Rod McKie Illustrations and Cartoons

Dudley Watkins Addendum (but added to the top, as it were).

2009-10-12T20:39:00.005Z

The Dudley Watkins piece below is one that I have wanted to post for some time, and I wanted it to have a little extra because I really believe we are talking about an exceptional cartoonist, but I really didn't know what that "little extra" would be. Well, as luck would have it, two cartoonists who you will all be quite familiar with have given me permission to reproduce their posts on a simultaneous discussion we are having in another place on this piece on Dudley, and I couldn't be more pleased. I'm particularly delighted with Steve Bright's anecdote about Dudley's Crucifixion painting, the Dundee Courier's heading is hilarious.

Roger (Beau Peep, Andy Capp) Kettle

As I'm sure I've mentioned, Rod, I joined DCT just two weeks before Dudley Watkins died. As an 18 year-old junior, I was given the wonderful job of sorting through all the old Broons and Oor Wullie originals for dating and re-printing purposes. I shared this job with two other kids, Morris Heggie and Euan Kerr who, of course, went on to edit The Dandy and Beano respectively. The artwork in the flesh was staggering and some of the storylines unthinkable in this day and age. (Stopping for a smoke on the way to school and a black kid called Sambo moving into the street). I still feel privileged to have done that job.

Steve (Bananaman) Bright

As another DCT 'kid' of a slightly younger vintage than Messrs Kettle, Heggie and Kerr (the boys done well!), I joined the company several years after Dudley Watkins death, but of course, his legacy and influence on the comics I worked for was still very much alive and plain to see.

I'm particularly pleased to see you make the point about how much he improved over the years, and that not all great cartoonists are born. I can only think of a few who appear to have been the real deal from Day One (the third of Watkins successors on the Broons and Oor Wullie, Ken H. Harrison, being one of them - consistently brilliant throughout his career). Rather than the "solace" you write of, to be taken from those early Watkins years, I'd hope those of us who struggle with our own early years (I was certainly one) can take inspiration from DDW's work, although I agree that usurping the master at his peak would be nigh on impossible. Perhaps I lack that particular ambition, but I still delight in seeing the evolution of the greats (and Baxendale's growth was perhaps an even more marked contrast), and take inspiration from that. And hopefully I never stop learning and improving, but my target has always been to be half as good as those greats, and I've never looked to better any of them.

I turned down the opportunity to take on The Broons and Oor Wullie back in the 80s. At that time, they were being ghosted by Tom Lavery, a fine comic cartoonist, but struggling to fill the great man's shoes. He had a thankless task. I was very flattered to be asked, but scared stiff at the prospect. I'd have taken on Oor Wullie, but the Broons was way too daunting, with something like ten family members in most frames. But both came as a package deal, so I declined. I was right to do so - I'm not good enough to do it justice now, never mind back then, and the artists who eventually took it on (Pete Davidson, Ken Harrison, then Davidson again) were far better equipped to do the job than I ever will be.

Interesting to read about Watkins Biblical ambition. Only last year, a rather curious depiction of The Crucifixion, drawn by Watkins over 50 years ago, was discovered in a house in Fife where it had hung for decades, having been given to the house owner by Dudley Watkins as a personal gift in 1951. Unmistakeably in Watkins' style, it shows children in contemporary clothes and hairstyles of the 1950s, queueing up at the foot of the cross. It caused quite a stir in the press at the time, but DCT's own headline was typically understated.

The Dundee Courier website reported, "Unusual Work by Oor Wullie Artist".

Scotland's Greatest Cartoonist, Dudley D. Watkins

2009-10-08T23:49:00.013Z

It is generally accepted that an Englishman born on February 27th 1907, in Manchester, England, Dudley D. Watkins, was Scotland's greatest cartoonist. Undoubtedly some of the people who say it is so simply pay lip-service to that notion because he remains to this day one of the few cartoonists people in Britain can actually name (even if they only say "the guy who did the Broons"), but to many comic fans and cartoonists alike, Watkins simply was the best. All over Great Britain and the Commonwealth, legions of fans collected every single full-page episode of The Broons and Oor Wullie from the weekly edition of The Sunday Post newspaper, a newspaper that regularly found its way all over the world as families oceans apsrt kept in touch with distant relatives. And every Christmas, The Broons and Oor Wullie Annuals were a standing dish here in the UK and overseas. Then of course there were those other fans who grew up with Dudley's work for The Beano and The Dandy, two comics that really only came into being because of the tremendous popularity of Dudley Watkins work.

For we cartoonists' who are not naturally gifted and have to work hard at our craft, there is some solace in looking at Dudley's very early work before the Broons and Oor Wullie. That's because if you began with no knowledge of his earlier work, and you just picked up a Broons or an Oor Wullie page from the 1940s or 1950s, and then traced it back to the first Broons comic of 1936, it can be very intimidating indeed. Although the Broons of 1933 is rougher than the Broons of 1943, it is still a very polished looking page for that era. There is no sign of the very rough artwork of say, the first Tintin story by Herge, Tintin in the Land of the Soviets. Indeed, if you start with the Broons alone, Dudley seems to have just sprung up as a fully-formed cartooning genius. Of course, that wasn't the case, and Dudley's earlier art work is a little rough around the edges, thankfully, although it is still intimidating in itself because it illustrates the rapid professional development of the man's penmanship.

Watkins's first published work appeared in Boots in-house magazine, The Beacon, while he was working for Boots Pure Drug company in the early 1920s. In 1925 the Watkins family moved to Scotland and Dudley attended classes at Glasgow School of Art. It was the school principal there who recommended the talented illustrator to the Scottish publishing powerhouse D.C. Thomson, and soon afterwards Watkins moved to the Thomson company's Dundee base. It was there that Dudley began what would become a life-long career in comics, as just one of a number of DC illustrators, churning out pages for Adventure, Rover, Wizard, Skipper and The Hotspur. To make ends meet, Watkins earned a little extra income teaching life drawing at Dundee Art School, but his talents did not go unnoticed for long, and a keen-eyed editor assigned him the drawing of two new comic strips, The Broons and Oor Wullie - both of which were launched in the 8 March 1936 edition of the weekly newspaper The Sunday Post.

On the 11th of February 1933 D.C Thomson's Rover Comic contained a free-gift, the Rover Midget, and the episode of PC99 in the Midget was not by PC99's usual cartoonists, Charles Gordon, it was drawn on this occasion by by Dudley Watkins 1933. It was Watkin's first full strip for DC Thomson.

Just three short years after his first full strip appeared, Watkins had begun work on what would become the most iconic cartoon characters in Scottish history. The Broons and Oor Wullie comic strips were tremendous hits with the Scottish public, and it was their success that encouraged Thomson to produce both The Dandy Comic (1937) and The Beano Comic (1938), both of which were built around the look and style of Watkins work. From The Beano #1, until his final comic for Beano # 1422, the creator of Desperate Dan, Lord Snooty and Biffo the Bear, served up a steady diet of comic masterpieces that impacted on almost every single child growing up in Britain, and even further afield. Such was his reputation that he was the only Thomson artist at the time who was allowed to sign his own work, a shy D.W on the adventures of Lord Snooty in the Beano #292, September 7th 1946, gave way to the more familiar and iconic signature Dudley D. Watkins in issue '293.

The cover artist for the Beano, with Biffo the Bear, Watkins was also to become the cover artist of Thomson's two new broadsheet titles, The Topper, with Mickey the Monkey and Ginger, for The Beezer, and in addition to this comic work. Watkins still managed to work on adaptations of classics and to work on a number of biblical works, David, The Road to Calvary, both of which appeared in the Sparky Annual in the 1960s, that were very dear to his heart. A committed Christian, Watkins drew artwork for mission calendars, and from the 1950s he produced the comic strips William the Warrior and Tony and Tina - The Twins, strips full of Scriptural quotations, for Young Warrior, a children's comic paper published by the Worldwide Evangelisation Crusade.

From a cartoonist's perspective there is, perhaps, today at least, a crumb of comfort in looking at Wakins very early Broons pages, but it is just that, a crumb. Let me explain, you see, as cartoonists we tend to learn from other cartoonists and whilst we do want to learn from the greats, like Dudley Watkins, we really also want to one day usurp that surrogate-cartooning-parent, and so it is essential that we can hope, one distant day, to outdraw them. There is at least a hint that one could maybe someday draw as well as Dudley in the very early 1930s Broons, but I have to admit that by the Broons pages of the 1940s any such hope is soon dashed. Within a very short time, in relative cartooning terms, Dudley Watkins was regularly creating some of the most beautiful comics pages ever seen in the history of cartooning.

There were very, very, few cartoonists in the world producing work of the quality of Watkins's work. The Broons pages contained less panels than the more action-orientated Oor Wullie, so there was more of a canvas for Watkins to experiment on. His command of perspective and shifting points of view was almost peerless and I think, with the exception of a handful of European and American greats, like Winsor McCay, it would be difficult to think of a more talented and influential cartoonist. He truly was one of the all-time greats.

One dream Dudley Watkins did not managed to fulfill, was his dream of adapting the entire Bible into illustrated format. Oh that would have been something, wouldn't it? That would have been an awesome "graphic novel", a spectacular celebration of what a dedicated cartoonist could achieve. But it wasn't to be. On the morning of 20 August 1969, his wife found him, a half-finished Desperate Dan strip on his drawing table before him, Dudley D. Watkins had died of a heart attack, doing what he loved.

Artwork copyright D.C Thomson.

Some pics purloined from various sites. For more, and more detailed, information on the great Dudley D. Watkins, I suggest you try the following excellent sites:

That's Braw

Christian Comics International

Matt and Sammy's Treehouse of Ergot and Horror

2009-10-01T12:31:00.008Z

You'll know by now that I like anthologies. As I've said before, I grew up with them because UK comics were and still are, in the main, anthologies. So it will come as no surprise that I really like Bongo Entertainment, Inc's annual, The Simpsons' Treehouse of Horror. But what might come as a surprise to you, with this edition #15, is just exactly who has edited, written, and drawn this collection. It would be fair to say, I think, that it is a stellar line-up of creators; and at least three of my favourite cartoonists are involved.

Guest edited by Sammy Harkham, the award-winning creator of the Kramers Ergot anthology, and featuring the work of a good few of that publications line-up, The Simpsons' Treehouse of Horror #15 features comics by some of the brightest stars in the idie-comic universe. With an eyegasmic cover by Dan Zettwoch the comic opens up to reveal such a range of talent that it really does require two or three passes just to take in, on a superficial level, the delights on almost every page. The impressive collection consists of Cloud 13 by Tim Hensley, The Call of Vegulu, written by Matthew Thurber with art by Kevin Huizenga, Blurst Agin, by Jordan Crane, Mo' Bodies Moe Problems, written and coloured by Ted May with art by the collection's editor Sammy Harkam, The Gods Must Be Lazy, by Will Sweeney, C.H.U.M, by Jon Vermilyea, Boo-tleg by Ben Jones, Three Little Kids, by John Kerschbaum, Bad Millhouse, by Jeffrey Brown and The Slipsons, by C.F

Perhaps the best introduction to the cast of creators, though, comes from the pen of the Editor himself, and I'd like to see more anthologies add this sort of illustrated calling card to its pages.

As with any anthology I have my favourites and not every story works for me, but then that is the appeal and the attraction of anthologies, isn't it? There is something for everyone, and I have to say, this collection comes very close to being pretty much perfect; for me.

The Call of Veula, for instance, was always going to work for me because it's drawn by Glen Ganges creator, Kevin Huizenga, whom I rate very highly as an illustrator. I just love his work.

Almost every piece of this works, and the stories are all very good. It has clearly been a job that everyone involved enjoyed taking part in, and it really is very nice to see such a variety of drawing and colouring styles and methods under one cover.

One of my favourite stories from the collection is C.H.U.M by Jon Vermilyea. I like everything about this story, I like the story itself, the drawings and the colouring.

Another real favourite of mine from this collection is Jeffrey Brown's Bad Millhouse (nice detaills about creating the piece on Jeffrey Brown's blog). I just love the way the condition of the characters deteriorates, in a sort of nod to Juni Ito, but is also reflected in the darkening of the felt tip pens as they themselves begin to deteriorate. It is beautifully drawn.

The comic book itself is full of lovely touches that you don't pick up on at first, like Sammy Harkham's deserted couch with little bits of various Simpson's characters littered around the scene of the crime. It's a delight, a real Halloween treat. This is really worth buying.

Appreciating the Madness of The Bunty

2009-09-18T13:53:00.012Z

I'm not going to be too unkind here because D.C Thomson has changed significantly over the years. The company that once paid its creators less than IPC's juvenile comics division did, and refused to allow credits on the stories, is no longer that sort of company. In fact, with the publishing of Gary Northfield's creator-owned Derek the Sheep in the Beano, D.C Thomson took a massive leap in support of the creator, beyond any other British comic publication and many American ones. For that they should be congratulated, and in pointing that fact out I hope they will not be too mad about my close-ish reading of this Bunty Summer Special from 1972, that was given away free this week in The Guardian. After all, we need to learn from our past, and it is an interesting historical text.

As you know, my cousin Allan was a big Bunty fan. His sister, my cousin Mary, bought a few D.C Thomson titles and despite a fairly comprehensive slagging-off, he always championed the British titles when we were growing up. I, on the other hand, despite working on a British comic back in the 1980s, was much more into the US titles, and it's actually only over the last 10 years or so that I have woken up to how great the British comics, especially the 'girls' comics, actually were - and are. Having said all that, the fact that we readers have no idea who made these stories is not fair on us or on the creators. I have, I think, some idea who created some of the pages, but it irks me that creators were treated that badly.

Bunty was a weekly British comic for girls that began in 1958. Like most other British titles, it was an anthology and consisted of a collection of small strips sometimes two, sometimes three but hardly ever more than four or five pages long. There were seasonal specials, such as the Summer Special featured below, and Christmas and summer annuals. The stories, usually written by men and illustrated more often than not by men, were about, well, you'll find out when you read the examples below. They were often beautifully illustrated, often by celebrated European artists, and the coloured pages were hand-coloured by a team of women in the Thomson offices.

Most features in the Bunty came and went, but The Four Marys ran for years, becoming the comic's longest running story. Drawn by Roy of the Rovers and Scorer artist, Barrie Mitchell, who also worked for Mandy, Pow, Wham, 2000 AD and other titles, The Four Marys ran for decades from the comic's initial launch in 1958.

The story Tommy the Tomboy, with its ridiculous schooling premise, it's stereotypes and its anachronistic ideas about lady-like reactions makes us laugh for all the wrong reasons today; and perhaps would even have raised eyebrows in 1972, but the art is accomplished and attractive. It may be the work of a Spanish a Belgian an Argentinian an Italian or a British illustrator, I have no idea and I can't, at the moment, find out, but I've looked at the panels repeatedly over the last few days and each time it impresses me more.

The drawing of the strident Mrs Ponsonby, secretary of the 'Feminine Freedom Fighters', is simply perfect. She is constructed as a thick-lined, but not indelicately-rendered, shrew, and you can just imagine her shifting her balls as she moves her weight from leg to leg. By contrast, the delicate rendition of her daughter Tomasina, who is being 'taught' to be first manly and then feminine, is at odds with the text that tells us she has manly-traits.

Class rears its head in The Four Marys. Yet again we are faced with the sharp contrast of a story that is wonderful to look at, but reads like something from the Victorian era of chars and scullery maids held to ridicule.

Emergency 666 is not as weird as it looks at first glance. Again the premise is ridiculous, but there is nothing diabolical about the thing, well, apart from the dialogue that is. The emergency services number in the UK is 999, the number here, 666, is simply a reversal of that. I'm pretty certain it has nothing to do with The Book of Revelation and the number of the Beast. As silly as it is, I love the artwork.

Okay this is here for my benefit; I just love cut-outs.

Now, I have to admit this piece of ridiculous hokum, Peggy the Promette, is my favourite story. I absolutely love the hand-coloured work of some faceless Thomson staffer and I love the quality of the line-work. The story is awful, but it looks fantastic.

You know, sitting down reading 200 episodes of one of these adventures, or even just 10 or 12 of the more fleeting visitors to the pages of the Bunty, would fill me with dread; but I could sit there for hours eyeballing the pages. It's a tragedy that it has taken us (and by 'us' I really mean 'them') this long to appreciate this part of our heritage.

Great Anthologies Create Not So Strange Bedfellows

2009-09-07T00:06:00.017Z

I love anthologies. If you look over at the piece I did on the Forbidden Planet UK blog on Danny Hellman's Typhon, you'll discover why I love them - in a nutshell, it's the variety I suppose. But I also love new-takes on existing characters, as evidenced here on an earlier Batman post, and Marvel's Strange Tales has both these things going for it, Strange Tales is an anthology-comic, and it has a variety of new-takes on existing Marvel characters; by Peter Bagge (Neat Stuff and Hate) Nick Bertozzi (Houdini: The Handcuff King), Molly Crabapple and John Leavitt (co-founders of the hugely succesful Dr. Sketchy's Anti-Art School ), Nicholas Gurewich (The Perry Bible Fellowship), Norwegian cartoonist Jason (Low Moon, profiled here), James Kochalka (Monkey versus Robot), Michael Kupperman (Tales Designed to Thrizzle), Junko Mizuno, (Pure Trance). Paul Pope (Batman year 100), Johnny Ryan (Angry Youth Comix), and Dash Shaw (Bottomless Bellybutton).

It's a stellar line-up, complete with cartoonists who have heightened the profile of the artform beyond the pages of publications and the interweb. Japanese artist Mizuno's Gothic-Kawaii drawing style, a mixture of super-cuteness, and blood and syringes, appears on clothes and in gallery shows, and Paul Pope has designed a Pulphope line of clothes for DKNY and Diesel.

As with any publication of this sort, I have my favourites; Paul Pope and Jose Villarrubia's cover is excellent because it takes itself seriously, alerting the reader that although the Marvel Universe will be treated slightly flippantly, it won't be disrespected. This is a very clever piece of marketing which is especially important to a significant band of readers who are not particularly welcoming of indie cartoonists. For those readers, Paul Pope's cover and introductory story will prove a gateway to this comic's tone and Strange Tales #1 itself will surely prove a gateway comic to a world of indie-illustration for the uninitiated comic book reader. And with any luck, it will also establish a demand for more work in a similar vein beyond Strange Tales #1,2 and 3. I love the sub-text of Leavitt and Crabapple's She-Hulk (coloured and lettered by Star St.Germain), and what could easily be a jarring-juxtaposition of artistic styles, between Molly Crabapple's silky-thin, embroidery-like drawings, and Junko Mizuno's solid-lined Spiderman (translated by Aki Yanagi, and adapted by C.B. Cebulski), becomes a delight in the context of this anthology. I just adore Dash Shaw's Doctor Strange, for reasons to numerous to mention, and Michael Kupperman's Namor is equally brilliant. I think of all the stories in this volume though, my favourite is Jason's Spider Man, I read it about 3 or 4 times and each time I read it it seems funnier and more clever.

My only criticism of the comic, and it is a slight one, more a grumble really, or a gripe, and not even a full gripe, more a gr... or an ...ipe, is that a page or two of the work is 'Not Brand Ech-sy'. I mean, don't take that the wrong way, I loved Don Heck's comic at the time, but that style of parody isn't really what an indie-collection is about. What I mean is I don't like the pages that are more a parody of the character, than an indie-interpretation, as much as I do the rest of the comic. So whilst the majority of the illustrators have combined the more cartoony indie-look with a certain amount of psychological depth, one or two have delivered nothing more than a superficial parody. As I have said though, this is an anthology and whilst I might not love all the pages, there is still more than enough great work here to keep me delighted and eager to read the next comic in the series. All told, it's pretty fab.

Papercraft, Urban Paper, Paper Toyz

2009-08-26T21:13:00.012Z

I have a bunch of posts in the 'drafts' folder that I had forgotten about. They are kind of rough and ready and some lack links and credits, so if you see anything of yours here that should be linking to your site let me know, and I'll slot it in. This post was put together in November 2008, I'm guessing, because I referred to the Guy Fawkes mask as 'timely'.

I should own a Dalek. A real one. Let me explain, when I was a youngster I "won" a competition to name a Dalek. I called it "Deckie", but instead of sending me a "real Dalek" the company they sent me an excuse about having 'too many winners', and a paper Dalek. They sent me what today would be called, I suppose, a papercraft Dalek. Of course, if that competition was run today I'd own a Dalek, a real one, and I would have been spared the trauma of having to try to stick my cut-out Dalek to cardboard with Treacle, because we had no glue at home. Instead, I do not have a real Dalek and I don't even have a parcraft Dalek because it all ended up a tear-soaked, sticky, mess. What a rip-off! It would probably have scarred a less heroic child for life, but I've managed to put the fact that despite actually winning a Dalek, I don't even have a papercraft Dalek today.

Anyway, if you've seen my Rod McKie papercraft cut-out and keep doll, you'll know I love these papercraft things. I'm a fan; it's all I can do to stop myself cutting up my Chris Ware books, believe me. Papercraft sculptures really add to a publication, don't you think? I think they do. They were very popular here at one point and appeared regularly on the back page of some British comics - my cousin Allan told me. I'm not saying he did, but my cousin Allan might have cut out all the papercraft girls that came with the Bunty Comic, and he might well have practised his counselling skills on them - there's a thought - and you thought they weren't practical...

Today's papercraft models are, by comparison, utterly amazing, and despite the fact that you can knock up a 3D-model on Maya or Lightwave or Rhino, these paper constructions still command a lot of respect in the toy and game designing communities, and they are increasingly popular with cartoonists and illustrators who often prefer a tactile turnaround to a digital one. Japan, the home of Origami (oru and kami) leads the way in papercraft, as you might expect, with giant robot sculptures, and an endless amount of practical and impractical designs, from a variety cartoonists and illustrators, and even from companies like Yamaha, Canon, Honda, and Toyota.

With sites like the Paperkraft blog, Papercraft Museum, Thunderpanda, The Web Dude, Cubeecraft, and Toy-a-Day highlighting a range of skills and designs available, Urban Paper, a seriously underrated art form in the west, will continue to attract fans and practitioners. If it is an art form you would like to know more about, and maybe experiment with, then you'll be pleased to know that there is a Japanese Paper Craft programme, Pepakura Designer, and a viewer, Pepakura Viewer, that you can download for free. In the screenshots below, I'm using the Pepakura tools to show you Web-Dude's Papercraft Gigantor guide, and model and a timely Guy Fawkes mask.

Whether you just fancy collecting and assembling some favourite vintage characters, like Astro Boy, or the Moomin Trolls, or more modern cut-outs like the cast of Dexter; or you fancy designing your own Papercraft figures, it really can be a fun way to spend some time. And don't overlook the fact that some Papercraft figures of your own characters can be a pretty handy (excuse the pun) piece of PR.

Swings and Roundabouts.

2009-08-15T19:12:00.004Z

Okay, washing my Flashpen was a bit silly, but get this, it works! Seriously, a PNY Attache, it did a full wash and dry in a shirt pocket in an Indesit and after drying out, it works. None of the others came back to life, so this is a real good pen, and I suppose its fold-in-on-itself motion is what helped save it. Although at least one of the others might have been thrown into the old washing machine, but I'm pretty sure that was an Indesit too, so the only other factor would be the quality of the shirt, but it was a thin cotton shirt, so you know, it just looks like the pen is a toughie.

So, you know, that saves having to scan all the stuff into a new drive, to move it around, so I'm quite happy. That doesn't balance out the day, which has not been great, but it is a tick in the positives' column.

Anyway, I mentioned the new work for the older book idea well that's what got soaked. I was really upset because the hard stuff, the actual drawing and writing had been going okay, and then I worked through the boring scanning bit and then the Photoshop malarkey, only to lose the darned pen...and well, the rest you know. But that's all water under the bridge now, I have the finished hi and lo res drawing back, without having to do it all again. Yippee.

It is, as I mentioned, now three smaller books but as the story goes forward it also adds to the back-story, so I'm kind of literally beginning in the middle of the thing, rather than at the start. Now I am utterley convinced that author/poet John Burnside taught me this trick about working back in the story as well as forward, when he did a stint at Stirling University, but it's such a good idea I want to pretend I dreamed it up.

Here's an interesting fact (oh, no); the characters are cycling up Ellens Glen Road, and will turn along Lasswade Road, and make their way to Liberton Brae, or Libby Bray, to use the vernacular; which is an area in Liberton that was full of allotments and apple and pear trees. It is the place we used to go 'scrumping', and I write about as Lepertown. Well, I happened to be reading a Tweet from my Twitter chum, author of Going Bovine, Libba Bray, just when I clicked the pen open - Libba Bray, Libby Bray, - spooky, huh?

That's Seizon - Life

2009-08-11T18:54:00.000Z

I used to like all the titles Alan Class Comics reprinted over here. They were all really Tales to Astonish or Bewilder or Astound the reader, that is those filling the gaps between the adventures of Mandrake the Magician, and T-Bolt, and the Phantom, were. Those were the stories I liked best, the filler stories. The comics that had no big comic book star, but were made up of a bunch of disparate short stories, were by far my favourites - not simply because they often contained little gems by Ditko and Kirby, they did, but because there was more substance to the stories, or at least it seemed that way to me, back then.

In retrospect, reading them today, as I sometimes do, a lot of these filler stories were a little hackneyed. You kind of new what to expect, a slightly supernatural twist in the tale that was anything but unexpected. Occasionally though, there was a thoughtful piece of writing in there, and those stories really did make a lasting impact on this young reader.

Hindsight is a great tool for any reviewer, and I realise now that the type of story that really resonated with me was likely to be based, however loosely, on urban-mythology. You know the stuff, the claw on the door handle, the banging on the car-roof outside the lunatic asylum, the strange woman with the hairy wrists, and variations on these tales. One story that really excited me was a story about a stranger accepting a lift in a car from a driver who gets increasingly paranoid that the person he has picked up is an escaped mental patient. The twist in the tale is that it is the driver of the car himself who is actually the lunatic at large; not the person he has picked-up. I remember thinking of this story recently, when I was rereading Locas in Love, where an increasingly paranoid Maggie starts to worry that a car is stalking her car. Another favourite was the against all odds tale, that often featured a character who after being diagnosed with a deadly illnes, goes off in search of a final adventure, and ends up being, somewhat mysteriously, cured.

I'll be honest, if you ask me what other stories are in that Alan Class Comic, the one with the paranoid driver, I'd struggle to tell you. And if you asked me which superhero the filler stories frame in the publication, I just wouldn't be able to say. The truth is, I wanted more stories like the paranoid driver, or I wanted the paranoid driver story to stretch for an entire comic book. Perhaps I was already starting to outgrow superheroes. The trouble was, of course, that there really wasn't a lot out there, other than superhero comics, that combined words and pictures for me to read. It is different today, thankfully, there is much more choice now, although it is still in many ways a limited choice if one considers all the autobiographical publications as one genre.

Growing up back then, I would have loved a comic like Seizon - Life. Oh, I admit that today, the adult me thinks the third volume of the series falls a bit flat, and that the story is a tad melodramatic, but the teenage me would have really loved it, and if I'd read it in my early twenties, then I might have started producing work like it.

Seizon, a collaborative effort by Nobuyuki Fukumoto, a previous winner of the Kodansha Manga Award, and fellow Kodansha Manga Award winner, Kaiji Kawaguchi, is a twenty three chapter story, spread over three volumes. It is first and foremost an action thriller, that tells the story of Takeda, a desperate and dying man determined to bring his daughter's killer to justice, before he himself is eaten away by cancer.

Scanlated first by Kotonoha, and finished (finally) by Hox, Seizon, is a classic who-done-it, but with a very modern denouement. The protagonist, Takeda, has suffered the loss of his wife, who died not knowing whether their daughter, Sawako, missing for the past fourteen years, was alive or dead, to cancer. When Takeda learns that his own terminal cancer is in an advanced state, he decides to end his life. However, just when he is about to hang himself, the phone rings and we hear the message from the police that they have found his missing daughter's corpse.

His short remaining life given new purpose, Takeda resolves to remain alive long enough to bring his daughter's killer or killers to justice. But he must move quickly, under Japanese law, the statute of limitations for murder lasts for 15 years, and Takeda has only six months left to live, and six months left to bring his daughter's killer to justice.

Drawn in typical Seinen style, Seizon looks terrific, and in the main the story captivates and keeps the reader interested in what happens next. It does flag a little toward the end, but when it does the cinematic switches of POV, illustrated well in the final page above, pick up the pace. I'd love to see some work like Seizon or Soil (we'll do a Soil blog later), created here in the UK and maybe in the US, but I'm only too painfully aware that there are limited opportunities to showcase such work.

Rupert Murdoch and Micropayments, a Futurology

2009-08-07T11:48:00.009Z

Let me begin by apologising unreservedly for having no cartoons and illustrations here, there will be lots on the next post, to compensate; promise.

Rupert Murdoch is launching a pay-for-view model for all his newspapers, over the next few months. For me, and for many other magazine cartoonists and syndicated strip producers, it looks like an inevitable step forward, and I would imagine that particular paradigm is the way of the future. At least it is if the pay-for-view method is intended as a business-model, and not simply as a tactic employed to drive people away from the web and back to newsprint.

Of course we won't know how it will play out at first, because in order for this pay-for-view paradigm to be seen to its best effect, or its worst, every other online-newspaper has to follow suit. As Andrew Neil, a former editor of The Sunday Times, has pointed out, it is a good idea "that will work better if all the main competitors do it". That is, of course, the rub, if all the other "main competitors" do follow suit, then that at least throws up the possibility that this business model could be used as a method of coercing people back to buying print newspapers; if those newspapers were considerably cheaper than the cost of reading online. Not that I think that is the Murdoch plan, mind you, because Mister Murdoch has had a team looking at the viability of this business model for more than a year.

So, what might this mean for online newspapers? Well, that depends on what you think a newspaper is. I prefer to stick to Noam Chomsky's definition of a newspaper as 'a device to sell customers to advertisers'. It is a definition that holds true and is best illustrated with the phenomenon of the 'free newspaper', a newspaper that costs the reader nothing to buy, and is paid for by the vast amount of advertising it carries. Newspapers that are not free are simply a more refined, more demographically-targeted, and less scatter-gun, version of the same.

The Guardian online, and The Times online, and the Sun online, will all attempt to sell their usual clearly-defined demographically-pigeon-holed consumers to the advertisers they will attempt to attract to their sites - advertisers who have, bear in mind, partly as a result of the recession, stopped buying space in the print editions of these papers. So how will they do it, how will they attract the readers they need to attract the advertisers they want?

You know, this is not an easy question for the papers to answer. It used to be. If you had to picture a typical city worker, a decade or so ago, dressed in pinstripes and brogues, carrying a newspaper under his arm, you wouldn't imagine the Sun being tucked under there. You would picture a broadsheet, and the particular broadsheet might depend on his political point of view, with the more liberal reader carrying the Guardian. It was, as much as the tie they wore and whether or not their hat was worn at a rakish angle, part of their uniform, a signifier of the tribe to which they belonged. I did it myself, on the way to catch my train every day, I picked up my extended uniform of a Coke and a Guardian. On some days I had a migraine and I knew I wouldn't be reading the paper that day, but I still went ahead and bought it anyway. It was so much a part of me, that if I was racing for my train the newsagent at the station just threw my paper to me, and collected the payment the following day.

Today though, picturing the newspaper the worker surfing at home might virtually tuck under that arm, is fraught with difficulties. That percentage of the readership that collected its paper to brandish like a self-defining badge, no longer needs to do so. At home, no one can see you read, and you can get the same news from a different, a cheaper, and even a free-source of news gathering. Bear in mind that for decades now these same people have been consuming The News of the World on the QT; reading online means they no longer have to buy a broadsheet to wrap around and hide the newspaper they really want to read. It would seem though, that Rupert Murdoch's futurologists have anticipated this problem, and as a result many news items, those that are simple reportage of events, without any editorial filter or slant, will be free. It is the more 'in -depth' or specialist items, and the info' and entertainment that will be pay-for-view.

This focus on specialist items is the area that should be of most interest for cartoonists, because it means that for a newspaper to survive, and especially to prosper, it needs to house exclusive content that the reader will not mind paying for. It is unlikely that the reader will want to shell-out for 'generic', ubiquitous, comic strips like Garfield, because the reader who wants to read Garfield can get Garfield from the cheapest online source. And, with the exception of a timely Halloween or Xmas storyline, it really doesn't matter if you read Garfield's adventure today, for a penny, or with a one week delay, for free. The smart online-publications will surely realise that with every online-publication carrying the same news items, and the same gossip, the same sports features, and the same comic strips, the only way they can proclaim any individuality, that will encourage the reader to choose them, is the amount of exclusive content they provide. So, star columnists will feature heavily in the new online-publications, and so too, if the newspaper's have any sense, will exclusive comic strips and cartoons.

However, there is a danger that for two reasons the online-publications will simply be a PDF version of their counterpart in print. The first reason would be that some publishers will attempt to pay the contributors no extra payment because it is simply an exact copy of the print publication, and the second is that the people behind the online-publications are trapped in a particular mindset that imagines news in only one fixed format. Simply putting a print publication online and then tacking a comments box onto a page does not 're-imagine' the newspaper as we know it.

It is probably time for a radical rethink about what a newspaper can be, and to be honest I can't think of anyone better placed than Rupert Murdoch to define the possibilities. The Murdoch organisation has the resources, and can place news feeds, live reports, and even animation on its sites. It is probably true that the old static magazine cartoon and editorial cartoon and single-column cartoon and comic strip will have to become something else, something closer to animation, or they will cease to have a platform. If that is the case then we cartoonists will have to be prepared to meet the challenge.

To be honest I had always envisaged a publication that the advertisers would hate, if they had to advertise in it, because it wouldn't exist, except in my head. I had always figured I would mix and match my own perfect newspaper, with articles by Charlie Brooker (it is damning him with faint praise to say his writing is better than his cartooning - but it is so much better) and Caitlin Moran on modern culture, Anthony Horowitz on literature, Mathew Parris on politics and current affairs, and a comic strip series like those run recently by the New York Times (Chris Ware, Jaime Hernandez, Megan Kelso, et al), but with comics by British cartoonists, or to be more precise, by me. Of course it would not be impossible to make a pick-n-mix publication because the advertisers could target me, the empirical me, not the virtual me, me the individual, not the publication. It is coming I suppose.

Rod McKie, futurologist.

Addendum:

It has been pointed out to me by literally hundreds of people (see earlier posts to discover exactly what that means) that I have not been as transparent as I might have been, so I'll summarise:

I see pay-for-view as an opportunity for local cartoonists in markets that have previously stopped taking cartoons or have used only syndicated work in the past. There will also still be a demand for syndicated work, though.

The paper I have always imagined allows me to 'create' my own personal publication at the point of sale. Instead of subscribing to 'The Times online', I subscribe to 'News Group' and within certain parameters I create my own newspaper with a section from here and a section from there, and featuring the contributors I want to read. And it had better have a good comics section. It is my own personal publication, so the adverts that will tag along with it help to profile me. That's the price I pay for being able to compose my own publication.

In addition, it may be that I, and the other readers who create and Arts and Media publications similar to mine, create a demand for some columnists and a lack of demand for others, even some from rival publications, so News Group can either syndicate in their material, or pay them to create more.

I suppose it goes without saying that if I don't get a good comics section and much as I love Peanuts I'm not including that, or Garfield, in mine; then I just won't be subscribing. And if we are simply talking about a PDF of a print publication, you can forget it - the www deserves better than that.

How I Didn't Get To See Batman, But Still Came Out Smiling

2009-08-01T19:01:00.024Z

I don't much remember TV, from my very young years, but I do remember radio. I remember The Jimmy Clitheroe Show, and I vaguely remember shouting out a catch-phrase of some kind. I'm pretty sure Superman, the old Fleischer animation, was on TV once or twice, and Mighty Mouse, I remember those, but that's all I remember of TV from that period. I do remember going to 'the Pictures' though, the 'movies', every week and I remember every single feature.

We lived at the foot of Great Junction Street, in Leith, opposite the State Leith Cinema, and every Saturday my cousins and neighbours and I would be sent 'over the road' to spend an entire morning watching The Batman, The Scarlett Horseman, Superman, Captain America, King of the Rocketman, Flash Gordon, Zorro, et al, tearing up the screen. I remember the excitement, the noise, and the sheer joy of being part of that huge army of kids cheering the entrance of every hero and booing every villain.

Years later, after we had moved to the area I feature a lot in my comics, Lepertown, I was only an occasional visitor to the movies. Of course the cinema was no longer on our doorstep, but TV had also become much more important, and the shows had become much more sophisticated and child-friendly. Saturday mornings were now spent in the company of the Banana Splits and the Double Deckers.

Somewhere around this period, Batman: the Movie, starring Adam West and Burt Ward, finally made it to Edinburgh, to The Playhouse Cinema (a John Fairweather design based on The Roxy in New York), at the top of Leith Walk, and I was aching to go see it. As fate would have it though, my parents went shopping on the Saturday that all my friends (not a Batman fan amongst them; at least not as big a Batman fan as I) decided to go see the film, and when they came to talk me into going I was unable to go. It would be a gross understatement to describe me as pissed; I was more furious than I can describe even today, that those people were going without me, and that my parents had conspired to deny me my right to see Batman. In fact I think it left a scar that can still be (faintly) detected today.

Okay, so there I am fitting the description 'stroppy kid' already, as you do, and I am also bearing a permanent grudge, because of the denial of my basic human rights as an owner of many Batman comics, and I am acting-up at every single opportunity. In fact I'm doing everything except a 'dirty-room protest' and a 'hunger strike'. Eventually though, it got wearing and so I gave in and accepted my parents' crappy compromise, that I could go to the pictures myself. To see what, I didn't care. I just went, the following Saturday, to the Playhouse expecting, I don't know, something for kids.

So I arrive at the Playhouse and the feature is 'The Red Balloon'. Oh my god, I was furious. This was what I was going to see instead of Batman? It wasn't even in English, it was in French, and I hated French. But that didn't matter after all, because it was a silent-French movie. It just kept getting better.

Anyway, the curtain rose, and what I saw on the screen was a kid like me running around familiar scenes of urban decay, and running through familiar narrow streets that could have been in Edinburgh's Grass Market or in Infirmary Street and almost from the very first second I was transfixed by this simple, silent, tale of a boy and a balloon.

In the beginning the red balloon is just that, on ordinary balloon, a found object, that the boy picks up on his way to school.

But he is not allowed on the bus with his balloon so instead of letting it go he walks to school, and when it rains he finds shelter for the balloon under the umbrellas of strangers.

The balloon slips free and the boy finds it and scolds it and from then on the balloon does his bidding. He no longer even has to hold the string, it follows obediently above him or behind him and even follows the bus when he rides on it.

At this stage of the story the balloon develops a personality of its own as it follows an adult from the boy's school.

After the boy leaves school his balloon, now fully a character in its own right, even retrieves a balloon a little girl has lost.

But there is danger afoot and a gang of boys wants the balloon fro themselves.

Our hero is determined to be reunited with his friend though and after a successful rescue mission he recovers his balloon and race of through the narrow labyrinthine streets of the old town, the gang of boys hotly in pursuit.

On a beach, our cornered hero loses his friend when a stone from a catapult punctures it.

After the red balloon is has the life stamped out of it a curious thing happens, all the balloons all over the town tear themselves away from the people holding them.

And ever single balloon in the place winds its way toward the distraught boy, still standing with his airless friend at his feet.

Gathering all the balloons the boy is lifted up clear over the city.

I didn't know it then, but this simple story would have a much more profound effect on the work I would produce over the years than Batman: the movie, ever would. Indeed, looking at the story now, I think I can see its influence on a great many modern works and classic stories and movies.

Don't keep Flashpens in your Pocket!

2009-07-30T21:24:00.005Z

Okay, this will probably interest nobody, but it does illustrate the new sort of problems we have to work around these days. My PC monitor died, just about one day after the warranty ran out, so at the moment I'm doing everything on a laptop. The laptop I prefer to work on (an older Photoshop with all my favourite filters) is above, on the right. Now the wireless connection works just fine on that laptop, but not on the one on the left (newer Photoshop but hardly any bells and whistles), and I can't get the one on the left online, and I can't hook it up to the one on the right. As a result, when I want to put artwork I have on the laptop on the left, online, I have to put it on a Flashpen and transfer it to the laptop on the right, and I do this often because I like to scan into the laptop on the left because it works harder than the one on the right.

Just the other day I scanned some artwork onto the laptop on the left, and then worked on it and saved it to my Flashpen, with the intention of transferring the finished work online using the laptop on the right. Then I put the Flashpen in my shirt pocket, promptly forgot about it, and the following day the shirt, complete with Flashpen, was put through the washing machine(about the third time I've done this).

Fortunately, I didn't delete the artwork from the laptop on the left, and as a result I was able to copy the artwork onto the large external hard drive, in the picture on the right of the laptop on the left, and then transfer it to the laptop on the right.

Trust me, that's a lot easier to do than it is to explain.

Don't Get Married to an Idea!

2009-07-28T21:39:00.012Z

Don't get married to an idea.

I wasn't quite sure what Charles Schulz meant when I first heard that. That's because gag, or magazine, cartoons are often recast with a brand new punchline, so you never really have to kill-off the entire idea, just come at it from a different angle. I know Michael Shaw has rewritten a punchline for a cartoon that the New Yorker didn't like, and then liked, in its new version. I've done it myself, when it suddenly occurred to me that I could completely remake a cartoon I had drawn years before, by changing the punchline to suit a new market, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Truth be told, cartoonists do it all the time. That's not to say though, that you can't ever come up with a completely unusable cartoon, you can - at least I can; but it is never as difficult to kill off a cartoon idea as it is to kill off an idea for a comic book, or comic strip, or a graphic panel. Those often represent a larger investment of time, energy, materials, and hope, and I suppose they also represent a larger degree of emotional attachment than the single cartoon idea.

Maybe it helps to think about it in purely economic terms, especially in this day and age, and add that given the current economic climate, when you are in the 'ideas business', and that is essentially the business cartoonists are in, you just can't afford to wed yourself to an unprofitable idea. I know that maybe goes against your artistic sensibilities, but you know, you have to make a living, and the best way for a cartoonist to make a living is to churn out as many ideas as possible.

Now, I came up with these twin characters a few years back, and I wrote a few one-page stories around them. And then I wrote a larger story, and then started to plan strips and entire comic books. Every so often I would admit to myself that maybe I was wasting my time, they were, after all, a bit of an odd concept, but I just kept devoting more and more time to the idea of creating, exclusively, stories about these characters. In time, I realised that they should have stayed on the doodle-board because they were very self-indulgent; but not before I had created comics and paintings and even a sculpture or two, to the exclusion of all my other work.

The Little Cherubs idea was another that I found hard to let go. I really designed it with a middle-of-the-road parent-type magazine in mind, but pretty soon I was designing cards and posters and promo-pages, and in no time at all I had almost 20 adventures ready for print and I could readily imagine the things being successful, even when the returns were telling me a different story.

Eventually, as you must, I divorced myself from those ideas, perhaps simply because I couldn't think of a way to make them pay, which makes them a costly lesson, but a valuable one. At least, in one way or another, I did manage to 'unwed' myself from these ideas, and they now sit in a folder in my archive, and I hope that just knowing they are there will remind me of the lesson I have begun to learn (you are never too old).

The extract here from Sunshine on Leith might surprise one or two of you, but it should be here under the 'bad ideas' section. Not because the book itself is a bad idea, it's not, it's just that the idea of creating a very big book was an idea that really very quickly started to get out of control. The section of the book that took place in Leith was very small, and really should have been made into a good small book, that still tackled the same big subject of sectarianism in Scotland, but the idea started to grow and grow, and as a result the story began to stretch too thin.

The section below is by far the largest section of Sunshine on Leith, and it grew from a story called Tommy Apple, which was in itself a charming little story about my friend Tom getting stuck in an apple tree in the Convent of Poor Saint Clars in Liberton, by a bunch of nuns with a German shepherd. By adding this section to Sunshine on Leith, I started to change the subject of the story to fit the overall arch of the longer narrative, and I robbed this major part of the book of all its charm. It was becoming clear to me that the idea of the book, of what it should 'say', was killing the story, so I killed the book and split the story up into three smaller stories, and as a result it is all starting to look, and to read, a lot better.

The Gnomes project really takes me back. The Gnomes was almost a career disaster for me because the project took up about a year of my life, and I did it while I was working on a weekly comic and trying to draw cartoons. I teamed up with a friend who was a salesman, and together we approached the Scottish Development Agency about setting up an animation studio in a proposed film production studio to be established in the old slaughter house building in Chesser, in Edinburgh. The idea of establishing a movie studio there had been on the table for a while, and it looked to have legs, even Sean Connery was interested, along with a number of politicians and business folks. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I created the characters and put them on a show reel and in book form and comic page form and designed the merchandise and strips and all the assorted paraphernalia over the period of time we were 'in talks'. When those talks finally got down to the bottom-line, the proposed deal was that I would have a teeny little stake in the business, and I would still be expected to invest money. Of course I walked, and took The Gnomes with me. That was an idea it was much easier to divorce myself from because by the end of the business process I was as poor as a church mouse and I needed to start drawing and selling cartoons as quickly as possible. I must say though, although I have no happy memories of drawing through the night like a maniac to make the things, they are not that bad.

This strip struck me as an obvious idea, a sort of female Calvin, but without Hobbes. I started it right away, without designing the characters and I just sat down and drew about five episodes, and then I kept going. I think I have about twenty finished strips, but I think I lost interest by about strip fourteen. There was no way I was going to draw and write the thing for twenty years, so there was no point in it going in, so it went in the archive. I think, to this day, only Aussie cartoonist Nik Scott has seen the strip. It had a cool name, Reindeer in the Attic (RITA), but it was a very slight idea.

Okay, this is really a good example of what Schulz meant by 'don't get married to an idea', because it should never have been drawn at all. In this case the strip didn't even have a name, I just thought it would be cool to draw characters in animal skins. But not just that, I kind of had an animal spirit kind of idea going on, so there was going to be another layer of meaning to this seemingly simple idea. Well, it lasted two strips before I realised that I just had no idea what I was on about. I had an idea that I would like to draw this scenario, and I could have created one hundred episodes and sent it out there and sulked when it didn't get taken and kept refining it and you know, I would have been married to the idea. It's just not a healthy choice.

So today, I am in a happier place, I think. I have been writing and drawing a strip and it is going well. I'm pretty sure I'm doing it for all the right reasons and I'm not just married to the idea - at least, I hope that's the case.

The late, great, John Ryan

2009-07-26T19:42:00.012Z

Steve Holland and Lew Stringer have both posted wonderful obituaries to Edinburgh-born cartoonist John Ryan, on their blogs. They have also both posted marvelous early drawings of Ryan's Captain Pugwash and his later Harris Tweed strip, from The Eagle comic. Please head on over to their blogs and take a look.

Pugwash strip from Steve Holland's Bear Alley Blog, click here to visit

I was invited along to an exhibition of cartoon art which featured one of my Harvard Business Review cartoons a couple of years back, and I was tempted to go because John Ryan, the creator of Captain Pugwash, might put in an appearance. It was enough that some of his drawing were there, to be honest, but meeting the man himself would have been such a thrill. At any rate I didn't manage to get there because something or other popped up; as it often does.

I've been a fan of John Ryan and Captain Pugwash for a long time, you see. It dates back to my lying on the carpet in front of the great-god-telly, eating ham rissoles and watching Gigantor, Belle and Sebastian, White Horses, and Captain Pugwash and the like, and being transported. As I think back, I am transported once more, not back to that time but back to the feeling of that time - it's a feeling of security, of warmth, of unadulterated joy. I can't think of the old cut-ups of Captain Pugwash without associating them with the feel of a warm carpet, the smell of home cooking and overheated TV valves, and the worry-free days of my youth.

I love the anime Gigantor, and the memory of it, but Gigantor never made me think I could become a cartoonist, nor did Wacky Races, or The Impossibles, but Captain Pugwash did. Captain Pugwash was not only fun to watch, but it looked possible to make. It was clunky and awkward and nothing like some of its more polished contemporaries. In today's parlance, it looked doable.

It never looked amateurish, none of his work did, it was obviously high quality and deserved its place on TV. It just looked like it was something it might be possible to replicate, with the sort of tools Blue Peter might use. Not only that, but it was possible, looking at Pugwash, to work out how the magic of animation worked. You could see which parts stayed still, and which parts moved. The backdrops were intricate and looked great, but there was no mistaking the jerky quality of the cut-out limbs.

Of course it has become fashionable over the years to make animation that looks like cut-ups. It costs a lot of money to make The South Park Show look as if it is cheaply made. Somewhat ironically, though, the new Captain Pugwash cartoons are slickly animated, and look as polished as any modern cartoon series. The quirkiness and uniqueness of the old series is lost, but the charming humour remains and one can see something of the old anarchy of the older artwork in the Puffin New Edition books, like Pugwash and the Ghost Ship, highlighted on the Vintage Kids' Books my Kid Loves blog.

All copyright remains with the respective copyright holders.

The Art of True Blood

2009-07-14T20:11:00.016Z

Or at any rate, the art of Lisa Desimini, for the covers of Charlaine Harris's Southern Vampire Novels, adapted for TV as True Blood; but that really doesn't trip off the tongue.

Let's begin with the TV series itself before we look at the books, because True Blood begins its British TV debut on FX later this week, and I have an interest in vampire lore. Many more moons ago than I care to admit, I began a thesis on The Role of the Gothic Outsider. I had high hopes for the thesis, and I was surrounded by people who had authored books on Gothic literature and even edited the The New Critical Idiom series on the subject, but during the research phase, I stopped believing in the subject matter.

Then I saw Guillermo del Toro's steam-punk vampire tale, Cronos and I was interested in the Gothic all over again. My appetite whetted, I even reread Anne Rice's Lestat books, two of them at least, and even partly resumed my studies, for my own benefit, and then, well, nothing much happened for the longest time, until that is, Let the Right One In appeared. My God, that is one seedy book. The movie of the book, which is brilliantly acted, is less seedy, but disturbing on many levels, especially if one has read the book beforehand, which many of the reviewers had clearly failed to do.

And now, along comes the TV adaptation of Charlaine Harris's Southern Vampire Mysteries, featuring Sookie Stackhouse, surely one of the most determined and daring heroes in any literature. In the TV adaptation, by Alan Ball, the creative genius behind the movie American Beauty, and the TV series Six Feet Under (surely the closest TV has ever come to creating art), the part of Sookie Stackhouse is played by Anna Paquin, the very versatile Oscar-winning actor who played the part of Holly Hunter's daughter in Jane Campion's marvelous The Piano, and Rogue in the X-Men movies.

The opening credits for the series, created by the same firm that created the opening credits for Six Feet Under, Digital Kitchen, are absolutely spectacular, and the theme song Bad Things, by Jace Everett, are really helping create the right buzz for the show. I have to say, looking at the True Blood merchandise on HBO's site, and the Digital Kitchen credits and the outline of the creative process on their website, I am really impressed by the ultra-professional way the various teams get right behind an idea they believe in, in the US. There is a sense that there is a well-oiled machine at work, but I don't mean that in a pejorative way, you don't loose sight of the individuals behind the project, it's just that all their talents seem to have been pooled together to create this juggernaut; from the author of the original books, to the screenplay writers, to the direction, to the acting, and the lighting, and the music and the mood, it's an all out attack on the senses. It's one very seductive package. The only worry I have is that Gothic is a romance genre, and very melodramatic and even when the melodrama is tinged with irony and humour it can still seem a little OTT. Hopefully though, the savvy viewers will stick with it as by about episode 8 of the first season True Blood really finds its feet. No spoilers, but season 2 is even better.

The one gripe I often have when a series like True Blood takes of in such a spectacular fashion, and I'm sure it's not one that the authors in that happy position share, is that book covers change to suit the new readers the shows or movies attract. A case in point would be the fantastic P.G Wodehouse covers by Ionicus, that one can only find in second-hand bookshops or vintage book emporiums or whatever they call themselves nowadays. It would be a shame if the same thing were to happen to the marvelous covers created by Lisa Desmini for Haris's books. There is something captivating about Desmini's drawings, and much as I like the series there is no way photos can capture the same magic.

I have to say, I was delighted to find that Lisa Desmini is making prints of her artwork available online here at her site. I'd actually quite like side by side copies with and without the lettering, but that's me. I think my favourite cover is A Touch of Dead. It shows Sookie perched precariously on top of a gravestone she is perched between life and death, between the land and the sky, between the Earth and the moon. It is a marvelous illustration.

You'll find a goodly number of True Blood sites out there but you could do worse than starting here at Loving True Blood in Dallas.

Comic Book Cultures: France

2009-07-08T12:42:00.024Z

I've looked enviously at the French love affair with comics several times over the years. When I was very young, before I was interested enough in comics to discover that Herge was from Belgium and not France, I thought all the major cartoonists were born there; the European ones at least. Of course I later found out that many major European cartoonists, and those from further afield, had simply, naturally, gravitated toward France, a natural home for artists, and, it seems, a natural home for cartoonists. From Herge, to Hugo Pratt, to Ronald Searle, to Crumb, and to Gilbert Shelton, that migration toward the place continues even today.

In the UK, we cartoonists, perhaps with two exceptions (no more), are artistic pariahs. The lone arts programme on independent terrestrial television, The South Bank Show, now cancelled, was more likely to feature a dancing-bear as an artist, than a cartoonist. Like Newsnight Review, our "other" arts programme, from the BBC, The South Bank Show figured there were maybe two or three cartoonists in the UK, Ronald Searle (living in France), Scarfe, and Posey. They are, of course, two very different sorts of arts programme, The South Bank show, chaired by Melvin Bragg, focused on one artist or movement at a time, whilst the BBC programme consists of a panel of arty-types, almost always journalists, poets, authors, or sculptures, curiously enough. Think, the London/Notting Hill village and you will have a mental picture of the usual panelists.

Newsnight Review is more of an arts magazine, and more like the French model of discursive TV, and it constantly reviews movies and TV shows based on comic book characters. Now, you might think that on the odd occasion the show actually does feature the work of cartoonists that it might have the odd cartoonist on the panel discussing the merits of the work, but no, it just doesn't happen. In fact, I have my doubts that the researchers even realise that much of the material these poets and journalists and sculptures review is written and drawn by UK cartoonists. As I said, we cartoonists are the pariahs of the arts world.

The position of cartoonists in the UK is solidified by the absence of cartoonists and cartoons not just from Britain's art shows on TV, and newspapers and magazines (with obvious exceptions), but also from artistic debates, art magazines and galleries. With the exception of Computer Arts, which occasionally mentions maybe Peanuts in a passing article on merchandising, I can't really think of one magazine that has ever devoted time and space to the artform. Oh there has been the odd review and even the odd 4 or even 8 page piece on French or US cartoonists, like Sempe or Chris Ware in the broadsheets over here, but those are mainly puff-pieces by trendy hipster journalists trying to appear geekily cool. The same people ensure that lots of ill-informed column inches are devoted to the most talked-about graphic novels and even manga, but those always seem to have been squeezed in for novelty value amongst the "real" literature.

Over in France, meanwhile, The Musée de la Bande Dessinée, in Angoulème, the town that hosts the celebrated comic book festival every January, has been granted full status as a Museum of France; so it ranks alongside The Louvre, not just in the public imagination but also in officialdom. Not that there has ever been a great distinction between comic art and any other art in France. Indeed, The Louvre itself recently celebrated comics art, the 'ninth art', with an exhibition of original drawings and paintings by some very famous bédéistes (Bande Dessinées creators). The new museum, with thousands of original drawings and more than 100,000 magazines and comic books, will also function as a reference library, storing every comics publication published in France. And fortunately for the museum's director, not all the 34 million graphic publications the French consume every year are published there.

In France, there is no suggestion at all that cartoons are such low art that neither they nor their creators should be seen and heard. The French magazine, Beaux Arts is the sort of publication I imagine we will never see in the UK. It is an arts and culture magazine that will discuss Fauvism in one issue, Expressionism in another, Bande Dessinee (graphic novels) in another, and Manga in another. It is simply accepted that cartoons are art and that the cartoonists who create the work are artists.

It is the recent manga edition of Beaux Arts hors serie, Qu'est-Ce Que le manga? that, for me, really illustrates the lack of interest in cartoons, of respect for cartoonists, and of inquisitiveness and interest about the artform amongst the literati in the UK. It is, perhaps, this manga edition, more than those that have focused on Band Dessinee that illustrates the poverty of Britain's art scene. It is unimaginable that such a magazine with such an in depth discussion of the history and role of manga would be published in the UK.

Edited by Claude Pommereau, the manga edition of the magazine celebrates the artform looking back at the history of manga, and forward to the new wave of mangaka. From an examination of the ubiquitous role of manga in Japanese life and culture, the magazine looks at different genres and looks back to link the art of Hokusai with the venerable movement. The overview of the artform, in this context, makes it almost impossible to argue that comic books are not art and it goes some way to illustrating the poverty of thinking on these shores.

In addition to an examination of the culture of manga, and a small history of manga there are liberal illustrated examples, including a gorgeous reproduction of a Walking Man piece, by Jiro Taniguchi and an episode of Osamu Tezuka's Black Jack, both of which are 'un-mirrored' and should be read right to left. In addition, they are printed backwards through the magazine - better to enjoy the real Japanese-style experience of reading manga. The 'Walking Man' page below, is the final page of this excerpt.

Like Walking Man, this wonderful Black Jack adventure, the tattoo man or man with tattoo, ends with the first page you see. For die-hard Tezuka fans this excerpt is a delight, and there is little doubt in my mind that it looks so fresh and vibrant that it must also serve to bring new fans to worship at the feet of 'the god of manga'.

With some excellent pieces on the masters of manga, the current crop of young masters, and the enfent terribles of manga, this edition of the magazine goes some way to explaining why you seldom hear any French cartoonists say 'I don't like manga', as many of their British and American counterparts do. Let me explain what I mean by that, whenever a cartoonist from Britain or America says 'I don't like manga' they invariably mean they do not like a particular genre of manga and, unsurprisngly, that genre is usually the genre of manga created for young girls aged 8-13. It is difficult to imagine the well-informed French cartoonist, and no doubt a good deal of the wider comics loving French public, if this magazine is anything to go by, mistaking one genre of manga for all Japanese comic books.

Beaux Arts magazine really does bring home to me that there is an almost unbridgeable chasm here in the UK, not between the reading public and the creators of comic books, graphic novels, BD and manga, but between the gatekeepers of the British Art World (including publishers) and the rest of the planet. Britain is fast becoming a cultural wasteland, obsessed with the sort of ephemeral souless art that the toxic banks hung in their foyers, and the prattle-filled thoughts of celebrity "authors". No wonder our cartoonists and illustrators and writers increasingly look elsewhere for support. You'll have noticed, I hope, that while the French have 'les bédéistes', and the Japanese have 'mangaka', Britain has no word to describe a cartoonist or illustrator who is skilled and experienced in the creation of comic art.

Let's Go Dutch

2009-06-28T20:50:00.012Z

I don't want to get involved in all that "green shoots" hype that the morons (bankers and politicians) who screwed up the World's finances try to spin to us; but I do feel a little more upbeat every time I come across a country that seems visually-literate, and still provides an outlet for cartoonists in these hard times.

The Dutch comic, EPPO, has had more than one incarnation, and over the years it has published many great strips by great cartoonists, including Aloys Oosterwijk, Gerard(Gleever)Leever and Peter de Wit. The latest incarnation of EPPO Stripblad, launched in January of this year, is seen by some though, as a retrograde step, an attempt at reviving a form of comic that is no longer fashionable, overtaken in popularity, as it has been, by the graphic novel and the bande dessinée. It is a familiar story, and it is one that I hope has a happy ending because, like most every cartoonist out there, I want there to be as many markets as possible for our work.

I'm sure that the UK cartoonists out there will see the similarities between India's Comic Digest(see blog below) and EPPO Stripblad, and old IPC and DC Thomson titles. The major difference between the Indian publications and EPPO and the old British titles is that the Indian titles rely more heavily on syndicated US strips, rather than European work. In many ways India's Comic Digest is more like a US Sunday Funny insert, with one or two old IPC pages thrown in. Whereas EPPO Stripblad, with its Belgian influences, is more like IPC's Giggle Comic (see earlier blog here) than its Indian counterpart.

The lead comic in EPPO, Storm and Red Hair, is an example of the science fantasy comic series that has proved so popular in Europe over the post-war decades. It was originally drawn by the great Don Lawrence.

Eric Heuvel's January Jones, is a comic set in the 1930s, about a female pilot. The series was written by Martin Lodewijk and was published in the magazine Sjosji until the late 1990s.

The main force behind De Partners is illustrator and scriptwriter Dick Matena, who in addition to writing scenario's for the Carry Brugamn illustrated De Partners, also wrote for the Don Lawrence illustrated Storm (he also illustrated the Storm mini-series Kronieken van de Tussentijd).

Franka, the story of a Dutch, female, detective, is a very popular Dutch comic book series, and strip cartoon, by Henk Kuijpers.

Uco Egmond is one of the two EPPO cartoonists who can be likened to Britain's Leo Baxendale, in comic creator terms. From his debut with the gag strip Eppo in the magazine Pep, his work has been a constant. When the magazines Pep and Sjors merged in the 1970s, they became Eppo Magazine, named after Egmond's character. He co-created De Leukebroeders along with Peter Coolen and together they work under the pseudonym, Peco.

Dick Heins is another prolific cartoonist who in addition to working on Kleine Napoleon with Frank Jonker, inks and colours Uco Egmond's Eppo strip.

The team behind the Belgian comic series Plunk, a series of wordless stories about a little pink alien with green trousers and a green hat, from the planet Smurk, are Luc Cromheecke and Laurent Letzer. Plunk, created somewhat ironically as an experiment on behalf of the Belgian Centre for Comic Strip Art as an example of cartoon merchandising, became a very popular strip in its own right, was collected in several albums, and was republished in Spirou Magazine.

Kim Duchateau is just one of a group of talented new young Belgian comic artists. His comic, Esther Verkest, is also published in other magazines besides EPPO.

Bob Evers is the work of writer Frank Jonker, and illustrator Hans van Oudenaarden. There are some marvelous pics and a lot of info' about creating the new BOB EVERS comic books, on the pair's blog here, in English.

Flippie Flink is of course Beetle Bailey. It's a popular strip all over the world. They must be doing something right.

Havank, by Daan Jippes, is a series of exciting detective stories.

Jean-Marc van Tol, of Fokke & Sukke fame, is also the artist of the comic series Kort en Triest, on which he works with Herman Roozen.

De Stamgasten is by the other EPPO cartoonist who can be likened to Leo Baxendale, Toon (Antonie Marcel) Van Driel. His many great creations for Eppo, Eppo/Wordt Vervolgd and Sjors en Sjimmie Stripblad, the daily press, and television, all combined to see him awarded the Stripschapprijs, the most important Dutch comic award.

And finally Eppo, by Uco Egmond, coloured by Kliene Napoleon's Dick Heins.

Over all, I think the balance of Eppo Stripblad is really nice, it amounts to a pleasing, enjoyable and funny read. It's also great to look at, and not stuffed to the gills with syndicated US strips. I'd love to see this sort of publication over here in the UK, supporting some new UK strips, which might in turn help foster an appetite amongst UK comic fans for volumes of work featuring their favourite characters. I've also long been an advocate of this sort of publication appearing as an insert in US papers, funding the publisher with national adverts, and the newspapers with local adverts. Perhaps, as the amount of print publications continues to diminish, and those that are left drop their comic strips, it will be a business model that someone might want to take a long, hard, look at, again.

Writing Autobiographical Comics

2009-06-24T18:09:00.005Z

They can be really self-indulgent, autobiographical comics, but that's really because the "I" of the story is right there in your face, illustrated, coming at you. The character, because even in an autobiographical comic the "I" of the story is a character, is no more, and more than likely a lot less, self indulgent than say, Salinger's Holden Caulfield - but of course The Catcher in the Rye is a "real book". For some reason even members of the cartooning community, many of whom create comics themselves, cannot get their heads round the fact that autobiography can be used as a method of telling a story, rather than simply being a vehicle for telling a truth. It is not a new concept, and there is nothing dishonest about it; it is a method of storytelling that clergymen have utilised in Saturday and Sunday sermons for hundreds of years; "a funny thing happened to me on my way to worship today...". It is simply about placing a character, yourself, at the centre of the story you wish to tell, in much the same that one does when one relates an urban legend: "this really happened, I know because it happened to me...".

It is commonplace in fiction to use autobiographical and biographical details of people one has met, and one knows, in order to make the fictional characters more lifelike. It is also common in "non-fiction" to embroider stories, or to inflate the role of certain individuals. It is very common, more so than you might imagine, to discover that what was supposed to be an accurate Primary source, on which the history of an event was based, was actually partial, and part-fiction. It is also just a quirk of human nature that memory is unreliable, and so we change the order of events, and even the importance of our role in what happened, frequently over the years whenever we retell the story of ourselves, to ourselves. This is not a conscious attempt to deceive, it happens because the narrative of our lives is written in shifting sands.

Now, many of you (regular readers know what that is code for) have asked if many of the things that happened to my cousin Allan and I actually did happen. Well, yes they did; I believe. And more than one person has asked if my cousin Allan actually exists, or if he is a figment of my imagination, like E.J Thrib's friend Keith. Well, yes he does; here's a recent photograph of him modelling the latest fashion in Inverness:

British Culture, Anime, Corto Maltese, and Reefer Jackets

2009-06-22T20:33:00.015Z

I followed a link on Journalista (required reading, every day) that lead to yet another Guardian article on comics culture. This time it was about manga, well more specifically anime based on manga. The article is called Why is anime invisible on British TV? and it looks at the cultural differences between Britain and Japan that might help explain why Britain's TV schedule is now devoid of manga - after the demise, of course, of Anime Central. The premise of the article seems to be that animation aimed at anyone other than children is doomed to fail in the UK because we are Disneyfied. I'm going to call shenanigans on that.

The article lacks any depth or insight into why British TV has such a paucity of anime, save for the quote from Emily Man from Orbital Comics, who says "The UK censorship laws have made it extremely hard for the networks in the UK to show Japanese anime on TV too, our societies' tastes and cultural history are different." This is definitely a truism, but the "cultural history" that has disconnected some adults from appreciating animation, including anime (remember one hell of a lot of adults in the UK watch The Simpsons, South Park, and King of the Hill), had nothing to do with Disney (a point made in the article), and everything to do with the stranglehold a couple of British companies had on the indigenous British comics industry.

The success of the Japanese anime industry is inextricably linked with the popularity of manga, and as we have discussed here in a number of posts in the past, the Japanese manga industry has thrived because of the method of production and the primacy of the manga creator. The Japanese public have grown up reading comics, and have progressed through the ranks of the different genres targeted at males and females and children, teens, and adults. It is actually difficult to imagine an occupation, a way of life, a hobby, or a past time, that is not reflected in manga's broad range of subjects, from adventure, romance, sports, history, comedy, science fiction, horror, business and commerce, fishing, tennis, football, basketball, being a teacher, a wine critic, a butler, a shop owner, a baker, every gamut of society is catered for, and almost nobody is excluded.

I've written before about the organic way that much manga finds its audience. A serial like Monster or Death Note, begins in a manga magazine fighting for its audience alongside a lot of other stories, and its success leads to the collected chapters of the story being republished in book-form ( Tankobon). If a manga series is popular enough, as both Monster and Death Note were, it may be animated, and the process that leads to this stage practically guarantees financial backing because the readership or viewing figures are already proven.

I'm not going to suggest that had the British comics industry mirrored that of Japan we would also have manga cafés, where people can drink coffee and read manga all night. In that respect I suspect our cultural differences do matter, but I am going to suggest that if it had mirrored the Japanese model, British TV would not only be airing a lot of anime today, but it would also be airing a great deal more British animation. I'm convinced that with a different British comics industry, anime as good as Monster and Death Note, and animation on a par with King of the Hill and The Simpsons, would have been made and produced over here.

Anyway, there I was thinking about the different methods of comic production in different countries, and I happened upon the French magazine, Monsieur; which caught my eye because it had a Hugo Pratt drawing of Corto Maltese on the cover. Those of you who read my article on Corto Maltese on the Forbidden Planet UK blog, will know that I just had to pick the thing up. Also, and you may not know this about me, I'm a bit of a clothes horse (I'm wearing blue deck shoes and a stripey pirate top at the moment, and my Reefer jacket has anchors on the buttons) and since I know that all things nautical are de rigeur for men, currently, I didn't need to call on my very poor French to work out that Corto Maltese was being featured here as a fashion icon. looking at Monsieur, I just couldn't help thinking that this sort of love affair, with Bande Dessinee, or graphic novels, evidenced in the illustrated review of Piscine Molitor and the gorgeous Hugo Pratt reproductions, just wouldn't happen over here in the UK, with any degree of heart-felt honesty.

A quick update, Spirtofcorto left a message and I nipped over to the site and there is some great Corto Maltese info over there (really nice blog), including the new edition of Celtiques and a good look at the Corto Maltese line: Spirit of Corto.

There's Only One Nickelodeon Magazine

2009-06-18T18:36:00.013Z

When it comes to the creative arts it is never, or at least seldom, a good idea to dissect how you work. A great many people tend to shy away from doing so in case the analysis of the method leads to something happening, perhaps some spark vanishing, or maybe some unconscious secret becoming conscious and then unavailable. At some risk then (you are on the edge of your seat, right?) I'm going to divulge a part of the cartooning process that happens before one commits even one line to paper.

Before sending any cartoons to a publication, you must familiarise yourself with it. So you look up current copies and old copies and even vintage copies of the publication, and you begin to look for common themes. On a superficial level, you are simply trying to find out if you can work out what the Cartoon Editor of the publication likes; on a deeper level, you are conducting a close reading of the cartoons in order to imagine how the Cartoon Editor thinks, and trying to imagine what the Cartoon Editor's ideal cartoon might be. Now this is not too difficult with themed publications, like fly-fishing Monthly, the chances are you will be on target with a cartoon about fishing, but it is a dark art with more cosmopolitan and varied titles. When I was planning to send to Playboy my friend and fellow cartoonist Mike Lynch sent me a really thick envelope stuffed with pages of Playboy cartoons, which I glued together onto a lot of boards. Once I had those boards in front of me, I went over and over them, trying to think myself into a "playboy" frame of mind. When I was convinced I had done so, I created a batch of cartoons for them.

Now there are two ways of looking at this, it is either a strange voodoo-like technique that cartoonists employ to read the Cartoon Editor's mind, or it is simply a very practical example of the old adage of "being familiar with your markets". I'm inclined to think it is the latter, but it does sometimes feel a little strange when it works well. Years back, when The National Enquirer was a cartoon market, I sent a submission from the UK and the Editor sent me back a bunch of examples of the cartoons they had used; again, I used these examples to think myself into the magazine. To be honest, in that case it was more a case of realising the publication used what we call "general cartoons". But there you go, not a secret and hardly mind blowing - research your market and target the publication with work it can use.

So, having heard good things about Nickelodeon Magazine (US), I decided to get a hold of the thing and go over it with a fine tooth-comb, and try to think my way into the thing. The thing was, I had no idea what to expect, it was a kids magazine after all. Well, I was astonished when I saw it, really astonished. I'm not kidding, I was really bowled over by the magazine, I had never seen a publication more visually literate, more cartoon and illustration friendly, it was a cartoonist's delight. Imagine what was going through my mind; I was expecting maybe a gags page, or maybe a comics page or two, or maybe some sort of comic related to the Nickelodeon shows, but I was not expecting page after page after page of illustrations and gags and puzzles - page after page of fun.

As I looked through the magazine, I found myself responding to it with the same levels of wonder and delight as a cartoonist, as a parent, and as a teacher. I had never seen anything like this, and I had never seen such a range of mainstream and indie cartoonists all gathered together in one publication.

If anything, there was just too much opportunity, there was the chance to be an illustrator, a gag cartoonist, a comic artist, a colourist, there was a chance to create puzzles and quizzes. I had just started, in those days, to look to the US for cartooning opportunities and here, in this one publication, I could see dozens. Of course I knew it wasn't likely to be the case, and indeed it wasn't, but what if all the kids publications in the US were like this?

Not only that, but I could see the opportunity to get out of my funk. I wasn't feeling to great about being a cartoonist at that time, but now I could maybe recast myself as a cartoonist creating the sort of work I would like to read. In the UK a couple of my markets had dried up, there was effectively no comics industry, and here I might have the opportunity to create work that would appear alongside the work of Charles Burns, one of my cartooning heroes. What an opportunity.

Sadly, that opportunity will not be around for much longer. Nickelodeon Magazine is often referred to, in cartooning circles, as the New Yorker for kids. If you had never seen the magazine, you might consider that hyperbole, but I have little doubt that after seeing it you would know you were looking at a very superior publication. When the magazine ceases publication at the end of the year it will be missed, by a great many children and adults, and a good many cartoonists and illustrators. Perhaps it signals an end of an era in print cartooning; perhaps we will never see the likes of Nickelodeon Magazine again.

In this issue alone, from 2004, you can find the work of, amongst others, Charles Burns, Wayno Honath, Steve Ryan, Craig Thompson, Jason Lutes, Nick Bertozzi,Jason Shiga, Kaz, Ellen Fornay, Jen Sorensen, Johnny Ryan, David Sheldon,Jordan Crane, Robert Leighton and Sam Henderson. Over the years, amongst others, the magazine would also feature the work of Scott McCloud, Aaron Augenblick, Scott Cunningham, Dan Moynihan, Mark Martin, Terry Laban, Michael Kuperman, Scott Roberts, Andi Watson, Bobby London, Charice Mericle, C.H. Greenblat, Bob Flynn, Meg Hunt, Richard Thompson, Pat Moriarity, Jef Czekaj and Sherm Cohen. But that is just a random selection of names, however talented, and the creative team behind Nick Mag, lead by Christopher Duffy and Dave Roman, are the real stars behind the magazine's success; they will be sadly missed. If there is any justice, they will find themselves at the helm of an equally important magazine before too long.

The names above, with links, take you to examples of work from Nick Mag.

True Story, Swear to Blog.

2009-06-11T20:36:00.007Z

This actually happened, except that part of it didn't. It was a rugby night, we were playing the Welsh, and my cousin and I eventually wound up on Lothian Road in search of a good Brandy (VSOP). We did get locked in the cinema and the owner had to set us free.

It's a story that sounds like it should be exciting, but I think you really had to be there because getting locked in a movie theatre after a horror fest really has to be experienced.

Oh yeah, cut us some slack, neither of us has smoked for many years but in 1981 everybody smoked. Ach, you know...sometimes I still think about having a puff, and I gave up for good about 12 years ago.

Nickelodeon Magazine, US, Bows Out

2009-06-04T20:51:00.002Z

This is a real bummer. I'll scan some stuff from my favourite copy. This is really horrible news for all the staff, especially Chris and Dave who have done so much for cartoonists over the years.

Cartooning in India, Part 2

2009-05-31T00:04:00.008Z

In this second part of our look at Indian comic (I wasn't sure whether to describe Comic Digest and Comic World as comic books, comic strip collections or cartoon books, so I plumped for comic books) publications, principally those published by Diamond Comics, we are going to concentrate on the strips made in the US and the UK. The few UK strips, with the notable exception of Kettle and Christine's Beau Peep, are old pages from IPC's now defunct juvenile comics division. Unlike the old British comics the pages of Bewitched Belinda, Junior Rotter, and Joker came from, however, there seems to be little or no influence from Spanish, Belgian and Argentinian cartoonists. Unless, that is, those cartoonists from those countries who did so much work for IPC, are responsible for some of the reprinted horror or romance stories from the publications they worked for in the US.

I won't lie to you, at face value a publication like Comics Digest is probably the ideal publication from a cartoonist's point of view. That is, of course, providing, the magazine hasn't got a no contact with cartoonists outside the agencies it deals with policy in place. If it is actually in the market for new material, however infrequently, then it promises work and a large audience for a number of cartoonists, at a time when publications in the west are actually removing or dropping cartoons and comic strips. Providing it doesn't rely on a cosy deal with just one or two syndicates, then Comic Digest actually greatly resembles the sort of publication cartoonists like me have wished for some time. In some circles, cartoonists will often describe a publication that looks like a cross between a British comic and a Sunday Funny, full of colour comic strips and full pages, designed to be inserts for newspapers, or, and this would be in our wildest dreams, stand-alone publications.

Of course Comic Digest is not without faults: the production values sometimes slip and the lettering of some pages can be pretty poor, and there is a tendency to over-colour, I think. It also sort of amazes me that the publication actually does carry a feature like Junior Rotter, not that I don't like Trevor Metcalfe's drawings, it's just that it seems so odd to see a two-page Junior Rotter adventure rubbing shoulders wit Flash Gordon, Archie, and Calvin and Hobbes. Not that the quality of the work looks out of place, mind you, it's just that those are syndicated strips and JR is a character from a British comic. I really can't imagine who would be syndicating or supplying the work.

You know, I'm really very pleased about these publications because they tell me that India has the sort of respect for comics and cartoon strips that has been so lacking, over the years, here in the UK. Not that it should come as such a surprise, historically India has always had more respect for the visual language than we have, a fact I touched on in a post I made a while back about The Ramayana and the origins of the graphic novel, and the fact that the Indian comic book readers have good English and a liking for British and US comics is good reason for we cartoonists to look toward the Indian continent with a degree of optimism. The Indian market is a growing market, within a healthy economy, and there is surely reason to believe, if Comic World and Comic Digest are anything to go by, that there is likely to be an increasing demand for what we cartoonists have to offer. Needless to say, I hope, that we have to be ready and willing to put in the necessary effort to promote our work over there.

Indian Comics and Bollywood

2009-05-22T17:54:00.017Z

A while back I was looking at a graphic novel from Indian, and it struck me it looked like a sort of Indian version of a Tintin bande dessinée - not that there's anything wrong with that. There was certainly more of a European influence, or at any rate a Belgian influence, than an American one; I thought. It was actually the first original graphic novel I'd seen from India, up until that point I'd only seen the Indian translations of Mandrake the Magician, and The Phantom. Oh, and one or two somewhat strange amalgamations of US superhero characters and Indian ones, working together on superhero business.

As much as I do love the Phantom and Mandrake, especially old adventures, the original work was much more exciting and it encouraged me to pay a little more attention to what is, after all, a very large and increasingly important market for cartoonists.

In fact, the Indian market is not only very large, it is vibrant and still growing. Small wonder then that this potentially lucrative, upwards of $300Mn industry, which publishes somewhere in the region of 125 million comics every year, has attracted interest from Virgin, Marvel Comics, DC Comics, and Disney. But it's the indigenous market that interests we fans of comicdom, because it has grown so phenomenally over the last 4 decades.

For many years, let's call it Pre-Pran Kumar Sharma (Pran), no indigenous comic character appeared in Indian publications alongside American and European strips. That all changed in 1960 when Pran's comic strip, Daabu debuted on the front page of Delhi's Milap. In 1969, Pran went on to develop Chacha Chaudhary, who along with his faithful sidekick Sabu, went on to become the most popular comic character in India. So popular did the character become that the TV adaptation of the comic strip strip ran six days a week, every week. In 1995, Pran was awarded the prestigious 'Man of the Year' award for popularizing comics in India.

Pran's Chacha Cowdrey is handled these days by the biggest indigenous comic book publisher in India, Diamond Comics, who amongst other publications also publish Comic World, a monthly comics magazine,featuring the adventures of amongst others, Archie, Garfield, Dennis The Menace, Beau Peep, Batman, Tarzan, James Bond, and Chacha Chaudhary, and I think British comic artists from IPC may find this a little extraordinary, Junior Rotter - which I think was draw by Trevor Metcalfe for Whizzer and Chips. It has a circulation of more than (I'm going to err on the side of caution here and say 20,000, but I did read it was much higher - any new info' would be much appreciated) copies per month.

In addition to publishing comics, the ever expanding and diversifying Diamond, whose stable of characters includes, Chacha Choudhary, Shrimatiji, Chacha-Bhatija, Mahabali Shaka, Agniputra Abhay and Ankur, has recently joined forces with License India to launch its catalogue as animated features, complete with full character licensing.

It certainly looks as if these are exciting times for comic book and cartoon characters, and indeed cartoonists, in India. Which makes a nice change from the doom-and-gloom over here and across the pond. The news looks similarly good in the field of animation. Just recently, Kids Animation India, part of the larger company Spacetoon India, announced, with the help of Bollywood actress Vidya Balanthat, the launch of its first animated TV series, Fafa & Juno, a cartoon about the adventures of a girl and a panda.

Pic purloined from Prokerala

I just spoke with my friend and fellow blogging cartoonist, Mike Lynch about this post and we touched on the fact our colleague Dan Thomson works for India's leading men's magazine, Royal (remember it is a magazine "for men"; although having said that, it is a very tasteful magazine). You can read Royal online here. He gets a nice credit on the magazine's staff rota too, which is always a nice plus for a cartoonist. I think we should add an example to this post, as it shows that the promising Indian market is also relevant to magazine/gag cartoonists.

All images remain the copyright of their respective copyright holders. Comic World copyright, Diamond Comics.

It's All Downhill From Here

2009-05-12T23:05:00.007Z

You soon learn, in gag or magazine cartooning, that you don't really know what is funny. The cartoons that make you laugh while you are drawing them, almost invariably don't sell, at least not right away. They probably sell eventually, or after the punchline has changed, but by then you certainly don't find them funny anymore.

I think the average strike rate for cartoonists is quite low; around 10 or 20%, so most cartoonists reckon on selling only 1 or 2 cartoons from a batch of around 10. If you sell more than that, its a good feeling, swiftly followed by a feeling of impending doom. Back in 1982 or 1983, I sent a batch of only 6 cartoons to Punch, and they took 3, or 50%. I knew it was an ill-omen; things could only go downhill from there.

There is something comforting in Cartoon Editors picking only 1 or 2 of your ideas. You have the impression of things ticking along just nicely. As far as you are concerned they are possibly just taking one every week because you are dependable - there isn't too much pressure on you as you sit down to knock out the next batch. Now, you take just one cartoon out of that equation, and you really are under pressure. When you submit regularly to a market that takes one cartoon every time you send and suddenly they no longer take any, then you really begin to panic. Oddly, the reverse is also true; they take three of your cartoons when they usually only take one, and suddenly you are under a whole load of pressure. What does it mean, does it mean you have to raise the bar this late in your career? Can it be that you've peaked, and it is all downhill from here?

So here is a batch I put together back at the end of 2008, before I took ill, and which I really didn't punt much, but which failed to sell. I just wasn't feeling it. Don't get me wrong, I'm looking forward to drawing the next batch, which should be an interesting exercise as I think I'm drawing differently; again.

You'll notice that these are mainly pencil and some wash and colour; that's because I tend to send roughs, or at least I did last year but I think in the current climate most publications will prefer finishes, so I'm likely go back to sending the finished article.

Although I haven't rushed back into drawing cartoons, I have kept myself busy drawing a strip and redrawing a couple of Tales from Lepertown stories and I'm currently cooking up one or two indie pieces for a couple of projects out there in the wild. Just the other day though, an idea for a cartoon came to me and I scribbled it down and I had another idea earlier today, so I'm pretty sure I'll have 10 over the next day or two and then, with luck, I'll start chucking them out again.

When you can't get what's in your head, out there.

2009-05-10T22:22:00.013Z

I started drawing cartoons and submitting them to publications when I was very young. I think, in retrospect, that it was a good time to start because at that age it seems so implausible that anyone will actually buy your work that rejection is nothing more than what you expect. The really surprising thing is when someone actually wants to buy one of the drawings.

The first one to appear was I think, in the Sun. It may be that Accountancy Magazine was the first publication to buy a cartoon from me, but it was published monthly, so the Sun was the first to publish one of my cartoons. What surprised me was the revelation, when I actually had in my hand the newspaper in which my first published cartoon appeared, that what was important was not the drawing, or the humour, or the payment that would most assuredly be coming my way, but that my signature wasn't there. I had put it on the right, below the drawing and it had been cut off. I really wanted my name to be there, however small, however illegible. You see, I really did want to be part of the history of newspapers, albeit in a very small, very minor way. I wanted my name to be on a document that I knew would be housed for posterity, as one copy of all British publications were, in The Scottish Library.

Of course, over time my mindset changed, and then I got married, and then our kids came along, and went to school, and our bills grew, and cartooning actually became a job, and the money became important. At that stage there was a disconnect between the cartoons I liked, and the cartoons I drew. I wanted to create work like Clair Bretecher or Jules Feiffer, work that was intelligent as well as funny, but I just wasn't that smart. Oh, I tried, but I hadn't really been around that long and my ideas about people and politics and life in general weren't very sophisticated, and so there developed a fracture, between what I wanted to create, and what I did for a living.

So there I was, dreaming of tilting at windmills, looking at work that I admired and not really knowing why I couldn't make myself create something like it. Of course I know now that there were many reason why I couldn't do it, and I know now that the very act of trying to drive myself to produce it simply compounded the problem, but back then it was always in the back of my mind that whatever I did just wasn't good enough. It is not a healthy way to think, I know, but I was young.

Anyway, one of the magazines I loved and hated in equal measure, because it reminded me how limited my cartooning abilities were/are, was Heavy Metal. More than the superhero comics and the indie comix I collected, because I could convince myself that Ditko and Kirby and Crumb, were all one-offs, Heavy Metal was a constant reminder of just how many talented "one-offs" there were out there.

I mean to say, honestly, just look at that line-up from one issue in 1978, Moebius, Druillet, Forest drawing Barbarella for goodness sake. I really loved the magazine, but it was so infuriating, because I just couldn't see any way to make the leap from the sort of cartooning I did, to this sort of thing. To be completely honest, I had no idea how some of drawings were created. It would be another couple of years before I would figure out Richard Corben used a spray gun. In this issue, for instance, Francois Schuiten's Going to Pieces actually awed me, here was cartooning that was also clearly art. Here was a complete narrative, without words, for adults and children alike, that was so perfect, so realised, that I would just sit and stare at the drawings, and I had no idea how anyone could make illustrations like that happen.

Not that it made a whole lot of difference when I did understand the techniques and the media involved. If anything it was probably more frustrating to see what a cartoonist like Chantal Montellier was able to produce with simply a pen, ink and paper; and of course a brilliant imagination (the piece is eerily prescient, I think). In fact Montellier's 1996 is one of my favourite comics because it is so visually striking and the story always makes me laugh. No wonder the similarly striking artwork of Jaime Hernandez would be so resonant in my later years - when, of course, I sit in front of Love and Rockets thinking "I can never be this good".

Copyright; Metal Hurlant and the various artists and writers detailed on the contents page above.