covers- DHP no. 94

A Dark Horse Presents cover from the period when they dispensed with the sidebar (starting #91) and the covers were open and spacious, well except I've crowded in a bunch of skulls where the sidebar used to be. The signature is dated the month after the ones I showed yesterday. The cover goes with the first part of a serial of six ten-page chapters that ran monthly in DHP, Feb-July 1995, immediately following the miniseries I showed yesterday (Dec-Feb) and overlapping the The Bacchus color special (Apr) and launch of my own imprint (May). My entry into self publishing, or Campbell's world takeover as it was referred to around our house, was nothing if not impeccably planned. Hellblazer was in there too, Jan-Apr, and volumes seven and eight of From Hell in Nov and April. There were a couple of other things too, so that roughly speaking we had three outings per month over a seven month period, from four different publishers. It's no wonder I thought I needed help. Nevertheless, the main figures on this one look like my own pencilling and inking. I must have run out of patience and asked Pete Mullins to finish off the skull headed villains. I could never take that kind of thing seriously, even if this outing was more mock than heroic, though always played straight-faced.
I'd forgotten there was a pencil rough for this one until yesterday. There must have been a colour guide too, though I can find no record of it, as the Eyeball Kid is wearing the hat worn by my son age 2, and they wouldn't have otherwise known it was supposed to be white.
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hayley campbell linked me to CBS News: Dangerous Bomb Deactivated.
As for Londoners, the chances of something like this sending London into a panic are about zero. In 2005, Slate's David Plotz happened to be in London on 7/7 and noted, within a couple of hours of the attacks, "When I walked by the Queen's Larder Pub, not half a mile from the Tavistock Square wreckage, at 11 a.m., a half-dozen men were sitting together at a sidewalk table, hoisting their morning pints of ale. Civilization must go on, after all."
Hearty bunch, those Brits.

covers- HERMES Vs. THE EYEBALL K!D (3-part miniseries)

L ooking at these two covers (inked 1,2) (colour roughs 3,4) I noticed they both have the same date, 13 July 1994, and I recalled the industrious enthusiasm with which I and Pete would throw ourselves into the thing away back when I started 'Campbell Industries' (as Pete called it) in 1994. Whoever did the computer colouring at Dark Horse (April Johnson, who is listed as designer?) did a very nice job of interpreting our intentions (5,6), I like the way a potential tonal muddle has been avoided in the lower left corner of the second cover, enabling the foreshortening to thrust forward. Also, there is a sensible scaling up and redrawing of the logo from the small one Pete designed for the chapter box headings.


It's tricky now to say who did what on these, but relevant to recent debates around this blog, I decided to try for some Colletta lines on that first one, though they look like Pete's execution, on the Hermes at least. That's his more fluid line all over the second cover
Not only did we do the two covers in one day, but for the third I included in the package this cover I drew for Dark Horse Presents when the serial originally appeared there but which had not been used at the time.


I sent some extra spirograph patterns which I'd blown up from that product's demonstration booklet when I found that making them by hand was turning out to be much too difficult (another of wee hayley campbell's toys commandeered for professional usage), and invited the colorist to have fun.


All in a day's work.
Here's a recent review of the first issue.
And if this has made you curious about the story, It's all collected in here.

covers- BACCHUS no.32

T here are a couple more anecdotal cover things in the can, but I'm skimming the surface here today, so this is a lightweight post. The solicitation image was a hastily coloured job, but when I saw it in print i liked the accidental effect of mixed colour at top right, like those occasional chord changes in music that make you tingle, and tried not quite successfully to duplicate it by colouring another xerox of the same sketch (not having kept the first one.) For the design I was thinking of the Punch covers in the late 1970s when they would have a big one-line coloured cartoon on the front, with the caption typeset under it. Not sure whose idea it was to do the logo like Superman's. The way the story goes, they try to intervene on Superguy's drinking problem...
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two from hayley campbell!
Great piece at the Onion:
James Gandolfini Shot By Closure-Seeking Fan- June 25
NEW YORK—Actor James Gandolfini, best known for his portrayal of mob kingpin Tony Soprano on the hit HBO show The Sopranos, was shot to death Tuesday in a Greenwich Village restaurant by a fan unable to accept the open-ended conclusion of the series finale that aired earlier this month.
According to police reports, 28-year-old marketing research assistant Louis Bowen walked into the small Italian restaurant Occhiuto's at approximately 7:40 p.m. and...

Woody Allen quote:
Woody Allen to Direct Opera- June 24
“I have no idea what I am doing,” the famously humble director said. “But incompetence has never prevented me from plunging in with enthusiasm.”
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looking at Stuart immonen's life drawing outings over the last couple of weeks reminds me how one always meant to keep that up but forgot.
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In other news: Gag writers wanted!
SAN ANTONIO, Texas (Reuters) - Patrick Knight, 39, has been soliciting jokes on the Internet and plans to tell one of them before receiving a lethal injection, Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokeswoman Michelle Lyons said on Monday.
"Everybody who is there takes it very seriously and will not be participating in the joke," she said. "So knock-knock jokes are out."

Kids' stuff.

C omic books in their first great flourishing were a genre of popular fiction in which characters were illustrated wearing gaudy clothes, aimed at a class of people "not given leave to dress themselves. No doubt about it; they were kids' stuff." (last bit's from Chabon's Kavalier and Klay... apologies if I've misremembered it). In their current great flourishing we need scholars to explain them, even though they have not changed much.
Salon.com presents an excerpt from Douglas Wolk's Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean. to be published by Da Capo Press on July 2, 2007.
Comics fans, grow up!-June 23.
"With the rise of the graphic novel, comics have hit the big time. It's time for fans to quit whining and celebrate their favorite art... "
Where is he headed? An 'art' has 'fans'? (I'd like to buy an art please, said Dr Zoidberg when he came into some money).

"The blessing and curse of comics as a medium is that there is such a thing as "comics culture." The core audience of comics is really into them: we know that Wednesdays are the day when new issues appear in the stores, we populate endless Web sites and message boards..."
Looks like it will be a thorough history of the comic book genre, which does have 'fans', and I'm writhing in embarrassment at the thought that somebody might think i'm one of them.

"Over the last half century, comics culture has developed as an insular, self-feeding, self-loathing, self-defeating fly-trap. A lot of the people who hit their local comics store every Wednesday think of comics readers as some kind of secret, embattled fellowship..."
'Secret embattled fellowship' expresses it better than my 'loose-knit society of fellow travellers' of june 9. Wolk's phrase, with its hint of more desperation, would have suited my enquiry better, and supported my conception of it as a 'genre allegiance', a modern mindset that we recognize but would need a psychiatrist or sociologist to explain to us. Commentary on the genre has taken a sad turn of late. Paul Gravett's books have been giving me the same disquiteing feeling. In fact, hasn't wee Paul already covered all this, him and everybody else who has made a semantic mud puddle and then cheerfully stepped in it (like my commenter (hi, Steve) of June 15 who wound up arguing about the definition of the word 'definition' and who will probably be back for another serve at the end of this):
"But the "novel" part of "graphic novel" blots out the idea of short fiction and nonfiction -- it's odd to call, say, books of reportage in cartoon form by Joe Sacco ..."Graphic narrative" sounds like a euphemism twice removed from its source, and still has the unfortunate resonance of "graphic" with the way it tends to be paired with "sexuality" or "violence." And "sequential art" sounds utterly arid."

I've always thought that to describe comicbook culture beginning with its 'fan' roots would be the honest thing to do, as opposed to the other approach, in which aspects of ancient art (eg. the Bayeux tapestry) are cunningly and dishonestly 'colonized'. However I would have drawn the line at offering it to the world at large for fear of looking foolish, and not only because of our tedious arguing about the naming of things. The triumph of this geeky subculture in the big world can only presage the downfall of good taste. Oh, what am I blathering about; that got fucked a long time ago.
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If you're still with me, here's another cover:
My best ever party trick was making issue 50 coincide with the new millenium; I gave Mick Evans the painted figure and the little sketch and he made a lovely design of it even though he still argues to this day that the millenium wasn't until the following year. Here's my four pager about millenium night, from After the Snooter
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in other news: (the catholic boy in me couldn't less this one go by)
The Vatican issued a document listing its rules of the road, including one warning against using cars "as a means for outshining other people and arousing a feeling of envy."
"Unless having fun has become a sin, I don't believe it (to be wrong)," Amedeo Felisa told Reuters this week at an event celebrating Ferrari's 60th anniversary in its hometown southeast of Milan.

covers- BACCHUS no.46

I 'm not sure this solicitation image was for the Aug 1999 issue #46 of Bacchus, but since it doesn't relate compositionally to any other printed cover, it hardly matters. I can't deny that I spent as little time on it as I would on a con sketch. And the finished cover recycles a painting I made eight years earlier to go with my first Comics Journal interview. It looked much better in that original setting as the printing on Bacchus was sill making everything look murky. But I was always fond of that painting (i still like the texture of the bread) and between that and the piddling amount I made from it on its first outing, I didn't feel I was gypping anyone. This followed, as I said yesterday, a run of five issues where I didn't paint new covers but just coloured a panel from inside the book. They didn't look too bad and it sure saved time. When I posted yesterday's cover I started trying to recall why my mind wasn't entirely on the job at hand during these months. One reason is that I was spending most of my time at the drawing board on my 48 page illustration of Alan Moore's Birth Caul, which I published in June '99 very successfully with a print run of 18,000. But over and above that there was the problem that everything seemed to be falling apart around me and I was fearing for my future. The Direct Sales market was one thing. In my head I felt I was just merrily running the 'monthly' Bacchus book into the ground and at a future point not yet decided it would come to a finish. This didn't appear to be negotiable; sales dipped one or a couple hundered units on each issue and nothing could alter that. Anne went back to working as a legal secretary around this time, and what had been a busy studio operation was now just me on my own, hooking up with Mick Evans regularly to take care the design of the books. In fact, Mick also had six story pages in this issue, and White and Slattery ('Mr Duds' occasionally in this blog's comments box and more recently a bank manager, to the astonishment of all who know him) contributed a four-pager (in fact there were twenty pages of new art altogether, for anyone who thinks there was too much reprinting going on).

I'd been making a good living from comics since 1989, for ten years at this point, but things were getting tight. Everybody else I was working with was operating in the same market. Capital City, the second of the two big distributors, now went bust owing me ten thousand bucks. Kitchen Sink Press, who had rather strangely made an exclusive liaison with Capital, was caught in the middle of the release of the second Crow movie with all their merchandise tied up in Capital's closed down warehouse. They went bust too owing me and Alan over fifteen thousand bucks for From Hell royalties and that second Spirit story I produced in-house at Campbell industries (I paid everybody else involved at the time we made it, so to this day I'm still out of pocket on that one). The only thing I had that wasn't tied to the comic books distribution system was the upcoming From Hell movie; we'd been paid large for that in '98. But then, to top everything off, we lost the rights to From Hell to the conglomerate holding Kitchen Sink's assets. I was faced with a movie now officially going into production and no book coming out. I had to go through a few months of legal aggression to turn that around. By the time the above issue came out, my planet was back in its orbit. There's an ad on the back of it promising From Hell by November 1999, with the oil painting of the black hat, purple grapes and bloodied handkerchief. So at least the back cover was new.

And that's what went through my noodle when I looked at that cover after all this time, with wee Eddie Campbell drowning in a glass of wine in the foreground.

covers- BACCHUS no.40

C ampbell is all over the place today, so I'll just show this cover for no other reason than that the solicitation version (1) was quite diffrent form the finished print (2). The series was in a second phase in which I was cutting corners more drastically than before. The orders followed a straight downward slope right from the first issue, and nothing I did was able to divert it from that course. We started at 8,500 and ended and 1800. Thus I was able to plan ahead to the extent of saying 'by the time we reach a level of 3,500 somewhere between issues 30 and 33, certain cuts will need to be made. One of those was that Pete Mullins wasn't working with me on a weekly basis; the Bacchus story was wrapped up except for a few shorts to fill out volume six , The 1,001 Nights of Bacchus; From Hell was wrapped up; and I was concentrating on my autobiographical work, and also travelling a great deal. For the five issues following this one I didn't even draw new covers. I coloured a panel from inside and put that on the front. Interestingly, this made no difference to the sales curve either though I'm sure those who love me felt their patience being tried. And there was another much more serious problem screwing with my brain. More on that next time.
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If you need absolutely need to hear more Campbellian jabberings today, You'll find me interviewed in print by Colleen Mondor.

And in sound at Inkstuds. My goodness, it's an hour and a half! And they've framed me with Charlie Parker's Bird of Paradise and Beirut. How sweet.

covers- BACCHUS no.20

A nother cover from our run of good ones around 1997, this one being for Bacchus # 20, Dec 1996. I was tickled by the situation with the tobacco industry, being legally obliged to spend one third of its product surface and advertising space telling people not to buy the product recommended in the other two thirds, and the way the industry gamely presses on under those and other constrictions. For a moment I thought we were MAD magazine, with Bacchus standing in for Alfred E. Newman. For the first sketch I stretched out an actual cigarette packet and glued a drawing of Bacchus plus a logo onto it. I always used to put a thick line around the sketch with a caligraphy marker when I used it as the solicitation image (1), to make it stand out in the crowded Diamond catalogue. For the finished cover I was thinking of the typographical arrangement of the slick magazine ads for cigarettes. I gave it to Pete Mullins to turn into a painting (2) and Mick Evans did the finished cover design (3), taking a notion to dull the image and put it slightly out of focus for an effect of queasiness. The cover was odd enough to stand out quite nicely on the shelf.
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Our regular commenter Ben Smith noticed this because they used the photo of the gigantic condoms again, last linked to here when it tickled wee hayley campbell: India rattled by vibrating condom -By Jyotsna Singh -BBC News, Delhi-20 June
A vibrating condom has sparked a fierce debate in India, over whether it is a sex toy - which are banned - or a means of birth control. Hindu hardliners have held protests asking the government to ban its sale, though most people on the streets of the state refused to be drawn on the matter.
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meanwhile the lass herself is off to see Grinderman. Honeybee, we'll have to make do with youtube.
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covers- BACCHUS no.22

This has the same cover date, Feb '97, as the neat DeeVee cover by Pete Mullins I showed on Saturday. It was a year of good covers. It's one of those where I honestly can no longer tell who did what on it. I even think I see both Pete's and my own hand in the colouring. There is a slight change in the judge's facial expression, becoming a little more malevolent, between (1) and (2). I remmeber selling the original to a lady lawyer who was tickled by it and wanted to hang it in her private office. One thing I do recall is that I knew Pete was driving by the courthouse and asked him to do a quick reference sketch of the statue of Lady Justice in the fourcourt from his parked car. I subsequently received the following by fax, and like all faxes received from the inestimable Mr Mullins, I made a xerox for long term filing. He would usually find a humorous way of including himself.
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The music of science
Horace Dorlan by Andrzej Klimowski is a weird, witty and oddly humane graphic novel- reviewed by Michael Moorcock-Guardian-Saturday June 16,
(link thanks to regular commenter Ben Smith)

covers- BACCHUS no.25/27

After that gorgeous cover Pete Mullins made for DeeVee #1 of feb '97 (see yesterday's post) I commissioned one for Bacchus in the same manner. So he put together the image of the Anchovy, a character in the storyline being reprinted in the second half of the book, in his own studio, and brought it in and it appeared on my #27 August 1997 issue. This was one of only two or three occasions when a Bacchus cover was coloured on the computer. That approach would never have been cost or time effective in the Campbellian set-up. It was much more expedient to just get out the markers and paints and work over a good quality xerox of the image. Pete could always get a good crisp result that way as in the cover of Bacchus #25 of May '97, the gathering of the Elvises, which is also all his work. In pulling out pictures to scan here I was again struck by how clean and bright the pre-press proofs in my files are (used here for both of the above) compared to the printed results.

p.s. Some time later we put together a whole 8-page Spirit story for Eisner and Kitchen Sink Press that we coloured in-house on computer. It had its own technical problems. I'll talk about that some other time.
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hayley campbell sends this link: Doherty, the scruffy urchin with the million pound record contract and supermodel girlfriend, will join drinking pal Shane Macgowan and Meltdown festival curator Jarvis Cocker to pay tribute to classic Disney songs as part of the South Bank's annual music jamboree. Nick Cave, Baaba Maal, Ralph Steadman and Bryan Ferry will also perform. The event is June 17. you may have missed it already.
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In other news:
China censors "Pirates" for "vilifying Chinese"

covers-Eyeball kid: One man Show

When I made the simple black line drawing above (1) I wouldn't have intended to use it for the finished cover. It looks like the sort of character-sketch that artists do at conventions. But the reason I know it wasn't intended for the finished cover is that it's drawn 'same size'. I would always (at least up till this time) draw finished art at 'A3' size, which is the biggest size that will fit in regular photocopiers, and more importantly, in a regular Fedex box. Go bigger than that and you're making problems for yourself. Reduction from there to comic book size is about 63%. I recall my fellow cartoonist Glenn Dakin once explaining for the young 'uns on a letters page the arithmetical formulas for scaling artwork up and down, at the end of which he wrote "Or you can just be like us; get a comicbook and draw round it." So, never mind your specially blue-line printed art boards, for the solicitation and preview art I would always just grab the nearest comic book, usually last month's issue of Bacchus, and draw round it with a pencil. I coloured it with pantone markers, and then to fix some misjudgement I introduced gouache on top of that.
MIck Evans ran with that and made up a rudimentary cover that we used for promotion, but it wasn't quite coming together (2), with too much of a candy box look about it. At this stage I probably thought I was still going to have to get my head down and do a painting, as I'd done on the previous volumes. However Mick took it away and injected the kind of energy it needed (3).
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linkety split:
I'm interviewed at Wizard. It's a phone chat where the interviewer, Kiel Phegley must have had his work cut out compiling my jostling monologues into regular sentences. At the end of it I reveal some new info about The Amazing Remarkable Mr Leotard.
Brian Talbot's Alice In Sunderland reviewed in the Guardian (link via ben Smith)
Allan Holtz shows two more 1906 Herriman political cartoons from the LA Examiner. he is doing us a great service here. I hope you appreciate it.

Canadian Prime Minister doesn't want to meet Bono.
HEILIGENDAMM, Germany (Reuters) "I've got to say that meeting celebrities isn't kind of my shtick, that was the shtick of the previous guy," said Harper in a dig at his Liberal predecessor Paul Martin, who met Bono regularly."

covers- DOING THE ISLANDS WITH BACCHUS

D oing the Islands with Bacchus - Like the 'Immortality' cover I showed on may 21, this is another that I lived with through several variations over a ten year period. In the top two I was stuck at two extremes; one puts the protagonist so far back among the beach girls that we hardly notice him, while the second brings him so far forward that the girls could be in another picture. The lower composition tries to resolve the problem by having a large girl in the foreground and the small group further off , but not too far. I like that I kept the rough painted edge in that second one in my xerox copy. You never see that again after the picture is printed as a cover. I remember visiting Matt Wagner in Portland Oregon around the time I painted the second picture and we discussed the aesthetic of painting up to a straight edge by using masking tape. Collectors apparently like to have a clean edge. Damn them I say; let's see all the workings. The foreground girl in the lower pair is based on a figure from a ladies' underwear catalogue; I was very taken with the arrangement of a strong reflective light thrown up from the hot sand
(1) is an ink drawing intended for the cover of a third issue of the Harrier Bacchus in 1988 if the series hadn't been discontinued (#2 saw Bacchus arrive among the Greek islands to begin his adventures there). I saw a chance to successfully submit it to the Amazing Heroes annual swimsuit special (Fantagraphics) 1991-(third girl back looks out of proportion, and the band of distant figures was added to fill the space that would originally have been taken up by a logo)
(2) Doing the Islands with Bacchus, Dark Horse mini-series 1991, 1 of 3- a xerox of my cover in oils, untrimmed, without logo and title type.
(3) coloured ink drawing, solicitation image for my own 176 page collected Doing the isands With Bacchus 1997, all the girls in this one, (colouring too), by Pete Mullins from photo refs.
(4) chemical proof of my finished cover in oils, 1997, without logo and title type. Note the seated girl in the middle-distance, from a photo, who appears in all three of the colour versions and may even still be sun-baking in my cumbersome file of old reference cuttings, third drawer down in the old metal cabinet..

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coincidentally from comments:
"This next story caught my eye after re-reading 'Doing the Islands with Bacchus' the other night."-Ben Smith
An 89-year-old (british) woman took a £2,000 taxi trip to Greece - because she can't stand waiting in airports.-BBC NEWS-30 May
Taxi driver Mr Delefortrie said: "I like driving and it seemed a good idea. The drive through Austria was spectacular.
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John Coulthart alerts me to a new exhibition opening June 1:
DALí & FILM - A GROUNDBREAKING SHOW AT TATE MODERN. This is from the 24 Hour Museum site:
The dream recounted by Gregory Peck for analysis by Ingrid Bergman (in the Hitchcock movie Spellbound, the dream sequence of which was designed by Dali)– with its distorted perceptions, eerie landscapes and faceless tormentor – remains one of the most powerful depictions of the subconscious ever seen in the medium of film. The image of the eye returns here, again being slashed by a man with a pair of scissors; other disembodied eyes watch the chaotic action from their position on top of plant stalks.
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in other news:
Man falls off balcony in spitting contest

covers- BACCHUS no.17

T he Yellow Bustard. I was going to inscribe that on the cover of this sly dig at Sin City, but I thought, oh everybody will get it. I suppose they did, but nobody ever said anything. Picture on left from Frank Miller's The Yellow Bastard, picture on right by me except for the rubber chicken, which Pete Mullins contributed and logo and color were added by Mick Evans at the design stage. We had conquered that problem some time before, as explained in an earlier post. Apart from my suspicion that everybody missed the joke, we had no problems whatsoever with this one, and the solicitation image was the same drawing as the finished cover. Why can't life always be like that?
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After enjoying the Beirut video the other day I’ve been doing some digging. Hayley Campbell sends me this Guardian article from November 24 last, the day before I started blogging, in which Zach Condon and Eugene Hutz are cussing at each other. Ah, not since the heady days when trad and modern jazz locked horns have such passions been raised.
'There is no such thing as Gypsy music'
From Basement Jaxx to Beirut to Gogol Bordello, bands are looking to the Balkans for inspiration. But, asks Dorian Lynskey, is this a genuine new musical hybrid or just cultural tourism?
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I've been enjoying Leif Peng's look, over the last couple of weeks, at the work of great American illustrator Al Parker
There are yards of beautiful pictures.
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wha? there have been 50,000 views of this pilot of the Furry Freak Brothers movie and I've only just heard about it? Gilbert never mentioned the possiblity of a movie when we had dinner with him, Hunt Emerson and the Knockabout crowd in Angouleme in France two years ago.
(via mr j, drjon and just about everybody else who heard about it before me)
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I'm interviewed at Suicide Girls. These long distance telephone conversations are always tricky, but I don't seem to have embarrassed myself too much here.
There's another interview at Comic Book resources. This was by email, so there was less chance of me making an ass of myself, but you be the judge.
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Website of writer Miranda July is the most original and funny thing I've seen online in a long time. (link via Neil Gaiman's blog)

covers- BACCHUS no.30

With this one at least I had a confident idea from the start. Collage waving 'Yoo-hoo' at the reader. She hadn't been on a cover for quite a while. In fact she hadn't been in the storyline either since Bacchus was locked up in jail. The problems started when I painted it in gouache. Well, actually if I'd just stuck with the gouache we might have been okay, but I coloured her coat with a fluorescent orange pantone marker. I'm sure Evans would have called me an idiot, and remembering how well that Eyeball Kid cover came out, I'd have just said 'photograph it and see what happens', in my naivete not realizing that whenever these mad ideas worked out well it was because some poor muggins, unbeknownst to me, had put a lot of thought and effort into how it might be reproduced. So Mick grumbled, had a few beers with me, grumbled less, took it away to where he was working the nightshift in a design studio, and dropped the negs in at my place the following morning on his way home (he described our working method in brief a few days ago in comments). We'd usually be pressing ahead with the days rigors when he arrived. I had two drawing tables in the front room for me and Pete, as well as big desk with the typewriter on it, which was Anne's station. In fact, it wasn't really a 'front room', more the passage between the veranda and the living room. The front door remained open all day, letting in the subtropical sunshine and occasional bodies trying to sell me a story idea.
The problem this time was that the orange insisted on reproducing as a bright yellow as evidenced by the chemical proof Mick was showing to me. I can't recall whether we had another attempt to photograph it, but my solution to the problem in the end was to retouch the chemical proof and use that as the actual cover art. The retouching involved quite a bit of additional colour on the face. The surface of this was tacky, and we may have kicked it around before I decided it was to be the precious finished surface. There's a little speck of dirt stuck to the character's nose, and when I tried to remove it I just made it worse.
The true solution never occurred to me at the time. I had successfully made xeroxes of the painting at full and half size, which is why I couldn't figure out why it wouldn't reproduce for the process camera. There would be times like that I dearly wished I had been accepted for the graphic design diploma course way back in '74 (to this day I can't figure out why I couldn't get in there... must have been my arrogance or something) since I've spent so many days wrestling with technical problems associated with printing. Anyway, the local university paper made a special issue devoted to comics and Minty Moore became a key guy in rounding up material for them. I gave them the large size xerox of this cover as a stand alone piece of art (there's a great deal going on in the graffiti behind the figure), and it printed perfectly, at a nice big tabloid size too. In other words the xerox process converts everything in the art to the same material, photopcopy toner, so that all the elements react in the same way under the process camera. It's when you mix media on the same surface that you run into problems. Lesson learned.
(1) is the solicitation image as it appeared in the Previews catalogue, (2) is my half-size xerox and is colour-true (There may be a moire pattern caused by the scanning for showing it here.) (3) is the print job.
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I awoke today to find that I have that new Blogger feature I’ve been hearing about, the one that deletes your post while you’re working on it, and it doesn’t matter that you saved it earlier. It’s gone, pal. Thus the following has been done more than once, so let’s just hope it makes sense.
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Women in Art a short video. This is very lovely. Thanks for the link to my fellow artist, Christopher Moonlight. Christopher also says he just picked up The Black Diamond Detective Agency at Barnes and Noble, so it is in the shops now..
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Belgians do what PM can't: banish Tintin -The Australian-Sally Jackson- May 31
Bill Leak, The Australian's artist and daily editorial cartoonist, has been threatened with legal action unless he stops depicting federal Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd as Tintin…
This follows the news that three Tintin movies are in the pipeline, with Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson confirming they would direct two of them. Leak said he had been drawing Rudd as Tintin at least since December. Tintin's dog, Snowy, also features in the cartoons, although not his best friend, the hard-drinking Captain Haddock. "Sadly, Julia Gillard doesn't have a great big black beard," Leak said yesterday.
(link thanks to Michael Evans)
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Nobel laureate's next project will marry words and pictures.- May 30-Guardian
The Nobel laureate, whose previous acclaimed works include My Name is Red and Snow, had wanted to become a painter before he began writing novels... As part of the early groundwork for the book, he is preparing to teach a course at Columbia University in New York this autumn which has the working title of "pictures and texts".
"It's sort of a random survey of the relationship between pictures and texts," he explained, "from Plato's cave to Heidegger's Van Gogh shoes." The course will examine pictures as illustrations of texts and texts as descriptions of pictures, and explore the intermingling of picture and text in human thought...

Followers of this blog will recall that I have a special interest in the evolving concept of the novel in our times.
(link thanks to Ben Smith)
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German mistakes subway for underground car park
May 30, -BERLIN (Reuters) –
her vehicle got stuck on the stairs, police said on Wednesday.

covers- BACCHUS no.29

T his issue had the story that was bumped along from #28, whose cover I showed yesterday. I must have realized it was getting too difficult to predict where I'd be when the time came three months later to draw the promised story, for I've drawn a standard sort of pin-up cover in the solicitation image (1), showing a grouping of the characters as they were appearing in the supporting (reprint) story. The coloring on the printed solicitation (2) looks like Pete's work. Very nice too. I can imagine I bought the catalogue just to cut that out for my files. The printed size of these could vary; this one is two and a half inches high, yesterday's was two inches. With the finished painting (3), which Pete has painted so thoroughly I can't recall how much I was involved, a boot is tromping on the flag of civilisation. In retrospect, the idea is too complicated since it's not an object that anybody could possibly recognize. What I really wanted to do was have Bacchus wiping his bottom with it (4), as he does in the story, and was promised in the solicitation for the previous issue, and I've mocked up here just for a laugh, but I didn't think the distributors and the shops would stand for it.
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Book without words wins literary prize The Australian, may 29.
The graphic novel, The Arrival, by Shaun Tan, won the Community Relations Commission (CRC) Literary Award for 2007.
The $15,000 award was one of 11 announced tonight at the annual New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards dinner in Sydney. (thanks to Michael Evans)
I wrote about the book on dec 11
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Alan & Mel's Wedding Reception Flickr set. (thanks, drjon)
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Marjane Satrapi shares the Jury Prize at Cannes. I missed this profile in the Herald Tribune from last week.-may 22
Marjane Satrapi at Cannes: An Iranian graphic novelist's coming of age
(via First Second blog)
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here's another great sound. French band Dionysos, and my First Second stablemate Johan Sfar appears to have designed the cartoon video. (link via mr j.)
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If you liked that Nick Cave cover I drew for Punk Planet, David Carroll has posted a big full size version. My monitor is showing a lot of yellow on the face that shouldn't be there, it should be a flat flesh tone all over, but there's some nervous pencil detail that's picked up nicely. Mick Evans cobbled all my bits and pieces together in photoshop for this job by the way. the main portrait sketch is on a piece of tracing paper (used to trace the best parts of an earlier sketch) which when last seen hayley campbell was using as a bookmark in her copy of From Hell. In an artist's house, such things are taken for granted.

update: she says "'it's no there noo, it's shifted.' Now it's a bookmark in How to Beat an Artist."
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in other news:
Man wrestles leopard in his bedroom--Tue May 29,
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - An Israeli man wrestled a leopard to the ground after it entered his bedroom in a desert college and tried to make a meal of his pet cat.
"He jumped on the leopard and pinned him to the floor, then his wife called us so we could take it away," Amram Zabari, a local park ranger who rushed to the scene, said on Tuesday.

covers- BACCHUS no.28

I headed into my third year of Bacchus, without having missed a month, although in the third and fourth years the schedule would slip down to ten issues per year and then eight in the fifth and sixth. That's sixty altogether in six years. For most of that time, If I missed a month of Bacchus, there would be something else to take its place, either a big collection or a 48 page special such as the Birth Caul. In this third year I found quite a few of the cover predictions were hopelessly off course by the time we came to draw the issue. With this one I thought we'd be up to the collapse of social order and the advent of Bacchanalian chaos, but a couple of short chapters were inserted to delay that, such as the one titled 'the murder Ballad'. If I remember correctly, Nick Cave had just recorded his duet with Kylie Minogue, which had her playing the dead girl floating in the pond. With Minty Moore we came up with the idea of the blues singer narrating a murder ballad in rhyme and I pulled out the oil paints once more, unused since the Bacchus color Special cover. The printing on this cover was the single most heartbreaking dissapointment in my whole publishing career. So, (1) is the black and white small scale cover solicitation image. (2) is how it looked in the Diamond catalogue. Pete Mullins inked and colored it I think. Interestingly, the story described here would be in the following issue (see next post) but this cover idea was kicked out a second time and thus never used. (3) is my prepress color-correct proof of the painting, which has never been seen anywhere before. Click for an enlargement. Seeing it as it was meant to appear, for the first time in ten years (I sold the original quickly) I felt quite moved, recalling all the tragic feelings I tried to put into it. (4) is the dismal end result of the print job. For a couple of hours I felt like giving up.

In fact, what impresses me more than seeing the actual colours after all these years, is the fact that I was able to put it out of my head and get on with the next issue and the one after that. And the covers of those issues would create their own particular problems. Actually, no, what terrifies me the most is that this was all ten years ago.

covers- BACCHUS no.18/19

Y esterday I was writing about those little advance cover images that I'd send for the previews catalogues. Once I acknowledged the unlikelihood of the first idea being the one that would make the eventual finished cover, it seemed inexpedient to go to the trouble of drawing it up in a 'finished' way. Also, since my covers were more often than not painted, an inked line version was surplus to requirements. Thus I decided to cut a corner. Instead of drawing a full size cover at this stage, I'd make a very small drawing that would look good at the repro size of two or three inches high. In other words, since the distributors were agreeably showing a picture in their jam packed catalogues, I'd make the most dynamic use of the available space by composing to best suit the scale, and think of my picture as a 'placeholder' for a better one that would come along later. There was a lady at one of the distributors who phoned to point out that I had delivered a cover different from the one advertised in the catalogue, which was against the rules. I responded by pointing out that the rule was a sound one designed to stop publishers from offering , say a brilliant cover by Dave Stevens and then delivering a dumb one by Eddie Campbell, thus causing discontent with the readers who would naturally feel gypped. Since I had promised a cover by Campbell, and then delivered a more detailed cover by Campbell, I wasn't playing against the purpose of the the rule. I presume the matter was referred to somebody who knew who Eddie Campbell was, and no more was heard about it at this end for the rest of my duration as a publisher.
Anyway, after that first year of self publishing, most of those solicitation images were quite different from the covers as later published. Above are a couple of good examples. You can see how in the small versions the bold and simple black and white miniatures command their space more authoritatively, while if you click through to the bigger version, the colour image comes into its own. The Issue #18 (oct. '96) preview has a profile of Bacchus that is almost bigfoot cartooning. I tend to prefer it to the finished picture. The Subject of #19 (nov.'96) was so suited to Pete Mullins' skills that I handed it over to him and kept out of the way, so that one's 100% Mullins. The small girl's head sufficed until I or Anne found a photo ref for the finished image. With that issue Mick Evans finally got to redesign the logo after complaining about it for a year. 'Colo' was of course our version of the popular British mint, 'polo'. The story in this episode was one that Marcus Moore wrote for me, about the invention of a mint for inserting in your posterior, or the 'arse-mint.' Forever after, in the pages of Bacchus, Marcus was referred to as 'Minty Moore'.

(That's after 'Dinty' Moore, who was the chef in the great Bringing Up Father daily comic strip. There's a great site devoted to it, courtesy of Mark J. Holloway, including Dinty Moore way down the page.)
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Short Is Good: The concise joys of condensed books -- and the virtues of brevity
Wall Street Journal-May 12-By TERRY TEACHOUT
NEW YORK -- "Orion Books, one of England's top publishing houses, has just brought out the first six titles in a series of abridged versions of such classic novels as "Anna Karenina," "Moby-Dick" and "Vanity Fair." The covers of these paperbacks, which have been shortened by as much as 40%, bill their contents as "Compact Editions."
Of course great art deserves to be experienced on its own uncompromising terms, flaws and all. But the older I get, the more I appreciate those artists who say what they have to say, then shut up. Is there a more powerfully moving novel than F. Scott Fitzgerald's 56,000-word "The Great Gatsby"? Or a funnier film than Buster Keaton's 44-minute "Sherlock Jr."? Or a more profound meditation on the brevity of human life than "Anakreons Grab," Hugo Wolf's setting of Goethe's 12-line poem about the grave of an ancient Greek poet? "The happy poet rejoiced/In spring, summer and fall/Now at last this mound of earth/Protects him from winter." I'd trade any number of operas for that exquisitely wrought three-minute song."

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European men are flocking to Bulgaria to buy 'breast-boosting beer' after EU accession led to customs duties on the drink being abolished
Constantin Barbu crossed the Danube from Romania to buy Boza in the Bulgarian border town of Ruse.He said: "I've bought a case for my wife to try out. I really hope I see an improvement."