Whatever Happened to the Binman of Tomorrow?

...going to have to use that as a story title someday.


Anyway, coming after yesterday's retro fun I thought I'd post the above - a snippet of a brand new strip featuring my much-beloved (by me) sweary binmen of old. It is done, drawn and coloured, and it is also much less rubbish than usual as it was script-edited / kicked into something resembling coherence by none other than living comics legend Alan Grant.

Coming soon!

Old-School Hilarity

This just popped up on my screensaver and the 'punchline' made me laugh, so I present it here for your enjoyment. A Cleansing Services: Special Ops half-pager, drawn for Comics International back in, good grief, 2003:

(Click for legibly-sized version)

This strip is reprinted in my very own comic Absolute Dumbass, on sale... um, pretty much nowhere?

EDIT: no, wait, here it is!

MJ-a-Go-Go

I needed cheering up, so I drew a go-go dancing Mary Jane Watson.

Job done.

(Inspired, it need hardly be said, by the magnificent John Romita Sr, who could draw a hot go-go dancing girl like nobody's business.)

He Looks Like I Feel

Just playing with a few test images, taking the same sketch and messing around with a texture in different layer modes.

The guy is a chap who was sent to Siberia by Stalin, whose photograph was in the Guardian's Weekend section a couple of weeks ago, along with several of his fellow unfortunates. I'm afraid I have since misplaced the article, so have no idea of his name or history. I just thought he had an arresting face.

Super Monster Mashup!

Check out this rather stylish monster, clearly on her way to some glamorous Monster nightclub...

Drawn as a kind of visual game of consequences (monsterquences?) by Sarah McIntyre (head), Garen Ewing (torso) and myself (feet) over on the Super Comics Adventure Squad blog, where all us ex-DFC creator types hang out and play stupid monster-drawing games and stuff. Go take a look, there's usually something pretty amazing posted there on at least a daily basis.

My recent radio silence here is due to being in the midst of one of those periods where I'm enormously busy but kind of in the middle of a long stretch of work, so having nothing to post publicly for a while. However, I don't seem to let the workload stop me blithering away happily on Twitter and Blip.FM, so please check there if you feel the need to reassure yourself that I haven't died at the drawing board or something. (Which reminds me, as my current lifestyle so often does, of a page by Evan Dorkin that is one of my favourite comic strips of all time, "Cartoonist Goes To Hell").

Anyway, best get back to it. I'm currently drawing something that is making every fanboy nerve in my body tingle with glee, and I'll be sure to post about it here when it's coming out...

Shocking, I know

A while back I thought I'd try submitting some Future Shock ideas to 2000AD. It worked for Alan Moore, right? anyway, here is a sample page of art from the one story I ever managed to write an actual script for...

I really liked the idea for the story, but looking at it now I don't think I really managed to make it work in the script for a 5-pager that I submitted. (Needless to say, the Mighty Tharg agreed wholeheartedly.) Still, never mind - I'm sure I'll end up doing something with it sooner or later.

It's odd, because I usually like fun stories about ninjas fighting robots and what-have-you, but for some reason all the short story ideas I have seem to end up being really quite nasty. I was explaining the plot for this one to Di in a coffee shop and she started to look at me with proper, genuine "what have I married?" horror, which was rather pleasing.

Hey, remember Mo-Bots? They were pretty cool, right?

Gemma-DMC: Sports Casual Giant Robot

I'm kind of snowed under with work and deadlines and stuff right now, but have resolved to try and blog every now and then anyway, rather than fall into my usual hermitic radio silence. Anyway, I just read a nice positive thing on the interwebs about David Fickling pledging to bring back the DFC next year, and it put me in a DFC-y mood. So here for your enjoyment are some of the original designs / development artwork from back when I was first working on Mo-Bot High. I've reused bits of these here and there, but I don't think I've ever posted the originals anywhere, so here you go. Enjoy!

Sasha-DMC: Super Mega BOSS CHAV Robot

Sophie-DMC: flower patterns are SO hot right now

Jessica-DMC: never knowingly off-trend

Sigh. Hey, guess what? I totally want to draw more Mo-Bot High.