Note to John

Note to John

Cereal Boxer

Cereal Boxer

Working on my contribution to the Ink Studs Art Show next month. The cereal box canvas idea is shamelessly stroked from Dan Zettwoch's excellent cardboard as canvas pictures.

Xmas 2006

Xmas 2006

Working on this years Chrimbo card at the moment. Here is last years.
Front:

inside:

and back:

No Matter how Nerdy

No Matter how Nerdy

The Lads at the Wedding

The Lads at the Wedding

Don't drink and devolve

Don't drink and devolve

The Peaceman/Warman Dialectic

The Peaceman/Warman Dialectic

Halloween Night

Halloween Night

24hr Comics Day

24hr Comics Day

Last Saturday was 24hr comics day, the aim being to write and draw 24 pages in 24 hrs. A ludicrous and impossible task you might say and indeed I only managed the meagre 4 pages below and cheated with whiteout a couple of days later. On the other hand I spent an agreeable part of the day with the bold Jason Turner who not only coloured his pages and squeezed in a nights sleep but managed to produce a terrific, lyrical and consistent story - all off the top of his head. I give up.

Observer Comic Competition entry

Observer Comic Competition entry

Its difficult to produce comics on deadline I find. The drawing part isn't so bad if the story is well worked out beforehand but if not, it can be a halting mix of procrastination and slapdash finishing. It's a struggle that has hampered many an anthology contribution in the past. With the worst outcome in mind I decided to enter the Observer Comic competion anyway and managed to slog in the page below on time with the help of a few late nights and the kindness of a posting pal east side of the Atlantic. Deadline met and with lack-of-sleep induced elation, I had convinced myself that it was pretty alright - a bad sign since my own comics usually grow on me. In the cold light of day I wrestled with re-formatting or redrawing it to bake it to completion anyway and make something of the effort but in the spirit of many of the other entrants I'll share it here instead.

The eventual winners and entrants were, pleasantly, not what I expected and to be honest I think there are better strips amongst the un-gonged. It was just good to see so many decent entries though I wish I could have seen them before I started my own - it might have given me the kick up the backside to make a proper job of it.

Note to Stack

Note to Stack

Deed for the Day

Deed for the Day

Notes to John

Notes to John

Collaborations 03

Collaborations 03

Liam Geraghty provided the script on this one (and I attempted to apply some lettering lessons).

Collaborations 02

Collaborations 02

For this page Seán was kind enough to do the lettering first and even sent on one of his custom lettering tools, perhaps as a gentle hint to improve on the dogs dinner lettering job of the last post.

Collaborations

Collaborations

Occasionally I have the good fortune to collaborate on a page. Here is one with the venerable Seán MacRoibin that originally appeared in Matter #2.

Weird Face

Weird Face

Good news: I've started working again.

Matter 3 Coda

Matter 3 Coda

The inside back of the original layout of Matter #3 had a series of panels offering a brief glimpse into more of the characters lives.



Panel 1 is a younger Timmy O' Tay.
Panel 2 is the shirt.
Panel 3 is the little boyfriend.
Panel 4 is between our world and theirs.
Panel 5 is the girl from war wounds.
Panel 6 is the other guy from the little boyfriend.

Young Lad Divergence

Young Lad Divergence

These appeared on Bob's site way back.

Matter 3 Cover

Matter 3 Cover

The cover for Matter 3 was originally meant to be a two colour design on white card with the black people overprinting the red logotype (with all white pages inside). After giving up on Matter 3 in its original form I ended up just doing the design in black on red card to save costs via photocopying (for the 'Matter Free' giveaway book).



The inside front cover was to be a red monotone of an empty city street. People without street, street without people, see?



At the time I conceived the cover image I was working in those tall pyramid topped buildings on George's Quay behind Tara street Dart station. The office had a terrific view of the station and the streets behind and I used to sketch the little people down below.



The people part of the design is influenced by those LS Lowry pictures of matchstick men. Also the Louis le Brocquy illustrations of the large groups of people for the Táin Bó Cuailnge.

For the street scene I was referencing a couple of building paintings of Lucian Freud (better know for his paintings of flesh)- particularly the view out the back of his studio done after the death of his father. There is something very glum and desolate about these pictures. Originally I had a much more expansive cityscape in mind which was to be swiped from the style of Stephen Wiltshire - a dyslexic artist gifted with an amazing photographic memory for architecture and a fantastically intricate drafting line with which to realize it.

Timmy O'Tay 02

Timmy O'Tay 02

In hindsight these pages seem very 'Jimmy Corrigan' in tone (if not in execution) - I expect I was rereading the book at the time. Unfortunately there is a flaw in the main 'gag' on the top of the second page where its not clear that Timmy is concealing a jazz-mag in the comic to get a sly look (its also not clear that the mag is soap/shampoo themed). Once again the ending peters out inexplicably. This story was to originally appear in a large format 'Matter 3' along with the extended 'Touched' stuff elsewhere on the blog, hence the 4 stack panel layout.

Timmy O'Tay 01

Timmy O'Tay 01

Here is another page from the hard-drive clearout of old unpublished comics. I'm not quite sure what was going through my head with this one. Possibly the page started with the 'Timmy O'Tay' title which led into the idea of a shampoo drinking loser. Unfortunately it didn't culminate in a suitable punchline. Strangely I thought enough of this character to warrant a revisit and indeed roughed out some further stories - to appear here next.

Touched 04

Touched 04

Touched 03

Touched 03

Those Pesky Kids

Those Pesky Kids

Bicycle Skeletons

Bicycle Skeletons

I started collecting these pictures a while back for some sort of undefined art project. It never went anywhere: there aren't near as many in Vancouver as there were in Dublin.

Weather

Weather

Touched 02

Touched 02

Touched

Touched

Lint got April zine of the month in Broken Pencil Magazine which was nice. Lint is actually a sort of repackaging of the now out of print Matter #2 achieved by swapping out 3 of the stories and adding a new cover. It is probably the best seller of the comics I've done largely because of 'The Record' story which featured in Matter #2. Of the stories that were removed, 'The Divils' is better left by the wayside while 'Girl on chair' is a fine collaboration to appear here at a future point. The other story 'Touched' is one I remain attached to despite its flaws. It was a continuation of characters I'd drawn back in the 'Crack in the Shell' days. It had no real story, just a sort of slice of life back and forth through time. The few constructive comments I'd gotten about the strip remarked how it was hard to follow and understand what was going on and what the point was. The earlier version had these obvious frame shapes and age number badges to cue the reader to the shifting time periods for the character and I had unwisely discarded this convention in the later Matter #2 version. Most problematic though was the big missing chunk of story between the first 3 and the last pages. I knew in my head that something went on in this interval and I hoped the reader would too - big mistake.

Several weeks ago I discovered 2 partly inked pages that continued the story and I began to rummage around in my hard-drive to see what other fragments I had bothered to scan noticing that, barring a couple of additional pages, I actually did have almost the complete story.

I'll probably never collect it together in print partly because the page dimensions, lettering and drawing ability differ too greatly from end to end and partly because its not that interesting anyway - it's certainly not worth re-drawing. I'll attempt to present it again here in segments over the next few weeks or so with some rougher sketched pages for the missing bits if for no other reason than that is what the blog is for.

Eat Sardines

Eat Sardines