This Saturday is the Comiket comic show at the Bishopsgate Institute in London (the nearest Tube is Liverpool Street). You should come along seeing as it’s free entry – it looks to be a haven for independent comics with many of my comic BFFs are in attendance. There’ll be stalls, live drawing, reading rooms, a bar, a coffee shop and even an after party.

As with any show I have a few new things to sell. No new comics this time round, sadly but how about a brand new Chloe Noonan tote bag?! You can buy it online if you’re not coming to one of my shows this year.

If you’ve been following my on Tumblr recently you may have seen some pop culture drawings show up and that’s because I’m bringing the original art to sell at shows this year. I tried this last year and they did really well and this time I’ll throw in a colour print version for no extra cost. Here’s the selection I’ll be bringing with me.

Gonzo The Great. A5.

He-Man and Skeletor (without watermark) A5.

The Avengers. A4.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. A4.

Kermit The Frog. A5.

The Swedish Chef and Kermit. A5.

I’ll be bringing along the usual supply of comics, t-shirts and posters.

Today, myself and my good friend Adam Cadwell launched Great Beast Comics, a new publishing banner that specialises in independent comics and graphic novels. Our aim is to push our comics into new hands, celebrate fun and heartfelt books in a format that you want to read them in. You can read our manifesto here at the Great Beast website.

(Basically what we mean is books that aren’t afraid to be funny, books aimed at youngsters – from 8-18 and we’ll be releasing everything digitally on the same day as any print edition.)

Our launch titles are Chloe Noonan: Monster Hunter and Blood Blokes, which you should be familiar with by now. Coming later this year we are publishing collected editions of our autobiographical webcomics and above is the cover to the Ellerbisms collection. It’s possibly my favourite thing I’ve drawn this year and this book means so much to me. I can’t wait to have it out.

We’re excited and nervous and happy and terrified about this new venture. It doesn’t mean that we’ll stop working for other companies altogether and it most certainly does not mean you won’t find any of the previously mentioned projects elsewhere. This is a banner for like minded creators who are perhaps overlooked in the UK industry, by pulling our resources we can deliver content to readers new and existing.

We’ll be at the Comiket comic show this Saturday, a blog about that will appear in the next 24 hours. Hope to see you there, it’s free entry after all!

But the bit I’m most proud of is that I’ve coloured some Chloe Noonan comics and put them up on here. So if you’ve never read a Chloe Noonan comic before well here is your chance, here’s one of the pages…

The pretty brilliant Anne Holiday made this short 3 minute film about last years show and my drawings/hands turn up in a few shots, but don’t watch it for that (nor Luke Pearson glumly shaking his head) watch it to feel really good about comics and the community we’re all in.

Thought Bubble film from Anne Holiday on Vimeo.

Because sometimes it’s interesting to see this stuff, right?

So, whilst checking my Google Reader feed on the train to work the other morning I came across this little ditty from Storming The Tower, it’s a round up of a meme where Jess Fink, Kate Beaton and Carly Monardo posted year by year examples of how they’ve drawn themselves, so that kinda got me thinking how I used to draw myself back when I first started off. And then I got a bit grumpy because it hadn’t changed that much.

So, I decided to do this here blog starting back in 2003 to the most recent drawing I’ve done of myself this year. First up, for reference here’s a recent-ish picture of me

2003

I just got back into drawing “cartoony” after years fooling myself that I could try and draw like Graham Rounthwaite and so I was hella influenced by Jim Mahfood, so yeah these drawings are all over the place, with an emphasis on style over technical ability, but looking at that top image, face wise, that’s not too far from the truth…

2004

…but I think 2004 is probably where I drew myself most accurately. It’s that little piggy nose I have which I’ve ironed out of drawing over the years as I’ve streamlined my style down to a bare minimum. But look, cheek bones, floppy unstyled hair, that’s spot on. These are mostly from my comic Egocentricty which I flipped through the other day and, man, if there ever was a true start to Ellerbisms it’s that.

2005

And from then onwards I seemed to ignore what my face was about and go for this totally alien version with girl like hair. Vanity probably played a part in this, hiding parts I’m not comfortable with and making the “Marc” in the comics a little cuter, a little more attractive, especially in “Where Banished Eyes Haven’t Been“.

2006

Ahh the emo phase.

“Phase”?!

2007

These are mostly from early Ellerbisms, but the bottom left panel is from a Polar Opposites strip and that little piggy nose emerges for a whole one panel and then disappears again. Also look, little bits of stubble! I hardly ever draw the fact that I am a) terrible at shaving and b) have some bad spot problems, I guess the vanity’s kicking in again. Is this just a different way of “air brushing”?

2008

Not sure  what’s going on in that top panel from my first Hourly Comic Day strip, I remember thinking “this will make me draw faster” but why the heck it looks so different to how I drew myself at the time (bottom panel) is beyond me. Doooofus.

2009

Aaah there’s that face we’re all sick of.

2010

This is style I’ve been trying to get down for years. Clean, cartoony and streamlined. I’m really pleased with how I draw at the moment, which is a rarity for me and I’ve still got a lot to learn but it’s not so bad looking at it.

2011

This is part of a panel from the prologue to the Ellerbisms collection but the story takes place in 2007, so there’s that fluffy hair again and a little rounder face, but all in all not much has changed. I do worry that that in itself is a problem, that to develop as an artist your year to year drawings must be drastically different but maybe with Ellerbisms I got that particular set of characters down over a course of three years and then little changed because I was happy with how they looked? However doing this blog post has made realise that if anything I got my look down some 7/8 years ago and I’m questioning “why didn’t I keep that going?”.

It’d be interesting to see other people’s approach to this, if anything to make me feel lousier as an artist

I originally wrote this for the We Are Words + Pictures blog but thought it would be nice to include here for posperity. So here’s how I create a page from start to beginning. The page in question is my comic from the fifth issue of Paper Science.

My workspace, sadly, is nothing to write home about, let alone blog over. Due to “unforeseen circumstances” I’ve had to move back home recently, but lets not get into into that for the moment, lets instead concentrate on post-it notes and pens!

Ahh, my main tools. We’ll get to the pens in a second, but here’s what I keep in my utility belt…

a) a big ol’ green sheet of circle holes. These have been a godsend, I use them all the time for my word balloons. I suck at drawing circles, it starts off okay but just after half way, gah it falls apart. I picked this tool up in Toronto, but you can get them in any perfectly good enough art store.

b) a rag! not the most glamorous of tools, but this helps keep tricksy pens in line.

c) regular ol’ Daler Rowney bristol board. I actually prefer the Winsor Newton stuff but it’s just too expensive *shakes fist*

d) a metal ruler! I stayed with Cadwell last weekend and he was using some plastic rubbish so I marched him out on Friday to go ruler shopping. I couldn’t believe it, what is this, junior school?!

Pen love time…

1) bog-standard Staedtler eraser. Watch these, you should try and keep them clean or they’ll smudge your artwork.

2) a mechanical pencil with HB lead.

3 + 4) aha, now here come my inking trick. I have two Pentel brush pens, one with an ink cartridge in and another that has had one recently removed. Why do I do this? Getting ink consistency with Pentels, can be tricky, they love to chug ink out, mainly because they’re using cartridges. So taking out the cartridge gives you more control over how much ink is flowing through the pen. The thing with the brush pens is that they retain their ink for so long, I can go a few days without having to put a new cartridge in. I use the drier pen, with less ink, for finer details and the inkier pen for stronger lines and filling in. If the dry pen is running out completely, just swap the cartridge over from the other pen.

5) microns! Swoon, I love these, they’re impossible to get in England, so I import them via Ebay. They’re cheap, disposable and good for minor details, and facial lines. I use a 1 and a 2 nib. Pro-tip: get a bulk load of them because they don’t last long.

6) faber pitt pens. Which are a zillion times more easier to get hold of over here and handy for lettering. I mainly use the S and F sizes, the F to strengthen parts of dialogue.

I start my writing process by pretty much just writing dialogue down, often without instruction as to who is saying what. This probably sounds crazy, but with shorter stories like this I have a very clear idea as to who the few characters are and the setting. It’s quite an organic scripting process, with parts of the script leading one way, just to experiment with the flow of the piece and generate alternative ideas.

Not many people know this but my Paper Science entry was actually based on when I saw Slint perform at the first ATP vs The Fans and they were disappointingly terrible. Here’s a shocking video montage of the massive gaps between songs.

After scripting, I’ll thumbnail the comic a few times, often changing scenes, or cutting bits for space. They’re incompressible to anyone but me, I’m afraid.

Next up is the actual drawing. Hooray!

I drew this comic on A3 bristol board, like the majority of my comics. However I usually like to draw at about 150% the printed size, although for Paper Science that would mean drawing A2 and that just sounds intimidating and mental.

Along the way I’ll often do little sketches in the margin if a panel isn’t working out right, or just to figure out where people are standing.

It probably took me all day to draw it and another 2-3 days to colour. I’m kind of a slow-ass when it comes to colouring. I do all my colouring on Photoshop as it’s well easy, and once I’ve finished I then have to get it ready for print, which involves using the BPelt filter. Here’s a really good tutorial that Jamie McKelvie wrote about how to do all this. But here’s the image when it’s been BPelt’d.

After that it’s the standard flattening the image and sending it off. I then comes back printed and looks like this…

If you want to read the comic in question then I’ve uploaded it here. Enjoy!