keep the original. Feel free to send more than one page if you like. The editor reserves the right not to include certain submissions; please keep in mind an all-ages audience. The contributor retains the copyright on his or her submission; we will contact you for permission if we at some point decide to create a printed version of the magazine.



You can buy copies of Vern and Lettuce at Forbidden Planet International, Gosh! Comics (bookplate edition), Bookseller Crow, Newham Books, Amazon and loads of other places! Please ask them to get it in if you can't find it at your local shop!

If you like it, please think about writing a review, either on one of the major websites or on your own blog! We're having an official launch party in central London on Thurs, Oct 21. It's not going to be an open general invitation (due to space limitations) but please drop me a line (sarah at jabberworks.co.uk) if you would like an invitation!

Today Neill Cameron, Garen Ewing and I met up with Crystal Palace Children's Book Festival coordinator Alex Milway to do a festival promo event at Kingswood Primary School in Gipsy Hill, southeast London. Garen and Alex did their thing in the morning, then after lunch, Neill and I then each talked about how we made our comics, Vern and Lettuce and Mo-Bot High. After that, our characters went into COMBAT MODE! I made a quick drawing on the train, thinking of how Vern could look kitted up to fight a Mo-bot:



Then we threw Vern and the Mo-bot into the thick of it! We took turns let the kids decide what Neill and I would draw to arm our characters. They liked the comics talk, but when the fight started, the kids went completely ballistic! It was brilliant!
*Hey, if any TEACHERS or LIBRARIANS are reading this: Neill is your man for school visits!* All the kids could think about afterward was robots and drawing robots, Neill was like a rock star. You can contact our DFC Library publicist, Lauren Bennett, to discuss booking and rates at lbennett at randomhouse.co.uk or Neill Cameron himself (based in Oxford, willing to travel) at neill at neillcameron.com.



Poor Vern didn't fare very well at the final vote; the Mo-bot won hands down. But considering the Mo-bot's designed for combat, and Vern is a sheep, I think the sheep did pretty well.



And here's the event we were promoting, which features COMICS and MONSTERS! Oct 23, coming soon, all Londoners, mark your diaries! Visit the Crystal Palace Children's Book Festival website.



And finally, VERN AND LETTUCE LAUNCHES TOMORROW!!! Copies have already been arriving for the last two days, and shops are already stocking, so Vern and Lettuce are truly going live! Stitch London coordinator Lauren O'Farrell and I are throwing a joint stitch/launch party on Thurs, Oct 21, at a pub near Waterloo station. I'm not putting out a general open invitation because we need to make sure there's room for the knitters, but if you're interested in coming along, do drop me a line (sarah at jabberworks.co.uk) and I can send you an invitation.

Oh, one more thing, I absolutely love this video, Bottle by Kirsten Lapore.

I'm still plugging away at trying to learn a bit more about drawing landscapes. At the Wigtown book fest, I was telling Polly Dunbar about it and she burst out laughing,
'So you're doing it to impress Philip Reeve!'
'Noo!" I protested vehemently. 'I really need to learn how to do this!' Then I thought about it a bit more, and decided that if I really wanted to impress Philip Reeve (who's been posting his own sketch-a-day), I'd be posting anything but landscape sketches since it's the area where I'm least skilled.
And then I thought about it a bit harder and wondered if perhaps I was trying to impress him with my stubborn, pig-headed persistence. Yes, I decided, Polly must be right. I probably am trying to impress Philip Reeve (oh, the shame), but I can live with that if it forces me to keep drawing. I won't even tell you how fast I am whipping through his Mortal Engines books; he's impressed me, at any rate.

Here's a stretch of riverside at Newmilns Farm, near Wigtown, where Angus and Mary live. I'm still trying to work out how to draw finely-textured light (or backlit) things against a dark background without having to draw every blade of grass. Tricky. I bought a used book at Wigtown's Old Bank Bookshop called The Northern Landscape: Flemish, Dutch and British Drawings from the Courtauld Collections that I'm going to take along sketching with me, for reference.



The countryside around there's so beautiful, Stuart and I just kept saying, 'Wow. Wow. Just... wow.'



A big thanks to Richard Bruton and his daughter Molly, who have given Vern and Lettuce the ultimate thumbs-up. Richard writes:

...when I asked her what she thought of the book after she’d read it (and reread it several times) she simply added:
'It’s my favourite comic.'
I really can’t think of any way she could have said it better and can’t really fault her judgement either.

And the other big thanks to comics journalist Matt Badham for the interview he did with me, cross-posted at the Forbidden Planet International blog and Down The Tubes.


(Click on the pic to go to the different articles.)

(Blank Slate publisher Kenny Penman takes issue with the interview in the FPI blog comments, hehe. Still trying to think how I might reply.)

If you're in London, don't miss tonight's Laydeez Do Comics event just off Brick Lane, featuring my fab studio mate Ellen Lindner, DFC colleague and friend Patrice Aggs, artist Steve White and Charlie Bowden from Pickled Ink Illustration Agency. I'll be there, details here!

Edit: O

Loads to blog about before I head off tomorrow to the Wigtown Book Festival! Come along on the Saturday, you can come first to my event, then Polly Dunbar's.

**SALE!** I haven't wanted to sell any of my Morris the Mankiest Monster illustrations, but I agreed to let one go to the Facing Africa charity auction. It's happening THIS SATURDAY in Bath, and you can go along or also bid online. If my books ever become household names, this one will be from my first picture book with David Fickling and WORTH A LOT OF MONEY! (Or you can just keep it cos it's nice, hehe.) It's for an excellent cause, please don't let someone walk away with that picture at a bargain-basement price. It's Morris reading his comic in bed...

Place your bid now!

Congratulations to tBK Mag on its 30th issue! Vern and Derek the Sheep celebrated by taking over THE WHOLE MAGAZINE (although occasionally they deign to share the page with Jamie Smart's Chaffy, just to make him stop squeaking). Here's the first panel of a Vern and Derek Comics Jam.



My super-silly studio mate Gary Northfield's going to post the second panel on his blog.



A huge thank you to Sam Reeve for his fantastic drawing of Vern and Lettuce rocking out, and a very cool drawing of a tractor, with a miniature toy tractor used as a model. You rock, Sam!



Sam's da, Philip, said Vern and Lettuce has done wonders for Sam's reading, and he passed his spelling test at school the other day partly thanks to them: 'One of the words was 'government' and he worked out that it's 'Go Vern! ment' and now has no trouble remembering it.'



Last night I went to hear Philippa Perry talk about her new comic, Couch Fiction. The story takes us into a psychotherapy session between Philippa, the therapist, and her client who has a nasty habit he wants to break. It's very human, she lets us see the therapist making mistakes. And we can read it on two levels (like a Rupert Bear comic!): either we can just read the story going on in the comic panels, or we can follow the more detailed analysis going on in the footnotes. A fascinating read, and great to see the psychology and comics world coming together. Here's the doodle I made of Philippa during the talk:



The audience was full of people interested in psychology and I didn't see a single comics person in the crowd. The other guy who was talking about his psychology book did a lot of the speaking and we didn't get to hear much at all about the comic. But three of us went out afterward for drinks with Philippa and got to get to know her a bit better. (Funnil

Exciting! The marvellous Gosh! Comics, across the street from the British Museum, is selling an exclusive, limited edition bookplate run of Vern and Lettuce! I recently bought a bookplate version of the DFC Library's Mezolith, and the bookplates are very lush. I had fun drawing this one, it's based on the scene where Serge the ferret tailor is getting V&L kitted up for their talent show appearance. Get details and read their review of Vern and Lettuce here!



Also good news, I just heard from comics reporter Matt Badham that David O'Connell and I feature in an article about the small press that he wrote in the latest edition of Comics Heroes magazine. Thanks, Matt!

Look, we made ourselves a studio sign! Yesterday we had an appointment with Steve Pill from Artists & Illustrators to interview me and photograph our working space to feature in their magazine. Steve said not to do any tidying up, that they wanted to see us in our element, but then he sent through this earlier article about a guy's studio in Chelsea that looked like rooms from the Wallace Collection. After we'd all rolled around on the floor wetting ourselves with laughter at the comparison, we decided we at least needed to hoover and then thought we should make that sign we'd been talking about for at least six months. So here it is! That's Steve on the right, looking shocked at the state of our tiny paper and yarn sweatshop.



I hadn't read a copy of A&I for a couple years, it always seemed more of a Sunday painters kind of magazine than a cutting-edge journal on illustration. But Steve gave me a recent copy and I was pleasantly surprised to see a three-page article about one of my favourite printmakers, who's become a bit of a British icon, Angie Lewin. She follows on from a rich tradition of artists such as Eric Ravilious, Edward Bawden (and loads of '50s and '60s textile and ceramics artists that I vaguely know of but have lots more to learn about). Good stuff. Steve said my interview and studio photos should be in the October issue.



Last night Alex Milway rallied a bunch of writers, illustrators and publishers who will be involved in the upcoming Crystal Palace Children's Book Festival (Oct 23, book now!) to meet each other over drinks at the Royal Festival Hall. What a great evening! I'd never met Lerryn Korda before, and was totally taken with the aesthetics of her Little Nye books. I managed to come home with a signed copy of Rocket to the Moon, and I'm sitting here oo-ing over her colour palettes and nicely shaped blocks of colour that don't rely on outlines. I need to get all four books and read the stories, but the artwork is superb. Here's a version of Little Nye's house that you can print, cut out and stick together.

I've been doing some musing about possibly making an online Vern and Lettuce magazine, set in the world of Pickle Rye. Here's a sketch I made last night for a possible cover.



When I was a kid, I loved making magazines for my neighbours and I bet a lot of other kids (and maybe some adults) would love helping me come up with pages for it that everyone could see. Comics, short stories, local news journalism, fake adverts, the Pickle Rye characters modeling their latest fashions, an agony aunt (maybe Granny Goat who lives on the first floor), lonely hearts, Pickle Rye park sports coverage, knitting tips, craft ideas... anything we find in a regular magazine, but make so that it would make sense in Vern and Lettuce's world. No humans.

I'm trying to decide about a format if it goes ahead. (Should it be colour? Black and white in case we decide to print it?) This could be a lot of fun. Here's a peek at my reference sheet I've been using for the past couple years, to remember which animal belongs to which family, and to keep the names straight:



Anyway, I'll keep thinking and get back to you about it! I might do a page with the latest recipe one of the bunnies and the polar bear cub came up with in Vern's kitchen.

Hmm, I wonder if I'll get time to colour this one. Could be fun making him have a very loud suit and tie, tasteful or otherwise.
(Find out about the first three books of the DFC Library here.)

For a daily warm-up, I thought I'd try to draw all the different characters in Pickle Rye, the home of Vern and Lettuce (my comic book coming out on Sept 30th). I present to you... the moles! Feel free to colour them in, if you like!

Find out about the first three books in the DFC Library here.