A drawing I did for the exhibition ‘Who is Rupert Ray?’, an exhibition for the launch of ‘Rupert Ray’, a new agency founded by Alex Maclean and Caroline Matthews, both previously of Airside. A bunch of artists answered that very question by doing portraits of said character, a bio of whom can be found in their ‘about’ section.

My Rupert is a kind of old eccentric, posing in his studio with all the cool stuff he’s acquired over the years. There were some real illustration badasses in the lineup including Jean Jullien, Adrian Johnson, Dick Hogg, Pete Fowler and tons more which you can see here.

Please click the picture for full size, because it looks a lot cooler that way.

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A drawing I did for an exhibition of Midland’s based artists called ‘Once Upon a Time in The Midlands’. The theme was fairytales. I wanted to have a bit more of ‘The Midlands’ in there thematically, and was originally drawing a troll at a rusty Tamworth bus stop, but that picture went a bit long and I just did this instead.

Other artists in the exhibition were Lizz Lunney (who made a really cool Bogmen comic), James Bourne, Lee Crutchley, Herman Inclusus (Stuart Kolakovic), Mark Long, Mr Millerchip, Sarah Ray, Paul Roberts and Steven Silverwood.

You can see a few other pieces from the show here.

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Cover design for the Penguin Essentials series. It’s actually a wraparound cover, but I’m not sure which version has ended up on the back yet so I’ll hold off from posting it. I was so pleased to get to do this as I’ve wanted to do a book cover for probably my whole life (I’ve done a couple more that should be out soon too). In taking on Lucky Jim, I’m also super proud to be following feebly in the footsteps of Edward Gorey and Quentin Blake.

Here’s the text from the back.

‘His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as a mausoleum. During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.’

Jix Dixon has a terrible job at a second-rate university. His life is full of things he could happily do without: the tedious and ridiculous Professor Welch, a neurotic and unstable girlfriend, Margaret, burnt sheets, medieval recorder music and over-enthusiastic students. If he can just deliver a lecture on ‘Merrie England’, a moderately successful career surely awaits him. But without luck, life is never simple . . .

This version is available now.

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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.

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About a year ago I was very close to announcing a project entitled ’100 Horses’ or ‘The One Hundred Horses Project’, the aim of which would be to draw 100 wildly unique horses. I thought this would be a cool project, a challenge in variation and in mastering the depiction of an animal I’ve traditionally struggled to accurately portray. Thankfully however, I did not announce it, as I only got to six before realising it was a silly idea and that there are way better ways to spend your time than drawing 100 stupid horses.

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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.

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Here’s Hilda watching over the stock at my signing at Gosh! Comics on 26th November 2011. And now for some spreads from the book:

Hilda and The Midnight Giant is out and available to buy now (preferably buy it straight from Nobrow or support your local comic shop and get it from there. If they don’t have it, ask them to get it! You can get it from Amazon if you must, but no one wins in that deal but Amazon.)

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Thanks to the hard work of the amazing Felt Mistress, Hilda has at last stepped forth into the 3 dimensional, felt and blood world. She’s huge, the size of an actual little girl, so I feel like I know a little of what it’s like to be the father of a strange, globe headed daughter now. It also makes it all the more troubling when she’s bundled into a dufflebag on wheels and dragged away by a cruel Nobrow employee. She’ll be accompanying me to any appropriate appearances so perhaps you’ll get to meet her and shake the end of one of her fully-poseable arms.

Felt Mistress/Louise Evans creates all manner of stitched people and creatures with partner in crime Jonathan Edwards (who did an incredible drawing of Hilda himself, which pretty much improves on my own design in every conceivable way) and is very very good. It’s a delight to get to hang about with one of her creations.

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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.

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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.

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