Bostin'

Well, bless my soul. We have suddenly sold and bought a house after 5 months and 129 emails-worth of fannying around.

Yes. YES.

And I finished - finally finished, two-in-the morning insomniac retouching and redrawing finished - my comic strip. I'm at the stage where I'm partly pleased and partly can see only mistakes. Still, tomorrow I look for an A3 scanner and so I can tune the images, make them really black and white, and then I can send them off to their creator Matthew in the nerve centre of his empire. Thanks for the opportunity, Matthew, I had a hoot.

I hope he won't mind a brief, non-spoiler taster:



Here we see Antonio Giallo, aka B-Have, and assorted Brummagem gawkers. It makes the change itch in your pocket to buy one, doesn't it, hm?

Moonlight, Snow and Mutant Cat Action.

One of the tremendous advantages of stress related insomnia is that it frees up so much useful work time that would otherwise be frittered away sleeping.

When I got up for a soothing hot chocolate this morning (I know, I know, you're not supposed to stimulate the brain by internet or television etc.) there was a thin, bitter-looking layer of snow on the cars and a fine, hard white moon, almost full. Moonlight and snow is such a powerful and bleakly evocative sight, it was rather beautiful. Bloody cold, mind.

I did this piece (not tonight) as a commission for my mother, who has a special affection for the cathedral close at Wells. And cats.



I think one day I'd like to do a more refined version. One day. In the meantime, I'm getting on with my first ever piece of published comic strip artwork, efficiently summarised by it's splendid creator Matthew Craig as "sixteen pages of mutant cat action."

Everyone likes cats.