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You just can't keep Nelson within the pages of a book! Here's the most recent contribution to the collaboration with Blank Slate Books, from my fab studio mate Lauren O'Farrell (aka Deadly Knitshade). The story in the book goes up to 2011, but Lauren's taken it to 2012, when Nel writes a book about her little brother, Sonny. We all got to see her creation for the first time at the Cartoon Museum, at the launch of an exhibition of comic roughs and final artwork from our book. You can see some of our pictures on the wall behind Lauren... exciting!



Look at all the detail Lauren put into this! She was up til 4am the night before, making these tiny polaroid photos of scenes from the book. The exhibition runs until late February, so do pop by for a look! It's just a couple streets away from the front of the British Museum.
Edit: I just found out that you can bid on Nel at the Gosh Comics party on Friday, and the profits will go to Shelter's charity for the homeless! Go look at Lauren's amazing post about her Knitted Nel.



Speech! Speech! Here are our fab editors and fellow creators Woodrow Phoenix and Rob Davis, the original two who mused about the Nelson book idea on Twitter and then took it forward with our whole gang of 54 creators. (My web designer, Dan Fone, took the photo.)




A lot of us listened to the speeches from the first floor:



Here's Woodrow's mum, proudly holding our new book. Mrs Phoenix is more of a legend than all of us put together: she's fostered more than 200 kids, founded loads of programmes in the community, and was the first black woman in Britain to be awarded the MBE, in 1973, which she turned down unless the council would agree to give her a house for her foster children. And they did. (I once rang up Woodrow when we were both working on the DFC and caught him on the way to Buckingham Palace, where he was taking his mum to collect her OBE.)



Here's my fab studio mate Ellen Lindner signing a copy of Nelson. She tackled the 1970 slot in Nel's life, three years ahead of my 1973 story, with former DFC colleague (and contributor to the new weekly Phoenix Comic!) Jamie Smart and our studio mate Gary Northfield taking the years between our comics.


Photo by Dan Fone

We were all very proud to see our artwork hanging on the walls. I was surprised that curator Anita O'Brien decided to use my pencil rough instead of my inked page. But she made good sense when she explained that the pencil had a lot of life and looked very different from the final artwork, so it was m

Hurrah! The Fougasse exhibition is officially open, and he's one of my all-time favourites! Here's illustrator/designer/typographer Rian Hughes posing decoratively with the banner last night. We're both big fans, as is, we deeply suspect, one of Rian's greatest heroes, Serge Clerc.



I don't even know that much about the life of Fougasse (aka Cyril Kenneth Bird), as far as research is concerned, I just love the LOOK of his stuff. I've been studying it before I even came to England; here are some copies I did in my sketchbook back in Pennsylvania, 12 years ago or so:



Thanks to comics artist-in-residence Mark Stafford for tipping me off about the show! It's fascinating to see how in Fougasse's early work, his lines and washes are fairly complicated, in the style of the day, and gradually becomes more and more clean lined, to the iconic look we know today and associate with the war-time Underground posters. I love the way he uses red, and a bright salmon pink, along with a very limited but lush palette. There's a great cartoon of a guy sitting on a chair looking at an enormous blank canvas (we've all been there) and a great crowd scene picture that's at once very complicated and hugely simplified. You'll have to go there to see what I mean.



If you're in London, it's just a couple streets back from the front of the British Museum, well worth a visit. The show doesn't last very long, only until 21 November. Cartoon Museum website. I need to go back and read a few more of the exhibition panels and have a look at a new Fougasse book that's just come out. (They have one preview copy in the shop.)

During the first of two 2-hour workshops I led at the Cartoon Museum on Thursday, we started with warm-up sketches. Here's mine, some sort of burping rodent.



The first session was very chilled out, only three kids, and we had a wonderfully companionable time drawing together. They were old enough so I could just keep setting them tasks, then letting them get on with it, which let me take part in the drawing, too. For the warm-up sketches, we started with putting some random eyeballs on a page, drawing a simple shape around the eyeballs, then turning it into a character.

The second workshop had loads more people show up, including two mums who happily mucked in. The day's theme was Comic Jam, so first we designed characters (the way that Emma Vieceli taught us all last year at the Crystal Palace Children's Book Festival), making a list of professions, then a list of animals/objects, and combining the two (hairdresser cat, assassin chicken, chef toilet, etc).



Then I showed them the Airship comics jam I did with my friend David O'Connell (you can read it here on my website) and then they set their own characters off on a four-person comics jam (passing to the left, like with cards). Then we designed mini comics so they could make their own story, inspired by things that had popped up in their comics jam if they wanted.


Comics Jam, here's how we did it:
* Design a character on a piece of scratch paper.
* Fold an A3 piece of paper in half twice. Open up, there will be four square, or panels.
* Decide if you want to turn your page so that your comic is portrait or landscape format (either will work)
* Start with the top left-hand panel.
* Start off a story using your character. The scene can be fairly ordinary, but bring in a hint that something unusual will happen in the next panel.
* After five minutes, everyone holds their papers up in the air.
* Pass your paper to the person on your left (or swap, if there's only two of you).
* Read the first panel, then decide what happens next in the story and draw it in the second panel (top right).
* After five minutes, swap again. By this third panel, the story should be in full swing, possibly with its most dramatic scene.
* After five minutes, swap again. This fourth panel will finish the story; so think about a way to bring the story to a conclusion, whether it's with something funny, a tragic end, or have the character making an observation about what's happened to it that best fits that character's personality.
* Pass the story back to the person who drew the first panel, find yours, and find out what kind of adventure your character's gone on while you've been away.



Using a Comics Jam in a workshop, some great things:

* It forces the kids to to concentrate on storytelling clarity. It doesn't matter how great the picture is or how passionate the writing is if the next person can't understand what's going on or read their writing. So the creators have to keep stepping back and trying to look at their single panel from another person's perspective, and understand that just because it makes sense in their head, they have to put in extra work and attention for it to make sense to someone else. (Which contrasts to the warm-up