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

DOG-EARED LITERATURE

DOG-EARED   LITERATURE

Lurve & Hayshe

Lurve & Hayshe

Tony and Sheila

Tony and Sheila

Here's another reject submission to Bob Byrne's Shiznit, the excellent issue 4 of which is free to download now:

UFOs

UFOs

Recently, I've been reading UFO books again. To offset the waste of time involved I thought I might try and extract some sort of comic strip stories out of the material towards which the following tentative effort was knocked up. The summary text after the page was supposed to be typeset into it though it was too long to fit in legibly:



Subsequent chapters relate how Corso again encountered the recovered saucer in 1961 while heading the army's foreign technology desk. Corso claims he managed the covert seeding of the alien technology into corporate industry to foster breakthroughs like kevlar armour, fibre optics and integrated circuitry.

The story is largely unverifiable and thus stands or falls on its internal strengths. It is an intriguing tale, certainly until the dryness of the technology transfer details become boring - Corso's flat delivery tends to render even the more fantastical elements of the story mundane.

True or not, the most intriguing thing about this story ends up being the question as to why the author bothered? The 80yr old Corso died soon after the books release and almost certainly didn't earn much from it or associated UFO convention appearances. Doggedly loyal, he claims he was waiting until his commanding officer passed away before coming out with the revelations, adding some half hearted hokum about how it was time to 'let the next generation know the truth'.

But something doesn't quite ring true. Is the whole thing some sort of bizarre gullibility test tied to his army intelligence background? A complicated red herring? Or just the delusions of a senile old man? More likely, I think a tanglement of all three. Wish I could recommend it - unfortunately, as with alot of this UFO material, it was much more interesting reading about the book on the Internet than the book itself.

Demento Memento - part 2

Demento Memento - part 1

after Kees Van Dongen Woman with Hat

after Alexej von Jawlensky Spanish Girl


after Amadeo Modigliani A Student


after Otto Mueller Self Portrait with Nude

I had been thinking of putting together a small zine of the ink wash type sketches I'd been doing in my sketchbooks. A selection of the sketches were scanned and a rough layout version of the book assembled. The collection didn't seem to gel though. The toned wash effect was difficult to reproduce in photo-copiable form and there was no overall common theme. Looking at the project again I can see there were some different sets of connecting threads - though not enough of each to justify a zine of their own. This set were copied from tiny black and white thumbnails of the pictures in question from an old 'Introduction to Painting' type art history book.

Bomb you back to the stone age