The shocking moment when Franklin Clinton gets banned from the Games Oscars for punching Mario.
Happy birthday Ben.
The Games Oscars
Category: cartoon
Paul’s Pizzeria
Happy birthday to Paul. Who isn’t actually a pizza chef, but if he wanted a change from his day job he’d look the part in the uniform I’ve designed for his cartoon alter ego.
Survival Kit
Just those bare necessities. Happy birthday to Daniel who last autumn located a log cabin with attached Boc Beag real ale beer pump at the head of a Scottish sea loch.
The Veg Test
Happy birthday to veg tester Emma.
Winter Arts Olympics
Despite what my pantomime version of Will Gompertz is saying, there really are people who are daft enough to take a Loony Dook in the Firth of Forth on New Year’s Day. Happy birthday to Leo.
Type Faces
Some familiar faces on this card for Ali.
And, in a busy weekend for birthdays, following yesterday’s card celebrating Sarah’s Ancient Rome class project, here’s a card for classicist Tom.
English phrases from my school Latin exercise book, from 1963, but if you’re struggling with the Latin phrases they’re:
- An eagle doesn’t eat flies
- Seize the wine
- Through adversity to the stars
- As wise as far as the beard (i.e. don’t be mislead by appearances)
- My hovercraft is full of eels (a quote from Monty Python’s ‘Dirty Hungarian Phrase Book’, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Episode 25, 1970)
- If the winds fail you, use the oars
Hail, Sarah!
Sarah’s birthday today, and this card celebrates her enthusiasm for giving her class to a hands-on taster of Ancient Rome.
“Zach said straight away when I opened it ‘I know this one, it’s definitely Uncle Richard’s!’ ” she tells me, “and then was occupied for 5 minutes trying to work out the maths problem! Until Will explained it was deliberately very difficult :-)”
From my school Ancient History book my S.P.Q.R. News features a comics section based on my mum’s paper, The Daily Mail, so my Col. Pewtius was inspired by Arthur Horner’s Colonel Pewter which ran in the paper from 1960 to 1964. I thought enough about Colonel Pewter to collect the strips, originally four square panels in a 2×2 grid, and paste them into a newsprint booklet I’d made for them. This was a story called 12.2 to the Tropics about a Titfield Thunderbolt type steam excursion that ends up on a tropical Shangri-La deep in the North Wales hills. Unfortunately I no longer have it and it’s not one of the reprints that show up when I search Google.
At first the adventures of Adamus in the Corn Top strip didn’t mean anything to me but, knowing the way my mind works, I remembered the title Barley Bottom.
I must have read Barley Bottom in a friend’s dad’s newspaper as at that time it appeared only in the Daily Herald, a left-wing paper. My Adamus seems to be in the same mould, a hapless everyman frustrated by big business and establishment politics:
‘Frame 1: Adamus is trying to keep an old soari service going (possibly I meant to write ‘sella’, a Roman sedan chair)
Frame 2: At Bigus House: ‘Lay an ambush’.
Barley Bottom by ‘Lucian’ was written by Roger Woddis and drawn by Derek Chittock.
Colonel Pewter had originally appeared in a liberal newspaper, the News Chronicle, Barley Bottom was left-wing so presumably Flook the strip that I read for years in my mum’s Daily Mail was suited for right-wing readers. I liked the nostalgia of Colonel Pewter but out of the three of them my favourite was Flook because of the crisp, bold pen work of the strip’s cartoonist Trog.
VisNews
I’m delighted to have made it onto the cover of this month’s Vis News, the Visual Narratives Academy Newsletter.
‘This issue we interview a fine British comics maker and illustrator,’ writes editor David Haden, ‘who cleverly combines digital methods with traditional looks. It’s a long and informative interview.’
My comic strip experiment for this month’s Dalesman didn’t make it into print – editor Dan Clare and I decided that Dalesman readers would prefer a more traditional format for the nature diary! – so I’m delighted that Vis News has featured the strip and the process that I went through in creating it.
Link
Visual Narratives Academy at Digital Art Live
Live Community Webinars and Promotion for 3D and 2D
Book Heroes in Colour
Book Superheroes bursting into colour. Having familiarised myself with the storytelling suggestions in Stan Lee’s How to Draw Superheroes, I can now let these characters return to their secret hideout and get on with my other projects.
Black Dog on the Beach
I drew my foot – in a Vivo Barefoot shoe – this morning as I waited at the hairdressers.
For my latest card, a guest artist. My niece Hannah drew a Black Dog on the Beach story with me when she was 5 or 6 years old. She’s since gone on, via a year’s work experience at DisneyWorld, Florida, to work in the travel industry, so I thought that it was time for update her original artwork for her birthday.
That’s me taking the part of the tourist.