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Something that made me sad, then happy, then sad after my friend Nelson died was finding our email exchange about how he wanted to start writing again.

And thank you for thinking me a writer, or at least having the seed — I know that having the chops requires craft.  And craft requires time, sweat and not a little bit of Jameson’s.  I thought about what you said, though.  Maybe essays would be a start; the idea of writing the great American novel is outside both my ability and my reality.  I am starting to think that reading email for a living has reduced my attention span a bit too much for that level of dedication.  Sad, that.  But words will always fascinate and entertain me, so if they find a way to come out in a way that someone else would enjoy — that would be something.  Thankfully, some of them entertained you enough that summer to call me in the first place.

He sent this soon after the last time we saw each other in New York, in November 2012, right before Hurricane Sandy. I remember being so glad he was thinking this way. The letters he wrote to me while he was in the army — I’ve written about that era a few times — were a joy. I hoped he’d find his way back to the page.

Nelson and I first got to know each other in a high school writing class — the one I took my senior year that also led me to my friend Lili, who died ten years ago of pancreatic cancer, and to our teacher, Mrs. Kjos, who died of ovarian cancer in 2008. I guess this is what being in your forties is like.

Last night I dreamed that I was reading a collection of short stories Nelson had written, a book he self-published knowing he would die soon. In the dream he was still alive. Waking up this morning was the most bittersweet thing.

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Woodrow Phoenix is one of the two editors who compiled Nelson, a 250-page anthology featuring work from over 50 different writers and artists. The idea of Rob Davis, the Blank Slate-published anthology tells a single tale, as told by a variety of different artists and writers. Amongst the incredible range of creators involved are people such as Roger Langridge, Paul Grist, Kate Brown, Posy Simmonds and Philip Bond.

I caught Woodrow by surprise and cornered him on the morning after he found out Nelson had won Best Book at the British Comic Awards, to ask him a few questions about the book and how it came together.

Steve: Last night Nelson won Best Book at the British Comic Awards!

Woodrow Phoenix: We’re very pleased and thrilled that people whose opinions we respect have seen fit to bestow this honour on us!

Steve: What first inspired yourself and Rob Davis to create Nelson?

Woodrow: Rob had this idea which I thought was a great concept I’ve never seen before. Nelson tells a complete story, as written and drawn by a series of gifted creators. It’s an anthology with just one story. It was such a great concept that I immediately thought ‘we have to do this’! I work as a designer as well as an illustrator, and I knew that something like this would need a strong sense of design, so I felt that was something I could bring to the project.

For example, I designed the cover for the anthology – we wanted something that would stand out and have something immediately compelling. Rob sketched the character, I did the type treatment, we put them together and we literally had the cover design in only a few hours.

Steve: How did you go about finding writers and artists to work on the anthology?

Woodrow: Between Rob and I we know a lot of people who we think are doing different, interesting things in comics, and we reached out to them. We also wrote a list of people who perhaps hadn’t done as much experimental, different stuff, and we wanted to challenge by inviting to work on Nelson. We picked people we wanted to see work, and then emailed everyone on our lists to see if they were interested. We thought it’d take a long time, but surprisingly, almost immediately everybody said “yes!”

Steve: With the now award-winning success of Nelson, are there perhaps now plans for a sequel project?

Woodrow: When we first finished, I vowed to never do something like this again! It was complicated and tiring, but enough time has passed that I’m thinking maybe there is something we could do. Something which would have some of the same features to it. It’s exciting to do something as ambitious and wide-ranging, and I’m considering trying it again.

Steve: Do you have anything else coming up on a personal level? Any other projects on the horizon?

Woodrow: I’m working on something else – a silent comic, where each page is a metre wide. I won’t be finishing it for a while!

I’ve reached a point now where I feel I’ve got all these crazy ideas, and it’s time to start trying them.

I think it’s important for the comics medium that we don’t keep doing the same things all the time. If you think about what we could do, you realise that there are a million subjects and styles we can work in. Rather than confining ourselves to capes we can do whatever we want, and I think we have to start taking that freedom to make work which isn’t predictable, doesn’t rely on old concepts, and isn’t always the same thing. We’ve got nothing to lose! We can afford to just try things out and be different.

Many thanks to Woodrow for his time! You can find more from him on his website, or on his twitter @mrphoenix. Also, if you google his name, you’ll see a picture which reveals he has the most suggestive eyebrows since Roger Moore. True!

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Hurrah! We got comics into this year's Hay Festival! Here are our two fabulous editors (and fellow contributors!) Woodrow Phoenix and Rob Davis, holding a lovely copy of our graphic novel, NELSON.



If you follow my blog, you will have seen loads about NELSON and our launch events already, but if not, here's a little peek:



NELSON's a comic book for adults, in which 54 of Britain's top creators each took a day in the year of a woman's life and, basically, we created a person. I got 1973, when Nel was five years old. So Rob Davis had taken 1968, the year Nel (and her brother, Sonny) were born, and made a comic, then Woodrow Phoenix took 1969, my studio mate Ellen Lindner took 1970, Jamie Smart took 1971, and another of my studio mates, Gary Northfield, took 1972. I read all of their comics, then decided what would happen in the next year of Nel's life, and created three pages of comics about her first day at school, in 1973. The book continues like that, with creators each taking a year until 2011, when Rob, who's initial idea it was, brings it back to a close.



Here we are on Hay's Starlight Stage - me, Woodrow, Rob and Kristyna Baczynski talking with actor and journalist Lisa Dwan.



There was already lots going on at Hay when we arrived! We met up with Oliver Jeffers in the Green Room, who urged us to come along and paint on his Jumpers wall. We saw MP Tom Watson and got him to come along and paint with us.


Oliver Jeffers, Lisa Dwan, Woodrow Phoenix, Kristyna Baczynski, Tom Waton, Sarah McIntyre, Rob Davis


It was funny, because we'd been having a big debate in the van about the way Oliver always puts matchstick legs on his characters, even the big hefty ones, like a bear. Our camp was very divided on whether we liked that schtick or not. Rob didn't know Oliver's work, so when he looked it up his website on his phone, he laughed to see the very first image was Oliver's book, Stuck, which we all decided was the past tense of having stick legs.



The idea was that everyone would paint a jumper on one of the little bean characters, then sign at the bottom. Here's a Gruffalo jumper by Axel Scheffler, who was just leaving when we arrived. And you can spot a few signatures below, including Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie.



Kristyna (whose name I learned is pronounced "kriss-TEN-ah", like the number ten), Lisa and Rob having a go at painting:



And Oliver drawing up a few new characters for us to paint. I didn't quite hear the directions, that we were only supposed to paint a jumper, so I gave mine a bi

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One of my publishers, Thomas Nelson, is not afraid to try new things. Publishers Weekly reports:

"Starting February 28, the first half of Need You Now is available for 99 cents from all major e-book retailers. In mid April, the second half of the e-book, as well as the full e-book and the physical trade paperback will be available. The second half of the e-book will have a list price of $10.99, and the complete e-book as well as the trade paperback will have list prices of $15.99."

Read more about Nelson's interesting move here.
I'm not sure it's been tried before. It will be interesting to see if it pays off.

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By Kenneth S. Broun

Twenty-two years ago, on the 11th of February 1990, Nelson Mandela walked out of a South African prison, a free man for the first time in twenty-seven years. He immediately assumed the leadership role that would move South Africa from a system of apartheid to a struggling but viable democracy. No one person, not even Nelson Mandela, was solely responsible for this miracle. But no one can doubt the crucial role that he played in the process that brought a new era to South Africa, or that his intellect, sturdy leadership, and political savvy made this process far more peaceful than anyone had predicted would be the case.

That Mandela was alive to assume this leadership is a remarkable story. When the trial that led to his conviction began in 1963, most in South Africa and abroad predicted that he and his codefendants would be hanged. Mandela and his codefendants faced charges brought under the recently enacted Sabotage Act, the violation of which carried the death penalty. The South African government proudly announced that it had brought to justice men who had planned and begun to carry out a campaign for its violent overthrow. The country’s press celebrated the success of the police in catching the violent criminals who represented a very real threat to the way of life of white South Africa. Foreign representatives were told by informed sources that the maximum sentence for the top leadership was possible, indeed likely.

The 1963–64 trial of Mandela and his co-defendants is known as the Rivonia trial, named for the Johannesburg suburb in which most of the defendants were arrested. Other defendants included ANC leaders Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, the father of future South African president Thabo Mbeki, and the South African Indian leader, Ahmed Kathrada.

A team composed of lawyers of great intellect, legal ability and integrity defended the accused. They applied their considerable skill to a cause in which they deeply believed. The accused, through both their statements to the court and their testimony, demonstrated strength of character and devotion to a cause that even a hostile judge could not, in the end, ignore. The conduct of the judge before whom the case was tried illustrates both the strength and weaknesses of the South African judicial system. The judge may well have been independent of the government and its prosecutor, but his own prejudices guided him through much of the proceedings. The prosecutor, who was described by a visiting British barrister as a “nasty piece of work” may have hurt, rather than helped his case by engaging in a political dialogue with the defendants who took the witness stand.

White South African opinion was clearly in favor of the prosecution and harsh sentences for the accused. But international opinion was almost unanimous in its support for them, particularly in the newly independent African states and the Communist bloc. There was also considerable attention to the trial on the part of the major Western powers, or at least concern that death sentences would sour relations with African and other Third World people. The question was how the West, and in particular the United States and United Kingdom, might attempt to influence the trial’s outcome.

Perhaps the key point in the trial was Nelson Mandela’s statement from the dock, a statement made in lieu of testimony. He ended the statement with these words:

During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to the struggle of the African People. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to li

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This was the first part of the Gosh! London comics shop window project for Nelson Week, a scribble on a dinner napkin by our Nelson editor Woodrow Phoenix, after we had finished two full days in Leeds at Thought Bubble comics festival. (Well, Woodrow doesn't really scribble, he draws quite carefully.)



And here's an excellent video shot by Gosh's Tom Crowley! You can read all about it over on the Gosh blog! And do come to Gosh tonight (1 Berwick Street in London's Soho) at 6pm for our Nelson signing party, it'll be good fun!



I'll post a few more photos from our Monday painting session. Woodrow has posted a bunch more on Flickr here. I was just going to show up at the shop and paint something, but on the train ride in, I thought, hmm, I think I'd like to do a bit of pre-planning. So here's what I sketched on the stretch between London Bridge and Charing Cross stations.




Woodrow was stuck on messy trains from out of town, so I had a chance to grab a muffin in the lovely coffee shop next to Gosh, Foxcroft & Ginger and work on my Nel sketch a bit more.



When Woodrow arrived and Tom at Gosh gave us our supplies, Posca pens, I remembered them well from my mural painting session at Game City (blog post about that here) and how much they need shaken to get the paint running. Shake, shake, shake. It turned into a sort of dance session, while Hayley Campbell tweeted this photo.



Then Will Morris arrived, with much more polished preparatory sketches. Will studied on the same MA course at Camberwell art college as I did, a few years later, under Janet Woolley, and we're both big fans of her. Will's work is lovely.



We decided the lettering had to come first, before the character paintings. And no one does lettering as well as Woodrow, he's very exacting.



I asked him if 'e' was the hardest letter to draw, and he said, no, that 's' is much trickier, getting the two curves just right.





We were painting on the inside of the window (so passers-by couldn't pick it off) but I did a quick sketch in white on the outside of the window as a guide.



When JAKe arrived, here's the sketch he made, drawing straight from the book:

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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

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Introducing the best of British comics! 54 creators (including me, all my studio mates and loads of former DFC comic colleagues!) have worked like mad and, in less than a year, turned an idea circulated on Twitter into a beautiful book crammed full of amazing comics. The profits all go to Shelter charity for the homeless, so it's an all-round perfect Christmas prezzie!


My studio mate Lauren O'Farrell's knitted Nelson at the Cartoon Museum, photo by Dan Fone

The Blank Slate publisher website describes it: Part exquisite corpse and part relay race, Nelson spans decades of British history and a myriad of stylistic approaches in telling the story of one woman’s life by 54 creators, in 54 episodes, detailing 54 days. I've just written a blog post about it over on the David Fickling Books blog... have a peek! Even though the book is published by Blank Slate, so many of the creators came together through the DFC comic.



My three pages cover a day in the life of our character, Nel, when she's five years old, living with her family in 1973 Dagenham, east London. It's not a comic for young children. (Kate Brown drew a sex scene! Even though all the dodgy bits are amusingly covered up.) But older teenagers and adults will seeing how so many different talented artists drew the same person, and the carefully edited collaborative story works brilliantly.



So this week is NELSON WEEK and, wow, it's been a busy one! I'm going to do a separate blog posts about Thought Bubble comics festival in Leeds last weekend, where Nelson was the talk of the fair, a launch party for an exhibition of original rough drafts of artwork and final art at London's Cartoon Museum, and a stint at Gosh Comics at Berwick Street in Soho, where four of us - Woodrow Phoenix, Will Morris, JAKe and I - spent much of Monday painting Nel on the shopfront window. If you're in London, you can still go to two more events! There's a signing at Forbidden Planet on Shaftesbury Avenue on Thursday and I'll definitely be at the Gosh Comics signing on Friday.



More news and photos soon! Meanwhile, get a hot drink, some cake, and start reading!

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Contributed by Lou Simeone

Artist Kristina Nelson has spent years - many hundreds of hours - honing her skills as a crayon artist.

Wait a minute!

Yes, go ahead. Read that first line again.



Kristina Nelson has created the art featured here - and numerous other pieces - using  the same simple, ordinary crayons that children use in their coloring books. But as you can clearly see, there is nothing simple nor ordinary about what Kristina creates with this medium.




Kristina earned a degree from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. She then spent a year studying under Don Marco, one of the few and foremost crayon artists in the world, and later, set off to open her own studio.


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Oh my, there are SO MANY upcoming exciting things, it's making my head spin. Let's start with the Saturday after next. If you can get to London, Comiket on Saturday, 12 November, 11am-6pm, will be a great time to come meet your favourite comic creators and make some new discoveries, too!



The new venue near Liverpool Street station is beautiful, at Bishopsgate Institute. The DFC Library will be well represented, with this signing schedule:

1.30-2pm: I'm signing! If it's a bit quiet, and you have your sketchbook along, I might also do a little comics jam story with you. Good times.
2.30-3pm: Adam Brockbank, the artist behind Mezolith and many of the monsters in the Harry Potter films
3.30-4pm: Neill Cameron, writer and artist of Mo-bot High and drawer of kick-ass robots

Thanks to everyone who's congratulated me for getting long-listed for next year's Kate Greenaway illustration award for my book with Anne Cottringer, When Titus Took the Train. Fingers crossed!



Here's the animation Anne and I made for Titus (apologies if you've seen it already):



It's quite an exciting list because I can count quite a few friends and good acquaintances on it, so I want lots of people to win, including Viviane Schwarz, Mini Grey, Chris Riddell (all three double long-listed!), my Monsterville colleagues Neal Layton and Ed Vere, Mei Matsuoka, David Roberts, Axel Scheffler, Chris Wormell, Tim Hopgood, Leigh Hodgkinson, Oliver Jeffers, Louise Yates, David Lucas... all of whom have appeared on this blog at one time or other. And quite a few on the Carnegie Medal long list, too! Hello, everyone! *waves in congratulatory way*

And lots of Nelson anthology events coming up, get read for NELSON WEEK! I'm taking part in three of the - Thought Bubble Festival, The Cartoon Museum launch, and the Gosh! comics shop signing, but I have so many friends involved that I'm sure I'll be at all four events. Do come along, this anthology's going to be amazing!!



Here's a single panel peek at my entry, about the main character in 1973, when she's five years old. The guy on the left is her dad, the lady is, well, I'm not telling.



Okay, a few more photos I've taken in the past few days with my new camera. Gary and I just went to the art shop near Brick Lane and there's a huge stork painted on the wall:



Here's the sweet shop that tempts us most horribly to pick up biscuits on our way to the studio. I kind of like how the photo ca

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With times being so hard for illustrators right now, I’m always impressed and encouraged to see fellow commercial artists come with with new ideas to keep themselves busy and keep revenue flowing. Like illustrator friends here in BC, Doug Jones and Fiona Richards, who started a smart little side business called Cartolina, selling stationery featuring “centuries old block prints and antique cartouches, combined with twentieth century lead type, contemporary colours and our own original illustrations.”

And it’s not just paper cards; they also have an accompanying iPhone app which is really quite delightful and brings a whole new spin on doing e-cards:

This app is all about sending brief but beautiful emails and texts using one of our customizable Cartograms. Choose from a selection of beautiful designs, customize your message and pretty up someone’s inbox! Includes an integrated calendar which sends you automatic reminders.

I attempted getting into the stationery business years ago, and it was harsh. It’s hard work to carve out a spot for yourself in an industry dominated by two or three giant aggressive companies, so I’m glad to see Fiona and Doug making a go of it and being successful.

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Posted by Luc Latulippe on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | No comments
Tags: BC, Business, cards, greeting cards, Illustration, Nelson, stationery

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I wish that by some shift in solar winds or magnetic fields, Michigan Congressman Bart Stupak and Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson could have their hormones scrambled and change into women. It’s not that I’m eager to join into sisterhood with these two but it would be instructive for them to feel in their feminized gut what it’s like to have a pair of men using their legislative clout to restrict women’s reproductive health services. It’s difficult to understand what motivates men like Stupak and Nelson. Maybe they’re so angry nature didn’t give them the biological equipment to become pregnant and give birth that they’re out to get revenge by efforts to control women’s bodies. Maybe they just hate women. There’s surely a lot of that sentiment among men throughout the world. The Taliban, radical Islamists, fundamentalist Christians—they’re all the same in their anti-woman attitudes. Whatever their twisted motivation, Stupak and Nelson are among a cadre of fanatical men who lead the anti-choice brigade. If these men are enabled by a spineless Congress to succeed in their ultimate goal of banning abortion under the ruse of “health reform,” American women’s health will be pushed back to the era of coat-hanger abortions. Since I don’t believe in magic, I know there’s not even the freakiest chance that Stupak and Nelson will change into women. So my back-up wish is that they change into frogs. Forever. With no chance of becoming princes!

My second wish is for more members of Congress who will serve the people who elected them rather than the lobbyists that dump bribe money into their campaign coffers. We have some terrific Congresspersons who do stand up for the American people and who passionately care for our Constitution rather than the corporations but we need more. So I wish that in the upcoming 2010 elections, all the corporate fascists and cultural Neanderthals will be kicked out of office and more enlightened candidates elected.

I wish for a Republican party that is a true opposition party rather than a demolition party. Since Barack Obama was elected, Republicans seem to have only one item on their agenda – destroying his Presidency. There was a time when overt efforts to bring down a Presidency would have been considered treason. Today it’s just business as usual for a Republican party dominated by white right-wing fanatics and led by a venomous ex-vice-president and hate-mongering spokespersons like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. Democracy needs an intelligent opposition party; right now, we don’t have one. The “party of no” is just that. All negatives, lies and fear manipulation. Nothing positive or coherent or intelligent.

On the cusp of a new decade, I wish for an end to war. I wish leaders of the world’s nations would recognize the terrible waste of war – the killings, raping, ecological destruction – so much needless suffering and misery. With commitment and leadership, economies could be profitably based on efforts that nourish life rather than on technologies that hasten death and philosophies that turn human beings into weapons of mass destruction. The human lifespan is pitifully short but it’s all we have – less than nine decades to discover and fulfill our potential, realize our hopes and dreams, raise families, and leave the planet a better place than the one we inherited. Subjugating that precious lifespan to death and destruction is the most obscene crime against nature imaginable.

Finally I wish for a powerful global movement of citizen activists that will work on all fronts – the arts, science, education, technology, politics, religion – to transform societies from death promoters to life supporters. Each individual in her/his own way CAN help to make a difference. We CAN empower each other.