Once Upon A Time Machine

Ah, it's happening! Check out this lovely looking comics anthology, a selection of classic folk and fairytales re-routed through a sci-fi filter, all wrapped up in packaging by the great Farel Dalrymple - see title page above. I did my own bit for it (artwork for a delightful re-telling of 1001 Nights by Tara Alexander) a good eighteen months back, so it's great to now see the entire collection very nearly finished and officially on the lookout for a potential publisher.

Naturally there's a big online promotional push going on, via the likes of Bleeding Cool and Facebook; do please stop by and have a peek for further info and artwork previews.

1001 Nights

I'm supposed to not be doing unpaid/exposure jobs anymore. It gets me in big trouble with my girlfriend. I'm a hopeless addict, seized by a furtive need to put pictures to other peoples' scripts. She's seen me do dozens of these things over the last ten years, and heard me wheeling out the same (increasingly hollow) justifications: "it'll be good experience...", "You never know, someone might see it and offer me some paid work..." etc etc. I'm aware that I have a problem. Truly I am. Although the fear of my beloved's withering gaze is enough to keep me on the straight and narrow most of the time, when I do crumble, and crumble I always do, it's mainly down to my absurd inability to remember just how long it takes me to actually do the damn things.

Anyway, so there's this 'fairytales in the future' comics anthology that's been in the works for a year or so, marshalled by Chris Stevens over on Digital Webbing. That's right: fairytales in the future. Straight away you sense that the abstinence/participation battle in Nelson's poor brain was only ever going to go one way. And then Chris (evil pusherman that he is) delivered the killer blow: an invitation to illustrate the update of 1001 Nights, pencilled in as the opening strip in the book.

My resistance went majorly kaput due to Tara Alexander's lovely script, which is an out and out love letter to the joys of comics (and by extension the timeless clout of good storytelling in general). Especially appealing was the sweet, subtle human love story running throughout; I knew I was going to relish trying to nail something of the weird, delirious awkwardness that ripples through your head, heart and gut when Crush at First Sight occurs.


If the script wasn't enough, Farel Dalrymple, one of my favourite (and no doubt everyone else's favourite) comic artists is doing the cover.

I even got to go a bit mental in the middle:


It sounds like it's going to be a pretty massive affair: 300+ pages, loaded with strips and pin-ups, all massively varied in style and tone. One to watch? Absolutely. Is this the very last unpaid/exposure comic I ever do, straight up, no messing, honest to god..?

Absolutely. I'm finally CLEAN!

The Evergreen Archive: The Little Beast

A couple of years back writer Jason Louv and I were busy pitching a comic biography of one Aleister Crowley. You know the chap: occultist, mountaineer, poet, perennial frequenter of Madame Infamy's boudoir. A bit of an arse, but a fascinating, colourful arse nonetheless.

You can see the opening two pages of that initial pitch right here.

Trial and Error

My website's had an extensive rebuild so that it'll more coherently house the avalanche of new illustrations heading its way over the coming months. Have a peek.

It feels good to be giving the old portfolio an overhaul, especially having spent a sizeable chunk of the last twelve months working on a comic strip pitch for The DFC - a pitch which, despite a strong start in the editorial enthusiasm stakes, is presently inert. Such is life. I'd been needing to get away from it for a while, do something else for a bit and go back to it with a fresher head - if anything can take it onto a new level, it's that... plus maybe spending at least a week watching nothing but kids' TV and films, reading nothing but kids' books and eating nothing but sweets. 'Bit of a no-brainer. It's a long time since I was ten, after all. Time to get a re-grounding. Be a sponge - soak it all up and knock it out into new shapes.

I'm happy with the concept of the strip (courtesy of my partner) and the look of it, even if my writing and dialogue have been a bit prosaic so far. It's partly down to aesthetic hesitance - not being entirely sure how you should approach the process, and not being entirely sure who you need to be aiming the results at. I'd like to think I'll be clearer on that front by the time I dive back in... So far, the bits that work best are when it touches on the kind of verbose silliness and surrealism abundant in some of my grown up comics. If I can combine that with a more universal feel, well, we might be onto something.