The Prison gets going

I've had it in my mind to work on long form comics for a while now, but getting to a stage when I'm ready to actually produce anything has been a long process.
Making a comic of any great length realistically represents a commitment of years and this is a truly daunting prospect, balancing the need to make a living with the urge to create something worthwhile and beautiful. I have reached the age of 30 without yet having managed to do either terribly well, safe in the knowledge that I probably could do it if I set my mind to it. The problem is that it's far easier to acknowledge your own potential than it is to try and actually fulfill it.
A case in point: about 18 months ago I had got to a point where I felt like my work was actually starting to catch up with my thinking, where I had, to my mind, achieved a level of complexity and finish that meant I could look at the pages I'd been working on without wanting to abandon them or tear them up and start again, and could even admire some of the decisions I'd made. With this in mind I spent weeks working on a 4 page strip and submitted it to the Observer's Graphic Short Story Competition where it got absolutely nowhere. I'm pretty sure I've mentioned this before, but for me it was the last straw of an all-round dreadful year and I stopped working for a while to re-evaluate and feel sorry for myself. I may, on reflection, have over-reacted.
So anyway, I'm writing this as I wait for the bleed-proof white to dry on the first completed page of the Prison, which itself will hopefully be one of eight episodes that will make up the finished- and as yet untitled- work (based loosely on Hogarth's A Rake's Progress, one of the very first printed, sequential visual narratives.) at some point in the distant future.
It's an ambitious project that draws on many disparate ideas and influences, but one I've tried to make as achievable as possible by making the chapters work individually. I've also decided to serialise this chapter online as I go, as often as possible in order to create a deadline for each page. Wish me luck...

new page

New page. This will form part of a longer chapter.

A Competition Entry

I did a comic. Actually I've done quite a lot since I last posted here, I just have absolutely no blog discipline.
Anyway, this is for the Northern Sequential Art Competition, part of the Thoughtbubble convention up in Leeds.  They've got Alison Bechdel as a guest, her Fun Home is brilliant and I can't recommend it enough.

Competitions ,Submissions and the Terror Thereof

  For anyone that isn't into comics and doesn't read the Observer, every year they run a comics competition with the publishers Jonathan Cape for a four page comic story (there's a link to the competition page here). The winners have been excellent and have deservedly done well out of it. I entered it for the first time last year with enormous trepidation and spent ages working on a strip that singularly failed to make any kind of impact whatsoever, something I'll admit affected me quite deeply, sending me into a spiral of self-doubt and meaning I didn't pick up a pencil again for a couple of months. Obviously, I'm entering again this year.
  Once again I find myself getting bogged down: I've put so much pressure on the success of this strip that everything about it's creation is taking vastly longer than usual. I have page upon page of notes, script and character and object sketches that I can't help but constantly revise. Working on the actual finished pages themselves has become a nerve-wracking experience as I constantly question decisions about composition, pacing and scripting that I made and liked weeks ago.
And woe betide I should make a mistake at the inking stage.
Frankly, I need to chill out a bit. I should be enjoying this.

My workspace with work in progress

 There are comparatively few outlets in this country for people making 'alternative' comics. Firstly there's the self-publishing route. I'd recommend to anyone interested in comics that they attend a self publishing fair, as everything there will have been made by people with an undeniable and almost palpable enthusiasm for the art form, encompassing every genre imaginable. For example, earlier this year when I was still blissfully living in London, I went to the Comica market at the Bishopsgate Institute and bought a stunning comic from this guy. Cartoonists self publishing have some historic success stories to inspire them: for an extreme example, the first issue of Eastman and Laird's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was self published, and many successful cartoonists of the underground and literary comics scene have produced work this way. I'm planning to self publish some short strips as a comic later in the year, then take them around the comic fairs in the hopes of attracting a readership and making contact with other aspiring cartoonists. 

There are also two (that I know of) British comic anthologies dealing in alternative comics: Nobrow and Solipsistic Pop, both of which are excellent and I first came into contact with at self publishing fairs. Which brings me to the reason I'm writing this post. What I should be doing is sending them  lovely submissions emails with a link to my website, whereas what I'm actually doing is putting off the abject terror the thought of writing an unsolicited email inviting someone to pass judgement on my work provokes. 

When I'm able to pick up a pencil again in a couple of months, I'm sure I'll write about the experience.     

Drawing the Line- some sketches

Tilting at Windmills

Sure, I used to read comics.
It started with the Beano: good, innocent fun, time locked at some point in the 1950's, with a jokes page and, if you were lucky, a fruity chew glued to the front. 
Then there was a Beezer and a Whizzer and Chips annual at my grandmother's house that I would read by lamp-light having managed to squirm free from a savage tucking in.
Then there was Asterix.
Then there was Tintin.
At some point around 1990, having been introduced to Marvel Super-Villains Top Trumps in the playground, I confronted my father in the kitchen, presented him with a copy of X-Men Classics and made a well rehearsed and persuasive argument:
"As you can see, the art-work and story lines really are significantly more sophisticated. I think it would be much better for me as, frankly, I've been finding the Beano rather puerile of late. Plus, I think this comic and others like it will really help me in my development as an artist. In conclusion, I think it would be best if you allowed me to subscribe to the X-Men, or perhaps the Amazing Spider-Man- I haven't decided yet."
My ploy worked, and for a few years I amassed quite a collection and became something of an authority in the school yard. God, I really loved those comics.
But then my favourite artists started to drift away, forming Image Comics in the early 1990's. I tried to follow them, I tried to enjoy Spawn and the Maxx but they had nothing of the colourful Marvel characters I had loved, which themselves had lost something now they were drawn by others.
Then I got bored.
Then I grew up.
This is also the point in their lives at which most other people stopped reading comics too and, I would argue, the reason that comics are so often seen as more of a genre than a genuine artistic medium. I have lost count of the times I've been asked "What, like Batman?" or some variation thereof when I've sheepishly revealed to someone that I draw comics.
But the story doesn't end there. It was the new millennium and I was at art school, trying desperately to reconcile my decidedly old-fashioned, academic technique in drawing and painting with the conceptual demands of contemporary art. Inevitably, I started producing portrait miniatures.

My first attempt at a miniature. About 5cm diameter

It was at this time that I stumbled upon a book. No, a comic. "These are both behind me and beneath me, if that's dimensionally possible." I probably thought, but I read it anyway. It was From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell and it fucking rocked my world. Literate, complex and exhaustively researched with a 42 page appendix of notes to prove it, I wasn't aware that such an object could have existed in the superficial medium of comics I had left behind a decade before. Perhaps it was an abberation. So I carefully selected a different comic, this one had won a Pulitzer prize, like To Kill a Mockingbird, or The Grapes of Wrath, it had to be good. It was Maus by Art Spiegelman, which is still arguably the pinnacle of artistic and narrative achievement in the comic book medium and I started to wonder whether there was something in this comics business after all.
Then there was Jimmy Corrigan by Chris Ware.
Then there was David Boring by Daniel Clowes.
Then there was Hicksville by Dylan Horrocks and It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken by Seth and Louis Riel by Chester Brown and Blankets by Craig Thompson and Black Hole by Charles Burns and Palestine by Joe Sacco and I Killed Adolf Hitler by Jason and Jimbo's Inferno by Gary Panter and Berlin by Jason Lutes and Garage Band by Gipi and Epileptic by David B and The Six Hundred and Seventy Six Apparitions by Killoffer and Alias the Cat by Kim Deitch and Fun Home by Alison Bechdel and Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi and more by these writers and many others.
I became something of an authority.
And I started to think that maybe I might quite like to have a go at these comics.

My first comics page as an adult

I drew a comic strip. It was 5 pages long, based on an existing character, Hellboy by Mike Mignola, and was drawn purely for the purpose of trying my hand. It took ages, and it wasn't very good at all.
I'm not sure why, but I was reading and loving 'alternative' comics, but for a good few years I was drawing stuff that was a lot more 'mainstream'. I seem to remember the logic being that if I could work for one of the big comics companies, it would be easier to produce my own work later on when I was more experienced and had garnered some sort of following. To this end, a couple of years after my first go at comics, I downloaded a sample script from the 2000A.D website and started work. I never finished it and found the whole experience torturous. If you wish, you can see the results here.
It just wasn't working.
In frustration I cleared my drawing board, got out a fresh sheet of paper and started drawing. Not Batman or Judge Dredd or Hellboy, but something I just made up as I went along that combined my love of 1950's tiki culture, my knowledge of second world war uniforms (don't ask.), a recently discovered taste for sushi and a collection of the work of Dashiell Hammett. I completed four pages of Bali' Hai P.I. very quickly which can be seen here.
Maus it ain't, but to me it had been something of a revelation. I'd never produced work so quickly, and never enjoyed drawing comics as much.
And that's kind of where it begins. Make no mistake, I'm not writing this from the position of a professional cartoonist. My work has not so far been published (and I would argue that comics are nothing until they see print), though that's something I aim to rectify this year. I write instead as someone who's still learning, (hopefully) improving, and excited by the potential of what I might possibly be able achieve in the medium I love.
Future posts may well not be as ramblingly wordy as this one, and if anyone stuck with me this far, I thank you for reading.