It's a plan!

Something different I did recently. A strip I was commissioned to do for The Planner, a magazine published by the Royal Town Planning Institute for those involved in Town and Country planning. Not available in shops so I thought I'd post some images here to show you. The brief was to show a "Play Street", which is a scheme where busy streets are cordoned off for a few hours for kids to safely play in.

••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

OINK! in Germany!

Thanks to Brendan Quinn on Peter Gray's UK Comics group for finding this curiosity. I'd heard way back when that there was a German language edition of OINK! comic in the late 1980s but had never seen one. My 'Tom Thug' and 'Pete and his Pimple' strips (amongst strips by others) translated into German! Naturally, IPC never paid us for these foreign editions... 
https://www.comic.de/2018/12/oink-wie-wir-bei-bastei-das-ferkel-rausliessen-oder-als-man-bei-bastei-ueberlegte-marvel-aufzukaufen/

••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

Pathetic Sharks VIZ art for sale!

I'm selling a piece of my original artwork on eBay this week. It's a large 460mm square illustration of The Pathetic Sharks that I did for the 1992 Viz Calendar. Drawn on Bristol board with black ink, water colours, and Carab D'Ache colour pencils. 

The auction has just started and runs until Sunday 1st December. Good luck if you're bidding! More info and photos at this link:

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/ORIGINAL-VIZ-ART-PATHETIC-SHARKS-CALENDAR-PAGE-1992-Lew-Stringer/202830311004

It's Doctor Who Day!

November 23rd is apparently Doctor Who Day as the series began on this date in 1963. I'm not sure if I watched the first few episodes but I was definitely there to see the first appearance of the Daleks in December of that year. 

The photo above is an old one, from the Brighton Comic Con in 2005, but I thought I'd dust it off for the occasion. This was the first time I'd seen a Dalek actually moving around and speaking at a convention (thanks to remotes and someone peddling like mad inside) but these days it's commonplace and the Daleks can be controlled without any occupant. (See photo below, which I took at Nor-Con 8 weeks ago.)

I sent off my Christmas episode of The Daft Dimension to Doctor Who Magazine the other day, and you can see it in print in issue 456, on sale in a few weeks! 

'Enry in the spotlight

Here's a sneak peek at a little bit of my Pup Parade strip for next week's Beano. This time it's about 'Enry, the bespectacled one of the Bash Street Dogs.

See the full comic strip in Beano No.4013, on sale Wednesday 27th November. 

Tom Thug - in colour for the first time (1986)

It seems hard to believe now but there was a time when most pages in British comics were printed in black and white. Colour printing was an expensive luxury, usually restricted to the covers and (if you were lucky) a few interior pages. Things started to change significantly in the 1980s, presumably as colour printing became more economical to use. Even then, although my first mainstream work appeared in 1983 it would be three years before I did a full colour strip for a comic.

Here's my first published full colour page. A Tom Thug strip that appeared on the back cover of Oink! No.8 (cover dated 9th to 22nd August 1986). It was a bit of an honour to be given the back page of a comic so I was very pleased with that. 

I'd done a bit of colour work before when I was working as Mike Higgs' assistant on his Learn with Moonbird books in 1983/84 but they were single illustrations for children's books. This was the first time I'd been let loose on a comic strip in colour. 

After inking the linework with a Rapidograph I coloured it with Dr.Martins watercolour inks and Faber-Castel pencils. Looking at it now, the colouring is quite crude in places but it suited the rawness that Oink! was about. I'd improve as time went on, but I wish Photoshop had been around back then because I prefer colouring digitally far more than with a brush. (And I think my digital colouring is far better than my hand colouring ever was.) 

I did all my own lettering too. Each balloon had to be done on patch paper (sticky back paper), cut out to the required shape, and stuck onto a clear acetate overlay. 

Anyway, so there you have it. My first full colour comic strip. Yep, the story has some crude elements too, but again that was part of the remit for Oink! Incidentally, Tom's last line was changed by the editor. My original version had him saying "bog" instead of "sink". Yes, even Oink! had its limits. 

Bash Street in the Beano

I had the opportunity to draw The Bash Street Kids recently for a joke page and you can see it in this week's Beano No.4012, on sale Wednesday 20th November.

I also put some of the Kids in this week's Pup Parade too for the same issue...

It's always a pleasure to draw such iconic characters that I enjoyed so much when I was a child. 

Beano No.4012, price £2.75, will be available from WH Smith, supermarkets, and all good newsagents or you can subscribe at this link and save money!
https://www.beano.com/subscribe