Here’s a full page from the Big Jim graphic project. This part if the book deals with a particularly messy incident where the good intentions of individuals actually may have had a detrimental affect on the campaign being run by the perceived ‘good guys’trying to help out the poor and downtrodden. Cryptic? Convoluted? Well it’s another example of the weird relationship between the Catholic church and it’s dominating position in Irish society at the time, and I guess you’ll have to read the book when it comes out or check out those links for your history lesson.

Getting accurate period reference continues to throw up storytelling challenges, but I’m pretty happy with how the setting for this scene came out.

Here’s another short sequence from the Big Jim project. I’m not known for any sort of  ’high octane’ storytelling, so when it comes to action sequences like this (and there are plenty scattered throughout the book) I find the infliuences of my misspent youth reading X-Men and Batman comic books coming into play.

There’s a balance to be struck in a sequence like this. I don’t want to downplay the brutality of  the Dublin Metropolitan Police (who by all accounts acted as little more than hired thugs), but I don’t want to fall into the trap of glorifying the aesthetics of violence, which unfortunately many comics do. Hopefully I’ll strike that balance throughout.

As if keeping one blog updated regularly wasn’t hard enough, I’ve gone and signed up to Tumblr.

For a while, I’ve  felt like I have to have something announce to warrant a post on this blog, so the  tumblog will work as a much more informal outlet for diary comics, sketchbook excerpts, and random personal illustrations updated several times a week. So add it to your rss reader or if you’re on tumblr get ‘following’, ‘reblogging’ and ‘liking’ as one does in these situations.

In the meantime this blog will continue to be updated with works in progress, previews, news and the usual bits and pieces that you may have come to expect up to now.

One thing I’ve found while working on this project is that I’ve become more and more particular when it comes to what materials I use . I used not to be that fussy over paper type, possibly due to the influence of some of the more ‘fine art’ practices I had in college, preferring a rough paper texture and soft pencils. However, recently I found that this combination was not giving me the optimum surface quality that I would like for inking so I’ve caved and switched to the ubiquitous Bristol board. As can be seen in the examples above, it’s lead to a somewhat tighter pencilling/inking combination than I used to display.

Anyway, this scene was really a joy to draw. There are a lot of nicely plotted sequences throughout the book like this that play little moments against the larger Moments of Grand Historical Significance. I honestly think this is important, as there is a danger with historical based drama to fall into the trap of hyperbole which leaves little space for the reader to identify with the characters or the events being depicted.

I promised last week that I would begin to share some previews of my work in progress from a rather large project (for me, anyway) I have been working on for the last few months. So here it is, some inked, but unlettered, artwork from the start of the tentatively titled Big Jim graphic novel. I have to give thanks to my publishers for allowing me to preview this work in progress. Undoubtably some of these pages will be altered and revised significantly before seeing print, so it’ll be interesting to compare these previews with the final printed versions next year.

It’s been a while since I posted anything, so here are a couple of photos of some illustration/design work in progress from a few weeks ago. Got to do some nice hand lettering as part of it as well, which is always a bonus. There’s a bit of a back story behind this work that I’ll go into when the finished products come back from the manufacturer.

In other news, I recently got permission from my publisher to preview material from a major work in progress, so expect to be drip fed some new comic work over the coming months. Also in shot in the second pic are two great zines from Pepper Morrison and LMNOP that I picked up at the Dublin Zine Fair at the end of August.