Have you been out today?

Contributors to the forthcoming dark, scary animation Peur[s] Du Noir (Fear[s] Of The Dark) include Charles Burns, Lorenzo Mattotti, Dupuy & Berberian and Richard McGuire. If you look for it hard enough you can find a teaser trailer here. Looks great.

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The estimable staff of bugpowder.com are seeking a bit of extra exposure and as they've been perfectly lovely to me any number of times in the past I'm more than happy to oblige. It used to be Pete's baby, having grown out of his real world small press distro into a veritable online hub for the UK small press scene, and now it's run by Matthew Badham who took up the baton in March at Pete's request. And it remains a fine resource for anyone wanting to know what's going on in the UK small press/zine/mini-comic community. So if that's your thing then go take a look.

This is actually from ages ago but I only just stumbled upon the scrap of paper I noted it down on. According to 6Music news:

"There's been a big increase in babies born outside weddings".

I can't imagine that the average vicar would be best pleased about this. They get baity enough about confetti making the churchyard look untidy let alone amniotic fluid.

Mr eDavid eHasselhoff wishes to remind you that my eBay auction of a page of doodles ends at noon tomorrow. Bidding currently stands at £46.00. That's still about £73,859,841.87 cheaper than a Klimt. Bargain.

I noticed that my pound signs weren't displaying as pound signs in Firefox and now I've fiddled with the HTML and fixed it all by myself (i.e. without asking Pete for help like I normally would with anything technical). I am so proud.

So when this entire blog suddenly turns a nasty shade of pink and starts speaking Mandarin you'll know why.

Just messing about with some new Photoshop brushes...

Fans of Mike "Hellboy" Mignola may wish to view the animated pilot of The Amazing Screw-on Head. As funny and as silly as the one off comic book that inspired it. Marvellous.

This is how the cover of Sophie And The Locust Curse is not going to look.



I was asked, after some initial roughs of a very different design, to try out a more "high concept" kind of cover design with locusts seemingly eating the cover itself in a trompe l'oeil kind of a way and this is the rough I knocked together. Having seen it the folk at Andersen decided to revert to something more straightforward, I think mainly to be more inkeeping with the first Sophie book. And I think they were right too, though I'd be interested to attempt a finished version of a more design-led cover sometime.

In other news: the bid on the page of doodles on eBay currently stands at £31.00. This is roughly £30.50 more than I was expecting at this stage.

Okay. The page of doodles is now on eBay.

Go here for the auction. Bid early, bid often and feel free to use large numbers.

Currently awaiting news from the nice folk at Andersen as to how to proceed with the cover and inside illustrations for Sophie And The Locust Curse. A third rough of the cover went in last week and a first set of roughs of the b&ws went in yesterday. There should have been some word about the cover in the post today but it failed to appear. In the meantime I've been doodling on a big old page (a touch smaller than A3) that, if there's a whimper of interest, I'm thinking of sticking up for sale on eBay.

Here's a detail:



Click here for the full page and here for the enormous version.