I generally don’t do the crunch thing. That is: last minute deadline work ’til you drop.

Partly it’s because I’ve always been pretty fast – whether that’s down to my art style or laziness I guess we’ll never know. I have a set tempo I work at and that’s it. My lines come out at that speed.

My speed also doesn’t reflect the quality of the work – that’s an entirely separate metric, I’ve done amazing work fast and terrible work slowly (in fact, more often than not that’s how it goes). I’ve also often poured much more effort in to work that is later described as lazy than work which people are just aghast at the detail (that work I usually do on the phone on autopilot – as long as I have the structural points right the rest is just a kind of intense phone doodle).

Actually, let me address the elephant in the room that you won’t be able to see because, really, it’s my particular elephant.

If you describe an artist as lazy without knowing them or their work ethic and spending the time with them when they did the work – then you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.

If you describe an artist as only putting a few hours or minutes in to a page without knowing exactly how much time they spent on the work – then you’re showing yourself as entirely ignorant and again you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.

If you call an artist lazy because he’s drawn 45 pages in a month and you’ve not seen those pages so don’t actually know how good or bad he is? You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.

(And guess what? those two months where I drew 49 and then 45 pages? some of the best work of my career. The following month, where I drew 6 pages? some of the worst.)

I’ve drawn three amazing pages in one day, and drawn some frightful pages that have taken upwards of 10 days to complete.

Maybe for some it’s a very simple equation of time=effort=quality. But for most artists it’s really not.

God, I wish it was that simple though.

The reality is, when you make your money drawing comics, sometimes your “talent” is the ability to finish a page even though you hate every line you draw.

Sometimes the talent is just keeping your head down and moving on even when every part of you screams “I hate myself, why am I doing this?”

It’s not fun, but that’s the job.

Anyway, my point.

I crunched last night, worked til 3am, on stuff which I quite like actually (TANKS! EXPLOSIONS! WWII!) and now I’m just a hollow husk of a man, no point doing anything. Too tired.

I won’t be crunching again.

There’s an idea that seems so blindingly obvious that I can’t shake off notion that it’s happening and I’m just not aware of it. And it’s this:

A comic shop loot crate service.

Simply, you subscribe for a monthly direct debit cost (say £20) and the comic shop sends you a box full of things – mostly comic things, but things inspired by your choices rather than being specific to what you’ve asked for.

So, for example, you might fill in an online form that asks “Favourite Genre” / “Artist” / “Writer” and, the shop will then fill you a box full of stuff they choose, and every month the box changes (but with some caveats)

It could contain a number of current title runs based on your choice of character/genre/publisher.

It could contain some back issue runs (based on your choices/relationship to the current set of main titles you’re receiving)

It might even contain the odd graphic novel.

Or possibly some tat.

And, hey, every twelve months you’ve been subscribed maybe you’d get a free longbox to put all of those comics in!

But it would be mostly about comics.

For me, I’d be subbing based on comic creators. So, Mike Mignola might end up getting me few months of Hellboy, or BPRD then switch it out for something else and every so often I’d be pleasantly surprised to find an old Mignola strip that I hadn’t expected in there.

Or I’d add Alan Moore to my list of creators I’m interested in, maybe that would end up with a sub to whatever Alan is currently doing, plus a sideways link to other horror genres and maybe some small press surprises.

The idea would be, comic shops get a fixed income and a potential way to get rid of back issue comics that are still great comics but are just sitting in bins, subscribers know how much they’re paying per month, and get a box full of comics – some they’re expecting, and some they’re not, but that they’d still enjoy.

Of course, I’m not stupid, this would be risk and a headache for any store that’s doing something like this, but it’s a service I’d love to see and one I’d actually subscribe to.

If you’ve any thoughts, leave a comment – does this exist? Is it a stupid idea? is it plainly genius but no-one is doing it? LET ME KNOW!

Fire and ice.

Trying to figure out the best way to publish comics/multiple images. Patreon seems to limit image posts to a single image – which is a bit of a pain. So here’s an attempt at getting a comic on here. While we’re in the soft launch period stuff like this will be available to everyone, once we (ie me) get are (er.. my) act together we’ll (me’ll) put this kind of thing on one of the paid tiers.

My twitter experience is starting to reach the point where … well, it has no point. Like most, it turns out, I’ll tolerant a large proportion of a service I use being full of nazis*, as long as it can still do something FOR ME, but really lately it’s felt like it doesn’t do anything for me at all.

(*I know, I know, this paints me in a terrible light, in my defence, I’m not the only one, and it’s not like I follow any of them)

Having inverted the point of blue ticks (previously: sought after awards for notable/famous people, now anyone daft enough to pay so they too can have their replies highlighted on a trending topic showing just how much they’ve missed the point) to the stage where previously you might have spotted a blue tick and thought “Oh, someone worth following” to now “Oh, someone I should block” and having toyed with the idea of preventing the block from functioning. Gradually, I’ve found that the promise of a 15,000 people reach (roughly my follower count) really only ever reaches at most 100 people. To be fair, this was always true, twitter’s potential and actual was always a bit of a ratio and lately I’ve started to see people who I’d’ve followed finding themselves blocked from the ultimate free speech platform for … criticising the ultimate free speech platform.

I’ve now locked my twitter account. It’s still there, but like cutting the blood supply to a skin tag in order to kill it, it might take some time for my account to die and in the meantime I’m likely to keep prodding and poking it in a sort of morbid fascination of what exactly will happen there.

---

I’ve been trying to get out and walk a bit lately, as you’ll be unsurprised to find out my physical fitness is just dreadful. I was always fairly fit (working from 14, lugging giant boxes around I’d never walk any where I couldn’t run to) and never needed to consciously exercise because it was all happening at work, but it turns out if I don’t consciously get up and walk my body is more than happy to turn into sludge.

So me and my pal Jim have been going for short walks (his fitness is way way ahead of mine) First couple of weeks have been… not great. Muscles in my calf have quite hurt, which is a weird experience – as I still myself fit for walking, much in the way I still consider myself in my twenties – a sad dream belied instantly by looking in the mirror.

Using the apple health app on my phone I’m aiming for a modest 250calories of exercise per day – it’s about 5k steps (I know, I know, it’s nothing) and I don’t always get there. But I should.

---

I’m wondering if we’ve finally reached peak enshiffication yet? That term, coined by Corey Docterow to mean the process where a company ends up sucking first its users dry then its suppliers until the point is reached where users no longer want to use it but they’re trapped, having built a web of important connections trapping them and their valuable data in the hands of the enshittified company.

Docterow’s naming it is useful – in most fictional magic naming something means having a power over it, and I think there’s a logic to that. You can’t discuss something if it’s too nebulous for a conversation about it to mean anything. But you give it a name and the name sticks then suddenly EVERYONE knows what you mean. Now you can go: “Wow, google sure sucks now” “Yup – it’s been enshittified”.

What I’m wondering is will this became a bulwark for companies to stop that from happening. So many companies can be profitable and work well, but they’ve sold their souls to shareholders who want to maximise every single penny at the expense of the customers, other businesses and ultimately the company itself. In the 80s that kind of hedge fund management/vulture capitalism was the bad guy, and now it’s sort of lauded, we need to think of it as a deeply unhealthy thing when someone swoops in a says “I’m going to make this company a unicorn to maximise value” at least now someone can say “sure, if we can avoid enshittification”.

---

It is something I think about a lot, but it’s depressing how much more important who is President of America is than who is Prime Minister of Great Britain.

It’s coming time to update my passport, and genuinely I’m considering getting an Irish one. I’ve never ever considered it before, but it makes a lot of sense from a purely practical standpoint. Possibly I’ll end up with both. We’ll see.

---

So a couple of years ago now, I got a quick little scan done on my kidneys (the problem wasn’t there, and in the end the actual reason for it turned out to be nothing) which turned up a small – 3cm or so – mysterious growth on my left kidney … cancer! but cancer with a little tiny c. Almost cancer with a subscript c. Caught so early as to be no threat to anything. Anyway, eventually they operated (they froze it off with needles, so couldnt even call it an operation) and it was fine. So now I get a check up once a year for the next 10 years. If they hadn’t caught it by accident, chances are they’d’ve picked it up in a decade when it might have been too late (once a cancer like that shows symptoms then you’re body has it all over the place). Any way, wen’t off to a “hub” today to get my bloods done (quick needle, couple of millileters of liquid gold later and that was it). But, it was in a thing I’d never heard of, so I was “What does Phlebotomy mean?” “Oh it’s just the word that means this is where we take blood”. Ok.

Tomorrow, in my old man is falling apart adventure, emergency dentist appointment – because man have I got a sore tooth. More tomorrow!

This month has seen me hit the books (well, hit the sketchbooks). Around Christmas time, John McCrea and I studiously poured ourselves over the Chris Samnee Daredevil artists edition (a review) (there’s a new Samnee artists edition coming- the Black Widow book). Samnee makes everything look so simple it very neatly fools you into thinking “Hey I could do this”. So at the start of the month, I decided I’d stop relying so much on the computer and start drawing on paper (I mean, it’s the same job, but paper is so much nicer to work with, but also so bloody awkward).

To that end, I started doing layouts that were about four times my normal layout size, with an eye on making them my pencils – I’ve drawn about 40 pages that way (nothing I can show yet, I’m afraid). Notably, this is waaaay slower than my regular layouts because it’s not just silly notes to self, these are the pages. But also notably, the plan was to scan these and print them and use them as pencils and… nope. Not so much. Samnee can do it, I can’t. So instead I’ve printed them as used them as the basis for pencils. Now, arguably that might make my pencils a little better, and, consequently the inks might be also a little better and every minor improvement I’ll take.

Parallel to this approach, and because it’s been a while, my non-digital inking – is a bit all over the place. I’ve used every tool I have (and many of them are a bit rusty from lack of attention over the past few years). Back when I started comics, I drew everything with a pilot v5 techpoint, then when I got my first gig I sort of panicked myself into learning to use a brush – it was, after all, the tool proper comics artists use – I redrew the same Dredd strip three or four times, each time with a brush and getting slightly better with it.

Of course, I could never master the brush of kings (Winsor & Newtown Series 7 Sable Brush) but I did get quite adept at the W&N Sapphire 10/0 Rigging Brush (a tiny tiny brush, which felt very much like a very fin marker to me – back when I could both see it well and control it decently)

Time and technology move on, most artists these days (non-digtial at least) use combinations of brush pens and pigment pens. Brush for filling black and giving brushy lines (feathering, it’s called feathering Paul), and pigment for most of the drawing (but a lot of it requires moving between tools to get proper life from them) and pens have been what I’ve been doing, but I’m still finding them unfulfilling. So, my back up plan is nibbed pens but ideally, a brush. It feels like I’m starting from scratch in inking. But that’s ok, I think one of the problems with being an artists with some years under you is you work off so many assumptions (just to get the work out there) that you don’t get a chance to relearn tools. Anyway, that’s what I’ve been doing. Relearning things, and seeing if there are better ways to do stuff. One interesting thing between when I started (back in 2001) and now, is the prevalence of manga tools for pencilling and inking. Nibbed pens where hard to get back then but now a G Nip is one click away.

---

Since drafting the above, I had a minor panic and started digitally inking for a thing, traditional inking was proving much slower than I’d become with digitals, and so I hit the Huion/Clip Studio to ink some pages. I wish I hadn’t. Nothing wrong with the art (though of course, I will look at it later and think “I wish I’d drawn hat differently). Then a wobble, then I started pencilling on paper again, and I’m back to tradional inkss. Maybe. We’ll see.

---

I’d quite like a to find a plug in for a wordpress blog that, as you get further and further away from your last update the blog reflects that – maybe growing cobwebs over the banners, or having some sort of count down since last update going. Maybe that will shift me into doing more updates.

I know something has to give. What is the point of a blog? It existed before twitter, it’ll exist after. But what am I doing with it? (that said, I’m pretty sure this was the exact same lament I was making 20+ years ago)

It feels like the trivial thoughts should just go to social media, and then you’re left with the important stuff, but really, what’s that important? almost nothing. Just some goofy notes on what’s going here.

Anyway, here’s an update for whatever people are still travelling the highways and byways of the big old blogosphere.

---

Spent one night this last week trying to figure out the programming language Python – why? mid life crises? a sudden panic that comics may not be forever and maybe I should relearn some old skills? or just me getting in touch with one of the things I used to love as a kid – programming.

I will say this, programming, when you get in the zone, remains one of the most zen like things you can do – it feels deeply comfortable, like meditation (I imagine. Any time I try and meditate I fall asleep) and without any of the self doubt that drawing throws up. If I can’t do something in python it feels like “well, I just need to see how it’s done, and then I can do that” in drawing if I can’t do something it feels like “well, ok, I see how they do it, but I haven’t a clue”.

I don’t expect this to be more than a passing fancy, but there it is. I at least now have been able to do a “Hello World” in a nice gui in python.

(I have some not-unreasonable aim to make a text adventure, or at least write the code to do one. and maybe a calculator for page sizes for clip studio, so you can pump in a page size “US Comics” and get the correct clip studio dimensions at various levels of magnification – don’t hold your breath though, I’m more likely to grow a second head as complete any python project)