DFC Preview Site

I've always firmly believed the DFC needed to have some of the comics strips available to read online, and now they have! Go, see! If you like what you see, subscribe! The DFC is a good thing for children's comics and the UK comic book industry in general. They're trying something brave and new and I think it deserves to do well. Of course, I'm biased, but now you can make up your own mind.

Blurby info bit:

"We've put a new previews site up! There are flashbook versions of some of the strips now up, at our fantastic new previews website! There's one episode of some of the strips, in most cases (but not all!) the first episode, to give people a taster of The DFC. We didn't want to put up all the strips at once so as not to blast people with too much content, but the plan is to cycle the strips round, so that it isn't always the same content. If a strip isn't up now, rest assured it will be appearing in the near future! First episodes of new strips will also be going up, a certain amount of time after first appearing in the comic."

I think this is an excellent move and the previews, though in a Flashbook form, look good and work very well indeed.

Nemi-sis

Sarah went into town yesterday and brought a copy of the Metro back with her, it's a free London paper that usually has nothing worth reading in it but you can't help picking one up and thumbing through it anyway. The Metro's only useful function is to provide something to peruse when you're on the London Underground and you've forgotten to bring a book. You can try putting off the inevitable by reading all the adverts on the train fourty-seven times but eventually you'll grab one of the many discarded copies littering the train carriage and start flicking through the paper (unless you're one of those lucky people that can doze on a train and never have to resort to such desperate measures).

The Metro's most heinous crime is the inclusion of the comic strip 'Nemi' by Norwegian cartoonist, Lise. Nemi is the second most popular strip in Norway, according to Wikipedia. The Nemi gallery on the Metro site, part of the heading says:

...love her or hate her, she always gets a reaction!

I can't argue with that. My reaction in this case was goggle-eyed, head-smacking disbelief; that a cartoonist could be so lazy and unfunny at the same time. Cutting corners I can understand, producing a comic strip day in, day out isn't the doddle that it may appear and if you can come up with an idea that allows for an easy ride once in a while, I'm all for it. There are times when the economical approach can be more effective and successful than any other. But if you're going to be this lazy and not even try to improve or enhance the joke with some artwork then it had better be brilliant...

This makes me want to weep. A black panel in which all you're imagining is Nemi sitting on the loo. It's not funny, it's not clever but it is weak and boring. If she was shouting in annoyance at the perpetrator then it might have, at least, raised a small smile of recognition. Instead we get an explanation of why there's a black panel.

Edit: I forgot to mention that the "older sibling" line doesn't make much sense either, surely a younger sibling is more likely to muck about and turn the lights off? And how often is the light switch on the outside of the toilet? Can't say I've found it to be all that often. 

Freshwater Fish

I'm just trying a smaller font size on this post to see if I or indeed anybody else prefers it, any comments welcome.

Here's some spots produced for (yes, you've probably guessed it) Horrible Science Magazine, various freshwater fish and some of their strange/interesting behaviour. I've had to draw a fair few creatures for Horrible Science, drawing animals well can be difficult especially when you may only have a small amount of reference or knowledge and have to draw a variety of them in a short amount of time but as I've probably mentioned before you can learn an awful lot from having to draw things that you probably wouldn't choose to draw. It doesn't hurt to have a broad knowledge of all sorts of stuff if you're an illustrator - or artist of any kind I suppose. Sorry that I don't really remember what all of these spots were about in particular and can't give you more information about them but I do remember that I enjoyed doing them and that out of all of them I think I like the Pike one most.

Goldfish

Suckermouth Minnow

Piranha

Tench

Siamese Fighting Fish

African Cichlid

Pike

Illustration Friday - Wired

I didn't have time to finish what I was working on for the latest IF as I had some Horrible Science stuff to finish off so here's something old that fits the topic, it was originally produced for Hi-Fi Choice magazine. I can't help feeling that posting something old is cheating a bit and kind of misses the point of IF so I guess that makes me a dirty cheating hound. Hopefully I'll finish off the piece I originally wanted to do and post it here.

Horrible Science - Astronauts

More spots produced for the Horrible Science Magazine, pretty self-explanatory really a bunch of astronauts from various countries.