Three days later I am still in a very buoyant mood after the day tabling and selling comics at the South London Comic and Zine Fair 2023. Everyone was so helpful. Tom Murphy had put in a word for me in the first place – that was back in November 2022 when I first made…
Chris Reynolds passed away peacefully in his sleep on Thursday morning 4th May 2023. I heard the news from my friends John Bagnall, Harley Richardson, and Paul Gravett. We are all profoundly saddened. I’ve lost an old friend and the world has lost a unique cartoonist. We had an email exchange in early 2021. Even…
This just arrived. Drawn earlier this month, after a discussion with publisher Tom Murphy in November last year. That’s more like it – I mean the speed of delivery which is something I like about the small press (in the 1980s, Fast Fiction really was aiming to be fast). Colossive Press has this unique range…
I received a package of comics from Jason Atomic in November – this was after my recent review of Ugly Mug # 6, in which he appears. So far I’ve read Satanic Mojo Comix #7, a US-sized book with a mini-comic insert. Just by looking at the cover alone you can see the E.C. Comics…
This is a totally biased, partisan, non-objective review of the new issue of Ugly Mug comic, published by Harley Richardson…Harley is an old friend of mine, he helped me with the Fast Fiction service in the 1980s, and we’ve collaborated on other projects too. Also he happens to like my comic strip work, so my…
I made a new page to display my collection of Fox Comics. This was an Australian comics venture, edited by David Vodicka who was based in Melbourne, with his friends and co-editors Phil Bentley and David Bird. They did it through the mid-1980s up until the early 1990s. I think Fox (co-edited by Vodicka with…
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…
Here we have the cover for an early small press comic The Big Sneeze by Trevs Phoenix (now Woodrow Phoenix), published under his Catopants imprint. This “Sumo Conceptual Comic” comprised drawings of sumo wrestlers and starred Henry Sumo Sumo as the main character. The cover is brown A4 card folded lengthways, like a greetings card;…
Original art for a one-pager “Some fear-fraught occasions of Charley Dome, related by himself”. I’m 90% sure this is Caspar Williams under an alias. From 1986, this is probably a submission to Fast Fiction magazine. Good gritty atmosphere in the drawings, nice shadows, use of Letratone. The Totally Evil Insect Kid is a potentially strong…
Here we have scans of Sun Jam, which was an improvised comic strip made by Darryl Cunningham, Paul Schroeder, and myself. Drawn very quickly in one single session. No pencilling, just inking right onto the page (though some TippEx afterwards!) The rules were that each artist would start a page with the first two panels,…
