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...

Ghost Detectives, Space Ninjas, General Awesomeness

I had a lovely time at the Faringdon Arts Festival on Saturday - wandering around the town, enjoying the music, scoffing calzones and - pertinently - giving a little talk / workshop on making comics for some of the local youth. I brought along my patent-pending Awesome Idea Generator, a highly complicated and technical device I invented specially for the occasion.

After a slightly nervy start where I was convinced absolutely no-one was going to show up (because, after all, who the hell am I?) a bunch of kids did, in fact, show up, and from there on in it was pretty much the funnest Saturday morning I could have hoped for. We combined the A.I.G (tm) with what I am considering christening the Cameron Technique for (Admittedly Formulaic) Comics Storytelling, and the results were, frankly, awesome. So awesome, in fact, that I feel it incumbent upon me to share some of the results here.

All comics are (c)2010 their respective creators. Whose names I unfortunately didn't manage to make a note of. But they know who they are!

1: NINJA IN SPACE vs. DINOSAUR

2. MONKEY WIZARD vs. SPY... IN THE FUTURE!

3. GHOST DETECTIVE!

4: ALIEN DINOSAUR vs... IMOGEN!



5. The frankly rather disturbing SCHOOLBOY DETECTIVE vs. SUICIDE BOMBER DISGUISED AS THEIR TEACHER:


...and that's just the few I managed to take pictures of. Anyway, thanks to the organisers for inviting me along, and to my 'students' for making it so much fun. Parents of Faringdon, your children are well-brought up and hilarious. Good work you all!

Jeru the Damaja - Wrath of the Math #vinylcanvas

This is my entry in #vinylcanvas, a fun internet art-jammy thing whereby a bunch of artists on twitter draw new sleeves for their favourite albums. If you search on the hashtag you'll find some awesome work by Matthew Allen Smith, Rusty Shackles, @sequentialmatt and many more!

Anyway, that was just a ton of fun to draw, little treat for myself on Friday. If you haven't had the pleasure of hearing Jeru the Damaja's epochal DJ Premier-produced masterpiece... well, clearly I would recommend that you do so. It's pretty much the first hip-hop record I ever bought, and certainly the one that started the whole 'lifelong obsession' thing. Here via the magic of Youtube are a couple of choice tracks from the album, in which as a nice bonus you can see the original (better) album art.

The Frustrated [NINJA]



Me or the Papes



Bonus: here's the inks!



Pencilled and inked in the time it took to listen to the album, coloured in the time it took to listen to the album again. Are you getting yet that I quite like this album?

Meet Doc Dinosaur

A weird thing about the recently-completed A-Z of Awesomeness was that at no point did it involve dinosaurs, which is almost unthinkable given that (a) I am mildly obsessed with them, and (b) lets face it, they have an Awesomeness Quotient second only to Giant Robots and possibly Jack Kirby. Here to make up for it is the first of probably several dino-themed posts for this week! Meet... Doc Dinosaur!

This was a stray idea my fellow ex-DFC creator Mr Tony Lee was kicking around a while back. He is a dinosaur in a jetpack - there may have been rather more to the pitch than that, but that was all it took to sell me on it.

Here are some of my (somewhat TOO SCARY) initial sketches:

Will the adventures of Doc Dinosaur be coming soon to a comics shop / cinema / saturday morning cartoon near you? Oh, probably.

More awesomeness tomorrow!

Blipping myself silly

I have been getting caught up with all the marvelous new timewasting possibilities offered by the internet under the guise of "social networking"¹, and I have to say my favourite by far is Blip.FM, a rather clever system that lets you kind of build your own radio station and earn "props" for your musical choices.

It's like having control of the stereo at a party, except no-one can tell you to shut up and play something people actually like. (PHILISTINES). It is diverting, wonderful and hilarious, and I've already discovered some really great music via other people's 'blips'. Go look me up on there at blip.fm/neillcameron, it's way nifty.

Here is a mini embedded version of Neill.FM. I think you will agree it is highly awesome. What's that? Too much hip-hop? PHILISTINES.




I am also on Twitter now, at twitter.com/neillcameron but I'm still kind of getting my head round that.


¹ Any clients / editors reading this: only joking, I work VERY HARD.

Best Letter Ever

From issue 30 of The DFC:


Me too, Kevin. Me too.

Max's Mo-Bots!

I was absolutely delighted to receive the drawing above from a reader - the very talented Mr. Max Wardle (age 7)! This totally reminds me of the drawings I would make after reading a new issue of Transformers when I was a kid... and look how that worked out.

He's got it all in there - Asha, the DMC pictograms, and a BIG BLUE MO-BOT and everything. Awesome job! I can only hope that when I get to Season 4 of Mo-bot High, my version is half as exciting as Max's.

(Check out the DFC website for more reader art and fun stuff like how to draw a mo-bot yourself!)