Actionless Comics

I've recently done a couple of little comic strips for awesome new kids' gaming mag / website MEGATON, and for technical reasons that I shall doubtless explain in due course I've been completing the character artwork and backgrounds as separate layers. Anyway, I thought it would be fun / pretty to make a little comic using just the backgrounds. So here it is.

And That's About That

I sent off the last batch of A-Z of Awesomeness Posters this morning, and while I was up that way popped into the SSNAP offices to deliver a cheque for £1,500.00, which is what profits from sales of the posters came to. I do actually have a few posters left, but I'm afraid all the staying up nights addressing envelopes and constant trips to the post office carrying heavy bags of packages was starting to wear me down a bit. £1,500 (that's 300 posters) seemed like a nice round number at which to cut it off, so there we go.

Apologies to anyone who's had to wait a little while for their poster to arrive; as I say, I got a bit swamped with it all so some of the last orders to come in had a bit of a delay before I could get to them. Anyway, they are all posted now, so hopefully you should have them soon.

Thanks to everyone who got in touch to suggest / request putting the A-Z on books, t-shirts, mugs, sailboats etc, and sorry to anyone I haven't had a chance to reply to yet. Basically, I would love to do every such thing, but I do kind of need to get on with that tiresome old 'making a living' thing for now, so that's why I'm kind of drawing a line under it there. I'll probably take the remaining posters along to conventions and stuff, but for now, that's about that. There is one cool thing I'd like to do with the A-Z, which might be happening later in the year, so I'll be sure to tell you all about that as and when.

Huge thanks to everyone who retweeted, reposted, dugg etc. It was a crazy and rather entertaining couple of weeks (I've made a note of the dates so in years to come I can tell Logan about The Week I Was Internet Famous. Mildly), and we made a nice little bit of money for a very good cause. So that's nice. Cheers to you all.

Coming Soon: me posting about something else!

Watching Doctor Who

My nerdiness for Doctor Who will be familiar to followers of this blog, which may explain why Matt Badham asked me to contribute a short review of the first episode of the new series for a quick round-up of reactions on the Forbidden Planet blog. I was delighted to contribute, but thought I'd probably be better off drawing something as, y'know, that's sort of my thing. The way it all worked out over Easter I only had a very short window to come up with an idea and draw something immediately after seeing the episode in question, so the strip above is what you get.

While I'm here, a quick update on the A-Z posters! They are very nearly all sold out again, and so I'm going to be taking them off sale again today. I won't be printing any more as, quite frankly, the time it takes to pack and send them all out is kind of killing me. Once I've closed the books and done the sums and taken the cheque for the the final tally to SSNAP I will blog the details here!

Technical Difficulties

Due to the frankly insane level of interest in my A-Z of Awesomeness over the last week, I've had to move / upgrade my hosting yet again, to the point where I'm now on a package apparently designed for small-to-medum ISPs and domain-name-resellers. Um... anyone want to buy a domain name? (Please nobody say yes, I would have no idea how to sell you one.) Anyway, despite my taking extra precautions and receiving several reassurances that no, the website wouldn't go down... well, my website went down. Even more nerve-wrackingly for me as a self-employed person, there were a couple of stretches over the last few days where my e-mail address stopped working, so apologies to anyone who was trying to get in touch. It all seems to be working again now, and with my new unlimited bandwidth arrangements, that should be the last we see of this sort of problem.

Unless, of course, my new domain-name-reselling business really takes off.

Posters. Again.

For whatever reason, there seems to have been a resurgence of interest in my A-Z of Awesomeness lately, with posts about it appearing in places like io9, buzzfeed, wired.com, and all sorts of others. This has led to a surge of people getting in touch to express their dismay at the A-Z posters being sold out and asking if I could please print some more. I hadn't planned to, but it was just starting to seem kind of stupid, so last night I ended up caving, printing off a bunch more posters and putting them up for sale.

Here's the thing, though. I never drew the A-Z in the first place with a view to making money from it. It was just supposed to be a fun thing, a creative exercise rather than a commercial one. I only printed the first lot of posters after initial reluctance because I'd ended up losing a lot of money paying out on bandwidth charges when it all first blew up so much bigger than I'd expected. Having sold all the posters and recouped my costs, the idea of making more money off it - well, it was just making me weirdly uncomfortable.

It's not that I have an actual aversion to making money, although I can see how it may be starting to appear that way. The point is: all the characters featured in the A to Z are not my characters. I don't own copyright on Spider-Man, Doctor Who, Gundam, etc. etc. They all belong to other people, and I do take that sort of thing somewhat seriously. If someone started making a bunch of money selling their own posters of Mo-Bot High, I wouldn't like it, right? (Well actually, I would probably be all geekily excited if that happened, but I risk diluting the force of my argument here.)

Anyway, I woke up this morning with an idea which, for me, solves the whole problem and restores the project to it's original unsullied state of pure awesomeness. So here it is: all profits from this second batch of posters, and any subsequent printings, will be donated to SSNAP (Support for the Sick Newborn And their Parents), a charity which supports the Intensive Special Care Nurseries (Neonatal Unit) at the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford. It's a place and a team of people to which I owe more than I could ever hope to repay in this lifetime, but maybe a few quid from selling some silly posters will make a start.



So there you go. Buy as many posters as you like, in the knowledge that by doing so you are increasing the sum total of awesomeness in this world.

And I'm back to not making any money, and can relax again. If you would like to support me financially as an artist, and believe me I have no desire to stop people from doing so, you can buy some of my comics - I will try and add them to the shop page soon - or why not go and pre-order my book? It is entirely full of awesomeness, I can assure you.

Streetfighter II

Here's a pic I drew yesterday for #DLC4, the latest instalment of a monthly (?) twitter art jam organised by the incomparable Rusty Shackles. The idea was a bunch of artists on twitter all coming up with new artwork / game boxes for their favourite videogames. Go check out the hashtag, there's some fantastic work on there, including my particular favourite from Benjamin Birdie. I didn't think I'd have time to join in on this one, but you know what? Sometimes it is okay to draw things just for fun.

Here's the finished version, complete with nostalgia-inducing SNES game box:

In the interests of full disclosure, I should point out that Streetfighter 2 is probably not actually my favourite game of all time - that honour belongs to either Super Mario World or Twister, Mother of Charlotte (don't ask). But it was what I felt like drawing so nah nah nah.

This was actually the first thing I've tried flatting / colouring using Manga Studio, and I have to say it was a bit of a revelation. After I finished drawing this I then got to spend a couple of hours watching Dave Gibbons demonstrate how he works in MS, and learning some cool new tricks, and all in all I have to say I'm pretty much sold on the new version, and can't wait to start using it to create some comics.

And on that note, I had better go do just that.

Bloggy bonus: here's the original pencil sketch.

Posterpalooza 2009: REPRISE

Back when I was selling those posters of my A-Z of Awesomeness last year, I held about 30 copies back out of the print run of 250 as I was convinced the post office were going to lose / mangle / destroy a lot of them in transit. Six months later, and it seems I may have been a little paranoid there.

I have 25 copies of the poster left now and, in response to a recent mini-flood of enquiries that I think stem from the A-Z getting a big-up on io9, I'm offering the remaining 25 copies up for sale.

Run don't walk over to the print shop page on my website if you would like to snag one. After this there shall be no more! No, really.