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I’m working on a sequel/prequel book called Tourist Trade. So what are you still doing here? Get busy with the clicks and hit the Amperduke Micro-site now.

I originally planned for it to be mostly a vehicle for Uncle Spunk Nugget but then it turned into a more personal autobiographical thing.

Read ‘Today we worship Michael Landon’ here

You can read the epic ‘Paedo-Apocalypse’ here in one big handy chunk or go to the Uncle Spunk Nugget Spazzmoid page.

2000AD was my heroin when I was a kid. Waiting for each week to pass for the next issue was torture for me. Many mornings I’d leave the house early to walk in the opposite direction from school and wait for the newsagents to open so I could read it at lunch or covertly in class. Sam Slade: Robo Hunter and Rogue Trooper just did it for me.

A few years ago I submitted the original Mister Amperduke to the Judge Dredd Megazine as part of a small press spotlight series they were doing and Tharg liked it. I sent him another idea that I had, also told without words and he agreed to print it. The story was The Salesman, a creepy cartoony tale about a shady salesman trying to gain entry to a cosy house.

I originally thought it to be part of the legendary Future Shocks stories but since it was wordless and weird, they thought it better to start Twisted Tales and I’ve been drawing them (at a snail’s pace) ever since. Unlike a regular 2000AD story which may have 5-6 panels per page for 6 pages, some of the Twisted Tales have a total of 96 panels. It kills me that I can’t make produce them faster.

I know they’re not to everybody’s liking and I’m not sure how I’d feel if some odd, wordless comic bumped out my favourite gun toting space mutant back in the day but I get a constant trickle of mail from people who really dig them. I think the wordless medium is just so much hassle to the reader who wants the regular comic experience. I just feel that comics don’t need words. It’s a visual medium.

There is a TWISTED TALES gallery for you here.

They say nothing is created in a vacuum but MBLEH! sort of was. After eagerly lapping up Freak Brothers, OINK!, 2000AD, Archie Ninja Turtles in my early teens, I stopped reading comics for years even though I was always trying to make them. From 1996-1998 I didn’t buy a single comic, let alone go into a comic shop. I still know nothing about them. I’ve never read Watchmen, never read anything from Neil Gaiman, Chris Ware, Warren Ellis and even Tintin to name a few. I only read Robert Crumb for the first time at 27 years of age. I really am an idiot. I should have exposed myself to every type of comic before making my own because now I learn something new every time I pick one up.

So MBLEH! and I suppose a lot of my work was stunted because of this odd isolation.

Around 2001 the first substantial Irish comic Toenail Clippings came out. After seeing how relatively easy it is to gather material and just pay a printer to make your book I was decided. What I was going to do with them after they were printed didn’t even come into my mind. I had no contacts in the comic world and even less business sense. It was existential angst more than anything else that made me do it. I just needed to get something out there. But it turned a few heads and sold well all considering.

I’ve conveniently lost the files for issue 1 of MBLEH! but you’re not missing much. Downright awful mostly with no cohesion. It was just a collection of things I had randomly built up. I both laugh and cringe when I see it now. Some pages were scanned in at low res, most of the comics are terrible. I still like the cover though. Issue one came out in May 2003.

It was a bad idea calling it MBLEH! as nobody could pronounce it. The ‘m’ is silent. Like everybody was meant to know…

Anyway, below are issues two and three of MBLEH!

The one big thing to come out of MBLEH! was Mister Amperduke. By issue three I was finding my feet and beginning to produce much better work, Amperduke being one of them. But overseas sales on issue three were bad so issue four would sell even less which lead me to pull the plug on MBLEH!

So that was MBLEH! After this I started work on The SHIZNIT

It was a crazy experience.

(Jump to Issue one, issue two, issue three, issue four)

I had previously published MBLEH! but was frustrated with the fact that there were only 4 or 5 outlets for it in Dublin and that there was no indigenous comic industry in Ireland. I wanted to create something a little more colourful and acceptable, a comic that could sit on the table in a barber shop,in cafes etc and something that might turn the average dope on the streets into reading comics. By the time it ended I had created a monster, made full use of our wonderful right to free speech and got a glimpse into how easy it is to dabble in mass media.

It also killed my interest in pushing the medium of comics on the general public.

The idea was to sell ad space in order to pay for printing and distribution costs. This was 2005, the height of the Irish economic boom and people were spending money as evidenced by the many other free magazines around the city. But the Shiznit was different, not only was it the first glossy colour comic out there, it was physically tiny so it could sit on any shop counter discreetly and fill any available nooks and crannies. I was obsessed with the idea of a comic that you could fit in your pocket and then throw away or pass on to a friend. We all know how speculation has harmed the comic industry so I wanted a comic that was quality but worth nothing.

Because it was funded by paid ad revenue I knew I had to keep the content tame enough to begin with. So with this is mind and in order to set up a production system that would allow me to have professional, ready content in case I needed to rush more issues out I used syndicated material from the US. It was a good idea but it’s one of my biggest regrets. I should have just gone with the material I wanted to use and not try to second guess what people want.

The ultimate goal was to create a regular free comic that would publish Irish artists and writers and then once momentum picked up, to put a cover price on it and go national through newsagents. It never happened. I wasn’t exactly bombarded with high grade Irish material to publish but it was of course mostly the financial side and my waning enthusiasm in favour of other projects that killed it.

After issue 1 came out I got a flood of submissions, some of them really good but by far the best was from Brian Kenny. He’s just a funny and angry writer. Nearly every idea he pitched was gold. Even his emails and phone calls had me in stitches. Some of his single page comic ideas were so intricate that I knew 95% of the readers wouldn’t get the gags but it was quality. We were on the same level, disgruntled perverts with a love for punk and a hatred for the horrible New Ireland we lived in.

Brian was also a great salesman and he immediately and enthusiastically got out there to shake things up. Without him it would never gotten past issue 1. His enthusiasm carried me along. The Shiznit was his as much as it was mine. He put in so much hard work, ad sales, promotion, etc. He even put up money for issue 3 after we were ripped off by a printer.

As with all my output until 2010, everything was done on lunch breaks, evenings and weekends as I always had a full time job to juggle. I was used to squandering cash and working all weekend, every weekend to get the product out, that in retrospect I see it was a massive sudden commitment for Brian but with me receiving most of the praise. I’m sorry if you think I fucked you over man.

Production wise it was mostly drawn on paper and of course badly put together in Corel Draw and Corel Photopaint. It was hard going. Today as I was assembling the comics from the old files for inclusion here I was appalled at how I used to work. Of course the software existed then but I was ignorant to it all, what back then could take me 6 hours of work could easily be done under 30 minutes today. By issue four though I was working fully digitally thanks to meeting Frank Prendergast, one of the dear and valued friends I made through The Shiznit.

All in all it was a great experience. I met great people and I got a few months of being mobbed by giddy teenagers in the streets looking for the next issue. It also opened a lot of doors for me professionally. Below are the guts of the four issues. I omitted pages here and there for various reasons; legal, quality and just plain losing the files.

The SHIZNIT issue 1

There was a lot of syndicated material in the first issue not included here. The cover features Uncle Spunk Nugget, this issue featured this USN story but the reaction from a few shops and parents firmly told me that a comic about a boy and his jizz-ghost uncle was not the way forward. So it never became the vehicle for USN as I had envisaged. You can read all the Uncle Spunk Nugget tales here though.

I added a few production notes here and there in this version. Click to read full screen.

The SHIZNIT issue 2

This issue was fairly weak as a comic but as a relic of sheer slanderous venom it’s strong.

As detailed in the comic, I felt wronged by The Arts Council and their snobbish and apparently corrupt practices. I applied for a grant to part finance Mister Amperduke, made a strong proposal with all facts and figures needed but was refused. Like the bitter and angry young man I once was, I investigated just who they felt worthy of the awarded money and I discovered, after a lot of snooping that they gave the award money to an EMPLOYEE of the Arts Council who already had grants heaped upon him.

I got a lot of attention over this. I’ve since spoken to the artist in question and I admit what I did was a bit harsh but what was I going to do? At the time I felt he personally wronged me and even now I’m still going to relentlessly attack anybody who does but I’m glad I did it. I’m just glad it was an artist with a bit of edge and not some poncey soft target. He can take it.

The cover for this issue came from a great black and white illustration by Hurk that I flipped horizontally and coloured

The SHIZNIT issue 3

This issue was good. It featured the classic Bad Dublin Hash, written by Brian and our take on Count Curly Wee which we considered to be our best collaboration. Count Curly Wee is this awful ‘comic’ from the 1800′s or something that plagued most Irish kid’s childhoods, but not surprisingly the contemporary audience didn’t get a lot of the references as you might not now but trust me, it’s full of gold.

Cover done by BrenB, the legendary Irish illustrator who gave me my big break by first publishing me back in the day

The SHIZNIT issue 4

This is the strongest but final issue. It features the kind of stuff I should have started with in issue 1. The five page long HATE LIST really went down well but by far the surprise runaway hit was Any Bread? I drew the cover for this one. I went with the super cute style  after the abrasive second and third issues and it worked really well. People, especially girls wanted to pick it up.

The end of  The Shiznit

It only lasted four issues but with a massive circulation of 20,000 copies per issue it made it’s mark. I was always torn between The Shiznit, other comic projects and the relentless struggle to keep real life going. The final nail in the coffin was one evening when I was cleaning the kitchen listening to the radio, waiting for a segment about Irish comics that I had been interviewed for. The programme before was a sports show and it dedicated 30 minutes to talking about the new junior manager for the Galway Hurling team or maybe the manager for the junior team, I can’t remember, this was the national radio station RTE with an audience of millions, the next show started and Irish comics got about 30 minutes and it followed the usual path of stupid people phoning in asking if the old Eagle annual they have is worth anything.

I realised then that my efforts to try get people reading comics was pointless. The junior manager of the Galway Hurling team is more interesting to most people. How can you compete with that? I’m not dumping on people’s tastes but that just crystallised it all for me.

Certainly I have some regrets about the tone and content of some issues. And I definitely regret not using it to attack more personal enemies. But hey, it is what it is.

Case closed.

Then I had the Batman and TMNT inspired Ninja Pig vs Colossal Clown when I was 12 and another highly derivative comic about my brother Poncho’s cat and a blue mouse very similar to Itchy and Scratchy around the same time. I had lots of stories that never made it past a page but it was good training. My Dad who is a creative powerhouse in his own right sat me down one night and showed me how to rule up a page and even photocopied a bunch of different panel layouts for me and bought me a folder to keep them all in. Since then I got serious about making comics.

But not serious enough to keep any of the originals….

The selection here is from 1998-2000.  Poncho was always years ahead of me in technology and even drawing at one stage. He took one of my finished pages, scanned it in and coloured and it blew my mind. I just couldn’t believe how much the computer could shave time off and cover up my bad drawings. We only had Corel Photopaint 6 for years and it was only 2007 when I started using Adobe products.

After finishing school and doing a lame ‘art course’ for a while I had a few months off before necessity dictated I get a job, I broke my back trying to draw my first epic MOTUKA.  Painfully slow going but it was a great learning experience. The most important and bitter lesson was to back up your work. I lost all the files due to those stupid Iomega Zip Disks and their wonderful Click of Death. So the pages here are scans of print outs.

The whole idea is to knock out a full 24 page comic in one day, you can’t have anything prepared and for the ultimate experience you have to pick one of the random titles provided. It’s a worldwide event where people all stay in the same room for a day and work against the clock. I think it’s a great idea for comic artist of all skill levels. Doing one month’s worth of work in A DAY makes you learn so much.

This is the first one I drew. ‘Stock Car Ninja’. How can you go wrong with that title? It practically draws itself. I got so carried away with it that I miscounted my pages so it came out at 25 pages in about 16 hours.

This is another one from a random title ‘The Dangerous Voyagers’. I went with dialogue on this one and wrote it as I went along.