ZERO SUM BUBBLEGUM at THE AWESOME COMICS PODCAST

Tony Esmond recommends my comic Zero Sum Bubblegum on the latest episode.

He specifically discusses the stories A Book with Death in the Title, Tiddlywinks, No-One is Keeping Score, and Junior Scrabbl.

Have a listen here.

ZERO SUM BUBBLEGUM - Preview 2

More stories from my upcoming comic...

Tiddlywinks

Stay Alive

No-One is Keeping Score

No Greater Love

Marriage Statistics

Death Bed Farewell

My Troubles with Men

You can pre-order Zero Sum Bubblegum here.

MAKE / SHARE

Photo pinched from @Creative_Dundee

I took part in Creative Dundee’s monthly event Make/Share last Wednesday. It's an open call to anyone making things to come and talk about what they’re doing.

It’s held at the MakerSpace in the Vision building at Dundee’s waterfront. I knew I was one of three speakers, and as it runs 7-8.30pm, I had about half an hour.

There was a limit on how many images you could take along – 4 or 5 in total, which was perhaps a more problematic number to someone doing comics rather than other creative endeavours, what with the emphasis being on sequential storytelling. But no matter, I decided to show a page each from the 4 most recent comics I’ve put out: “No Greater Love” at the Guardian #opencomics page, “Tiddlywinks” in Dirty Rotten Comics #5, “Silently Falling” in Jack Sprat #1; and “A Book with Death in the Title” from the forthcoming Treehouse #7.

What was interesting was not knowing the extent to which the audience was familiar with comics. In one respect, I can talk about comics minutiae forever, but how to structure a half hour talk to people who maybe have no prior interest? A brief intro about how I came to start doing comics and then the background to each of the 4 stories was the way I went.

It’s always great to hear people’s interpretations of my stories. An intriguing one for "No Greater Love" came on this night, in which the mother had died after giving birth and the father was now left alone. Because the story is told in images, there is a lot of room for interpretation, and I found this take fascinating.

The MakerSpace studio is filled with creative people with an interest in technology. Another of last night’s speakers was Grant Richmond, who had taken an old radio, gutted it like a fish and refilled it with modern electronics, replacing the speakers and enabling it with wi-fi. Impressive, and he still hasn’t finished tinkering with it. The other speaker Andrew Kieran, has an enormous weaving machine onsite that he has transported around Britain. It too had a technological aspect – one of his woven articles has a mobile code as part of the pattern.

I enjoyed shoehorning self-published comics into the creative arts arena last night. A really fun evening.

DIRTY ROTTEN COMICS #5: Available now!

Further to yesterday's post regarding a review at comics website Broken Frontier, I am pleased to say that the postie today brought me my contributor copy of Dirty Rotten Comics #5.

It's a fine book. Loads of variety and great comics.

The story I have in there is "Tiddlywinks", which was itself the subject of a short series of work in progress blog posts here.

The book is now available at the Dirty Rotten Comics website!

DIRTY ROTTEN COMICS #5 at BROKEN FRONTIER

Andy Oliver has written on the new anthology Dirty Rotten Comics 5, which I have done a story for. The comic also features;

Amy Smith; Andy Barron (Website, Twitter); Anna Dowsland (Website, Twitter); Barney Farmer (Twitter) & Lee Healey (Website, Twitter); David Meadows & Andrew Potts (Website, Twitter); David Thomas & Rosa Devine (Website); David Ziggy Greene (Website, Twitter); Des Buckley (Website); Gary Clap (Website, Twitter); Ioan Morris (Website, Twitter); James Gifford (Website, Twitter); James Wragg (Website, Twitter); Jess Milton (Website, Twitter); Jessie Huckin; Jey Levang (Website, Twitter); Joe Callanan (Website, Twitter); John Dredge (Website, Twitter) & Joseph Champniss; Kevin Loftus (Website, Twitter); Kirk Campbell (Twitter); Matthew Dooley (Website, Twitter); Olivia Sullivan (Website, Twitter); Rozi Hathaway (Website, Twitter); Sarah Crosby (Website, Twitter); Scott Wrigg (Website, Twitter); Teal Barnes (Website, Twitter); Todd Oliver (Website, Twitter) and Tom Mortimer (Twitter).

Have a look at the review here.

WORK IN PROGRESS 6 - FINI

It is always comics making time!

Last page today.

In the course of drawing this one, a change in the events occured to me. I thought it got my story across more strongly than what I had originally written, so I went with it.

Here are the pencils:

 Here are the inks:

I had also left a storytelling problem I knew I had on this page hanging, trusting I'd come up with something at the drawing stage. I did! So a succesful session at the board today.

Tomorrow night I will have a look over the four pages for any glaring mistakes I've made, or changes I want to do. Then I'll scan the pages and send them off.

WORK IN PROGRESS 5

Yes, it's still comics making time.

Today I've been working on page three. Here are the pencils:

It's important after a few hours at the drawing board to stretch your legs and have a break. I'd recommend a cup of tea and some buttered toast.

 

Then on to the inks. Here they are, all done:

One page left to do. It's great to get these under the belt, one at a time, slowly but surely.

WORK IN PROGRESS 4

Hey. It's comics making time.

Here are the finished inks for page two:

As with inking, the first things to be done on the pencil page are the lettering, captions, speech balloons, etc. Here are the beginnings of page three:

I'm aiming to have the four pages done by Monday night. On track so far.

WORK IN PROGRESS 3

Hiya. Here I am again. Third day on this comic.

Here are the pencils for page 2:

You may notice panels 3, 4 and 9 are blank. This is because they are the same picture as panel 2, and so I can ink them using that panel.

I should explain that I ink using tracing paper over my pencilled pages. I started doing this years ago after destroying one nice set of pencils too many with my awful inking. This way I keep the pencils and inks and it's interesting to compare them retrospectively.

Here's the inking started on page 2. I generally do the panel borders, caption boxes, speech balloons and lettering first...

WORK IN PROGRESS 2

Hey! Here we are, another night working on this four page comic.

First photo is the completed pencils and inks of page one...

Time to start pencilling page two, working from the layouts below...

More to come! Three pages more to come...

WORK IN PROGRESS 1

I'm working away on a four page story at the moment.

Thought I'd show some photos as I go along over the next week or so.

First, here's a photo with my layout book on the left and the pencils so far on the right.