I'm pleased with how much ground we covered in Italy. We made a day-trip on the Friday to Parma, tunnelling through the Appenines. It was surprisingly warm and summery in Lucca, for November, but suddenly, on the other side of the mountain range, it was winter. I made an appearance in a comics shop called the Pop Store. Attendance was small, but a brave fellow named Alfredo interviewed me in English on video for 45 minutes. When either a transcript or footage turn up I'll let you know. Otherwise, i have no photos of Parma, though in case you think me a philistine, I did visit the cathedral, with Correggio's celebrated ceiling,


and the wonderful old Gothic Baptistry. On the same day we went to Sarzana where I was interviewed in the very old town hall under the auspices of the local shop Comic House, with the translation by a lovely lady from Manchester named Catherine, and then was requested to do a big drawing at an easel. This didn't go too well due to the supplied materials not being up to the challenge due to me not having forwarded any instructions on same, but I may have saved the day by improvising it into a comedy. I have no photo of this event either, perhaps due to the wife of my bosom getting locked in the rest room with the camera. The only record I have of of my visit is this appealing poster I grabbed in passing from inside the window of Comic House:


Apparently this was an ambitious program for one day and it was past midnight when we got back to Lucca.

We were driven from Florence to Lucca at night. When we woke up we saw this view of rolling olive groves from our hotel window. I have another photo, quite striking, of Anne standing naked in the frame of the window in the morning glow. As she heard the click of the shutter she said, without turning, something to the effect that if it appeared on the blog I would be toast.


At the Lucca comics festival. 'lospaziobianco' filmed me doing a sketch. As you can see, I realised I'd drawn Gull's arm too long and tried to fix it by stretching the legs. Once after drawing my pal White, he complained that I'd made him look fat. I told him I'd fix it by making his head bigger. These are the, ahem, secrets of the trade.



Three more photos from Lucca, including me and local boy Giacomo Puccini:

The wife of my bosom and I got home Tuesday and I'm taking stock of all the stuff that's come out of our suitcases. We flew into Rome and were met and driven by a charming bloke and fellow artist named Marco Farinelli to Florence, where we slept and stayed most of the next day. Florence, city of countless artistic marvels, which I appear to have recorded in two photos. First, this great shot of our Monty vomiting out of the side of the Cathedral:


Second, a view from the roof garden of the Scuola Intenazionale di Comics, where I gave a stand up talk for about three hours to a roomful of great students who laughed in all the right places thanks to Vanessa, my translator for the day. She came up here for a smoke break, and we comic book artists never miss an opportunity to make a photograph of foreign rooftops. You never know when you might need it.

This very old photo at black and wtf has been drawn to my attention by Nick Dimmock of Northampton via Hayley Campbell of London.


It sure does look like the Snooter, last seen in costume for the short film we made last year.


The Snooter is a humanoid version of an actual bug that flew in our kitchen as told in After the Snooter, contained within Alec: The Years have Pants, of which we had air-shipped signing copies in London last weekend but will not be seen by the world at large until the sea-shipped print-run arrives in maybe three more weeks.

Note the colonial/tropical setting in the top picture, lending credence to my claim that this bug actually exists, and that's the wife of my bosom in her nightie in the second picture.