"At his age, his prostate needed all the statistical support it could muster"

M y pal Chalky White asked me to remind you that: "The new issue of the long running Australian anthology DeeVee is listed in the current Diamond Previews catalogue. This stand-alone special features 'tales of spiteful romance' including a brand new Playwright story illustrated by Eddie Campbell plus The Fat Sheila Hit Me, the crime story he illustrated to crime author Peter Doyle's script. Also features work by Jeffrey Brown, Mandy Ord, Jason Paulos, mr j and the pick of current Aussie cartoonists. We're listed under the Top Shelf section and the order code is Diamond APR074012."

The original Deevee was a comic book anthology out of Brisbane that ran for fourteen quarterly issues 1996-2000, during the same period as my Bacchus monthly. Appearing in all of those issues was my serial that became How to be an Artist. Since then the guys, White, Evans and Best, have put out three specials in 2001, 2003 and 2005. In each of these White and I have been developing a new serial titled The Playwright. Thus this new issue offers the fourth part, six pages long, of this intriguing serial. It's all about a chap who writes for stage and tv and has some very tortured sexual frustrations. I established a style for the strip which was supposed to save me time but turned into a special feature of the job, upon which I lavish far too much attention. I blow up details on the photocopier until the pen lines look fat and monstrous and raggedy, then I draw in details on the copy using the finest possible rapidograph. here's an example from the second story in the series, from the hilarious jogging page. There will be more along the same lines in the new story. And I hasten to add that the parts of this serial are not really sequential and can be read in just about any order as they tend to circle around the theme and the character rather than advance in a conventional linear manner..
Also in the new Deevee will be the complete The Fat Sheila Hit Me, a true crime story which I illustrated for an exhibition at the Justice Museum in Sydney. the whole story of that is in the link. This is the moment when she actually hits him:



As you can see, the art turns very savage here. the original was blown up large on a wall. I expect it made an impression.

Finally, here's the cover:


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Interesting connecting links:
My pal John Coulthart posts about Talin’s proposed monument for St Petersburg (which would have been 100 m higher than the Eiffel tower). Follow the ‘dead monuments’ link at the foot to his earlier post mentioning ‘the degraded sculptures made by Igor Mitoraj’ and my pal Nathalie’s link in the comments to a beautiful photo of that artist’s Head of John the Baptist on her own blog.