Despite being a very small time comic artist I get a fair amount of suggested collaborations. When I first started drawing comics I had a couple of bad experiences with collaborators/writers so for ages I stuck to the one man band formula.

This year has been great for meeting decent like minded writers, Brian Kenny (writer of "20/20 Vision" available in the Shiznit #2 download on this site) emailed me first during the Summer and has since become a valued friend and ideas man. The other success story is Cian Hallinan, writer of Clown Syndrome.

The title alone nearly sold me on the project but Cian's sharp writing and direction sealed the deal.It makes things so much easier when a story is laid out properly with everything broke down panel by panel. So if you're sending me an idea for comic lay it out properly.

Cian also provided detailed character biographies so the character design only took a couple of tries. Below are few of the sketches, ranging in different styles and from good to downright shit.


After settling on the character designs, I roughed out the comic and put in the text to see how it read. It's always important to include the text in your rough because a common mistake made by aspiring comic artists is to neglect to make room for the speech bubbles. You can see from the roughed and inked versions that very little changed which is a rare thing. I colour my stuff in Corel Photopaint, fuck Photoshop, Corel is the king and all the nay-sayers are invited to try it out before dissing it.



Stay tuned to clamnuts, www.oxygen.ie and The Spanner for more.


On a completely different note: Check out Looking for comedy in the Muslim world

Jesus Christ, the trailer for this vaguely rascist film made my good/bad opinion meter swing from both ends of the spectrum around ten times.

'Aw this looks deadly! Very sharp'
'ah, here...'
'No it looks good!'
'What the fuck? Looks like Cool Runnings'

Check it out and see what you make of it, I'm confused.
http://wip.warnerbros.com/index.html