Comic Strip Thoughts

Here's the very latest Super-Sam and John-of-the-Night cartoon strip. I'm more pleased with the artwork on this one than any I've done to date.

My thinking lately with this strip, is to make it a little more story-orientated. I'm not going to forget that Super-Sam is basically a gag strip, but I want over the long run, to add levels of narrative and many more characters.

I've also been inspired by Dick Tracy. I always loved the fact that the villains in Chester Gould's newspaper strip were so freakish (Flattop, Pruneface). I'm going to amp up the surreal quotient in the stories, aiming for a much more bizarre, and even dreamlike quality.

One of the most wonderful things about being able to draw a comic strip, is that you have the chance to build your own world from scratch. The only limits are the limits of your own imagination. It's the cinema of the printed page. Not only that, but the sets are really, really cheap.

The previous nine pages can be seen here.

Paper Town

Cardboard cut-out town lit with a desk lamp.

Two Handmade Models

Pinny Pinhead. Made from cardboard, modelling clay, ball bearings and pins.



Jack Flash. Handmade out of wood, plastic, paper and modelling clay.

Christmas Card Designs

Five card designs. I do my own every year. It's always a chore to think up another Christmas design, as nearly everything you can think of has been done a million times already. I try to avoid penguins wearing scarfs.

The Wire

What would it be like, I wonder, to have the omniscient ability to observe the inner workings of a modern American city? To see every level of a decaying, crime-ridden, urban metropolis in exact detail, from the streets, right up through every social level to the mayor's office itself. Wonder no longer, because HBO's TV series, The Wire delivers this ability.

Through four series, The Wire, has placed a microscope on crime, education, poverty, greed, and the political system, while simultaneously showing us exactly how these disparate pieces fit into the larger widescreen picture. Starting small, The Wire has expanded outwards with each series, until it has presented us with an epic, multilayered narrative, interweaving a teeming cast of street people, police, drug dealers, children, teachers and politicians. The thriving drug trade, the dying dockside industries, the collapsing education system, policing, and politics, have all come under the show's scrutiny.

The first series cleverly paralleled the structure and bureaucracy of the drug trade with the police force investigating it. Unlike any other crime show I can think of, The Wire shows us, time and time again, how investigations are stalled, even shut down for short-term political gain. Many of the police characters appear to have no interest in solving crimes. Crime detection is secondary to career advancement, and The Wire shows us exactly how this situation has come about.

The Wire is particularly good at showing just how interconnected people's lives are. Nothing happens in isolation. Small events in a character's life can ripple out to cause major changes across the social boundaries. The show's great strength lies in its ability to balance the small details of each character's story, against the huge unfolding narrative that contains it, without ever losing its place.

All reviews of The Wire come filled with superlatives, and the show is often lazily compared with the novels of Balzac, whose stories are similarly socially realistic and expansive. The reason critics have to reach so far into the past and into another medium for comparisons, is that there has never been anything on television quite as ambitious and brilliantly realised as The Wire. That being the case, it's shameful that the show is so little seen. Contrary to what you might think, The Wire is not difficult to watch, it bursts with tragedy, sorrow and the darkest humour. The Wire is an all too very human story, universal to us all. Catch The Wire.

Town

Edie

Edie needs love. Edie was made out of a fruit juice carton, bottle tops, modeling clay, ball-bearings, and tubing rescued out of a skip.

Famous Monsters

George Bush as a zombie. Night of the Living Rednecks.


Putin the vampire.