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!

I’m sure I’ve pos­ted this up some­where before, but as a monday-morning-not-quite-comics link Missed Con­nec­tions NY is a great way to start your week. The Radar short film is essen­tial view­ing (see below);

Mes­sages in bottles, smoke sig­nals, let­ters writ­ten in the sand; the mod­ern equi­val­ents are the funny, sad, beau­ti­ful, hope­ful, hope­less, poetic posts on Missed Con­nec­tions web­sites. Every day hun­dreds of strangers reach out to other strangers on the strength of a glance, a smile or a blue hat. Their mes­sages have the lifespan of a but­ter­fly. I’m try­ing to pin a few of them down.

Aw, hell, while we are at it (and by ‘it’ I mean talk­ing about some­thing other than com­ics) head over to Radar’s page on Babel­gum to see the films, and then get yourselves over to Radar’s Site. Those of you that atten­ded Thought Bubble might be inter­ested to watch Epis­ode #08 — Dr Sketchy’s. I like the way Radar think.

RADAR is a series of 3 minute epis­odes that high­light innov­at­ive pro­jects and events across dif­fer­ent cre­at­ive dis­cip­lines, hangs with cre­at­ors and founders, and digs deep into pro­cess, method and par­ti­cip­a­tion. From what it is means to ideate on the fly with musical improv duo I Eat Pan­das, to the cur­a­tion of con­fes­sional storytelling in Cas­sette From My Ex and the import­ance of com­munity in the Next– Door Neigh­bor all-star web­co­mix pro­ject, RADAR provides a cul­tural com­pass for audi­ences, in order to both inform and inspire.

With the Lottery-funded Thought Bubble Fest­ival in Leeds fast approach­ing, here is a ‘super-link’ post, start­ing off with a series of mini inter­views (min­ter­views) pos­ted up on the Thought Bubble blog;

Hugh ‘Shug’ Raine,
Marc Ellerby,
Steve Tillot­son,
Jack Fal­lows,
Lizz Lun­ney,
Adam Cad­well,
Emma Vieceli,
Charlie Adlard,
Frank Quietly,
and Ben Temple­smith so far…

Exhib­it­ors this year include (alphabetically);

2 Tone Com­ics,
Aaron Murphy,
Accent UK,
Adam Cad­well,
Al Maceach­ern,
Andi Wat­son,
Apo­ca­lypse Com­ics,
Ariel Press,
Asth­matic Com­ics,
Banal Pig,
Bang! Bang! Com­ics,
Bey­ond Mono­poly,
Black Lib­rary,
Cazbounces Books,
Chamon­kee,
Charay­dis Com­ics,
Chris Doherty,
Chris Garside,
Cine­book,
Claude Trollope,
Com­ics Cre­at­ors Guild,
Cos­mic Apple,
Cute But Sad,
David O’Connell,
David Gold­ing,
Dealer Com­ics,
Dean Orm­ston,
Des­tin­a­tion Venus,
Adam Lowe,
Don’t Panic,
Doc­tor Simpo,
Dr Sketchy,
Drastic Com­ics,
Dumpy Little Robot,
E-Merl,
Fet­ish Man,
Fiona Steph­en­son,
Fly­ing Mon­key Com­ics,
For­bid­den Planet,
Francesca Cas­savetti,
Frozen Real­ity Stu­dio,
Future Quake,
Games Work­shop,
Genki Gear,
Glyndwr Uni­ver­sity Com­ics, (dis­claimer — I teach on this course)
Gothy Beans,
Grimm Com­ics,
Gun­nerkrigg Court,
Har­oldinium Com­ics,
Hello Aunt Alicia,
Hex­gib­ber,
Her­man Peaks,
Hope For The Future,
Hyde Park Pic­ture House,
Infin­ity & Bey­ond,
Ink Soup,
Insom­nia Pub­lic­a­tions,
Jemma Web­ster,
Joe Decie,
Joe List,
Kristyna Baczyn­ski,
Large Cow,
Leeds Anime Soci­ety,
Leeds Com­ics Soci­ety,
Leeds Sci-fi & Fantasy Soci­ety,
Leonie O’Moore,
Little Ter­rors,
Liz Green­field,
Liz Lun­ney,
Lucky Tar­get Com­ics,
Magic Beans Com­ics,
Magda Borey­sza,
Marc Ellerby,
Mat­thew Craig,
Mod­ern Mon­stros­ity,
Mor­o­n­oid,
Murky Depths,
Naniiebim,
North­ern Delight,
OK Com­ics,
Omni­v­ista­scope,
Paper Jam Com­ics,
Paul Fryer,
Paul Rainey,
Pop­corn Pea­cock,
Quick­sil­ver Com­ics,
Ragada­bah,
Richard Smith,
Reet! Com­ics,
Rob Jack­son,
Sam John­son,
Self-Made Hero,
Scarygoround,
Sgt. Mike Battle,
Shef­field Space Centre,
Soar­ing Pen­guin,
Sour Meat & Moose,
Space­Babe 113,
SmallZone,
Span­dex,
Split Infin­ity,
Sum­mer Rain,
Tempo Lush,
The Juz­zard,
The Fallen Angel Media,
Time Bomb Com­ics,
Tokyo 15,
Tom Cock­er­ham,
Touche Tees,
Trav­el­ling Man,
Turn­ing Cog Cre­ations,
Twi­light Zone,
UK SF Out­reach,
Veli­cia,
Viz Media,
We Are Words & Pic­tures,
Wild­ways Com­ics,
Wynn Ryder,
and finally, Zip­Gun Com­ics.

Apo­lo­gies in advance for broken links and incor­rect pages!

I really love all of Chris­toph Niemann’s work. Check out these awe­some infograph­ics on the New York Times blog, and then head on over to his site to check out his other work.

Derik Bad­man writes a brief post on Grand­papier, a pro­ject star­ted by Bel­gian pub­lisher L’Employé de Moi. The site fea­tures work in French and Eng­lish as well as a num­ber of word­less strips.

Recent Com­ics Bur­eau pos­tee Darryl Cun­ning­ham com­ments on Derik’s post;

I was recently asked if I wanted to con­trib­ute to Grand­Papier, and have now been doing so for a num­ber of weeks. I find the style of the com­ics on the site to be so much more play­ful than US or UK com­ics. There’s a real fresh­ness about the approach there which made me real­ise how staid Eng­lish lan­guage comix have become.

Look­ing at the qual­ity of the work, this is a hard opin­ion to dis­agree with.

Fol­low­ing a lead from the tal­en­ted Jonathan Edwards is Darryl Cun­ning­ham.

Darryl makes com­ics about his exper­i­ence of work­ing as a psy­chi­at­ric nurse, which makes for fas­cin­at­ing reading.

David Small talks to Sasha Wat­son at Pub­lish­ers Weekly about his graphic mem­oir ‘Stitches’.

You can also have a look at a pre­view of the book here.

David’s site is also quite good — have a look through his sketchbooks.

Lucy Kins­ley, author of French Milk returns to Paris with her boy­friend and keeps a travel diary — Paris Journal.

Check out Dash Shaw’s ‘Bot­tom­less Belly But­ton’, his blog and his web­site. You can also listen to an inter­view with him here.

Although I loved ‘Mono­logues For The Com­ing Plague’, which I found both funny and thought pro­vok­ing, I think I might have had Anders Neilsen wrongly pegged up until recently as some­thing of a ‘thinking-man’s-David-Shrigley’.

Hav­ing taken the time to find out more about his work, I’m some­what impressed that he can recon­cile the ways in which he works — his at times abstract lan­guage of icons and sym­bols, and his superbly draf­ted illus­trat­ive work. (See below)

Have a look at his gor­geous site, buy all his books and read his blog immediately!