MEGACON, Collages and Coldplay

A new event has been announced to take place in Carlisle on the 18th Aug. I'll be there with the Accent UK crew, and it looks to be shaping up into a great opportunity for comic readers in the North West to get a feel for what Cons are all about, and meet some of the creators and publishers face to face. I love these smaller events as they are much more informal than events like KAPOW and allow readers and creators more time to chat.You can find out more on their blog and facebook group.
Whilst I'm busy writing more than drawing (or what I pass off as such) I've taken the opportunity to do some more cutting and pasting on the side of my desk, and produced another little collage. This time it's what I think Captain America would have looked like had he been created to help the Union soldiers in hte American Civil War.

I quite enjoy playing around with collage ... might try something a little bigger next.
I took my daughter, Jemma, to see Coldplay at the Etihad Stadium in Manchester last nigh,t for her 14th Birthday present, and we had a great time. They certainly put a lot into these events these days. In my day you were lucky if the whole band turned up. These days there's giant globes bouncing around and confetti blasts. I did find standing for 6 hours a bit of a strain, it's my age, and am suffering a bit today but I must say that I really enjoyed the experience.

Happy New Year...

Not wanting to start the New Year on a down note, but when will I get rid of this damned Flu Virus ? Not only is it messing up my Bank Holiday enjoyment but has also chewed its way through three days of holiday that I took between XMas and New Year ... due to this I've done little more than sit in front of 9 hours of The Lord Of The Rings with my daughter (and her comment at the end of it all ? ' I prefer Harry Potter...').

We did manage to get a few games in there and as is traditional I managed to own the Bank at the end of our Monolopy session, I won't talk about the other games, being beaten at Scrabble by a 12 year old is something that I need to deal with in my own time ....

A friend at work showed me a book that I found really amusing. It's called Movie Charts, by Paul Copperwaite, and using pie charts (etc) to reflect certain elements, and messages, of films we all know and love. I've not copied any here, but have made one up concerning the movie 300 that should show you the type of thing it contains. Not to evertone's taste I know but it appealed to me.

I've made a few New Year's resolutions, in the hope that one makes out beyond January, but am not brave enough to share them with the wider world, as they'd then be played back to me on a weekly basis.

On the comic front, The Fall Of The Wolfmen, written by myself and illustrated by Mr Bloor has been reviewed over on http://www.hypergeek.ca/2010/12/comic-review-fall-of-the-wolfmen.html. Good timing as the comic itself is listed in Jan's PREVIEWS. if you'd like a copy then now id hte time to pop in to your local comic shop and get them to order one for you.

In other news, Steve Holder has a blog up and running over at http://holdersteve.blogspot.com/. Steve and I are collaborating on a couple of projects at the moment. Robot Shorts, a collection of tales about ... Robots .. that are .. well ... short. The stories that is, not the robots themselves. Steve is also illustrating a future Blessed/Cursed comic, but I'll keep that under wraps a bit at the moment.

Here's an image of Steve's that I've greyscaled, but sadly we've decided it best not to include it. To find out more then pop over to Steve blog, there's a link on the left :o)

The Captain America blues ....

Been a busy week this week ... catching up with the 300 odd emails at work ... yep ... things just carry on when you're not around.

More interestingly I've now printed off Andy Bloor's Wolfmen 2 pages and they are great. Really impressive work. Our process is that I now sit down and script it more tightly, as Andy has put many of my words into the images. This typically means that I end up writing it from scratch with his visuals as the thread through the story. I'm not sure if other people work this way but I enjoy the opportunity to re-write the script in this way and believe that a better comic is the result.

Well, back to work ... if you can call this work :o) Did I mention that I've now seen all the pages of Andy's fabulous artwork ... and everyone else has to wait another month :o)

Captain America loves all creatures ....

So, Capt America is off to foil another of the Red Skull's evil plots to take over the world, but has a bit of an accident on the way. This delay could spell 'doom' for mankind, but at least the bunny is OK.