First off a big congrats to Dec and Andy for scooping an Eagle Award for Hero Killers in Bristol over the weekend. Big thanks to you all if you voted through here. Seems like a lifetime ago that he timidly dangled a copy of it at me at the Irish Comic Showcase thing, now we’re bumchums and even going half on adopting a little black kid.

Here’s a page from an upcoming Twisted Tales in full jaysis colour. Still don’t know if they’re running back to back but they’re running and that’s all that matters. I’m moving house tomorrow so prolly no posts for a week or two.

I have a list of stuff that I need to re-post such as the interviews I done with imfamous Irish cartoonist Scratch and the genius Nicholas Gurewitch. Still can’t work out how to post images in wordpress without posting them to my flickr account. Anybody know?
So here’s a popular comic which I neglected to put back up. In fairness, Lego have sort of redeemed themselves since I made this but here it is anyway:

The ‘Dropping Loads’ bit comes from a running joke on Howard Stern. It cracks me up. Listen to it once and it will ruin your sex life.
Definitely not work safe or for kids (so if you work in a creche, that’s a double no). I was pouring milk on my breakfast this morning and couldn’t help shouting ‘Dropping Loads all over your fucking Shreddies’. So there.

Whaddup goons. Was talking to a bloke yesterday about the series of comics I done for The Dubliner magazine a year ago. He reminded me of them as I had completely forgotten about it and never mentioned it here. Written by the obscenely talented Cian Hallinananan, I think they went in under the name ‘Saint Stephens Green’ or something. All drawn on the sly in work, I’m happy with most of them but think the art is generally ropey.

It’s mad, when they were running a relation commented that she had seen them and was impressed. No offence but fuck these comics, what about the hundreds of pages I’ve drawn over the past 6 years? I think because they were in a legit mag they valued these more than the rest of my output.

Ah yes, how sweet it is. My life has taken a series of well deserved major good turns over the past while and then to top it all off I find out that DEVO are playing this summer. This is unreal. They are in my top 5 favourite bands and I had sort of resigned myself to the fact that I’d never see them. The three bands that I’d give my left nut to see would be Dead Kennedys, The Clash and Devo and although I saw the awful new Dead Kennedys it doesn’t count.

They’ve been a big influence on me and several references to DEVO pop up in my comics. That SHRIVEL UP comic in MBLEH gets it’s name from one of their songs and then there’s this:

The cwazy thing about them though is that I HATE alot of their stuff. Sweet sufferin jaysus, some of their later material is woeful. But I suppose you can only be pioneers for so long before you end up second guessing yourself. And that recent DEV0 2.0 nonsense is just callous. But I still love them dearly despite all this and can’t wait to see them live and hopefully buy a proper energy dome so I can get rid of my homemade one.

The Freak Show launch was deadly, thank you one and all to all the strangers who bought me pints. Dec’s new Freak Show bumper edition came out on the day, just delivered straight from Ivan’s which was another highlight. Looks deadly. And here, look at the cover to the Your Round comic that I contributed to, really is amazing and it will definitely stand out and do the biz.

Seeya later spuds

Just finished up a 6 page story for a new anthology called Your Round. It’s been published by clamnuts regular Dec ‘Fishburger’ Shavley. From him:

Your Round is an anthology series set in a pub. Any pub. Everybody has a pub story, Your Round is where creators can tell one. The first issue, ‘Tequila,’ has 3 stories. One by Mike Collins (artist on Doctor Who, Superman, Star Trek, etc.), another by Bob Byrne (of Mbleh, The Shiznit and 2000AD fame) and one more by myself.

My contribution is a real life story from 1998. A crazy night that really did change my world view. I think Dec is getting a site together for it. Also, lissen diss: Vote for his comic HERO KILLERS in the Eagle awards or else I’ll scweam and scweam and scweam. Come on lads he’s a good mate he deserves some props. It only takes a minute girl. It’s in the Best Black and White British (ha!) Comic category. You don’t have to vote on everything. Vote here

Ps. Vote for Sancho and Matt Smith for best editor (2000AD). That man has great taste.

Sweet Jaysus I drank a 2ltr bottle of coke for some reason today and I’m all jittery. The amount of caffiene in that shit. And you see kids drinking it, babies! Not good.

Here’s a promo pic I done for my book. It was a giveaway for The Den, it got a mention on it a few weeks ago. It’s the first physical pen on paper illo I’ve done in ages. Of course it had to be a real drawing if it was a giveaway, it’d look great if the winner just got it on a disk (with some flarn). So I done it in pencil, scanned it then inked and yesterday morning I inked it digitally as part of my daily warm up doodling. The inked version took around 45mins and I timed myself on the digital version, 12 minutes boyeeez. Ahhh, the Wacom is the fuckin biz. Shiznit 4 is all digital except for the cover which was scanned pencils and then inkified with Painter.

Was saying to Bonzo Bonham last week about going digital and he, like so many others gets all cranky at the thoughts of it. And as I’ve said a million times before, I was reluctant to make the change until I heard Brian Bolland doesn’t use real ink an’mo. Yeah it is cheating a bit but when it saves 3 to 4 hours out of your working day….

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

Shiznit 4 is back from the haunted carpet shop where it’s printed and it looks great. Absolutely packed with goodness. I’ll be putting up a pdf of it soon but for youze in Dublin you can start hunting it now

To get a copy of issue 4 AND the other 3 issues, go to the namless and bestest comic shop on Crow St in Temple Bar. That’s the only place that has back issues. Rumour has it that the shop is called ‘Story’ but after 5 years of visiting it I still don’t know. Here’s a map.

And for fuck’s sake, buy something in his shop! He’s good enough to let us keep all our comics there but loads of people just come grab Shizzes and leave.

UPDATE: just found this pic from the day Issue 2 was delivered. This was when I had a day job in the piss-prune factory. You had to wear an energy dome on your head or you’d be chased around by the boss like Benny Hill.

So here’s a taster of the first Twisted Tales. I’ll let you know when it’s out. Once it’s published I won’t be able to post it here so don’t miss it. Technically I shouldn’t even be showing this but since it’ll pull in a bunch of new readers I’m sure its cool.

I didn’t explain in the last post that the stories are self contained silent stories like Amperduke. I have 8 great stories worked out. My biggest concern is that I’ll paint myself into a corner like M.Night Shamalan, that dude was the biz straight out of the trap but steadily fucked it up for himself and now he’s a joke.

I’ve been working on the two new ones constantly for the past couple of weeks and they’re looking swell. One of them is in colour. Hopefully the fans will like them, Future Shocks were always my favourite because you got a full story into you and weren’t left hanging. They have the contents up the top of the cover now so you can see which stories are running which is a great idea.I always said they should have a symbol on the cover to say there’s a self contained story in the Prog because when I stopped buying it in the mid 90’s, I wouldn’t buy it if I saw it because I knew it was full of serials and hard to jump in to a story that’s 6 instalments old.

Check out the previous post, my first submission to Galaxy’s Greatest back in 2000(AD).

A friend asked me how the Twisted Tales thing come about. I told him that I never really submitted anything to them but then I remembered Graylin.

This was a half arsed attempt of a comic I started back in 1999 and sent in March 2000. It was a mess, I didn’t have a computer or a digital camera of my own and had to do it in dribs and drabs in my Da’s house. It stars a young Poncho and yes that is his real hair. I was new to Photoshop and didn’t really know what I was doing. I’m still fond of it and might give it another go, always loved photo comics like Doomlord and with my modern digital bag of tricks I reckon I could do it right.

Most of it is painfully bad but I still love the little gun that transforms into a cricket.
Poncho played Graylin, that dude in the lizard mask and that baby is also him too. The mutant bat was my dog Bozo, the lad shot in the face was Diamond D and Quinner was the villain. We shot the Museum scene on the sly and for most of it the security guards were shouting at us to stop but we didn’t which was funny. “Here! No photo’s!” “Yeah, in a minute, just one more”. What’s the problem? The animals are dead!