The Evergreen Archive - "Shocking Yarns"

These were part of a delusional, market-oblivious attempt to pitch myself as a greetings card artist many, many years ago. Must have been 1997 or thereabouts - I'd not long moved down to Brighton and was feeling all energetic and enthusiastic about, ooh, everything, if not remotely clued-up about any of it. One of my many doomed schemes from the time was a huge batch of 'funnies', all carefully rendered in pen & ink with zero colour, because, well, badly drawn, colourful greeting cards seemed to be incredibly popular, so obviously what people must really have wanted was some well drawn black and white ones. Erm, heh heh. They didn't have the desired effect, of course, but god it was fun doing them. Most were surreal, silly gags - for these three I wandered off down a more specific side road (the title being a big obvious tip of the hat to Michael Palin and Terry Jones's 'Ripping Yarns').

Edgar Allen Poe's "Berenice"

Just finished this job for Graphic Classics' second collection of Poe adaptations, due out on August 1st 2011. Needless to say, it's the kind of source material I've been dying to be let loose on, this particular tale concerning a monomaniacal French aristocrat becoming morbidly obsessed with his ill fiancée's teeth.

On reading the section of the script illustrated above, I'll admit to succumbing to a good giggle. The guy's haunted by visions of The Teeth, see. He covets and clutches at them. There's a big potential pitfall here, because it's all a bit silly, but needs to be dark and somewhat horrific as well (or preferably instead). Whether I've nailed it is up to you, excellent, lovely and discerning human being that you are ;-)

The actual drawing of the story was a game of two halves. I've been long beholden to Bernie Wrightson's luscious inkwork on comics such as this, and have been enjoying a long running re-primer in his back catalogue courtesy of Peter Richardson's fab Cloud 109 blog, so it's little wonder that this started out as an unconscious homage. A poor man's homage, admittedly - a couple of weeks into the job I realised what was happening, and overhauled the look to more genuinely reflect the direction in which my work's heading these days. So it's ended up as a combination of me on a good day and Wrightson on a bad day. Does it work? Again, that's for you to decide, you brilliant thing you, etc etc etc.

Bad Radio

Here's something I forgot to post when it went live a few weeks back: "Bad Radio" - five pages of Weirdness in the Woods, written by Sam Costello and illustrated by yours truly for his excellent monthly horror webcomic Split Lip.

Sketched very roughly in pencil, with blacks and greys in Photoshop, retaining some of the pencil textures here and there and trashing them elsewhere. Huge fun.