Leo Baxendale Space Trek artwork found!

I'm elated, well, as much as I can be given my problems in that area. You know that Albion Comic I'm in, well at least the cartoonist Rod McKie, which is the fictional and the real me is in - Albion #3, or the graphic novel (there's a post or two about it on here) - the one where I mention Leo Baxendale's Space Trek artwork? Well, I don't know if you've read about that escapade but I gave some of the artwork from IPC to Les Lilley, who wrote pages and pages of stories for IPC and who was at that point Chairman of the Cartoonist Club of Great Britain, to auction that night for charity. The person who bought the other page of Space Trek was cartoonist Nick Newman, who managed to outbid Jerry Banx. So, anyway, long story short, I moved home in the year 2000 and lost lots of artwork, until the other day when I found it stored at the back of our Linen Cupboard. I'm made up, here's a scan of my beloved Leo Baxendale page (it's about 17"x11"):

I Manga coming in a day or two

I think I have time to post the first I Manga Blog post this week. I had a long hard think about what to launch it with and I swithered about reviewing MPD Psycho first, just to be cool, but good sense has prevailed and I'm going to go with Naoki Urasawa's epic seinen manga, Monster.

I've drawn a few batches of cartoons, and they are pretty good, I think, and I've caught up with my Webcomics Nation posts (I'm managing to add episodes of Dirty Dick's Bottomless Pond), so I'm ever so slightly made up.



There's just one part to add. I don't know if I prefer doing it this way, you know, uploading a page at a time. A lot of the Lepertown stories are like this, a few pages long and I think I prefer posting them in complete finished form. It's just that it can be a lot of extra work. It's still fun, to a degree, I suppose.

I've been watching episodes 10-11-12-13 of Ugly Betty. My God, you won't believe what is happening! I did though, I kind of sussed it early on, but then it is a genre piece dealing in stereotypes and I think that's part of its appeal. I'm still enamoured with the Betty charcter 13 episodes into the series, which is comforting. However, as usual, the Halloween and Xmas episodes will be shown here sometime in March or April. You'd think Channel 4 was run by morons...Oh, wait, it is.

I know I'm behind with The Cartoon Fiend blog, badly behind with it and I can only apologise to my hugely talented interviewees. I promise I will bang a whole bunch of interviews on it shortly. I'm going to upgrade it to Java Blogger first though, so fingers crossed.

Updated WebComic Nations site with the Tammyclava.

I suspect a lot of the trends of the 60s were inspired by surplus goods. The 'trend' for haversacks as school bags came around quite nicely to use up the surplus of gas-mask bags in the Army and Navy stores. The Tamaclava probably came from a similar source and would have been some kind of Naval thing, I suspect. Anyway, we woke up one day and everybody had to have one. That's about the long and the short of it.

You can read the entire comic at WCN