Art Monkey Club: Activity Sheets!

Here is this week's Art Monkey Club activity sheet! Click on it for bigness and then download / print / draw all over it and colour in at your leisure! Um, sorry it's a little late. Look, it's been a bit of a week. Hopefully should all be up-to-date and uploaded over on the Phoenix's How To Make (Awesome) Comics page very soon!

Here's last month's one too, to make up for it.

 

Don't forget to check out the Art Monkey page on the Phoenix site for loads more activity sheets and teaching resources and FUN STUFFS! (Just scroll down past the santas. Um. We should probably tidy that up a bit.)

Hey, Kids, Comics Festival!

 Comics! For kids! Drawing! That kind of thing!

Put May 4th in your diaries! For it is the day for the first ever Oxford Children's Comics Festival! (I'm not sure if that is the actual, official name - there may be an 'International' or something in there, but you get the gist.) Anyway, it promises to be a ton of fun! Oxford's entirely brilliant Story Museum will be filled out between the hours of 11am and 4pm with some of the best all-ages awesomeness-tastic comics and creators you could hope to spend a Saturday with. Who will be there? The Phoenix! 2000AD! (the family-friendlier wing thereof). LOAf Magazine! The DFC Library! And a whole bunch of brilliant cartoonists, writers and illustrators doing workshops and other creative funtime activities To Be Confirmed.

I'll be there, anyway. Come and say hello!

Oh and hey it is Free Comic Book Day also! So I dare say there will be some FREE COMICS or other available.*

* Hey, if worst comes to worst I'll bring some of mine along.

More details and an official announcement should be rapidly forthcoming on the Phoenix website, I daresay, but in the meantime if you're a creator of kids' comics and you'd like to be involved - well, for now, holla at me on twitter and I'll put you in touch with the relevant parties?

FUN TIMES you guys! Let's make this a happening happening.

Pirates of Pangaea / Art Monkey SPECIAL EXTRA NONSENSICAL EDITION!

The Phoenix Issue Ben cover - by the frankly wonderful Faz Choudhury

Back before Christmas a bunch of us who work on The Phoenix put together a special issue of the comic as a leaving present for our editor, Ben Sharpe. It was all the idea / fault of the magnificent Dave Shelton (he of Good Dog, Bad Dog and A Boy and a Bear in a Boat fame), and - well, it was a completely ridiculous and impractical if not outright impossible idea, so naturally we all decided to do it immediately.

Anyway, I just saw Richard Bruton post a few extracts from it over on the marvellous Forbidden Planet blog (brilliant to hear that our old pal Molly got hold of a copy), and it reminded me that I'd been meaning to post my bits here. So here they are.

DISCLAIMER for young or sensitive / readers: there's not outright swearing or naughtiness, but... well, let's say the following episodes are.... "non-canonical"?

First, a bonus episode of Pirates of Pangaea that presents a nightmarish vision of the strip's future without Ben's steady hand on the tiller:

Please note: the first person to say "hey, I much prefer that style, you should always draw it like that" gets a SLAP IN THE CHOPS.

And then a special How To Make (Awesome) Comics that finally let me give Ben A TASTE OF HIS OWN MEDICINE AND SEE HOW HE LIKES IT HUH

You can see some of the other contents of the issue over on the Forbidden Planet blog, or in posts from m'colleagues Sarah McIntyre and Gary Northfield. My nonsense here was utterly and completely outclassed by some wonderful contributions from my fellow Phoenixers, and I think the lengths everyone went to are the best possible indication you could ask for of, well, of how awesome Ben was as an editor.

And that is MORE than enough sincerity for this blog. Hey, while I'm here: I posted a bunch of photos from a recent(ish) comics workshop up on twitter, and then thought I'd try putting them all together on Storify. So go and see the Ballad Of Bouncy Jim and get the closest thing to the Live Neill Doing A Comics Workshop Experience. (You will just have to imagine lots of kids shouting and me laughing at my own jokes). Enjoy! Enjoy and LEARN.

iPirates and iDinosaurs

 

Gosh, has it really been a year?

Well, it seems like just yesterday we were celebrating the launch of the Phoenix and the start of Pirates of Pangaea, and... no wait a minute, it doesn't seem like yesterday, it seems like an entire year ago. Because it was! Yes, here we are at the beginning of The Phoenix: Year Two, with this week's issue #53 heralding not only the return of Sophie, Kelsey and Cornflower in m'colleague Dan and I's latest piratey dinosaury magnum opus, Escape From Razorbeak Mountain, but also - and possibly even more excitingly - the launch of a brand new iPad edition of the comic!

I've been looking forward to this for ages, and I'm super excited to see it all go live. Distribution and geography are obviously huge challenges for a small company like the Phoenix, and I'm really optimistic that the iPad edition will allow lots of new readers, all over the world, who'd previously been unable to get access to the comic (without fairly herculean efforts / dedication / substantial shipping fees, anyway) to join in the fun. It helps that the Phoenix app - developed by Panel Nine and available through Apple's Newsstand - really is a great digital comics-reading experience. It's as smooth and intuitive as you could hope, easily standing up against something like ComiXology's interface but I'd argue even better, due to some of the top-level navigation features (index / ability to 'favourite' strips) which work wonderfully in the context of a children's anthology comic.

 

The index page. Screenshots via Comics Alliance because, um, I have no idea how to take screenshots on my iPad.

Also, the 'Something Cool' pop-up bonus content, designed specifically for the app, allows for story recaps / character profiles /  development art, and all kinds of cool extra bits n' bobs you'll see popping up as the weeks and months progress. Then there's the little touches, like the fact the editorial pages have all been designed / reformatted to suit the iPad edition, and the fact that web, e-mail and twitter links etc. work direct from the app. You can now e-mail Adam Murphy your suggestions for what corpse he should dig up next, or have a quick go on Professor Panels' Awesome-o-Tron, direct from reading the comic! It's all indicative of the level of care and attention to detail that are being put into it, by both the guys at Phoenix HQ and over at Panel Nine, and it really makes the difference.

Why yes that IS something cool, I agree.

It's pretty good, is my point. If you've got an iPad, go download the app. It is free and you get a free comic to read, what's to lose? And also, the app is launching with what I can frankly only describe as an INSANELY good one-week launch offer, whereby you can get SIX MONTHS - yes, SIX ENTIRE MONTHS of the weekly comic for just £9.99. That'll take you through the entire 5-month epic run of Pirates of Pangaea book 2, for example, and out into whatever lies beyond. As well as giving you approximately 425,780 pages of other awesome comics to read.

It's a pretty good deal, is my point. Anyway, initial reaction to the app seems to be really positive - here are some write-ups from Comics Alliance, Paul Gravett, Down the Tubes, George Shiers - and on launch day the app made it straight to #1 on the Children's Magazines chart on iTunes.

 

The adventure begins! Again.

Anyway, I hope people give it a try. I think it's a great thing, but I'm really glad that it exists as an alternative / supplement to the print edition, rather than replacing it. (My son prefers the physical comic, and I'm not sure anything can ever quite replicate the joy of getting that brilliantly hefty, colourful envelope thudding through the postbox every Friday.) Regardless, whichever way you choose to read, I hope you enjoy our new run of pirates. A few people have asked whether Book 1 is also available digitally, and while this is a 'not yet' (you can track down print copies of back issues but that's about it currently), Dan and I have worked pretty hard to make this a very clean start to the new adventure. There are a couple of kids and they have a dinosaur and, pretty much, that's all you need to know to get started. Much fun awaits. Hop to it!

The Best Comics of 2012! A DEFINITIVE LIST.

Bunny VS Monkey (c) 2012 by Jamie Smart

I meant to write one of these ‘Best-of-the-year’ posts for the Forbidden Planet International blog but completely failed to get it together in time to do so. Anyway, it is still 2012 (just) so I thought I’d post mine here: sticking to the same format as the FPI posts (which you can read here): my 3 favourite comics from the last 12 months...

1: TIE! BUNNY VS MONKEY by Jamie Smart / GARY’S GARDEN by Gary Northfield

 

Gary's Garden (c) 2012 by Gary Northfield

Having spent many weeks attempting to decide which of these was my favourite, I eventually decided I couldn’t, so we have a tie. I love both of these strips for similar reasons – that they are very, very funny, and wildly imaginative, and that my son loves them and I love reading them to him. Each also has a special claim in its favour that kind of balance each other out: BvM has achieved the highly admirable feat of being amazing every single week in 2012. And in the other corner, Gary’s Garden produced amongst its many riches the single best  page of comics I saw all year.* So that is why it’s a tie!

*I don't have it to hand, sorry. It was the one with the pond and the tadpoles. If you saw it, you know which one I mean.

2: CORPSE TALK by Adam Murphy

Corpse Talk (c) 2012 by Adam Murphy

Yeah, yeah, another Phoenix strip, I know. But if you can show me another comic out there that is – week in, week out - as funny, clever, inventive, silly, gross, imaginative, fascinating, and beautiful as Adam’s work on Corpse Talk... well then I will be very grateful to you for introducing me to such a wonder.

3: THE NAO OF BROWN by Glyn Dillon

The Nao of Brown (c) 2012 by Glyn Dillon

I don’t feel like I need to say much about this one, as I assume it is on everyone else in the universe and their dog’s Best Of 2012 lists already. An absolutely glorious achievement, one of my favourite comics I’ve read in ages, by probably my favourite comics artist in the world. Yeah, it’s a bit good.

HONOURABLE MENTION: pretty much everything else in the Phoenix. I utterly love that comic. Not sure if I mentioned that.

I think if this was an FPI post I’d have to come up with lists of my favourite movies, and TV shows, and books and such, too. But really, who has time to watch movies or TV or read books? We went to see Looper, that was quite enjoyable. Ooh, Catfish, I liked that. Um... Doctor Who? Cheers? I watched quite a lot of Masterchef?

I would also then be called upon to give you a quick plug for what you can expect to see from me in 2013 but hey, this is my blog, I talk about that stuff all the time. More Pirates of Pangaea! Coming Soon! Coming, in fact, NEXT WEEK!

And that right there is why I have had so little time to write these sort of blog posts. But while I am here and in a ‘reflecting on the Best of 2012’ mood, let me just say how delighted I was to see Pirates of Pangaea and the Phoenix pop up on just such a list – and from no less august a journal than the mighty Comics Alliance! Given what an undertaking it is for a reader outside the UK to even get hold of the Phoenix, it really is appreciated. And hey! We are mere weeks - no, days - away from international access to the Phoenix getting a whole, whole lot easier. Brace yourselves, 2013 is going to be fun...

Santafest 2012 round-up, plus SINGING

 

I've been a bit slack at posting my daily Santa drawings here on the blog, so here is a bumper omnibus round-up of Santas 13-20!

Check out the full set (and all the names of the Santa-suggesters) over on the Art Monkey page on the Phoenix site!

I thought taking requests from Phoenix readers would be an interesting exercise, and was really just hoping it would throw up some New Things For Me To Draw - something that, after drawing several years worth of Santas, was actually becoming a little challenging. Anyway, I think I can safely say this objective has been MET. Met with bells on.

Anyway, a further delightful surprise was supplied by those fine folks at the Phoenix who took some of the Santas and applied some cutting-edge animation techniques and high-end musical production, and produced... THIS.


It is very silly but it did make me laugh. (And also my son absolutely loves it - I think he probably accounts for half it's views in YouTube single-handed.)

Only a few Santas left till Christmas! I think I have just one spot left open, so if you or any young Phoenix fans in your family have any ideas for Santas you'd like to see, get 'em in fast to: artmonkey@thephoenixcomic.co.uk

The Pirates of Pangaea: Escape From Razorbeak Mountain

Starting on 5th January 2013 in issue 53 (I think) of The Phoenix is the second FRANKLY EPIC run of m'colleague Dan Hartwell and I's Pirates-and-Dinosaurs-and-Pirates-RIDING-Dinosaurs adventure tale, The Pirates of Pangaea. It's another big one. OH MAN is it a big one.

Here are a couple of not-too-spoilery choice panels of the inked artwork, to give you a taste.

Such fun stuff coming up. To make sure you don't miss out on a single teeny tiny pterosaur, why not rush out and subscribe to the Phoenix? Go on. This Christmas, give the gift of PIRATES RIDING DINOSAURS.