The Acrid Stink of Burning Trash

Hello! I've been striving away on some in-depth and lengthy projects for some time now, so I've been doing a wee bit of dumb doodling on the side when on the train and so on. Here's some shonky photographs of the decidedly mixed results...

Jar Jar Binks ♥s Deathspell Omega. Of course he does.



For someone who's pretty sick of the near-saturation of culture by Star Wars and mash-ups thereof, it's pretty hypocritical to combine the Mos Eisley Cantina Band with berobed drone outfit SunnO))). But here we are. 

Here's KIZZ. I pretty much hate KISS. I imagine if I was born ten years earlier I would have absolutely loved them, but to me they seem corny as shit. Maybe I'm a rigidly self-conscious person who's uncomfortable with their unabashed celebration of life and self. Who knows? We could ask Paul Stanley I guess. 

♪ ...Thank you for being a friend. ♫

Even the least talented of us can get on the Mad Max: Fury Road Fan-Art Armoured Bandwagon. And why not, it was a glorious thrash metal religious experience. This is an accurate recollection of the movie's events and characters.

Life philosophy. 

You can simultaneously indulge your interest in making tattoo-like crest-designs about ridiculous things while shamelessly baiting for RTs and Faves on Twitter by engaging with a current topical issue. But you won't necessarily get those Faves, and then you'll just feel cheap. 

 For your Ferengi Devo needs. Yeah, zap those Federation fuckers!

Product Review for the Gregg's BBQ Pulled Pork Lattice. I'm a big fan of variations on existing foods. They put Ritz Crackers in Cadbury's chocolate, I need to know, and then share my opinions with anyone who'll listen. Maybe Greggs would have RT'd this if I'd awarded them four Blight Grenades, but they just weren't all that good.

It's a bit of a challenge to not be over-expectant of myself and grow comfortable with my limited skills, and essentially just draw some dumb shit and not be too precious about if it looks "good enough". But it provides a great brain-valve and allows me to just get some stupid ideas out there, so I suppose we're all in for a bit more of this.

Literary Death Match and The Stripped Comic Fair

During the the last week, I was asked by the Edinburgh International Book Festival if I'd like to take part in Jura Unbound's special "comics edition" of the infamous Literary Death Match, a literary death bout with three other competitors and judged by Craig Silvey, Dawn O'Porter and none other than Neil Gaiman...

Too good an opportunity to pass up, I spent the next two days in a flapping state of dread and terror attempting to pull together something decent, and come Friday night I attempted "spoken word" performances of some of my comics to a packed out Spiegeltent....

To my great surprise it went down really well with the crowd, who gave me such a great reception. I performed "The Landlocked Sea Shanty" from Roachwell, followed by the trilingual English / French / Dutch strip "House of Mercy", and ultimately finished with the appropriately literary "Seamus Heaney's Heinous Penis".

When you write a strip like that, you don't really expect to be performing a few years later, grinding on stage to crowd of 200 or so while your mobile plays "I Like To Move It"... but there you go.

 

In any case while I didn't win, the crowd's reception was fantastic and the judges comments were so exciting to hear, which included Neil Gaiman saying my performance was "shocking, astonishing and delightful". Which was oh, pretty nice, and Dawn O'Porter severely embarrassed me. The other competitors were all lovely people, and congratulations to Amy Mason who struck down all her opponents and drank from our skulls as a true victor!

So it was a really exciting and pretty astonishing experience. I had a great wee chat with Neil afterwards, and gave him my books for the bus home. It was really cool to speak to people in the following days who saw the show and complimented me on it, and to show them the strips I performed. I have to thank the Edinburgh International Book Festival for asking me to take part, pals who made it along to watch and also the astonishing Adrian Todd Zuniga who was the most electrifying and hilarious host. If you get chance to see a Literary Death Match, go for it!

* Update - write up on the Literary Death Match site here! *

* Update again! - Video below! I come on about 42 minutes in... *

 

Onward to the Stripped Mini Comic Fair! My first shot at tabling my own comics and in the lovely environs of 5 Charlotte Square, a National Trust for Scotland building and surely one of the nicest places a comic fair has been held.

There was a really impressive and diverse range of talent on show, and I had a really nice time chatting with some new pals. All in I had an excellent weekend of it, with great sales and plenty of interesting chat with people who were in to check out the comics on show. Here's hoping Stripped as part of the Book Festival goes on to even greater success in future years!

A Bloodbath of Hideous Self-Promotion

It's a fearsome feast of raw reviewage here of late, with a cool wee review from The List coming in that declares Roachwell "...does run the gamut from laugh-out loud funny to quite disturbing to totally incomprehensible, which may just be an achievement in itself". Thanks!

Here's us stinking up the place next to 'The Wire' writer George Pelecanos. Sorry George!