Month: February 2024

Dunno if they’ll end up being used, but here’s some sketches for the folklore book that’s being collected…

We needed another page for the book, and specifically something selkie related, so John sent me a tweet and I turned it into a metaphor about the fleeting nature of tv fame… I dunno if that’s what anyone expected, but it’s certainly what I delivered!

This week I pencilled a somewhat staggering 27 pages. An entire chapter of Bad Magic (the graphic novel) and a six page strip. Next week is all inks.

Owing to the way the page count on bad magic has gone, I have to go back and add a couple of pages, doing that tonight. Tomorrow, I’ll be going back and adding an extra page (see it exclusively here first!) to the folklore thursday stuff as it’s being collected into a nice volume of stuff. (also gotta to reletter it)

Weekends/job ends are like speed bumps, give mea  straight week of doing inks or pencils and I take off like a plane. Once things get bitty and complicated, it slows me right down. 

Here’s a non spoiler page, and pretty typical for how detailed my pencils are. I mean it’s all I need to go in with inks.

Saw John McCrea at the weekend, along with some of his dead eyes art (which is beautiful, I like John’s work anyway but this stuff is something else again).

Anyway, expect some inks next week!

This is the last page of the leopard from lime street ep8 – a particualrly tricky one to figure out the layout for, two things I’d like to see in BIG panels, and then two sort of end panels. I think, in the end what I got worked – but largely because you can get away with goofy circular panels in this sort of thing (where they’d be out of place in, for example, a war book)

Anyway, there’s what the layout looks like, I actually really like the composition on the page now.

A couple of years ago, Keith Richards -editor of Monster Fun- tasked me with repbooting a strip from the old monster fun for a one off brand new monster fun. I really enjoyed doing it, but I suspect while the comic seemed to get a chance at life, the strip didn’t (or at least we weren’t asked to do more…)

Anyway. just for us, here it is! 

If you think of my artwork as cartoony, this is proper cartooning… and I got a chance to do some paid work with John Reppion…

So, in total, this week I pencilled five pages and inked 11 – so you could think of that as the equivalent of 16 half pages or 8 pages of finished art in total this week. A decent haul, but actually Friday I only inked one page, and didn’t do much else and saturday I did some layouts for the next episode of Leopard of Lime street, but not much else and today I’m started the 21 pages of layouts for the next chapter of Skulduggery Pleasant… but not much else.

So three pretty lazy days in there, which is annoying. 

Doing layouts tonight with a plan of just powering through as many pages of pencils as I can all next week. 

Above – leopard from Lime street layouts

One of the 8 inked pages.

I also drafted a first draft for tango, I’m gonna pitch that in film school tomorrow night, we’ll see how it goes down.

Cross posted from my blog 

So, I did the first class – a sort of introductory who-we-are-and-what-our-favourite-films-are, two hour thing.

(For the record, I said my favourite film is The Big Lebowski – which I think it is, probably the film I’ve seen the most, and has bits that make me laugh, though honestly the reason I’m doing a course on short film making is I love things like Inside No 9, Black Mirror and… you know … 2000ad)

The plan is everyone who wants to can pitch an idea and then Larry (who’s running the thing) will pick one (based, more on how well it’ll use everyone’s abilities, as much as the quality of the idea/script)

It’s weird introducing yourself in a group – especially one where odds are you’ll find a comic fan – or at least someone who knows you (Belfast is a small place anyway, so – as was the case here – Larry had heard of me, but from people saying “there’s a guy who lives [redacted] who writes* for 2000ad” (*these things are always a bit garbled)

So last night I sat and had a think and came up with about five ideas for shorts, I dunno if any will get past tomorrow, and they’re all a little nebulous, but here they are:

TANGO

Outside a community centre a husband and wife talk about their past, and their future, and how this tango class is a first step in a new future for him. As he walks haltingly towards the door, we see a sign for the tango night – “Singles Tango Night – widowers welcome” and he turns and says goodbye to his wife, who vanishes.

The Pass

Spide and Jaunty are two not-so-bright belfast hoods who need some money for weed, and decide to mug the first person to come down the back street they’re in. That first person, it turns out… is Gandalf.

There’s a confrontation – Gandalf gets the better of the two idiots and escapes, but as he does so, he drops his pipe.

Spide is disappointed, they got nothing. “‘er, you think he was… you know, Magic…?” Jaunty, drawing from the pipe and in a smokey weed induced haze – “I dunno about him, but this is fucking magic”

The Ticket

A traffic warden and a badly parked driver face off, as the warden is about to place a ticket on the car and the man knows if he can get to the door he can claim he was just leaving. No dialogue and filmed like a spaghetti western, including tumbling crisp packets and close up of sweaty eyes.

Working Stiff

An office style docudrama as a husband and wife are interviewed about their typical day. The husband though, is a monosyllabic zombie. “Oh well, day to day there’s not much difference from before, I mean he’s still mostly in the way, though he is a LOT better with the dog and to be honest his personal hygene isn’t what it was… ” “And your … love life” “Oh, well, now … that IS different… I mean… now he’s always … ” [end credits]

Me, drawing the leopard from Lime Street. I dunno why but I’m really happy with that last panel…

Like a fool I posted saying I’d do a week ending on the friday, then I remembered my diary runs Monday to Sunday. So Sunday is better.

Here’s last week’s diary. Planned to Pencil all of BadMagic, but deadline for the Leopard leapt on top of me and I had to turn my attention to that.

This is a diary of my own devising, my pro comic artist diary, I can keep track of pomodoros I’ve done (you can see here, I’ve done none) and – optimistically – four pages at a time (plus room for notes).

Boxes with a single stroke are where I’ve pencilled a page ((oh Tuesday, the third, you golden child, how I thought everything was gonna work out fine because of you). You can see Wednesday I had to start pencilling/inking stuff. The numbers above the squares were my original plans for what I’d planned to do.

Still, this tells you: six pages pencilled, five pages pencilled and inked – that’s not bad (given I had an ibs attack last night and genuinely didn’t think I’d get anything done – saturday morning I thought I’d get three pages over the weekend, but, in the end, all things considered I got two… still not awful.)

Next week’s plan? finished leopard (one page left to pencil/ink – it’s a cramped one though) that’ll happen monday, then I have GOT to get a book cover done, might also pencil that for monday. Tuesday – Wed finish pencilling Bad Magic (three pages left to go) then Wed-Sun ink as much of the bloody thing as I can get done, I hope for two pages of inks per day. That’d be a good week. Will let you know how it goes!

Right, gonna try THIS – a regular weekly check in to tell you what’s going on behind the scenes… This is all hush hush though, but you’ll find out what I’m up to as I do it…

This week … I’ve already lost track but so far, I’ve pencilled six pages (of shhh! Skulduggery Pleasant graphic novel) and pencilled and inked two pages of a new Leopard from Lime street (also shush!) and done my taxes. Which was grim. Tax year 21/22 was the best year I’ve ever had (and expect to have) a large part is from the misfortune of my pal John McCrea which meant I ended up shouldering a chunk of his workload (at one point I was drawing three different projects in one month, crazy)

I’ll be checking in every friday, though this first week basically only covers Tuesday to Friday since that’s all I’ve taken notes of.

Leopard from Lime Street – I thought had a deadline of the 7th of Feb – but it turns out that’s the print deadline, so my deadline was actually the 10th – so there’s a rush on now! (irritatingly after I’d spent a day pencilling four pages and thinking I’d finally gotten ahead of stuff)

I really wanted to find a good voice for Leopard, but in the end I didn’t have time, so page one suffers from a weak first panel and a strong last panel. Which I hated, so I decided to redraw it and (unusually for me) added a panel. Script (by Simon Furman) called for an establishing shot AND a close up all in one panel, but I couldn’t do it (tried but failed) so repencilled a new version adding a decent establishing shot and a good closeup. Hoping to get to that today. After I pencil and ink page 3 of the story!)

It’s only six pages, so I’m hoping I’ll get it completed over the weekend then can pour myself back in to skullduggery. 

(At some point I’ve got to work up a cover for the collected Folklore tales by me and John Reppion too)

-pj