SUMO RIDDLE BOMB!!!

Occasionally I like to draw something random, to cheer myself up / warm up / get the juices flowing / blah blah bah. Anyway, today was such a day, so I put out the call for Twitter to tell me what to draw. Leenygma suggested:

A cross between a Sumo Wrestler and a heroic version of the Riddler. With a jetpack.

Combining as it does two of my very favourite things to draw (obscenely fat guys, jetpacks), this was clearly a no-brainer for me. His name is SUMO RIDDLE BOMB!!! and I think you will agree he deserves his own Saturday morning cartoon series immediately.

More nonsense like this - next week? Oh, probably.

Displacement Activity

Today is my annual day to tidy up my studio! There is, I admit, a case to be made for making it a slightly more regular occurrence. Anyway, I don't want to do it, so you - you lucky people - get a blog post instead!

I've been flat out with work lately, getting everything together for the Mo-bot High book. I'm really happy with how it's all shaping up, can't wait for you guys to see it. Will post about it all a bit nearer the time, and show you some of what I've been up to...

Anyway! Couple of things I've been meaning to mention.

Firstly: Hashtag Funnies! I can only apologise to anyone who was enjoying these (and I include myself in that) for their complete disappearance - it's just down to workload, really. They were always supposed to be just a quick warm-up exercise, but I always ended up going over the allotted hour once you factored in the time for lettering, saving files, uploading etc, and I just really haven't got that kind of wiggle room at the moment. I do intend to get back to them - or something similar - as I kind of discovered I really, really enjoy doing the gag-strip-a-day thing. I've got half a notion to print a bunch of them off as a mini-comic at some point, so look for that in 2010! Mmmmaybe?

Secondly: while I often mention / whine about how busy I am with work, it occurred to me that I haven't actually blogged anything work-related in like a year, so thought I'd chuck a few sample pages of recent projects up on here. A lot of recent and current work is all under wraps, but here are some recently completed things that are OK to blog...

First up, here are a couple of educational maths-y comics, part of a series I've been working on for the BBC as part of their raw numbers project:

And here are some pages from a comic strip I did for a road safety mag aimed at kids starting secondary school:

And finally, continuing the public awareness theme, here are a couple of pages of 'pencils' from a comic aimed at reducing the incidence of Chronic Indigenous Disease amongst aboriginal communities in Australia:

You can't say I don't have a varied workload.

Right, and with that, these mounds of paper, unopened bank statements and printouts of old Lois Lane covers aren't going to organise themselves...

Superchap

This is a poster I drew as a private commission in December - someone got in touch asking for a picture of their boyfriend as Superman as a Christmas present for said boyfriend, which struck me as a rather lovely idea and one I was very happy to help out with.

Anyway, apparently the guy loved it, and it was a fun little job to do that pretty much paid for our Christmas dinner, so that all worked out nicely.

May you all have a thoroughly super new year! I am back at work, busily trying to kick the artwork for Mo-Bot High Book One into shape. Feels so nice to be drawing mo-bots again, I can't even begin to tell you. And lots more on that subject soon, I have no doubt...