Just a quick heads up to let you all know that there’ll be a 30 minute interview with me on Alex Fitch’s Panel Borders show on Resonance fm at 5.20pm tomorrow (Thursday 17th July). You can listen to the show live here or download the podcast after the event here.

We discuss the origins of the weekly drawing event I organise – Pen Club, my 24 hour comic Everything You Never wanted To Know About Crohns Disease, the evolution of my comic work from the early Art School Scum to How To Date a Girl in 10 Days, the recent My Fellow Americans book, and various elements of the comic industry.

As the final pages of the concluding chapter of the Eagle award winning (sorry, I will let that go…) How to Date a Girl in 10 Days slowly get finished, I thought I’d offer you an exclusive chance to see the first page and a look at how it came together…

The third issue is all plotted out and planned, with notes, dialogue and page layouts scribbled in various notebooks. So the first stage of tackling each page involves a quick thumbnail drawing to work out pacing, beats and basic composition:

Then, I’ll draw a rough version of the page in pencils, with basic shading and lettering:

At which point I can start inking, lettering and putting simple shading washes in. I started cross-hatching any shading with issue 1 but have since made a decision to experiment with this. In issue 2 I relied on scratching Letratone into the pages, with Issue 3 I’m trying a mix of grey brush pens, Letratone, and a little computer interference. Here is what I have by the time I scan the page in:

And here’s the final image:

The rest of the issue will follow soon. Would be good to find out what people think of the new look. Hopefully it remains consistent with the previous issues of How to Date but also shows an aesthetic progression…

Some new sketchbook material. This one here is a quick self-portrait…

And here are some other bits and pieces…

Here’s an illustration for a piece in the latest issue of Word magazine (July 2008). It’s about the recollections of Word contributers buying their first records as teenagers from intimidating record shops.

I rarely do things like this but since you’ve managed to find my work and continue to return to it, you are obviously all intelligent and discerning people who deserve a nice friday treat.

Treat number one
Dave Eggers, author of A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genuis and You Shall Know Us By Our Velocity, talks at TED about the creation of 826 Valencia, the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Company, the Echo Park Time Travel Mart (”Whenever you are, we’re already then”), publishing McSweeney’s, and teaching children literacy skills. In a funny, energetic, and inspirational talk he puts the call out for creatives in similar positions to do similar things with the children in their community. He’s a little nervous to begin with but very worth a watch…

Watch it here

Treat number two
David Simon, creator of the only TV show worth watching – The Wire, talks at USC Law to a roomful of Journalism and Law students about the show, the end of the American empire, the future of journalism and the internet. There’s a couple of spoilers at about 15 minutes in for those of you who’ve yet to see all five seasons of The Wire – so it might be worth skipping ahead. It’s a fascinating talk and you’d be doing yourself a favour if you gave it a listen.

Watch it here 

Okay, back to work and back to our regularly scheduled online portfolio/self-promotion… Apologies for the interruption.