Displaying : comics

NOTE: THIS COMIC IS NSFW.

Also it reads right to left, manga style. Click the image to read all four pages.

This comic appears in Secret Prison 7, published by Retrofit Comics. It was conceived as a tribute to the alternative manga anthology Garo, featuring contemporary western alt-ish cartoonists working in the ‘traditional right-to-left/newsprint/pulp-manga format’. It’s satisfyingly large at 10 x 13″, 150 pages and is full of cool people. It’s one of my favourite comics of last year for sure, even if I wasn’t it. There are some other full comics from it online from Angie Wang, James Harvey and Katie Skelly, that are all distinctly better than mine. Below is the front cover and back cover of the anthology, by Ryan Cecil Smith and Angie Wang.

I have mixed feelings about my own comic. There are a few panels in there that I feel are some of the best little bits of a comic I’ve ever done, but there are also some awful drawings, particularly of the main character whose design slips all over the place and exposes some of my drawing weaknesses. Also I’m not convinced that the comic isn’t altogether a bit icky and embarrassing.

Two years earlier I was in Secret Prison 2 with this comic.

 
Above is a flip-through of the comic by Box Brown.
You can buy a copy here.

I noticed I never pointed out that all 12 pages of this comic are online now. So here it is. It’s a couple of years old now and it shows in places, but I’m still pretty pleased with some of the stuff in here, particularly all those trees and the creature itself (the design of which is based on/stolen from Tezuka’s weird dog police cars from Astro Boy.) It also features what I still believe to be the best panel I’ve ever drawn.

You can either read it online over at spera-comic.com (where you can read other stuff featuring the same characters and world, including the ongoing story Glass Flowers, other stand-alone shorts like mine or the original online collaboration which I also contributed to some time ago) or you can click on the image above to read through it right here.

My contribution to Nobrow 7: Brave New World. Please click a page to make it big and click through to read the whole thing.

I’m choosing to display it in black and white here, because that’s how I prepared the artwork and I’m quite fond of the way it looks. In the actual book however, (which you can buy here) it’s printed in a nice blue. Which you can see below.

I did this comic for The Guardian for a section called ‘A Cartoonist’s Worldview’.

Here it is next to some stairs.

The contributor list was made up of some of my favourite cartoonists going so I was pretty excited about getting to take part. It included Stephen Collins, Kate Beaton, Lilli Carré (you should read her book The Lagoon, it’s one of my favourite comics), Gabrielle Bell (I think her one might have been the best), Tom Gauld, Ivan Brunetti, Nicholas Gurewitch and Modern Toss. You can read all of them over on the Guardian website, right here.

Also, a big thanks to Becky Barnicoat for helping make it happen. She draws great comics and should have been in it as well.

A strip appearing in Art Review magazine (the March issue I think). Paul Gravett wrote this article about me and my comics to accompany it.

Click the comic to make it big.

A sample page from a 12 page comic called Ahuizotl which appeared in the 2011 Spera preview comic and is now featured as a short in the hardback Spera Vol. 1, alongside longer works by Kyla Vanderklugt, Hwei, Emily Carroll and Olivier Pichard. The book sees these four artists retell the Spera story which was originally told online by considerably more artists including myself. It also features a bunch of shorter one-off stories, of which mine is one of them.

Ahuizotl will be online in full at spera-comic.com at some point (I’m excited to share it, it’s got a couple of my personal favourite pages I’ve ever done in it), but until then you will have to seek out the book (see above – cover art by Afu Chan). You can buy it from Archaia here or look for it in your local comic shop.

This was my contribution to Solipsistic Pop 4. The theme of the issue was ‘maps’ and so I decided to create a sort of broken down map of the experience of being me at the moment of the comic’s inception.

I decided to really push how small I could make the text and still have it be readable. Perhaps expectedly, for quite a few people, I pushed too far. Its illegibility is maybe no great loss. The words are pretty much just guff that fell out of my head as I typed anyway. But for anyone who felt like they missed out:

Read page 1 hi-res HERE .  Read page 2 hi-res HERE

You can read more about Sol Pop 4 HERE and buy it HERE.

Two page comic I did for Nobrow 6: The Double. Click for full view.

This issue is twice as big as previous ones, with two covers and two halves, one dedicated to illustration and one to comics. I get to be the opener for the comics one. Alongside Nobrow regulars, the comics section of the book includes work from Joe Lambert, Richard Short, Matt Forsythe, Michael Deforge, Kevin Huizenga, Roman Muradov, John Martz, Andy Rementer, Jesse Jacobs, Scott Macdonald, Gemma Correll and more AND has a cover by Tom Gauld. Which is a lineup and a half.

You can order a copy here.