Bitz n Bobz

Currently, I am nearing the end of a week-long stint house sitting and looking after a dog, cat, fish, guinea pigs and lizard. Armed with a stack of reading (thus cutting down my backlog of reading to one book, two Williamson collections and a Frazetta collection), I found that typing on a laptop is a bloody frustrating exercise and abandoned my plans to continue revising my comic-0n-TV book for the second printing. So what else has been going on recently?

Two things are out now featuring my work: details of the tsunami relief project Spirit of Hope can be found at http://www.comicbook.org.uk/spirit-of-hope/ , while Dirty Bristow#2 is out now, a Birmingham based magazine featuring a few of my illos for a piece by Mr Tom Lennon, also available online: http://dirtybristow.co.uk/pledge/

Nice feedback here too:

Danny found his interview with an Otherkin was relatively easy to write but tracking someone down willing to talk to him was in his own words ‘the ballache of the year’. His pick is Tom Lennon’s Mythical beasts of Birmingham.

“It’d be a cliche to say how difficult it was to pick my highlights because they’re all so good wouldn’t it? I’ll just say that Tom’s piece is top quality funny and writing from a fresh local talent given room to write something that probably wouldn’t fit elsewhere. With frankly jaw dropping illustrations from Nigel Lowery, it’s why we started the magazine in the first place”

I've also been contributing more often to theweeklythemedartblog recently. I missed a few for being spoiled for choice but the one about robots coincided with watching an DVD tutorial by Adam Hughes, so I was inspired to create the piece above, Platinum of the Metal Men. I've also attached my version of Forbidden Planet (not likeness-strong as I wanted to change the horrid 50s hairdo) for the same blog...

Also put up a jam between me and Tony McGee: he inked my Loki, I inked his Magneto then he sank my battleship...

Fancied a chance on the Space Ghost DVD, as I only ever saw about three episodes as a kid, shuffled around the ITV schedules as space fillers. I LURRRVED them...but oh, dear, they've not held up well. Still, an excellent feature length documentary on Alex Toth makes it all worthwhile: odd to see quotes I've just read in Genius isolated spoken aloud on the DVD!

Ahead of the Avengers (shot of above) next year is Ghost Rider 2...it's almost certain that it can't be worse than the original (though the Rider himself, his bike and Carter Slade were all well executed) but it actually looks pretty decent. It feels more like the mood of the comic and the last few minutes alone are worth watching the trailer for: