polarized double

This dying year of 2015 has been one of extensive creativity..as well as upheavel and turmoil. Here is a basic overview of my cartoon undertakings throughout this past 12 months, and  looking back it has been a pretty creative time. JAN-MARCH   2015  :   ---the year started off well enough, with me on extended holiday, beaming in a fresh gag [ in rough sketch form] into a  UK Cartoon Forum: it was only about one sketch per day, but it seemed a lot more for some reason:  it was during this period I came up with THE FLY and MEDIEVEL WORLDES, both of which have moved on to 'polished glory'. The fun stopped abruptly, however, when those utter spoilsports banned me for Life from their forum. [ details of this farce can be viewed on the Unseen CCGB Forum Cartoon and CCGB Public Forum Ban postings from March 2015, on this site] . I asked the Mods to remove all my posts and drawings from their site, but as far as I know, they are still on  there, on a thread t...

THE I SPY SAGA  may have bowed out in a spectacular finish in May 1970, leaving followers of the strip with no lead hero for over four months, [ along with an I SPY- free SPARKY] however fan demand was such that the character duly returned in October of that same year, in the issue dated number 300. Our hero is seen relaxing at SPY HQ casually chatting to Boss at his desk, recounting how the lethal explosion at Masterminds' lair had propelled him outwards and he landed in a tree, spending the last few months recouperating and re-tuning his many secret devices: not exactly a convincing, satisfactory explanation for his back-to-normal reappearence----taking into account the sheer severity of the explosive blast at the climax of the previous episode---------, but there was something a lot more alarming about I SPY's first new appearence in almost five months:    THINGS THEY HAD A-CHANGED...[almost]    ----------FOREVER:    Everything...looked.....very dif...

THESE 'I SPY' ENTRIES should really be called: 1969 in 1989....in 2015 because they are cartoons I done 20 years after seeing the original I SPY strips: for about 20 years, I had absolutely no material or archive files on this character at all, not even a grainy photocopy---how times change, the stories existed only in my memory-banks.......so this explains why my recollections in drawing form here are so off-model; everything springs from my own personal memories of I SPY. I picked up the annual stories again  in the early 90s, and I obtained the full run of Les Barton era SPARKY  I SPY comics in March 2007. No serious appreciation of I SPY [the strip and character] seems to have been taken up by anyone [ and indeed,  SPARKY comic has been very much ignored within established Comic  History until relatively recently] until June  1987, in which BRITISH COMIC WORLD [issue 5]  put out a very well-written, well-illustrated, multiple-page assesment on the achie...

MORE ITEMS DUSTED DOWN from now-distant and dusky 1989, the next servings represent my dabbling and delving into the D C Thomson comic character from  SPARKY, namely  I SPY : which continues to be, and always has been, my favorite-ever comics-character, by a wide, wide margin. I SPY started modestly enough in issue 211, the copy dated Feb 1, 1969:  it's first run of 60-odd weekly adventures running until May 23, 1970.  The first incarnation was brilliantly drawn by LES BARTON, and the sheer energy and spirit evident in all of his work has been a powerful inspiration to me as an artist since I first laid eyes upon this character: I never forgot his sterling work on   I SPY during an agonizing, especially long fallow period when I was unable to revisit the comic-pages for well over 30 years.  Today, I have all the known published work that Lezz done on this character, including the two SPARKY ANNUAL stories from 1970 and 1971:   The Case of the Disappear...

TODAY'S ITEM is 'sort of' connected to the previous Hitler one [I think you will all agree that Adolphus is forever linked with the concept that is WAR] inasmuch in that it is very much a Military-themed undertaking......I used to do loads of Army-based cartoons on here, in the early days of this blog,  and I really must get back into this: it's one of the all-time 'limitless' themes for cartoonery. Anyway, just take a look below at some of the detailed work I used to do in the 80s: I assume I done such delicate linework with a small steel mapping-pen and bottled ink. Detail like this works fine for drawing intricate machinery [say] but it usually works better if surrounded by lots of roomy space: the way I have done it here, with almost every inch of the paper taken up with endless detail. only really works on a poster design, or something else  meant to be pored over. A lot of readers are also turned off by hyper-detail, and will turn the page of a comic  quic...

THERE IS A FAIR BATCH OF THIS previously-unseen [ well, mostly!] material to get through, and perhaps this next item should have been dubbed 1889 due to the fact that I may well have drawn it in 1989: the Centenery Year  of the birth of Adolf Hitler, easily the most despised figure of the 20th Century.....and whose Legacy extends to ordering the release of  explosive bombs which landed  in the very next street from where I am writing this blog. Like many others, I have long since had a fascination with the German Fuhrer: his disturbing crimes against Humanity still chill to the very bone, even decades after discovering the devastating facts of the acts that sprang from his polluted mind....if nothing else, Hitler gave us knowledge of the depravities human beings will stoop to if the conditions are right in order to commit mass atrocities. I have only encountered petty atrocities in my time: thankfully, nobody wielding real power like Hitler did has been able to affect my ...

IT'S BEEN GREAT FUN RIFLING THROUGH these 'vintage' inkings I churned out in 1989, and apart from the intruige in seeing how much my style has changed in the intervening years, I am happy to report there is a lot of diversity within this material, including my renditions of favorite established characters, usually from the D C Thomson stable. During the 80s, my absolute favorite cartoonists like John Geering or Robert Nixon had gone the dreaded sketchy route so I looked elsewhere for quality stuff: it duly arrived in the shape of CUDDLES and DIMPLES, a DANDY strip by BARRIE APPLEBY that started around late 1986: there were a lot of upheavels in the UK comic biz at this time, with many IPC titles closing down and former employees looking for work on the BEANO, etc: improved color and paper stock appeared in the late 80s too. The 80s were not a brilliant time for British Comics but I am glad I got a wee bit of work back then: the Industry was starting to die to be sure but at...

A QUICK SCROLL through this site will attest that the content of the material I place on here is in a state of constantly-changing flux: recently there has been a shift towards more 'satirical' output, and although I loved doing this stuff, I have decided to pare back the screening of further satirical drawings: or at the very least, I have chosen to shelve it for the forseeable future...I may well release more of  this work in future, we will see. It is not a case of the material being too weak: on the contrary, I am more concerned about it being too strong to exhibit publicly, ---believe me, there is quite a stack of these unseen cartoons and I would love to show them-------but fear not, there is an abundance of alternative cartoons for me to place on here. The vast majority of the material I place on here originates from me soley: I can 'do' characters originated by others, and although this approach has never  especially attracted me in quite the same way, a good ch...

I HAVE JUST RECENTLY UNEARTHED some fairly early 'vintage' cartoon works, I  done  these in the very late 80s, when I was in my 20s and still a sexy young thing............. ------I found a whole package of this material, done 'between jobs' in most cases although this one possibly dates from 1991, going by the inclusion of Steve Hickner and his Studio Manager at Amblin where I worked.......[ see my' Heil Hickner' entries for further details on this ] : I have lost track of time on some of the undated pieces. No computers for me at least back then, of course: in some ways the medium of cartooning was 'purer' using wholly natural methods. Life was certainly a lot more straightforwards back in the 80s, that's for sure: no pointless  distractions like Internet Waffling from Crashing Bores on Forums,  :    just pencil, steel nibs and bottled ink: photocopies were about as high-tech as it got at that point in time. Anyway, you can see how much more detail...

The 'Daily Sketch' [5] IF YOU SEE A LOAD OF  DAILY SKETCH  MATERIAL coming up, it usually means I am adding them into the mix as I need extra time to finish off the more time-consuming, accomplished material... --------This is not to say I am contributing filler material in the meantime, though.......if anything, this approach gives me a good opportunity to try out some strong images lurking around in  my noggin: such as the one seen here, hopefully. I feel images like these are well worth including though...... I have always loved drawing HEAVIES or bulky, muscular characters: recent developments in digital manipulation means I can improve these figures further: in the  MEDIEVEL WORLDES- like character seen below, the head of the executioner guy has been shrunk to about half- original-size and set higher, meaning I can get the proportions more akin to BLUTO out of the old 30s and 40s Max Fleischer  POPEYE  animations: exactly the effect I have always striv...