Dungeon Monstres - Volume 1 - The Crying Giant by Sfar, Trondheim, Mazan and Menu

I love Dungeon, me. This is the latest one to come out in English. The first story is a good one about John John the Terror, who is a potato like monster who is cut into two living pieces. The second one is the Crying Giant and is drawn by J C Menu. I've never read anything more than a few pages long by Menu so it's cool to see something longer. Its much darker and bleaker than most of the Dungeon stories, must be Menu's influence, and has a few nice little bits about his other work, such as a mention of the Mederists as a Terra Amata religion. All the dungeon books are worth getting and its good they are still coming out in English. There are loads and loads out in French now so I hope they keep translating them...

Injury 2 - Ted May

Injury 2 is cool, I like it even more than Injury 1. The best story is the first one 'Hair of the Dog' which is a story from Jeff Wilson's heavy metal loving youth. In this tale he gets a girlfriend and then she breaks up with him by letter as he is 'a wastoid'. there aren't enough heavy metal comics, even 'the dude from Nazareth' appears in this one and sings 'Love Hurts' at the end of his doomed romance. The second main story is part 2 of 'Manleau' a tale about a cyborg fighting gang members. Its funny, and I enjoyed it ,more than the first part (in Injury 1) but not as cool as 'Hair of the Dog'. Nice cover too. The back cover is even better but I'm not showing that. You will have to buy the comic (or go find it on the interweb). Great to see an excellent comic length book.
It Lives

Manhole 3 - Mardou

Manhole 3 is my favourite Mardou comic for a good while. Its one long proper story about two best friends who go out drinking and listening to music and go out with blokes from the bands. They plan to go to America and follow the bands but things don't work out that way. It's set mainly in Manchester and even has a section in Darwen (probably the first comic to ever feature Darwen, I imagine).
It Lives

What I Am Doing

At the moment I am working on my next comic. It's going to be a short story collection. I've done an 11 page story 'The City that Fell In Love with it's Own Reflection' and 2 one page stories. I've done 4 pages of a sci fi story maybe called 'Utter McKinley Funeral Parlour' but at the moment I've no idea where that's going. Hopefully I'll finish it, it's about coffins being fired into space on little rockets. Today I'm trying to start a new 2 page story set in Korea called 'My Nearest Mountain'. My plan is to finish the comic for Birmingham. I'm going to have to think of a new name for it and make it into the first of a new series like 'Random Journeys'. Oh well, back to work...

Yotsuba &! 5 by Kiyohiko Azuma

Yotsuba is such a nice series. It is a great antidote to all the usual depressing, shocking and brain confusing stuff I find myself reading the rest of the time. I wouldn't like to only read dark things, oh no. It's all about a little girl and her adventures with very ordinary situations and is brilliant. This is number five in the series and they are all this good. Highly recommended to cheer anyone up.

Skyscrapers of the Midwest - Joshua W Cotter

Woah this is a lovely looking book! The drawing is great, all chunky fat people, looking a little bit like Crumb with the cross hatching. It's full of fake adverts, letterpages to a cowboy character, year books, class photographs, and extra stories with robots and the like to give a great bonus and loads of depth to the main story. The main story is drawn with cats as the characters, a bit like Jim Medway's cats too. It is basically the story of a kid who's fat and nerdy and his unpleasant time at school. His time at school doesn't really seem that bad to me, he gets bullied and laughed at by girls, but to him it of course seems the worst time in the world. There are loads of comics about depressing childhoods of course but I think this one is a great addition to the genre, its very funny too. Warning though - there are some very sad scenes with dying kittens and grandparents. That sounds really cheesy and obvious when I write it down here - but in the story it is done very well. I would recommend this to anyone.

Stewart Lee - 90's Comedian

Stewart Lee - 90's Comedian is the funniest comedy DVD i've ever seen. Buy it and see why the phrase 'cats feet towel' makes me laugh to myself whenever I hear it.
Its got the best Joe Pasquale joke ever and loads of stuff about blasphemy that he wrote after the Jerry Springer the Opera business. Its too controversial to get a major release and so is released on Go Faster Stripe a very cool indie comedy DVD company. Have a look on their website, they are cheap too...

Mickey Rourke for sale now...

Hello everyone. Dan Lester's new anthology 'Who Gives a **** About Mickey Rourke' is finally out so I thought i'd mention it here. I've got 2 pages in it and the back cover. It's also got Matthew Craig, Dan Lester (obviously), Banal Pig, Douglas Noble and lots of other people in it. I thought it was a really good anthology this time, way better than the 'Crap Your Pants' anthology.
You can get it here-
Mickey Rourke

MOCCA report

Yay Secret Acres were selling my comics at MOCCA, Gary Sullivan's bought two of them and mentions them in his MOCCA report Thanks Secret Acres! Thanks Gary too, he does the excellent looking 'Elsewhere' Comic. Here's a picture of the stall with Sam Gaskin standing behind it that I found on the 'I Know Koe Kimbel' blog.

Bog Wizards Review

There's a little review of Bog Wizards up at Optical Sloth
cheers Whitey.

News

I wish I was at MOCCA in New York this weekend... never mind. The Secret Acres table should be selling some of my minicomics there, I hope they do well.

I got a copy of Skyscrapers of the Midwest by Josh Cutter yesterday and its brilliant so far. I'll write more about it once I finish it.

Paper Rodeo Issue 19
Its well worth getting an issue or two of Paper Rodeo to have a look at it. It's all printed on newsprint with giant newspaper sized pages and looks like the above picture. Some days I really like it and some days I think it is like wallpaper (crazy ape shit wallpaper mind you) and what's the point. I guess I often feel torn between comics that are all about the art and comics that are all about the story. You can obviously like both kinds. The drawings great though always and is by loads of different artists. Has some one or two page cartoons in it too and the brilliant Multi Force is serialized in some of the issues. From providence USA.

Comics For Sale....

You can now buy my comics at the following fine stores...

Travelling Man Manchester
OK Comics, Leeds
Firecatcher Books


thanks!

Carl is the Awesome Volumes 1 & 2 collected - Marcos Perez
Each of these volumes contains 3 little minicomics and is housed in a nifty little envelope with a picture stuck on the front which is a great idea for minicomics. These are great and very funny. Carl is a dinosaur with a beavers tale who is indeed the awesome. He plays in a band, his vest is super sick, his body is rugged like corduroy and his confidence is bizarre and otherworldly. In Volume 2 Carl show's us how to really be an awesome small press cartoonist while staying super sick. Nice.
Recently he's gone on line-
Carl is the Awesome

Jimbo 2 - Gary Panter
Everyone should buy any copies of Jimbo comics they find, I got them all on the cheap a few years ago in a back issue pile. There is a series of 5 of them getting more detailed with each issue as they go along, and they are supposed to lead up to Jimbo In Purgatory, which I still haven't read yet, in some way. The drawing in these is just perfect somehow. the subtitle to this issue is 'hillbilly punkers explore the land unknown' which should explain what's going on in this issue. Exploration.