The Comics Bureau

Dave Shelton, of Good Dog, Bad Dog fame kindly agreed to take some time out of his sched­ule to answer some ques­tions. Good Dog, Bad Dog is out now through the excel­lent DFC Lib­rary. (more on that soon) You can visit Dave’s site here and his blog here.

How would you like to be introduced?

” Oh, the usual: “Dave this is [insert name here], [insert name here], this is Dave” that kind of thing.

What was your primary expos­ure to comics?

All Brit­ish stuff to begin with. From a very early age I was look­ing at and later read­ing Brit­ish humour com­ics like The Beano, Dandy, Whoopee, Whizzer and Chips, then from around the age of 7 war com­ics like Battle and War­lord came into the mix. And my older brother got Action, whenever that was, so I read those too. And he saved them too which was the first time the idea of read­ing and reread­ing com­ics had occurred to me. I had an ini­tial reluct­ance to have any­thing to do with 2000AD, which seems odd to me now, but latched onto it after a year or two and got well and truly hooked.

What was it that encour­aged you to pur­sue a career as a pro­fes­sional cartoonist?

I hon­estly don’t know. I’d kind of thought I wanted to do some­thing art-based for a liv­ing from around the age of 13 or 14 I think but only had the very vaguest idea of what that might entail. By 19, at the end of my found­a­tion course I’d only just decided that Fine Art wasn’t the way to go and went on to do an HND in Illus­tra­tion but I don’t think I’d set my sights on comic strip work par­tic­u­larly. As the years went by I retained an interest in com­ics and the illus­tra­tion work I got ten­ded more and more to the car­toony rather than any­thing paint­erly (some of my earli­est jobs had been done with water­col­our or acrylics). I think it was just in my DNA and was bound to find its way out eventually.

Either that or I just couldn’t res­ist the lure of the glam­or­ous life­style and the fab­ulous riches…

You are a self-confessed pen enthu­si­ast. How did this start?

I don’t know really, it kind of crept up on me. I remem­ber I used to share a flat with a mate I’d been at art col­lege with, Mike Irwin, and a bloke called Oli and one time after a night in the pub Oli com­plained that Mike and I were weird because we had con­ver­sa­tions about pens. We were offen­ded by this and told him not to be ridicu­lous, of course we didn’t have con­ver­sa­tions about pens, in fact nobody has con­ver­sa­tions about pens, how sad would that be. Then a night or two later I caught myself doing exactly that and real­ised, yes, maybe I had some kind of a problem…

How does your pen-thusiasm mani­fest itself?

I own more than 350 pens. That would be the main manifestation.

Also, I will very hap­pily talk, at some length, about pens to other car­toon­ists. Or any­one who’ll listen. Or any­one who won’t.

Oh, and occa­sion­ally I’ll find myself watch­ing a film and miss­ing some of the dia­logue because I’m think­ing some­thing like “Ooh, look, that Woody Harrelson’s got a Montblanc.”

I know this can be a dif­fi­cult ques­tion, but do you have a favourite?

The Pilot DR draw­ing pen, 0.3. That’s my weapon of choice really. Oth­ers come and go and I dally with them for a while but that’s the missus.

I like the Pen­tel brush­pen and Colo(u)r Brush a lot too.

Tell us about the life of a pen.

The Life Of A Pen was some­thing I did a few years ago after a long spell work­ing almost exclus­ively on a licensed pro­ject. I’d spent three or four years draw­ing mostly in a style that wasn’t quite my own and I’d become rather jaded and wasn’t really enjoy­ing the act of draw­ing much. Any­way, that work came to a nat­ural end and I had a little money in the bank so I decided to take a little time off dur­ing which I decided to act on an idea I’d had some time before. I took a brand new pen (one of the afore­men­tioned Pilot DR 0.3s) and a brand new sketch­book and I drew with that pen only in that sketch­book until it ran out of ink so that every mark it made from first to last was all in one place. I thought it’d be an amus­ing little diver­sion that would res­ult in half a dozen or so quite inter­est­ing pages of doodles that I would post up on my blog as they were com­pleted. In fact it held out for 27 pages. But it got me fea­tured on the Drawn blog and res­ul­ted in a tem­por­ary massive boost to my blog read­er­ship. And down the line it got me a couple of bits of work too.

I also prin­ted up a few cop­ies of a little self pub­lished book repro­du­cing the 27 pages and flogged a few cop­ies of that. But the main thing was I drew 27 pages of dir­ec­tion­less, play­ful, joy­ful draw­ing and got back to a point where I was enjoy­ing draw­ing again.

What does your workspace/studio look like?

My part­ner is an illus­trator and we share the down­stairs front room of the house as a stu­dio space. It’s only rel­at­ively recently that I moved in so we’re still set­tling into how best to arrange the space and ourselves within it. The fixed points though are a lot of Ikea Billy shelves full of a mix of our books and a decent-sized wooden table that we occupy either end of (if we’re both work­ing at the same time) some­times with each of us on a laptop and look­ing ter­ribly mod­ern, some­times both draw­ing, some­times with a DVD play­ing on a laptop off to one side for us to fail to pay proper atten­tion to.

There again I some­times just work in a sketch­book in bed.

What does a typ­ical work day (if there is such a thing) look like?

There never was such a thing and, again, with mov­ing into my partner’s place and hav­ing her and her six year old daugh­ter to con­sider (which I don’t always make that good a job of), it’s now even more up in the air than before. I’ve never been one of those dis­cip­lined office hours types (though I can cer­tainly see the sense in that). I’m get­ting a bit old for work­ing through the night though so I try to avoid that these days. And I’m try­ing to think of week­ends as work days only if abso­lutely neces­sary rather than as a default. That makes me sound obsess­ive and indus­tri­ous which I’m abso­lutely not. I can be quite hor­ribly lazy and inef­fi­cient at times, but then I can turn in 16 or 18 hour days for a spell if need be. Hope­fully I’ll be able to improve and organ­ise myself a bit bet­ter as the com­ing year looks to be a bit more pre­dict­able in terms of hav­ing big long term pro­jects to deal with rather than fits and starts of smal­ler jobs that need to be done in a hurry. That’s the the­ory anyway.

Explain your writing/drawing process.

Haphaz­ard. Dis­or­gan­ised. Inef­fi­cient. Pan­icked. But ulti­mately successful.

What are you work­ing on at the moment?

I’m writ­ing the second draft of a children’s novel that I’m also illus­trat­ing. It’s for David Fick­ling who also pub­lished Good Dog, Bad Dog (both in the DFC and in book form).

What pro­jects do you have on the horizon?

More Good Dog, Bad Dog, about which I am very pleased indeed.

Whose work are you excited about at the moment?

It tends to be the dis­cov­ery of illus­trat­ors from a pre­vi­ous age that gets me excited these days as much as any­thing by any­one work­ing now — either chance find­ings in second hand book­shops and char­ity shops or stuff I stumble over or have poin­ted out to me on the inter­net. A lot of stuff from around the ‘50s. People like Aure­lius Battaglia who illus­trated the amaz­ing Fireside Book of Amer­ican Songs and a hand­ful of other Golden Books illustrators.

But also I’m a long­stand­ing fan of Ron­ald Searle, both the humour stuff from the ‘50s and the report­age work. Nic­olas Bent­ley’s eco­nomy of line is a won­der­ful thing to behold. Um, Thi­erry Mar­tin, Chris­tophe Blain, Sarah McIntyre, Jamie Smart, J H Buchanan, all the usual sus­pects like Crumb, Clowes, Ware, Jaime Hernan­dez, Posy Sim­monds. And, you know, a load of people who just aren’t spring­ing to mind right now. I’m ter­rible at remem­ber­ing names whenever I’m asked this sort of thing. Sorry.

Have you been out today?

Yes, I went to the corner shop not long ago for milk and teabags.

Need­less to say, you must now visit Dave’s site and blog, get a copy of the lovely Good Dog, Bad Dog and encour­age every­one you know to do the same!

Again, apo­lo­gies for the ‘not com­ics con­tent’ today, but I thought that this was such a good story on Wired that I had to share it;

Blan­chard pulled off his first heist when he was a 6-year-old liv­ing with his single mother in Win­nipeg. The fam­ily couldn’t afford milk, and one day, after a long stretch of dry cer­eal, the boy spot­ted some recently delivered bottles on a neighbor’s porch. “I snuck over there between cars like I was on some kind of mis­sion,” he says. “And no one saw me take it.” His heart was pound­ing, and the milk was some­how sweeter than usual. “After that,” he says, “I was hooked.”

I’ve just done a small update to the site to let those hip young things with fancy Apple products view the site with an iPhone-specific tem­plate. Let me know if this has any kind of knock-on effect, but it shouldn’t have any effect on the major­ity of people.

Thanks!

Linked on Strange Maps, Abstruse Goose lets us in on what extra­ter­restrial view­ers might be watch­ing where they are.