These are the first six pages of the eight page short story I produced for book one of Solipsistic Pop. It’s my first full colour comic and my first real attempt at fiction. Buy the book here to see the final two pages and to see it in print.

It’s been a busy few months. Which, I suppose, came to fruition when Solipsistic Pop – the anthology of alternative British comics that I edited and published – launched at the ICA. I’d been working hard on the book since September and it was wonderful to finally see what everyone made of it. You can read more about that and the reasons I wanted to publish Solipsistic Pop here.

Below is the flyer I created to promote the launch and a flyer I illustrated and designed for Paul Gravett to promote the Comica Comiket which it was all a part of.

(this illustration was later used to accompany a Guardian write-up of the day)

The next event Solipsistic Pop will be a part of is Josie Long’s Lost Treasures of The Black Heart on December 8. More details here. I asked SP contributor Anna Saunders to draw the flyer for the night and I coloured it.

Dan Hancox and I were invited by Sheffield’s literary festival Off The Shelf to give a talk about My Fellow Americans on October 26.

As Dan wrote on his blog:

“It’s 20-odd months since Tom Humberstone and I hitched our way through sub-zero temperatures to see prospective Democratic Presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama speak at a rally in the snow-caked fringes of Iowa City. Fuck it was cold that day. Few thought it would be possible on 3 January 2008, the day of the Iowa Caucus, but yesterday President Obama addressed the UN about his vision of a multilateral American future, about leaving the Bush era behind, and everyone nodded. Of course he said that; we knew he was going to say that. It’s funny how quickly extraordinary events become normalised. The New Statesman’s myopic, Clinton-obsessed US editor decided (from the comfort of his desk, naturally) Obama was finished within a week of the Iowa rally. Ha.”

We had no copies left to sell, nor did we have any business cards or, in fact, anything to promote our work. In a way, that seemed to be for the best. Equal parts shambolic and noble. The My Fellow Americans way.

It was a great weekend. Many thanks to the organisers and everyone who helped out on the day. There were many moments where Dan and I felt we were getting a chance to relive the My Fellow Americans trip – for which we were grateful. Sitting around in bars, re-reading the book and discussing anecdotes ahead of the talk… there was something very enjoyable about it all.

Of course, we were a little anxious when it came to do the talk. But it went extremely well. The hour flew by. People seemed genuinely interested in our journey. And they laughed in the right places. An hour-long Q&A followed in which we offered as much political insight as we could, and then we headed to the bar to relax before our journey home the next day.

A new experience for the both of us, but one I can see us happy to try again at some point. In the meantime I need to get started on making My Fellow Americans available to download as a pdf. The kindle and e-book readers are the way to go at this point I think.

Due to our nerves, we didn’t think to get any photos from the weekend so I’ve chosen to throw a few from the trip itself on here.

Meanwhile, Matthew Sheret has reprinted one of the blogs with some accompanying illustrations in his mini-anthology Paper Science – which you can pick up here.

There’s also an interview with Dan here – with some of his thoughts about My Fellow Americans and grass-roots reportage.

Josie Long’s Hundred Days project is a great idea. The concept is simple. You agree to do one thing every day for one hundred days (starting on December 1) – with the intention of improving yourself. You should all go and pledge to do something – anything – over the next three months. I’ve been thinking about what I would do – should I try and learn how to play a musical instrument? Learn a language? Do something that would make me a better, more interesting person? Well… yes… all of those things sound great…

Or… I could draw a comic. Every day. For one hundred days.

See, you may have noticed this blog has been neglected over the past couple of months. If you have a look over at the Solipsistic Pop website you’ll understand why. Editing, publishing and promoting a book of that scale has been hard work and it still requires a lot of my time. I don’t mind. I enjoy it. But the one thing that has been bothering me is that I’ve not had much time to get to my studio and draw my own comics recently.

There have been illustration commissions (all of which will be posted on this blog when I’ve had a chance to catch up) but I’ve not drawn a single panel of a comic since finishing Special Guest Appearance and I’m itching to get started again.

And here’s why I’ve pledged to do this slightly crazy task. Not only is it going to force me back to the drawing board with a regularity that could, if all goes to plan, inform some sort of routine in the future – but it also gives me an excuse to have a go at all the silly, small, throwaway ideas I never get around to. An excuse to play with styles and not feel boxed in by expectations. An excuse to have fun with comics. An excuse to just enjoy drawing.

I’ve been doing a lot of teaching recently and one of my refrains has been that you need to draw every day if you want to get better. It doesn’t matter what you draw – it just matters that you draw. Looking at my sketchbook lately, I’ve started to feel like a hypocrite. The Hundred Days pledge is a way to counter that and an attempt at getting me to develop a bit more as an artist. I’m hoping I’ll be a better comic artist when – and if – I come out the other side with one hundred comics. At the very least I’m hoping these comics will be useful warming up exercises (much like Richard Herring’s Warming Up blog) before starting on my actual comic work. Something to get the drawing hand working properly.

I should clarify: I’m not totally insane. These comics will not be long, sprawling thirty page opuses. They will rarely span an entire page. These comics will be anything from gag panels, annotated sketches, strip cartoons, or whatever I happen to feel would work that day. I may try to be more adventurous on weekends when I have a bit more time but we’ll see.

They will probably be terrible. Possibly more interesting to me as learning experiences. But even then, this exercise will prove worthwhile. Hopefully making a hundred bad comics will mean I’ve got them all out of my system!

This will, of course, mean I’ll inevitably break my No Auto-biographical Comics Until The New Year rule as I’ll most likely be attempting a kind of visual diary, with the occasional experiment or joke – but I hope you’ll all cut me a little slack.

Regardless, if you’d like to join me and follow how I do during the next three months, bookmark this blog or subscribe to the RSS feed. Your support will be useful in helping me retain my sanity.

Comic Number One will be up here sometime on December 1. Wish me luck!