Have you been out today?

My DFC colleague Mr Neill Cameron, as well as being a talented creator of comicky goodness is co-curator of the excellent and amusing Unified Review Theory blog, in which he and his brother James set about the task of reviewing (and allocating marks out of ten to) everything in the universe. This is clearly a bit of a task. I suspect it will be months rather than weeks before they're finished. In a change from their usual written reviews their latest report is in the form of a podcast in which they tackle Quantum Leap and the Cameron family motto. It is hilarious.

I give it 9.3.

(Mr Cleary, if you're reading this, I particularly recommend it to you).

... you know, for a change...

A6 Seawhite of Brighton sketchbook number 6, Oct '95



Hmm, mostly bad drawing this time. Oh well. But once again including a Karolina Larusdottir image, in blatant, but well-meaning, breach of her copyright.


Click image for bigness.

Mr Shelton is pleased to announce that he shall be attending Hi-Ex, the Highlands International Comics Expo in Inverness, on the weekend of the 14th and 15th of Feb. I won't have a table or anything I'll just be wandering about, looking slightly awkward, and displaying my astonishing lack of knowledge on the "2008: A Year in Comics" panel on Sunday morning. If anyone reading this is going then do please say hello. Especially if you'd like to know what pen I use.

Dooby dooby doo...

The heavily pregnant optometrist asks how she can help.

I tell her that my new spectacles (obtained just before Christmas and of a bolder design than their long-serving predecessors) are hurting my nose and ask if there is any adjustment she can make to alleviate this. She tells me to take a seat, so I do. Then she gently takes hold of the arms of my glasses and wiggles them about a bit to ascertain what the problem might be. In doing so, the heavily pregnant optometrist has placed her chest exactly on my eye level and in closer proximity than is usual in the day to day social interaction of strangers. I glance sideways to avert my gaze and see, clipped to her lapel, a fountain pen with a familiar white star motif on the end of the cap. Blimey, it's only a Montblanc! I wonder if it's a Meistertuck 149 (with an 18ct gold nib) like Mattias Adolfsson used to use (though I believe he now favours a Namiki Falcon). I wonder if I asked nicely if the heavily pregnant optometrist would let me have a go on it. I am staring at the pen. The pen is clipped to her lapel. The lapel, as lapels will, resides in a place close to her chest...

To all intents and purposes I am now staring at one of the heavily pregnant optometrist's breasts. Furthermore, in the presence of such a writing instrument, my expression might very well be one of intense desire.

The heavily pregnant optometrist removes my spectacles and takes them into the mysterious Back Room where she uses unseen Special Equipment that makes a low humming noise to fractionally change the shape of one arm of my frames. She returns, replaces the glasses, wiggles them about a bit more and is satisfied.

"They were pulling a little on this side." She indicates my left ear. "They should be fine now."

So, after a lengthy hiatus, we return with Seawhite of Brighton A6 sketchbook number 6 (a daring experiment in the landscape format and with a jaunty grey cover rather than the more usual black - what was I thinking?)




Click image for bigness.


NB The work of Ms Karolina Larusdottir is copyright Karolina Larusdottir and included here in the blind hope that, should she, or any of her representatives, ever find out, she won't mind too much (especially if I advertise her forthcoming show at the CCA Gallery in Trinity St, Cambridge, 6th - 29th March).

Following an inspirational week in which I drank Guinness and talked pen-related matters with a gaggle of fellow DFC creators, stayed over in smelly London as the pampered guest of erstwhile Good Dog, Bad Dog colourist, brilliant cartoonist and good friend of twenty, count 'em, twenty years standing Mr Faz Choudhury, ate cheesecake and chatted with the charming and talented Ms Viviane Schwarz and her flatmate, the talented and charming Mr Alexis Deacon (oh my, those sketchbooks!) and bought some new pens, I really ought to have some very exciting new work to show you by now.

Instead, I shifted the furniture around in my front room.

So anyway, here's a sketchbook page...



[click image for a bigger version]

Talking of sketchbook pages, From The Archives returns weekly from tomorrow - the moving around of furniture allowed me to extract the next couple of sketchbooks from under the drawers that they were propping up.

I'm working on redesigning daveshelton.com and I'm thinking of using this sort of a thing (simpleviewer, a free thingy from Airtight) for the gallery page. Does that look okay to everybody? And if not, why not? It looks okay to me and works fine on my big display and with a decent broadband connection and using Firefox on a Mac but is it slow/too big/strangely purple and spotty to others?

All comments (aside from "you need more and better pictures" - I know that) gratefully received.

A budgerigar. Because Viv asked nicely. It's rather a stern one.

Latest sketchbook page. The usual chaos.



Tell you what, save me from aimlessness: first request in the comments, in one word or fewer, I'll try to draw.

Been meaning to say for a while that The DFC now has a previews site featuring online episodes of many of the strips, including the surprisingly action-packed four page Good Dog, Bad Dog strip that appeared in issue 1.

Go have a read, why don't you.

I am a little bit poorly but even in my depleted state I have drawn you this picture of a crocodile. What a trooper!

A happy new year to you all.

To celebrate the arrival of 2009 here is a drawing I laboured long and hard over throughout the last several years...