Another illustration from the protest on Thursday. Not entirely sure why I’m doing these or if they serve any purpose but I’m enjoying drawing them and happy with the results. Probably one or two more to come.

Photo reference from a Dominic Lipinski image via The Guardian.

In an attempt to follow up on my vague notions of documenting the student protests using the work of Denys Wortman as inspiration – here’s a quick drawing I did based on some reference provided by Dan Hancox. Thanks to Dan for allowing me to use it.

I like the idea of juxtaposing an earlier image of the protests against a piece of text taken from later on in the day. Trying to solidify and consolidate the fast-paced nature of a twitter feed into something with more permanence. But that’s an unfinished thought – let me come back to that.

Whether this becomes a regular thing or not remains to be seen but I enjoyed doing it and at the very least, drawing these on a regular basis could work as great warming up sketch practise.

If you have any photos you’ve taken during any of the recent demonstrations and don’t mind me using them as reference for future drawings please email them to me at tomhumberstone*at*gmail*dot*com. You’ll, of course, get a credit if I use it.

Throughout today, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the opening quote Dan and I used to open our My Fellow Americans book:

“I’m tired of hearing it said that democracy doesn’t work. Of course it doesn’t work. We are supposed to work it.”
- Alexander Woollcott

No time for small talk and excuses about why I haven’t updated this blog for a while – instead, a quick update of what I’ve been up to and what I plan to be doing over the next few months.

Solipsistic Pop
Most of my time and energy has been spent getting the third volume of Solipsistic Pop finished and launched. The launch at The Black Heart in Camden went really well (despite technical problems and a very hot and over-crowded room) and we had a successful UK-wide launch at Thought Bubble in Leeds the following weekend. It’s been an incredibly fun year putting SP together and now, coming to the end of 2010, I’ve had a chance to reflect a little and figure out what i want to do with it in the future. If you’re interested – I’ve blogged over on the Solipsistic Pop website about my plans for year two. Essentially, I’m only planning on producing one SP in 2011 and hope to focus on my own work for a while.

Forgive the slightly scrappy look of the SP website at the moment – Wordpress changed the theme, ruined all my custom CSS and I’ve had to improvise. Will tidy it up when I have a bit more time on my hands.

Website Polish
Speaking of website changes – I’ve had a little bit of a clean over here. You’ll find www.tomhumberstone.com has become a simpler to navigate online portfolio and I’ve tinkered around with this blog a little so I don’t look an entire decade behind the rest of internet. Now I’m about two or three years behind. Let me know what you think or have any suggestions on ways I can make it better.

Some Interviews + Press
I recorded an interview and selected some songs for the WAW+P podcast at London Fields Radio. Host Mike Leader is always a pleasure to chat to and the whole thing was a lot of fun. Closest I’ll ever get to doing Desert Island Discs too – I possibly enjoyed the process of selecting tracks far too much – I think I drove Mike a little mad by constantly changing my mind.

I also recorded an interview for an arts programme on Resonance FM in which a few other SP contributors such as Philippa Rice, Marc Ellerby, Luke Pearson and Lizz Lunney were interviewed. This may be released as a podcast at some point – will edit this blog with a link when I know more.

My 24 hour comic about Crohns Disease was mentioned by Scott McCloud over at his blog the other week which made my month. You can read the comic for free here. I’ve sold out of printed copies of this but will put a free PDF version together for people who want to print it out at home.

Sketchy Thoughts
Here are a few sketches I found lying at the back of a sketchbook. On a related note – I’ve just picked up Denys Wortman’s New York: A Portrait of the City in the 1930s and 1940s – such a beautiful book and highly recommended. It got me thinking I’d like to see a comic artist document London right now. Dan mentioned the Lenin quote: ‎”There are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen” on Twitter the other day and it occurred to me that someone should be out there transcribing the protests in words and pictures. I’m half tempted to give it a go… Meantime:

Christmas Comics
Finally, with Christmas just around the corner, Eddie Ross blogged about supporting your favourite small press artists and giving the best present you can give to your loved ones – comics! Have a read of his recommendations and be sure to buy his 100 Tiny Moments as it’s one of the best comics reads of 2010.

I also – of course – completely agree with encouraging people to support their favourite artists and local stores. Go down to your local comic shop and buy a bespoke, hand-stapled comic for a friend. Email an artist and commission a piece of original artwork. You’ll be in possession of a unique Christmas gift and also be a patron of the arts. Most artists have prints, posters, cards and other merchandise available on their websites. Go buy some of it!

Convinced but not sure where to start? Why not buy some gorgeous hand-crafted jewellery from Tuck Shop? Sparkplug Books have got some wonderful comics available, so do Picturebox, maybe you need a Hairy Midget Elf in your life or know someone who does – Lizz Lunney has the answers, you don’t just have to support comics – fancy a bit of comedy? how about an awkward Christmas CD from Helen Arney? Julia Scheele is a fantastic illustrator – why not hire her to draw you a card? NoBrow deserve a few of your pennies, as do Self Made Hero and Blank Slate… I could go on and on. But I should stop. Basically – please go spend some money directly with artists, local stores and small publishers!

Merry Christmas.

Here’s a quick drawing I did of Marc Ellerby’s Chloe Noonan. The sardonic, ginger monster hunter is a wonderful character and the comics are a great read – be sure to pick them up here.

I drew this a while ago as a warm-up sketch but forgot about it. Having just signed off the proofs for Solipsistic Pop 3 on Friday, I was clearing space for the forthcoming delivery of boxes-and-boxes-o-comics and came across it. It seemed like a perfect time to finish colouring it and throw it online seeing as Chloe is the cover star of the new Solipsistic Pop:

These images have been sitting in my sketchbook since last week due to my laptop charger dying on me. Only just got a replacement and catching up with some scanning today. Did you know it’s £60 for a MacBook charger? £60! For. A. Plug.

Anyway. It’s Saturday!

Off to Scared To Dance tonight. Might even do some drawing. Maybe see you there.

I double dare you.

As promised, I’m continuing to draw daily comics now and again. After yesterdays Latitude comic (which I’m counting as day 101) I’ve decided today is day 102 and all these journal/visual diary comics from now on will be titled Worth Recording (rather than labelled as Hundred Days comics). At some point I’ll explain why and organise this all somehow but for now I’m just running on post-weekend enthusiasm and need a chance to think it all through first.

I think it’s becoming clear I really enjoy documenting my life this way. I found myself sketching away tonight without even thinking about it. There’s something more… permanent about capturing great evenings like this using comics instead of a camera. Looking back over the other comics, it’s amazing how they trigger so many memories…

I may not do it all the time. And sometimes may not share the more personal ones. But I’m going to keep doing these as and when it feels right. Very possible I might challenge myself to do another 30 day run now and again too.

Go listen to Allo Darlin’, Antarctica Takes It! and The Smittens. They’ll put a smile on your face.

A very quick comic about Latitude while it’s all still fresh in my memory.

I had a wonderful weekend with the We Are Words + Pictures gang. Go visit the websites of Edward Ross, Philippa Rice, Anne Holiday and Matthew Sheret right now if you haven’t come across them already. Talented people. And great festival companions.

A massive thank you to you if you dropped by our tent and joined in with the drawing. It was such a wonderful weekend and so inspiring to see everyone throw themselves into creating comics with complete abandon. The WAWAP site will hopefully have a bunch of pics up for perusal with a proper blog about it soon (Update: It’s now online here).

In the meantime, here are some extra bonus sketches. To start with – some drawings I did during the workshops. Most of my drawings from the weekend were sold during a mini-exhibition we held at the end but here are the remaining images…

Actually… a brief explanation: One of the ways in which we tried to get everyone started with an activity was to ask people to draw a comic or illustration based on their experiences of the festival or previous festivals they’ve been to. We wrote simple prompts and provided them to people if they looked lost. Here, by means of providing an example, was my first one…

And another…

This one was just a doodle during the last stretch of Sunday…

Outside of the workshops, I didn’t get much of a chance to sketch. But here’s a quick one of a couple in the literary tent…

And a brief sketch of some people at a nearby bench…

Finally… a few photos! Here’s us setting up and a pic of Anne and Philippa…

A couple of shots of the workshops in full swing (this is during the quieter moments when we could actually take photos)…

Here’s Matt with a hand-made speech balloon (did I mention we had customisable speech balloons so you could star in your own photo-comic?!) and a small section of the make-shift exhibition we had at the end…

Before I go, just a quick mention to say that if you make comics or are interested in promoting comics at all – make sure you get in touch with the WAWAP team immediately. They’re always looking for new artists to work with and new events to organise. Anything to help spread the joy of making and reading comics. So email them right now if you want to help!

Phew!

And that’s it. One hundred comics. In one hundred days (with, of course, a little hiatus in the middle).

Hope you’ve enjoyed the ride. It’s been a very interesting and exciting challenge for me. Definitely learned a hell of a lot along the way. I’ll probably write a proper postscript about it all next week when I have a bit of time.

In the meantime, I’m off to Latitude festival on Thursday with We Are Words + Pictures to help run a comics workshop in the Pandora’s Playground area. If you’re coming to Latitude, make sure you stop by and say hello!

I’ve had such a fun time with the daily comic that I have a feeling I’m going to continue doing it. I won’t do it every single day – just now and again when it feels right. I expect I’ll do some drawing at Latitude so will try and have something to upload when I get back. Essentially – this isn’t the end of my daily comics.

On my return, I’ll be doing a bit of housekeeping on this blog and my website to make it all more up-to-date with the kind of work I’ve been doing over the past year or two. It feels like the right time to do it.

Orbital Comics will also be rehanging an updated version of The Art of Solipsistic Pop exhibition this weekend with new art from both volumes of the book. Do stop by if you’re in London and curious to see some original comic art.

I’d just like to say a huge thank you for reading and for the lovely feedback and support you’ve all given during this whole thing. It can be a tough slog doing a daily comic sometimes so those emails/comments/tweets all make a massive difference when I’m scanning in lineart at 2am and doubting my sanity. Do leave comments on this post with your thoughts on the whole thing – very interested to hear what you all made of this exercise. And hope you stick around for any future comics!

Until I get round to doing a proper overhaul on the blog – here’s a nice, easy way to read through all one hundred days (and here’s a quick Spotify playlist to listen to while you read… indulge me…)

Day 01 | Day 02 | Day 03 | Day 04 | Day 05 | Day 06 | Day 07 | Day 08 | Day 09 | Day 10
Day 11 | Day 12 | Day 13 | Day 14 | Day 15 | Day 16 | Day 17 | Day 18 | Day 19 | Day 20
Day 21 | Day 22 | Day 23 | Day 24 | Day 25 | Day 26 | Day 27 | Day 28 | Day 29 | Day 30
Day 31 | Day 32 | Day 33 | Day 34 | Day 35 | Day 36 | Day 37 | Day 38 | Day 39 | Day 40
Day 41 | Day 42 | Day 43 | Day 44 | Day 45 | Day 46 | Day 47 | Day 48 | Day 49 | Day 50
Day 51 | Day 52 | Day 53 | Day 54 | Day 55 | Day 56 | Day 57 | Day 58 | Day 59 | Day 60
Day 61 | Day 62 | Day 63 | Day 64 | Day 65 | Day 66 | Day 67 | Day 68 | Day 69 | Day 70
Day 71 | Day 72 | Day 73 | Day 74 | Day 75 | Day 76 | Day 77 | Day 78 | Day 79 | Day 80
Day 81 | Day 82 | Day 83 | Day 84 | Day 85 | Day 86 | Day 87 | Day 88 | Day 89 | Day 90
Day 91 | Day 92 | Day 93 | Day 94 | Day 95 | Day 96 | Day 97 | Day 98 | Day 99 | Day 100
The Pledge

I don’t think this will come as much of a surprise to anyone, but every single one of these one hundred comics is dedicated to Harvey Pekar, whose death was sadly announced today. It’s almost impossible to overstate his importance and contribution to comics. When I heard the news, I think I felt much the same way as I did when Joe Strummer died. The art that both men created had affected me in such a way that I thought them immortal. As Douglas Wolk remarked on twitter – “America is a little less splendid today”. A true original and a huge inspiration:

“Essentially all I’ve wanted this to be is a journal of a life, because I think that sort of thing is worth recording” – Harvey Pekar

UPDATE: You can now buy the full 100 Days comic – over 150 pages – as a digital eBook here for just £1.

The final day tomorrow!

For the record: I thought Jennifer’s Body was slightly flawed but enjoyable, smart, and with a pleasingly black sense of humour. My brother thought it was terrible. We both, however, completely enjoyed Zombieland.

Only two comics left!