This ad was the first time I ever heard of Avon in Spain and it cracks me up every time I see it.

Why? Because it is ingeniously honest and sneaky.

I’ve seen a few Irish people get suckered into selling Avon and inevitably be stuck with copious amounts of lipsticks and body lotions.

But in this ad they tell you upfront that this is going to happen. This poor girl has Avon stock dotted around every corner of  her house. And the vibe is that you just can’t get rid of it…

She starts her day by using an Avon make up brush to stir her coffee…

No food, just Avon. Your children will learn to love nail varnish sandwiches.

Pens? In this house we use Avon lipstick for all writing. I’d love to see one of her cheques…

At 17 seconds into the ad she actually sprays Avon perfume on a fucking plant!

More Avon…is this a well stocked wardrobe or an overflowing storage room?

And here is the biggest scam of all, no Avon party looks like this. I’ve actually been to an AVON party ( also an Anne Summers…) and trust me it looks nothing like this. It’s missing about 10 bovine women, a thick pall of cigarette smoke and vodka bottles everywhere.

]]> http://clamnuts.com/the-truth-about-avon/feed/ 0 http://clamnuts.com/i-hate-spain-dubbing/ http://clamnuts.com/i-hate-spain-dubbing/#comments Mon, 18 Mar 2013 11:20:19 +0000 Bobby http://clamnuts.com/?p=1695 When people ask me how long have I been living in Spain the best way I can put it is…

Everything is dubbed here. And there appears to be only 6 voice over artists working in the entire country of Spain.

Okay, it ruins art and its goofy but the serious side of this is the damage it does to the already embattled and non-competitive Spanish workforce: there are 5 MILLION able bodied Spaniards unemployed right now in desperate need of more skills.

I’m not pig headed enough to expect Spanish people to speak English with me. But for THEIR sake they need to pull the finger out of their paellas and get rid of universal dubbling of imported movies and tv shows.

Every time I go to Sweden I am amazed at not only how perfect they speak English but how late they start learning and how relaxed the process is.

Contrast this to the Irish experience where we were drilled everyday in school to try teach us the Irish language…with a terrible success rate. All of our cartoons and tv shows were in English. Even if you picked it up in school, as soon as you left you would lose it.

In Sweden everything is left in English but with Swedish subtitles. So you have no choice but to become bi-lingual.

Here in Spain they dub everything horribly…

This cracked me up; My Left Foot in Spanish. A Spanish voice over artist recreates Daniel Day Lewis’ halting and garbled speech to hilarious effect.

Here is a beautiful example of how they completely dump all over and destroy Andy Serkis’ brilliant all round performance of Gollum in Lord of the Rings.

But probably the best example of how dubbing English tv shows into Spanish can ruin it is what they did to HBO’s The Wire.

I couldn’t find Bubbles talking in Spanish but this will have to do. Just listen to the voice, even you if don’t understand Spanish you can tell it’s a million miles away from a street level hitman, it sounds like the nosey neighbor from ALF.

Hey, thats how I learned how to drive.

The following screenshots are from about a 2 hour session of dicking around in Zbrush. I still can’t figure out how to do eyes or adjust the lighting. I still can’t figure out most things in Zbrush to be honest but last night I started to play around with Fiber Mesh; the plugin for making hair etc.

Normally 3D hair annoys me. Remember when Monster Inc came out and they wouldn’t shut up about the blue lad’s fur? Well now its my turn to bore people.

This forlorn fellow started off as a speed sculpt to try out a new technique for creating mouths…

…but then I saw he had a good enough face to play around with him…

…I convinced myself that this big clumpy hair idea could work…but it’s shit so I tried Fiber Mesh…

…I randomly picked a Fiber mesh and WOOMF! he grew a fro…

..with the facial hair and shorter bed head he really reminds me of somebody but I can’t place the face…

..again another random mashing of the buttons and he grew long hair. In Zbrush the hair can be controlled by gravity…

…But I went back to this style and saved it, planning on going to bed…

…but then I thought about chnaging him into her…I puffed up his cheeks and made him flabbier…the grey patch on the head is

the mask that you first define before growing the hair

WHOOMF!

…Some heavy handed make-up…

…different facial features but still the same model…

…on my swanky macbook with the retina screen the hair looks fantastic, in fact its the only thing that I’ve noticed that looks different on Retina. That cost me an extra 900 quid….

…Fiddling with the jowels and hair groomers. In Zbrush there are lot of grooming brushes just for hair….

…nee hee hee!…

…and in one last rapid burst of messing before bed time …

…I turned her into an old grump …

My second interactive comic made in Hype. View the first one here

This is a re-upload as I have fixed a few bits, still can’t get it to work without clicking each panel but its still cool.

My plan for this was to make some of the panel interactions to play videos, namely the atom bomb and toilet scenes but I just couldn’t get it to work. Next time I’ll use video definitely.

I must clarify panel 8: ” Maybe Dave was right about Spanish birds”…meaning Spanish girls. My friend Dave warned me that Spanish birds are skanky.

I hate Spanish television. There are 5 million Spanish unemployed right now with their brains slowing turning to mush.

It’s truly appalling. Besides the twelve minute ad breaks, yes TWELVE minutes of ads, the quality of the Spanish produced television programmes is unbelievably trashy and low rent.

The daytime and afternoon slots are full of tabloid stars shouting at each other, talking heads rabbitting over a ten second clip of a retired bullfighter entering a nightclub which they will replay over and over again. The same ten seconds on a loop with a scrolling news feed ticker announcing similar nonsense.

But it would be too easy to post and poke fun at the many awful and vacuous Spanish tv shows. So I present you with this…

Spanish television is so void of creativity and substance that even their high brow material is unoriginal and derivative. To the max.

I’m sure you have already seen it. Louis Theroux meets The Phelps aka ‘God Hates Fags’ right?

I think it was first broadcast in 2006, nosey but polite video journalist Louis Theroux travelled to America to meet The Westboro Baptist Church. It’s a great documentary.

But wait…what’s happened to Louis? He’s shrunk and become annoying…he’s become Spanish!

Ah ha! Here is the real Louis Theroux with The Westboro Baptist Church leader Rev Phelps.

Yes, the Spanish have cloned and copied him in the form of Jordi Évole, an investigative reporter with a reputation for being pushy and contrary. Granted, some of his reports about Spanish politics are genuinely interesting but remaking an existing documentary with the same questions?

It’s just the tip of the iceberg. They have their own Larry King too.

Here are the original ink doodles which act as my guide layer.

Speaking of comic inking, Eclectic Mick PJ Holden is gathering info about comic production in the form of a very detailed survey, if you are involved in making comics head over there and fill it out. Future generations will thank you

He’s like me, sort of out of touch with contemporary pop culture but familiar with the basics. He said something that sent me doodling aimlessly while we talked:

“Yeah the bloke who made Minecraft must be loaded now, what’s his name?….Snooki?…Snotch or something?”

And so the first sketch was born: Snooki meets Notch, Jersey Shore meets Minecraft.

I cant figure out if she should be called Snotchie or Snotchy, any ideas? I have Pauly D as Pauly C. Maybe I’ll add the Pick-uation…

Then after talking to another dude last week about animating in After Effects we agreed we should see what we can come up with in a 24hr period and compare results.

That is to write, record audio, animate and upload in 24hrs. Sort of like the 24hr Comic Day Challenge thing but for animated cartoons.

I’ve jumped the gun a little, I already redrew the characters but it should be fun smashing this into a 30 second cartoon.

It’s been about 11 months since I started playing with After Effects for Character Animation and already made a few fairly complexed yet basic 2D cartoons. Check some of them out here

Of course I want to make my own short films etc but to able to make nutty things like ‘Drunken man laser Battle’ was my goal.

Inspired by that I made this

I drove past it every week and always thought that the rain caused that horrible wrinkle/fold beneath her right boob…turns out its for real.

On one hand I admire them for not cleaning it up…they present the girls as they are. But then maybe they are really cropped from the torso down in real life…

I still find it shocking that brothels can buy massive billboards beside family ads for ham, shoe sales, even movie posters here in Murcia.

In Valencia (the province beside me)  they can advertise on the back of busses.

The above flyer is for a place that leans more towards lap dances and strip shows but there are lots of straight up brothels dotted around my area. Blinking neon signs, the works.

I have no problem with that really as it keeps prostitution off the streets. My closest drive-through Mc Donalds is about 20 metres from an ever present line of street hookers ranging from young to old and covering a few countries.

So odd.

Kids having their birthday party in Mc Donalds and within plain view money is exchanged for sex.

The drive-through in Spain is called the Mc Auto.

That makes sense.

See the development of the Crab Rider fellow here

2012 was an odd one for me… it started off with a knockout blow but then ended probably as perfect as possible.

2013 is going to be good, working on a couple of new comic projects in between my beloved Twisted Tales for 2000AD.

The above colours were provided by Artmunki

 Zbrush eye texture

Idiot that I am I added his collar as a test but combined it so I need to start from scratch on the whole thing in order to finish his shirt. Hey, these mistakes are the best way to learn. If it hurts…you won’t do it again.

And the beginning

I want to nail the full 3d bust of Mister Amperduke before Christmas as I plan to start work on the sequel book in 2013.

This is the second page of my Banana Republic comic.

So last night I watched a few videos on The Gathering 2013 official website to get a better idea of what The Gathering 2013 event is all about.

It is easy to criticise it as a cynical marketing ploy. A lot of things are easy though. It’s easy to hit yourself in the face with your phone while texting in bed, doesn’t mean you should though.

Two of the public faces of The Gathering 2013 are Irish GILF Fionnula Flanagan and comedian Brendan Grace. I immediately recognized her as the baddie from The Others but the others are so weak it’s unreal. The organisers of The Gathering are really trying their best to avoid mentioning pub tours, drinking and using celebrity. But come on, put Samantha Mumba in there for Christ’s Sake.

Instead we have a middle aged bloke doing some She-ra cosplay.

Does he have the wrist things like Wonder Woman too?

I do think The Gathering 2013 is a good idea, maybe all the Americans who consider themselves Irish really need to settle it once and for all. But it is sort of a distorted reality; how can you experience a country while being part of a massive, concentrated visit of your fellow country men? I see groups of middle aged Texans sitting in a bar in Donegal… full of middle aged Texans also here for the Gathering 2013.

I remember going on a shit packaged sun holiday to a generic holiday resort in the Canary Islands and lo and behold, every bar was full of people from my part of Dublin. Specifically, meeting 2 couples that I knew. What a relaxing break! 4 hours on a plane to sit with the people you avoid in Tesco like the dude out of Assassin’s Creed. Leaping from aisle to aisle.

I’m am too lazy to read Gabriel Byrne’s comments about The Gathering being a scam or something. But ALL campaigns are scams. Anything with an animated Flash banner is a scam. That doesn’t mean The Gathering 2013 is just a money making enterprise. All his films are scams. His IMDB reads like a rap sheet.

Irish Consulate in Alicante Spain is in a Banana Factory?

Yes. I’m dismayed at how many people have read this comic and then asked me ‘is that true?’ See for yourself.

Try it. Google ‘Irish consulate Alicante’. They have since removed the direct url that links to Eurobanan but see for yourself. The first time I saw it I thought the page was hacked and this was a prank. I want a new passport, I click on the link and land on a banana factory.

You can all go Gather around my balls.

I keep hearing about The Gathering event in Ireland.

The Gathering 2013 is a drive for those who have left Ireland to return, go for drinks in Dublin, get emotional, get battered on the street by a group of 15 year olds and get the fuck back out of there.

I left Ireland four years ago. I had to go back for a funeral a few months ago and I have to admit I got a little choked up when I saw the lights of O’Connell Street from the taxi window on the way from the Airport.

But by the time we passed Central Bank and made it up Georges Street I saw two scenes of drunken mayhem that reminded me why I left. It was madness. Like that scene in The Wire when they legalise drugs in Hamsterdam and there is a panning shot of all the carnage. That’s what it was like.

Girls dressed like strippers chugging naggins of vodka, a group of shirted and hair gelled men squaring off against each other as the Garda played Snake on their old Nokia. Glasses being smashed on the ground all over the place. Blokes piddling all over the broken glass. The taxi driver laughed at how shocked I was.

I’ve met loads of “Irish” Americans. Loads. And it’s always such an awkward conversation when you have to explain that nobody likes/listens to Dropkick Murphys. Same with U2 I suppose.

So how is Failte Ireland going to ensure that the Gathering tourists’ intial journey from Dublin Airport to their hotel isn’t as tainted? They could put up hoardings like they did in Tallaght the year the Tour De France passed a local Traveller’s camp. Seriously. To prevent the world’s cameras from actually seeing the caravans and squalor on the Tallaght Bypass they slapped up huge big wooden panels.

But I think thats part of our charm. We ARE a joke.

The stereotype of rowdy drunks is justified. I prove that every weekend here in Spain. I always brag about how peaceful this place is and that in the four years I’ve only ever seen two drunken fights. I never mention that I was the aggressor both times. Hey, law of averages. Irish man + drink = 90% chance of jocularity and 10% chance of red faced shirtless rampages.

The above comic makes light of something that always annoyed me; why as an island does Ireland never looked further than potatoes and tried eating fish?

READ PART TWO HERE

Buy my book for more crankiness

The below is far from finished but another promising result from just a couple of hours of fiddling with it. I can’t get the masks out of Mission Impossible out of my mind every time I play with Zbrush. Soon I will be able to sculpt full 3d busts then print them out in latex and commit crimes.

I want to nail the full 3d bust of Mister Amperduke before Christmas as I plan to start work on the sequel book in 2013.

The first mesh made from Z-Spheres

Some really messy geometry going on here but the pose is better

The legs are so stumpy but I just couldn’t wait to start sculpting…

At this stage I jumped about 1hr of work and just slapped a base colour and texture on her!

This was banged out in 20 hours in 2006…in between a fight with my new nextdoor neighbours that sort of started the collapse of the relationship I was in!

It all ended happily though, I moved to Spain and became rich while all other parties are stuck in the paper thin over priced houses in Dublin.

This comic, chosen at random from the random title list is also a winner.

I produced all the graphics and animation with sound design by Media Coop.

Two people contacted me over the past month about this comic, requesting to see it again and enquiring if I had any thoughts about the Total Recall remake.

I was tempted to do a Total Recall one but it didn’t fire me up as much as the horrible remake / prequel of The Thing did. I drew this comic about three months before the The Thing remake was released and what a pile of shit it was. I think I covered most of my arguments against it in the comic so any additional comments after seeing it are pointless.

But the Total Recall remake…I have yet to see it but man…what a horrible film.

Buy my book for more crankiness

Two people contacted me over the past month about this comic, requesting to see it again and enquiring if I had any thoughts about the Total Recall remake.

I was tempted to do a Total Recall one but it didn’t fire me up as much as the horrible remake / prequel of The Thing did. I drew this comic about three months before the The Thing remake was released and what a pile of shit it was. I think I covered most of my arguments against it in the comic so any additional comments after seeing it are pointless.

But the Total Recall remake…I have yet to see it but man…what a horrible film.

Buy my book for more crankiness

Two people contacted me over the past month about this comic, requesting to see it again and enquiring if I had any thoughts about the Total Recall remake.

I was tempted to do a Total Recall one but it didn’t fire me up as much as the horrible remake / prequel of The Thing did. I drew this comic about three months before the The Thing remake was released and what a pile of shit it was. I think I covered most of my arguments against it in the comic so any additional comments after seeing it are pointless.

But the Total Recall remake…I have yet to see it but man…what a horrible film.

Buy my book for more crankiness

Just finished up fun two animations as part of an initiative to raise awareness about rural energy starring broadcaster George Hook (who furnished my brother’s house as part of some radio competition years ago)

There was a competition held for Irish school children and the winning ideas for finding new energy sources were turned into cartoons, I’ll add the actual vids once they are public

There was also a wasp that lived in the fridge

And this friendly fellow sat on my table all day.

This new issue is shaping up to be the best yet with the cream of Irish comic artist talent.

Finkle finds a head lice and bug convention going on in Crumbert’s hair so he dresses as an insect and shrinks down to investigate….

This panel was so silly and fun, I could draw this all day

Same with this! So dopey but fun.

On the cover AND on the back are massive pics of Judge Dredd, the back one being from the new movie which I’m going to see tonight in Spanish… which always makes me cringe, it’s awful how they dub them.

My Left Foot in Spanish is a real treat.

Here is the initial rough. I wanted to keep it that loose but it sort of clashes with other scenes in the movie.

 Contact me if you are looking to produce an animated short movie for your website or company. Visit our design company Wukomi Media to see all the services we offer; illustration, animation, app design and all.

Here he is with more or less finished inks and flat colours….man I hate colouring.

Any colourists out there looking for paid work give me a shout.

Here is part one of Mr. Crab

This story has yet to appear in publication yet so keep your eyes peeled in 2000AD.

I was partly inspired to do a monster riding themed story by this excellent post on Monster Brains on He-man paintings

Here is the inital rough draft which once approved I use as a guide layer….

This grizzly fellow got truncated in the final version but here he is with his grizzly legs etc….

It’s rare that I use reference photos for my characters but thankfully I have my own little monkey here to pose for me….

What a dopey comic from The Shiznit days. Drawn actual size on the piece of card that comes inside a new shirt if I recall correctly.

**Update: Best viewed in Chrome. Seems to be extremely glitchy in Safari. Plays fine on my iPad but not on desktop. Will fiddle and fix soon..**

Wahey! My first interactive html5 comic with sound AND animation! We truly are living in the modern age if a scrud like me can make a html5 comic.

I’ve been keeping a keen eye on other html5 comics and interactive webcomics but I’ve yet to find one that really makes use of narration by the artist. I love Bifter and the innovative way they use SVG but I wanted to make a comic that would let me speak and could be more or less understood with out interaction.

Interactive comics have huge potential if done right, I remember seeing on the news about ‘motion comics’ where they cut up lame Spiderman comics and have him swinging between buildings. Wow.

I think the most obvious, easy to implement and powerful application for html5 storytelling is allowing the option to hear the author. Granted my voice sounds like a whiney street vendor but it occured to me that after writing and drawing 100′s of comic pages over the years, nobody has heard me speak. This would definitely help me for some of the nuttier and murkier stories in Spazzmoid that are based in Dublin.

Listen to the funny out takes of the recording process:

HTML5 Comic Recording goofs

This was made in Hype but just as I was half way through it I got a mail from Smith Micro the makers of Manga Studio about their new html5 comic tool MotionArtist  so I’m going to try it out for my next html5 comic project. Although their website made me feel ill looking at it.

There are obviously a few snags in the above comic like:

-Audio won’t stop if another panel is clicked

-No feedback to the user about the duration of each panel although it does jump back to start.

If you are a html/Java maestro and would like to collaborate in some coding PLEASE drop me a line. Code hurts me deeply. Like salt on a slug I curl up into a hissing ball on my desk every time I need to code.

More interactive HTML5 comics soon. I definitely want to make one in Flash ( I know, I know…) just for old times. I made this animated short in Flash last week for the design company Wukomi I’m part of and it is a million times more versatile and fluid that either Hype or Adobe Edge the two current leaders in HTML5 animation.

The twitter conversation on #html5comic

Please wait, fetching the tweets…

I remember trying a different technique for the colouring on this; drawn and exported from Manga Studio, coloured in Corel Painter THEN imported back into Manga Studio for lettering. My poor old laptop nearly exploded trying to import the gigantic colour page into Manga Studio.

I now use a huge iMac, whatever the biggest one is… 25 or 27 inches I think. And although it is lightning fast…the thing is so hot after a couple of hours that you can’t touch it for more than a couple of seconds.

Lettering in Manga Studio

Although I like the page I still flinch when I see some of the lettering goofs.

The big problem was in my settings for the Halfsize Alphabet, Symbol Fonts etc options they need to be the same as the Standard Font Size.

This is why the exclamation points and question marks in the above page look weak and lost.

Another dopey mistake I made was not giving each speech bubble’s text room to breath, it’s all too close.

For the panel where the speech bubbles are interconnected and overlapping I used the Double Line brush, a really handy tool.

Here is a corrected version with stronger question marks and that nifty double line connecter.

Manga Studio is brilliant for lettering comics. You can even write all your dialogue in Notepad, import it and it automatically formats individual speech ballons. The big draw back of lettering your entire comic in Manga Studio is that if a client wants layered source files…exporting to Photoshop won’t work, the speech bubbles will be one flat layer.

Now I draw, letter and colour everything in one Story file within Manga Studio and it saves so much time it’s unreal.

Before my workflow was something like; Draw over scans in Corel Painter, colour in Painter or Photoshop then export to Illustrator for lettering which was a nightmare.

The twitter conversation on #html5comic

Please wait, fetching the tweets…

Red bin red letter bug red bug bin Red man litter bin red letter bug red bug bin

Loop this.

For more Catchphrase based goofing, check out thevideo I made with Roy Walker and Mr Chips going  nutty.

This recently blew my mind when going through some old press stuff.

In a Sunday Tribune Newspaper a few years ago there was the above 2 page article called ‘Unusual Suspects: The new Irish Cult heroes’ and I got top billing among a group of fellow nobodies. I knew who John Creedon was of course but none of the others.

Man I was such a cranky cynical prick back then that I just read my write up and then threw it into the box.

I never even mentioned it on this site as I think it’s so corny to appear in a newspaper and then for somebody to be interested enough to look up your site and the first thing they see is “Pick up the newspaper today for an interview with me”. Such a corny move. I instantly leave a site or blog if I see that.

Like those stupid phoney restaurants that have their  sun faded laminated press coverage stuck in their window.

Of course it’s flattering to be called an Irish cult hero and for my big round face and Depeche Mode hair to dominate all others in the photo but at the time I wasn’t even phased. The Groucho Marks philosophy of ‘I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member’.

BUT having just rediscovered it my jaw dropped to see that the bloke standing behind me is Aiden Gillen, the Mayor out of The Wire! Nice!

NOW I take the role of cult hero seriously. I love The Wire but at the time I never even heard of it.

So now I’m going back and looking at all my old interviews with the machine out of Bladerunner that lets you zoom in to photos. I think its called Photoshop.

(Apologies for jumpy playback, this is a html5 output test and it seems to lag towards the end)

I do most of my comic work in Manga Studio Ex 4.

I love it but calling the software ‘Manga Studio’ and not just ‘Comic Studio’ is probably the worst marketing decision of the modern age as it instantly turned me and many others off before even trying it.

Manga Studio is not just for making manga comics.

There are dozens of time saving tools for comic artists in Manga Studio and the Panel Ruler is top amongst these. Ruling a page/creating comic panels was my biggest problem when I started making comics as a kid…and learning how to create panels in Manga Studio also nearly caused me to smash up my computer.

Plus I’ve heard form other that this also causes them instant frustration so here is a quick demo of how to use the Panel Ruler Layer and Panel Cutter.

But it is really easy to do rule a page once you figure it out. (This is also an experiment embedding Captivate html5 with controls, you can skip forwards and backwards in the above video)

I drew this for Punk Rock Jesus week on Eclectic Micks. Punk Rock Jesus is the new comic from Sean Murphy, published by Vertigo.

The bare gist of it is that Jesus is cloned from the Shroud of Turin and a reality show is built around it then things get messy.

I met Sean in a pub in Dublin years ago, great bloke but only yesterday did I actually see his work and daaaaammmmmnnn I love it. Here is his Deviant Art gallery.

The Axolotl family always delighted me and I’ve been itching to use an Axolotl type character in a story for years.

The above sketch is more of a skin texture test than a proper character work out, I think I need to add red fronds under his tail.

Come on admit it. This is exactly how you feel.

I just watched this short film ‘The Gift’. Looks great, nice design.

The Summer heat in Spain continues to pester me…it hit 49 degrees in the city centre last week. Not fun at all. I feel like a sap the way I used pay for sun holidays now. I try to spend as much time as I can swimming or thinking about swimming. I’m buying this remote control amphibious tanks with BB gun so I can shoot some kid’s eye out. It’s fairly cheap on Amazon.

Taken from my autobiographical graphic novel SPAZZMOID: Today we will worship Michael Landon.

Taken from my autobiographical graphic novel SPAZZMOID: Today we will worship Michael Landon.

Taken from my autobiographical graphic novel SPAZZMOID: Today we will worship Michael Landon.

Taken from my autobiographical graphic novel SPAZZMOID: Today we will worship Michael Landon.

Taken from my autobiographical graphic novel SPAZZMOID: Today we will worship Michael Landon.

Taken from my autobiographical graphic novel SPAZZMOID: Today we will worship Michael Landon.

Taken from my autobiographical graphic novel SPAZZMOID: Today we will worship Michael Landon.

Taken from my autobiographical graphic novel SPAZZMOID: Today we will worship Michael Landon.

Taken from my autobiographical graphic novel SPAZZMOID: Today we will worship Michael Landon.

Taken from my autobiographical graphic novel SPAZZMOID: Today we will worship Michael Landon.

This one, Chonko the knacker pea vampire…no idea when this happened. Maybe somebody else drew it in my sketchbook but it definitely looks like my work.

I’ve been fiddling with Zbrush for a few weeks now, a really intuitive programme for 3d modeling. It really is amazing. I tried Mudbox a few years ago but my pc wasn’t even close to being powerful enough.

There are a few decent tutorials on Youtube and I found the Lynda.com course really useful but I’ve yet to find a complete idiots guide that lays it all out from the beginning. Getting over the hump in Zbrush seems to much harder than other apps because not only is the concept nutty but man…the interface…

The above is my first draft of a Mister Amperduke head…very stiff and dull. The texture was just plopped over in Photoshop as a test.

I’m going to stick with it though.

Check out my book Mister Amperduke; a Lego themed comic/graphic novel that uses no words.

The Cult of Lego by John Baichtal and Joe Meno is a new book that covers the history of Lego and the many offshoots of the medium. Packed full of photos and details I never knew about our beloved bricks. And they gave Mister Amperduke a full page shout out!

My only qualm was that they didn’t delve into Fabuland or cover Bootleg fake lego much but other than that I loved it

Get it on Amazon The Cult of LEGO

O’Brien Press have just published his new book Where’s Larry? , an insanely detailed cartoon book in the same vein as Where’s Wally but with an Irish spin.

A few years ago I made a few samples for the same book but just couldn’t get it right. There’s no way to cut corners! Phil blew my efforts out of water on his first try.

Here’s one of my coloured samples, even though I drew them digitally my hand nearly fell off. And the result looks messy and lifeless.

This fine gentleman is for a new Twisted Tale. Drawn in Manga Studio with the oldest living Wacom Bamboo this side of Pangea.

I have a farily big collection of Lego related images that I started compiling 10 years ago when I started work on my Lego themed graphic novel Mister Amperduke.

These are all from Kinder Surprise eggs as far as I know.

See here for more fake lego sets

Check out my book Mister Amperduke; a Lego themed comic/graphic novel that uses no words.

Joe Duffy is a radio presenter from Ireland. I used to really dislike him; he mumbled and stuttered his way through his show like an amateur BUT I have to admit that after listening to him nearly every day over the past few years he really has become a decent broadcaster and not afraid to express his opinions. So you have to give credit for that even if you’re not a fan.

There seems to be kink in my generation that instantly writes off Gay Byrne and Pat Kenny too but they are great at what they do on the radio. Seriously. Telly is another matter but on the radio are the best broadcasters Ireland has ever produced.

I’m working on a sequel.

I bought this Enlighten brick fake Lego set about 8 years ago now and I’m sad to say I have either lost or swapped most of it by now. But it’s the kind of Lego set where the instruction booklet is just as cool as the actual toy.

It’s part of the Military Century series from Chinese company Enlighten Brick. I bought it in Dublin for 10 Euros I think in a sleazy market.

Highlights from the cover art of this fake lego set include:

- The real fighter jets looming in the top right hand corner

- The all dominating surveillance tower

- The goose stepping Lego men

- The barrels of toxic radioactive goo

- The odd whip/staff/ capturing device in the hand of the bloke on the horse. Presumably for chasing down enemies of the state and grabbing them by the Lego neck

I think this has to be one of the best fake Lego sets I’ve found, mostly because it just screams creepy Chinese oppression. Reminiscent of the Lego Concentration Camp set only this set is actually real.

Check out my book Mister Amperduke; a Lego themed comic/graphic novel that uses no words.

I tried to cram every trick I learned from the first half of the excellent book by Trish & Chris Myer ‘Creating Motion Graphics’ as recommended by the great Irish animator PMC

It’s rough and messy but a good starting point for more fun. I’m going to re-do it all and finish the entire clip.

I heard this segment on Today with Pat Kenny and Paddy O’ Gorman about Community welfare grants in Tallaght. These people are already receiving all manner of Social Welfare but for emergencies they can apply for extra cash. Sounds like a great idea but it appears to attract the hardcore social welfare spongers.

The above woman is looking for money for new clothes as she got too fat.

Not to go for a job interview but to her nephew’s Christening or something.

The next girl blew me away with her request for part funding for her Da’s funeral which sounds like they wasted 1000′s of Euros on horse drawn carriages etc! I love it.

I lived with a bloke who was a keen moocher of these grants in the exact same office. He went down with a pair of the smelliest, beat up runners claiming he needed 60 quid to buy new clothes for an interview. The cut him a cheque there and then and he bought a block of hash within the hour.

I just found this; BBC: Dublin Dole office bans pyjamas! I drew the fat girl in a pink tracksuit but I should have drawn pyjamas…nuts.

This is a six page Mister Amperduke story.

Mister Amperduke is a Lego themed comic/graphic novel that uses no words.

This is a six page Mister Amperduke story.

Mister Amperduke is a Lego themed comic/graphic novel that uses no words.

This is a six page Mister Amperduke story.

Mister Amperduke is a Lego themed comic/graphic novel that uses no words.

This is a six page Mister Amperduke story.

Mister Amperduke is a Lego themed comic/graphic novel that uses no words.

This is a six page Mister Amperduke story.

Mister Amperduke is a Lego themed comic/graphic novel that uses no words.

The song is called Rude Girl and I strongly encourage you to buy it on itunes

Full colour Paperback: 126 pages available worldwide through Amazon.
Spazzmoid: Today we will worship Michael Landon: A collection of stories from Irish comic artist Bob Byrne.

You will know me better than I know myself after reading this book. Dipping in and out of my childhood and wasted years in my 20′s, Spazzmoid collects the entire webcomic along with loads of exclusive material including of course, the gripping resolution to the Michael Landon story.

Also features the entire Uncle Spunk Nugget arc.

Told without words through over 2,000 panels, Mister Amperduke is an epic, fast paced, and dark adventure that offers a new mode of graphic storytelling.

Amperville is a miniature Lego city built by Mr. Amperduke in his basement as a hobby. The tiny Lego people live a blissful life in their manufactured utopia until Mr. Amperduke’s grandson drops a large insect into their world.

Mr. Amperduke is hospitalised while the vicious monster unleashes a devastating rampage on his model society. The citizens are helpless as the monster destroys everything. It’s a race against time as their benevolent master struggles to return home through his injury and bad traffic while the giant insect relentlessly eats the trapped citizens.

But there is a secret weapon lying in wait and ready to do battle…..

The whole book uses no words, the reader is involved in a different way than a normal Graphic Novel. There are hidden stories and details waiting to be discovered by the reader. It took 5 years of work to write and draw.

Mister Amperduke EXTENDED EDITION is now available worldwide through Amazon: Mister Amperduke Extended Edition

It includes the original story that started it all, a new 6 page story, the ‘making of’ and a gallery of Amperduke art from comic greats such as Guy Davis

180 pages Paperback.

This is a six page Mister Amperduke story.

Mister Amperduke is a Lego themed comic/graphic novel that uses no words.

I wanted to see if I could make a simple HTML5 game without words….and without any programming skills! It plays fine for me on iPhone, Chrome etc but not for others.

See if you can make it to level two.

I chose the random title ‘Dangerous Voyagers’ for this 24hr comic day in 2009 and I surprised myself at how many nautical terms I could think of.

I think I neglected to include ‘Swab the deck’ but maybe it’s in there… I love doing the 24 hour comic day challenge, it’s such an odd creative experience having to lash out 24 pages in one day. I’ve yet to pull the all nighter, I prefer to start early and finish at normal bed time.

I drew this in Manga Studio, the Story feature where you can add 100′s of comic pages in the same file is a godsend for 24hr comics. That and a bag of mixed nuts with raisins for energy.

My name is Bob Byrne, I’m from Dublin, Ireland but now live in Spain.

I write and draw comics.

In a career that has included working as a snake handler, baker, forklift driver, designing teddy bears and toys amongst other things, making comics has always been a part of my life.

It´s been over a decade since I launched this site and a lot of things have happened since then.

If you are unfamiliar with my work I think the above timeline will help bring you up to speed.

Even if you’ve been reading my stuff for years, the timeline will help you get a handle on where it all fits together. It’s rare to meet somebody who both knows (and likes) all of my output/antics. Me included.

This has always been a pain in the arse for me; each project has nothing to do with the previous or subsequent one…

The parent who reads my children’s book would be appalled by Spazzmoid, the lovers of The Shiznit and Spazzmoid have no interest in reading Mister Amperduke. The astute and perceptive readers who enjoy Amperduke and Twisted Tales rightly hate MBLEH!

There are lots of projects not mentioned in the timeline but you can find them elsewhere on this site.

After years of fiddling about with comics of vary degrees of awfulness I took the bull by the horn and self published the unpleasant and equally unpronounceable comic MBLEH! which
although very rough around the edges it holds the lame title as being the first Irish comic to be distributed worldwide.

Trading back then as Clamnut Comix, I started this site and it rapidly became a hit with angry loners waiting for MySpace to be invented.

MBLEH! begat the free pocket sized comic The Shiznit which really took Ireland by storm. In between The Shiznit I started my silent opus Mister Amperduke; a wordless graphic novel that took five years to complete.

I love wordless comics.

Why the majority of comics have text baffles me. Its a graphic medium so why so many words?

I write and draw a series of wordless comics for 2000AD called Bob Byrne’s Twisted Tales.

A few years ago I moved out of Dublin and relocated to southern Spain.

And from my sunny cave I continue to write and draw comics, make educational apps and experiment with interactive storytelling.

Thanks for visiting, take a look around and please be warned that although I have significantly toned down the content of this site; there is a lot of NSFW material which is not suitable for children or the easily ruffled.

Hire me for your illustration, comic or animation project, you can visit my design site here.

and a search for ‘lorem ipsum’ will uncover many web sites still in their infancy. Various versions have evolved over the years, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose (injected humour and the like).tent of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribut

This was a handmade comic that I started  but never finished or released. But I told enough people about it or mentioned it in a few interviews so that I would get a few ‘What happened to Pour Scorn?’ every year.

I am a dope.

And that combined with the fact that mainstream comics in Ireland were hard enough to find; I never really read any handmade small press comics until AFTER publishing MBLEH!

Phil Barrett and Ronan Kennedy were of course knocking out their own stuff in Dublin, but that was about it.

So once I got in contact with other small pressers, mostly in the UK, I was swamped with amazing handmade comics. I felt like an idiot with my big oversized glossy comic with a print run of 1000′s when there were so many artists a million times better than me who made between 25-100 beautiful copies per issue.

I never paid my dues.

The thought of being able to produce a comic completely by hand enthralled me.

I produced MBLEH during frantic lunch time bursts on my PC where I worked and all the crappy colouring and computer lettering stinked.

So with this in mind I started to draw POUR SCORN a 24 page comic with more experimental content, all produced manually.

The main reason I wanted to try produce a comic like this was to make use of the flexographic printing machines I had access to in my job. Essentially I could make gigantic rubber stamps, as big as I wanted.

An abandoned panel from the main story.

Each cover was to be hand pressed with two stamps. Here are some tests and a little glimpse of the cover…

This page from ‘EVIL MACHINE’ was really fun to make. I used real Letraset tone!

So I was all set to start making POUR SCORN when Diamond Comic Distributors said yes to taking on MBLEH after sending them the first two issues. So POUR SCORN was abandoned and I used some of the pages to rapidly fill up an urgently needed issue three of MBLEH!

I really wanted to get back into making it but to be honest the thoughts of all that folding and stapling sickened me.

So I made THE SHIZNIT instead, the complete polar opposite of what POUR SCORN would have been.

And I still haven’t paid my dues.

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.

The box and some ads for MBLEH!

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 had no computer at home so the entire thing was coloured and assembled during lunch breaks where I worked. I had no idea what I was doing but eventually figured it out. Like all my work prior to 2006 I was using the red headed stepchildren of the graphic design world: Corel Draw and Corel Photopaint instead of Adobe. It was like trying to eat a bowl of soup with a matchstick.

The MBLEH! T-Shirt and some promo images

FUN FACTS:

* The house where I was living during the MBLEH! years was a few doors away from where the tabloid celebrity killers The Scissor Sisters lived

* Two notable colleagues in the place where I worked are Dublin poet/writer Colm Keegan and another tabloid celebrity murderer, a bloke with the worst criminal alias in history: The Champagne Killer

* MBLEH! like it’s little pal The SHIZNIT appeared in some awful Irish Tv shows. I signed a release to let MBLEH! be used in a scene of The Big Bow Wow and then later  The SHIZNIT was in The Roaring Twenties…both fucking awful pieces of Irish television. I’d prefer if they appeared in one of those videos where they saw off the hostage’s head off rather than those shows.

* To save costs I actually developed the film used to create the printing plates myself in an epic struggle of trial and error.

Issue one came out in May 2003.

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.

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

BUT for all its faults and roughness it really did cause quite a commotion and people really seemed to love it. It was picked up by Diamond Comic Distributors and sold good enough overseas, that was my dream come true; to receive fan mail from American girls. Actual letters, people still used to send letters in 2003.

The best thing to come out of MBLEH! was Mister Amperduke which appeared as 6 page story in issue three.

And the cover of issue three above with the worm was a personal triumph.

I still have a handful left if really want to buy them at an exorbitant price.

Case Closed.

The SHIZNIT was a free pocket sized comic that I produced and distributed in Ireland from 2005-2007.

It was a crazy experience.

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.

I really cared about the ’cause’ of trying to build up the Irish comics industry but now I couldn’t give a hoot about it.

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.

I used to drive a forklift. Never dreamed I’d be lifting a palette of my own comics

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.

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.

Production wise it was mostly drawn on paper and of course badly put together in Corel Draw and Corel Photopaint. It was hard going.Back then what could take me 6 hours of work could easily be done under 30 minutes today. I didn’t have a computer at home until the third issue!

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 around Temple Bar looking for the next issue. It also opened a lot of doors for me professionally.

The SHIZNIT issue 1

The cover features Uncle Spunk Nugget  and inside featured a one page 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.

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 a MEMBER of the Arts Council who already had grants heaped upon him.

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, 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

The Return of  The Shiznit?

One good thing about the worldwide economic meltdown is that printers have really lowered their costs so perhaps a fifth and final issue will appear in 2013.