Comiket April 2012

I did my second comic show of the year yesterday – the Comiket! I did a Comiket con in November too, and really enjoyed it (mainly because it took place shortly after my first MCM Expo which I didn’t enjoy at all!). So yesterday was an okay day, but a little bit of a struggle – the hall seemed a lot more crammed-in than the last one (I’m not sure if they added more tables?). Every time you tried to move around it seemed impossible, and the people behind me had banners so it was even harder to move behind the table. It was a good crowd though, and nice to meet my regular punters, meet new ones, and chat to new people.

One thing did annoy me a little bit though – some of the prices. Too much! I went over to buy a beautifully drawn small press comic – A5 colour, not a huge pagecount – and it was £6! £6?! And there were a couple of black and white books I liked the look of – Paris and Depresso – but at £15 and £13 that’s just too much. Some of Nobrow’s stuff seems a bit over-priced too. Even normal black and white A5 indie comics seem to be going up – with some at £4. I don’t know why this is? Are people attempting to make a living out of this (that's a very hard thing to do) or just being greedy? Print prices really aren’t that much these days, so if that’s the problem they should get a cheaper printer. The punter shouldn’t suffer!

It wasn’t all bad though! 9th Art were giving away a stunning looking indie anthology for FREE! (9thartmagazine.com). Lloyd and the Bear (.com) is a lovely little comic and is only £2.50 (I chatted to the creator who is nice, and was drinking a bottle of wine at his table lol). I bought a couple of new Andi Watson books (Gum Girl and Glister) off Walker Books, and their prices are really reasonable – well done to them!

I have to mention one interesting find – ‘The Zoom’ comic! It’s a fun, Beano-style comic, and here’s the twist – it’s created by a 10 year old boy! It’s pretty impressive. I mean, you can tell it’s done by a kid, but it also has this strangely compelling quality about it – I think he could develop into a Jeffrey Brown type of creator. And I think it’s funny that it really does feel reminiscent of a lot of autobio indie comics done by adult indie creators (some of whom have 'young' styles). Anyway, check it out, it’s at zoomrockman.com

I did have one horrible experience though (it’s been ages since I had a horrible experience at a con!). It was with a French lady who seemed friendly, but I think she was a little bit weird. Let me relive it in dialogue form:
Strange French Girl: Can I have a badge? (Badges cost 20p!)
Me: Er, okay, go on then.
Girl: I bought Spandex 1 last year. I didn’t like it.
Me: Oh…
Girl: Yeah, it wasn’t very good. Not much fun.
Me: (Seething, thinking: I want to say, give me that badge back, bitch!) Okay…
Girl: Were you at the last Comiket?
Me: Yes.
Girl: Do you remember me?
Me: No.
Girl: I think we spoke?
Me: I spoke to a lot of people…
Girl: So who writes and draws Spandex?
Me: I do.
Girl: Oh… I didn’t realise…
Me: Yes.
(She then tries to backtrack and is confused and thinks she bought it off someone else, and I am still seething…)

IPAD!

I have got an Ipad! Yes, to try to cut down on the space taken up by all the comics and books I’ve got, I was thinking about getting a Kindle, and then thought well why not get an ipad! Plus a friends showed me his ipad, and I was very impressed by it (particularly by the ‘App’ that lets you watch live TV, any channel).
The plan was to get it from the Apple store (there’s always something special about buying an ipod from there) but I happened to pop into HMV to look at their cases (always cheaper than the Apple store for that kind of thing!) and spotted that they were selling the previous ipad 2 model (I thought they’d all been phased out except for the 16GB). So I got a 64GB ipad 2 from HMV – it was around £479, which is cheaper than the 64GB new ipad (I think that’s around £560). And I think the best thing is that I got 50,000 points on a HMV loyalty card! I can get a 12-month subscription to Empire mag with that, apparently!!
Anyway, it’s so-far-so-good! The battery seems to last quite a while (I hate the battery on my iphone!) and it’s a generally convenient and fun thing to have. I bought a few comics from FP last week and I was able to download the digital version with a code – and the comics look stunning on the ipad! So I think I will be doing a lot of reading on it. The only annoying thing is that digital comics/books are surprisingly not that much cheaper than the print versions – they really need to sort that out, I think.

Spandex 6 cover - behind the scenes!

These bloody covers never work out the way they’re supposed to!
The original cover idea for issue 6 is something I’ve had in mind for at least a year. I’d seen a picture of the singer Nikka Costa and I loved the body language of it, so I wanted the Diva issue to look like that.

So the time came to draw it and I spend a looooooong time on it… I reckon it was almost a month. And of course, then I decided it wasn’t right for the issue (plus I hadn’t captured what worked in the original picture). Damn.

I put it on the Facebook Spandex page and it received a great response, but it wasn’t what I wanted any more.
Pretty much before I’d decided to dump that cover, I saw a photo of the singer St Vincent in Q Magazine – it was on Boxing Day this year – and it gave me an idea for a new version of the cover.

Plus it played to my strengths – I love drawing hair – so the thought of drawing all that blonde hair appealed to me.
So I sketched it, and then drew it – the first version I drew was the one I went with. Then I had the dilemma of what version to go for – a black and white version (with just the eyes coloured), a red version with a white Diva, or a full colour version.



After a few days of carrying the images around on my ipod and looking at them, I decided the colour version was the one to go with (it was a close call with the red one though!).
So there you go! The story of issue 6’s cover!

Issue 6/Me UPDATE!

Blimey I haven’t ‘posted’ anything for a while, have I? Oops! I guess I do a lot on the Facebook page and Twitter. Well anyway, here is what I’ve been up to, if anyone is interested!
Spandex 6 is coming along frighteningly well (touch wood) despite my only-one-year-old scanner playing up like a bastard. If I have to uninstall and then reinstall it once more I will not be happy! (Actually I seem to have to do it every day, so I will probably 'be not happy' tonight!)
But yes, the issue is coming along well, mainly because I have my new computerised font and I’ve tweaked the one I used in issue 5, so now I don’t have to do any extra work to it, hooray!
Yet again, the cover has been a bit tricky, and the cover idea I was going to go with – a design which had been planned for a couple of years now – has been dumped at the last minute by something I came up with on Boxing Day and which I prefer (it's actually based on a portrait of the musician St Vincent!). I’ll be ‘revealing all’ soon!
I should also say that I am very nervous about this issue. It contains one of the series’ biggest twists, and I think it might shock a lot of people. Honestly, I am bracing myself for the reaction - but I am standing by my story.
I can also reveal that this issue will come with THREE MINI-COMICS!! Yes, I decided to give the issue a little something extra, and I think the mini-comics will be fun to sell at conventions too. So basically, I picked three characters and three artists I wanted to work with, and I wrote the stories – and the mini-comics will be in different shapes and sizes. It feels a little bit weird ‘giving away’ my characters to other people as I am quite precious about them, but I don’t mind with this project, to be honest, and it frees me up a bit, not having to draw. So anyway, the mini-comics are:
BEAR-MAN & TWINKLE with art by Rob Wells (his comics are so funny, I only recently discovered him! And Rob always gives Spandex a good review on his website, so I guess it’ll be awkward if/when he comes to review this one!). This mini-comic will be a kind of 3-panel gag strip format thing and should be fun! You can see a preview pic above!
HAG by Garry McLaughlin. This will be a nasty little horror story, and Garry likes doing those!
CHERRY BLOSSOM GIRL with art by T’sao Wei. This will be a kind of poetic/haiku thingy, exploring how Cherry Blossom Girl came to be.

In other news, I’m working on pages for the 3rd issue of Rol Hirst’s excellent Too Much Sex & Violence series, and will also be contributing to Grant Springford’s Abnormals Anthology (Abthology).
I think that’s it, other than plans to release a ‘Complete O Men’ collection – well volume one (of 5) anyway! It’ll probably be around 300 pages, and I’m currently scanning the pages! I’m not going to change any of the art (which was pretty bad in places) but annoyingly I will have to do a bit more work on it than I’d have liked – there are lots of white and black spots on the art that need to be tidied up. I really wanted it to just be a case of scanning the art in and that's it, but ah well. I will also be creating a new cover for it – should be cool!
Oh and I'll also be doing a few cons - the first one is the London Superhero Con on 25/26 Feb (the one with me and someone called Stan Lee as the top guests!) (Kidding about me lol)
Ooohhhh and finally - is anyone still reading this? - Eagle Award nominations are open so if you fancy voting for Spandex as Favourite British Colour Comic, I'd be eternally grateful!!

All of the trading cards, revealed (spoiler ban lifted!)

Now that a fair few people have read Spandex 5 (in particular, most of the people I didn't want to see spoilers), here's a pic of ALL the trading cards available with issue 5! I think it's quite fun to read the issue and put names to faces (I didn't have room to name everyone in the issue!)

Spandex trading cards

In case you haven't seen 'em, here are the Spandex trading cards! I'm giving one away free with every copy of Spandex 5 - which is on sale on Saturday 29 Oct, launching at the MCM Expo! I'm also giving away a free J-Team mini-manga comic with the issue.
There are 64 trading cards in all, but I'm only showing 48 cards here, for spoilery reasons.

O Men piccie

Ooh, Stephen Newbold did this lovely O Men pic on his blog! Very cool!