Comic Series

The archive

Posted on 17th March 2021 by pj

Because I’ve been published by 2000ad for quite some time now (about 20 years and counting) I’ve built up rather a massive back log of back issues. Right now I’m in the process of taking one copy of each and shoving it in a thrill power containment unit (or a magazine holder, to your average Terran).

Right now I’ve archived up to 2004 – not a lot between 2001 – 2004, couple of fun dredds, couple of future shocks and then – what I considered my big break – Rogue Trooper real politik. I got offered that job while I was on honeymoon in Barbados.

I used the hotel’s rather crappy dial up to check my email – iirc we were either about to head home or we were heading out for the day, and man, such an exciting email for me! YES! OF COURSE I wanted to draw a six part rogue trooper – I’d be delighted.

I don’t think I nailed Rogue in that strip, bar on panel, which, ironically, was the first one with him I drew – usually I’ll draw a strip in sequential order, but Rogue was such a big part of why I loved 2000AD that I decided I needed to do the last page first, as it was the first time Rogue appeared in the strip.

And it was … ok. I think it alleviated my worry about it all. But for plot reasons, that final page didn’t feature Rogue’s helmet. And that stupid thing turned out to be my undoing.

Anyway, if you’re interested in reading that Rogue, it’s available in the Rogue Trooper volume 4 from 2000ad.

One last note, my mum died while I was in the middle of drawing the Rogue Trooper. There was a bit of a gap in the schedule of it anyway, and so it’s always had a weird mix of associations, joy mixed with grief.

I mean I don’t want readers to ever judge the work on anything other than the work, but I think, you’ve got to remember behind the lines there are people.

One long year

Posted on 16th March 2021 by pj

Last Christmas my wife gave me a sketch a day book, and, of course, I didn’t use it. Part of that was my general rubbishness at doing any sort of do-this-per-day part it was because … well, covid happened and all bets were off.

I did do four entires, over the span of a few months, 26th December (a drawing of Baby Yoda) and… 14th March. In which I wrote:

Corona Virus. Calm before storm. There doesn’t feel like a good way to prepare. Think we’re all taking it seriously (esp Nathan) Tom should be ok, my dad is fine now, but he won’t survive it. And neither will Annette’s dad. [I’ve] lived through the fall of the Berlin Wall, Thatcher going, Blair landslide, 2008 collapse, Brexit and now this. Feels like it’s the biggest thing since WWII and yet, right now, NI feels nothing. 28 deaths so far. Dad off to wait it out in Newcastle. Feeling overwhelmed but know it’ll get worse. Trying to get stuff done before it starts. Will amazon stop?

Sadly we lost Annette’s dad – he hadn’t been well for a long time and passed away. Covid simply made the whole dreadful experience much much worse.

So one year and two days later and a little glimpse of optimism, as I had the first of two vaccine shots today. It was the oxford AstraZeneca one, which – as of right now – is suffering a cloud over questions about whether it’s causing blood clots (two/four reported deaths in italy and they’ve halted its use). Could be. Could be a bad badge. Could be the deaths (awful as they are) are not significent given how many people die of blood clots anyway. In the UK – at least – 11 million shots of the Oxford one have been given with nothing bad reported.

I’m an athiest, but these vaccines are the closest thing to a miracle I’ve ever seen. They’re the moon landings, Martian Rovers and … god, I dunno… the internet … all wrapped up in a little tiny bottle.

Anyway, I’ve had my first shot. Take yours.

(also: Amazon never stopped)

Who Killed Captain Cookies?

Posted on 8th March 2021 by pj

Well, another belter of a Kenneth Neimand script, in the form of Who Killed Captain Cookies, and, hopefully, by now you’ll realise the Chimpsky is on the case!

This is a four parter (part 2 this week) and I promise you, it won’t be the last you’ll see of Chimpsky. (though I can’t exactly tell you when you’ll see more of him…)

Here’s the layouts of part 1, I remember the day I did these and it was so much fun to just noodle drawings of Dredd, hence the nutso details on Dredd and the vagueness of everything else. It was also a period where I was struggling with the work generally. Times like that you just sometimes have to trust the craft will get you through. Thankfully, I’m actually feeling pretty pleased with the stuff I’m drawing right now – but you’re unlikely to see that stuff for another year!

Having seen the story in print (and remember, drew this around August?) I think I made page 1 panel 1 & 2 a little more confusing than they needed to be, the thumbs work better here I think.

Thumbnails for Who Killed Captain Cookie Episode 1

I’d very much like to try and get this blog into a useful shape again and for that, I think, what I really need is feedback. Even if it’s just to say “Hi I saw your blog” please leave a comment below! And I promise I’ll begin posting more…

March, eh?

Posted on 7th March 2021 by pj

Time has become a non euclidian space.

Somehow it’s the 7th of March 2021. It’s probably a Thursday*. It’s always a Thursday.

*No, it is, of course, Sunday. I think.

I’ve plenty of work on, thankfully, should see me working for several months actually – which is, frankly, the best position to be in.

I’m currently the is currently the Dredd artist in 2000ad, in a turn that surprised me, that means on the twentieth anniversary of my first published work (also a Dredd) I’ve doing Dredd. Certainly, by any measure of success I ever set myself before breaking into comics, this is the apex.

But, you know, I’ve probably a solid 20+ years ahead of drawing -(and about 19 of them will happen this March) that translates to about 4,000 pages (that’s 20 pages per month) not a lot when you think of it in those terms.

I had planned on a few things, but this year and the past couple have caused me – like anyone with any sense, I think – to draw my horns in and just sit out and work.

Anyway, without getting too bogged down, this is a merely a proof of life post. Kids start school again in a couple of weeks (for a little bit) expecting to get the vaccine by August, and maube… just maybe… we can start hoping for comic conventions again. Man, I miss those.

2004 Q&A

Posted on 11th February 2021 by pj

Some context, in 2004 a young fella called Tim asked if he could interview me for something (I forget what it was for, I stumbled across this old email while scouring my archive of emails which I thought had all been deleted)

I’d just got married, my mum had died shortly after. I was working for 2000ad while working a part time day job in computers. The warhammer gig mentioned here was bought and paid for but warhammer went under just after they paid me, so it never saw print, sadly. I’ve added annotations in square brackets.

Tim

ok so last time we went over what you are doing now, so i’ve got a few
questions about how you got into art in the first place…
Oh and My sincerest congradulations on getting married…:)

Cheers.

1.  What got you into art in the first place, and more to the point
comics?

I’ve always drawn and I’ve always enjoyed drawing – even before I’d
seen a comic. Started reading comics when I was about 8ish, prior to
this I was in a remedial reading class in school as I just wasn’t
interested in reading. We used to holiday in this caravan site (very
small, isolated place with bloody awful weather) so there was very
little to do – mum used to buy comics for us to keep us entertained.
2000AD/Warlord/Battle Action, etc. I started reading cus I had nothing
else to do and was pretty much hooked. I read anything I could get,
one year we found (my cousins and I) a bunch of Avengers comics in a
bin (Adam Warlok, Thanos, all that stuff) and that was me hooked on
superhero comics. Wasn’t long before I started making my own comics
(using carbon paper to reproduce and make multiple copies). Stopped
reading comics at secondary school (around the age of about 15) cus of
peer pressure (also stopped drawing after failing my ‘o’ level in art
at about 16) but started again at about 18 cus I’d seen a single page
of the Dark Knight Returns (this was around ’88) and that got me
hooked again – plus a local comic shop had opened and that got me
started both reading and drawing (John McCrea was co-owner of the
shop, this was long before he’d done any pro-work) – incidentally
thats the same shop Garth Ennis used to shop in (again, before he was
famous) – and where his long-standing working relationship with John
started. [Garth and I started working together around 2009 doing war comics for the most part, and that working relationship continues along!]

2.  Have you worked on anything not of the 2000A.D. series lately?

Currently drawing something for Warhammer
(http://www.pauljholden.com/warhammer) and working up a proposal for a
series for 2000AD, also working on a proposal for a series for Image
comics (Image don’t pay a page rate so not sure if I’ll actually be
able to afford to do it) [The image series became “Fearless” with Mark Sable]

Any print type things or work on other books?

3.  Have you lived in Belfast all your life?  (I do plan to get to
Ireland one day… I hear it’s beautiful with lots of beer!  🙂 )

Yup, around the 12th of July I start getting itchy feet because you
start to see the worst in people, but a nice holiday usually sorts
that out – my wife will tell you I’m a real Belfast lad – I love the
place.

4.  Do you come to the states anymore?

Only been to the states once in 1993 [actually went to canada, and drove down to the border, crossed it into the states to go to a big retail mall and left again… ] plan to go to a San Diego comic convention at some point. I love the idea of America but find it’s currently president to be … less than palatable. [went to the states in 2006 and been a fair few times since, and boy, didn’t Trump make George Bush slightly more palatable…]

5.  Are you able to do most of your corrispondance over the internet?

About 90% of it, I email artwork back and forth to editors and writers
(and some final artwork is also delivered over the internet) helps
keep the thing alive in the editor and writers minds. [was 2004 really the early days of the internet? I suppose it had really just started finding it’s feet]

6.  Is there anything that you like to do before starting a long
project?  (i.e. warm up excercises, doodling, quick sketches?)

I find myself doodling as a way to stop myself working – if I really
need to draw a page I just start – the doodling and warm up is just a
way for me to put off the hard work. (I will try and draw the bits I’m
more comfortable with to begin with)

7.  Do you ever wish you would have gotten into another career?

I wish comics could be a career – I’m not convinced I can make it –
maybe I’d’ve had a much brighter outlook in the early 90s but at the
moment I can only see two types of artists surviving/thriving in
comics: the really amazingly good and the really amazingly fast –
anyone in between is gonna find it tough. [Still think this is true, fast or good are where you can make money, anything in between is bloody hard going]

8.  Do you find working for others taxing?  (I mean as far as comics
go, I know its taxing doing comp. work for others)

Yes and no. The work I’m doing for warhammer at the moment is based on
an idea I’d had for doing Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai as a comic
and I was gonna write and draw it myself but it’s easy to procastinate
and never finish something like that – whereas cus I pitched the idea
to warhammer they assigned a writer and are gonna pay me to draw it
it’s actually nearly finished (and I’m quiet proud of bits of it). [written by James Peaty, never saw print, sadly as warhammer folded]

9.  Did you ever learn to do color for yourself, or does someone do it
for you?

Any coloured work is done by other people, I’m greywashing (painting
with just greys) at the moment and I’d like to maybe paint something
at some point. I do draw for a colourist – making sure there’s enough
there for them to do something interesting with the page.

10. Have you ever thought about branching out into other medium?  (3D,
or perhaps sculpture? Games or animation?)

I’d like to get away from computers and do more stuff by hand – I’ve
been toying with doing some sculpting but it’d be more for my own
enjoyment than anything else. [eventually played with building a massive VR landscape that NI took to the annual SxSW festival – that was fun, but unlikely to do it ever again]

11. Did you see Judge Dredd the movie [the Stallone one]?  Bring up any bad taste?
(Personally I own the movie and thought it was hilarious, in an action
packed way)

Saw it twice at the cinema (was working in Milton Keynes at the time
for the Open University designing interactive multimedia CD type
things – I was on a job placement for my degree  in computers, which I
dropped out of in the final year cus I thought I was gonna be a rich
comic artist …) I was homesick and had just started dating my
then-girlfriend, now-wife. The first 10 minutes are just spectacular,
and Stallone looks the part but ‘I AM ….. TH’L’W’ just sounds awful
and it’s a question of watching it through fingers from then on.

12. On a more pesonal note, are you a fan of movies?  (I find I work a
lot better when I’ve got some cheesy horror film or something in the
background.)

I love movies, the quirkier the better. I Bought a DV camera a couple
of years ago with the intention of making a small movie, and I still
have that intention… it just may never happen 🙂 [readers: it never happened]

13. Have you lived in Ireland all your life?

Yup.

14. Does the website get you many hits or e-mails?

I’ve no idea – it gets more hits than I expect. I did it, originally,
as a way to let people I know know what I’m up to as I’m bloody awful
at emailing people, but there’s a lot more ‘strangers’ read the
website than I ever expected. [Websites and blogs used to be a big deal kids!]

15. Who would you reckomend I go see about getting into comics?

My generic advice is to draw and draw and draw. Do lots of small press
work (Digital Webbing presents would probably be a good avenue) [does this still exist? maybe] . Get
to know some writers and work with as many different ones as you can –
you never know which of them will be in a spot to push your artwork in
front of an editor. The go to conventions and show editors and other
artists your stuff looking for advice. [still solid advice, when cons are on again]

16. Do you keep a clean or messy workplace.(I have noted that many
artists keep and extremly messy workplace)

I find it easier to start work if my workplace is very clean, but
after working for a few hours my workplace is incredibly messy, so now
I have a little ritual of cleaning up before I start a brand new page
(which means if I’m not in the mood to draw I clean up and then start
anyways – it’s a good way to overcome the initial fear of the blank
page)

17. Do you ever come to comic conventions here in the states?

Haven’t done so but fully intend to get to a San Diego convention at some point. [Nope, never intend to go to San Diego, New York comic con started in 2006 went to that and some others, san diego looks like it would be horrible!]

18. Play video games?

I love video games, but never play them for more than 2 minutes at a
time as I’m rubbish. But I’m always amazed at the quality of the
graphics. [still amazed at the graphics even now]

19. Have any pet peeves?

George Bush, Hypocracy, National ID Cards, The General Public,
Politicians, my own laziness, Tony Blair (who, on paper, is as far
away from Bush’s politics as it’s possible to go, but in practice is
his bestest mate) and er.. there’s probably more. [sigh politics]

20. Do you ink?

Yup. use black indian ink and a brush (can never remember the
name/make of it, but it’s thin and longer than most brushes).

21. Do you draw in straight pencil or do you use a blueine lead first?

2H or 4H pencil, using a .5 mechanical pencil – sometimes I pencil
very losely (one of the benifits of inking yourself) and often I’ll
ink while pencilling (for example, I might ink a foreground figure
before I’ve pencilled anything in the background ) [as my eyesight has got worse my preference is now for HB pencils, or digital]

22. Do you make your own sheets for the pages, or you do buy from
blueline or someplace like it?

I buy 220 gsm A3 size paper pads 25 pages for about £7 sterling. [actually about £10 nowdays] And
then rule it myself. They don’t stand up to a great deal of erasing
and it took an awful long time for me to get good enough at inking to
ink on them as they’re not smooth pressed, but they’re my favourite
type of paper for pencilling on and I’ve used them for (off and on)
about 15 years.

23. Do you do your own background art?

Yup. Everything on the page is drawn by me – unless it’s coloured. 

I just wanted you to know that i haven’t been to the comic store in a
long while either, but plan to get back there soon, that is in part
why perhaps i haven’t seen anything new?  Sorry about that, I’ll pick
up what I can, and at the least I’m sure that my brother-in-law has
all the newest.  He’s a bit of a Dredd Freak…

heh. I don’t have that much stuff out there – and what I do is UK
based. Maybe in the next few years you’ll see me all over the place
(but I wouldn’t hold your breath). [I\ve drawn a fair few things since then, it’s true…]

24. Have you ever thought about maybe starting your own company?

Er… for comics I am my own company, as all comic work is freelance
(even if you have an exclusive contract you’re still a freelance
worker). I could branch out into illustration of
magazines/advertising/etc, but I love drawing comics and I make enough
money part time that I can be choosy about what I draw.

I’ll add a question:

‘Do you watch/listen to anything while you work?’

I listen to the radio, although now I’ve got a mac I’ve started
listening to CDs again as I can get three days of music witout having
to change the CD (using iTunes). Since I’ve had broadband for years, I
use it to listen to the radio (bbc radio 1 – chris moyles show, and
bbc radio 2 – jonathan ross show) and sometimes Air America (although
it gets old kinda fast). Occasionally I’ll throw a DVD on a listen to
the commentary but I can’t watch ’em as it gets too distracting. [as I’ve aged my radio station has now shifted to radio 4, I can’t even imagine listening to radio 1 at all now. Radio 4 and spotify]

And that’s it, funny what changes and what remains the same, innit. Far more of my work is digital now, though I used a computer way back then, it wasn’t absolutely an essential part of the process like it is now. And you know, since then, I’m now at home in the middle of a pandemic with a 16 year old son and a 12 year old, things must have been so much quieter back then…

Stay On Target!

Posted on 31st December 2020 by pj

If you’re not familiar with “The Pomodoro Technique” it’s a super simple technique for focusing on tasks. The name “Pomodoro” comes from the italian for tomato, and is based on a rather cutsey tomato shaped timer the creator of the technique used. The idea is simple, and it’s this:

You set aside 25 minutes to do a single task. At the end of it, you take a five minute break. Do it again, and repeat until you’ve done 4 sets in a row, then instead of a five minute break you take a 25 minute break.

I find, for the sort of work I do (ie drawing comics) it’s a brilliant way to break log jams. Where I often focus on getting a page done, it’s very much a-can’t-see-the-woods-for-the-trees problem. Focusing on a timer that I draw to, rather than obsessing about whether can draw or not .

I’ve also been playing (for decades really) with a way of figuring out how much time I’ve been spending on pages. So here’s the latest iteration, the target below is pretty simple and represents a single page (you can write the page number in the centre). The first set of segments out from the page, the first inner ring – represents pencils, inks, colours and lettering (or, if you’re me, two segments represent pencils and two inks).

The larger outer ring, divided into chunks of four represents individual pomodoros, in sets of four – I’ve been aiming to do around 16 pomodoros per day – so in total the outer circle represents two days worth of work.

The plan, the guarantee, the thinking, is that instead of worrying about how long a page takes, all I’ve got to do is fill those outer rings as I do pomodoros and boom the page does itself (I mean you’ve still got to draw it, but it makes it – for me – much more manageable)

In this example, page 15 is fully pencilled and I know it took me about 3.5 hours.

So I’ve created a weekly sheet (let’s see how long I keep this up…) that contains a day breakdown of pomodoros as I do them along with 12 pages I could finish in the week (I mean 12 is ridiculous, the reality is, I’ll be happy to get six pages finished in a week, so if you’d like to use this, just remember the extra targets are just there for symmetry and balance on the page rather than actual work you should do)

If you want to use this yourself, it’s scaled at A5 so you can cut it out and stuck it in a diary or just use it on its own (or don’t use it at all!)

Download here:

pomodoro-comic-sheetDownload

2020 Vision

Posted on 29th December 2020 by pj

Sigh. Does anyone want to look back over what they did last year.

I suppose the one significant thing we’ve got to take from it all is that we need to be kinder to ourselves and to others. I fail at both, often. Not through want of trying, but rather the unthinking idiocy of just being human. Cruelty can often be the undercurrent of humour, and I’m probably guiltier of most for going for the joke without giving a thought to the cruelty (and I’m sorry to everyone who suffered one of the tiny little barbs of me making a joke because it seemed funny for half a second).

Anyway, mea culpa out of the way, how was your year? (I realise, 2020 being what it is, sitting writing this on the 29th of December is asking for another Black Swan to leap in and disembowel us all, but here we are)

For me, it started with a decent resolve to make notes on everything – keeping weekly posts on what I’ve done and what I’d intended to do, partly this was just a way to fill the blog and keep a connection to the wider world (a thing easily lost when you’re at your drawing table, head down and working away) and partly it was a good self motivator – yes, work is happening, and look, you even took some breaks and did some creator owned stuff.

Of course, I hadn’t planned on a world wide pandemic, which buggered that right up.

I’ve kept working throughout it, jobs were lost, of course, and productivity took a nose dive as kids had to be homeschooled or my wife ended up working from home, and I had to abandon a slew of things that there just wasn’t time for or required publishers who were no longer looking at projects.

Minor miracle we’ve come through it all, I suppose.

I’m glad I kept some of those productivity notes now though, as I look at a productivity reboot for 2021. I realise new years are entirely arbitrary points in time (time, of course, being an illusion, lunchtime doubly so*) but I’ve always loved them. Suddenly, some mental cobwebs are blown away, and, rightly or wrongly, I reset and think “Well, who cares if you blew it last year, this year… this year could be different”. It’s a placebo date. For many it’ll make no difference, and for a tiny few (me included) it actually does make a difference.

Of course, whatever I decide about 2021 the year itself may have other plans. We’re nowhere near at the backend of the pandemic, certainly here, in the UK, we’re still dealing with it (either we’re at the peak of a second wave, or closing in on the beginning of a much much worse third wave) we’ve got brexit to look forward to (everything until now has been a buffer against whatever the worse brexit has to offer us) and, brexit, panedemic out of the way, what will the government do to pay off the enormous amount of debt it’s had to rack up during the pandemic (and being a tory government that usually means massive cuts to services).

But sod it, those are things I have almost no control over, so there’s little point worrying about them.

Traditionally, I look over whatever my resolutions for 2020 were and see how I’ve done – but, frankly, getting the other side has been an impressive job. (Also, I don’t appear to have made any resolutions last year beyond “DO THINGS” so, even getting out of bed counts)

Next year?

Get more organised. Stay organised. Try not to work all the time (or, rather try to limit work + worrying about work to 5 days out of seven). Keep on top of the boring tax stuff and invoices.

Not sure what work has lined up for me next year. Doing some Chimpsky, there MIGHT be a long project in there (originally scheduled starting in November, so we’ll see if it comes off) and, you know, just try to get through 2021 in one piece.

Twenty Years, Creep

Posted on 22nd December 2020 by pj

This coming year marks the 20th anniversary of my first 2000AD Published work.

tl;dr Just that. This year, twenty years drawing Judge Dredd, and hopefully I’ll get to do more… now read on…

2000AD Prog 1233 – cover by Andy Clarke, my 2000ad Debut Issue dated March 2001

I’ve told the story many times, but to recap, following 2000AD’s purchase by Rebellion, Rebellion decided to have the first 2000AD Convention DreddCon:1 in November 2000 –

Flyer from the first Dredd Con with Artwork by Jock, a barely minted droid at that stage, but already doing some definitive work.

Having previously wheedled my way in to the online 2000ad fan community, via the fanzine “Class of ’79” (itself a product of the imagination of sadly missed WR Logan aka Stewart Perkins) and drawn a few strips for it, I’d also become friendly with Gordon Rennie – who was writing Dredd at the time – from doing some small press work for the fanzine “Violent” (created by Mike Sivier) It was clear I needed to go to the new convention.

The Class of ’79 Stand at the comic convention Comics ’99. That’s me in the foreground, ignoring everyone and just drawing – story of my life, really.

I was pretty active on alt.comics.2000ad – a newsgroup (newsgroups were message board type things that had elements of social media to them – ask your parents)

And had set up a nascent web cam type operation to draw live from my drawing board (twitching before there was a twitch) And thanks to the wonders of the internet, here that is:

There’s a reason I’m telling you this and it’ll be clear shortly…

The year 2000 was a seminal year for a multitude of reasons, I’d applied for a new job that I’d started on the 1st of that year, working for a charity as their IT manager, but, importantly, it was a part time job and I’d intended to spend the remaining time drawing more and – as a kid growing up reading 2000ad – the year itself, obviously, meant something.

Plus, and this might have been the clincher, 2000 was the year I turned 30.

So I went off to DreddCon, with a pile of comic pages (having advised people over the years you only need a few pages, I decided I’d try a slightly different, idiotic, tact and bought a whole load of work with me, the hope being I’d show it to then editor Andy Diggle and he’d relent under the pressure of my resolve and volume of my pages)

As it turns out, Andy was one of the people who’d watched the webcam (see, told you it would be relevant!) and said he thought (as he surface skimmed the art on the top of the massive pile of comics pages I’d bought) that my art had improved, so yes, he’d give me some work. I was a little anxious because he wasn’t really looking at the mountains of artwork I’d bought for him to look at.

This super lo-res photo is from a photo taken on the day Andy Diggle said he’d give me work. My cheeks hurt from smiling. I was 30.

In one of those happier coincidences, my girlfriend (who’d become my wife a few years later) was with me, so it was a glorious glorious con – best of my life, probably. (She remains not-a-con goer though)

I phoned Gordon immiediatly, and Gordon, to which I’ll always be in his debt, said he’d just sent in a Dredd and he’d ask for me to draw it.

And lo, I ended up debuting in Prog 1233 in March 2001 in Judge Dredd.

Some mad person has done the leg work of checking all of the contributors to Judge Dredd and the number of appearances (in the Megazine and 2000AD) and in the twenty years since, of the 146 artists to have worked on Dredd, in terms of number of appearances, I come in at number 9. Something which even now I’m slightly baffled by – how did that happen? In my head I’m still trying to break in to comics in general and 2000ad specifically. This past couple of years I’ve gotten more comfortable with how I handle Dredd himself, even as I’m still casting around trying to figure out how to draw his entire mad world.

The top Dredd artists twenty by Appearance

That first Dredd strip, I redrew it maybe three/four times, a curse that has followed me around on almost every job – the most recent Dredd I abandoned pages and redrew them with just as much insecurity.

How it started…
How it’s going
And here she is in B&W

Anyway, twenty years. Kind of remarkable to do anything for 20 years really – I think my life working in IT lasted from the age of 14 to 37, in comics 30 to 50 (seven year overlap). Maybe, as the comics time frame takes over the IT time frame I’ll stop thinking of myself as an IT nerd who draws comics and instead ease into old age thinking of myself as a comic artist first and foremost.

This next year, in the bag already for 2000AD is more Judge Dredd, a solo Chimpsky series and more Dept K – if I end up spending the next twenty years working for 2000AD, well, it’s a life well lived as far as I’m concerned.

There’s no central committee to say “Here you go, twenty years of service, well done” so I make no apologies fort the self-congratulatory nature of this blog post, almost everything I’ve ever done in comics has been a way to connect to an 11 year old me, sitting in my room drawing Judge Dredd and trying to escape the real world, so well done you – you did it. I love drawing Dredd, I always have, I always will, and now I’ve finally gotten good at it, I’d like to do more.

Thanks to everyone who’s helped me get here – WR Logan, Gordon Rennie, Andy Diggle, Mike Sivier, Christian Dunn (former Warhammer editor) and, of course, Matt Smith – Thargs current incarnation who’s been there as long as I have, as well as the pals I’ve made along the way, Rob Williams, Si Spurrier, Arthur Wyatt, Al Ewing, and many, many more. And, finally, of course, special thanks to the readers who’ve put up with me as my art style has evolved over the years, there will always be ups and downs in quality, sometimes because you learn and try things out, sometimes it’s because drawing is bloody hard and life is hard and everything is HARD. But it’s never, NEVER because I don’t love the job.

Christmas Films List

Posted on 1st December 2020 by pj

I asked yesterday on twitter for a some films I can watch during decemember as a kind of Christmas run down – specifically looking for films that are seasonal (but not xmassy) and then xmassy films. So you start the month with something set at winter (or in the snow, like, for example The Thing) and you end on something that is a perfect xmas movie (like It’s a Wonderful Life)

So here’s the suggestions (copied and pasted from innumerable twitter replies, so forgive any duplication/missing suggestions), and in no particular order:

  • Billy Wilder comedy Stalag 17 is actually a Christmas film.
  • The Junky’s Christmas on Christmas Eve 
  • Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence
  • Die Hard
  • Gremlins
  • Christmas In Connecticut. Dec 14.
  • Holiday Affair. Dec 19.
  • Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. Dec 23.
  • DIE HARD
  • LETHAL WEAPON
  • KISS KISS BANG BANG
  • THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT
  • GREMLINS
  • A MIDNIGHT CLEAR
  • BATMAN RETURNS
  • ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE
  • TRUE ROMANCE
  • IN BRUGES
  • LA CONFIDENTIAL
  • WHERE EAGLES DARE
  • CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE
  • TV episodes: MILLENNIUM – Midnight Of The Century
  • THE X-FILES – How The Ghosts Stole Christmas
  • THE WEST WING – In Excelsis Deo, Noël
  • BTAS – Christmas With The Joker, Holiday Knights, Heart Of Ice
  • JUSTICE LEAGUE – Comfort And Joy
  • TALES FROM THE CRYPT – And All Through The House
  • Scrooged
  • Rare Exports
  • Family Stone
  • Noelle
  • The Night Before
  • Jingle All The Way
  • A Charlie Brown Christmas is a TV special, not a movie, but it’s required viewing, and is best in mid-December.
  • Von Ryan’s Express.
  • Bad Santa
  • On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Christmas Day, after dinner.
  • Black Christmas 1974
  • Krampus 2015
  • Better Watch Out 2016
  • Elf,
  • Muppets Xmas Carol,
  • Nightmare Before Christmas,
  • Ghostbusters II.
  • “Trading Places”. Christmas Eve
  • ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 remake = New Year’s Eve
  • cliffhanger
  • home alone
  • The Office Party,
  • Lethal Weapon,
  • Hateful Eight
  • Arthur Christmas.
  • Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
  • Iron Man 3 Spider-Man: Miles Morales (begins on Christmas) Elf
  • Tokyo Godfathers
  • Brazil
  • The remake of Miracle on 34th Street is a fave
  • Edward Scissorhands
  • Lethal Weapon
  • Rocky IV
  • Caste Away
  • Coming to America
  • The Ref
  • Hogfather
  • Silent Night, Deadly Night
  • Silent Night, Deadly Night II
  • Santa Slays
  • The Bishop’s Wife
  • THE DEAD ZONE

Anyway, trying to work my way through them, started on the Dead Zone, which is about the least xmassy (probably more an oct/november film)

WordPress and Comics

Posted on 31st October 2020 by pj

I’ve been using wordpress for … well, as long as there’s been a wordpress. At various times, I’ve attempted to make it work for me to do comics online, and I’ve never really managed it. This time though, it was time to give it the old college try.

Over at channelhex.com – the generic website I set up for doing comics stuff with people, which has been underutilised for some time, I’ve made it the new home of the webcomic Monster Macs by me and John Reppion. Monster Macs will be on patreon, and twitter, but over at channelhex.com it’ll be displayed as a simple webcomic. At some point I’ll look into adopting it to fit the webtoons format, but that’s a fair bit more work, I think.

One of the problems with WordPress is that I like NICE BIG CHUNKY IMAGES – get me to the source of an image as quick as possible, this especially useful on webcomics, but wordpress just absolutely refuses to do so – for reasons best known to itself.

With wordpress though, there’s usually a plugin – and because this website is hosted at Stratgem.host (highly recommended, and fairly cheap) rather than wordpress.com it’s a fairly simple matter to install one (wordpress.com wants you to pay extra for adding plugins)

So I added two plugins, firstly: simple lightbox. This makes any linked artwork display on screen in a maximum resolution on a layer on top, a nice classy way to view art. (And adds navigation when you need it)

Secondly I added the plugin Manga+Press for WordPress. This simple plugin lets you create a comic that you can update and it will archive it for you.

A neat solution, but it still wasn’t displaying the strip large enough and for that, I’m afraid, I had to dig deep deep into the archives of my brain for how wordpress worked.

(And you can nope out of this now – unless it’s relevant to you!)

Essentially manga+press gets you to create new pages in wordpress for the current comic, and it uses two template documents stored deep in the bowels of the plugin directory in order to display that. AND you need to edit these files if you want the thumbnailed image to have a clickable link to the larger image.

The first file you edit is wordpress/wp-content/plugins/mangapress/templates/single-comic.php – this php page simply the comic one page at a time along with a bit of navigation, but I wanted a link to larger image.

Normally this very simple file contains not-much and so I simply added a bit of code to do what I wanted… 

<?php
/**
 * MangaPress
 *
 * @package Manga_Press
 * @subpackage Manga_Press_Templates\Single_Comic
 * @version $Id$
 * @author Jess Green <jgreen@psy-dreamer.com>
 */
?>
<?php mangapress_comic_navigation(); ?>

<div class="mangapress-media-img">
    
 <?php  
    // Grab the url for the full sized image... / PJH Added
     $img_atts = wp_get_attachment_image_src(get_post_thumbnail_id(), 'full'); ?>

    <a href="<?php echo $img_atts[0]; ?>">
    <?php echo wp_get_attachment_image( get_post_thumbnail_id(), $thumbnail_size, false );?>
    </a>
</div>

<?php mangapress_comic_navigation(); ?>

All my little addition does is grabs the url of the full file for the post and creates a link to that.

This is sufficient to give each archived comic page a link to the full image. But, weirdly, not the current page which, oddly, has a slightly different template and as a little harder to figure out (because it’s been years since I’ve dabbled in html, php or wordpress)

You also need to edit the file in the wordpress/wp-content/plugins/mangapress/templates/content/latest-comic.php

And changed it to

<h2 class="mangapress-comic-title">
    <?php the_title(); ?>
</h2>

<div class="mangapress-media-img">
      <a href="<?php  the_post_thumbnail_url(get_the_ID());?>">
          <?php the_post_thumbnail(get_the_ID(), $thumbnail_size);?>
      </a>
</div>
<?php mangapress_comic_navigation(); ?>

<div class="mangapres-entry-content">
  
    <?php the_content(); ?>
 
</div>

And that’s it – not a lot changed (but by crikey it was hard to hunt down exactly what I needed in wordpress tags to get it to do what I wanted, and I’m not convinced there isn’t a better way)

Anyway, that might be of use to some!