Mauretania and Psychetecture

Here’s a gallery of printed materials from my Mauretania collection. After the success of the Penguin book in 1990, Chris Reynolds and Paul Harvey mounted a series of exhibitions and events, to publicise the book and promote their ideas about “Psychetecture”. These took place in 1992 and 1993, and they appeared at Freud’s in London…

Drake and Fantômas

Here’s the original art for one page from “Drake and His Dog Meet Fantômas”, an unpublished Drake Ullingsworth story from around 1997. Fantômas is a fictional character who has long preoccupied me. It started with my love of Rene Magritte; like many other Surrealist painters, he was captivated by the character and at least two…

Drake in Fox Comics

The editors of Fox Comics printed quite a few of my Drake Ullingsworth stories in the 1980s. Here are some selected pages, as printed, from the stories “Drake and His Dog Meet The Mariner Man” and “New Savagery In Jaystown”. They were serialised to some extent, long stories broken up into chapters. Later, I submitted…

Fast Fiction flyers and small ads

Here we have artworks and paste-ups for some flyers and small ads I put together, to help publicise the Fast Fiction distribution service for small press comics. I suppose these date from around 1986 to 1988. One would tend to do the lettering with a computer nowadays, but at that time I didn’t have access…

Gag #2 colour sketch

Gag #2 was published in July 1987 by Harrier Comics. Editor Phil Elliott sent me this colour sketch proposal for my cover drawing. The cover as printed is seen in the small image copied from the Grand Comics Database (GCD).

Primitif and Feroce

This is an additional colour image produced for the Primitif In The Land of the Dead story. This may have been used when I prepared a one-off “artist’s book” edition of the story, and needed a cover image for it. But it wasn’t much of an artist’s book, to be honest – just colour xeroxes…

Gag back cover

Following on from previous post’s example of hand-separation, here’s another one from 1988. This is the back cover for an issue of Gag!, a comic book anthology edited by Phil Elliott and published by Harrier Comics. It featured work from many of the Fast Fiction artists, and included some reprints of old favourite stories which…

Dennis Dewprat

Here you can download a scan of “The Transfiguration of Dennis Dewprat”. This was printed as the back cover to The Big Lift #3, edited by Tom Tiffin, in 1988. Tom was able to get proper litho printing for his A4 books (even though he wasn’t averse to small-run photocopies too). I tried to take…

Vladimir’s Memoirs

Here you can download a scan of the opening page from an unpublished and unfinished story featuring Vladimir The Medico. I started this in 2001; I recall it was a very depressing and sour story, of which the crucial narrative points depended on misunderstandings and a serious lack of communication. Vladimir feels trapped in his…

Hello There Tom Tiffin

Tom Tiffin did lively and splurgy small press comics such as The Big Lift – entertainingly combining painterly artwork with parodies of film noir, and liberally borrowing from cartoon and comics “tropes”. Later, he created hand-made greetings cards – he may still be doing that, for all I know. He managed to make it into…