Notes from the drawing board
A brand new Monkey Arms secret origin comic! Thomas (now aged 14) has been working on this for yonks, issue 1 is officially launching at the Enniskillen Comic Festival (assuming the prints arrive on time!) Selling for £5 per issue – BUT you can download and read issue 1 right now!
And, if you’re feeling so inclined, you can paypal Thomas whatever money you like here:
I’ve lately returned to pencilling pages in a notebook. For the past… I dunno … 300 pages? I’ve pencilled and inked directly on to the computer, and I think it’s some of the best work I’ve done, BUT I feel like I’m missing something from not touching paper. Not sure what exactly, it may well be all that I’m missing is the satisfaction of feeling pencils touch paper.
So I bought a couple of Sakura drawing pads (roughly A4 in size) they’ve replaced my previous love Canson 180 because… well, they’re a decent amount cheaper (£11 vs an astonishing £27 on amazon – price correct at time of writing, and honestly I’m shook it’s that much – brexit? supply problems? amazon algorithem going mad? dunno – it was about £18 before and I’m sure you can find it that price still)
The Sakura isn’t bad, the paper is pretty nice, the book lays reasonably flat (the canson lays totally flat, though the paper is rougher).
I’ve used it to pencil the most recent work I’ve done, so far there’s about 35 pages of pencilled comics in there – it’s nice to have and look at too. Pencils are generally a nice medium. Though I use HB leads, I seem to have two grades of HB leads – a cheap and expensive set and they are different on the paper. Very odd.
I’ll generally pencil, scan them in to clip studio and then resize and rejig the panels – so there’s still a bit more work to do with them than simply pencilling directly into the computer, but the bg advantage is I can pencil anywhere.
I would LOVE to return to old fashioned inking, particuarlyl with a brush, but I now lack the studio space to do that, but it’s a dream, innit (Plus everytime I did ink traditionally, it’s not long before I run back to the computer with my tail between my legs). I no longer have the eyesight, the subtly in the hand or the patience to work with traditional inking media. Real pity.
I think time can correct that – I taught myself to ink with a brush with my first pro comics gig for 2000ad, in 2000 – largely by stubbornly refusing to give up (and computer inking wasn’t an option, plus I’d convinced myself brush inking was the way pros worked – it’s not, they use whatever makes a mark)
I’ll post some pencils as the work sees print.
I’ve been drawing digitally for a long time (ask me how long ? well, gee, I’d say my first digital drawings where from about 1984 when I literally had to write my own program to draw digitally)
For decades the only game in town for graphic tablet displays was the Wacom Cintiq, so much so, that Cintiq became shorthand for that very grade of device – a digital screen you could draw on. Unlike a tablet (a relative johnny-come-lately to digital drawing) the Cintiq’s require a computer and even then they can be horrifically expensive.
My first Cintiq was a Wacom Cintiq 12 XW. A 12″ Display. I remember drawing my first tentative lines on it and thinking “I wonder if these will look digital?” what I found was that no-of course they don’t look digital. If anything Cintiqs (and devices like them) did tend to make you a little lazier in how you draw a line, so easy to just scribble, and scribble the wrong size. So you have to learn discipline.
My second Cintiq was a Wacom Cintiq 27″ QHD – a massive beast of a thing, 27″ of display and what seems like 12″ of border around that display. But, it’s been utterly invaluable. As my eyesight deteriorates (in that way that it will to most of us as age takes us away from ourselves little by little) the ability to zoom in on a page, and work at a higher than print quality has been great. The resolution of the 27″ is about 110dpi, for comparison the ipad pro 12″ is 260dpi (approx) and laser printers print at 300dpi(roughly) so good enough, but not as high as print, obviously.
Lately I’ve been staying with my brother as a part time carer (he doesn’t need much care, really, just company) and I needed a mobile studio setup. Having moved my desktop over to an M1 Mac Mini some time ago (it’s both tiny and utterly silent, I love it – it replaced a Mac Mini that made a lot of noise, which in turn that replaced a brute of a desktop computer that sounded like a 747 taking off – never underestimate how much silence is worth) my computer was a simple matter of bringing with me, but the 27″ attached to a legotron arm was just not gonna be lifted and fit where I needed to. So, initially I tried my ipad pro as a mobile studio – but I was having trouble with the sensor (I’ve since had it replaced) and as a stop gap I bought the Huion 16″ HD, it was listed on Amazon as £349 and I thought – well, what do I have to lose.
Let me tell you, I have never been as impressed with a piece of computer equipment as much as this in a long time (really I’d say the only things that impressed me more on first sight have been the various apple first-of-their-kind devices).
This 16″ screen (which does have a 1″ border around all sides, except the left which is about 2.5″ but includes some buttons you can program as you see fit) is about 140dpi – a marked improvement on the Cintiq 27″ and the price! THE PRICE!
I ordered this on the Saturday, it was priced at £349, on Tuesday when checking for the delivery I’d spotted the price had changed to £299 and I thought – I’m not having that. Phoned amazon support asking for the price difference, they told me to cancel and reorder, so I did.
Look, if you’re a professional comic artist and you work digitally, you’ll know how important it is to keep file backups, well, let me go one further – if you rely entirely on digital art – it’s important to have system backups. What’s your plan if the cintiq breaks?
I cannot recommend the Huion highly enough, for the price it’s a steal. The build quality is fantastic, the driver, on the mac, is pretty simple (download some software, run it and boom it works)
And if you’re not a professional and you’ve a half decent computer setup, it’s a bargain as a first digital tablet for drawing.
I would say this screen doesn’t feature touch (and frankly, touch is a pain, every device with touch I’ve tried to disable the touch aspect of it.)
The pen is battery less – previously, presumbly due to patents wacom held, Huoin pens used a battery. It lacks the eraser button that is common on the cintiq pen, but it’s largely the same look and feel.
And if you’re plugging into a M1 Mac mini you only need one cable, a USB-C.
Honestly I can’t get over it for the price.
The quality is such that I’m genuinely thinking of just ditching the 27″ cintiq (which, tbh is so big that I have my keyboard to the left and my mouse to the right and I have to shift my body towards either device if I want to use them)
Either that, or splashing out a bit and buying the 24″ Huion 4k, which looks absolutely the bees knees.
Affiliate links on Amazon:
Huion 16″ (as of this writing the price is £330 LESS a £50 voucher, making it £280)
Huion 24″ 4k (Currently £1299)
Wacom Cintiq 27″ QHD has now been superseded, so I suppose the closest is the Wacom Cintiq Pro 24 Touch. Which is priced, on Wacom’s website, as £2,399.
Last week, 2000ad prog 2268 had my debut as a writer. Roots is a “Terror Tale” – a four page horror story. Partially inspired by Junjo Ito’s deeply disquiting horror comics, it tells a story of what how smothering a mother’s love can be.
I’ve talked a fair bit about it all over the place notably on Down the Tubes with John Freeman and Mathew Badham.
This blog started in 2000, though I’d had a webpresence as far back as about ’97 – the blog began life around 2000, specifically to talk about my breaking in to comics. As it happened my career began pretty much the following week, but there’s a slightly untold story of my posting a future shock idea to the alt.comics.2000ad newsgroup that was picked up by Andy Diggle who offered to buy it from me. I balls it up in the writing and it never went anywhere.
So here we are, at last, I’m a 2000ad script droid. Well, for that one week. I have a bunch of other story ideas (all futureshock/terrortale/time twister type stuff) which I just need to find the time to develop into a full script. Will I ever do that? I want to, but I’m gonna be pretty busy for a long time.
This week will also see issue 1 of the Lion and the Eagle in comic shops, really excited to see the reaction. There are some bits of the art that make me cringe – but, early reaction to the preview suggests everyone has missed those bits and are focussing on all the good bits – so that’s handy.
I’ve also finally totally finished Soul Plumber (had finished it, but then needed to help John out on a couple more pages). All done.
Should be finishing the art on the Lion and the Eagle and then, I feel like I’m facing a new chapter as an artist. Well see if anyone agrees.
Hey, been a fab month – finishing off Soul Plumber (all done now!) hopefully you’ll see issue 5 soon (it’s been hit by world wide shipping delays apparently). Then the following month issue 6.
Also this month, issue 1 of The Lion and the Eagle, hope you like it – I’m pretty happy how this turned out and Garth Ennis writes a barnstormer of a comic.
Got some work to do to finish it up, but should get that done soon, after that I’ve a couple of prior commitments (a short 8 pages and a long one 40 pages!) then I’ll be snuffling around like one of those truffle pigs looking for work. Possibly. It’s also possible work will come to me.
Kind of looking forward to seeing what this year brings in terms of work.
Crikey, lot of stuff coming up this year. Some of the dates are approx or subject to change, because, well, isn’t everything subject to change in the plague-ridden twenties?
(If you’re curious – I certainly am this amounts to about 212 previously unpublished pages this year – and the year ain’t over by any means!)
ISSUE #4 OF SOUL PLUMBER
Lion and the Eagle #3 Date / Cover TBC
Lion and the Eagle #4 Date / Cover TBC
I tend to make new year’s resolutions every year, they don’t hold for long, but I like to do them. The last couple of years, unsurprisingly, my resolutions have largely been of the form “just do something”
Also, there’s a tiny part of me feels resolutions are a young man’s game – when you’ve yet to be beaten down by the world with it’s harsh reality and your inability to meld it to the shape you really want. BUT… but… I still like the discipline.
Last year, I noted:
Next Year?
Get more organised. Stay organised. Try not to work all the time (or, rather try to limit work + worrying about work to 5 days out of seven). Keep on top of the boring tax stuff and invoices.
How’d I do? as expected I stayed organised for a few weeks of every month, I spectacularly failed to try not to work all the time – ultimately I’ve ended up working more this year than any years previously (normally I’ll find myself with gaps between projects, this year I’ve found myself with projects piling on other projects)
Keep on top of boring tax stuff and invoices? er… invoices, check (uhm except for two invoices I’ve just realised I should have done mid Dec). Boring tax stuff? Nope. All last minute as usual. Try better next year Paul, for God’s sake.
So, this year:
Keep better notes on work done – I wanna make sure I know how much work Ive done at the end of a year – I’ve been trying to do that, and been reasonable happy with the results, but it’s a slog. I suspect a good system might be at the start of every month to put a post it note on my cintiq, tick off page after page and then stick it in a book when it’s done. We’ll see.
I’d like to get some more work at DC – not entirely sure how to turn that into a resolution though, I mean I’ve no control over whether they give me work, but I can control how often I badger them with updates/looking for work emails. So I should probably do that. I think I’ve a gained a bunch of good will at DC stepping up doing Soul Plumber and helping it stay on track.
More Chimpsky – that’s just a question of me badgering Ken Neimand and hoping 2000Ad have a window. That’s a pretty nice place to be.
Write some more – I wrote a couple of shorts, both had great feedback/reactions, and I’d like to do more. I’ve a bunch of half written horror shorts for pitching to 2000ad and I need to polish one of those up (having had one already accepted, I’m hoping that’s not just a fluke/a mercy commission). Maybe when I’ve put Lion and the Eagle and Soul Plumber both to bed.
Creator Owned work! I’d like to do something Creator owned at Image. I mean, it’d be from a standing start if it were to happen, but even getting a pitch seriously considered at Image would be good this year (and this is not me writing/drawing something, purely art).
Avoid COVID – man alive, I’m doing my best. Triple jabbed (and I’ll take a fourth, fifth and sixth if they’re offering) I do not want covid. At this point it’s the fear of Long Covid and what it can do, I’ve seen how other’s have been impacted by it and that is something I just don’t want.
AND… you know… that might be enough. Come back next year and we’ll see how far any of those things have progressed.
Have a great New Year’s Eve and an even better New Year!
As I write this, it’s my birthday. One of those non-numbers, the important ones are everything up until 18, then 21, then 25, then 30 then you’re counting in 10s – 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, and then 85, 90, 91, 92, and up it goes year on year until you’re dead. Happening as it does in the nothing-time between Christmas and New Year.
Anyway, I’m 52 this year. New 52, if you’re a DC Comics reader that’ll mean something, if you’re not it won’t. It’s a non-year. Only thing of significence I can say is I think I started blogging around ’99, aged 29, and broke in to comics about 2001, so this has been the the 20th year as a professional, but I left my day job in about 2008 – so have spent far more of my adult life as a working comic professional than not – but it’s weird, your brain sort of locks in things you know about yourself as “facts” when you’re in your twenties, so in my head I’m still Paul-wants-to-draw-comics (I’m also still a 32” waste, and fit enough to run everywhere a normal person would walk – sadly none of those things are true any more). Some deep part of me hasn’t fully accepted that this is my day job now and that no-one will take it away from me (though they might just refuse to give me more work…)
This past year though, has been pretty good to me, I started off not sure how it was gonna go, I think I’d started the drawing of the Lion and the Eagle, but I’d also got some 2000ad work out of the way, having done two covers that came out last year (doesn’t sound like much, but I’ve only really drawn about 6 covers for 2000ad in my career…!)
Chimpsky and Dept K came out, two series co-created by me – and ran concurrently in 2000ad for a while (this is beginning to be the story of my life, work I do running at the same time and effectively competing with itself, if you think it’s bad now, wait til the new year – oh boy!)
Now Dept K and Chimpsky are both Dreddworld tales, but it’s still cool to have actually made something that hopefully will have long term legs in 2000ad. Next stop I’d like something wholly new, but that’s a hard task to master.
Most of the year’s has been spent drawing Lion and the Eagle, and, 120 pages in I’ve still 40 pages to go. But I’ve also found something at DC – wasn’t the plan at all, and my fortune comes from my good friend John McCrea’s misfortune, so it’s tough to enjoy the opportunity knowing it’s born out of that, but John got hit by long covid – he’s fine, but one of the major effects of long covid seems to be a sort of brain fog that can make working/thinking hard – and contrary to rumours, drawing comics DOES require a certain amount of brain power. John was still able to ink, but had found pencilling slower going, so asked me to help, slowly this has gone from a couple of pages of pencils to peniclling and inking most of the book – again wasn’t the plan (John is getting better and back to work though). In the plus column, it’s meant this year I’ve had Soul Plumber in print, and hopefully it’ll be collected next year. It’s a fun book. It’s also helped me show DC that I’m a man with a pencil and an ability to both do the job and do it in a timely manner, something I’m hoping will lead to more opportunities down the line.
Other things of real note: I finally wrote and sent a script to 2000ad, one quick rewrite later it was commissioned and I drew it. (It’s a short four page horror tale) I’d also worked up about half a dozen other ideas to varying levels of fit-and-finish. I’d like to do more writing, but honestly, the past three months has been the busiest of my life for drawing. I also wrote a fun little one page horror script that may lead to something fun eventually, we’ll see.
I wish I could put a number on how many pages I’ve drawn this year, I THINK it’s in the 200-300 realm. I know next year there should be about 240 pages of my work in print, albeit I still have to draw about 80 of them (and I’ve drawn about 100 of them in the past three months) I feel like it’s safe to say I’ve drawn 200+ pages of comics this past year. A good haul, I’ve never had a year with as much work. I’m hoping I can keep the pace, and find projects rather than have projects stumble on me.
On a personal note, I’ve let the blog slide, I have a patreon, I’ve also let slide a bit – I’ve used it to post stuff I’m currently doing, since so much of it has to be kept generally hidden until launch, so patreon is a good way to just … talk about it.
I still would like to get blogging back on track and twitter – well, every year I feel like this I suppose – but twitter feels like it’s evolving beyond being something I enjoy, but I’ve said that before and stayed with it. Anyway, last dregs of birthday gone now. New Year’s Eve coming up, and I’ve said it before, it’s easily my favourite time of the year. New beginnings, things you’ve done wrong you can get right, new habits can form, you can believe you can change (even if you can’t actually change).
You lucky, lucky people! Thomas (now aged) has been hard at work on his new Christmas special, and so you get to spend time with all your favs, Mean Dean, Space Dogs, Time Thief and more!
Hope you enjoy it!
(Thomas would very much like you to buy his first volume from amazon!)
Artist PJ Holden will draw DC HORROR PRESENTS SOUL PLUMBER #3 with John McCrea this December.
The press release follows:
Media Release — DC HORROR PRESENTS: SOUL PLUMBER ramps up the stakes, and starts to assemble a new horror… and a human body. Blorp, a strange creature with an unsettling affinity for the human race has been unleashed upon an unsuspecting world, and to try and blend in is putting together a human body for itself. This invader from beyond the veil has one mission…but what is it? And how can Edgar and Elk put a stop to it?
The grimy, gross body horror and humor of SOUL PLUMBER has hit a chord with its audience of comic book fans who grew up on PREACHER and THE INVISIBLES:
“A wild action-horror hybrid with an unhinged premise and even crazier characters.” – CBR
“It seems a little strange to call a horror comic rooted in religion and populated by uncomfortable characters with art and colors that make one feel like they need to wash their hands after reading them a masterpiece… but that’s what Soul Plumber is.” –Comicbook.com
“Soul Plumber #1 is a grimy, hilarious, and deceptively smart opening to this blasphemous mini-series.” – Monkeys Fighting Robots
Now, in Issue #3, on sale December 7th, artist PJ Holden (JUDGE DREDD) steps up with John McCrea to draw the scuzzy, scummy world of SOUL PLUMBER. DC is excited to preview inks from the upcoming issue:
