How to use this Page

Today Elissa and I have a canine life model in the studio!



If you look in the front of Jampires, this cutiepie gets a mention in my picture book with David O'Connell. :) Treacle's surprisingly tricky to draw!

So my Jampires co-author David O'Connell has just released another picture book! This time he wrote the book, and HarperCollins teamed him up with illustrator Francesca Gambatesa, and it's all about fathers, and out just in time for Father's Day! :) (Here's a link to it on Francesca's website, where you can see some early sketches of When I'm a Monster Like You, Dad!.)



So a bunch of us went along to Gosh Comics in Soho to celebrate! Gosh are awesome at not only stocking comics, but also a range of other illustrated books, often by people who also make comics. Here's a photo nabbed from Gosh's Facebook page. (I wore my new flourescent jumper, wahey.)




A big congrats to Francesca because, while she's done lots of other illustration work in different formats, this is her first picture book, and it's lovely. Hurrah! (We agreed that picture books are quite a lot of work and take quite a lot of time to illustrate.)



Here's Dave doing a dramatic reading with one of Francesca's pictures on the screen. It's about a little monster who thinks he can have fun being big and scary like his dad as a grownup, but the dad shows his kid how they can have fun together right now.



And then there was a big signing. (Stuart got our copy dedicated to both of us and we shall treasure it.)



Fab to see writer-illustrator friends Laura Ellen Anderson, Jamie Littler and my studio mate Elissa Elwick:



And the crafty artists Sami Teasdale and my former studio mate Lauren O'Farrell (aka Deadly Knitshade):



Side note: did you see the amazing phone box cosie that Lauren and Sami knitted for The Clangers?


Photo by David Jensen from Knit The City Facebook page

Thanks to Gosh's lovely Steven Walsh, Nora Goldberg (and Tom Oldham who was manning the basement) for hosting!



And since I was practically the only person who'd never tweeted a selfie from the Gosh loo, that was WHAT I GONE AND DONE.



Huge congrats, Dave and Francesca!

Today was Jampires painting day! My co-writer/co-illustrator David O'Connell and I had fun mucking about with Posca pens in the front window of Gosh Comics in Soho.



Painting on windows is strange, the opposite to painting on paper, because the first colours you apply to the glass are the ones that show in front. So I kept running around to the front of the window to check we were doing all right. The other thing about painting on windows is that you have people watching you! Which is actually quite fun, because you can wave at each other and see them heading off with their freshly signed Jampires books. I love this photo of Lily with her new book, tweeted by Charlotte Hacking:



Ta-dah! All finished! We're keeping our fingers crossed that Gosh will leave it up for Christmas as well as Halloween. You can knit a Jampire to go along with your book if you want to download the free pattern (along with lots of other activities) at jampires.com.



Maybe they will; Neill Cameron's lovely Pirates of Pangaea painting is still in the window!



Dave and I signed a lot of stock, so you can still get copies of the Jampires picture book and mini comic, Dave's Monster & Chips series, and my Dinosaur Police, There's a Shark in the Bath, Morris the Mankiest Monster and You Can't Eat a Princess!. We also met a nice Scottish chappie named Mark Millar who also makes comics and film stuff, and ladies in nice costumes like to pose for photos with him.



I'm off to Norway for a week packed full of school visits and a festival, so I'll have more news soon (but I might be a bit slow getting back to e-mails and things).

Last weekend, the Jampires were out in force at Thought Bubble comics festival, to spread Comics Jam over Leeds! Here's team Jampires' David O'Connell, Matt Badham, Molly Bruton and me:



So what distinguishes Comics Jam from, say, raspberry jam?


Badges designed by David O'Connell; Jampires jam by the Butch Institute

A little explanation (as seen in the Thought Bubble anthology):




Our Comics Jam session attracted fellow Jampires like, uh, bees to honey. (These were Phil Welch and Katie White, who stayed with us and blogged all the way through the 24-Hour Comic Marathon at Lakes International Comic Art Festival in Kendal, earlier in the autumn.)



We ran a Comics Jam competition, and here's the winning comic! It's by 13-year-old Jordan Vigay and 10-year-old Jonathan 'Jonny Toons'.




Congrats, guys! Here are Jordan and Jonathan drawing away at our activity area tables, buoyed up by jammie dodgers.



Actually, the competition was a close call. Their original Comics Jam was in black and white:



And was competing hard against this Comics Jam, which really zinged off the page with its colours.



So we struck a deal, that if Jordan and Jonathan promised to colour the comic right after the festival, they'd be the winners. (And they did, using a mix of digital and coloured pencils.) You can find out more about running Comics Jams at home (or in school!) over on the Jampires website.

So let's meet the creators: I filmed Jordan and Jonathan each giving a lesson on how to draw a character from the comics they self-publish. And you can get a glimpse of other kids getting involved with Thought Bubble:



If you're scrolling through this and can't see the video, here's the shot of Jordan and me with the Red Crow comic he publishes. (You can buy the latest issue, No.8, for £1.75 via his website.)



Issue 8 includes a Comics Jam that Jordan and I did at the end of my signing session in Page 45 bookshop's room at the Lakes festival.



Oh, and you may have noticed that Jordan dressed up! He's cosplaying as Captain Spaceington from James Turner's Star Cat (which is hugely funny and I recommend it for kids AND adults). Here's an interview with James on Comics Beat.



James was super-pleased to see his own cosplayer! Right behind him, you can see Liz Payton manning The Phoenix Comic table (a weekly comic which I also highly recommend).



And here's Jonny Toon's table! Not many 10-year-olds are on Twitter, but you can follow this one at @JonnyToons. (He's just tweeted the work-in-progress cover of his Christmas issue.)



I was very impressed with Jonathan's design skills for Crystal Orb...



...and the comics inside are funny and remarkably sophisticated for someone his age! Keep an eye on this guy, I think he may go far. It was great to see him teaming up with Jordan to draw stuff; they're a real power duo.





And of course, if you read the Guardian, Independent, Vogue, almost any newspaper, you'll have seen articles about Zoom Rockman, who's been making comics since he was 8. He's 14 now, and has a lot of issues under his belt. He sources local advertising and has been a real pioneer in kids self-publishing comics. Check out his website and you can follow him on Twitter as @The_ZoomComic



I love the Skanky Pigeon quill pens!



His younger brother, Ace Rockman, also loves to draw and drew up a storm at the activity tables. (Great hat, Ace!)



Here's a video Zoom made about how to make comics when he was much younger and still too shy to talk on camera.



And it was great to see the debut of TEAM KETCHUP with their comics anthology Issue No.1! They found local Yorkshire funding and the kids involved worked shifts at the table, selling their comic and badges and running their doodle area. If you have questions about how they did it, have a chat with coordinators @_Joolze, @Coldjenius and @beth_k_t.



And you can follow Team Ketchup collectively as @theteamketchup! Here's a recent tweet of their doodle wall:



One of the coolest thing about Thought Bubble is seeing parents and kids geeking out together about books, comics and artwork. It's such an awesome way to spend time with your kid and let them see that reading is fun, without turning it into a lesson. This family were a joy to watch, and that little Green Lantern Guardian went straight for the books and got stuck into them. Ha, one of the funny things about Thought Bubble was that my picture books sold much better than my chapter books. Usually it's the other way around at book festivals; people see Oliver and the Seawigs or Cakes in Space and prefer them to the picture books because they have more words and are therefore deemed more like 'proper books'. Whereas I'd see Thought Bubble people leaf through them, realise they didn't have quite as many pictures, and move on to the fully-illustrated picture books, with 'proper illustrations'. This crowd is a visual crowd, and they appreciate reading pictures as much as words. It's a wonderful place to be.



My Jampires co-author David O'Connell and I kept looking over and breaking into broad grins as we saw our teammate Matt Badham working his magic. He's SO GOOD at relating to people, I wish I could work with him full-time. He could talk to anyone, on their own level, and he made a lot of people feel very welcome. It was almost poetic. (And he also sold a heap-load of books. Matt could very easily lead courses for booksellers.)



Here's a look at the two activity tables we had in our area. We had four tables in total: one for display, one for talking with people, book signing, laying out drawing supplies, and two table with chairs around them for families (and anyone who fancied a sit-down) to gather and draw. Some people wanted to keep their drawings, but we hung a lot of them up on the backboards and had a flip-chart ready for people to draw on and other creators to come over and do drawing demonstrations.



Some people did Comics Jams with other people, but a lot of kids were happy just to draw comics on their own. We found they didn't actually want much adult intervention; most of them were familiar with comics and happy to be left alone to get on with making things.



There were LOTS of jammie dodgers. When we ran out, we gave Jordan and Jonathan money to go off to the Tesco and buy us more.



It was fun seeing people of all ages getting stuck in.



Some people were a bit young to draw comics, or just wanted to do something a bit more relaxing, and we had a sheet posted, showing them how to draw a Jampire.



I always love seeing the Jampire variations. (I hope someone someday writes a symphony called The Jampire Variations.)









Flip chart fun times:





(Who can even SPELL 'submarine'?)














Here's Jordan and his mum, running The Phoenix Comic tables for awhile, so Liz could run around and talk to people.



And look at the fabulous volunteers, in their matching Thought Bubble staff t-shirts! They're designed by partners Donya Todd and Jack Teagle. (I sat next to Jack and Donya for a full 24 hours to do our 24-hour comic, and they're both ace.) The lady in the middle was our main contact for the family activity area, Martha Julian, and she really worked with us to make the best possible space for everyone. Thanks so much, Martha and team!



Of all the comics festivals I've been to, Thought Bubble and Lakes have by far been the best organised, and you could really tell, the way everyone talked about them so positively afterward. They made creators feel welcome, and we didn't have to fight like cats to make sure we had all our backboards, and they went out of their way to get stuff for us, to make things work more smoothly. Having a team in matching t-shirts is really helpful, there's always someone in view that you can run over to and get some help. I also did some planning with Lisa Wood (shown here) and Clark Burscough. If you follow @ThoughtBubbleUK, that's Clark manning the Twitter feed.



Huge thanks from Dave and me, and team Jampires!



Another cool thing about Thought Bubble is that kids can meet their favourite creators milling about everywhere! Here's The Phoenix Comic's Matt Baxter at the activity table:



Hey, look, it's my studio mate Gary Northfield! Gary did some awesome drawings and little watercolour paintings at his table. Check out his family-friendly The Terrible Tales of the Teenytinysaurs and Gary's Garden comic books; they're ace. Gary's the guy who originally walked me through how to do workshops and went with me on my first library event.



Check it out, Glasgow-based Adam Murphy and Lisa Murphy, creators of Corpse Talk! Lisa's done colourist work for Adam, Gary and lots of other people, and she's an important part of The Phoenix Comic team. I'd never really talked properly with her and Adam (other than fleeting festival chic-chat) but we had dinner together on our first night and really got to chat, which was one of my highlights of the whole trip.



Here's a look at their latest Phoenix cover. ZING!



And it's Neill Cameron and family! Neill's latest book, How to Make Awesome Comics is something I've been waiting a long time for; something I can recommend to kids who want to know more about making comics but are too young for the Scott McCloud books. Neill packs in loads of inspiring challenges and tips to get kids drawing and writing comics. And he's great at running workshops, too. In fact, Gary, the Murphys and Neill are all good at that, book 'em into your event diary, librarians, festival people, teachers, etc. His wife, Di Cameron, works at The Story Museum in Oxford, so they're a story-packed power team.



Neill and Adam had printed up their own Comics Jam for the festival, a humourous horror story called The Curse of Barry Starkey, which you can read about on Neill's website here.



Thought Bubble was so large this year that it filled three separate huge venues, all inside the big square at the Royal Armouries. The Jampires Comics Jamtastic area was in the Royal Armouries Hall, and there was a real effort to make that area the most kid-friendly place, including a special chill-out lounge for people with autism. In the middle of the square, the organisers erected a white marquis called 'The Teepee', a slightly misleading name because it was Enormous. A lot of the celeb signings were happening in there. And across the square was New Dock Hall, which has much higher ceilings, black walls and hosted more of the grown-up comics (although there was still a lot of family-friendly stuff there).

I first made a bee-line for Philippa Rice's table. I love Philippa's comics, and she always makes the most beautiful table displays. When I do talks about getting kids involved in comics festivals, I always show photos of Philippa's tables because I think I would have LOVED to have made dioramas and things like this as a kid. Check it out:



And a closer look. Those are real lights in there! So awesome.



Last year I came to Thought Bubble as a punter and had a great time going to events, browsing comics and talking with people at their tables. I'm quite tempted to do that again, one year at table, one year as punter, on and off. This year I hardly had any time to see anything, but the Jampires team let me off for half an hour to run around and see as much of the festival as I could. (Huge apologies if I didn't manage to say hello to you as I madly dashed about!) This book by Becky Palmer caught my eye, La Soupière Magique (The Magic Tureen?). Becky originally wrote it as The Biggest Helping but she couldn't find an English-language publisher, so she got it published in French instead, by SarBacane. You can see some pages of it here on her blog and it is GORGEOUS. It's quite startling to think that this is her very first comic book. Wow!



Hey look, it's Dan Berry, who ran our 24-Hour Comic Marathon! He makes fab comics and always uses hand gel. If you're not following him on Twitter, get on the case: @thingsbydan. And he also makes wonderful, professional-quality podcasts with my favourite comics creators for his programme Make It Then Tell Everybody. Check it out!



Here's Mhairi Stewart and friend manning the Roller Grrrls table she runs with Gary Erskine. There were table neighbours at the very first comic con I did by myself, and I was very clueless and they made me feel incredibly welcome. I love those guys.



And I'm a big fan of all three people here! That's Moshi Monsters' Nana Li, buying prints from North-Wales-based Jonathan Edwards (aka Jontofski) and Louise Evans (aka Felt Mistress).



Coffee time for Lizz Lunney, Joe Decie and Joe List. ...Oh, look, Decie has posted a Thought Bubble DRINKS TASTE TEST.



On Saturday night, Molly and I trotted along to the British Comic Award ceremony, hosted by a blue-suited Adam Cadwell and David Monteith, where we got to hear Maura McHugh interviewing Hall-of-Fame winner Posy Simmonds. Here's Molly, Posy and Maura with Alison Sampson, who won the New Talent award. Congrats! I was also hugely chuffed that Isabel Greenberg won Best Book for The Encyclopedia of Early Earth. (You can read my fangirl meltdown blog post about it here.) And it was no surprise, Luke Pearson winning the Young People's Comic Award again, this time for Hilda and The Black Hound. The competition was stiff, but Hilda is MEGA.



You can read about the awards over on their website here. (Vern and Lettuce won it back in 2011 and you can read my blog post about that here.) I was a judge last year and it was great to see fellow judge Jamillah Knowles again! She caught me up on some of the comics I was missing out on by being at a table.



Okay, now for a few costumes:







Ha ha, here's when things started to get a little weird:



And finally, a good place to end, Dr Mel Gibson with the elephant in the room:



Oh wait! One more thing... what is this? Ha ha, this is what I look like to the kids I'm working with:



(THANKS, Jordan and Jonathan.)

I spent a lot of time with these little dudes: Jampire, whom I really ought to name, but who is still 'Jampire', and the Iron Bear, who is probably made of bronze and is really named Paddington, but I just like calling him the Iron Bear. Anyway, I spend a lot of time at Paddington station. And today I was Oxford-bound!



It's quite fun travelling in full costume, it makes so many people's faces light up. Also, I tried travelling with my Bakewell Tart hat in a bag last time and the cherry came off the top, so it's safer just to carry it on my head, all the way to Oxford's Story Museum. Which is where my co-author David O'Connell and I did our Jampires show!



Huge thanks to everyone who came along and drew with us! I'm lucky, both of my current co-authors can draw, so we can do fun drawing double acts. We taught everyone how to draw a Jampire, but then went on to create other beasties. (Mine here is a Sushipire and Dave's drawing a Ricepuddingpire.)


Photo tweeted by @DragonDentist John McLay

Oh, I must include the lovely poster Dave drew for our event. He gave me such excellent pointy feet.




Here are a few more drawings from the day! If you came along and want to do more activities, you can find them on our jampires.com website. Here's @helen_geekmum:




Tweeted by @McgrattanRj Rebecca McGrattan

We even sang our brand-new Jampires song, and got everyone to join in the jammy chorus! (Thanks for your help putting that together earlier this week, Philip Reeve!) I was nervous about forgetting the lyrics, and writer Holly Smale offered to come on stage again and help me. (The last time she did it was for my Shark song at the Hay Festival.) She didn't actually turn up, but she was well represented upstairs in a Narnian wood, dressed as the White Witch. (The best of the costumes in the 26 Characters exhibition, I think.)



And our Jampires jam-maker came along!



Here's Emma Preston-Dunlop from The Butch Institute here with her assistant. (Emma has just spotted a Jampire lurking in her jam, oh no!)



I came home with a jar of her Cherry Bakewell with Amaretto syrup and Almonds jam and must confess that already a shameful amount of it has been eaten. Uh... by the Jampires, yeah.



Emma gave a great demonstration about how to make jam, using very basic kitchen equipment, and everyone got to have a good sniff of the bubbling raspberry mix.



Bramble tats, that Emma is DEDICATED to jam, a proper Jampire.



When I arrived, Dave was still leading his comics workshop for older kids, and I caught the tail end of him signing his Monster and Chips books.



A fabulous day, thanks so much for hosting, Tom Donegan and the Story Museum!


Photo tweeted by @DragonDentist John McLay

Bye bye, Oxford! See you next time!

Jamtastic! Today's the official publication day of JAMPIRES, my picture book with my fab friend David O'Connell and our Oxford-based publisher, David Fickling Books! We're quite shocked, this book has been so long in coming - at least four years - that we sometimes thought it might never happen. But it HAS! :D


Photo by Dave Warren

So much development went into the making of this book that I'm going to run a small series here on the blog about how we made it. First, how did we design the Jampires characters? You can see them here, in some of the finished artwork:



Digging through old files, I quite like these ink sketches with their accompanying notes:




And here are some of Dave's sketches!


We both wanted the Jampires to have a slight vampiric quality to them, since they suck jam out of doughnuts, but I think I saw them as slightly more cuddly, whereas Dave's started out a bit more monster-like.


I think some of the monster stuff that didn't go into Jampires may have ended up in his Monster and Chips books.


Gosh, I'd forgotten this drawing until now. This was when we were still planning Jampires as a comic, and I think I was envisioning them a bit like Shel Silverstein, David Shrigley or Exploding Dog drawings.



And I wanted the colour palette and feel of the book to be very different to books I'd done before, but I hadn't quite hit on my new Jampires way of working in pencil. Here are some studies in tea, ink and gouache.



This was before both Jampires had hats; one of them was very bald.



I'll post more about our drawing technique soon, but I'll leave you with a Jampires mask, in case you think jam is so wonderful that you suspect you might just BE a Jampire. You can download it from our jampires.com website here!



Congratulations, Dave and TEAM JAMPIRES! Big thanks to our publisher David Fickling (who was very active in the story's creation), our editors, Hannah Featherstone in the early days and then Alice Corrie, designer Ness Wood, publicity team Philippa Perry, Manchester-based Liz Scott, Phil Earle and Anthony Hinton, to our lovely agent, Jodie Hodges, and to our partners and all our friends who gave us help and encouragement along the way!


Photo by James Petrie

Oo, and Jampires is definitely in the shops! Here's a photo tweeted in by bookseller Nora Goldberg at Foyles Southbank:

Photo by James Petrie

Hee hee, it's great fun to stand in the middle of a field wearing sparkly red platform heels when everyone else is walking around in wellies. This weekend my co-author David O'Connell and I launched our new picture book, Jampires, at The Big Feastival in Oxfordshire.


Photo by James Petrie

I couldn't believe it, I forgot to pack my Bakewell Tart hat! Nooooo!


Photo by Dave Warren

But never mind, our book was well and truly launched with a dramatic reading by David and me. (Dave's very good at doing the voices.) And I can rock a converted poodle skirt. (Thanks to my mum for helping me sew on all the Jampires.)


Photo by Neill Cameron

And I taught everyone how to draw a Jampire! 'But what is a Jampire?' you may ask. Well, if you've ever bitten into a jam doughnut and found it disappointingly dry and jamless, they are the culprits. These little critters suck out them jam. They LOVE jam. Our book is basically a hymn to jam.


Photo by James Petrie

And you can learn how to draw a Jampire, too! David and I have put all sorts of goodies on our new website, so do have fun exploring it: jampires.com


View as a PDF

We have masks, too! Check out the website! :)


Photo by James Petrie


Since the Jampires are obsessed with jam, we had actual jam on site...


Photo by James Petrie

...and an actual jam maker, who has joined our Jampires team! Meet Emma Preston-Dunlop, jam maker extraordinaire, who gave us a little lesson on how to make jam, and treated us to samples of her tasty concoctions.


Photo by James Petrie

Emma runs a jam company called The Butch Institute and while raspberry jam is always my favourite, she gives it a real run for its money with her Cherry Bakewell with amaretto syrup and almonds.


Photo by James Petrie

Since The Big Feastival's all about food, we explored, and went straight for the PIE. Gotta love a pie. Emma taught me how to eat it from a carton without getting gravy all over my skirt.


Photo by James Petrie

And our lovely publisher, David Fickling, cycled all the way over from Oxford - a two-hour journey across many hills - to be there for our launch. Hurrah! (He didn't cycle in his signature bowtie, but he put it on as soon as he arrived.)


Photo by James Petrie

JAM. Who doesn't dream about The Great Jam Pot in the Sky? *wistful sigh*



Dave and I couldn't be there both days, so actor Devon Black stepped in and led her own Jampires session on the Sunday, which looked brilliant. She made a costume, a whole new show, and I hear she did a brilliant job! Thank you SO MUCH, Devon!!


Photo tweeted by Philippa Perry

Feastival had some rival vampiric creatures, not all as small and cuddly as our Jampire.


Photo by James Petrie

After a little scare, he got a cuddle from Neill Cameron, and everything was all right.



So Neill was mostly busy drawing comic characters over in The Phoenix Comic area. He's the amazing creator of stories such as Pirates of Pangaea, Mega Robo Bros and has a new book out, How to Make Awesome Comics. Here's a Cyborg Mode Jamie Oliver (the chef who hosts the festival, along with Blur bassist-turned-cheesemaking-farmer Alex James):



The drive to Feastival was quite a long one, and our friend James Petrie was a hero and gave us all a lift in his car. As you can see, Dave and I were terrible back-seat drivers.



Lovely Dave. It's not just his genius talent, you see; I mostly work with him because he has such beautiful flowing tresses.



Big group selfie! Huge thanks to David Fickling for publishing us, Emma for being such a great Jam Master, Devon for Sunday's awesomeness, Feastival for hosting us, fab publicist Philippa Perry for organising the day, James for driving and photos, and Ann Lam for our knitted Jampire. Jammy times!



Head over to the David Fickling Books website to see their blog about Jampires, and jampires.com for all your jammy needs.

Jammy Twitter links: @davidoconnell, @DFB_Storyhouse, @ButchInstitue, #JAMPIRES

Have you heard what's lurking just around the corner???


Photo by David Warren

Have you ever bitten into a jam doughnut and thought, HEY! What happened to all the JAM??! Well... that jam was stolen... SUCKED OUT, in fact, by some mischievous little characters, called...



...JAMPIRES.


Gorgeous knitted Jampire created by Ann Lam. More about this soon....

And Jampires love nothing more than - you got it - JAM!



The stickier the jam, the better! Our publicist Philippa Perry teamed us up with local jam-makers at The Butch Institute to get this custom-made raspberry and vanilla jam with added sparkles.


Photo by David Warren

THE PICTURE BOOK: So my fabulous friend David O'Connell and I have written a picture book for you in rhyming verse, published by David Fickling, and we're very excited about it!



JAMPIRES will emerge hot out of the oven at the beginning of September, and it's not your usual book. Most picture books are written by one person and illustrated by the other. But Dave and I are both writer and illustrators, and for this book, we were completely co-writers and co-illustrators. AND we got our inspiration through comics! The story game we played together to come up with the idea is called a 'Comics Jam', and we loved how our Comics Jam was also about jam!



THE COMIC: Our picture book started out as this collaborative comic, and you can read the original version here on our BRAND-NEW JAMPIRES WEBSITE, designed by multi-talented Dave.



This Jampires website is absolutely JAM-PACKED with things to explore and activities to make and do. Have a browse!

JAMPIRES is mainly a picture book, but we did print up a small number of Comics Jam comics, which you might be able to get from us if you come to our events.



EVENTS: These events include Sat, 30 August at The Big Feastival in Oxfordshire; we may be able to provide you with some at the Lakes International Comic Art Festival in Kendal on the 18th & 19th of Oct; our event on Tues, 28 Oct at Oxford's Story Museum (details here); we'll be running a whole Jampires Comics Jamtastic activity area at the awesome Thought Bubble comics festival in Leeds on 15 & 16 Nov.



You'll be hearing more from us about JAMPIRES, our hymn to jam - only a few more weeks until it comes out! - and in the meantime, spread the word (spread it thickly!), so no one misses out on this jammy treat. You can follow us on Twitter at @davidoconnell and @jabberworks, hash tag #JAMPIRES! Here's Dave's blog post about it!


Photo by David Warren

Two things! First: my lovely new SHOES arrived! They're supposed to look very jammy, for the launch this autumn of JAMPIRES, with my fab friend David O'Connell. But I had to show them off a bit early because they're so lovely. I'd also better not click them together too much, Dorothy-style, as the glitter seems slightly unstable and my carpet is already a bit more glam that it was this morning.



Second thing: Dave has taken up the next episode of My Writing Process Blog Tour. Here a picture he drew of himself busily working away, go check out the article he's written!

Look, my Jampires co-author David O'Connell and I have been out on a heist mission!



The Discover Children's Story Centre in Stratford, northeast London, has a fabulous new exhibition designed by writer-illustrator team Andy Briggs and Peter Mac called SECRET AGENTS. I've always loved London's Cabinet War Rooms, and they've captured a whiff of that sort of atmosphere. And unlike the Cabinet War Rooms, you're allowed to run around and play and dress up and generally muck about.




Today our mission was to bring a drop-in comics workshop - Codename: Comic Maker - to the exhibition. Here was our team of agents: mission mastermind Agent David O'Connell with Gary Northfield, Alex Milway, and yours truly.



Here's Agent O'Connell handling a classic Matrix phonebox situation.



Oh no, I think the evil agents have discovered us, and the phone's not working! RUN, DAVE!



There's all sorts of fabulous stuff to explore, conveniently at kid height. Like this picture safe in the wall. Tip: you can also climb through the fireplace.



We had such gorgeous weather that we relocated outdoors, and then had our pens at the ready! I should add, I also had a There's a Shark in the Bath event, which is why my Secret Agent outfit has a tentacular twist.



Our team drew all sorts of things to order. Here's Dave taking on a Vampire Giraffe. Dave's a great friend and the writer-illustrator of the popular Monster and Chips books, and we have a book coming out together this autumn, called Jampires. (Exciting!)



And we did some Comics Jams, passing the comic around the table so everyone could draw a panel.



Some of the Comics Jams got quite dark and disturbing.



Very dark, indeed.



To lighten things up a bit, here's Alex Milway with his book Pigsticks and Harold, which comes out in May. It has pictures, some comic elements, and very jolly animals. I'm definitely going to get this book for kid friends who love stories but aren't so sure about tackling pages with lots of text.



Here's a result of one of Alex's Drawing Challenges:



Making comics in the sun with my excellent studio mate Gary Northfield (creator of Gary's Garden in The Phoenix Comic and wonderful book The Terrible Tale of the Teenytinysaurs). (Photo by Ben Stephens.)



Dave and I both took the challenge to draw a Vampire Giraffe, and this kid copied them so expertly; they actually looked better in his drawing.



The Discover centre had been lucky enough the previous day to host comic artists Laura Ellen Anderson, Jamie Littler and Richy K Chandler, awesome. Thre's so much fun built right into it. I'm always checking out the magic mirrors. Here's are stretched and squashed Ben Stephens and Discover's Racheal Brasier:



Oh my goodness, and SUCH a cool thing: I thought they'd chucked out all the stuff I'd designed for the Monsterville exhibition, but I spotted this sign over the toilets! I love it that the men's side is 'Beauty'.



And this cupboard room is being put to MUCH better use now:



Before I did my Shark stage event, I did some vocal exercises with my lovely Scholastic publicist, David Sanger:



Big thanks to everyone who came along and drew sharks with me! I got to see some wonderful sharks with loads of personality.





And comics! A few kids really got stuck in making them; it was wonderful to see. This girl used themes from the exhibition as inspiration.



Adam, who was running the tech stuff for my Shark event came with a very appropriate tattoo. Not a shark, but I give him a 9.5 for sharkish effort.



After my event, CBeebies presenter-turned-picture-book-writer Cerrie Burnell led another story session, and it was great to meet her.



Hey look, it's illustrator Guy Parker-Rees! He had been doing a Giraffes Can't Dance event upstairs. Giraffes somehow became a bit of an overall theme for the day.



Big thanks to the Discover team, Dave (for organising the whole Comic Maker part of the day), Gary and Alex on the comics team, and David Sanger for looking after me. If you haven't visited the exhibition yet, it runs until 31 August; details on their website.

I love how social media makes little stories at night, but by morning, they've slipped unnoticeably the Twitter stream. Anyway, it's a good excuse to post a quick drawing:



And here's how it came about: lovely Alex T Smith, making cookies and drawing a goat.


Goat sketch by Alex T Smith You can follow him on Twitter as @Alex_T_Smith.

Other news, just saw in The Bookseller that Raina Telgemeier has signed to do another graphic novel with Scholastic Inc, called Sisters. Cool! Now if only we could convince Scholastic UK to publish graphic novels... *smiles wistfully*

One more thing, it's school half-term and London's Imagine Festival is still going full-steam ahead. Don't miss David O'Connell's sure-to-be-fab comics workshop this Friday! Ages 7-11, details on his website. (He's @DavidOConnell on Twitter, keep an eye out for future workshops.)



And just in case you missed it on the Fleece Station blog, here's a goat video that had us in absolute stitches:

Hey, exciting, the second edition of ink+PAPER is about to come out, and you can put in your pre-order! Loads of amazing comics by your favourite indie creators, including six pages of new comics by me.



Here's a peek at mine! It's a story about two reindeer in a wood that turns out to be more than a wood. My fab friend editor David O'Connell has been releasing little peeks on the ink+PAPER website... exciting contributions by the likes of Will Morris, Francesca Cassavetti, John Riordan and more, including Andrew Waugh, AJ Poyiadgi, Carl Thompson, David O'Connell, Fred Blunt, Jenni Scott, Kim Roberts, Kripa Joshi, Paul Harrison-Davies, Rick Eades, Sally-Anne Hickman, Sarah Gordon and Seán Michael Wilson. And you can follow further developments on ink+PAPER's Twitter feed, @ipcomic.



£8 for 100 PAGES of independently published, full-colour, brand-new comics, what a deal! Go on, order your copy here.

So who's joining us in London on Friday night (tomorrow!) for the launch of ink+PAPER? Editor David O'Connell and loads of the comics brigade are launching a new comic magazine, 96 pages of full-colour comics in a handy A5 size publication. See you at Orbital Comics (near Leicester Square) from 7pm! Here's Dave's lovely first cover design, and you can find out more about ink+PAPER on its Facebook page.



And, of course, don't forget this Saturday's Comica Comiket festival! One of my all-time favourite comic artists, Posy Simmonds, will be signing and drawing from 11am-noon, and I'll be drawing at 1pm and signing from 1:30-2.

Here's the whole Drawing Parade line-up, it's pretty amazing! I'll have Vern and Lettuce, the new Nelson anthology, and TEN copies of my brand-new 70-page comic, Please Be Moral Do Not Spit. It's not a limited edition in the numbered sense, I just suspect I won't get time to make very many of them, so if you really want it, do stop by my table first thing.

I really need to get back into drawing, but I've been a bit distracted lately by all the possibilities unleashed by my new camera phone. I'm sure it will pass, but I've been taking lots of photos. Here's a morning view of the Royal Naval College in Greenwich.



By any chance, do you remember that blog post I did about the park full of fallen-down gravestones, by St Alfege church? Well, it turns out the gravestones weren't supposed to be down, someone had knocked them down, and there's been controversy about when and why it happened. And bizarrely, one of my photos turns out to be a player in the argument, which I found out when journalist Rob Powell got in touch with me to ask if they could attach my name to the photo on their news site. All very intriguing!



So moving on, come along with me to Greenwich market, full of all sorts of weird and wonderful treasures on a Thursday morning:

Thanks to Mike Medaglia and Mark Haylock for organising the first Comic Gosh!p book club meeting at Gosh! Comics in Soho. And to David O'Connell for presenting his comic, Tozo, as the first book of discussion, along with Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons' Watchmen.



We had a good discussion of both books, and it was great having David there to be able to answer questions about his comic, which he's been working on for five years. (You can see some of my Tozo fan art here.) Dave Gibbons recorded a video for us, talking about Watchmen and then trailing off as he got absorbed in reading Tozo (nice segue into the other Dave's talk there...). Here's a doodle I made of the whole group.



If you're on Facebook, you can join the secret Comics Gosh¡p group and the next meeting will take place on 9 Nov, discussing Batman: Year One, written by Frank Miller, illustrated by David Mazzucchelli, coloured by Richmond Lewis, lettered by Todd Klein and Hemlock by Josceline Fenton.

But first... here's a picture I drew yesterday in Oxford with Mo-Bot High creator Neill Cameron and David O'Connell! Click here if you'd like a slightly larger version for you or someone you know to colour in. (See if you can guess who drew which part!)



Dave and I went up to Oxford for another meeting with our publisher David Fickling about the picture book we're co-writing and co-illustrating. But before our meeting, we stopped by the new offices of the Phoenix Comic, set to launch in six months. (I was so curious!) Here's Dave at the front door:





The Phoenix Comic blazes the same amazing comics trail as the earlier DFC magazine, with much of the same editorial team, but this time set up as its own business and a three-year guaranteed run. Here I am with Ben Sharpe, my lovely editor who worked with me on Vern and Lettuce. He gave me wonderful amounts of freedom with the weekly strip, mostly just giving me encouragement and telling me to go ahead with it. I really miss working with Ben, and I'm so glad he's back!





You can tell The Phoenix just moved in, here's what you see at a series of front doors:





Ben showed us some amazing comics stuff, but we have to keep it under wraps, just for now. But you can see him hard at work at his desk. (Spot the Mo-bot High sticker on his Mac...)



The Phoenix are looking for high-quality comics! Do you make them? Have a look at the submission guidelines here.



After a cup of tea and rather lovely biscuits with Ben, we waved goodbye and went two doors down the road to the David Fickling Books office, where we had our meeting. Here's a little painting in the front hall that someone's done of the logo:



And fabulous Tilda Johnson, the first person you see when you walk in and the person who tells David off when he's been e-mailing too long or needs to go to a meeting. She's loads of fun and super organised.



Here's Dave at the big table in the middle of the office with David Fickling and our new editor, Kirsten Amstrong (who's taken over from Hannah Featherstone, who just had a baby. Which is something that happens

First, here are a couple more pics I made for the Beauty & Beast boutique in Monsterville. These will pin up next to the mirror where people (and monsters) will go for their fancy wig fittings.



And here's a little tailor chappie to greet you when you come into Beauty & Beast. It's sort of like those funny gentlemen shops you find on Jermyn Street with big shaving brushes and shoe-horns. Except it also sells Marie Antoinette alien wigs.



It's funny, I'm not much of an expert on gentlemen's fashion, and I keep thinking, if I had more time, I'd love to get in three illustrators who know loads about this kind of thing. They would be my dean from art college Christopher Sharrock, Philip Reeve and David Roberts. These guys know everything about men's fashion, ha ha. Oh...Hurrah! I just saw that David Roberts finally got himself a website! I'm bookmarking it to go back and have a long look. David's attention to clothing detail - well, everything, really - is AMAZING.


Christopher Sharrock, David Roberts (I couldn't find a good full-outfit photo so one of his characters is standing in for him), Philip Reeve

So you can come see my monster boutique Lolliplops old-fashioned soda fountain and ice scream shop. And the other fab stuff Ed Vere and Neal Layton have been coming up with! Here are the details:

Welcome to Monsterville - FREE OPEN DAY - Sat, 28 May - All day
***To ensure a space on events please call 020 8536 5555 to pre-book.***

Set off a Monster Bank Holiday by coming along to the FREE launch of Welcome to Monsterville with the brilliant Sarah McIntyre (Morris the Mankiest Monster), Neal Layton (Emily Browne and the Thing) and Ed Vere (Mr Big).

11.30am 0+ Mini Monsters: Enjoy Story time for babies and toddlers in our Story Glade in the garden (inside if wet!)

1 & 2.30pm 5+ Monstrous Trail: Our Story Builders will take visitors on a tour around Monsterville - can you spot all the monsters lurking in the shadows? Are you up to the challenges and games?

12 - 12.45pm 4+ Ed Vere: Author of Mr Big and The Getaway will be coming along to delight us with live drawing we can join in with. Introducing us to his new book Bedtime for Monsters and telling us how he came up with his monster creations for Welcome to Monsterville.

1-145pm 4+ Sarah McIntyre: Fabulous illustrator Sarah McIntyre will be reading from her absolutely disgusting book Morris the Mankiest Monster and talking about how she created Monsterville's Lolliplops Cafe and Beauty and Beast Salon.

2.30pm 4+ Monster Draw-off: Monsterville makers Ed Vere, Sarah McIntyre will be drawing to become the most despicable champion monster creator of all time. Who will fashion the most terrible creature? Who will you vote for ?

3.30pm 4+ Neal Layton: Join Neal Layton illustrator extraordinaire as he shows of his sketchbooks and talks us through how he produced his amazing range of monsters for Welcome to Monsterville. Discover's Story Builders will then present Emily Brown and the Thing.

Monster Top Trumps: Drop into this event and draw your own monster, decide what their special pow

Here's a drawing I just did of me and my friend David O'Connell, who also had his birthday this weekend. Happy birthday, Dave! (That's tozocomic.) He is my favourite person to write stuff with, and he's been sticking by me on our project even though it's been a bit frustrating lately.



After the studio party on Saturday, King Cupcake and I spent Sunday going for a lazy walk in Greenwich with Darryl Cunningham, through the park (I had to show him my favourite trees) and then through the market, where we picked up some fab Nigerian food for lunch on the lawn of the Royal Naval College. Here are a couple pictures we took in the Painted Hall, in the mirrors they put out so you can look at the ceiling without getting a crick in your neck.



The lovely Tulip Staircase in the Queen's House:


I like the way the people on the lawn are dotted about in a pattern like a Lowry painting. Darryl said his work's very influenced by Lowry, as well as other woodcut printmakers, it was fun talking with him about that.

Why is it, that the last two times I've taken Will Kirkby (chamonkee) to a nice pub, we've met head-on with full retro-kitsch Englishness? This time it was a group of very randy Morris dancers, but at least the ale was good. I did some drawing with Will and Lou (naniiebim) and Will let me mess around with his nice expensive magic marker until I ran it out of ink.



Hey, look at the fab drawing David O'Connell (tozocomic) made of yesterday's life drawing session! (He is thinking hard about the cookies Viviane baked.) You can see more work on his new website.

Today I was doing character development for a picture book, and since it involved just lots and lots of doodling, I decamped to the big sunny atrium at the National Maritime Museum. About three hours in, one of the doodles started to look distinctly like my friend Dave, which made me giggle, and so I finished it and coloured it in when I got home. (I'm not so sure he's going to like it, he looks downright cross. But I look like a primate, so perhaps we're even.)

And then I found in my Inbox a marvellous Vern and Lettuce picture by the magnificent Warwick Johnson Cadwell! If you haven't seen his work yet, have a look, the guy is insanely talented. Some of the best drawing I've seen in Britain, I'm serious. I met him for the first time at the Thing and had a bit of a fan girl moment.



Don't forget, you can bring your DFC questions to the DFC panel at the Oxford Literary Festival at noon this Saturday! You can book tickets here to see a lively discussion with David Fickling, John Aggs, the Etherington brothers and me.

Hi, this is Lettuce here! Vern's busy getting his wool in knots trying to figure out what he could wear to Tozo's party, if he's invited. Have you seen the annual Tozo competition? Vern applied yesterday, and maybe he will get lucky and Dave will draw him in a little box with holes in it, so everyone can look through to see he's sleeping.

Except he won't be sleeping, he'll be very cross and trying to get out of the box.

Lookie, lookie, I had my own stall! This was a first for me and very exciting. And it couldn't have been a friendlier place; thanks to the huge publicity campaign by Jimi Gherkin and Peter Lally, the venue was PACKED. People were buying things, and stuff was flying off the tables! And I got to be next to two fab tablemates, my friend David O'Connell and I lovely guy I met for the first time, Wes White. (A third of a table each isn't much room, so I'm glad we three got on well!)



Funnily enough, the thing that sold the fastest and got the most attention was my little neighbour girl's two minis, go figure. She is destined for great things, that kid. Here are people fussing over them:



I had a few great LiveJournal moments, meeting joedecie (whose comic I mentioned recently), yunni, cdave and ratherlemony for the first time. (Hooray!) I also got to see harveyjames, ryclaude, and got some great comics from Maartye Schalkx, Al Maceachern, Naniiebim (Louise Ho), Dr Parsons and a little packet of circus items from Divya Venkatesh, Simone Rodney-Foli and Stacey Roper. It was great to see loads of the Camberwell college illustration gang turn up (I plugged the fair rather mercilessly in my talk there last week) and lots of people I'd met at Comics Creators Guild gatherings and at Oxford's Caption festival.

I wish I had taken more photos, but here's one with Will chamonkee and Dave tozocomic. Dave's going to let me share a table with him at the UK Web & Mini Comix Thing on 28 March, which should be more good fun.



Will Kirkby and Louise Ho were driving back up north the same night, and for some reason, Will thought it would be easier to leave his car at my place. But we came out of the fair to the deepest snow I've ever seen in London and it took us ages even to get back to mine. Good luck to Will, who is determinedly committed to showing up to work in Sheffield tomorrow morning!
Will and I had both planned to do Hourly Comics Day, but running a stall was pretty full-on, and I just couldn't manage it. But I'm looking forward to seeing other people's results here!

For my morning warm-up sketch, I couldn't resist challenging darkwaterfrey's magnificent portrayal of Tozo's Spider Queen. I loved his, but I had a totally different picture of her in mind.



I got a tip-off from the DFC's Dave Shelton: if you're anywhere near Inverness on 14-15 Feb, don't miss the 2nd Highlands International Comics Expo. Dave will be having a fling there with a lot of other good comics folk.

And I just had a second-hand greeting from my second cousin in Berkshire, via DFC Headquarters, where she submitted her ideas on what the letters DFC stand for. (Hello, Alex!)

Over on libba_bray's blog, I just saw this year's must-read book: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Fabulous.

I was working very late last night, and when it got to the Silly Hour, just before hitting the sack, I couldn't resist drawing something for what was happening here in the comments on nedroidcomics' blog post.
(This picture refers to a painting by Valetin Serov, which is very famous in Russia but I guess not so much here.)



While he was in town, Will Kirkby (chamonkee) did a sketchy life drawing of me, and I liked the head so much that I sat next to him and did my own little drawing based on his sketch. It looks like a cross between the way Will draws and I draw.



And tozocomic made me laugh with his drawing of our pub-going group a couple nights ago, and he let me post it here. It's me, Will, Stuart and Dave. (As you can see, I'm rather tall-ish.)


'Comickers in search of a pub' by David O'Connell

My friend Kim Toohey has posted a link to a November article in the Guardian about one of my favourite writer-illustrators, Satoshi Kitamura here. I was particularly intrigued by this:
He draws with ink, but instead of a springy, steel nib he uses a Japanese glass pen, with tiny grooves to accommodate the ink . This creates a distinctive line that blobs now and then as it glides, giving an unmistakable character to everything he draws.
Does anyone know who makes these Japanese glass pens? I've never seen one.

Want some recommendations for this year's reading? My writer friend Candy Gourlay has made a video interviewing the kids in her neighbourhood to hear their best picks! (Thanks, Mia, for the Vern & Lettuce plug.)

...or, I should say, Klikker meets the bunnies! Here's my guest comic for David O'Connell, or tozocomic, posted on the ultra-stylish Tozo website. It was inspired by the second panel in this strip, where Klikker is 'helping' a drunk party goer with his bottle. I wasn't going to give Dave a Christmas prezzie because we already did a Secret Santa exchange at our comics 'office party'. But I just couldn't resist this one!

Go have a look at Dave's work if you haven't seen it: his Tozo work, his illustration work and also our Airship comic jam. Meeting Dave and getting to know him has definitely been one of the highlights of my year.



Tomorrow my book club's discussing Empress Orchid by Anchee Min. I was doing some quick research and came across this fascinating hour-long interview. Have a listen if you have the time, I think I'm going to listen to it again while I paint.

YouTube link

I've been getting some Christmas photos from my American relatives, and these two are my favourites; Uncle Roy in his new hat and digging out the car. He looks very stoic with his broom:

Today Vern and Lettuce met up for a quiet little comics office party, while Garen, Dave, Ellen and I went streaking through the streets of Brixton.
... Ha ha, no, the other way round (shame, that). The DFC Christmas double issue is HERE! And it looks fab!!! You can get lots of little peeks at it on the DFC website! Gary Northfield's Little Cutie gets a full double-page spread, and you can read a newly posted interview of Gary on Anna Mondo's blog. Ooh, and another one with Gary about Derek the Sheep on the Forbidden Planet blog.



And the other exciting thing today, I got to try quince jam! The reason this is exciting is that it was one of my four goals of things I wanted to do in England, the other three being animal sightings. (Seen a meadow lark, still need to see a live hedgehog and a badger.)

Here I am eating Ellen's mother-in-law's quince jam with hot scones in Ellen's kitchen:


And here is our office party at a fab little pizza place in Brixton market:

(tozocomic, rainboworchid and ellenlindner)


For our Secret Santa gifts, we all made 2"x 2" drawings and I got Dave's! Ellen kindly models with it here:

Edit: You can see my little art piece on Garen's blog here!

And one last thing, this morning I saw a mysterious message scrawled onto the pavement next to my post office. Whatever can it mean?