Well, I’m not going to do any drawing tomorrow, but let me tell you – phew, what a month.
In the end, I pencilled 47 pages and inked 49.
It felt good. It breaks down like this:
Week Beginning
Pencils
Inks
2 Jan 2023
12
8
9 Jan 2023
5
11
16 Jan 2023
29
1
23 Jan 2023
1
24
31 Jan 2023 (so far)
0
5
That included two episodes of the Leopard from Lime Street and finishing chapters three and four of Bad Magic (the Skulduggery Pleasant graphic novel written by Derek Landy). Next month I have the final two chapters to complete.
If you’re a patreon member you can see and follow the progress of the work I’ve done over the last month, and I intend to try and keep that format of weekly updates with photos of my work journal.
StreA page from the Leopard from Lime Street in the comic Monster Fun.
I’m feeling pretty good about not only how much work I did, but the quality of it (and idiot might say “fast pages aren’t good pages”, but I’ve always maintained, for me, the opposite is often true – fast pages frequently are ones I’ve felt confident about, slow pages are the ones that I’ve had to labour over).
Last time I hit a burst of speed like this was for the second volume of Dept of Monsterology (and I’m still really happy with a lot of those pages).
One worrying factor is if I DO the same next month, I’ll literally run out of work – but then, I can always start looking for more. Certainly, like an idiot I’ve started to turn over the idea of a commando digest style comic as a possible project. That’ll pass. I’m sure that’ll pass. I think.
Anyway, hope you had a good start to the year, mine has been great!
Acer Asus 4k 27″ Monitor (which I can show 3 roughly print sized pages on across ways) cost: £179 (I think I picked this up as a bargain, it was the last of two of these in curry’s and they were discontinued, the newer one I think was about £230 or something)
Huion 16″ I picked that up for around £300 (Actually it might’ve been £269?) absoloute bargain at either price. I’d buy another of these in a heartbeat.
Even when I had the massive 27″ Cintiq, I’d usually split the screen in two, in the left I’d show the full sized page and on the right I’d show a zoomed in area I was working on. The Huion is capable of the same but there’s not enough real estate there realistically, so instead this double screen set up is perfect.
Both powered by a Mac M1 Mini, the new M2 Mac Mini starts around £649 (8Gb RAm, 256Gb HD) – I’d probably go to the £1049 model (16Gb Ram, 512Gb HD) the mac isn’t upgradeable, and while my current setup is 8Gb/512Gb I do slightly regret not getting more ram (not that it’s ever hampered me, mind you, it runs fast enough for everything I do)
Updated to add: I forgot, the mac doesn’t come with keyboard or mouse, so I’ve a logitech wireless mouse (about £20?) and a really lovely, took-me-ages-to-finally-pull-the-trigger keychron keyboard, that was about £69(!) yes, I know. But it’s super small footprint, the keys are bright white (though it has an irratatingly large selection of how the keyboard lights work – I mean keyboard lights that dance around while you’re using it, I just want them on or off!) and they have a chunky nice feel when you use them. Plus it’s wired OR wireless, I use it wired just to keep the lights on all the time. (And you have three bluetooth connections you can choose from if you like).
Connected to all of that is a Brother DCP6690CW – which I think I bought 10-15 years ago? An A3 scanner/inkjet printer. Anwyay, it was around £260 and I use whatever rubbish ink cartridges I can find cheap and it works great for everything I do – scanning lineart, and printing blueline for inking. (though a more modern one would work a bit nicer on the network and I could print/scan to an iphone) That said I don’t actually ink this way anymore, so I’ve got it on hand JUST IN CASE.
Second printer is a Brother HL2350DCP laser printer, I use this for printing scripts and the odd comic, it’s A4 and can print double sided so good for silly fun projects.
Software wise: Clip Studio Pro Ex ver 1.13 (Latest version 1). There’s a version 2 coming soon, I’m not sure it has any features I want/need, but my old computer head will kick in and I’ll probably upgrade.
For scripts/editing, I’ll usually turn to Pages – which is Apple’s word processor and free with the mac. Word compatible so good enough for most things. Though I am tempted to get Scrivener for comic scripting, which is about £50.
I’ve gone round the houses on twitter, and the quitting of it. Here’s where I am now: my account – while active is only so because it’s a reasonable defence against my username being handed to a pornbot or similar (how many old comics forums are now in the hands of porn websites? I dunno, but don’t look up panelxpixel, it’s depressing)
Anything I post here gets autoposted, I do occasionally browse twitter and when I do, I might RT someone generally if it’s someone looking for help, or trying to drum up an audience for their kickstarter. I’m trying not to engage, but twitter still remains the best way to catch up on the world. BUT – my days of posting bon mots are, I think, over.
I have occasionally posted stuff, but it’s now basically just when I want eyeballs to look at things. I’ve found, like my old boss Davie used to say – I’m as replaceable as a fist in a bucket of water (you remove the fist and the water rapidly fills in the void)
I suspect over time those eyeballs numbers will drop and drop until the point where there really is no point posting there (partly this is the algorithem anyway, and partly I suspect Musk’s push for payment for audience is gonna make it useless)
That all said, my blog has never had more attention from me, and I’ve been averaging three-four pages of pencils per day (I mean yesterday I finished pencilling a page from the previous day, then did two pages of pencils and then did two pages of inks and still went to bed at a reasonable time…) so being mostly off twitter has been generally a net positive in my life – even if I do miss all my old mates who haven’t made the leap to Mastodon.
So, I did the first class – a sort of introductory who-we-are-and-what-our-favourite-films-are, two hour thing.
(For the record, I said my favourite film is The Big Lebowski – which I think it is, probably the film I’ve seen the most, and has bits that make me laugh, though honestly the reason I’m doing a course on short film making is I love things like Inside No 9, Black Mirror and… you know … 2000ad)
The plan is everyone who wants to can pitch an idea and then Larry (who’s running the thing) will pick one (based, more on how well it’ll use everyone’s abilities, as much as the quality of the idea/script)
It’s weird introducing yourself in a group – especially one where odds are you’ll find a comic fan – or at least someone who knows you (Belfast is a small place anyway, so – as was the case here – Larry had heard of me, but from people saying “there’s a guy who lives [redacted] who writes* for 2000ad” (*these things are always a bit garbled)
So last night I sat and had a think and came up with about five ideas for shorts, I dunno if any will get past tomorrow, and they’re all a little nebulous, but here they are:
TANGO
Outside a community centre a husband and wife talk about their past, and their future, and how this tango class is a first step in a new future for him. As he walks haltingly towards the door, we see a sign for the tango night – “Singles Tango Night – widowers welcome” and he turns and says goodbye to his wife, who vanishes.
The Pass
Spide and Jaunty are two not-so-bright belfast hoods who need some money for weed, and decide to mug the first person to come down the back street they’re in. That first person, it turns out… is Gandalf.
There’s a confrontation – Gandalf gets the better of the two idiots and escapes, but as he does so, he drops his pipe.
Spide is disappointed, they got nothing. “‘er, you think he was… you know, Magic…?” Jaunty, drawing from the pipe and in a smokey weed induced haze – “I dunno about him, but this is fucking magic”
The Ticket
A traffic warden and a badly parked driver face off, as the warden is about to place a ticket on the car and the man knows if he can get to the door he can claim he was just leaving. No dialogue and filmed like a spaghetti western, including tumbling crisp packets and close up of sweaty eyes.
Working Stiff
An office style docudrama as a husband and wife are interviewed about their typical day. The husband though, is a monosyllabic zombie. “Oh well, day to day there’s not much difference from before, I mean he’s still mostly in the way, though he is a LOT better with the dog and to be honest his personal hygene isn’t what it was… ” “And your … love life” “Oh, well, now … that IS different… I mean… now he’s always … ” [end credits]
Are you a Northern Irish comics creator looking for a place to connect with others in the industry? The NI Comics Creator Club (or, simply “NIC3“) is a new Google Group that aims to provide a space for people of all ages and skill levels to share information, collaborate, and support each other in the creation of comics. Whether you’re self-publishing, printing, or trying to break into the industry, this group is for you.
Join us at https://groups.google.com/g/ni-comics-creator-club. While the group will be informal at first, as membership grows I plan to establish regular posting. Let’s build a thriving community of comics creators in Northern Ireland together!
I loved twitter, signed up in December 2006, and would be considered a high usage person (or a “saddo”).
Twitter has given me extraordinary experiences that could have only come about because of twitter – most recently, the current gig literally came about because I had a gap and posted on twitter “I need work!”. More on that as I can talk about it.
It was twitter I leaned on when my son was going through periods of anxiety and things were tough, and got to chat to Count Arthur Strong (from the self titled tv show- and extraordinarily funny show) , who sent me some CDs of his radio show to cheer him up, and I sent some comics to him in exchange. (he’s a comic reader!)
I spent a day hanging out with Jonathan Ross, because he saw my tweets about Clip Studio and wanted to learn how to use it.
And I’ve had thousands of small interactions with people I consider heroes that have brightened my day and just generally made my life richer, and even more with people I never knew but who’ve since become friends – I only did a podcast because I asked on twitter if anyone was interested in doing a podcast with me… that was over a decade ago and we had some fun doing that.
Of course it’s not all been amazing. I’ve found myself at the sharp end of a couple of pile ons (I quickly learnt, if you’re gonna reply to a high profile twitter user about politics, do so while wearing a very strong flame retardant suit – and turn off replies, and make your profile private)
And my own use of twitter has frequently adopted doom scrolling as my morning, deeply unhealthy routine.
The rot, for me, really set in pre-Trump, when it was obvious that outrage was becoming the currency, in an attention based world the one furious man is king.
But as long as you steered clear of that world, and avoided using words that could be triggers you could still have a pretty decent time, but it was hard to ignore the fact that the floorboards were starting to rot and moving to a different room in the party was only going to be a short term solution.
Musk’s purchase of twitter is going to be transformational, he likes the stuff about twitter that I consider its flaws and while Jack Dorsey and twitter’s previous owners were also not without their problems, Musk ownership and direction he’s steering the ship in are not something I find myself able to ignore.
So in the spirit of the best way to deal with a narcissist is to not deal with them at all, I’ve deactivate my twitter account. It was coming anyway, this has just been the final nail for me. I’ve watched friends disengage more and more with the platform as the far right successfully hijack language and weaponise kindness and consideration.
So, I will always be available here (or via email pjholden at-symbol gmail.com ) or I’ll be sending out an irregular newsletter via https://www.tinyletter.com/pjholden and while I’m on mastodon (@pauljholden@mastodon.social) and hive (@pauljholden – no idea how to link to it, sorry!) and instagram (@pauljasonholden) it’s likely my taste for social media has soured.
On the plus side it’s given me more time to read books, but I do miss everyone… well, maybe not everyone…
(btw if this turns up on twitter, it’ll be because even if I’ve deactivated my twitter account it *might* reactivate to publish this… we’ll see…)
The Devil’s Hour is a six part Amazon Prime drama about a woman haunted by something, a child who seems to be absoloutly emotionless and a mother who talks to herself. All while Peter Capaldi sits in a prison cell being enigmatic and coy.
Prima facia it’s your standard crime drama with some hints at supernatural, and feels like a british version of True Detective Series 1 – and from this point forward –here be spoilers (after the drawing)
Not a great likeness, but a 15 minute Peter Capaldi painting done in clip studio
Ok, slowly but surely over the episode, through flashbacks, flashforward and things that look like hallucinations it feels like maybe this is a show trying to make us feel the madness of a central character and Capaldi’s serial killer schtick is maybe someone playing with the main characters mind.
It’s a story about a man who lives his life over and over again, each time trying to save more and more people, sometimes by letting the air out of tyre he doesn’t have to rewatch them crash their car because of a tyre blowout as he’d done in another life. Sometimes it’s by catching and killing someone before the kill someone else.
And I’ll be honest, even up to the last few minutes of the last episode I was thinking “wow, how are they gonna turn this around in to a normal crime drama and “it turns out it was all a dream” – and they don’t.
I loved it. Thought it was great, hauntingly supernatural with a time travel twist (though as Nick over on twitter pointed out, he has more or less the exact same powers as Moira McTaggert in Jonathan Hickman’s X Men run – Nick is a writer and has a cracking collection of short stories here.)
Unusually in a show with a single show stopper premise, it was also prepared to expand that out and look at different ramifications that could have. In fact, despite Capaldi being our protaganist it’s almost entirely focused on Lucy Chambers whose emotionless son seems to be able to see these other lives.
Clever premise, not exactly as youd think, and a good show which sort of leaves on ah “what will they do if they get a second series…” and in a way that explains why Chambers is the way she is.
So, in the current arrgh!-what-are-we-all-gonna do panic, people have started to move on to a variety of other social media platforms, making a nest for if twitter just implodes (and honestly, I’m not convinced it wont).
So here’s other places you can find me, but in all honesty, I’m hitting a point where I too old and tired to try and burn up another platform, so I don’t expect these to be anything other than unused life rafts.
Let’s start with instagram (which I have used more than the others)
https://ello.co/pjholden Oh this one is still working! Actually it looks pretty good, artist focused. Unlikely I’ll ever use it. Man, just checked and my earliest notification from it looks like sometime in 2014…
I’m eschewing facebook entirely (at least I’m nothing but a lurker on there, no friends, don’t want any friends, just want to occasionally look at some lovely art by some artists I like)
Twitter has been an absolutely invaluable place for me to find work, and be offered work (current gig, in fact, came about precisely because of twitter) and so, as much as I’ve been tempted to I’m unlikely to delete the account, but I HAVE given up the blue tick of validation, which to be honest, weighed heavily on me for a number of reasons – even pre Musk. It always seemed silly I had a blue tick and a number of much better known writers/artists didn’t have one, and getting one seemed weirdly arbitrary. Post Musk I felt like a lot of the criticism I had of how Musk was handling the *new* blue tick of verification (which isn’t verified beyond, you know, you paying for it) was easy to interpret as me going “but my blue tick is special and so I don’t want anyone else to have one” – removing the tick has made me feel weirdly relieved about criticising what’s going on and lifted a slight weight of whether twitter was a job or not.
My threshold on facebook – that tipping point where I went – NO. NO more. Was when I was looking at some people who wanted to friend me and I was spending days, weeks, months agonising over whether to friend them and I realised it had become an unpaid job, helping facebook gather accurate information about it. It was the unpaid part that got my goat, so it went.
The thoughts of paying twitter to actually help it give me more focused advertising seemed bonkers.
Anyway, blue tick gone now. Faint feeling of relief.
Back to my first love of blogging, maybe. I started blogging before blogs existed. Hand coding entries on a static web page. WordPress is a bit easier. A bit.
(if you’ve got a tick and you want rid of it, the answer is change your username to something else and then change it back and boom! blue tick be gone!)
I’ve pretty much binged all of SAS Rogue Heroes this week, based on the true story of the origins of the SAS. And look, honestly, I’m deeply conflicted, I’m not sure real characters should feature in gung ho whiz bang boys own adventure stories about WARS! (which this show clearly is, even as it also suggests that the characters were not unaffected by what was done by them) and a lot of the real people in real life were … not pleasant, and this arguably strips all the unpleasantness away and leaves very much movie style heroism.
BUT the whole show is a bag of fun. WWII by way of the James Gunn suicide squad, I suppose. Mixing the music of George Formby with Ace of Spades, and the action sequences are visceral fun.
Plus, it did make me pick up the book it was based on and start reading it, so I’m certainly not taking it as read that the people we see on screen are the people they were in real life (and certainly even the books say a lot of these guys were largely unknowable and by all accounts, frequently just awful human beings).
(The real characters in war stories is something Garth Ennis avoids, when he does include them it’s usually as side characters who if they speak usually do so with the actual words attributed to them in historical records)
Anyway, you should check it out if that’s your bag. And I suspect if you’re following me on twitter or blogs or my work at all, it probably is your bag…
Sparked by a (funny) question on the 2000ad message board:
Genuine question – does the lawgiver only eject casings on covers? I’m sure I’ve seen it before om [sic] covers but not that I’ve seen it in stripwork.
As someone with a passing interest in this stuff, I have considered this question. What I’m suggesting isn’t – by any means definitive – but it’s an explanation of why I draw things the way I draw them, but first, let me talk more generally about my approach to Dredd.
I would rather draw something that explains the story and gives an emotional punch more than something that is the actual science of the world. As, I think Russell T Davis said of the Sonic Screwdriver (and I’m both paraphrasing and unsure if he’s the right writer) nobody wants to watch a Doctor Who episode where he spends much of it figuring out how to unlock dozens of doors, so the sonic screwdriver just magically does it.
So let’s start with that stupid/amazing/vision-obscuring/visionary helmet. Designed by Carlos Ezquerra to look like an executioner’s hood, and refined and refined over the years by list of the giants of British Comics, including Mike McMahon, Brian Bolland, Steve Dillon, Brendan McCarthy, and you know, nearly every UK british artist has had a go.
What’s striking about Dredd’s helmet is just how malleable it is, how open to interpretation and how iconic each artist can make it. Here’s a fun link, Steve Green takes a bunch of Dreddworld helmet designs and renders them in 3d, including Brendan McCarthy outrageously flared helmet, which on first glance I’d’ve said you could never make in 3d, but it works really well.
Personally my helmet design probably comes mostly from Steve Dillon, but also – and hold on to your Dredd-hats – partly from the Stallone Dredd movie.
From Dillon the general Dredd shape, from Stallone movie various frills, but also an opening mechanisim at the back, as well as a little extra padding at the back of the neck…
Elements, I’ve always presumed that came from practicalities of wearing the damn thing.
I’ve banged on about my approach to Dredd’s uniform already, so if you’re interested, that is here.
Now, as to the science, I tend to think of Dredd’s helmet as delivering information directly to Dredd’s eyes/ears, essentially super-vision, a Heads up display – possibly fed from tiny cameras around the head (If you’ve ever used an oculus rift in its camera mode, you’ll see how cool that can look), literal eyes in the back of his head. Linked to his gun too, so it would be fairly possible for him to turn his head fractionally, but have accurate vision 180deg behind him and to fire at a target without missing.
I’d also imagine that helmet would reduce/increase the information feed to Dredd depending on what’s happening. Dredd on a bike gets a HUD that’s different to Dredd on the street. Dredd with gun out, will get information about targets that he can acquire and suggesions for ammo type. Once the gun is ‘hot’ it’ll switch to a simpler mode.
Vision augmented, and the same will be true of his auditory input. (And this may even have some sort of neural link directly to him (this, by the way, almost all falls under the heading of “fan wank” – ie, 90% of readers won’t care, but some – SOME LIKE ME – get really excited about shit like this)
NOW! On to the gun…
Here’s how I see it: Dredd’s gun is essentially a super sophisticated 3d printer. It holds multiple ingredients for building multiple types of bullet.
The device is primed (usually through spoken command, though it will default to smartly identifying the type of bullet) theory: maybe cadets are trained to shout out the bullet type so other Judges can have a better situational awareness. Dredd shouts “Armour piercing”? everyone else goes with Armour Piercing.
(Again, this is very much fan wank – the real reason Dredd shouts out the bullet type is so the reader knows what Dredd has fired…)
Why the shells? Well, the real reason is: they look cool. The in-my-head reason is that some of the raw material (but not all) is held in cartridges, and so they eject after they’re spent.
The question I have is, is it like my colour printer : where if you don’t have yellow ink you can’t (for some reason) print black and white. If you lack ingredient X can you still use bullet Y that doesn’t use it, or is the gun out of ammo?
I suspect some ingredients are common to all bullet types (projectile types? is bullet the right word?)
But that’s it. Now you can just ignore all of this, because, let’s face it, it’s just my fanciful head canon, that I’m just as liable to ignore myself if there’s a more interesting way to draw it.
The one thing I can’t explain, is why the Judge Eagle would sometimes flip on to the wrong shoulder…
UPDATE: I’ve turned on comments if you want to pop your own “How does the science of Dredd work” theory in here…
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