clearing up my shelves I came across this sketch I made on a beach a couple of years ago, of a girl who was standing on a rock at the water's edge. Ballpoint is my sketching tool of choice. The ink runs out at approximately the same speed as my eye uploads, and you can go light tentatively and then darker decisively. After the first sketch I realised the subject should have been the way the intense sunlight was falling vertically on the figure and quickly did a second one.


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At Electronista ('gadgets for geeks'): Latest Blu-ray copy protection cracked

The latest effort at blocking unofficial copying of Blu-ray movies has been undone, the developers of a cracking utility claim. Any DVD 6.4.0.0 adds the ability to bypass BD+ encoding, used on a number of discs to prevent either direct copying, or ripping to a hard drive. This change is said to particularly affect releases from 20th Century Fox, who have led the adoption of BD+, while other companies continue with variants of AACS... etc etc bla bla bla

The author of the above has chosen the From Hell DVD to illustrate his article. (link thanks to my pal Chalky White)

Charlton Heston Dead

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Charlton Heston, who won the 1959 best actor Oscar as the chariot-racing "Ben-Hur" and portrayed Moses, Michelangelo, El Cid and other heroic figures in movie epics of the '50s and '60s, has died. He was 84.

NEW YORK TIMES: Charlton Heston, who appeared in some 100 films in his 60-year acting career but who is remembered chiefly for his monumental, jut-jawed portrayals of Moses, Ben-Hur and Michelangelo, died Saturday night at his home in Beverly Hills. He was 83

update; the NY Times issued a correction.

Saturday 5th April

Happy Birthday to the wife of my Bosom

my thoughts have turned to an old pal I first met exactly twenty years ago. I'm having trouble verifying details on this and I'm sure somebody will help as apparently he has no online presence (except for a reproduction at Tabula Rasa, David Carroll's Australian comic book covers gallery). I gather that he was found at the foot of a cliff six or seven years back, presumed suicide.
I first saw the work of Nigel Gurney on this striking cover in 1988. Tusk Comics was his own self-published book. The first issue appeared the previous year and was titled 'Hap Hazzard,' and this was the second. Brigid Bolt was a character that made her first appearance in the first issue and in between landed a weekly spot in local Sydney newspaper the Sun-Herald.


Brigid Bolt was an original and memorable cartoon character and I like the way Gurney and his scripting collaborator figured out the cadences of the sunday comic format and married that to their own subversive purposes.
sept. 6 1987

The above appeared in the book, while the next were loose xeroxes Nigel sent me. jan 10 and 17 1988


Nigel was a few years younger than me, which I always presumed because he seemed to think I was further along the road to recognition than he was. In 1988 I was appearing in a number of places but not making a lot of money out of it. I used one of his stories in The Dead Muse, a book I edited that was published by Fantagraphics in 1990.
I'm looking at a dozen or so letters from Nigel over the course of two years, thinking how fine it was when we all wrote to each other, properly thought out two page handwritten letters.
(9 june ) "Hope things pick up for you- can understand that feeling of 'the doors closing on another phase'. Brisbane is a tough place to entertain such thoughts. I always get depressed there... maybe it's because it's where I spent my early years."
(26 july) "Got your letter and 'Honk' (long defunct Fantagraphics humour mag whose last couple of issues were edited by Joe Sacco) in the box on my return- many thanks. 'The Wonders of Science' was certainly a gallant effort of lunacy, way beyond what we were allowed to do in the Sun-Herald. I found out the other day that our last story caused a storm of editorial controversy and nearly wasn't published because a) it showed a hand being chopped off, and b) it was about two lesbians. it's probably a good thing we quit."
Nigel was a granson of famous Australian cartoonist Alex Gurney of Bluey and Curley fame (Lambiek site biog):
(8 nov) "I'm going to photocopy a batch of Bluey and Curley strips for you, so you can see what Alex Gurney was doing. Rereading them I think they hold up incredibly well and I still get a real laugh out of quite a few of them."

Brigid Bolt made some later appearances I think in a gay interest magazine, but mostly I think Nigel experienced only frustration trying to get somehwere with his art. I have two photos in my files. One is a smiling portrait and the other is a tiny photo-booth mug-shot which nevertheless captures something of the desperation of the young artist perpetually thwarted.

happy 16th birthday,
callum campbell
Here's a panel from an unpublished page titled
"Callum's Alan Moore anecdote."


The big 'Alec Omnibus' planned for next year will have at least fifteen pages of never before printed material, and there are the same number again of pages not in print since 1990. If all you've ever seen are the four books I published myself in 2000-2002, then there could be as many as ninety pages altogether that are new to you.

a preview

i'm getting impatient waiting for The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard to come back from the printer in Hong Kong. I may see a copy later this month, but it will still be a while before the boxes arrive by sea mail. So here is a small excerpt to whet your appetite and keep you interested. I've cut the pages so they can be readable here on the main page (Blogger resizes things according its own logic unless you take pains to outwit the system):



I see via my pal Dirk Deppey that I'm being discussed here. Both blogs reproduce an image I drew as part of a set of question-answers for the Powell's site two years ago as promo for Fate of the Artist (It's been linked in my sidebar for some time). They invite an author to select between six and ten questions from a bunch of twenty. The Bookseller was having a special 'graphic novel' month and somebody had the interesting idea of asking me to do my Q&A as a set of cartoons. I thought that was nuts as it would take me longer to draw it than a regular author to just type his answers. So I grudgingly did it. I wish I'd spent more time and enthusiasm on it as it turned out to be very popular for its novelty value. You can still read it here. If you click on the first image you can see it all as a slidshow.


I think a few other cartoonists drew their Q&A after that, if you want to browse around the site.
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"Men love women, women love children and children love hamsters. It's all hopeless." -Alice Thomas Ellis

i feel a little unclean for bringing up that business about Vince Colletta once more. It's starting to look like I actually give a damn about the whole thing. Sure enough, my visitor statistics shot through the roof for a couple of days. However, I don't think I made myself clear in the end. My position on this is that arguing about Colletta erasing a few of Kirby's pencilled figures is on the same level as arguing about who is stronger, Spiderman or the Hulk. If you care then you are a loony! Don't tell me any more about it! Furthermore, consider how it must look to the outside world, who think it rather eccentric if not foolish for grown people to read comic books, let alone get upset and villify an artist for erasing another artist's pencilled figures FIFTY YEARS AGO. This stuff sounds made up, like a hokey plot for Murder She Wrote or some other old 1980s TV blather for people who stay home in their cosy slippers. Stan Lee could have done a cameo and explained to bright wee Angela Lansbury what an 'inker' is. And the main suspect could have been a big puddin' with no social graces. I expect someone will send me a comment telling me it was already done, and Mark Evanier wrote it. And wee Dirk Deppey remembers it well and put his homework aside to go and watch it and how mortified he was to see his hobby mocked in front of all the adults.
uh where was I ...

Changing the subject, Leif Peng looks at the illustrations of William Smith. I love the big bar scene, of which this is a small detail: