Have you been out today?

...which surely needs no further explanation.

Well, I'm not, but me book is...

Good Dog, Bad Dog has been nominated for the inaugural Northern Graphic Novel Award. Which is nice.

Better yet, both the other books in the first wave of DFC Library releases are also nominated (so DFC Library titles take up half of the six nominations).

Congratulations to Kate Brown for Spider Moon and to Ben Haggarty and Adam Brockbank for Mezolith. I'm not familiar (yet) with the other three titles nominated (a Wizard of Oz adaptation from Marvel; Silverfin, a young Bond adaptation drawn by Kev Walker from Charlie Higson's novel; Beasts of Burden, by Evan Dorkin and Jill Thompson, from Dark Horse) but I hope it'll be a good clean fight with only minimal kicking and gouging.

And I hope a DFC book wins.

"Should I stay or should I go now?
Should I stay or should I go now?
If I go there will be trouble
An’ if I stay it will be double"

Well go then, obviously.

A6, Daler Rowney (for a change) sketchbook number 8, beginning December '96.

So, what I'm doing lately is drawing illustrations for my children's novel(la?) while also working out the plot for Good Dog, Bad Dog book 2.

Here's an example of the former:



As to the GDBD2 plot... I've never really attempted a proper murder mystery plot before so it's coming along slowly. In fact for quite a while I hadn't worked out who had died, let alone who had done it. But I'm beginning to be hopeful about how it's turning out now. I think I've got a nice couple of plot twists along the way but there should be room for plenty of silliness too. Mostly, now, I need to work out details of how to tell it and when to reveal what and, crucially, how to avoid the need for the scene in the library where everything gets explained.

Oh, and then I'll have to write, draw, letter and colour the thing, which will take forever and drive me a bit mad.

But that's just the way of things, I'm not complaining.

A6, Daler Rowney (for a change) sketchbook number 8, beginning December '96.








Ah yes, Gary Gilchrist... He was a friend of an ex of mine. Lovely chap. Played in a band called the Blue Smarties who did a great overdriven kazoo version of, if memory serves, Thus Spake Zarathustra. And he worked in a place that made missile parts. He once told me about everything he'd been reading recently and I noted that they all seemed to be either very fat books or very thin books and he explained that the very fat books he read at home and the very thin books he read on the toilet at work (they were thin enough to tuck into his waistband and not be noticed beneath his shirt).

Gary, if you ever stumble here by Googling your own name: hello.

... Singapore.

A6, Daler Rowney (for a change) sketchbook number 8, beginning December '96.








I think that rhino was something to do with some favour I was doing for a friend at the branch of Waterstones where I was working at the time but the details escape me.

For those of you wondering, a zeugma (a word brought to my attention by my then flatmate the excellent Mr Tuliani) is a bit like a syllepsis.




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This was a private commission for a lovely fellow in Canada, Neil Davidson: Bergman and McBoo as Holmes and Watson. I chose to avoid the deerstalker made commonplace in portrayals of Holmes by the Basil Rathbone films but the thought of Nigel Bruce as McBoo is a happy one...

A6, Daler Rowney (for a change) sketchbook number 8, beginning December '96.











Click images for biggerosity