I’m the official cartoonist of the 2011 Lille Festival des Langues.  This basically consists of creating three dialogue-blank comic pages; school kids can then enter a competition where they have to make a story out of the images by filling in the blank spaces in a variety of languages.  You can see the pages used in previous years here.

I’ll be at the awards in Lille in April in case anyone wants to hear me speaking offensively bad french.

The story had to be open to interpretation by using different dialogue; I usually have a full script written before I start drawing, but this time I just sat down and started drawing one panel after another until I had the three pages.  Stressless cartooning.  If you’re familiar with my usual comic work the subject matter won’t surprise you too much.

I have a vague idea of a story now I’ve finished it, so I’m interested to see what other people will come up with - hopefully something completely different.  Have a go yourself, if you’re bored.  Send me links.

Just updated Lusi Sulfura’s site with some new material - all the 2-page previews of the strips published in the Wasted anthology mag have now been updated to their full strip glory.

It turns out, to my amazement, that my Kreepy Kat webcomic was actually pretty popular.  When I stopped the strip last month, the support I got from a whole legion of fans I never even knew about was so big, and so many people were asking why the strip finished so abruptly, that I felt like I owed them more of an explanation.  So this is an open letter to the Kreepy Kat Army…

Troops,

The response to the end of Kreepy Kat has been incredible - it turns out Kreepy was a lot more popular than I realised.  Thanks for all your kind words and supportive emails.  I have to admit that all the positive feedback did make me think twice about killing Kreepy.  The girls who sent photos - you know who you are - were particularly persuasive.  Yow.

But not enough.  Kreepy means a lot to me and will probably keep appearing in my work occasionally, but as an ongoing weekly concern he really is over.

I’m stopping Kreepy for three main reasons:

1) I think the central joke has run its course - at least for the time being.  I never wanted Kreepy to be a one-trick pony and I always tried to keep the strip fresh and inventive, but for a while now it’s felt like the same thing over and over again.  I want to quit while I’m ahead, before I just start churning out derivative rubbish just to fill the weekly slot.
2) I just wasn’t enjoying it any more.
3) None your goddamn business.

Maybe Kreepy will return someday, when I feel the inspiration again - or get offered big buckets full of cash - but for now, he’s dead.

Thanks again for reading all the depraved bile seeping from my brain over the past few years.

Now get the hell away from me, you disgusting legion of morally repulsive freaks.

DISMISSED.

Al

My weekly webcomic Kreepy Kat is now dead.  I think the joke is over.  The little bastard will still probably keep turning up in my sketches but as a going weekly concern he’s finished.

Thank God for that.

Issue 3 of the Wasted comic anthology is now on sale, with a cover by comics legend Simon Bisley…

The issue features a new 4 page Lusi Sulfura strip, which you can preview below and at her site.  This strip was actually originally done a while ago - so long ago that the judges had to be updated to remove Sharon Osbourne and insert the current pretty cardboard mannequins before publication!

Etc…

Wasted comic has a nice little viral video ad for issue 2, featuring my Lusi Sulfura cover quite heavily…

The tune is by Glasgow’s premier electro disco hip hop kingpin, the Niallist.  He’s a driving force behind the brain melt of Little Rock Records, and his first music video is right here.  F-F-F-FRESH.

Rock the Shop - The Niallist from Che Camille on Vimeo.

I was given the Jack Kirby book for Christmas.  All that volcanically intense , pop-violence artwork really made me miss drawing big, dumb fight scenes.  So I drew one!

I tried to draw, ink & colour this as quickly as possible to keep some kind of fun momentum in the images.  It’s also the first comic I’ve inked with the brush pen - I’m obviously still struggling to loosen up my death-grip on precision inking but it did make things about ten times faster.  There’s definitely a lot more action and flow to the characters as well.

So buckle up, turn off your brain and enjoy.

More Lusi Sulfura here.

A quick look at three stages of creating a Lusi Sulfura page - inks, B&W Photoshop composition and colouring.

Hopefully have this new comic done by next week.

Getting near the end of my uni course… soon to be in desperate need of cash.  So, naturally, I thought I’d apply to work for Tharg at the Galaxy’s Greatest Comic.

Which means, in case you’re not a geek, 2000AD - British sci-fi anthology comic, home to Judge Dredd, repository of some of the best comic writing and artwork ever and, along with my parents and Star Wars, one of things most responsible for warping my childhood brain into the sorry state it is today.

Here’s some previews of the pages I’m planning to submit.  I’m not particularly expecting anything to come from it - I suspect cold submission without meeting people face-to-face at conventions and the like is always going to be extremely difficult, but if you don’t ask, you don’t get.  Plus, just drawing something outside of my usual subject matter has been a really steep learning curve.

More heavy Mignola influence in the shadows and inking style here.

Been getting reeeeaaally lazy again about updates, but I’ve still been busy with my animation project (now completed - and hopefully online in the next week or so).

I’ve also been busy with this, however, the latest Lusi Sulfura strip. Another experiment in using photos as backgrounds for her comics.  It’s about stylising the artwork and not laziness.  Honest.  This is also the first strip where I’ve drawn all the images seperately and combined them into the strip in photoshop, to try and keep the artwork fresher.  Check out the previous post for some of the original sketches.

The main aim of this strip was to capture a little of that carefree sunny-day-in-the-park feeling.  I like to think I got close in a couple of places.

Just a preview here, check out the full strip at her website.