I’ve been working on this off and on for a coupla months now, and just got it finished in time to print the first 32 pages for tour in the USA. It’s a silent comic re-imagining the Wind in the Willows from a bucolic idyll to a dystopia full of walls, checkpoints, bulldozers and trigger happy conscripts. I’m pretty happy with how it’s turned out so far – I’m excited to see it at how it will look once it’s printed by the cool people at 1984 printing.

I’ll have copies on tour in the USA if you want a copy (http://zinesontoast.org) if you live Stateside, but will hopefully have some to bring back to Blighty in five weeks time!

I finally got this done for the Birmingham Zine Fest postcard exhibition. Not 100% happy with it, but I didn’t have much time, so you know! Both the Birmingham Zine Fest, and the exhibition, look like they’ll be great though. It’s happening the 10th – 12th of September.

In other news, I finally got my zines finished for the USA tour. I’ll post some info on them later this week.

I’m going on tour in the States during August/ September (www.zinesontoast.org), and am going to print up some copies of the ‘The G20, bad apples and Ian Tomlinson’ story as a stand alone zine (it first appeared in Excessive Force) because sending out Excessive Force was gonna be too expensive.

Anyhow, I decided to write an afterword to the story after Keir Starmer, the Director of Public Prosecutions, declared that there would be no charges brought against PC Simon Harwood in connection with the death of Ian Tomlinson. The whole thing looks like a complete stitch-up, and the comic runs through some of the inconsistencies. If you want to read more about it I think Keir Starmer’s speech when he announced there’d be no charges brought is the most insightful – it’s a fairly brazen argument about why the CPS won’t be recommending prosecution. The Guardian newspaper put it up in full here.

Click the images to see a version that’s easier to read.

My friend Chris 12o5 is putting together a zine called ‘Once more with morphine’. I’ve not had any experience with morphine, but I do seem to have spent too much time around hospitals in my young adult life. Anyhow, I thought I’d draw a short comic about having my frenulum cut – the short bit of skin that connects the foreskin to the head of the penis – because it was too short (Frenulum breve). According to an article in the Guardian Frenulum breve affects 5% of uncircumcised blokes, but I guess doesn’t get talked about much so thought I’d draw a comic about the process (which was thankfully much less painful than Jonathan Cope who wrote the article on the Guardian!).

(click on the images to see a readable version)

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Still busy with getting comics ready for the Zines on Toast tour (which hopefully I’ll post up here soon). In the meantime it was the birthday for both my Dad and sister last weekend. I made this for my sister:

It’s making fun of her new house, and DIY plans.

Then for my dad:

A travel ticket for an adventure we’re going on in October…

So it’s a week until my French exam. Hence the lack of new updates with real illustration work. At the moment any spare moment is being pored into these sodding cards. I have hundreds of the things now with random bits of vocabulary I think I should know. Here’s some of the ones I made this evening. All about negative emotions and TV (points if you can decode what the little symbols mean!). It’s good, I guess, I’m learning lots of new words (who knew the French decided to Francophone Sauerkraut?). But this whole learning another language is way harder than it’s cracked up to be. Anyhow, hopefully next Tuesday/ Wednesday I’ll pass the DELF B2 I’m sitting and be able to have a break from it for a while. Long enough at least to work out how to get from my fumbling intermédiaire avancé level to somewhere approaching fluency without moving to the country… Anyhow, card illustrations:

I’ve totally failed to get the new comic projects I planned ready in time for the zine symposium, so I can’t post any of them up. They’ll be worth the wait I think though. Anyhow, I rediscovered this little sketchbook that I thought had got lost when I moved flat. This time last year I was working in a bunch of these little books (I made a video about how to make them at the time – http://www.archive.lasthours.org.uk/diy/bookbinding-without-the-glue/). I filled five or six with ramblings, but I quite like some of the details in this one particularly so thought I’d post it.

I got to create the poster (and flier) for the London anarchist bookfair again this year. I decided to do something totally over complicated for the poster. I think there’s 50 different characters in the image. The idea is that the anarchist bookfair is help building up the circle ‘a’, because it’s a vital bit of the anarchist community. Deep! Anyhow, hopefully I’ll be getting it off to print this week – I think the bookfair collective are gonna go for the green, but I’ve included the blue because I think I like it more (but then I do have an obsession with blue). Either way I’ll look forward to seeing the finished result as a full A2 poster – I think it’s gonna look pretty mint. Oh I’ve also included a bit of detail from the poster at the bottom of this post because squashing an A2 poster down to 500px mushes out quite a lot of that! And also the ink sketch that started it all…

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It’s five years since the London Zine Symposium was started so it seemed like a good time to release a book about the symposium (The London Zine Symposium: tales from the first 5 years). Last Hours will be launching it at the London date of the UK leg of the Zines on Toast tour on May 5th, 2010. Here’s a preview though of the cover and comic that you’ll find inside. We’ll be posting a couple of the articles on the main bit of the website in the run up to the launch as well.

You can see more after the cut if you want!

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It’s two weeks since Last Hours published the ballot boxes poster. I’m not going to bore you with the pencil sketches of all the different ideas I came up with to try and communicate the image, but here are the two that got away (one with good reason, the other’s an idea I want to use on another day)

I like this alot, especially the speech bubbles. Unfortunately it didn’t really communicate what it needed to for this project so it had to get put to one side.

This one was just hideously generic, and a bad illustration to boot. I was thrown by the initial brief that it should be a two colour poster . For some reason I’m really bad at limiting myself to two colour. Also, the type is rubbish. Anyhow, for a first working of the brief it’s not terrible and at least pointed the way not to go.

And the final version, which looks a lot better on the poster than it does as a small 500px graphic. I managed to smuggle a whole load of friends into the crowd scene, and I like the two blundering politicians perched on top of the ballot boxes. I’ve got to work out how I could use them in a future project.