Cuddles speaks!

So here we are. The first new page in quite a while. I’m still aiming for Sundays – just not every Sunday.

This one was fun to do, the blood was a challenge (still working out how I prefer it to look) and I stole the lightning idea from an issue of Jeff Smith’s Bone which I read a couple of weeks back. In it, the three heroes were hiding from the rat creatures during a thunderstorm and each time the lightning struck the world behind them was illuminated, showing a tableau of movement, movement broken by the darkness between flashes.

I found it very effective and decided to use a similar concept here.

I’ll be honest. Can I be honest? Yes. Good. I hate panel 2. Hate it. I want to redraw it but for now I’d rather focus on getting a new page done (after a month of nothing – sorry to all my avid readers… or should I say *both* my avid readers hehehehe.. heh… ahem) than bother with that.

In the future though, I would like to redraw panel 2. Because panel 2 is shit.

In the future, I am also liking the idea of colour cover art; but we’ll see how it goes. Thankfully, I can replace the art at any time so that’s handy :]

By contrast. I *love* panel 4.

This was really fun to draw. Coming up with a kids bedroom circa 2005 was both a trip to my own childhood – note the 80′s style Transformer toy – as well as a tribute to the pop-culture heritage of comic book nerds today and indeed my own would-be comic book life. Without Calvin & Hobbes, a series I have read again and again since the age of around ten, I would never have been inspired to draw in the first place and Cuddles would not exist.

The influence is obvious – a stuffed animal come to life – although the character shares more with Childs Play‘s Chucky than with Hobbes. Still, without all this and a poorly drawn cactus (another story for another time) we would not be here, looking at my scribblings and reading my monologues.

It was also a challenge, as each artefact I decided to place in the room needed to be checked for historical accuracy. Was Doctor Who around in 2005? Was Pokémon? The lower end of the Transformers poster says soon – the film itself wasn’t released until 2007 but it’s believable that promo material existed as far back as 2005, however unlikely.

*I’m so gonna get sued for this page.

Spot the reference, win a prize*

*prizes not guaranteed

New issue begins June 5, 2011.

It bugs me slightly that this page has a visible lean to it. It’s a byproduct of the importing process, in which the top edge of certain pages was further away than the bottom edge. It’s rectified in new pages but still. It bugs me.