The Comics Bureau

Joe List, the brains, hand and pen behind the Annot­ated Week­ender, last year’s must-have col­lec­tion of abrupt stor­ies ‘Freak Leap’ and the minicomic ‘Guts’ announced this morn­ing that he has star­ted a web­comic, also entitled Freak Leap.

You can read an inter­view with Joe for the Birm­ing­ham Zine Fest­ival here;

Q — What are your motiv­a­tions with your work? I notice there is a lot of humour. Is this espe­cially important?

A — I like telling half jokes, ideas that aren’t quite fin­ished. That’s what makes me laugh and so that’s what I try to con­vey in my comics.

The Freak Leap will be updated EVERY week­day, apart from Thursdays, as that is Annot­ated Week­ender Day. Update your book­marks, folks!

Usu­ally the man ask­ing the ques­tions, Alex Fitch runs the UK’s only weekly show about the world of com­ics, Panel Bor­ders. If you aren’t aware of the show, head over to the site and check out the archives and sub­scribe to the pod­cast feed. Alex kindly agreed to share his insights into the com­ics world with me. Image thanks to Craig Grobler.

How would you like to be introduced?

“Mr Spiel­berg, your after­noon inter­view is here…”

What was your first expos­ure to comics?

I can’t remem­ber the very first comic I was bought. I did read a few cop­ies of humour com­ics like Whizzer and Chips and The Beano but they never really struck me as some­thing I wanted to col­lect. The first comic I did col­lect right from the first issue was the relaunched Eagle in 1982 – a few weeks before my 7^th birth­day – and I really enjoyed the mix of hor­ror, SF and action strips in the comic, par­tic­u­larly the weird fumetti (not that I knew that term then) Doom­lord story. I watched a lot of car­toons when I was a kid and so also col­lec­ted the licenced com­ics based on Trans­formers, Zoids and Thun­der­cats. I picked up the odd issue of 2000AD in news­agents with my pocket money from time to time, but was put off by the hor­rible news­print it was prin­ted on, how­ever when ‘prog’ 500 came out with a glossy cover I star­ted col­lect­ing it and only had to put up with news­print for another 19 issues before they improved the paper stock. The two strips I really enjoyed in the comic were Bad Com­pany and Nemesis the War­lock but the story that has kept me buy­ing it to the present day is Judge Dredd, which while some­times not neces­sar­ily the best strip in the magazine, is always enter­tain­ing even when the comic is going through fal­low periods.

It’s nice dig­ging out these old Brit­ish com­ics as they were delivered by a paper­boy and so while the back cover and occas­sion­ally the front are spoiled by my par­ents’ address writ­ten in biro, it means I have a record of every­where I’ve lived since I was young.

It’s nice dig­ging out these old Brit­ish com­ics as they were delivered by a paper­boy and so while the back cover and occas­sion­ally the front are spoiled by my par­ents’ address writ­ten in biro, it means I have a record of every­where I’ve lived since I was young. That said, my par­ents can­celled my 2000AD reser­va­tion when I went to film school in New York in 1999 without me know­ing, so hav­ing waited ten years for the final Nemesis book, I missed it until the reprint book came out! A story from 2000AD was also my first graphic novel, or trade paper­back reprint if you want to quibble about the defin­i­tion of the phrase. I’d been taken to Har­rods for the first time as a spe­cial treat for my 9^th birth­day and was told to choose a birth­day present. I found my way to the book deptart­ment and picked up the Judge Dredd: Apo­ca­lypse War reprint book by Titan. Unfor­tu­nately this coin­cided with a fire alarm going off and vari­ous shut­ters com­ing down between depart­ments, so I found the whole exper­i­ence a bit trau­matic, but I guess it still led to a love of the medium as I went on to buy or get given as presents every graphic album and graphic novel Titan prin­ted in the late 1980s.

I was fam­ilar with Amer­ican com­ics through the Mar­vel car­toons on TV and the Brit­ish reprints of Amer­ican com­ics, par­tic­u­larly Spi­der­man. It was also quite com­mon to find genu­ine Amer­ican com­ics in Brit­ish news­agents back then, albeit with no pat­tern to what they might have one month to the next. I  picked up quite a few of those, includ­ing my first ‘adult’ comic, Saga of the Swamp Thing #29, which iron­ic­ally was the first to go out without a ‘com­ics code author­ity’ stamp on the front due to the extreme con­tent inside – good­ness know what that did to my 9 year old mind!

What is your background?

I stud­ied Fine Art and His­tory of Art at Gold­smiths Col­lege and then 16mm film pro­duc­tion at film school in New York. Per­sonal trauma in my fam­ily led to me leav­ing the lat­ter course a couple of weeks before the end of the second semester and while I star­ted doing an MA in Media Stud­ies at the Art School in New York I’d been plan­ning to move on to, it proved too dif­fi­cult to con­tinue with long dis­tance after a few terms of being given the wrong info and doing the courses in the wrong order – I’d like to fin­ish it one day or move onto a PHd as there’s at least one book on film I intend to write. After film school, I found myself work­ing in video / DVD rental shops for five years and in order to con­tinue doing some­thing cre­at­ive, designed and wrote in house magazines and web­sites for a couple of those shops includ­ing the one I man­aged in South West Lon­don. Unfor­tu­nately the bot­tom fell out of the industry, so just as I was get­ting bored with work­ing in the field, there were no jobs left there anyway.

How did you come to host the uk’s only weekly show about comics?

My flat­mate was doing a degree in Music Tech­no­logy and as part of his course did a work place­ment at Res­on­ance 104.4 FM, the Arts Coun­cil radio sta­tion in Lon­don. He moved up through the ranks as an engin­eer to a show pro­du­cer, becom­ing the co-host of a fort­nightly ‘agony aunt’ / advice show called Mid­night Sex Talk. He enjoyed the film reviews I’d been doing for the local video shop and so asked me onto the pro­gramme a few times to talk about vari­ous cinema releases. The sta­tion man­ager in turn liked how I came across on that show and men­tioned at the begin­ning of 2006 that he was launch­ing a new weekly film show – I’m ready for my close-up – and asked if I’d like to present it from time to time. I did so monthly from Feb­ru­ary to July that year and then weekly until the end of 2007. Dur­ing that time he men­tioned that Res­on­ance was happy to expand the film show’s remit to include all visual media, so I sug­ges­ted com­ics, obvi­ously, and did inter­views with Kev Suth­er­land  in Autumn 2006 and with Matt Smith (2000AD), Pat Mills, Alan Moore, Paul Gravett and Charles Brown­stein (CBLDF) in Winter / Spring 2007. I seem to remem­ber meet­ing Kev, Pat and Paul for the first time at the pre­vi­ous year’s Com­ica and I got the inter­view with Alan by going up to him at a sign­ing after he’d done a talk on stage at the Uni­ver­sity of Lon­don and just ask­ing him if he’d be up for it!

The inter­view with Alan opened a lot of meta­phor­ical doors as when I then went to the Bris­tol com­ics expo in May 2007 with my co-host Duncan Nott, we asked vari­ous people for an inter­view — David Hine, Frazer Irving, John McCrea, Glenn Fabry, Steve Yeow­ell, Simon Fur­man, Geoff Senior – and many of them had down­loaded my chat with Alan and enjoyed it. How­ever the amount of inter­views we came back from the expo with meant that I’d have had to give over the film show entirely to com­ics based inter­views for the next three months, which I thought was break­ing the format a bit too much, so I sug­ges­ted I might do a seper­ate com­ics show as well…

Panel Bor­ders star­ted off as a 15 min show – which com­bined with IRFMCU, made a total of ¾ hour a week of broad­cast radio I was pro­du­cing – and then that autumn I was asked to rename it Strip! (which I dis­agreed with and kept the name of the pod­cast as Panel Bor­ders) and make it an hour in length, doub­ling my weekly out­put! As I’d just star­ted a new full­time job, this would have killed me, so I got per­mis­sion from the ICA to fill the second hald of each hour of Strip! with a half hour record­ing of talks from Com­ica, as long as I didn’t pod­cast that mater­ial. In Autumn 2008, Strip! / Panel Bor­ders settled at its cur­rent length of half an hour, and I also do occas­sional one hour ‘Clear Spots’ and epis­odes of I’m ready for my close-up when I fancy it.

Tell us about your work with Elec­tric Sheep Magazine.

Vir­ginie, the editor of Elec­tric Sheep, approached Res­on­ance in early Sum­mer 2007 as she’d heard I’m ready for my close-up and wondered if the show needed any other con­trib­ut­ors. This didn’t hap­pen as often as you might think, hence my present­ing nearly every epis­ode for a year and a half! Vir­ginie had been doing Elec­tric Sheep as an online magazine for a few months and recor­ded some inter­views for tran­scrip­tion via dicta­phone and wondered if we could broad­cast a recent one she’d done with Ale­jandro Jodorowski. We became friends and our meet­ing conin­cided with the Curzon cinema decid­ing not to go ahead with a cinema pod­cast that I’d done a couple of pilots for them. Frus­trated about this I decided to keep going with the pod­cast any­way with Vir­ginie join­ing me and comedi­enne Jes­sica Fostekew as co-presenters, renam­ing it the quartlerly ‘Art house cinema pod­cast’ and even­tu­ally the monthly ‘Elec­tric Sheep magazine podcast’.

In August 2007, Vir­ginie cre­ated a print ver­sion of Elec­tric Sheep, a bimonthly A5 stapled magazine that was dis­trib­uted for free in Art House cinemas before get­ting fund­ing from Wall­flower Press in Sum­mer 2008 to turn it into a lar­ger per­fect bound magazine that was sold in book, art and cinema shops. I moved from being an (anime) reviewer to an assist­ant editor of the magazine and with the Wall­flower ver­sion, Vir­ginie and the designer Emer­ald wanted to include illus­tra­tions as well as stills from movies, so hav­ing become friends with many mem­bers of the UK small press scene by this point, I sourced 80% of the new illus­tra­tions for the magazine, with the likes of Tom Hum­ber­stone, Oli Smith, Sean Azzo­pardi, Mark Stafford, Lee O’Connor, Emma Price, Daniel Locke, Julia Scheele and James Stringer illus­trat­ing reviews and articles.

I don’t know who first sug­ges­ted we do film reviews in comic strip format, it think it just came from a gen­eral dis­cus­sion I had with Vir­ginie as she’s a fan of com­ics too (and indeed inter­viewed Jamie Delano, Mar­jane Sat­rapi and Charles Burns on my behalf for Strip! / Panel Bor­ders), or it may have been Mark Stafford’s idea as he’d been look­ing for a way to com­bine his interest in both media, but the first comic strip film review we ran was actu­ally by Dan Lester as I was chat­ting to him one time and he men­tioned that he did Asian film reviews as com­ics (which was a white lie, as his first – Big Bang Love for Tres­pass magazine — was still on his to do list!), so he became our first reviewer in com­ics format. In sub­sequent issues I com­mis­sioned comic strip reviews by Daniel Locke, Douglas Noble and Han­nah Berry. Regard­ing the lat­ter, we were hon­oured and proud to print her first new comic strip since the pub­lic­a­tion of her ter­rific graphic novel Brit­ten and Brü­lightly. Stafford and Lester are our most pro­lific comic strip review­ers with three each under their belts, but since the print magazine fol­ded we now do a monthly comic strip review online and I’ve com­mis­sioned new work by Chris Doherty, Julia Scheele, Philip Spence, Karen Rubins and Adam Cad­well (and also print art­icles by Julia’s We are words + pic­tures col­lab­or­ator Mat­thew Sheret).

I’m a big fan of the UK small press and it’s been great to have them cre­ate new work for us; I hope the print magazine and web­site have given each of our con­trib­ut­ors addi­tional expos­ure. Elec­tric Sheep will be return­ing to print in the Winter with our first annual to be pub­lished by Strange Attractor press and Tom Hum­ber­stone is illus­trat­ing the first comic book strip I’ve writ­ten (on mod­ern zom­bie movies)!

How do you see the cros­sover between film and comics?

Inev­it­able! Cer­tainly Hollywood’s obses­sion with super­hero movies at the moment can’t last forever as every block­buster fad, whether it’s SF or buddy movies, only dom­in­ates the box office for so long, but when I was a kid, the Super­man movies were show­ing at the cinema and I remem­ber read­ing then how artists like Mobius influ­enced films such as Alien and Dune.

I think it’s a great shame that some of the best comic adapt­a­tions of recent years aren’t noticed as such – for example Road to Per­di­tion and A His­tory of Viol­ence – but with dir­ect­ors hir­ing comic book cre­at­ors to design and story­board movies it’s about time that artists who pro­duce ‘widescreen’ visu­als on the page are get­ting work in Hol­ly­wood. Geof Dar­row and Steve Skroce work­ing on The Mat­rix was a great early example for this generation’s cinema while the plot of the film with Neo as mes­si­anic super­man was obvi­ously indebted to com­ics as well. It’s dis­s­ap­point­ing that people like Brendan McCarthy haven’t been util­ised prop­erly by the film industry yet — High­lander, Teen­age Mutant Ninja Turtles and Lost In Space dis­play little of his sur­real­istic anarchic humour, though I haven’t seen Con­e­heads, yet…

What are your thoughts on devices such as the iPad for dis­trib­ut­ing and read­ing comics?

If I owned an iPad, I’d cer­tainly down­load com­ics to it as it seems the best digitial device so far for dis­play­ing the medium. I’ve read a few web com­ics over the last few years but I don’t par­tic­u­larly enjoy the activ­ity of read­ing com­ics on a screen or the vari­ety of inter­faces to get from one panel to another. Hav­ing seen a few com­ics on the iPad, it seems a lot closer to the exper­i­ence of read­ing a print comic.

I sus­pect the rais­ing of the price of monthly Amer­ican print com­ics to $3.99 may be the final nail in the coffin of dwind­ling sales. The idea of down­load­ing a monthly comic for say $0.99 – although Marvel’s $5.99 pri­cing of an upcom­ing Iron Man annual seems insane – is a great idea that would put com­ics back into the realm of pocket money prices and more of an impulse buy, but it’s not going to attract younger read­ers due to the price of the iPad as a machine and I doubt few par­ents would trust kids not to lose, dam­age or be robbed of such an expens­ive device.

I think it’s poten­tially a great medium for com­ics, but it’ll take a cheaper col­our device – the much lauded flex­ible elec­tronic paper may be a cheap mass mar­ket product in 5 years time – to make iPads or their equivilent the ideal replace­ment for print. Also, like a lot of people, I love books and would hap­pily spend all my dis­pos­able income on graphic nov­els. To quote Neil Gai­man, I’ve not yet seen any­thing “as good as being a book as a book is”, and as nice as the iPad is, it’s not even as big as a monthly Amer­ican comic in terms of page dimen­sions, let alone a Brit­ish weekly. Hav­ing an iPad would encour­age me to con­sume more web com­ics if they release a legal web comic aggreg­ator and indulge in more impulse buys of the digitial equivilent of ‘flop­pies’ – I read and enjoyed The Middle­men for the first time on my iPhone – but the machine itself still seems too much of a lux­ury toy until they release a model I can do pro­fes­sional sound edit­ing on as well…

Whose work excites you at the moment?

Darryl Cun­ning­ham kindly swapped a copy of his book for mine (World Cinema Dir­ect­ory: Amer­ican Inde­pend­ent, Intel­lect Books www.intellectbooks.co.uk) and so I’m really enjoy­ing Psy­chi­at­ric Tales at the moment.

I thought Dave Lander really deserved his prize in the Manga Jiman com­pet­i­tion for Last Drink and would love to see a graphic novel col­lec­tion of all his work so far.

I’m really glad to see Tom Hum­ber­stone cre­at­ing new work! He’s done an amz­ing job edit­ing two volumes of Sol­ipsistic Pop so far and hope it gets recog­nised out­side of the blo­go­sphere as an indis­pens­ible col­lec­tion of UK creators.

Sight­ings Of Wal­lace Sendek by Sean Azzo­pardi and Douglas Noble has come to a head scratch­ing end, but it’s a bril­liant comic and one that stretches Sean immensely, show­ing his incred­ible range as an artist. It’s just a shame it wasn’t twice as long, but then the wait for a con­clu­sion would have been impossible to stand!

Julia Scheele’s new comic Every­one is talk­ing about the weather is excel­lent and I think more cre­at­ors could bene­fit from mak­ing news­pa­per com­ics – it was after all the best thing that DC pub­lished in the last year… (Am cov­et­ing the big Wed­nes­day Com­ics hardback)

Speak­ing of the main­stream, I’m sad to see the end in sight for Ex Mach­ina which I’m a big fan of but look for­ward to whatever ori­ginal new series Brian K Vaughn does next. I’m a fan of Greg Pak and Fred Van Lente’s Mar­vel work so a guilty pleas­ure has been buy­ing all the vari­ous Hulk and Her­cules titles, which are gradu­ally becom­ing the only monthly com­ics I buy.

Who have been your favour­ite interviewees?

It’s been bril­liant to inter­view some of my her­oes. My first Alan Moore inter­view was a great hon­our and proved what a kind inter­viewee he is – Alan hap­pily chat­ted for over an hour an a half –using my hand­ful of ques­tions for going off on intriguing tan­geants while Melinda brought him cups of tea! Eddie Camp­bell was a pleas­ure to talk to and the first time doing an inter­na­tional phone call felt like some kind of time travel, as I was talk­ing him at night in Lon­don and he was on his ver­anda in Aus­tralia in the morn­ing with all the sounds of local wild­life in the distance…

Jill Thompson, David Lloyd, Pat Mills and many more all proved to be really nice people and a joy to talk to. Hope­fully one day I’ll have the kudos to get more than ten minutes with Neil Gai­man or Phil­lip Pull­man, but in the mean­time I’m doing all right with the guests I’m getting!

Out­side of com­ics it’s been amaz­ing to talk to act­ors like Mal­colm McDow­ell, Bruce Camp­bell and Susan­nah York and favour­ite dir­ect­ors like Stu­art Gor­don, Dario Argento and Joe Dante…

What are you work­ing on at the moment?

Well the the­ory this sum­mer was to catch up on my sleep, but haven’t had much luck yet! I’m just about to start record­ing some inter­views for a spe­cial on Latin Amer­ican com­ics and am look­ing for­ward to inter­view­ing Splice / Cube dir­ector Vin­cenzo Nat­ali… I’d bet­ter start writ­ing that zom­bie comic for Tom Hum­ber­stone to illus­trate this week as well!

Is there any­thing you’d like to plug?

If you’re based in Lon­don, please come along to one of our Elec­tric Sheep screen­ings at the Prince Charles cinema and else­where! Last month we showed For a few dol­lars more with an intro­duc­tion by West­erns in comic format expert (and writer of The Pris­oner), Ian Rakoff and over the next couple of months we’re show­ing Foxy Brown and Hero… www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk/events

Thanks, Alex!

Head over to the World Com­ics India site to look at some superb Wall­poster Com­ics — inform­a­tional com­ics cre­ated by com­munit­ies that deal with local issues, includ­ing cor­poral pun­ish­ment in schools;

The school teach­ers of Maha­ra­jganj in Uttar Pra­desh are a wor­ried lot. Gone are the days when they could pun­ish stu­dents at will, for the most ridicu­lous reas­ons, slap them, beat them with sticks, or make them sit or stand for hours in uncom­fort­able, pain­ful and awk­ward pos­i­tions. The age-old notions of a good teacher – a strict dis­cip­lin­arian who would use the rod lib­er­ally on his stu­dents – is being ques­tioned and chal­lenged, by the stu­dents themselves.

Well worth check­ing out is their  Com­ics Manual, that runs through the entire Wall­pa­per Com­ics pro­duc­tion pro­cess, from con­cep­tion to deploy­ment. Not just a com­ics manual, this is a primer for social act­iv­ism and social engage­ment. Drop everything imme­di­ately and devour the entire site right now.

Once you have fin­ished read­ing the site, head over to Zee­news to read a fas­cin­at­ing inter­view with World Com­ics founder, Sharad Sharma;

It is simple, easy, non-threatening and can con­vey a power­ful mes­sage. But it is not just World Com­ics India, which is using comics/ car­toons to deliver social mes­sages, but across the world sev­eral organ­isa­tion are doing the same. The dif­fer­ence is they have done the same job by hir­ing artists, and we have done it by teach­ing com­mon people. Since the com­mon people are the ones who pro­duce them, so the 100% own­er­ship of the con­tent is theirs. They know the artists liv­ing next door. It is not for mass dis­tri­bu­tion, but for local use – so they pro­duce say 20 copies.

John Allison, the red-faced and monocled Great Man, pre­vi­ously of Scary Go Round and cur­rently of Bad Machinery fame kindly agreed to answer some poorly thought out ques­tions. If you aren’t aware of John’s work, you have a lot of catch­ing up to do. I sug­gest you start dir­ectly after read­ing this interview;

How would you like to be intro­duced if you were speak­ing at a posh after din­ner speak­ing engagement?

“The Great Man”. I remem­ber in the Just Wil­liam books, a “great man” would often come to town, red faced and monocled. I wish to be one of these gouty emperors.

What was your first expos­ure to comics?

I think it was the Rupert Bear com­ics in the Daily Express when I was a boy. My dad got me the Rupert Bear weekly comic and I used to get the annu­als too. I sup­pose I would have been 6 or 7. There were some odd back up strips in Rupert. There was “Grandma Next Door” (self explan­at­ory) and “Goody Fox”, a fox who was excep­tion­ally well behaved. There was also “Gay Dog”, the details of whom I sadly do not recall other than to say he was an odd confection.

When did you real­ise that com­ics was your ambi­tion, and what set of cir­cum­stances led to your career as a full time cartoonist?

I never had a burn­ing ambi­tion to “do” com­ics, I had no sense when I was young that I had the skill to draw them and while I might have enter­tained the idea of writ­ing them someday, in my pre-internet rural upbring­ing I had no sense of how I was ever going to do that. My career has been a series of acci­dents. At the dawn of web­com­ics in 1997/8, the bar­ri­ers to entry (and gen­eral expect­a­tions) were so low that I simply saw no reason not to have a go.

How has the jump from Scary Go Round to Bad Machinery gone?

Cre­at­ively I think it has gone well. Per­son­ally I’m pleased with my pro­gress. I lost a lot of read­ers when I ended Scary Go Round, but that was to be expec­ted I sup­pose. I kept it on the same URL as if to say, “here’s more of the sort of thing you liked” but that may have been a mis­take. It prob­ably didn’t make a huge dif­fer­ence if people were ready to check out. Some reviews I’ve read seem baffled by how dry it is, but I made a self con­scious effort to scrub all the trade­mark Allison mania out of it (expect for spe­cial occa­sions, of course). I’ve had a lot of very sup­port­ive emails and heard from a num­ber of people who didn’t read Scary Go Round, so I think I am through the worst of the transition.

Your work is avail­able both digit­ally and as phys­ical books. How do you feel about the cur­rent debates sur­round­ing digital com­ics on devices such as the iPad?

I don’t really know what the debates are! I do know that if you read all your com­ics on an iPad you’ll knacker your eyes. From what I can tell, the iPad is a net­book without the pre­tence of offer­ing pro­ductiv­ity. It’s computer-as-domestic enter­tain­ment appli­ance, the paradigm Apple has been gag­ging for since the first iMac. I recall that CD-Roms were going to replace books, and PDFs were, and web deliv­ery was. I recall all three being aston­ish­ing boons to one or other forms of pir­acy. I’m all about deliv­er­ing through the chan­nel du jour if there’s a quid in it but all I see and hear are a lot of circle-bearded nerds stamp­ing their feet and it gets my back up. “My granny loved the iPad”. Well good bloody luck to her. In the short term I anti­cip­ate it being a great new way for people to not pay for your content.

What does your work­space look like?

Deeply dull. Messy. Shameful.

Explain your writing/drawing process.

I try to keep things as loose as I can, but with a plot struc­ture in mind. As the under­tak­ing of mak­ing a 100 page story takes months, I don’t like to pre­clude a good idea arriv­ing down the road, but at the same time I try to avoid the dead ends I used to take myself down on Scary Go Round. Hav­ing a plot makes writ­ing dia­logue a lot easier, with situ­ations in mind I just get away from any dis­trac­tions and usu­ally some­thing use­ful will come out unpromp­ted. I write in batches of four or five so I have a week’s worth of mater­ial to go at at any one time. I always write on paper as I find the com­puter too distracting.

As for draw­ing, I do detailed thumb­nails for the week’s com­ics on Monday morn­ing. Then I pen­cil and ink using a Cintiq in Manga Stu­dio, col­our in Pho­toshop and let­ter in Illus­trator. I have all the let­ter­ing typed in before­hand so I can thumb­nail around the actual text.

Do you draw for fun?

I draw all the time, I can’t help it. It’s an excel­lent way to stave off bore­dom. I haven’t been bored in years.

Do you have a typ­ical work day, and are you dis­cip­lined with yourself?

I’m not a maniac but I try to be dis­cip­lined. I try to get up before 8 and start work by 9.30. I prefer to do a comic in the morn­ing so that the after­noon is free to do com­mis­sions or inter­min­able “light admin” like going to the post office. My brain starts wind­ing down around 5.30 whether I like it or not, so it’s best to have everything done before then. I am not a night owl.

Whose work excites you at the moment?

A lot of web­com­ics is bru­tally cyn­ical stuff that I have had a belly­ful of and loathe. So I really enjoy the more naive (or faux-naif), upbeat stuff like Anthony Clark’s nedroid.com, Phil­ippa Rice’s My Card­board Life and Scott Campbell’s Double Fine com­ics. I’m still blown away by Yot­suba&! and Kate Beaton keeps get­ting bet­ter and better.

What do you have com­ing up on the horizon?

The final Scary Go Round book “Reck­lessly Yours” is out very shortly, and I want to make a Shel­ley Win­ters cook­book, though I can’t really write the recipes myself, so I am woo­ing a col­lab­or­ator with posies and heart shaped boxes of chocol­ates. Bey­ond that, I can’t really say. More com­ics! More books! More problems!

Well, need­less to say, head over to John’s shop and fill up on great books, prints, bags and some very lovely tea tow­els. You can pre­order book eight, ‘Reck­lessly Yours’ here!

(The Wendi­gos were expertly stitched by the Felt Mis­tress — you also have to imme­di­ately go and look at her superb work.)

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!

Brian Heater over at the Daily Crosshatch inter­views the man behind ‘Shen­zhen’, ‘Pyongy­ang’ and ‘The Burma Chronicles’.

This is a one, two, three, four part interview.

Optical Sloth has a big post on Kevin Huizenga’s work. I love his work, and think that he is doing some of the most inter­est­ing work in com­ics at the moment. Head over to his web­site, fol­low his blogs, read these inter­views and buy all of his books. Just buy them, you won’t be disappointed!

If like me you have ever wished that you could have 3,856 stor­ies in a single book, you are likely to be wait­ing for Jason Shiga’s ‘Mean­while’ with baited breath.

“Mean­while” begins as our young hero in dire need of a bath­room, knocks on the door of a mys­ter­i­ous recluse. His man­sion is in fact a won­der­ous labor­at­ory filled with amaz­ing inven­tions: A mind read­ing hel­met, a dooms­day device and a time travel machine (although it can only go back ten minutes).

Which inven­tion will young Jimmy play with? YOU, the reader get to decide in my branchi­est and most com­plex inter­act­ive comic to date. “Mean­while” works via a net­work of tubes con­nect­ing each panel to the next. Some­times these tubes split in two giv­ing the read­ers a choice of which path they would like to fol­low. Some­times these tubes even lead off the page and onto tabs stick­ing out from other parts of the book.

Head over to Ori­gami Yoda to read an inter­view with Jason;

Q: Can you explain how Mean­while works? Nearly 4,000 pos­sible story com­bin­a­tions? I can’t wait!
A: Mean­while works via a series of tubes that con­nect each panel to the next one in sequence. Some­times the tubes lead right off the page and onto a tab on another page. Some­times the tubes branch off and the reader can choose which dir­ec­tion they want the story to unfold. It sounds com­plic­ated but once you hold the book in your hands, it makes more sense.

The fig­ure of 3,856 pos­sible story com­bin­a­tions is a bit of an under­es­tim­a­tion. The fig­ure didn’t include storylines where you enter the incor­rect code, or storylines that end in an infin­ite loop. There’s lit­er­ally an infin­ite num­ber of story com­bin­a­tions if you include storylines that have repeat­ing panels.

Then imme­di­ately head over to Com­ic­BookRe­sources to read up fur­ther on the book;

Branch­ing stor­ies can be more dif­fi­cult to write than their lin­ear coun­ter­parts, and the phys­ical design of “Mean­while” also plays a role in how the story is per­ceived. “One of the most chal­len­ging parts of cre­at­ing a branch­ing story is man­aging the tradeoff between giv­ing the reader lots of choices and restrict­ing the expo­nen­tial growth that fol­lows from all those choices,” Shiga said. “One prob­lem I had with Choose Your Own Adven­ture was that the stor­ies were typ­ic­ally very short. Fight­ing Fantasy had longer nar­rat­ives, but the tradeoff was that they ten­ded to be more lin­ear. Two books that really com­bined the best of both strategies was ‘House of Hades’ by Steve Jack­son and ‘Escape from Ten­opia’ by Edward Pack­ard. Both of them presen­ted a geo­graphic area that the reader could explore in their own way. I almost see those books as being closer to the parks of Fre­drick Law Olmstead than to any other authors.”

And if that wasn’t enough for you, an endorse­ment from Scott McCloud should tip the scales a touch.

I’ve let the dust settle a bit before post­ing up any­thing need­lessly reac­tion­ary regard­ing Apple’s new iPad. For those of you that have inex­plic­ably not heard of it, the iPad has pro­voked the full range of reac­tions from lust to indif­fer­ence. Here is a quick roundup of what us comics-types have been talk­ing about;

Pub­lish­ers Weekly speaks to pub­lish­ers about the pos­sib­il­it­ies of digital pub­lish­ing and distribution;

Top Shelf pub­lisher Chris Staros said, “It’s prob­ably going to have a sig­ni­fic­ant effect over the long term, as many of the things we pub­lish can now be read in a com­par­able size to the actual phys­ical books.” Top Shelf is already at work on applic­a­tions for the iPod and the iPad and Staros believes the device will spur sales of phys­ical graphic nov­els, not­ing that the “art object nature of graphic nov­els will keep them in print for many years to come, and, in fact, it’s very pos­sible that the digital deliv­ery of them may even increase the demand for prin­ted ver­sions. Time will tell.”

Infoworld have a fairly tech-heavy set of eight ques­tions that Apple won’t answer;

Fam­ously tight-lipped, Apple often views the press as an exten­sion of its mar­ket­ing effort, treat­ing all but a favored few to a sad­istic game of hard-to-get. When Apple extends this silence bey­ond a product’s razzmatazz unveil­ing, it’s usu­ally meant that the product in ques­tion could not deliver the func­tion­al­ity journ­al­ists have asked about. With that in mind, unanswered quer­ies about the iPad may imply that the iPad is less “magical” and “revolu­tion­ary” than Jobs suggests.

Tech­land talks to Douglas Wolk about his thoughts on digital com­ics;

Me, I like phys­ical things. I strongly prefer hav­ing com­ics that I can not only read but give away or lend or sell or drop in the bathtub. It’d be great to have easy access to a com­plete digital archive of comics–and wouldn’t it make sense for continuity-minded pub­lish­ers to post apro­pos links to things that tie into their new com­ics each week? But, you know, comics-bootleg blogs and Rap­id­share effect­ively do that anyway.

I think that the paper/pixel debate will con­tinue to roll on regard­less, but I also think that there can be a tend­ency to think in very polar­ised terms — ALL paper or ALL paper­less. I’m pretty sure that whatever we end up with will be a hybrid digital/analogue com­ics eco­nomy. I’ll be post­ing up fur­ther thoughts on this topic soon, includ­ing some thoughts on the long-awaited-baited-breath Long­box system.

Get over to We Love You So and read up a great inter­view with Jordan Crane of ‘Uptight’ fame. A lot of covered in this inter­view, from Maurice Sendak to The Simpsons to tar­get audiences;

When I’m writ­ing some­thing I usu­ally have a par­tic­u­lar per­son in mind that I’m writ­ing it for. Not a gen­eral thing like “I’m writ­ing for someone between the ages of 25 and 50” but rather an actual person.

First of all, I think that people are more alike than they are dif­fer­ent. So let me start with that premise. When I’m writ­ing, I kind of use the guide that if some­thing reads as per­tin­ent or good to me, that other people will like it too. I’m pretty con­fid­ent in using my own edit­or­ial voice for other people. So first and fore­most, it has to pass my own brain. If it’s good, good. I don’t dumb any­thing down.