JBFCSS2 Preview

yes here he is! a picture from the hotly anticipated Jolly Bear and Fun Coconut Summer Special Number 2, which will be on sale in less than 2 weeks(!) how exciting. I'd better get my arse in gear. same old same old eh? another comic convention, another mad rush to finish. i'm not gonna spoil it, but terrible things happen, as you can see, i've done it a bit painty, like.

clock i made

here's the thing i made for my lovely girlfriend's birthday. a clock with a lion on it. it's based on an antique we saw that julie liked, but as i think you'll agree, it's much better.

pastel pic yeah

quiet week. another nice picture. yes thats right i did do a painting based on this pic too. i found the image on the ground in walthamstow thanks for asking.

another piccy

Here's another one from the vaults. i didnt like it when i did it but i think its pretty good.
Meanwhile in comics, JBFCSS2 is gathering pace like a large round cheese rolling down a steep hill, and the preparations for the all new web funnies during October continue. 'citing.

more never before seen art

here's a couple of things i did a few years ago, and havent seen myself since we moved to bristol. the footballer is from my pastel phase, and the flamencos are coloured pencil (i was completely gay for coloured pencils at one stage) both pics are A1 size. i do want to get rid of a lot of my old art and prints and that but i dont want to chuck them for the sake of it, so i would be prepared to virtually give stuff away as long as it went to a good home. please contact me if you are interested.

tv guide drawings

here's a couple of pictures from an old sketchbook. i used tv guides as reference material quite a lot due to their universality and their pointlessness. i used to enjoy this coloured pencil technique, and i'll post a few more things over next week. i've been a bit nostalgic about being a proper artist and i actually started a new painting yesterday.

banal pig's art appreciation society part 1

have a look at this picture pig lovers, what a beauty! we saw it in a charity shop in wells yesterday and had to "snap" it (didnt buy it though). It is an image full of enigma and symbolism. for example, the little bear is obviously out of his depth, standing still in a world which is always on the move; he clutches a pencil- a creative soul? and his bow tie shows he is part of a society which values appearance over personality. he looks up to show he has aspirations- will he ever achieve them? - i hope so.

also, who wears a yellow skirt, red tights and green high heels? -i like it.

banal pig web funnies up and running!

there'll be no new work up until October probably, but i'm just getting the format right by putting old stuff on there, so any feedback would be appreciated- here it is! there will be a large fanfare etc when new (and exclusive) work goes up, featuring all new Crying Dog, Benny the Ballbag (from Cat Dad) Truculent Strawberry and a new recurring feature tentatively named "Office Funniez", which is a bit of a pastiche of the usual office based rubbish humour we see so much of. Gareth "Man Man" Van Brookes will also hopefully be contributing from time to time, so it should be non-terrible.

Ah, New Look

Yes i thought i'd have a bit of a facelift, so to speak. What do you think? it matches my myspace too. i am however a bit chagrined that i cant put a nice little picture as a header-i've tried loads of times but it just keeps loading forever with that irritating exclamation mark in a triangle.

Banal Pig Pics Brand New

New Banal Pig Pics from my entry to the observer jonathan cape thingy. these are three of the 20 panels of the strip, and i was pretty happy with it in the end, but the copy of it from my buttocks printer didnt do it loads of justice. edit- its come out a bit weird, but i like the composition on the cut off one- click on it for full image.

more daily pig

i'm quite excited at the moment about doing a newspaper style strip as discussed previously, and i've been doing a bit of research into web comics and the like. i have noticed a few things which i intensely dislike about certain strips, and as a result have come up with a few rules about how i am going to do my strip-
1- no geeky referencing of esoteric things (e.g. computer games, the internet in general, obscure films etc)
2- no boring continuous strips- the whole point is that its contained in 3 panels, if a story needs to be continued i'll do it as one long strip somewhere else
3- no "based on a true story" disclaimers

thats all ive got for now, but i might think of more.

i'm also going to stop moaning about the small press scene, and my terrible lot in life and concentrate on doing my own thing. i cant do anything about people i dont know, and i just need to keep making good entertaining work and see what happens. feel free to give me some shit if you hear me moaning.


peace and love and good vibrations pig lovers!

the daily pig

further to yesterday's post, i've been thinking about newspaper strips, and more specifically how rubbish they are. any city dwellers out there who have to endure a tedious commute to work will no doubt be aware of the Metro newspaper's singularly unfunny strip "nemi" (is it even meant to be funny?) and that other one 'this life'. there's also a couple in the sun, "hagar the horrible" and "george and lynne" which are also quite crap, although george and lynne transcends the crapness of the other three examples mentioned and is in a weird, sexy, terrible league of its own- thus:



we dont have the same culture of funnies pages as they do in america, i wonder if they have better ones...
the e.c. segar popeye strips are amazing, and i know there's stuff like krazy kat that old school people like but i dont really get it. also the perry bible fellowship is really good, but there's no way he does one of them each day.
i aim to discover why these strips are so rubbish. is it the three panel format which is limiting? or the sheer volume of ideas needed for a daily strip? -most probably the latter. when i am finished my current projects, probably in october, i am going do an experiment where i have to do an amusing (or not) comic strip every day for a month, and then we'll see how hard it is. i'll have to do it in my lunch break at work so i'll be limited to about 40 minutes, but it should be interesting.

why dont you try it yourself? and i'll see you next time....

ting and ting

no real news on the comics front- working and that- finishing off the nice banal pig for that gosh darned obsever/jonathan cape thing, and also i'm now looking forward to the birmingham expo in a couple of months, new jolly bear for that.
i've been reading a lot about the state of the comics industry recently, how marvel and dc and that dont make any money apart from from films and toys, and the independents are lucky to break even. it amazes me how anyone makes a living in this industry. with this in mind, i dont know where my ambitions lie- should i look towards publishing my own (and other's) work on a decent scale. what about web comics? any money in that? or should i branch out- what about animation/films/toys- yeah, nice ones with lots of lead paint made by chinese people*

you need money to make money isnt it? i'd really like to make a book with two colours with really nice covers and all the rest.

i got a few comics the other day- "Hey, Wait" by Jason which is quite an old one of his but has some really nice stylistic touches, although my heart wasnt quite as broken as the quotes on the cover promised. i also got Uptight No.2 by Jordan Crane which is decent enough, and i agree with Tom Spurgeon that the format of the comic works really well and there should be more indies that look like this- 24 b&w pages with a nice colour screenprinty cover, and its pretty cheap- £1.40.

anyway, i'll repeat my request for some paid work- i'm cheap and try really hard, and if anyone wants to make cartoons of my work (for free) get in touch....





*funnily enough, someone from hong kong or somewhere sent me an email asking if i want to make a banal pig action (or should that be inaction?) figure- i'm going to see how much it is.

ANTSHREW- SHREWANTS!

Yes here be another in my non-regular series of photographs of dead animals. This is a shrew, being eaten by ants.
I'm currently doing my entry for the observer competition, a deluxe banal pig strip, which i wont win, but like they say, you've got to be in it to not win it!

Caption

So we went to Caption for the first time yesterday. A lot of the small press veterans bang on about it as one of the big events in the calendar, so we were a bit surprised to see a rather poky room with not a lot going on (and not a lot of comics) when we got there, and having to pay a fiver to get in seemed a bit steep. The trouble is that people turn up throughout the day bringing their stuff, so if you got there early, you would be gutted, and not necessarily realise there was more to come, so you go home empty handed because there wouldnt be anything to hang around for. The idea of caption is really good though, you leave your comics and they sell them for you for 10% commision -peanuts compared with the cost of a table at one of the big expos, or even the web and mini comix thing, and of course you only have to give them money when you sell something.

I sold surprisingly well however, i took 3 of each issue of banal pig, 3 ethel sparrowhawks and 3 anthologies, and sold all but the unsellable issue two* and two of the anthologies, which means i made nearly £30 with no effort. So there's no complaints from me, especially as we had a nice day out in oxford to boot, but it did seem for the casual small press fan there simply wasn't enough going on to justify paying £5 to get in, especially if you also had to travel to Oxford in the first place (in comparison, the Web and Mini Comix thing is £4, there was far more going on, and it is really easy to get to as its in London near a tube station).

I dont know what to suggest to improve this, and i think form a creators perspective it's important to have these events and support them, but everyone there seemed to be creators who know each other and were in their cliques, so you dont get the direct contact with the creators like at an expo (which can be a double-edged sword as i have previously mentioned, but at least you'd have someone to talk to if you liked the work). also there's events going on which we didnt see, but i never generally bother with that sort of thing anyway.

But i did well so i cant grumble.


*if i ever start a different comic series, i am not going to have an issue two because it has proved very unpopular, even though it is far better than issue one, and other comic creators have confirmed their issue twos sell badly as well.

banal pig's hot celeb goss no. 1

so we goes shopping today yeah, like we normally do to bedminster asdal, and they're filming one of those "celebrities working at asda" adverts, yeah, and it was ian wright working behind the fish counter, and we got a monkfish tail, and ian wright served us. they didnt film it though, so i'm not going to be on telly. stay tuned for more hot celeb goss!

chek dis right here jb fans!

so here's the latest colouring in project. all of you pig lovers will be familiar with the tale from banal pig 3, but i hope you like the pretty colours. i do. the eagle eyed amongst you will notice i've removed two "fucks" from fun coconuts dialogue to make it a bit more suitable for all ages, and the decaying corpse is obviously in good humour. consider this a teaser for jolly bear and fun coconut summer special 2, which will be ready for the birmingham expo. of course, this was done for the rok comics website, and that $10,000 prize is announced next week i think- good luck me. i'm also cracking on with the observer thingy, but the submission guidelines mean i have to draw full size, and the way i've divided up the page means the panels are tiny. oh well. i've finished my thing for the forthcoming monkeys might puke anthology, another thing ticked off the list, another thing on the bottom.

something for the weekend

here's something i have done for a feller called pigeon dave, and he's organising an exhibition of these cards from drawing people all over the country. i'll post when they're all online.

leafy green jokes

thanks to jvs, here they are:

how did victorian leafy greens get around london?
-hackney CABBAGE!

why was the leafy green ill at ease at the fancy dress party?
-because he looked RADDICHIO-ulous!

whats the leafy tina turner song?
-simply the CRESS!

why did the leafy green titanic sink?
-because it hit an ICEBERG LETTUCE!

let's have it!

E for Ethel Sparrowhawk

David Lloyd, famous artist off V for Vendetta and everything likes Ethel Sparrowhawk, and judges you if you dont have a copy.