| A Good Sit-Down |
[Mar. 14th, 2008|03:34 pm] |
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A wee sketch of the main characters from Headstone Blues have a lovely, manly meal together. |
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| Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year |
[Dec. 22nd, 2007|11:52 am] |
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Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, youse. Here's to 2008!
(Apologies for the the return of Highly Questionable Santa, it's just he got some good feedback last year...)
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| Iraq Book Roundup |
[Dec. 7th, 2007|11:48 pm] |
Well, the Institute of Contemporary Arts panel was flippin' great. Many thanks to everybody who turned up and sold it out! I was a bit nervous, but I thought I managed to engage the audience pretty well.
Here's a few photies.
One side of the Nash Room Lecture hall at the ICA, before everybody turned up. Friendly tech guys can be seen rummaging about checking everything works.
The view out from the balconies of the Nash Room, of The Mall. Trafalgar Square is off to the left, and Buckingham Palace is down the road on the right.
See just how exciting it was... Heh. That's me in the white shirt, writer Sean, then Ruth from War on Want and Paul Gravett on the far right. I don't have any photos of us talking at the event, but I've nicked this one off Sean. We're working on getting some from War on Want, who were snappin' away while we were gabbin' away.
The book on sale in the ICA bookshop! And sign copies of it in the bar afterwards we certainly did.
Scan of the ICA's events programme with - unlikely as it seems - some of my artwork alongside Posy Simmonds'. Will wonders never cease?
We've been getting some great press for the book, which just goes to show what the Press Officer of an International charity can do for your project. Look! We were in The Guardian Guide, where they used the cover to the Iraq book to sum up the whole of the ComICA 2007 festival. Blimey.
The book's being reviewed by Paul Gravett in the December issue of Plan B Magazine. There have been reports on the book on; BBC Arabic, Reuters (In Korean!), United press International (UPI), the multi-lingual Euronews, French news service France 24, and on the radio in Austria and in print in Dubai! Apparently, we were nearly on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, too. Click all those links above for articles and videos (of Sean looking glamourous in Gosh Comics in London, talking about the book...) The nice little promo video used was put together by a lovely fellow called Adib at... Al-Jazeera.
So...
The book's out now. and y'know what..? It's available to buy from from the War on Want website, and the Boychild Productions website. It's also in the December issue of Previews, on page 350 or so, under Boychild Productions, order number DEC07 3504.
G'wan and give the gift of charitable comics this year. |
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| ICA Panel Details (or, 'They let us have comics in the building and talk about them') |
[Oct. 7th, 2007|05:32 pm] |
Get a load of this, you can come to London and see myself and Sean talking about our Iraq: Operation Corporate Takeover graphic novel in a proper Arts venue and everything. We'd love to have you along.
It's at 7pm on Tuesday 6th November, in the Nash Room at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London.
More details on the event listing on the ICA website. The ICA is here. The nearest tube station's Charing Cross.
We'll be sharing the stage with the savvy twosome of Dan Goldman and Anthony Lappé, all the way from that there North America, whose webcomic Shooting War is so good that even I've heard about it.
This is all part of the ComICA 2007 international comics festival, organised by the Man at the Crossroads himself, the unequally wonderful Paul Gravett.
Anybody with tips on how to actually appear interesting and intellectual, as opposed to Just Some Guy Who Draws Stuff will be rewarded with, erm, drawings..? |
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| Iraq: Operation Corporate Takeover - The Cover! |
[Oct. 6th, 2007|11:49 pm] |
The Iraq book has a name, and it's Iraq: Operation Corporate Takeover. It's at the printers in Quebec right now. Here's the final cover:
The guys with the guns are Private Military Security Contractors: mean mercenary sumbitches who are numerous in Iraq and don't have to answer to anybody. Like the many other issues going on with the country currently, they have their own part in the story. |
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| The Essence of Tong |
[Apr. 23rd, 2007|12:09 am] |
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It's been a funny ol' weekend, thanks to what I've been upto: 
Little gift for the people who make the BBC videogame show Videogaiden and it's original web counterpart, Consolevania. They pitched a game to Rockstar games - the company who made Grand Theft Auto series - entitled 'Manpuncher Versus Boxhead'... Hee.
And now a couple of pieces for a small press anthology all about song lyrics being put together by the wonderful Paul O'Connell, who produces 'The Sound of Drowning', a small press title that's also wonderful.
That'll be 'Dr Buck's Letter' by The Fall...
What's that? popular DJ Pete Tong being chased by a giant, disembodied Mark E. Smith head and accomplices..? Well, the idea for this come from an old LJ art meme thing involving drawing your favourite band, which I never got around to doing anything for. The Fall's lineup has changed over forty times, so that's the reason why there's a difference in scale in the characters. I feel slightly guilty about not being able to get a likeness of Mark right and just settling on making him look angry to make up for it...
I feel like a right emogoth posting this. Sigh. This is what the music of Angels of Light and The Swans will do to you. Children, if someone says to you, "Let's go back to my house and listen to a Swans record," Just Say No.
I know this seems trite, but sod all that death metal rubbish, this is among the darkest music you will ever hear in your short life. Seek it out. |
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| Headstone Blues II |
[Apr. 17th, 2007|11:51 pm] |
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Italian comic pitch all coloured and lettered and looking alright, h'actually.
Headstone Blues is all about corruption and racism in 1930's Tennessee. The pitch pages of the porlogue here involve the arrival in town of travelin' Lenny Crane the bluesman, and the pillar of the local black community just about to discover he's being framed for murder.
It's being pitched in Italy by my homefellow Alessandro Cremonesi.
( The rest of it, 6 more pages... )
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| "If only we had someone with the powers of jungle creatures!" |
[Feb. 22nd, 2007|08:57 pm] |
I forgot about this - it's a photie from the Birmingham Comics Show (Or, "Brumcon", to you and me) last year. With the apparent 70th anniversary of pulp costumed adventurer The Phantom, the organisers came up with the idea of putting up some big, blank boards for people to draw on, so they could assemble 70 drawings of The Phant' in honour of his 70 crusty years.
First up was Marvel's Staz Johnson, who supplied a great starting point (on the far right of the picture), which then ended up looking a bit lonely for a day or so in the middle of a huge load of white boards, until people gradually cottoned on that that was as far as it had been planned. Under the cover of darkness, confident they weren't going to get a hand-slapping, groups of small press artists descended on the locale to scribble their own Ghosts who Walk'd down, including myself and the incomparable Al Ewing.
He had this magic (or something) ring, The Phantom, y'see, that let him into his secret jungle cave lair, as I learnt from watching bad cartoons in the '80's and mid-'90's. So that's where the thought behind this one came from.
(Looking at it now, I shaded his upper arm wrong, consarn it!)
Oh, and anybody who correctly identifies the quote in the title of this post gets a free sketch. :) |
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| Holiday Haul |
[Jan. 1st, 2007|10:58 pm] |
2006 is dead. We killed it. Long live 2006! Happy New Year, you lot.
Here's some scans and photies of some artistic (eh?) presents I gave my friends for Chrishmash;
That's a promo image for the greatest fictional 80's Hair Metal band who never actually existed, 'Throb Daddy'. Sample song title: 'Get Your Rock Out'. I'd like to say thanks to the people who did the band 'Dokken'''s artwork for most of the inspiration behind this. That and trying to crowbar as many cliches into one image as possible... Oh, and for holiday fun, try and spot the badly-concealed knob joke in this image...
( 4 more under here! ) |
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Happy Non-Denominational Festive Period! |
[Dec. 16th, 2006|11:33 pm] |
Highly questionable Christmas card placeholder for all you lovely people.
Thanks for reading. :) |
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| Headstone Blues |
[Nov. 5th, 2006|05:10 pm] |
A promo piece for a comic pitch called 'Headstone Blues', written by Alessandro Cremonesi, for touting about at the Lucca comics festival in Tuscany... |
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| Splurge |
[Nov. 5th, 2006|05:00 pm] |
Three paintings I've splurged out in great messy daubs recently, all of them birthday presents for various peeps:
( The other two... ) |
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| Yarrrrrgh! |
[Nov. 5th, 2006|04:46 pm] |
There's an amiable young man called James Harvey who comes and leaves nice comments on my LiveJournal - he's an Animator, don't you know. Anyway, he's undertaken a massive project, which involves him drawing 100 Pirates in 100 Days... Take a look at the link and you can see a fantastic imagination just running wild. Seriously impressed by the amount of moxie he has, I did a 'Guest Pirate' for him...
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| The Skeletons in my Closet Have Big Eyes |
[Oct. 11th, 2006|06:17 pm] |
Me colouring up some old linework (2003? 2003?) from my sketchbook. Yeah, it's more Vurt stuff. I once read in an interview that Jeff Noon gave - about his novel being translated into Japansese - "...The Japanese one's great," says Jeff, "but what I'd really like to see is the manga version. I'd love to see Scribble [the main character] with those big eyes..." And so this kind of happened.
The thing is, it was manga that got me drawings comics seriously in the first place... The work of people like Masamune Shirow, Yoshiyuki Sadamoto and Katsuhiro Otomo were like pure, distilled ideas and outlandism compared to any 'Western' comics about... In the mid-nineties the small U.K. monthly mag Manga Mania was the bible, as far as I was concerned... The slightly ironic thing was that from the mid-nineties to the turn of the millennium, even though I was was rabid for it, larger circles weren't bothered with manga at all really. It was a level point between Manga Video's initial 'violent cartoons for teenagers' explosion, and Tokyopop's current dominance of bookstores.
If I can sound even more self-involved, think the linear aspect of my style - although flavoured later on by European comics - definately came from Manga's concise nature. My natural sense of pacing in graphic storytelling is also much, much slower, 'glacial', even - compared to the frame breakdowns in the scripts I artwork...
Not that I'm complaining or owt. :) The bottom line is though, it's all comics, no matter which way you hold or read 'em. Yay. |
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| Charactersheetgasm |
[Sep. 3rd, 2006|08:05 pm] |
'Ello. "What are you doing?" I hear you shriek, in an almost disbelieving fashion.
Well, I'm about to start drawing a 4-issue miniseries from Platinum Studios, written by the very prolific Mr. Steven Grant. How about that, eh..? (How they matched him up with a chancer like myself is anybody's guess, but it's not like I'm going to argue...)
No pages yet, but I do have approximately a 'shedload' of character sheets to show you, in both Sketchy-Vison and Tight-O-Vision:
( 20 more of 'em under here! )
The pages come when I get the artboard in the post, kids! |
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| Ladies' Night in the New Romantic Robot Factory |
[Jul. 29th, 2006|12:54 pm] |
Gift Doodle for an old friend who got back in touch, in which I mostly just take the pish out of her for liking Duran Duran:
Also, I'm definately not gay or owt. |
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| Love hidden in the attic |
[Jul. 12th, 2006|08:25 pm] |
My little comic adaptation from a few years ago of U.K. author Jeff Noon's award-winning first novel, Vurt, still attracts sporadic comment from kindly folks on the interweb, for which I am eternally grateful.
I got a mail yesterday from an Austrian gentleman whose Serbian housemates had introduced him to my work... What do you do when presented with such love from differing international quarters..?
Draw them a sketch, of course!
I heart the internet sometimes.
If you're someone somewhere interesting in the world and you genuinely like Vurt and my wee comic of it, I might even draw a sketch for you too... |
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| 'Move-Find' |
[Jul. 10th, 2006|11:26 pm] |
A little Art Attack:
Enjoyed daubing this out a lot, also started thinking I really should paint a whole lot more. Even if they are little medium exercises like this. Slopping paint about is fun, garshdarnit.
Realised half-way through it's actually nothing but a repetition of an older motif. What can I say, I'm currently more obsessed than usual with the work of Akihiko Yoshida... |
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leeoconnor's journal
