MBLEH!

Where to begin? It already seems like a distant memory.

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