Let's Hope it's a Good One...

Of course the chances of 2008 being 'without any fear' are pretty slim, so let's just hope we all live in, less than 'interesting times;, shall we say?


The Saga of The Bee-Man


I'm at that stage where I can just about see the finishing line with The Bee -Man. I hope some of the people who emailed me 'their novels' to illustrate last year are paying attention here. The last time I wrote about this I had finished drawing the pages, all 88 of them - from one little short story (hint, look at how long it takes to turn around 4 pages and then look at your 200 page manuscript, and think hard on it).

I have set out the cover and the flyleafs and at the moment I am cleaning the artwork and laying down tones - so far I'm, on page 60. I should finish in a week or two and then I'll edit the story down and letter the pages and that will be the entire project finished. I'll put about 25 pages or so online when it's complete - meanwhile, here are a few pages that are almost finished.

After this is finished I want to make some headway on my large graphic novel, Sunshine on Leith, but I have my cartoons to finish, to say nothing of card designs and my spot on our version of Narrative Corpse coming up (see below) and I may have enough cartoonists and writers to put The Garden of Forking Paths anthology together, that's providing I can successfully bash heads with Brenda Romans and knock out some kind of skeleton-structure to work with - something Lee Nordling (who is really a bit of a god to we cartoonists who have read and reread his Your Career in the Comics) has also challenged me, rightly I feel, to sort out.

Thank Goodness for Christopher Butcher

If I die before I actually make it to Japan, I will at least have managed a vicarious visit, thanks to Christopher Butcher, manager of the world-famous comic book store The Beguiling, freelance writer and comics production artist, and the co-founder of the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, and the fantastic photos he posts on his blog. I'm not joking, his pics really do mean that much to me because I am pretty much trapped at the drawing table for the next 12 months. The sainted-Christopher has even been good enough to group all his comics-related Japanese photos together under the heading Japan on his Comics212 blog, I can't recommend it highly enough.

Thank Goodness too, for Mike Lynch

This is a sad note with which to begin the year, as Randy Glasbergen pointed out to us, cartoonist Bob Zahn passed away early this month. Mike has posted a really nice tribute to Bob. a marvelous and very distinctive and funny cartoonist, on his excellent blog.