Here’s one that was lost was in the move over to Wordpress. I interviewed Nicholas Gurewitch 3 years ago. If you haven’t seen his work you are a spa. Alot has happened with the PBF since then, the collected edition is now available to buy here
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There was no info or link to it so I spent a few days searching the net for leads. No joy. But by sheer fluke, a few days ago a friend sent me a link to the PBF Archive; the wonderful fucked up world of Nicholas Gurewitch’s painfully concise and beyond funny comic strips. The Perry Bible Fellowship.

Even a quick skim through the PBF’s will leave you happily confused and giddy but read them all and you will see a true master at work. The fact that he hits such punchlines in the newspaper strip format is amazing and inspirational.

Bob: How many publications are your comics in now? Have you gone down the self syndication route?

NG: The PBF appears in at least 20 different publications that pay. I share itwith a bunch of college papers too. I’m also very excited that it’s running in my old high school’s newspaper. There’s no syndicate involved in the syndication. The Universal Press Syndicate called me a while ago, but they were looking for something with less violence & no sex.

Was is tempting to try something tamer in the hopes of getting your work toa wider audience?

There was no strong temptation. If I can’t laugh at an idea, I’m rarely inspired to capture what makes it funny. The comics would not come out well.

You work in a variety of mediums; traditional water colours and computer rendering. When you get an idea for a strip do you immediatley know which colouring method you’re going to use or is it decided after it’s drawn?

After penciling a comic, I usually get a strong idea about whether I want the comic to look dirtier, cleaner, prettier, or looser. I usually decide how I want to colour it then.

Have you worked on any longer comic stories other than the PBF format?

Yes. I did multiple long-form stories in college. One involved an elven woman and her serpent lover. I thought it was pretty sexy, but I had some friends that openly abhorred it.

The Matrix sequels were shit. Discuss:

It seems to me that artists struggling to be heard have much more consideration for their audience than artists who have already struck it rich. The Matrix sequels are probably phenomenal (I couldn’t tell), but maybe the Wachowski’s weren’t inspired to let everyone know.

Having a large body of your work available online, your comic archives and short films, what’s your take on the whole file sharing/internet piracy thing?

I don’t mind sharing. Holding back, to me, indicates that: 1) I’m not gonna be phenomenally fucking rich someday, and 2) I don’t want people seeing my art. Both indications would be so very false.

What’s your take on the blog revolution thing? Are there any you real regularly?

Nope. Though I’ll plug my friend/sometimes-PBF-collaborator Evan’s blog because I find it very funny: http://antireptile.blogspot.com/

What was the worst movie you’ve seen this year?

I was pretty stunned by the ending of War of the Worlds. Too call it a bad movie isn’t fair, but it was just…the worst.

I hear ya bro.

Back to your strips, do you draw everyday? Do you work on a few at a time or just the one?

I draw everyday, though sometimes on comics that I don’t end up finishing. I’ve taken to drawing several at a time lately, to take advantage of the clarity one gets from being “away” from a piece for a while.

From the archives, are there any strips that that took longer than the others? In terms of finding the right style or the right punchline? With such limited space you really have to pace it precisely, sort of like a haiku or something.

Of course. Sometimes I’ll work on an idea (after it’s “done”) for days, trying to find the right words, the right frame layout, or a better joke. This often involves redrawing aspects or entire frames.

It’s been said that 20% of the American public believe that the moon landings were faked. What think ye?

I don’t believe it was faked, but even if it was, the nation that can fake a moon landing deserves glory.

Glory indeed. Thanks Nick.

Check out The Perry Bible Fellowship for yourself here where you can also go take a peek at Nick’s short films and other stuff.

Also, read my PBF inspired comics here. Lame but I like them
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Wham!! Had to temporarily remove the Thinkhouse post till they print the cards. Yep so Brendan Behan double whammy, got a mention on the Forbidden Planet Blog about being like Behan and my good friend Sean Lennon just opened a Behan exhibiton.

Sean is my brother in law’s wife’s brother in law so we’re nearly family. I was trying to relate to Yvonne how exciting it is to meet another artist, how there is an affinity, sort of like a survivor’s group or something. We just know each other’s pain. Trying to handle a 9-5, a family and your dream is a killer.

This one is my favourite. He looks like a big sickly pint of Guinness.

I think it’s running for another 6 weeks or so, it’s in the Dublin Writers Museum and apparently if you tell them at the door that you’re just there for the exhibition you dont have to pay in to the museum. Great work, combining portraiture, cartooning and story telling all at once. Big pieces too, around 5′x5′ each. Drop Sean a line if you want more info SEANJLENNON at GMAIL dot COM.

So is being compared to big fat alco good? Don’t know. I’m not that big of a drinker anymore. Although I have to go get blood tests on Monday because my big fat liver is weird. I’ll be gutted if its from drinking because I’d expect to get in at least around 10 years of continuos boozing before it clapped up. Has to be cholesterol, I ate breakfast rolls everyday for 4 years and if there were pints the night before sometimes I’d have two breakfast rolls. So it’s looking like 2008 is the year of steamed broccoli.

Wank.

Around the mid 90’s, Poncho was big into Image Comics. I read more than my fair share of them, Youngblood, Spawn, Savage Dragon etc. They were enjoyable reads but after a while my main reason for getting my paws on any Image title was to see if Rob Liefeld had any work in it. I was already well aware of his weird proportions, stiff composition and ludicrous plagarism but it took Poncho to point this out to me:

Rob Liefeld can’t draw feet.

It soon became an obsession, going through all the back issues , sometimes laughing, sometimes in awe of his ability to structure a frame or a page layout so that the feet are truncated or obscured.There was one classic page where Cable is standing, and everything looks good till your eyes reach his feet where a German Shepherd conveniently sits, a feet blocking German Shepherd. Here’s exhibit 1. Check these, my favourite one is the X-Force cover with Juggernaut, that dodgy looking cloud of yellow smoke rids the artist of any annoying forshortening.

And when he HAD to draw feet, they usually looked like this……….

And his figure drawing sometimes threw away all the rules and invented new ones. Check out the scale of these characters standing beside each other, and that Captain America is just silly looking!

But I honestly admire him. For somebody to reach such heights in any field with an obvious flaw should be admired. And the further I rank in the biz the more I respect him. Yeah, he’s a hack but so am I. If I waited until I was 100% competent before getting into comics, my first published work would be out in 2056. Plus in the recent ‘Liefeld attacks Alan Moore’ scandal I take his side in alot of points. That’s for another day.

So hate Liefeld if you want. But he’s sleeping sound tonight while you shuffle around the comic shops like the scrud that you are, talking about Kevin Smith and wearing some lame t-shirt, pulling the underwear slying out from the crack of your arse and when you get home you sniff your finger and it still smells. And this makes you happy.

Just got word from Tharg that my first Twisted Tales will be in the next prog; number 1536 bitch. I’m doing a signing in Sub City next week on the 11th or the 12th I think so come down and get a back rub off me. There’s another signing in Sub City Galway in June too for Freak Show.

Going over to Aberdeen this month for a launchy signing thing with Dec for Your Round too.

It’s all good

The Freak Show comic I done sort of fell through the cracks between changing over the blog to Wordpress and oh I don’t know, my whole life being ruined by Jabba the Slut.

So here it is, my first full colour ‘proper comic’. Set in 1950’s America, a detective agency headed by disgraced ex-cop Jack Dixon goes to DizzyLand to solve a mystery. It’s all very Scooby Doo. It’s different from the other Freak Show stories as it’s a stand alone episode/one shot special and is drawn badly. It was a personal triumph doing a comic completely digitally and one that featured humans. I should have pushed Rob (the writer) to do it with Lego people.

Freak Show is Ireland’s biggest selling and longest running comic. It launched the international careers of Stephen Mooney and Stephen Thompson who now work for the big companies. The current artist is my bum chum and recent Shiznit contributor Dec Shalvey and I’m sure he’ll be snapped up like the other two.

We’re all doing a signing for the launch of the third collection edition at Sugar Club, Thursday April 26th, Doors open at 8.
with live music from The Sensors and Miriam Ingram. I’m sure they’ll be doing Freak Show sketches too, I’ll leave that to the lads but if you want me to draw you a crap looking monster by all means I will.

So pick up a copy if you’re in town, Sub City is the place to go. It’ll also be available to buy through here soonish too.

An in depth showing off of how I made the comic here

Hey Hey! So here’s the big announcement. This makes the Amperduke trailer look like shit; I’m getting a slot in 2000AD called:

The first story should be appearing either this month or next month and it’s a doozey. After that I have 2 more and then we’ll see what happens. I’m absolutely delighted with it. I was a huge 2000AD fan, even had a Judge Dredd T shirt at one stage. One of my first attempts at a comic was a Sam Slade story when I was 11 or 12. I loved it and was obsessed with it for ages.

It’s mad, I was over in the local net cafe and when I read the mail I let out a little squeal of joy like a ponce. Then when I was floating out, all dizzy and excited I saw my nemesis from school. She was always telling me how immature I was and used to tut everyday because I never had a pen . She used to rule her page like her life depended on it with a red pen, a double margin. Everyone said she’s go far, even the teachers.

And here she was all fucked up with kids and miserable looking and I wanted to say to her “Who’s immature now bitch? Fuck you and your double margins”

So give me the love and kudos I deserve. I’ll post a tiny preview of the impending story. It’s a story that I’ve had in me for around 10 years and it’s not bad at all.

Hey pigs! Here’s the trailer for the impending Mister Amperduke. So spread it like Hep C.

And here are the first 53 pages from it as a .pdf

Still netless, unemployed and trying to remove the daggers from my back. But I’m working on comics 10-14 hours a day and getting tons done. Man, I missed out on the Irish blog awards, wasn’t nominated for anything. I used to blog every weekday and this site gets more hits than a red headed stepchild so it’s a pisser. Definitely next year.

I’m still struggling on the cover design for Amperduke. I’ve done 20+ designs and it’s a head wrecker. I’ll put up a dozen soon to get your thoughts.

This time last year I was inking 95% of my stuff the traditional way and then scanning it in to colour and letter it. Never thought I’d get into digital inking so quick if ever and now it’s the other way around, 95% digital. The last pic that I actually inked was this thing.

I still feel sort of ashamed to be doing it all digitally but loads of artists I admire and respect are at it so why not?

Been getting a few questions about how I do it so here is a quick walk through of a page. All this is done in Corel Painter 9.5 with a Wacom tablet. I think it’s a Graphire 3.

This is page 10 from the Freak Show comic. The script was very loose and basically said the two characters walk through the deserted fairground, one of them sees the monster, the man gives chase and gives up. No direct instructions about how it should be broken down which is a godsend, so I got to pace it and plan the layout myself.

So I roughed out the whole 20 pages half arsed and this is page 10:

Top notch art! This was just to see if it reads right. The establishing of scene, a mood shot, character sees something, reacts, character runs, runs, struggles and gives up. I can’t see how it could be done in less panels.

For this page I done loose pencils over a printout of the rough. I didn’t need to do pencils for around 12 of the pages and just drew over the roughs. That’s why most of it looks shit. Ah’m only joshing ya!

I added in a few bits in the pencils like the overturned popcorn stand and tighter backgrounds.

Once the pencils are scanned in you can inkify. I use the scratchboard tool which can be found in the Pens. Always warm up with some doodles to make sure your settings are okay, these are typical of what that involves.

All those strokes are from the same brush without adjusting the pressure sensitivity or other settings. If you want to change them go to Preferences—Brush Tracking and do 5 average strokes and Painter figures out what settings suit your limp wrist best. Keep in mind that the relative scale will change if your doodle pad isn’t near the same size as the pencilled page.

Blammo! Inked in around an hour. I don’t feel so ashamed when I have 5 extra hours to pull my pud.

One of the many features that mimics real life inking in Painter is the way you can rotate the page so easy for those tricky angles. Having the safety net of an undo button allows you to experiment a lot more. I cheat with my speedlines and use pre-made ones. The last panel where he’s knackered, it’s tempting to put in an easy background there because it’s a flat horizontal angle but I went for no background because it suited it better and makes him look alone and lost

Colouring is fun in Painter too, I used to really hate it but sort of look forward to it now. Blazmack! Finished:

For the colours I dropped in that blue on the whole bottom layer and then with the chalk tool layed in the next layer of flats. Slap some highlights in and then blend them with a custom blendy tool and that’s it finished. Here’s the final colour layer without the black for all you perverts:

That’s as simple as it is. Fairly handy and fast to do. So give it a go and if you have any questions and need somebody to ask, try your local priest. Or me.

Yeah that wasn’t really a tutorial in fairness, just me showing off.

I think this is a great idea, Make Comics Forever aims to share advice from young punks like me. They kindly accepted my request to join
and below is my first post:

Being a comic artist with a fairly constant output while still having a crappy day job I believe I can impart some advice to others.

Not everything I say will apply to your technique or production methods but try and stop me:

-Impose a deadline on every project. Reward yourself for hitting them. Great practice for working under pressure real or imagined

-Sundays are the best for drawing comics, get up early, the house will be quiet and you’ll be surprised how much you can get done. But this will involve an early night on Saturday….

-We’ve all heard it a million times: always carry some drawing equipment with you. I swear by this and always have everything with me, a half hour of frenzied drawing on your lunch break makes all the difference, plus, if you see the page that you’ll be working during the day a few times, you’ll know exactly what has to be done when you get home. I found pinning the page in progress to the wall above my pc in work helps, when you’re on the phone or whatever you’ll end up staring at the page from a distance, giving you a fresh perspective and helping you mentally work things out.

-If you have a desk job, or anything that involves paper you can draw individual panels on loose sheets of paper and add them to the page later. This works! With
a page slid under your keyboard you can secretly work away. I was fortunate that
all the panels in my Mr.Amperduke comic are the same size and would fit perfectly inconspicuous under my keyboard. Your boss will think ‘oh that crazy kid is doodling again’ but little do they know.

-Here’s a crazy one that definitely works and can be applied to other stuff, while learning Japanese I laminated a sheet with all the characters I had to learn on it.
I stuck it in the shower, hence the laminating, so every time I showered I was learning. Scoff as you may but ever notice how you start reading ingredients on a shampoo bottle if its right on front of you? Don’t waste that time, laminate character designs or a tricky page.

-If you work on a pc in your day job here’s a tip, say you have Photoshop open and you hear the door, don’t be left fumbling buttons and panicking. Open up Window Explorer and use the Alt+Tab to jump into it if the boss comes in, it opens so fast and looks legit, I’ve weasled out of getting caught on the job dozens of times with this

-You have a light-box, use it. The cheap and easy way is obviously to tape two pages to a window and trace that way but I’ve found a physically lazier way, open Word or whatever and place your pages over the screen. The brilliant white empty document will allow you trace while still at your desk.

-Don’t throw away used or faded pens, a half dead marker gives a great shading effect

-Clean your ruler at regular intervals, wrap it in a piece of paper and tightly drag the ruler up and down. You’ll be amazed at how much crap comes off and its really satisfying seeing what you’ve just prevented from dirtying your page. Sort of like a Clearasil ad.

-Good backgrounds can make a comic. I find looking at photos really helpful for this, not just for copying scenery but for training your eye. Someone gives you a photo of them at a circus, you know it’s a circus because there’s straw visible, in the background a kid has cotton candy, a shadowy figure has an oversized stuffed animal under his arm etc. Picking up on the details that make a scene easily identifiable is important and since a photo conveys an image just like a single panel you can learn a lot from this. How many times have seen old family photos and recoiled at the 70’s wallpaper? Nuff said

-Multitask. Sounds corny but it’s essential. When I’m pressed for time I put a pizza in the oven, have a shower, study while showering, the pizza will be cooked by the time I’m dressed and I eat while I read my emails. Not a second wasted. A practical comic making application of this is while I scanning a page I’m erasing the pencils on the next page while the computer is tied up

-Print concerns: always allow for bleed on your page. Try work out which page will be facing which when it’s printed, sometimes a layout can look crap when beside a certain page either because the same panel layout is used or a character appears in the same pose/composition on the facing page.

-Speech Bubbles: A common mistake among novices is not to leave room for the speech bubbles so precious art is obscured. Stripping in text by copying and pasting from a Word doc to a graphics programme can really help. Sometimes I’ll letter a page to see how it reads before picking up a pencil. The position of speech bubbles guide your eyes down through the page so use this to your advantage, don’t waste time with intricate backgrounds on a text heavy panel, the reader, however courteous is compelled to move at a steady pace.

-If you hate drawing backgrounds, take at look at how manga artists manage to bang out hundreds of pages in a month. Strong establishing shots then vague backgrounds for page after page.

-The old ‘look at it in the mirror’ trick to try get a different take on the picture doesn’t work for me. I prefer to turn the page over the stare intensely at something unrelated for a few seconds, really studying it so that your mind is reset. Flip your page back up and you’ll see it as something new and be able to judge your work objectively

-I asked a friend before who had just finished a 4 year degree in Fine Arts:

“ Tell me the most important thing you learned” his answer was “ If you’re working on something and you can’t get it right, just leave it and start again, don’t try refine something you’re not happy with”. Hey, its good advice and it saved me 4 years.

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Finally actually bought a piece of software. 27 years of age, using computers for more than half my life and never actually bought any legit programmes. I’ve bought tampons more than I’ve bought software. (twice)

I’ve been a Corel nut since I was 15, my Da bought version 3 as he made the move from handmade posters and ads to digital. Poncho led the way in showing me what could be done to my crappy drawings and I was converted. My over-reliance on computers to make comics was at its peak around 2001 and since then I tried reducing the amount of screen time.

Last year I got the Corel Painter 9 demo and was completely dumbfounded by it. The versatility and realness is just mad, Jesus just check out this lad, all done in Painter. I let it slip and I forgot all about it till 2 months ago when I needed a copy of Corel Draw for a loaned laptop for this gay presentation thing in my day job, on the Corel site I saw the Corel 9.5 free trial and grabbed it. You get 60 days to dick around with it which is more than enough time to convince you. For the 60 days I messed around with it and inked around 6 pages , you get used to drawing on screen so quick it’s scary.

What pushed me over the edge was Alex Maleev’s Daredevil comic which he does completely digitally with Painter. For the first time I went about pricing software instead of just stealing it, like when you download a great album and feel guilty about it I reasoned that those Princes in Corel deserve the cash and the money would go back into developing the next version. I reckoned it’d be 500-800 clams and was hopefully going to con my boss into buying it for me. I was shocked to see that you can buy Corel Painter 9.5 for UK£150. It arrived yesterday (just at day 59 of my 60 days trial)

The first thing I noticed about the packaging and enclosed literature was the informalness, maybe contrived but the relaxed tone of the ringbound guide is the furthest thing from the usual cold instruction manuals you get. It’s just great. In conjuction with a Wacom you can do ANYTHING. So go get the free download here