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Hurrah! Congratulation to fellow Fleece Officer Ellen Lindner on the launch of her graphic novel with Soaring Penguin Publications, Undertow! Great launch part lasts night at the Miller Pub, near London Bridge.



This novel's been a long time coming, it's partly what got me inspired to explore comics again while I saw Ellen working on it when we were doing our illustration degree together. It's a great story set on Coney Island in the early 1960's, be sure to get a copy and if you can, have Ellen sign and draw in it for you. Barnaby Richards, Maartje Schalkx and Cooey the Pigeon look on approvingly (second pic nicked from Lauren O'Farrell).



Now I'm rushing around doing last-minute little jobbies before going tomorrow to the Paris Manga & Sci-Fi Show with Emma Vieceli (see my last post about that). I've been looking like an old sheepdog last night, but got that sorted out at the local barber (who usually only cuts men's hair, but Dennis did it for £12.50; beat that, Chelsea ladies!) Oh, and I never got around to buying new gloves, oops. Make do and mend, as the old war posters say.

I love doing collaborative artwork because we never know exactly what we'll get at the end. Here's a simple game called Consequences: fold a paper into three parts, have someone draw a monster's head and just indicate at the fold with two marks where the neck goes, then fold it over; the next person draws the middle bit without looking at the head, and the third person takes the bottom bit, again without looking. Ta-dah! Surprise monster. Here's one Jonathan Edwards (aka Jontofski), Warwick Johnson Cadwell and I drew at the Nelson party at Gosh! comic shop last Friday:



You can see more monsters on Gosh's blog, and also find out about a page of original Nelson artwork I've put up for sale, all proceeds to Shelter charity (and lots by other contributors, too!).

On Sunday, my friend (and website designer) Dan Fone invited a bunch of us to the House Cafe in Camberwell to come and make a spoof magazine with him. We spent much of the afternoon flipping through magazines, laughing at stupid headlines and finally cutting them up and making our own mash-up pages. I think Dan is going to turn them into an online readable magazine, but in the meantime, you can see some of our pages.



Mine started with a dumb article about the difficulty of fat girls and thin girls being friends (wha..?) but then I saw a shark movie advert and it all got very silly.

















Even though Dan was running the workshop, he still managed to mock up his own page. Thanks for a fun afternoon, Dan, and the House Cafe for hosting!



The other fun collaborative effort I saw this weekend was the new issue of the Strumpet comics magazine! I've been watching my fab studio mate Ellen Lindner do crazy amounts of work getting ready for it: making comics, editing other people's comics, chasing them up on deadlines and for artwork, making videos, promo images and badges, managing its Kickstarter fundraiser... if anyone wants to know how to take a publication from beginning to end, Ellen is a great person to ask about it (as is is David O'Connell, who just edited ink+PAPER). Thanks for a great party, Ellen, Jeremy Day and the Strumpet crew!



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Two costume parties in one day! Here was the first, Fearfest, at Foyles bookshop on London's Charing Cross Road. I'm posing with a comics reader named Belle, in front of the piranha tank. (Yes, real piranhas! And one of them was getting rather chomped on by the rest.) Belle had a cool broomstick and, very gratifyingly, knew my comic Vern and Lettuce, back to front. I love it when that happens, she caught all these tiny details I knew most people would miss. (Maybe she'll contribute a page to Vern and Lettuce's online magazine, The Pickle.)



A quick poster of Captain Waffle that I drew for the shop, a be-wigged Children's Marketing and Events Co-ordinator Neil Jackson with a be-hatted Sam, who both were good fun, and one of the kid's pirates. (You can download a free Draw a Pirate pack here.)



The event had free sweets for the kids, but I partook of them rather extravagantly. The chocolate sweets were the best, but Neil also introduced me to mallow sticks. Thanks, Neil, Sam and the Foyles gang!



Then it was on to the house of my fellow Fleece Officer Ellen Lindner and her husband Stephen Betts, where all my studio mateys from the Fleece Station were costumed up! Gary Northfield and Lauren O'Farrell had evidentally had a massive row and stuck things through each other's heads. It was all a bit gory.



Look, two villagers from The Wicker Man! We love playing that soundtrack in the studio, it's well creepy.




I was never quite able that evening to be at ease around Dylan Wyn Owen, his seamless mask/makeup job was just a bit too convincing.



Ellen had bowls of gummy teeth lying around, nom nom.



Gary's gone a bit simple since his hatchet job.



Oo, don't look at Charlotte Brown the Medusa or she'll turn you to stone.



Noelle Davies-Brock went all Star Wars princess...



And Alfred wore his heart on his sleeve.





James Turner (have you seen his brilliant new Super Comics Adventure Squad comic book?) and Bond girl Akanksha:

This weekend's drawing in Greenwich Park. I loved how, when people passed me drawing, most of them would turn around to look at the tree. Some even stopped to take photos of it, a most magnificent tourist attraction.



I wish I could draw the leaves, too, but they're awfully fiddly, it would've taken me at least another half hour, and standing on a slope drawing was doing my back in. I didn't notice that while I was drawing - I was totally in the Zone - but then I tried to put my pens back in my bag on the ground and it took me ten seconds to stretch out so I could bend over. I think this is what getting old must feel like.



Here are a few stages in the drawing. Have you been keeping an eye on Philip Reeve's sketch blog? He's been drawing some beautiful trees lately.



After packing my pencil case, I treated myself to a coffee and bun at Rhodes Bakery, but just before I went in, I had a look through the window of Lush Designs, got sucked in by all the pretty pictures and ended up buying this gorgeous cushion. Here it is on our sofa. I thought Stuart might be a bit annoyed about how much I'd spent on something we don't strictly need (£29), but he looked rather pleased when I showed it to him, and said, 'That's great, you never spend money on anything for the flat'. I think he's hoping it might be a sign that I have a tiny bit of nesting instinct in me. (The lama cushion behind it was designed by Meg Hunt.)



Oh, and I WAS a Squander Bug today! I also bought a fancy frock at Sika, a shop on the edge of Greenwich Market. It's my favourite dress shop, they combine Ghanaian fabric with western retro dress designs. I am keeping it hidden until my next festival (one where I'm not dressed as a pirate. But you can see a bit of the petticoat sticking out of the bag.)



And another event! Last night I took part in the Lewisham Literary Festival with my studio mate Ellen Lindner, writer Karen McLeod and moderator and For Books' Sake coordinator Jane Bradley. Thanks so much to Jonathan Main from Bookseller Crow for helping out with book sales!


Jonathan Main, Jane Bradley, Karen McLeod, Sarah McIntyre, Ellen Lindner

Ellen and I talked about our work, published and self-published, and Karen read part of her short story Never Can Say Goodbye in an anthology called Men & Women that had me hooked and I had to buy a copy. (It's not a children's book, I should add.)



I was really grateful, our whole studio showed up, including partners, and I talked a bit about what we get up to at the

Jet-lag and catching up means it's taken me a week and a half to blog this, but here it is, my Stumptown blog post!



My family used to go every year to the Oregon on holiday (Cannon Beach, to be specific - here's a photo. Cannon Beach was where a lot of the outdoor scenes of The Goonies was filmed.) Since it's our old vacation place, I've always thought of Oregon as my favourite state.



As I flew over from MoCCA festival in New York City, I drew this mini comic on the plane to Seattle and roped my parents into helping me put it together. Which I'm glad I did, as it turned out to be my best-selling item! (Apologies if you already read it in an earlier post.



There's been A LOT going on in Portland since I emigrated to Britain. It has a thriving arts and comics scene; in fact, such a scene that there's now a whole TV show called Portlandia that parodies the city 'where young people go to retire', 'all the hot girls wear glasses' and 'you can put a bird on something and call it art'. Portland residents have very mixed reactions about the series, it does hit a bit close to the bone (and particularly annoying if your art career involves a lot of birds.) But I love this clip. The '90s are how I remember America, so it's ALL STILL THERE... in Portland! Ha ha...


YouTube link



YouTube link

I was trying to think of things to draw in Seattle when I was trying out encaustic wax painting with my sister, so... yeah. The bird. I think in Britain right now it's unicorns, possibly shifting toward tentacled creatures. There was even a brief period where everyone seemed to put Abraham Lincoln on things.



And here's how it looks if you put three birds at a table. Here I am with my fab table mates, my studio mate Ellen Lindner (ellenlindner) and Cliodhna Lyons (lj user="ztoical">), pronounced 'Kleena'. I sold lots of copies of my new all-ages comic book Vern and Lettuce and generally felt pleased about its US launch.


(Photo by my sister's partner, reporter Mike Lewis)

A big thanks to visitor Linda Wada (who knew of me through British comics creator Garen Ewing), who shot several videos duri

Today's our fab studio mate's birthday! We had a celebratory lunch at our fave cafe, Panda Panda in Deptford, where we got lots of special treats. The Vietnamese coffee is STRONG AND BOY AM I WIRED. (You can see a couple more birthday photos over on The Fleece Station blog.)



And here's Van, the most excellent owner, and his lovely mum.



Gary's been saving the capsules from his Spider-Man kinder eggs.



Have you seen Joe Gordon's amazing winter wonderland photos from Edinburgh? He says he lives in Narnia, and it is true.

On Tuesday, my studio mate Ellen Lindner and DFC comics colleague John Aggs and I took the train up to Nottingham to paint murals for a big festival called Game City. We'd known about it last year because the guys who used to work upstairs in our studio, Ian Gouldstone, Martin Lye and Dave Surman had done a lot of animation work for it, so we were prepped to expect a huge burst of creativity on Market Square.



Our brief was for each of us to decorate a gaming lounge by Wednesday afternoon. John's and Ellen's were more specific (John had a somewhat open mission to feature the video game Crysis 2 and Ellen's instructions from LEGO were fairly tight.) I wasn't given a set theme, so I decided to draw a 30-panel space opera comic featuring a bunny called Flummox. When I saw the guys across the way finish theirs in three hours, I realised I'd been stupidly over-ambitious, and I had to work like mad, and leave out a lot of things I'd planned to do to finish by the next day and catch a particular train. But hey, it's there now, ta-dah!



This was my rough outline. It's a choose-your-own-adventure type of story, inspired partly by seeing Daniel Merlin Goodbrey's pieces at the HyperComics exhibition at Battersea Park, and having tied the idea into a workshop I led there.



Here's the almost-finished painted version. It's sort of a mash-up of the bunnies from Vern and Lettuce comic book and the aliens from You Can't Eat a Princess! picture book.



Poor Flummox. The story had several 'Game Over' bits, so he died a lot.




Here's some bits of John Aggs's work, which was sectioned off in the 'mature' area, since the video game is rather violent. The subject matter isn't my cup of tea at all, but no one can deny that that this John guy can really draw. (And he'd only been commissioned at 5pm the night before!)





Ellen was still working with the LEGO people as I left, but you can get a glimpse of it here, next to the family arts-and-crafts area. They changed the brief completely when she got there, but she was great at coming to a compromise with them.



These were the guys who finished in three hours: Daniel Grey (daninski on Twitter) and Tom Brown (tomshqui on Twitter) from Holbrooks Films. They dragged black paint down the wall on bits of cardboard, a bit like screen printing, and their walls looked great.

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

Not only does Battersea in south London boast the Battersea Dogs and Cats Home, but it also hosted a comics festival today in a perfect summery setting. Here's my glam studio mate Ellen Lindner at the bus stop.



I posted about the HyperComics exhibition last week here, but I caught a lot of things this time that I missed on my first visit. Barnaby Richards had trouble looking through the masks to see Dave McKean's installations - our specs kept catching the edge of it - but if we took them off, we couldn't see anything. Eventually we sorted it out.



Some fab people from the day: Woodrow Phoenix, Warwick Johnson Cadwell (I got a copy of his new minicomic sketchbook and The No.1 Car Spotter, yay!), Lou Naniiebim Ho and Nikki Shakino Stuart with our Birdsong anthology.


Back to fab Ellen and her amazing printed shirt:


And the tucked-away part of the exhibition that I totally missed last time.


Between Dave McKean's fascinating talk about his work, the lovely outdoor marquee setting and the good company, I think this is the best comics festival I've been to, just for pure comfort and ease. Oh, and I was just a punter - no table - that may have had something to do with it. The organiser and exhibition curator Paul Gravett was saying there was a chance this festival could become an annual thing, and I'm all for that! If you haven't seen the exhibition, be sure to pop along, and bring your kids to the HyperComics family workshop I'm leading on Sun, 19 Sept.

Oh, and one more thing, the yeti meister Alex Milway just sent me a link to this amazing historic Russian photos.

On to Edinburgh! Packing copies of Warwick's book and Geraldine McCaughrean's Pull Out all the Stops! in case I get any time to read on the train. I've already started reading Geraldine's book, it's so well written it makes me rather giddy.

Click the button to hear my studio mate Ellen Lindner and me talk about our studio and our work for fifteen minutes with Val Phoenix on Odd Girl Out at the Old Police Station's own station, Optical Radio!

If the button doesn't work, here's the direct link over at drop.io.

Lookie, lookie, I managed to make a mini comic in time for Hi-Ex in Inverness this weekend! Lauren just noted that the dates on the cover (1988-1990) make it look a bit like I've died, but at least I can take comfort that if I only lived two years, they were very full years.

I'll be selling most of my copies at Hi-Ex, but Ellen Lindner (ellenlindner) will have a dozen copies at her table, so pop over there quick to see her if you want one! She also has a few of my artwork prints for sale.



Ellen's been working like mad with her Gocco press and is just popping back in later to finish up. Hurrah! Her full-colour mini is looking beautiful.



Ellen and our fab friend Dave O'Connell (tozocomic) will be manning booths at the UK Web & Mini Comix Thing on Saturday in Mile End, east London. Dave's selling brand new Queen Mother mini comic, The Green Lady Mystery and the third chapter of his epic ligne-claire Tozo comic, and I am totally dying to get my hands on both of those. Everyone up in Scotland, I'll see you very soon!

Here's my contribution for the cover of whoresofmensa, an annual publication for which my studio mate ellenlindner has been busily making amazing comics. If you make cartoons or comics, you too can
** contribute your own partygoing portrait for the cover! ** Your character will join the party crowd scene, and the deadline is June 1st. Details here, along with the first portrait by Lee Kennedy.


pencil sketch and final version

I keep peeking at Ellen's work from across the room, and remembering I've agreed to do a double-page spread, on the theme of 'entertaining'. I need to get cracking on that!

Yesterday I went with Ellen Lindner and Myla Goldberg to Yauatcha in Soho, just around the corner from Berwick Street Market, for the most amazing dim sum and teacake selection! Ellen and Myla are both sophisticated New York literary people, so I felt like we should have been talking about complicated plot structures and things, but all I could think about was the cake:






My favourites were the white macaroons filled with what I think was almond paste and poppy seeds... mmmm.
Okay, sated by cake, I can now say that Myla's fascinating (even more fascinating than cake, really!) and I'm going straight away to read her bestselling novel, Bee Season. (You can read over 300 reviews of it on Amazon.) Myla's also written another novel called Wickett's Remedy, and she and her comics-making husband Jason Little are working on new books while they're doing a summer house-swap to London from their place in Brooklyn. And if you haven't read Ellen Lindner's Coney-Island-set graphic novel, Undertow, then what are you doing? She's also posted some great sketches from her recent trip to southern India. We were talking about her latest graphic novel project, it sounds really exciting - keep an eye on her blog to see what she's up to.

Just to prove to myself that I AM working on the Birdsong anthology, I'm posting the text I wrote for it this morning. I think the comic is going to peter out into wordlessness as the story kicks in. It's about something that happened to me at Limehouse Basin when I first got to London and didn't know anyone except Stuart. So 'morning writing' today instead of a morning sketch. (Hmm, I think sketches look nicer. The text in this one doesn't do a whole lot, other than set it up.)

Congratulations to ellenlindner ...it’s finished! I’ve been waiting with great anticipation for the completion of this book, ever since she presented some of its early artwork to our MA Illustration class at Camberwell art college. I read it in snippets, and Ellen even hired me to do some tonal work for a few sample pages, which gave me the confidence to colour my own first few comics digitally. I owe this novel and Ellen a huge debt of gratitude; I remember (with burning cheeks) talking with Ellen about comics early on in our course, wrinkling my nose and naively asking, ‘but aren’t almost all comics for adults just full of guns and tanks and boobs?’ Several things quickly helped change my opinion, but by watching Ellen work on Undertow, I came to admire the way her comics brought both flair and subtlety to a sophisticated and sensitive story.



Set in Coney Island in the 1960s, we follow a fiercely independent and street-smart teenager named Rhonda, whose mother rarely surfaces from alcoholic stupours, a brother with a police record and friends burdened by drugs and poverty. When Rhonda’s friend disappears while swimming in the sea, Rhonda alternates between her hard-as-nails act, despair, and whimsical moments where she take pleasure in small things like learning to dance. Rhonda wants more from life than what she finds in Brooklyn, but she’s not sure she wants to accept help from a Harvard boy, an earnest uptown social worker named Chuck who sometimes seems well-intentioned, sometimes seems to take a creepy interest in her, and who has no clue about the people around her.



I’m intrigued by the character of Edie Abrams, a socialite photographer friend of Chuck’s who insists he take her slumming with him so she can document scenes from the teenagers’ lives. This photography theme resurfaces when we discover Rhonda has photographic memory. Ellen also created a shorter comic for The Whores of Mensa magazine about another photographer from history, Lee Miller, and takes inspiration from the old photos she uncovers in her research. I’ll be interested to see how she continues to tackle the interlinking relationship between photography and her comics medium.



Ellen will be selling copies of Undertow at the UK Web & Mini Comix Thing on 28 March, don’t miss your chance to buy a copy! You can read Ellen's blog post about the launch of Undertow here.

This picture pretty much sums up how I've been feeling this week.



Don't forget Zinefest this Saturday!
Contributors include Ellen Lindner, Jeremy Dennis, Lizz Lunney, Charlotte Percival, Sarah Lippett, Rosie Brice, Karrie Fransman, Erica Akerlund, Lady Lucy, Flo Brooks, Carolyn Alexander, Kate Dickinson, Jenny Linn-Cole, Kate Evans, Liz Greenfield, Leonie O¹Moore, Carol Swain, Tanya Meditzky, Francesca Cassavetti, Isy Morgenmuffel, SarahRay, Sally-Anne Hickman, Laura Stimpson, Karoline Rerrie, Sarah Lynch, Lucy Sweet, Siobhan Bowers, Rachael House, Lee Kennedy, Jess Bradley, Heather Middleton, Jackie Batey, Iro Tsavala, Siobhan Britton, Mireille Fauchon, Emma Welch and Susie Rumsby.



And I just realised that the Alternative Press Fair on 1 Feb is the same day as Hourly Comic Day, and I'm thinking maybe I can combine the two. Hmm. (Here's the hourly comic I made last year.)

I went to my friend Ellen's house for the Obama inauguration and she got really into it with cutout letters over the telly. I brought a big bag of Toll House chocolate chips that my American auntie sent and Ellen made chocolate chip cookies, which was the most American thing we could think of.

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?

Hooray! Garen Ewing just posted this drawing on his blog! It was great to see him and Ellen Lindner during my day in central London on Wednesday (even if that funny-looking little green pastry turned out to cost a fiver). I'm really looking forward to Garen's upcoming work in the DFC, Charlie Jefferson and the Tomb of Nazaleod. Have you seen Ellen's latest book, Little Rock Nine? It's well worth reading, and she's currently working on another comic of E.M. Forster's short story, The Machine Stops. You can read her amazing novel Undertow online here.

It's funny, when you get a bunch of comics people together, we always have to get out pens and paper to draw things when we have difficulty describing them. I particularly liked this picture Ellen drew in my notebook during a discussion of historic genetic oddities of the Spanish royal family. (Although I think this must be one of the better looking monarchs.)

I'm off to the SCBWI conference in Winchester today, where in my workshop I'll be giving a first peek at layouts for the picture book I'm illustrating for David Fickling, written by Britain's best-selling contemporary poet, Giles Andreae.

I'll be back in London on Sunday morning for the panel at the ICA with DFC colleagues Adam Brockbank, John and Patrice Aggs and Gary Northfield. Speaking of which, have you been following Adam Brockbank's DFC strip with Ben Haggarty, Mezolith? It's just getting better and better, and I was totally amazed by his swan maidens and the big earth woman in the last couple episodes.

Don't forget, you can buy the DFC in Tesco from 26 Nov - 2nd Dec. (John Freeman comments on the DFC in Tesco here.) But you can also buy single issues at any time from the DFC website.