Category: Blogging

Hope you had a good Christmas, mine involved a lot of driving and eating and cooking and eating and some sleeping. Pretty pretty good. The main event, for me, was the receipt of the fantastically large Extremity Signature Edition by Daniel Warren Johnson, this baby will get poured over when John McCrea next visits…

I’m 55 today. I’ve been blogging on this here internet since 1999. Over 35 years of nonsense. It turns out, a lot of drivel used in some small part of help LLMs churn out ever more drivel.

How’d this year go for you? The two significant things for me, was finally completing the couch to 5k thing and then doing sundry park runs. My running is still a stop start affair with spaces of walking (not always, I’d managed to get to a point where I could do a 32minute 5k but you miss a week and it’s a bit of a hard reset).

Plan in the coming year is to get more consistent with the running and bring that time down.

The other significant thing was a return to acting – I’ve had an off again/on again relationship with performing from a young age, acting in primary school (being told to audition for a professional play, bottling it through nerves) acting in secondary then putting it away until uni (at age 23) and doing a bunch of plays (getting nominated for an Irish Student Drama award for Best Supporting Actor) and then giving it up altogether around age 27, then coming back to it in 2016 age 46. Did a few plays, really enjoyed it, but events over took and covid and then coming back to it this year. I felt differently about it. I’m more prepared to embrace it and dive headlong in to it. I feel about it, much the way I felt about drawing comics when I was in my twenties. I loved my day job, but drawing was great fun to do and allowed a recharge. Then when drawing became my day job, there was nothing to let met recharge.

I think if I spend the next 20 years doing. bit of acting, having fun on stage, that’s not a bad way to think about the future.

Plus, to be honest, I have been feeling … burnt out a bit with drawing. A slow dawning realisation that I will never be doing anything other than drawing at a table (and as much as I love that, the thoughts of doing nothing but that until you die lingers like a prison sentence) so having – as my mate Jim often says “a third space” – somewhere that isn’t home and isn’t work, but is just for me, that has really helped.

Forward in the year, more auditions (no guarantee I’ll get any part, but even if I don’t I’ll volunteer in some way, having been away from the local am dram and come back to it, the welcome back has been lovely) but ALSO, starting in January I’ll be doing an Improv comedy class. And I’m sort of determined to make something happen there. I don’t know what, I don’t know how, and it will never rise above hobby, but I want to do something.

I’ve spent 20 years of my life working in IT, and drawing, then 20 years just drawing, and the next 20 I’d like to spend it drawing and doing fun stuff on stage with people.

Have a great one, I’ll be back with a count of presents, a birthday blog and I think some new year’s resolution. I don’t want to preempt what I’d like to say as we roll from the old year into the new, but there’s things I’m optimistic about outside of work, and that’s fired me up a bit about work too. Turns out if you do something other than the one job all the time then you can get a bit of a renewed lease on that work.

Thanks for sticking with me, if you’re on the blog ever. Let’s see if I can get a bit more life into this place next year, eh.

I’m sending this out today, but really my Christmas spirit is somewhat lacking, given my wife has been down with the flu for a week.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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:

• Nick Derrington.
• Nick Klein
• Dan Panosian
• Riley Rossmo
• Ryan Stegman 
• Danny Earls 
• Kyle Holtz
• Matt Smith (aka Barbarian Lord)
• Dani
• Ryann Ottley

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.