Category: Blogging

The Ghost Train

Posted on 24th November 2024 by pj

Well, the play is over – six shows, all done and sold out every night.

I’ve really enjoyed going back to acting (again) – and it has been great fun. It’s a bit of a time sink, but, to be honest, I spend far too much of my time at the drawing table anyway, and this is a fun way to escape it.

What’s next, I dunno – Southbank Playhouse (the am dram club I’ve been a member of since 2016 and who did the show) do three shows a year, so will wait and see what they’ve got lined up next before deciding to audition, but I feel ready for more.

A few members of the cast also do improv comedy, and I think I’m going to take a swing at that too – there’s a local guy who teaches it, and classes start in February.

Anyway, enjoy these photos of me sporting a beard and my actual belly, and not padding as my dad thought.

Old Saul (mid shot)
Old Saul full body shot
Old Saul talking to “Richard”
Richard and Old Saul
Old Saul holding a lamp
Teddie kneels, Charlie holding the door open as old Saul lies dead at the door holding a lamp.
Old Saul arrested!

Anatomy in Perspective, thinking outside the box.

Posted on 7th November 2024 by pj

One of my many (many) drawing difficulties is the dead body lying on floor syndrome. This pushes one thing I think I’m good at (the human body) against another thing I really struggle with (perspective). Perspective isn’t hard, per se, and often my most successful perspective drawings are where I try not to get too rigid with it, but inevitably (especially as I’ve gone digital) I tend to fall in to the everything-is-a-box and can be drawn in perspective. And since the human body is extra hard to draw, that means extra boxes and extra hard perspective.

And that’s sort of useful, but it really steals a lot of fluidity away from the human form. Plus, and I dunno if this is a feature of my brain but it tends to lead to a lot of floating boxes. These notional boxes taking up head, torso, arms and legs, still sort of follow the placement of wherever I put them – rather than, as with the human body – sagging int other space that’s there.

When stuck on this problem I start looking at Geoff Darrow, who’s Hard Boiled is a bible for bodies lying on the ground.

I mean, look at that. Every body is painful reminder of the fact we’re only human flesh bags.

Anyway, staring at this, it seemed to me, the boxes where my problem, and if I could think of another metaphor (it’s not the right word, for what I’m trying to do – a drawing anology?) that might help it might be worth considering and staring and staring and it occurred to me if I thought of the torso as a sack of spuds, that would give me much of the flexibility of a real human body –

I feel the weight of a sack like this, much more than I do a box, and it has a bend to it that the body does that none of my box drawings ever do.

And if I extend the metaphor so instead of a box human we end with a person made of bags of spuds (or other less-norn-irish stuff) we can have a better way to think about the body in perspective, something that can keep the all of the relative lengths of the body parts the same while also making me think about weight and giving me the flexibility to move the body.

Anyway, this has JUST occured to me, so maybe it’s a bad idea, but sometimes I think you need to question your assumptions so you can rethink stuff, especially stuff you’re stuck on.

This month in Comics!

Posted on 16th October 2024 by pj

Here’s what you can find:

This month’s Judge Dredd Megazine, part 1 of the six part Devlin Waugh tale, Two Months Off. In which Devlin takes a well deserved break and as we all know nothing can ever go wrong on holidays, right? RIGHT?

Here’s the pencils and inks from page 1.

Also, coming up, Judge Dredd Case Files 46 – more details here

Finally you should be able to pick up Battle Action this month featuring me and John McCrea on HOOKJAW!

Look at this mad Steve White cover!

I don’t know what I can show you of Hookjaw, I did the scaffolding and plumbing for John and he built this extraordinarily pretty comic.

It did give me a rare chance to pull the old “let’s drop the credits in the water” opportunity

It was, I think, one of the more technically complex things I’ve drawn (lots of sharks in the water, people on boats, and drones in the air…)

That’s not the only shark action I did this month, I also got to draw… GUMS!

Unsure when you’ll see that, but man, that was so much fun to draw!

Anyway, that’s your lot, more as I remember them!

Outside of comics, the rehearsals continue apace. Had forgotten just how much i love acting. Even the sitting around waiting part of acting, I’ve always really loved, so doing that again (while also acting as a prompt for other people’s lines) was a real proper pleasure. I fill so much of my time with DOING that not doing seems like a real luxury.

AND… I have finally completed couch to 5k – the 8 week course, took maybe 15 weeks, and I’ve run two park runs (in the slowest possible time for a human, hitting about 45 minutes both times, though a five/ten minutes of that was me walking).

Now doing a regular Monday/Wednesday/Friday (at least that’s the plan) 4-5k run.

I had to fill in a form asking how much exercise I do and, for the first time in my life, I had to scroll past “NO ACTIVITY” to “THREE-FOUR times per week”

I’m still fat. I can’t outrun that. I need to think about my diet, because I would like to lose some weight too – but feeling pretty smug, going from walking half a k and getting sore legs to regularly running 4k (30+ minutes non stop running) is pretty good. Now just gonna keep consistency for running and slowly get towards a 5k around 30-35 minutes. I’ll be happy with that.

Artists Schools

Posted on 11th September 2024 by pj

I often think there are schools of artists (and by schools I’m talking collective schools of fish rather than people who were actually trained together) – artists who either are influenced by each other, came up contemporaries of each other or share some essential dna (or are maybe simply simpatico) Then you’ll get the occasional artist who will look like they’ve turned up out of the blue and generate a score of people influenced by them, but even they in turn will diverge and pick up different influences until they’re either nothing like that artist or so unique in who they are you can no longer tell their primary influence.

Before I start I want to make it clear, NONE of this is meant in any negative way, this is how artists make things – we draw influence and ingest it and combine it and get something out that we love (which is what Picasso means by “Great artists steal!”) also I’m probably deeply simplifying the influences here, for which I apologise.

So for example (and these are all artists I love) Frank Quitely, self admittedly is hugely influenced by the artist Dudley D Watkins (and many others, but he’s essential in that DNA)

X-Men by Frank Quitely : r/comicbooks
Upcoming Sworders auction of Modern and Contemporary Art sees Dennis the Menace offered alongside Picasso! – downthetubes.net

I think Watkins clarity of story telling, exaggerated features and Claire Ligne style is still very present in Frank’s style.

Frank went on then to influence a bunch of great artists.

Bill Sienkiewicz drew early inspiration from Neal Adams and then every other artist he could swallow into his own art until what he produces is nothing like anyone else alive. Except you’ll occasionally get some Adam’s like rendering on stuff. Adams’ influenced a lot of artists, I suspect you could also draw a family tree from Adams to Alan Davis and those who were influenced by Davis.

Neal Adams Green Lantern #77 Cover Original Art (DC, 1970).... | Lot #91002 | Heritage Auctions

When I was first putting pen to paper, my influences were largely Steve Dillon and Jerry Paris. To a greater or lesser extent I think both artists remain in my art, but as I got older I attempted to grab some broader influences, never all that successfully, but certainly slightly more mindfully (less demure though* this will make no sense as a joke in about a year)

Mignola, Adam Hughes, Kevin Nowlan, I took what I could from them – where I failed to grab those influences that failure is mine rather than their particular genius, and of course, the singular genius that is my pal John McCrea, whose influence is so deeply imbedded I frequently surprise myself by drawing what I can only describe as a McCrea face (First Dredd strip I ever drew, the took a small image of dredd to use in the index and when I looked I thought “Oh wow, for some reason they’ve used a John McCrea drawing in the index”)

Having not really been picking up comics for a while I’m out of the loop on what talent is out there, so I’ve decided to scour around and find artists that I would like my art to sit comfortably with – people I think plough a similar furrow (and I apologise for dragging them in to this, this is purely an exercise in my head) largely because well, it’s good to have a sense of what’s possible.

If you’re an artist, it might be a useful exercise to see what artists out there draw in a way that you can find inspiration in.

What surprises me about this list is that my initial list (Mignola, Hughes, Nowlan) are clean lines, beautiful tight line work and are generally, very controlled.

This list I’d describe, for the most part, as much more … muscular? maybe. Inky? I’m not sure. Any way… my list, in no particular order:

So instantly one common trait they share is all of them, I think, are traditional pen and paper and ink artists (and the ones that aren’t, well, they use a brush)

This may not be my artist school, but it’s one where I think I can learn a lot.

So … I got the part.

Posted on 9th September 2024 by pj
Entirely unexpectedly, and my brain is rattling around thinking of reasons other than the audition that I could have got it (was it a mistake? did everyone else get struck down by a mysterious fly? has the director been replaced by an alien with questionable taste?) Anyway. Quick update, I’m playing Saul in the Ghost Train.

Virtual Reality

Posted on 5th September 2024 by pj

(It’s a clever title, I promise and has nothing to do with VR)

I posted something about this on Bluesky the other day, so if you get a sense of deja vu, it’s from that.

I’ve been online for a long time, starting in the mid 90s, meeting other 2000ad/comic fans on social media of their day newsgroups. Newsgroups were a noticeboard like facility, no direct messaging but with very good threading, and it was largely before the “World Wide Web” – aka the internet as we know it now – was fully formed. Like many things, they ended up getting wrapped into google (specifically google groups – my haunt was alt.comics.2000ad you can probably find proto-me in there under the name paulj)

The rise and rise of social media and online ads, and all things internet has come at a cost, I think – and that cost is the slow decline of real world interactions. Real world opportunities to do things. It’s hard to measure because how do you measure something that may have happened. But it certainly feels real. And the older I get the more real it feels.

As social media now begins a slow but steady decline, a balkanisation, owing largely to the Musk transformation of twitter into X (shaped a bit like a swastika with the hard edges removed) to people heading off for threads, mastodon and bluesky (I went for mastodon, didn’t enjoy it, ended up on blusky, which is still lacking a lot of my mutuals from former days on twitter, but has enough comics folk it’s not a problem)

Part of social media’s problem is that it is now required to start making rather a lot of money. Twitter prior to musk buying it wasn’t making anything, facebook rakes in millions from advertising and its rather brutal shakedown of companies (“Hey! Congrats your latest post was seen by 25 people, if you’d like the 15k people who follow you to see it why not pay!”) and that, as others have said, leads to enshittification (the ongoing creeping crappiness that is created by the need for social media to stop serving its users and start serving mammon)

Anyway, maybe that’s all wrong and what’s really happening is I’m in my fifties and I’m feeling like a lot of what I’ve been doing online has been an enormous waste of time. I enjoyed being on twitter, I thought I was good at it. 15k followers was my upper limit and it never really moved from there, and you begin to realise it was all a bit pointless really.

I’ve been digitally drawing for a few years now, and my early digital work from 7-8 years ago are in files somewhere – maybe an external hard drive. I dunno. My early pen and ink work, from 25 years ago. It’s sitting in a box in my hallway.

I went to a Belfast Comics Jam this month. Maybe me being out of the loop of what’s happening locally means I’ve missed decades of this kind of event, but it certainly feels like, at least in Belfast, every couple of generations some small kindling of interest in comic making happens with enough people that people start to do something about it. We’re a small place though (Belfast had a population of about 345k people in 2022) and that feels like our limiting factor. The Jam was made up with people I’m pretty sure are about two generations younger than me. I felt old and out of place, and they seemed to be having a great time. I didn’t spot that anyone was interested in commercial comics, they all seemed to be just doing it for a bit of fun – which is great! I sat and did some doodling, and then went home. Feeling old.

I also did an audition for a play. People more my age. Acting. It’s been a while. Long term readers of the blog may know I did a few plays from 2016-2017 (Macbeth, The Dead, and Tucaret) and before that I think the last play I’d acted in was around 1997 (most 20 years before). In my twenties I was full of confidence, and bluster and could do anything. (Arguably arrogant, and a dickhead, but still CHARMING!). Then coming back to it in 2016 a lot of that ego had been knocked back. I think I was pretty decent for someone who was just there for the experience of doing it, but man I felt that age gap as a lack of confidence very keenly.

This time, a smaller gap (though bout 7 years yikes!) and my confidence is a busted flush when it comes to acting. My world has shrank so small, my ambitions now to sit in my room and work – and it’s great that I get to do that, but exposing yourself by sitting at a table and reading out lines in front of others.

I had tried auditioning before, last year, for a play and I think I can read out loud dramatically but it required an accent and I just… I just couldn’t muster one. I felt self conscious and that audition was so awful I thought “that’s it. That’s the end line of me ever acting again” and so didn’t think about auditioning again, until my wife suggested I give it another go.

This current play (and I’ll tell you all this on the basis I don’t expect anything to come from the audition at all) is called The Ghost Train, set in a Cornish train station (my wife being a cornish woman, I thought this might be at least some sort of sign I should give it a go). I bought the play and thought I’d practice. But I just couldn’t unlock any of it it in my head (I read a lot of comics scripts, and they’re not dissimilar, except a comic strip I start to see it – it leaps out to me now, this is what happens when you’re 24 years in to a professional career, I suppose) but one character is a broader cornish character and so I gave that a go. In my head. Not out loud. Well, occasionally out loud when no one was about. I mentioned it to a couple of people and when they asked to here, I immediately demurred. Not good. (Anyone who knew me acting in my twenties will struggle to reconcile mr ego then of mr petrified now)

Went to the audtions (I was a bit late) everyone was lovely, especially the people who knew me from the previous plays I’d done there (who were not only lovely but very happy to see me).

I did a couple of line reads. Very nervy. Very … not great. And got to do a cornish character “Do you want him Cornish-ish?” “Yeah that’d be great”. And I don’t know how to best explain what happened next, but my brain said “ok cornish” “yeah I don’t know what that sounds like” and then what came out was… my normal belfast accent. It was like I was trying to will myself to levitate and my feet stubbornly refused to leave the ground. Absolute disaster. I mean no-one could tell the inner turmoil, but having asked if they wanted cornish and having delivered Belfast (And I think I did an ok read, albeit in my own accent) I wouldn’t blame anyone for not making a mental note of me being a genius.

After the reads, I’d yet to get to read the broader cornish character (which was the one I’d actually done some readings of in the house) the director asked around if anyone wanted to audition for any particular role, and reader, let me tell you my hand steadfastly stayed by my side in much the same manner as my accent steadfastly stayed Norn irish.

(And worse, everyone else whod done accent work – and almost everyone had – had all been great, it’s a broad play, so lots of fun broad accents).

Then one of the other people round the table asked to read Saul (the cornish fellow) and we did another read (this time I was given one line, a posh, indignent ladies – because by this stage everyone was being a little goofy) and I read that one line great – nothing Belfast about it. (Well maybe) but it loosened my brain up. That after that, and just before the director called it a day I asked to read Saul.

And this time the accent came. Thick and … well.. west country. But broad and characterful and it doesn’t really matter if I get a part or not, the important point is I gave it a go.

Things coming in Print in 2024

Posted on 25th August 2024 by pj

Man, look it’s hard – SUPER HARD – to keep track of what I’ve got coming up in print, frequently I have no idea. These three things below were drawn over, I think, a two year period – and, of course, they’re all coming out within a month of each other. But anyways…

Batman Brave and the Bold issue 16

Cover date: October 2024

I have a ten page Metropolitan set story about cops and Superman (and what the cops do when superman is off doing super things), written by Jay Faerber and called “First Watch”.

You can see a little preview of one of the other strips right here:

https://comicbookdispatch.com/batman-the-brave-and-the-bold-16-preview

Old Dog: Operations

Cover date: September 2024

Old Dog Operations One-Shot

A 6 pager I wrote and did layouts for with John McCrea finishing, called “Reflections” – Old Dog chases a suspect into a hall of mirrors, and comes face to face with himself.

Once this is in print, I’ll double check with everyone but should be able to put up the script, thumbs, layouts and inks – just so you can see the shine and polish John does on my layouts! Honestly, every time John does this over my layouts firstly I get a thrill that it’s happening, then I see all the little modifications he’s made to make the art really zing and then I spot the big stuff he’s redrawn and I learn so much (and occasionally, I’m either embarrassed or, usually, humbled at how crude my art is compared to his, though I AM doing layouts). On the pat-myself-on-the-back side, my story telling is usually 100% intact, which means I’m good at that bit! But man John really brings it alive.

https://imagecomics.com/comics/releases/old-dog-operations-one-shot

Battle Action 2024

I’ve a strip in one of the issues (not sure which!) Major Eazy, written by Rob Williams. Major Eazy contributes to the invasion of Sicily.

https://shop.treasuryofbritishcomics.com/catalogue/B0064

Here’s Keith Burn’s extraordinary cover for the first issue (I think I might be issue 4? which means the cover date should be … November/December for my issue)

Leopard from Lime Street

There’s a collection of the Leopard from Lime Street, drawn by Me, NICK ROCHE & LAURENT LEFEUVRE and written by SIMON FURMAN (links all to Rebellion’s website of things we’ve done)

I’ve been drawing LOTS of other stuff though some you’ll seen sooner rather than later.

-pj

Tools of the trade: Rotring Isograph

Posted on 18th August 2024 by pj

The Rotring Isograph is a pretty old school architectural drawing pen. It comes in a bunch of sizes, and it was my tool of choice before any professional work came knocking. I’ve had to dig one of the old pens out, actually, because I’ve been digital so long I’ve had to remove some mothballs on this one.

This is the 1.4mm sized pen. Up until going fully digital in the last decade, this was my tool of choice for drawing panel borders and why, even now, my default panel border width is 1.4mm. I think I’ve owned this pen since the late 80s.

Photo of the Rotring Isograph 1.4 pen, the lid and “shroud” for the pen nib have been removed as has the ink refill and the main body.

I’ve exploded it out here so you can see its workings. It’s a refillable pen, and you’re better just using rotring ink (which to the best of my memory isn’t waterfast)

I’ve always loved the chunky line it makes and though it requires a little too much cleaning and care (it’s been sat upright for at least a year and unused and needed a bit of a cleaning, though I didn’t do as thorough a job as I could) but once cleaned it’s pretty rock solid.

If you want the 1.4 line you’ve got to hold it at 90° from the paper to guarantee a steady ink flow. On the other hand if you start playing around you can get a nice chunky ink line with some body to it.

Chunky Hulk Sketch drawn with a Chunky pen

Anyway, I’m digging it out because I want to go and use some old school tools. Many of the tools I use have deteriorated (and look, let’s be honest – so have I) in particular by lovely black erasers that where brilliant for erasing and never leaving smears, somehow the chemicals in them, it turns out, are just not that stable and they’ve sort of melted in to many plastic surfaces they’ve been sat near. Very odd.

Anyway, will let you know how it goes.

August 2024

Posted on 17th August 2024 by pj

So anyway, updates are a bit pathetic round here, arent they?

I can’t honestly say that’ll change, but I keep meaning too.

Now the meta moaning about my minimamal maintenance of this aide memoire is done, on to the action.

Things what I have done.

Couch to 5k – I’ve been doing this off and on for WEEKS! WEEKS! With my mate. It’s been a comedic disaster, our first attempt we got to week 4 day 2 and decided it was too much and went back to redo week 3, then by end of week3 we went back to week 2, then we discovered my mate, who is clearly much much fitter than I and yet was struggling, had to go to hospital to get a gallbladder removed. So we paused, and then when he was well enough we restarted back at week 1.

So it’s been 10 weeks or so, but we’re finally back at week 4 day 2.

The thing is, past a certain age comfort becomes priority and discomfort becomes something to be avoided. So for me, being sweaty and out of breath isn’t comfortable, and so I pull back a bit – but the really is, I suppose, you need to get there so you can be fit enough to bend down to tie your shoes without running out of breath. Similarly, being hungry is my first sign that I need to eat – and I honestly can’t remember the last time I was hungry. I need to learn to sit in discomfort if I want to get fitter and get slimmer.

Definitely Maybe

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is IMG_1704-scaled.jpeg

Yesterday me and my 16 year old went to see Liam Gallagher play in the Boucher road playing fields – on the anniversary tour of Definitely Maybe. Despite not being a full on oasis fan (neither of us) we thought it’d be worth seeing this tour – part of me regrets the fact that in the 90s when Blur and Oasis were big, I was entirely unbothered by concerts and live music. My twenties I’d rather spend it behind a computer screen programming than going to any concerts. But my kid loves music and loves concerts and I’ll sometimes make him jealous of the fact I saw Prince in 1991 (was my first concert, really, age 21, and I think it was my last concert for quite some time, as I just didn’t like concerts). So this seemed like a good one to share.

When Blur and Oasis were doing their direct face off, I was in Milton Keynes and knew a lot of people who were Oasis fans and I never felt I had a lot in common with them – too lary, too testosterone fuled and macho, and so it proved. Drunken blokes, constantly seeing plastic glasses with beers flashing over head like inept fireworks, and one bloke shouting “GET IN! GET IN! GET IN!” (though I think this was a football related joy).

Anyway, me and the kid did not enjoy that aspect of it. Plus we’re both short (me more than him) so finding a spot to see anything is great until people taller than us stand directly in front.

There were three bands playing, Esmeralda Road – a NI band – doing I suppose funky jazz? who it turns out, has members in it, my eldest son knows cus they were a year ahead of him in school, Kasabian who was great actually – bursting with energy, way better than I expected (and also everyone seemed to know their lyrics, except me…) and then Liam Gallagher, who did a lot of singing, not much talking and when he did talk it’s pretty much what you’d expect from Liam Gallagher.

Anyway, that’s my concert review.

On Anthologies

Man, I love anthologies – isn’t that obvious. Anyway, over the last year or so I’ve accidentally picked up “ASIMOV The Early Years” volumes 1, 2 and 3 – I used to love Asimov, so much so, that when I’d sort of exhausted his scifi oeuvre (ok I bounced off Foundation, but man the Caves of Steel! the Robot Stories! and these shorts from the Early Years – all great stuff to adolescent me) I discovered his Black Widowers stories – retired detectives solving mysteries.

I’ve also picked up the recent return of EC Stories, and have now set it my mission to get something in print in one of them. Let’s see how that goes – good to have goals, right?

Also, inspired by them, I’ve decided to try and focus on writing and drawing some shorts – it’ll take forever so don’t get excited, plus I’ll probably forget about it- that I can pull together into my own ec inspired anthology (difference between an ec inspired anthology and a 2000ad inspired one? I think the ec ones are all done in one, whereas 2000ad things have long continuous arcs)

And finally…

John McCrea was around so we took out my new Samnee Artists Edition of the Black Widow book, and let me tell you, John and I just stared at this thing boggle eyed. I will say my enjoyment of the artists editions has massively shoot through the roof since I decided I’d look at these books with John – it is the best way to enjoy them, get a pal around and share them with someone. But also, especially on this Samnee book, Chris is of the “I’ll fix it after I scan it” generation – ie, people (like me and John and more) who do much of their corrections on the computer. Which means there’s very little whiteout, but there is a lot of code on the page to indicate what to do (lines with an X through them to indicate – “ERASE THIS LINE” and arrows pointing at lines, which I think indicates “redraw this bit”) we compared the drawn art to the printed art, and man there’s a lot of small, almost insignificant differences, but differences all the same. Small cutsy cartoony faces, redrawn with slightly more realistic shadow. Light carved out of figures where the figure is entirely in shadow. Nothing major, but highlighted why Samnee is a genius.

Anyway, this afternoon I’m expecting Batman Year 1 Artists Edition, where all the marks are on the page, and McCrea is still in town… so …. let’s see! (will get some pics!)

Looking back

Posted on 14th July 2024 by pj

My son (aged 16) and I (aged er… not telling) opened up one of my boxes of original art, mostly containing stuff over a decade old (and some older) – which sounds like a long time ago and feels like no time at all. This was largely Dept of Monsterology (which I wish had been more of a success than it was), Numbercruncher and some bits and bobs of Dredd.

A couple of things struck me during this deep dive. Some of the art I liked, some I didnt – the mission was to separate good pages which I might be able to sell from bad pages (or at least harder to sell) I’d bin them, in the end of the pile of binable stuff barely made a dent (which isn’t to say I’ll ever sell the others, because the work involved in that would be substantial, and so it’s more likley they’ll sit in this box for another 30 years until my kids are left with the job of disposing of them in some manner, probably in a tip. (It’s ok though, they’re simply the building blocks for the comics that they become)

When I began my comics career, I kept all the art I drew, eventually I had too much and just started keeping finished comic pages (as opposed to the odd nice drawing) then I started only keeping the pages that were published, and even with that I still have a massive pile of artwork (one of the many advantages of going digital is I no longer keep pages and pages of paper)

One of the benefits though of looking through this old stuff is seeing where the quality varies, though I often don’t have a clue why it did – too mcuh confidence? lack of confidence? I don’t know, but some pages are much more amateurish than others – even in the same run of a book. I dunno how much of that is detectable by a non artist, but it feels painfully obvious to me.

Some of my inking is too clunky, even as the drawing is nice. Though often the clunky is better than the other stuff, where the inking feels weed-thin, like a strong gust will blow it away. There was a more explosive energy to a lot of it (but maybe that was the material – Monsterology, especially was a kinetic fun thing). Also, this work is about 10 years into my pro career, so I can’t even blame it on my own growing pains.

Also, I redrew a lot of stuff – I joke about it often, and it’s something I had a reputation for, but it’s much wilder to come face to face with two pages and NOT KNOW WHICH ONE WAS THE FINAL ONE. I mean, why? I used to say (and I still sort of believe it) I can redraw any of my own art and it will be fractionally better – but sometimes those fractionally improvements are so small, and yet at the time felt so important.

That Dept of Monsterology page? I think I drew a third version of that. Ugh.

I dunno if I can draw any lessons from this, I wish I could. I wish I could see exactly why the bad pages were bad and the good pages were good.

It’s not all bad, a lot of the work I look at and think “actually that’s pretty good” and even the weak ones I think – well, the colour probably made it harder to spot that was weaker.

Anyway, putting that box away for another decade might help. We’ll see.