Quick update, I did a fun little short radio interview on BBC Radio Ulster this morning, and you should be able to hear it here (it’s about 15 minutes in)
My old webserver company has become a new webserver company, hopefully they’ll keep the website up and running as smoothly as the old one did, and if you’re interested in hosting your own website (I pay around a fiver a month and honestly, it’s a bargain to have a wordpress install that’s all my own – with no ads, or features you “pay for”) anyway, the people hosting it now are:
And, if like some pals who had a google account with multiple emails, you should consider moving to these guys as a fiver a month will get you unlimited email addresses (instead of googles new crazy pricing per email address for business)
On the personal front, mad busy, can’t talk about it. Went to Disneyland paris last week – an emergency holiday (wife was taking son, but she took vertigo meaning she couldn’t do any rides with him, so I had to get an emergency passport and book a flight and hotel so it wasn’t a massive waste of money on a miserable holiday for the two of them) but came home to do a work catchup and somehow wife now has covid. She’s not had it lucky, that’s for sure. (Quite apart from marrying me)
Anyway, now the website is in a new home, let’s see if we can’t figure out what to do with the place, eh?
Hello chums, I’m going to recap a thing I’ve touched on here before, the idea of the two things plan.
Prior to covid I started this new process where I would chop my day up into doing two things. I mean not small things, not like take-a-bin-out, but things I consider cognitively hard; two pages of inks, two pages of pencils, two chunks of layouts (a chunk being roughly 12 pages, so two chunks is layouts for an entire issue).
Of course, it’s a tiny amount of things, but if you can do it consistently, literally every day of the week, every week of the year, you’ll end up – if the two things are pencils/inks of a page – drawing 365 pages of comics. Obviously, it’ll not always work out like that, so I try and aim for 25 pages per month. You’ll need down days of course, and sometimes one of the things will be pay the tax man (because man, that is a cognitive load just filling that form in and hitting send on the tax)
The reason for doing this is because I can be over productive sometimes, and find, even as I draw three, four, five pages (of pencils or inks) in a day that I end the day frustrated that I haven’t done enough. That somehow, drawing twice as much as an average artist just isn’t going to cut it. So I have to set myself a hard limit.
Once I hit those two things, fair enough if I’ve time I can start doing other stuff. And, again, prior to covid, I managed to find the time to write, blog and draw for fun (my sketch books can be pretty shallow things because I save my drawing for work)
Anyway, along comes covid and all plans hit the fans and suddenly I’m trying to do as much work as is humanly possible. An entirely unsustainable thing. Part of the problem with being fast is you miss a day or two (because the world gets in your way) and suddenly you go from being on time to 8 pages behind.
Now, this week, owing to the fact that my wife and youngest son are heading off to Disneyland Paris, I was looking forward to getting caught up on a serious amount of work. I’d be staying at home. BUT disaster struck and my wife came down with vertigo, necessitating a change of plans on my part – so now I’m also heading to Paris to ride the many many rides my son assures me he wants to go on.
So I needed to rethink my work and so I decided, counter intuitively it was no use just ploughing through it and trying to hurry it up and see where I landed, I needed to break it down day by day. Initially I figured I could chop it up in to two pages a day, and somewhere in that time draw the extra left over two pages (so some days would be a three pager) and that started well, until I discovered that I’d accidentally calculated the time left as one day longer because I forgot there wasn’t a 31st of June. Recalibrated, it turned out ok, because I’d started and already done three pages a day for most of it. But doing so really made me sit down and start thinking; two is the way to go.
The past year I’ve really sort of relaxed the reigns when it comes to knowing what work I’m doing, nothing has had deadlines which has meant I’ve just been doing work as and when I can. Didn’t work today? doesn’t matter. No deadlines.
But, of course, it does matter, because no one is paying me for my days off.
So, work scheduled up to the 30th the on hols for a a week, where, of course, I will be working. Nothing too hard though. Probably two pages of very very rough pencils per day…
Went to Enniskillen – a fun show that’s usually got a couple of fantastic guests (and the usual hangers on, like me) Alan Davis, Mike McMahon and Cam Kennedy were all there, and in great form. Picked up a Dredd sketch off Mike, a page from Alan Davis and a Cam Kennedy sketch book (I wish I had the budget to buy one of Cam’s extraordinary colour pages he had with him, just amazingly beautiful stuff). Getting an Alan Davis page is a bit of a thrill, as I’ve been a huge fan of his since I was a kid – from Harry 20 on the Highrock onwards.
I’ve been rearranging my studio to make room for a modest drawing desk so I can do some pen and ink stuff once again (because I do miss paper)
A couple of weeks ago, I decided I’d quite like to do a ‘zine. If for no other reason than I want to pour a little bit of energy into a pointless endeavour. It’s called VHS, and the aim is to take one film and make a ‘zine around it, as if I just saw it for the first time and it fired up my imagination just like it would’ve done when I was 12 years old. Partly it’s just an excuse to draw something without worrying about whether it’s any good, and partly because something I quite miss from childhood is that run up to seeing an exciting movie and being obsessed with it for ages. The excitement of seeing, for example, Clash of the Titans, the summer waiting for it and then it coming out (in the same year as Indiana Jones, but it’s Clash I remember because I was obsessed with Harryhousen movies) and then thinking about nothing but it for months until a different movie came out. Now, I find myself seeing a trailer and thinking “oh yeah, I’d quite like to see that” and then blinking and it’s 15 years later and the movie has long been on streaming platforms and I just can’t find the time to watch ‘em.
The other point, I think, is to be able to sit in the world of the movie a bit longer than just the couple of hours it takes to watch it. To explore the language and design work of a film, and just play with whatever ideas it inspires.
Anyway, noble goals. Part of me wishes I had the time/patience to do it, and part of me thinks “nope, this is going no where” But I throw the idea out to you, gentle reader – I think it’s a really good way to think about watching a film, and pulling all the deliciousness of it out from the celluloid and into the grey cells.
Finally, my webserver has given me notice of eviction (well, they’re closing and told me I need to find a new host). Maybe time to rethink how online I want my presence. I’ve been paying for websites for two decades and I know over that time I’ve had a number of people who’ve enjoyed my nonsense, but I’m feeling more and more like the old timer who decides to withdraw from the city and live in the woods with a bear.
Look, to reassure you, I will be finding a new home. I’m just not sure if I should start from blank or not.
Was at Lawless this weekend, despite going for 10 years (TEN! I no longer understand time) this was my first year. And honestly it was a hoot.
The hotel for the show was the same hotel used by one of the early 00s Bristol conventions, I used to go to, and I was suddenly transported back 20 years to 2004 and looking at old photos of the last show I’d been there at (I think I’ve been to subsequent bristol shows, but not that particular hotel)
There was a weird element of Sapphire and Steel as my brain flashed back twenty years to many of the same people and then back to the present, like I’d stayed at the some hotel convention in 2004 went to the bar turned round and everyone was suddenly twenty years older except me (obviously)
When I did turn up in 2004, I was determined to take photos (because I’d been going to those shows for a few years and generally didn’t bother) and so photos I took, and mostly my memories were of Stu – Stewart Crofts-Perkins, WR Logan, who was my first contact in Dredd fandom way back in the nineties (and who we lost in 2016)- here’s a post from 2019 (with photos from the 2004 Bristol con) when I decided I should go to more cons, oh what a poor idiot, had no idea a pandemic was coming…
Anyway, Friday was a weirdly mixed emotional night, on the plus side it was great to see some people I haven’t seen in over a decade (Robbie Morrison among them) but you couldn’t help but think of the people gone.
Still, the show itself was great fun, it is 2000ad specific. (And as I am prone to telling people at other comic shows, sure no-one knows me here, but for a certain kind of middle aged man, I’m like catnip). Found myself drawing lots of Chimpskys (the hyper intelligent Bonobo from 2000ad I co-created with Kenneth Neiman) and talking to Brian Bolland about drawing monkeys (albeit briefly).
Had to head home early on Sunday, rushed off early only to find myself waiting on an plane for hours longer than I should have done as it was running very late.
Feel like a reset is in order. I’ve been spending so long in the moment, by which I mean neither keeping track of the work I’ve done nor scheduling it in any meaningful way, simply trying to draw as much as I can when I can. This has lead, I think to burnout (if not total burnout at least early symptoms). No past, no future, only constant never ending present.
Sometimes the work will stop, every line feels wrong or you find yourself battling with the idea of drawing itself.
Iv’e taken a couple of steps. Step one, restart with the pomodoros, this is usually enough to stop my brain thinking I’ve spent hours on half a panel when in fact it’s only been five minutes.
Secondly, I’ve restarted noting what work I’ve done in a diary. I always fall off that, but I need to try not to.
And thirdly, I’ve decided to try and reset back to do doing TWO things per day. Two pages of pencils or two pages of inks. If I can do that without pause it’ll still represent 30 pages (or so) per month. Way ahead of what I need to do.
That’s largely a nominal goal, if I do more, brill. If I do less, that’s fine. But once I hit my goal I’m allowing myself to relax and not worry about any more work for the day. That’s where I’ve really been punishing myself, do more, do more, do more and you never did enough.
In other news, I’ve been regularly walking with my pal Jim Lavery most days for the past few months and then a couple of weeks ago we started couch to 5k together. He’s a lot fitter than me, but I’m now fitter than I was a few weeks ago. Oddly, now we run Mon/Wed/Fri I find myself not going for walks on the days between and that’s not so good. Will try and correct for that.
I dunno if I can guarantee I’ll blog more, I feel like I’ve spent the last twenty years alternating between promising I’ll blog more and apologising for blogging less.
I’ve been off twitter for a while, and there’s a big part of me feeling sort of done with all social media, and actually a lot of online stuff. Thinking more and more about retirement, it’s a good decade plus off, but I never remember it preoccupying my thoughts any where near as much. True to most comic artists, my retirement will likely look less like someone not working and more like someone who will inevitably die at the drawing board. But then, maybe I can keep getting better and better at drawing and – like Hokasai said “When I am 80 you will see real progress”.
The paperclip problem, except none of the paperclips can actually be used to hold paper together, and only sort of look like a paperclip from a distance and people are telling you how brilliant the paperclips will be eventually even though they never seem to get any better.
I’m quoting myself, which is TERRIBLE, TERRIBLE form. But I’m largely doing it to see if I can get “Press This” working again, a feature I used for years on word press that seemed to have slowly disappeared. It allows me to blog on whatever website I’m looking at, straight in to my blog.
Anyway if this works, maybe I’ll tempt me into more reliable blogging.
Slightly big oopsy doo there, I connected the blog to my patreon and did not anticipate 150 blog posts coming across. Yikes. Apologies if you were thinking I’d gone post crazy. Don’t think it’ll happen again (but then I didn’t think it would happen in the first place)
My studio is located facing the outwards at the front of the house, behind me my bedroom and my son’s room. So I heared what I thought was my son come up the stairs when the following took place:
me: “hello Thomas”
Wife: “It’s not thomas, it’s me”
Me: “Oh. I’m heading out at 3 for a walk with Jim”
Wife: “3? that’s earlier than you thought”
me (thinking) “that’s a weird way to respond to that”
me “Yeah. just the usual”
wife “Do you need any money?”
me(thinking) “Why on earth would she offer me money?”
Turns out she was having a conversation with Thomas (also going out at 3) and I couldn’t hear him, but I could hear her.
Speaking of Thomas, owing to the appearance of the Sidemen on netflix (which I keep mispronouncing to sound like spider-men) we’ve resubbed to netflix. So we’re cancelling paramount+.
One in one out for streaming for me from now on. Though even when you do cancel you end up with around a couple of weeks of streaming on credit (easily the best thing apple ever did for subscriptions, and I’m quite sure no company would’ve ever let you do that – have you every tried to cancel an adobe subscription early? madness)
Our tv watching is so diffuse now we’re all watching different things, nobody watches anything together, and honestly, it makes me a little sad. Sitting watching quantum leap with my brothers was one of my fav things growing up as a teen. Or star trek, even. Shared watching was great.
Another fine example of technology doesn’t always make things better.
(Have decided to try and burn through the last series of Star Trek Discovery, which I liked the first series of, and it got more and more weirdly convoluted each series. Star Trek: Brave New Worlds is a banger though)
One of the things that became obviously harder over the pandemic was the need to cook two meals every single day for a family of four. I suppose we could get away with sandwiches at lunch but even then you’re still cooking at least seven meals a week, 31 meals a month and 365 meals a year (and double those numbers of a sandwich isn’t going to cut it). Obviously, It can’t always be spag bol. Though it frequently is.
And I actually enjoy cooking, but it’s time consuming. One great thing about being in the new house (over a year now) is getting the new kitchen complete with dishwasher. It’s only small, and we frequently need to run it twice a day, and god knows what that’s doing to our electric prices, but suddenly a big chunk of the dishwashing burden is removed, and you have more time to cook.
So, to that end I’ve been trying to do one from-scratch side dish every so often with a regular meal, and seeing what new things I can do. At the moment I’ve had a right old go at Hassleback potatoes (almost no hassle at all and so pretty!) and potato dauphinoise, a little more work, and need some basic ingredients, but actually pretty simple and very nice, especially with steak (or chicken … or any big chunky main thing)
Anyway I grabbed both recipes from the bbc here: https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/dauphinoise-potatoes (I find about 250 cream and 250 milk with three large potatoes does three/four people comfortably) and https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/hasselback-potatoes (it calls for garlic and rosemary, I just did mine with a bit of butter and again a big ol’ baked potato) and actually if you’re doing a nice dinner, I do recommend doing both kinds of potatoes cus it’s pretty easy and dead impressive…
And despite spending two days traditional paper and ink, I’ve gone back to digital. This constant oscillation between these two states annoys me more than you’ll ever know. I lack the space to give over to both fully, and even traditional is tight for space, but it’s so much more satisfying to draw a GOOD line with ink, and yet I’ve got to face facts, I think my digital inking is better than my pen and ink…
Forgive me father, it has been two weeks since my last confession.
This sometimes (no, I mean, this frequently) happens. My record keeping gets sloppy as I slow down and things are a little less structured and more chaotic.
Let’s take the 13/March – 19/March Dred Judge Dredd strip for Rob Williams, episode 1 (of 8) decided to go analogue with the inking of this… that was, it turns out, a bad call. Pure greed on my part. I can sell Dredd pages. Unfortunately I’m just no longer equiped (literally, physically and mentally) to draw on paper any more. I just wasn’t happy with the results. I was getting no-as-good-results drawn much slower and for no real positive outcomes. So, two pages in I abandoned it and went back to digital. Monday/Tuesday I managed to do two pages, like cleaving the art out of stone. One page of inks per day. Then Wednesday I inked three pages digitally. Thu I finished it. But then had a whole bunch of corrections to do to Bad Magic – a hat band that had got progressivly larger as the strip went on, needed to be pulled back a bit.
Thursday I had three scripts on my table and I had no idea which way to proceed. So I planned out which I’d do, then abandoned that plan immediately, and instead started on another episode of the Leopard from Lime Street.
I think I have two more episodes of that to draw then it’s on hiatus, sadly.
Outside of that all, we had a wall yanked down and replaced with a fence. I bought a house and this is the start of me trying to make it my own. I’ve wanted to do this since we bought the place, and as my wife likes to remind me, I was out chatting to those guys all the time (I thought they enjoyed it! I just needed the company)
Nice to watch people who know what they’re doing, do stuff I know I’m not even remotely capable of!
WE BUILT THAT WALL!
Anyway, also had visitors to the house that week or so too. So in all bit chaotic.
Total completed that week: Inks 1 page, pencils 9 pages.
The next week – 20/March/23, the builders were still building and I’d got in to a slow, but reliable pattern. Really I operate on a two page thing per day minimum. Two pages of pencils or two page of inks. That way I can reasonably say I can do one completed page per week, and I can predict about six completed pages per week. OF COURSE, I’d like to go faster (and often do) but also life throws the odd random factor in your face and you’ve gotta dodge it.
This week has just been me finishing the Leopard from Lime street, and starting a new 10 pager for Ahoy with Paul Cornell. Featuring goofy cryptids.
I didn’t find time this week, though I should have (and might do so tonight) to sketch out some character designs for this image pitch I’m planning on (which I’ve had to scale back from 16 pages – a full story – to doing six pages – a “pitch” amount, because… well… time really)
This week’s work was Inks 6 and pencils 9.
This month to date, I’ve drawn 37 pages of inks and 21 pages of pencils. Which… wow, slightly surprised by.
Year to date: 107 pages inks, 115 pages of pencils.
Putting me on course for 428(ish) pages this year, if I can keep it up. (I don’t think I can)
Anyway, next week’s plans are: finish this ahoy strip, and see if I can find time to do this Image pitch and then MORE DREDD.
(SHH! TELL NO ONE… I have a story about the below first page – which won’t see print for blooming ages, so please don’t spread this around – but I’ll tell it to you all next week.)
Dentist today. Possible one of the most painful visits I’ve ever had to the dentist (marginally beating the last visit when I popped in to replace a bit of a filling that had popped out only for the dentist to announce I needed a tooth removed, that is a day that will live long in infamy)
AND WORSE! Nothing got done. It was literally too painful. So we’re giving it a day or two to rest before proceeding.
My dentist is also one of the ones going private. I find myself entirely frustrated about this, firstly I genuinely believe in the NHS and am willing to pay more for the damn thing to work properly, second of all, sure sometimes I can afford the odd private dental treatment, but I’m a freelancer, at some point I’ll be faced with needing dental work and not be able to afford the damn thing, and finally – and this is particuarly frustrating, now I have to be an expert on what detnal plans are best for me. I don’t want to know the difference between dentplan and bupa dentists. I DON’T CARE. I just, occasionally, want a dentist.
(Back on friday)
My patreon is still sort of functioning, obviously I haven’t updated it in some time, and I feel a bit guilty about that, but I’ve decided to consider it a gift from some people to me to keep you know… internetting. (I’ve given people lots of opportunities to cancel!) There’s a bit of a chunk of change once a year in there that I can download to my bank account (not serious money, but enough to make the effort worth it) and I don’t like locking my posts behind a paywall, though I do like having somewhere I can consider off-the-record (for advance looks and so on)
I’ve just linked the patreon to the blog, not sure how that will work out, we’ll see I suppose.
What does this mean to you? absolutely nothing. If you wanna sign up for my patreon, I can guarantee you nothing beyond my forgetting it exists and then suddenly remembering, but equally I can guarantee as little as you might think it is, in this perilous freelance life once a year it is actually make a quantifiable difference.
Youngest son had a sleepover, well, more of a talk-over last night. First time he’s hosted. Kept wife up all night from yakking, so may also be the last time for that.
The radio DJ Steve Wright died, he was a fixture on radio in the UK since the 80s, and as a spotty teen working my first day job in the mid-to-late 80s, he was the background noise of every single afternoon in work.
The shop, Botanic Computer Centre, was a family owned/run shop that started as a radio hardware shop, in 1949 (originally called Ideal Radio)- run by two brothers Bert and Davey (though actually Davey did a lot of the legwork, it was almost certianly Bert’s shop). By the time I started they were old men, in their 60s and Davey, who spent a surprising amount of time driving me from job to job (we’d sell Amstrad PCW8256s and PCW9512s – giant beasts of machines, with integral crt monitors, and often with vast daisy wheel style printers) and in the process he’d turn on the radio, hear Steve Wright, then complain about “bloody yaya music” and turn it to radio ulster (which was more talk radio)
I find the older I get the more I hear music and think “that sounds like bloody yaya music”.
Me at work in the sister shop to Botanic – A&F Corner. I suspect this was actually around early 90s?
It’s weird when a company you worked for for so long no longer exists, especially an IT company, but then Bert – a very smart man, with – even in to his lates 60s/70s was fascinated by tech (I remember us looking at the images from the first rover on mars) always thought the internet might be a flash in the pan.
I’m gonna preface all of this with I am NOT a lawyer, and copyright law, especially, is one where frequently the winner is the person in court with the most money. So below is largely my opinion…
Copyright isn’t a god given right – there’s no mention of it in the bible and humanity flourished specifically because it didn’t have IP laws of any sort for a long long time (someone had a good idea? we’d take it and build on it).
But it was really the invention of the printing press and the ability to mechanically copy materials that set up the start of what we come to know as copyright – the first true copyright laws are called the Statute of Anne (enacted in 1710) and set copyright as 14 years with a possible extension of 14 years by either the publisher who the materials were licensed to or the author.
Ostensibly the point was to ensure the copyright holder could make money for their material, for a limited time and they would be encouraged to produce new material.
Of course over time copyright has gotten longer and longer, and with some notable exceptions, authors will generally had that copyright over to a publisher so they are no longer the owners of the copyright and the publisher can get all the extended goodness of owning it. Different countries cover it in different ways, the UK mostly follows the US lead. The US lead mostly follows what Sonny (from Sonny and Cher) and the Disney corporation want (mad, isn’t it?).
The French, btw, are the most friendly to authors on this front – their droit d’auteur laws developed sort of in parallel to the UK laws prevent an author signing copyright over to anyone.
The US has a thing called Fair Use (in the UK our equivalent is called Fair Dealing), the idea being that as long as you only use a piece of the material (for example reproducing an image for review) that’s fine. There are other areas of exceptions (the UK allows you to use large amounts of material for research for non-profit – in theory how google uses it’s data, as it’s commercialised is outside of this, but we all used to find google useful so it’s been largely left alone, plus who could afford to fight them on this?).
AI companies are leaning on fair use and fair dealing for the bulk of what they do – swallowing up great gobs of copyright material and then regenerating something “new” from the result. Like chopping up every word in every book ever written and then mixing it with a user’s prompt to get a whole new set of words.
And there’s lots and lots of reasons why they might be right and they might be wrong – if the produced work doesn’t even have a faint echo of any of the material? If it was trained on out of copyright work? If the prompt was say much bigger than the generated output? And i’m sure there’s a whole bunch of other exceptions, and there’s so much money to be had on the AI front that companies will spend a fortune fighting you in court.
BUT, I think what we’ve all forgotten is what the point of copyright was in the first place – a way to give people the ability to earn a living from their creations.
On that front AI holds the keys to a much more dystopian world.
We’ve already started to see Ai’s trained on Ai output that amounts to gibberish, it still needs new inputs, but ai as it stands is likely to hollow out the middle or low ends of the creative industries. Students who would learn the basic craft of drawing might end up training on ai prompt generation and never actually learn good image composition, designers who would be expected to ply their trade on consumer advertising before they’d get a sniff of working at apple, might lose work/income because ai design software can do work that is just-good-enough. We’re in danger of an air lock in the plumbing of the creative industries.
Even without creative stuff AI tools can still be powerful (and useful) but I think governments have to recognise that they don’t want to hollow out the creative arts, and while ai fanboys can argue the bit out as to whether what they’re doing falls under copyright fair use or not, the fact remains it might be good for them, but it’s not good for creatives.
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