Christmas shopping made well easy

Just in time for Christmas (funny that) I have made all the original art from Trains Are…Mint available for sale in my online shop. Trains Are...Mint was nominated in the ‘Promising New Talent’ category of the 2008 Ignatz Awards, but you new that already. There are 12 featured pages in the shop but they are all available on request, apart from the three or four I’ve sold. Have a look and see if anything takes your fancy. I’ll put some art from Proper Go Well High up as soon as I can find the buggers.

Touch Wood

Kenny Blank Slate came round last night to drop off the Berlin And That art that he’d scanned (figure for a Feb./mar release for that particular book rather than a Jan one) and while avoiding explaining to Hunter why daddy’s not rich yet, we agreed to re-print Trains Are…Mint 4 at some point next year. Well, I asked him and he already assumed we were doing it. This is brilliant news; I love that book and it’ll will be a worthy stop gap between Berlin and the next new book. You can still read the whole thing online over here.

Not much other news books wise but I’ve started drawing Catherine’s biography so that’s all go.

All the best

Hood Pains page 3

Here’s the third and last page of Hood Pains, a wee experiment of sorts for me in which all the text, including the title, is made up with words I either overheard or saw while walking every inch of Moss Side’s Alexandra Park Estate. I’m hopefully getting all the pages photographed this week after which I’ll tart them up and make them available as a downloadable PDF as a thank you gesture of sorts.

Here's page one and two

Thanks for watching.

Thought Bubble thought

It's hard to write an in-depth report of a con when you spent the entirety of it behind one table, only popping out for a pee and a coffee. I sold some books, met some nice people, made awkward small talk with others and avoided the gaze of those whose work I've slagged off. There were lots of kids in what I assumed to be manga costumes and some tremendous back fat on show. The books did quite well in the end, better than I had hoped, with Proper Go Well High and Mawil's Sparky O'Hare being the big sellers, probably because I was sub-consciously up selling the former and the latter being a very reasonable £3.50. Thanks first to Kenny Blank Slate and Angela Forbidden Planet for arranging for the stock to be waiting for me at the table and allowing me to dump the leftovers back on them at the end. It made it all very easy. Thanks to Lisa Thought Bubble as well who, even though I'd booked a table very late and fully expected to be next to a long line for some random penciller, gave me a premium pitch and took time out to say hi even though she was very busy. Thanks to my two new favourite people who had come specifically to buy Proper Go Well High and massage my already ample ego, hope you like the book. Paul Gravett introduced Blank Slate to a friend as "the British Top Shelf" which was nice. I discovered a really cheesy message to sign books with. Thanks to Steven Tilotson for minding my table while I urinated and also well done to him for finding a copy of Kramers Ergot 7 for £30. Thanks to Chris Doherty for the anicdote about preferring to read Proper than play on his Xbox. I made Kenny more than three times the table fee which us good going. It's a friendly and relaxed enviroment to sell comics in, not like two other big shows I've done, and even though alt. comics are outnumbered by Zombie Wombat Whatever and back issues probably 4-1, there are enough plaid kids with beards and excitingly beautiful women to flirt outragously with to more than make it worth your while and hopefully I'll be back next year with more than double the quality books Blank Slate had this time.

I thank you.

Train Are...Mint

Just a quick reminder that I’ll be manning the Blank Slate Books table at the Thought Bubble con on Saturday, with books by myself and some Blank Slate also rans (otherwise know as Mawil and Nigel Auchterlounie), all with hefty discounts on their cover prices. Kenny Blank Slate promised a three-book deal contract to anyone who watched the table while I nip off for a pee/perv at the cosplay kids. Come and say hello then put your hand in your pocket for your next favourite book. See you there.

New book

Having a child and working from home obviously means I've much less time to get stuff done. It's taken two weeks to do two pages when, pre Hunter, that would have been two days. So I've gone and decided to take on a new book, obviously.

I've been asked by a friend to write her biography, which is a big deal for her and not an offer I could turn down. She'd got the idea for telling her story with comics from Persepolis and thought I could do a good job of it. Catherine (not her real name, more on that later) is a survivor of chronic abuse as a child: sexual, phsychological and emotional. She also survived abject poverty and bullying to live a very colourful and often hilarious life. I've never done a biography before and if I approached it in a conventional way I'd probably fail. So to do Catherine's story justice I'll need to play to my strengths then take it from there. We started today by walking from her house to a couple of buildings that played a big part in her story. I think this is the way I'll approach the research part for now; her talking while we walk to places important to her story. Walking and writing is what I do best, although walking and listening, then processing that information and taking notes is very tiring. I'm dyslexic and we don't do this well. We did two hours this morning and I'm knackered. Apart from, I think, short stints in Cheshire and maybe Wales, I think Catherine grew up, and has always lived, in Manchester, so we won't ever have far to walk and we can fit in a couple of hours here and there. I think she might have lived in Moss Side at one point so there's some cross-over there with my current concerns.

I'm using an alias for her for now because there is every chance I'm not up to this sizeable challenge and will fuck it up. With Catherine's blessing, which I have, I'll post stuff up here either when it's done or work in progress. If after a while it's obvious the book's not working and we decide to leave it then, because of the alias, noone's been hurt by my hamfisted efforts. If and when the book is completed, all other name's in it will have been changed to protect their identity.

There's a lot of Catherine's story to tell and what with me being lucky to get two whole days work a week, this could take a while but I'll keep you up to speed whenever there's anything worth sharing.

Wish me luck.

Hood Pains page 2

Here’s the second page of Hood Pains. Again: apologies for the photo but the art's A2. I might go over the white text again and I’ll colour the arrows as soon as I decide what colour, but I think this is done. Oh, I’ll re-do the bits if news paper as soon as I get an Evening News but I didn’t have one to hand.

Here’s page one.

Can you do us a favour yeah? My mum, Helen East, has been nominated for an award in the writer’s category of the Disability and Deaf Arts Awards which, if she wins, means she’ll get the chance to write for Coronation Street, which would be great in itself but they also pay top dollar, which she could then spend on me. She’s written plays and that that have been on Radio 4’s play of the day and she used to write for Brookside: there’s an episode ages ago when a house blew up, I think she wrote that one. If you went back and watched it again, you’d notice there are loads of snide digs at being a single parent. If you click on the link below and vote for Helen East you’d be making a very old lady happy. Sorry, an old lady very happy. Just a lady.

(don't click on any of the other nominees as I think that counts as a vote)
http://www.dadahello.com/dadafest/nominees?award=2