After a bit of a grim night with IBS and wrecked sleep on a slow Sunday afternoon my wife and I sat down and BIg was on the telly. We’re about four years apart in age, not a big deal at our age but I suppose when it comes to a film I last watched start to finish in 1988 when I was 18 and my wife 14 (we wouldn’t meet until 1995 so don’t panic) it’s interesting when we share a thing we both enjoyed from the 80s.
Anyway, really enjoyed Big. I remember it being a fun story about a kid becoming an adult but I don’t remember the very obvious symbolism about not wishing your childhood away which is so clearly in the premise but then also deftly delivered in the film too.
It’s a story that knows exactly what its theme is and then it plays out at every level, between Hank’s Josh wishing to be an adult and getting “big” but still being a kid, and then losing that young side of him because he’s enjoying the trapping of adulthood, to Elizabeth Perkin’s Susan who has Embraced adulthood and all its horribleness and hanks character brings out the innocence in her. A sort of near mirror of each others stories. Great writing.
Also after binge watching stranger things it’s fun to see an actual Magical film about kids made in the 80s. It was lot more omnipresent and pastel looking with shades of grey rather than the bolder colours on display in stranger things. Over on Reddit, amusingly, someone asked “did kids really run around totally unsupervised during the 80s” my friend you don’t know the half of it. Anyway great film. Lovely watch.
About 10 (maybe 15 years ago) I started getting excruciating pains in my stomach. I mean end of the world, apocalyptic, doubled over in agony crying, wishing I was dead pains. They would start in the evening and typically go on until the next morning. They’d have a sort of journey, from “oh I can feel something a bit odd” to “oh-this is sore” to “please god let me die” to eventually “on this is agony but actually I might have peaked”. I saw the doc, I went to a&e (where the now typical 14 hour wait meant that by the time I was seen the pain had crescendoed).
The doc put me on a fodmap diet (fodmap puts your food intake into food groups which are known to cause problems and you slowly start reintroducing them back in to your diet). Once I’d done that it was obvious that gluten was BAD.
I suspect this wasn’t entirely out of the blue for me, as I’d been effected by the same “oh that feels a bit odds” mostly after drinking beer. A discomfort that was noticeable enough that actually it’s probably a large contributor to why I’m not really a drinker.
eventually, after a few years of back and forth and testing etc, I was diagnosed with IBS-D (Irritable Bowel Syndrome – D for … well, you can guess) with a “wheat trigger”. Ibs if you don’t know is a special doctors code for “well we did all the tests we could for this issue, and you didn’t have any of those things, so you have IBS” – IBS might as well be called IDK.
So, I went off gluten (though like a brave little soldier I will occasionally have things with barley or rye in them which do contain gluten and they seem to be fine). I went off gluten because it’s easier to ask for gluten free than wheat free (and even asking for gluten free is a pain).
Going gluten free has helped. The end-of-the-world pain has largely been put back in its box, and those extreme pain attacks are few and far between. That said, they haven’t gone away and lately the attacks have been – if not as painful – certainly more frequent.
I suspect it’s because a “wheat” trigger doesn’t mean only wheat will trigger an attack. I’m beginning to suspect suger (oh my first and truest love) of also starting to trigger it.
I could stand to lose some weight, that’s for sure. So I think I’m going to cut sugar out, or at least as best as I can, there’s plenty of suger in prepackaged foods, but I’m going to give sugar treats a wide berth. I’ve lost bread, and I’ve stopped milk (well drinking milk, I’ve not gone vegan)
I’m happy to hear your thoughts on this, but I’ve heard every possible idea and I’ve visited the IBS Reddit threads where it is just other peopel talking about the pain, there’s no absolute solution to this (maybe… maybe faecal implant…?) and I’m not looking any sympathy. Just getting some 6am blogging in since I’m sitting here with a hot water bottle on my tummy due to the pain.
I think one of the things that killed my interest in blogging is that twitter became the first place to drop a thought. Over time, that slowly morphed my thinking into twitter formats, short, 180 characters (as was) blurts of information that could be linked into a longer post. Which then formalised the idea of blogging being something that I can only do once in a day and required more thinking (a spiral I suspect of preventing me from ever blogging).
Now, I did use to blog through the day, if something occurred to me, I’d post it on the blog first, but again, twitter (and all social media) took that impetus away.
So I’m wondering if I can reverse out of that thinking cul de sac. If, instead of going to Bluesky1 first, I hit up my blog first and type up whatever nonsense it is I’m thinking off there, will I break the habit?
I don’t know. I do know that checking social media every morning, right now, is just a spiral into dark moods and depression – maybe instead of that, I can open my phone and type up some early morning nonsense and just blog it. I mean, who cares? right? I set the rules for this place myself, that’s the whole point. So let’s see what happens when I start doing that.
I’d written twitter original out of habit, but I’ve been off twitter for awhile ↩︎
I’m about to start on page 21 of Terran Omega, and 24 pages mark the actual halfway mark and 25 pages is a good chapter break for part one. But actually I think getting to page 20 is a thing in itself.
Here’s how it started: about a decade ago I was approached by Broken Frontier to do a sci-fi story -I pitched an idea I’d noodled around for a bit – Terran Omega, the last human being who was a weapon who had worked up 10,000 years after she was useful and decided to become something not a weapon. The Iron Giant mixed with Kung Fu. It meant I could write and draw multiple stories with this one character, because she could stumble in to each one and help resolve it but she would move on to the next – a story engine, is how I thought of it. I enlisted the help of my pal Scott Ferguson (we were doing a podcast together at that point, along with our mate Ron).
Of course, I didn’t do more, I had a bunch of ideas, some more developed than others. And I kept coming back to the idea of space ship ghost story, and I kept trying to figure out how to make it work – both the story and more importantly, the actual method of doing the thing such that I could afford to do it.
So the solution and the plan I decided on is this, and it’s been successful thus far (and by successful I mean I’ve stuck to it).
Write the entire thing in advance. Write a story you want to draw, because you’ll be drawing it for a year. Don’t worry too much about descriptions, just write enough that you know what’s happening. I wrote it fully scripted, you could also write marvel style (where you write a paragraph a page and add dialogue after) but I worried by the time I added dialogue for, say, page 15, I’d be 15 weeks away from doing the dialogue on page 1 and consistency might be a problem.
Then I do all the layouts, just making sure I know what each page looks like (I have of course, LOST the layouts!)
I have a art shelf specifically put aside for the project, and everything I do on it, goes in there, so I can put it away and take it out when I need it.
I pencil and ink a page on the weekend (hopefully), then upload it to go live for Wednesday on patreon for free. I want to build an audience for the eventual kickstarter, so building that audience out before the kickstarter is important, and while I could do that on my own website, I felt like patreon would allow me to grab some people that wouldn’t stumble across the blog.
(I’d already had a little success with building an audience on patreon a few years ago with John Reppion doing our folklore comics)
I set a few tiers on patreon, free (B&W&Green comics on Wednesday) $1, $2, $10 – those tiers all get the same but it allows people to pay what they’re comfortable with. I’ll be honest, I don’t make enough from paid subscribers to even make one page of B&W art, so trying to figure out how to give three tiers of people didn’t things felt like a job. This way I get to say “Hey I appreciate you giving me money, I’ll let you access stuff early and see the colour work and whatever else I can think of, but I’m not going to draw a distinction between you”
With this book, as it happens, it divides neatly in to two parts. So I think I’ll have a two issue pdf comic BEFORE doing a kickstarter with the whole thing.
The magic ingredient for getting it done for me is getting the script done and just slowly but surely chipping away one page per week and ignoring the horrible urge to start other things.
Finishing is a skill of itself, and one I know I have (because I’ve finished so many projects) but with stuff I’ve written and drawn them myself I tend to do four page strips at most, and often don’t finish those so this – even now, at 20 pages- is the longest entirely creator owned thing I’ve ever done, and so I take a little pride in that. Wait til I hit page 48 I’ll be unbearable!
One thing I’ve decided to do is add a newsletter I’ve found there are people who are unwilling or unable to go to patreon. I suspect Substack would be best for this, but Substack has fallen prey to the billionaire nazi-bar problem (you know, you allow one nazi in to your bar, and before you know it you’re a nazi bar) So instead I’m using Kit. I know nothing about kit except it looks good and is free for less than 10k people. (And laughably I’m vastly orders of magnitude below that so can’t imagine it’ll be a problem.)
I’ll send monthly updates with the pages in them, I think. Because again, this is about gathering readers for the end goal of a kickstarter.
So, how’s it working?
As far as numbers, the patreon has gone from around 20 people to 325
My Patreon is collecting about $90 per month, which is probably really about £50 a month, the thing is, I’ll dip in to that when I get to the point that I need to turn the work in to something physical (though I suspect I might have to do that before the tax year ends) it’s been three months already so it’ll pay for… something. I’ve grown the free readers but paid readers have stubbornly refused to grow at the same rate. Maybe it’s because I’m not asking for much (perversely, people are more willing to cough up more than cough up less, if you don’t appear to need the money they don’t feel the need to pay it to you – it’s that thing where a thing of value looks better when it’s priced higher, so maybe I haven’t done myself any favours here)
I’d love to grow the patreon to around 500 by the time the kickstarter happens, I think that’s a really good base to a successful kickstarter (And I’ve no idea how to grow it but looking at other comic creators on patreon it’s not an outrageous number)- though I’m not expecting all of them or even half of them to make the leap to a paid kickstarter. For a start a lot of those readers may be in the US and postage may just make any kickstarter entirely unaffordable. I’m in Belfast and I’ve yet to figure out what that means for postage to the Eu and to mainland GB, I HOPE – but am not convinced yet – it puts me in a weirdly good position, where I won’t be hit by European de minimus rules (because NI is in a liminal European Union condition) and similarly I won’t be hit by GB de minimus rules, but the US remains a bit of a nightmare for figuring that stuff out (last I heard the post office was telling people not to send stuff to the us due to backlogs!)
I do need to reach out to various websites to do interviews and so on, but it’s something I’m not great at doing (I’m a great interviewee! but rubbish pr person). I think that’s something I should try and get better at.
All in all, been a good start to this. I turned 56 in December, and I’m more conscious than ever that there’s only so many pages in me and I’d like more and more of them to be stuff I wrote.
I’ve still got unread graphic novels from a couple of years ago and not enough space to store them all! BUT! I’ve made a start on this Incredible Hulk series volumes 1-4. Mother in Law very kindly bought them for me for xmas.
Got a lot of comics stuff this Christmas, to be honest, a little too much.
I’ve still got unread graphic novels from a couple of years ago and not enough space to store them all! BUT! I’ve made a start on this Incredible Hulk series volumes 1-4. Mother in Law very kindly bought them for me for xmas.
I will admit, I wanted this entirely for the art of Nic Klein. And boy does he not disappoint. It’s also very very monster heavy (I approve).
Though I think in Volume 3 it offers a very confusing interlude that was part of a cross over. You be the judge, but the chapter opens with the title “The Incredible Hulk Blood Hunt” then 9 pages in, as Banner asks another character “What Happened? Where is everybody?” they helpfully explain “Left. Went home. The Movies shut down when the sun went dark*” and that asterisks leads to a caption that reads “*See Blood Hunt #1”. Wait. What is this NOT Blood Hunt #1? Needlessly confusing (turns out Blood hunt was a five issue miniseries and “Incredible Hulk Blood Hunt” was the hulk issue that tied in to that)
But that little oddity aside, it’s monster bone crunching fun.
Recommend.
(Not entirely sure how many volumes are in this and the follow up series Infernal Hulk looks even more Kleintastic Rock Band Cover Bat of Hell mad so looking forward to getting to that)
I’d like to start with a blank slate. Wipe it all out. But it’s a hard to do so. So this is it, anything prior to this can be ignored. New start.
Honestly, I thought I’d be clever and try and archive a whole bunch of blog posts, but that ended up being chaos, so I unarchived them, which then sprung a bunch of blog posts out of my drafts folder into published (which is why there’s suddenly a lot of old blog posts). and I don’t even know where the blog posts from 2025 went, they just seem to have fallen in to a wordpress black hole. Then I altered the layout to at least make it feel different in here, but that turned out to be a nightmare because the “blocks” system in wordpress is an unforgiving nightmare that pretends to be easy but is any thing but so I went back to a pre-blocks layouts (wordpress uses templates, those templates can be good if you use them exactly as they’re given to you, but the moment you try anything slightly different, hooboy!)
I’d like to start with a blank slate. Wipe it all out. But it’s a hard to do so. So this is it, anything prior to this can be ignored. New start. Yes, I had decided my blogging days were done, but actually, no I still have the itch to talk about stuff beyond using bluesky (a platform which I think will never really hit the peak that twitter did) and any other big US platform (because they all seem to fall prey to billionaire brain rot).
The blog’s purpose was about comics, but actually I do more than that – and I’ll use the blog to talk about more than that. My main focus for comics will be on the patreon, though I’d even like to move back off that but it’s been the way I’ve been trying to build an audience for Terran Omega. Sometimes making a decision and sticking with it is better than no decision at all.
So things you might see in the coming year on the blog: terran omega updates about how I’m doing things (including the b&w and green art for those that don’t want to do patreon at all), I’ve got to get a newsletter going (purely for comics), but actually I might talk about writing a bit (I’d like to explore that more this year) and improv and performance stuff (which I did a lot of last year, this year I may pull back a bit, but we’ll see)
Anyway, sign up the newsletter, which I will endeavour to make happen on a monthly basis (last sunday of the month? sound doable?) and I’ll send art for terran omega (if you don’t fancy the patreon) and updates on whatever other comics business is happening. You can find it here.
I haven’t been great at keeping people up to date about what’s happening in print, let’s try and do better next year!
2000AD Judge Dredd Megazine issue 474 “Devlin Waugh: Two Months Off Part 2” Things get weird for Devlin and chums. Written by Ales Kote.
Monster Fun issue 26 FINAL ISSUE. Bit sad about this one, the final issue of Monster Fun, it had a good run (longer run than the issue numbers describe as originally it was only once every two months). I draw Gums, Draw with ‘Andi and a Prankenstien strip in this one.
And finally… coming in the new year (February!)
Battle Action issue 7 Major Eazy, written by Rob Williams.
Well, the play is over – six shows, all done and sold out every night.
I’ve really enjoyed going back to acting (again) – and it has been great fun. It’s a bit of a time sink, but, to be honest, I spend far too much of my time at the drawing table anyway, and this is a fun way to escape it.
What’s next, I dunno – Southbank Playhouse (the am dram club I’ve been a member of since 2016 and who did the show) do three shows a year, so will wait and see what they’ve got lined up next before deciding to audition, but I feel ready for more.
A few members of the cast also do improv comedy, and I think I’m going to take a swing at that too – there’s a local guy who teaches it, and classes start in February.
Anyway, enjoy these photos of me sporting a beard and my actual belly, and not padding as my dad thought.
Old Saul (mid shot)Old Saul full body shotOld Saul talking to “Richard”Richard and Old SaulOld Saul holding a lampTeddie kneels, Charlie holding the door open as old Saul lies dead at the door holding a lamp.Old Saul arrested!
One of my many (many) drawing difficulties is the dead body lying on floor syndrome. This pushes one thing I think I’m good at (the human body) against another thing I really struggle with (perspective). Perspective isn’t hard, per se, and often my most successful perspective drawings are where I try not to get too rigid with it, but inevitably (especially as I’ve gone digital) I tend to fall in to the everything-is-a-box and can be drawn in perspective. And since the human body is extra hard to draw, that means extra boxes and extra hard perspective.
And that’s sort of useful, but it really steals a lot of fluidity away from the human form. Plus, and I dunno if this is a feature of my brain but it tends to lead to a lot of floating boxes. These notional boxes taking up head, torso, arms and legs, still sort of follow the placement of wherever I put them – rather than, as with the human body – sagging int other space that’s there.
When stuck on this problem I start looking at Geoff Darrow, who’s Hard Boiled is a bible for bodies lying on the ground.
I mean, look at that. Every body is painful reminder of the fact we’re only human flesh bags.
Anyway, staring at this, it seemed to me, the boxes where my problem, and if I could think of another metaphor (it’s not the right word, for what I’m trying to do – a drawing anology?) that might help it might be worth considering and staring and staring and it occurred to me if I thought of the torso as a sack of spuds, that would give me much of the flexibility of a real human body –
I feel the weight of a sack like this, much more than I do a box, and it has a bend to it that the body does that none of my box drawings ever do.
And if I extend the metaphor so instead of a box human we end with a person made of bags of spuds (or other less-norn-irish stuff) we can have a better way to think about the body in perspective, something that can keep the all of the relative lengths of the body parts the same while also making me think about weight and giving me the flexibility to move the body.
Anyway, this has JUST occured to me, so maybe it’s a bad idea, but sometimes I think you need to question your assumptions so you can rethink stuff, especially stuff you’re stuck on.
