The Doctor is (still) in

A panel from an earlier Daft Dimension.

The news that Peter Capaldi is leaving Doctor Who reverberated around fandom yesterday, with many expressing disappointment. I think he's been a great Doctor, and I've enjoyed drawing his cartoon equivalent for my Daft Dimension strips in Doctor Who Magazine every month.

Be of good cheer though, because he's not bowing out just yet. We still have a full season of Doctor Who to come, starting on Saturday 15th April, and a Christmas Special (in which he'll regenerate into whoever replaces him). Plus plenty more Daft Dimensions and other 12th Doctor comic strips this year.

Whether I'll still be contributing strips to DWM when the new Doctor arrives (which usually means a revamp for the magazine) I don't know, but I'm not worried about that at the moment. My next Daft Dimension appears in Doctor Who Magazine No.509, on sale next week.

Pick up a Print Pack!

A reminder that my Print Pack is still available to buy from my online shop. It contains five exclusive full colour prints of varying sizes. Here's what you get...

The 7 Ages of Fan!
A4 size print spoofing "The seven ages of man". Which one do you relate to?

Character Card
A5 size print showing six of my created characters from over the years. (Tough Guy, Brickman, Combat Colin, Pete and his Pimple, Tom Thug, Derek the Troll.) There's also brief information of each character on the reverse of this card.

Mini-Prints!
Three A6 (postcard) sized prints. One each for Combat Colin, Brickman, and Derek the Troll. 

All five cards in a Print Pack for just £5.50 plus postage. (UK Orders only.) Not available separately. (The actual cards don't feature the copyright watermark shown here obviously.)

Interested? Then head over to my online shop here:
http://www.lewstringer.com/page7.htm

By the way, if you want me to sign/dedicate them, let me know and I'll be happy to do so. (No extra charge of course.)

Bash Street Teacher

I had great fun drawing this full page illustration of the Bash Street Kids' Teacher for this week's Beano. They've used it on the Beano website too!
https://www.beano.com/posts/inside-beano-no-3869-the-one-where-beanotowns-postboxes-take-over

Never Be Without A Beano! This issue goes on sale Wednesday 25th January.

In the news

I was recently interviewed by The Independent on my thoughts about the current state of children's comics in newsagents. Fellow comics creator Jamie Smart was also interviewed, along with others, and the emphasis is most definitely on The Phoenix. I did manage to plug a few other titles too though for balance. You can read the article at The Independent's website here:

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/how-classic-childrens-comics-gave-way-to-garish-magazines-a7535736.html

Combat Colin in cyberspace!

The character of mine that most people ask to see again is Combat Colin, the bobble-hatted hero who appeared in Marvel UK's Action Force and Transformers comics in the late 1980s. He'll be getting his own reprint comic this year but this just a reminder that there are four brand new three page Combat Colin stories amongst various issues of the award-winning digital comic Aces Weekly. All-new! All colour! All daft! Never seen in print! Exclusive to Aces and not published anywhere else!

You'll find the first one in Aces Weekly Volume 1 No.1. There's page one above. Colin and Semi-Automatic Steve encounter a new menace in the form of the Zombie-Yeds!

The second new complete story appeared in Aces Weekly Vol.8 No.7, with a guest appearance by The Giggly Sisters leading to Colin and Steve encountering their old enemy Madprof!

Giggly Sisters!

Professor Madprof!

The third new Combat Colin strip appeared in Aces Weekly Vol.16 No.6, with our heroes flying into space to avert the Ass-teroid!

Action!

The fourth new strip appeared in Aces Weekly Vol.21 No.7, and saw Colin and Semi-Automatic Steve battle each other!

Comedy violence!

Each issue of Aces Weekly also contains several other all-new strips by a variety of top comics creators. And the best bit is, each volume of seven issues will only cost you £6.99. Less than a pound a comic! It's multi-platform so you can access it on an iPad, Android tablet, PC, or Mac. Or even on your smart TV apparently, if it's smart enough. If you haven't yet tried it, what's stopping you? Check it out:
http://www.acesweekly.co.uk/

It's c-c-c-cold!

It's a cold day in Beanotown this coming Wednesday, with the Bash Street Dogs shivering in their bin. Find out their plan to keep warm in Pup Parade in The Beano on sale 25th January.

New venue for Comic Fest

Northern Ireland's Enniskillen Comic Fest has just revealed its new venue for this year's event. It's to be at Enniskillen Castle. Having never done a comic con in a castle before I'm looking forward to it! As well as me, other guests will include John Wagner, Carlos Ezquerra, Steve MacManus, Nigel Parkinson, Nika Nartova, Colin McNeil, Alan Grant, and Yanick Paquette, with many more to be announced!

You'll find us at the castle on Friday 5th and Saturday 6th May 2017, and it's free entry! For more info, visit the Enniskillen Comic Fest Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/Enniskillen-Comic-Fest-1030761763641321/

More convention dates to come

I'm now booked for eight comic conventions this year so far. It'd be bad manners to reveal them all before the official announcements have been made on the organizers' websites but I'll just say I'll be up and down the UK like a yo-yo between April and November. 

I'm hoping to have Combat Colin No.1 published for the first of those events, but haven't had chance to work on it yet. More news as it develops. At any rate, I'll be bringing along issues of Derek the Troll and Brickman Returns, and doing sketches (and perhaps some panels) at the shows. Again, more news when I can reveal it. Hope to see you at some of these cons!

In newsagents this week...

Thanks as always for visiting my blog. Here's a quick glimpse of what I have in print this week. In The Beano, Pug decides he's the fastest dog in Pup Parade, whilst in the same comic, Ivy the Terrible is having a quiet nap for once (that won't last). 

Over in Toxic magazine No.283, Team Toxic come up against a giant living snowman in a story I've titled Snow Chance...

...and still available from last week, Epic magazine features the first part of my new regular two page series, Hygiene High (plus a page of mini-strips I've drawn as well.)

All three titles are out now from newsagents and supermarkets!

Grab a Troll!

I've posted another bunch of Derek the Troll comics to buyers today (and copies of Brickman comics to those who ordered them). My apologies if you've been waiting a while. It's been a hectic few weeks! (Still is, but I needed to honour the orders.)

If you haven't bought a copy of Derek the Troll yet, it's a 32 page comic (American sized) that reprints all my 1980s Derek the Troll strips from Games Workshop magazines. In the back half of the comic there's the entire Rock Solid, Space Hero serial collected, that I did for Swiftsure comic back in the mid-'80s too. (Some of my earliest published work.)

It's a one-off comic and the stories are self contained, so there's no cliffhanger to disappoint you. Complete stories in one issue, like comics used to be. 

To order a copy (and any other items that catch your interest), nip over to my online shop at my website here:
http://lewstringer.com/page7.htm

If you live in or around Birmingham, there might still be a couple of copies left at Nostalgia and Comics, 14 - 16 Smallbrook Queensway, Birmingham B5 4EN. You'll find them on the shelf next to the Panini UK Marvel monthlies. 

Support British comics!

Preview: Next week's TOXIC

Here's an advance preview of one panel from my Team Toxic story that appears in the next issue of Toxic, on sale Wednesday 18th January. 

Throughout my comics career I've often tried to tie my strips into the seasons and anything else that the readers might relate to. (Christmas is the obvious one, but it's good to put in other relatable things too.) Some comics used to do that when I was a kid and it I think it gave us a better connection to the stories. So, as this is traditionally a cold and snowy month, Team Toxic battle a giant snowman in a story entitled Snow Chance!

See the full two page strip in Toxic No.283, on sale 18th January.

Just Dandy!

It's been a very hectic week of late nights and one all-nighter to complete my pages for The Dandy Annual 2018 but deadlines have been met and the pages are all done and e-mailed to D.C. Thomson. (I also had Pup Parade, and Ivy the Terrible to do for the weekly Beano and Team Toxic for an upcoming Toxic to do this week too, so it's been non-stop.) Not that I'm complaining of course. Being freelance is always volatile and a roller-coaster of a career so it's best to enjoy the busy times while one can. 

I've done nine pages in total for next year's Dandy Annual, which won't be out until around August so I won't reveal much about it yet. I'll show you a sneak preview of part of one panel here though. Yes, Keyhole Kate will be back! Other characters too, but I'll post more about those in the summer. Rest assured that although The Dandy weekly ended over four years ago, The Dandy Annual continues! 

New series! Hygiene High starts next week

My first new strip for 2017 starts next week in Epic magazine, published by D.C. Thomson. Hygiene High features the grottiest, grimiest kids since the days of The Swots and the Blots, and they're enrolled into a school that aims to smarten them up. It's a daunting task for their head teacher Auntie Bacteria! 

Written by Niall Murray and drawn by me, Hygiene High is a two page strip featuring six stinky kids; Pee-Yew Jimmy, Bean Jean, Snotty Scotty, the Bin Twins, and Pooey Louis. The sort of gross humour about farts and bogeys that adults sometimes disapprove of but kids enjoy, and Epic is aimed at kids so hopefully it'll go down well. (I really like the flies the designers have added to the page borders!)

The magazine also includes a page of mini-strips drawn by me; Eric Fail, Terrible Movies, and Zombie Sports...

...and there's also another chapter of Overreaction Man by Alex Collier and Steve Bright.

That's all in Epic No.127, on sale from newsagents and supermarkets from Wednesday 11th January! 

There "be no" other comic like it

Here's a quick preview of my strips from this week's Beano. Pup Parade have fun in the snow, and Ivy the Terrible's dad invites her to play his favourite board game. There's trouble ahead! See what happens in The Beano No.3866, on sale now! Only £2.50.

New series for 2017

Here's a sneak preview of a brand new series I've drawn that begins in D.C. Thomson's Epic No.127, on sale 11th January! It's a two-pager set in a school, and I'll reveal more next week. I'm not the scriptwriter on this one (I'll have to find out who is) but I'm having fun drawing it. 

More news soon!

Plans for the Future!

Happy New Year! After the successes of Brickman Returns! and Derek the Troll in the previous two years, one of my intentions this year is to self-publish more comics. Now, this is all dependent on whether I have time of course, as mainstream comics work must take priority as that's what pays the bills. However, 2017 is an anniversary year for two of my creator-owned properties so I really want to get them back in print. (And yes, that's print. Not digital.)

With that in mind I'll soon be starting work on Combat Colin No.1, the first in a series of comics I'll be publishing from time to time that will reprint all the old 1980s Combat Colin strips from Action Force and The Transformers right from the very start, in the right order. 2017 is the 30th anniversary of Combat Colin so it's time he had his own title. I don't have all the original art now so some pages will be scanned from the original art, some from the old comics, and will be reprinted in black and white with brand new full colour covers. There's the working logo design above, although that's not necessarily the final version.

The other property I'm considering reviving is Suburban Satanists, the adults-only humour strip I did for Norwegian and Swedish comics. It's been 20 years this year since their first strips appeared so what better time to release the first English-language collection? I have all the original art so the pages will be new scans and newly coloured and lettered. The plan is to publish them in five or six full colour comics over the next few years. 

Anyway, that's the plan! Life is unpredictable so whether I achieve that or not remains to be seen. Hopefully Combat Colin No.1 will be out by April (the character's 30th anniversary month) and Suburban Satanists No.1 later in the year. Fingers crossed! In the meantime I need to get back to work on The Beano, Epic, Toxic, and Doctor Who Magazine, but I'll keep you posted of developments right here as things progress!

If you're interested in my previous self-published comics and prints and you still haven't bought them you'll find my online store here:
http://www.lewstringer.com/page7.htm 



UPDATE: Just to clear up some confusion: With the very best intentions, The Birmingham Comics Festival plugged my forthcoming Combat Colin comic on Facebook this morning (Jan 2nd) but they used the cover of a Combat Colin Summer Special that I did 20 years ago. It's being shared around Facebook but that's not the cover of the new one so the price and info is incorrect. There's also some confusion over the date of the festival, which seems due to the April Birmingham Comic Con using the Birmingham Comics Festival web address (!). I'm a guest at the Birmingham Comics Festival in June, NOT the "Birmingham Comic Con" in April.