Having seen my comic from the other week, WIAIWYA Records asked if they could use the drawing I had made of Anna from The Middle Ones as a badge. They also I asked if I would fancy drawing Grace in the same style for another badge.

Here’s what I sent them:

If the designs end up being used, I’ll let you know how to get hold of the badges should you like these at all. The Middle Ones are a very charming, twee, lo-fi indie duo. Delightful. If you’re a fan of that sort of thing. I don’t think it’s much of a secret that I am.

I, along with Adam Cadwell and Jamie McKelvie, will be teaching comic and illustration workshops during the afternoon of an all-day event hosted by We Are Words + Pictures. It’s on Valentine’s Day. The press release:

Sunday 14 February at the Notting Hill Arts Club

Drop In + Draw 3pm-7pm; £1 (under-12s free)

Illustrators Adam Cadwell, Jamie McKelvie and Tom Humberstone

Illustrators, writers and animators of all ages come together for an afternoon of comic book art and fun. Featuring group-draw sessions, comic-themed activities and one-on-one tutorials, Drop In + Draw is open to all ages and artists of all abilities.

The illustrators coming to Drop In + Draw are among the finest young professionals working in comics today.

Adam Cadwell’s The Everyday is an acclaimed auto-biography web-comic that’s grown a loyal and devoted audience over the past three years;

Tom Humberstone won an Eagle Award – the ‘BAFTA’-esque British comics award – for his How To Date A Girl in 10 Days and spent two months following the US Presidential Primaries for My Fellow Americans with journalist Dan Hancox;

Jamie McKelvie shot to attention illustrating Phonogram, quickly being picked up for work on Marvel and DC titles and working on signature characters like Cable, Robin, Nightcrawler and most recently S.W.O.R.D. His creator-owned series Suburban Glamour will start its second volume in summer 2010.

All will be on hand to offer advice to amateurs, aspiring professionals and kids of all ages throughout the day. Even if you can’t tell Batman from Manbat, or don’t know which end of a brush pen to hold, come on down and we’ll get you making comics.

Here’s the flyer I made for the event:

In the evening, bands take over the stage for the Modern Romance night. Hosted by comedian Robin Ince.

You can find out more information on that and see Julia Scheele’s flyer here.

Hope to see some of you there!

This week sees Hype Machine’s 2009 overview going online – focusing on 50 artists chosen by users of the site. This year, they decided to have each artist/band accompanied by an illustration. They got in touch with me and asked if I’d like to provide an illustration for one of the artists and I chose – from the ten or so remaining – to go for Iron & Wine.

As Sheret commented to me once – Iron & Wine is the musical choice for men who want to cry late at night.

Here’s the illustration I provided:

I drew it fairly quickly during the festive period and only looked at it again today when it went online. Obviously, now all I see are the things I should have done differently. The background being the main issue for me I think. But you live and learn.

Thanks to Jamie McKelvie and Julia Scheele for suggesting me for the gig.

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.

“Jimmy Carr had to take Jim Davidson to task for stealing some of his material. Although, to be honest, if Jim Davidson can steal your material maybe it’s time to think about writing something else. To be fair to Jimmy Carr, it was a kind of sexist bit that he’d written with a sense of irony that Jim Davidson was able to appropriate at face value. One of the kindest things you could say about Jim Davidson as a fellow comic is: he’s not a performer who is troubled by the possibility of duality of meaning” – Stewart Lee

We’re getting close to Edinburgh Fringe time and Paul Fleckney, editor of the fantastic comedy site London Is Funny, has set up Edinburgh Is Funny as a one stop port of call for all festival attendees in need of comedic guidance. Here’s a small image I was commissioned to produce for the mini-site:

I sadly won’t be able to attend the Fringe this year but based on the preview shows I’ve been seeing, there will be some absolutely outstanding sets.

Of course, most broadsheets and various other media will be trying to be your source of information about the festival throughout the summer, but I really would advise you to bookmark Edinburgh Is Funny over all of them. Believe me when I say that it isn’t just because Paul is kind enough to commission me. Paul really knows his comedy and has been running London Is Funny for well over a year now. Besides being a great place for some genuinely well written comedy journalism, there’s a wealth of great interviews and Josie Long is writing a fantastic column about charity shopping (which I talked about in an earlier blog entry) so you certainly won’t be left wanting for interesting material and/or recommendations.

But also – you won’t find anything like this pernicious and unhelpfully blinkered article by Brian Logan (published in The Guardian yesterday) which attempts to address the extremely complicated issue of the apparent rise of politically incorrect and offence-for-the-sake-of-offence comedy. There is certainly an interesting discussion to be had regarding all this (I say “all this” because there are several related issues to be dealt with here) but it would not be a new one. Far from it in fact. Stewart Lee has often pondered the merits of political incorrectness, taboo breaking and the fine line comedians tread in and outside of his work (here, here and here), as has Daniel Kitson and, indeed, Richard Herring whose latest show is horrifically misrepresented in Logan’s article. The problem with such pieces is that they tend to engender the “I haven’t seen/read/heard it but…” argument in people who read it. Essentially, anyone who starts a sentence with that opening conversational salvo is really just saying “don’t listen to a word that comes out of my mouth from this point on as I am clearly uninformed and won’t empirically check things out for myself. Actually, it might be best to avoid speaking to me altogether as I clearly can’t be trusted to form reasonable and interesting opinions of my own. All the best now. Take care”.

I suppose what irritates me most about Logan’s column is that successful, intelligent, interesting comedy relies on a lot of trust. The trust of the audience in the performer to ride odd and sometimes uncomfortable trains of thought, and the trust of the performer in the audience to not take everything they say at face value and understand what they are really trying to say. Granted, there are undoubtedly comedians who may not think about the responsibility of what they say on stage but I’d suggest that the large majority do. Indeed, I imagine most probably agonise and overanalyse a lot of their more difficult material. To suggest otherwise would be to do them and the medium of comedy a huge disservice.

You might be asking: “What does this have to do with comics?” Well, not much really. Like I’ve said before, I enjoy live comedy and I get easily annoyed by lazy, reactionary journalism which takes things out of context to appease an erroneous conceit. Normal service will resume shortly!

Read Herring’s response to the article here. Andrew Collins also makes some good points about the article here. Paul manages to write a decidedly more entertaining and balanced piece about Herring’s new Edinburgh show here.

I love going to see live comedy. And London is a great place to see some.

The city is lousy with small, intimate venues that offer cheap, exciting new comedy throughout the year – and right now is a perfect time to catch a few shows. Edinborough is approaching and pretty much all the comedians taking part are previewing and testing their material for less than half the cost of those final fringe shows. There’s something fascinating and very enjoyable about seeing these shows come together at this early stage.

The Happy Mondays nights at the Amersham Arms in New Cross are just one way of seeing some of these previews. But if you want to find some comedy near you then there’s a new site called London Is Funny which will help you discover where and when to go.

The site (designed by Joe Lanman) is easy to use and has some very nice illustrations on it (I think you can all see where I’m going with this…)

I illustrated a header image for the incredibly talented Josie Long’s forthcoming guide to charity shops which will be on the site soon:

I also designed the logo and various icons for features on the site (”The Rant”, “My First Gig”, “Guide To London”, etc.):

Be sure to check out the site and give it your support – it’s a fantastic resource if you live in London and enjoy a spot of live comedy.

World Architecture News asked me to provide an illustration for a piece about Prince Charle’s comments regarding Mumbai’s Dharavi slums being a model for urban development. The piece can be read here. Here’s the image I came up with:

Electric Sheep Magazine asked me to illustrate a review of the Swedish vampire film ‘Let the right one in‘ which will be hitting our screens soon. I usually don’t upload these sort of commissions until the work has seen print and I can be sure it’s being used. But I’m pleased with this one and I thought I’d give you, my loyal blog followers, a heads up!

Having seen the film, I can heartily recommend it and it was a pleasure to produce this piece. I hope I’ve managed to do the movie justice. Go and see it.

A couple more illustrations I produced for this month’s issue of Electric Sheep Magazine (Winter 08). The images are for a short piece called ‘Alter Ego’ in which a writer will discuss which silver screen fictional character they feel they most closely resemble. I was asked to draw the writer (Maddy Costa) and film character (Traci Lords in Cry Baby). Here are the results…