All In A Week's Work

Definitely, definitely a truism; if as a self employed person you want shed loads of work, book a holiday.

I've been chasing my tail ever since returning from New York and since last Thursday, I've worked on a series of fiddling educational type illustrations of teenagers in a multitude of situations - but please bear in mind our Middle East market - therefore no bare shoulders, no makeup, no this, no that, etc, etc.

Plus a job for a U.S. Healthcare agency, plus two sea themed artworks for toy aquariums. These had to be layered, so that the client could then make stickers out of the elements. A relative breeze in Illustrator, but by this stage I only had four days to create the two complex images.

And then yesterday it was my friend Jon Higham's birthday and it was a biggie, and the very least I could do was an illustrated card much in the manner of the one I created for older brother Charles some two years earlier. As both the Higham's spent time growing up in France and are still passionate devotees of Bande Dessinee, it was done in tongue in cheek French comic book style.

I have to thank Allan Plenderleith and his Soggy Sprouts (aka Elly The Reindeer's nemesis) for the inspiration for much of the contents.



As regular readers of this blog will realize the Soggy Sprouts are not to be underestimated in their fiendish desire to undermine Elly the Reindeer's apps.

P.S. As super observant readers might notice dear wickle Elly has had to change her nose to a less obtrusive brown as opposed to the red nose she once sported. This because Jon was literally in receipt of a "Dear Jon" email from some U.S. attorney in L.A. who wanted to point out that his client was owner of the copyright for Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer and by implication any reindeer with a red nose was an infringement of his client's copyright.

Hence the rubber band with brown nose.

Wonders as they say will never cease...

"Come Away, Come Away with William Tell"

Children's TV in the 1950's was literally a' quiver with arrows, aside from Injuns on the warpath, there was also:

"Rahhhbinn Hood, Rahhhhbinn Hood Rahdin; Through the Glen"

and when you'd tired of that there was:

"Pwahhhhh, pwahhh, pwahhh, pwah,pwah,pwah, pwahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh...

Come away, come away with William Tell.

Come away to the land he loves so well."

Oh what the...

Here we go:



Actually a lot more edgy than dear old Rahbinnn Hood. The scripts were much more adrenalised and Conrad Phillips used to risk life and limb on those balsa wood stage sets - there was location filmimg too but Snowdonia rather than Switzerland. The one local cinema was used to view each day's rushes.

Script writing duties were divided between director Ralph Smart and a host of other screenwriting luminaries such as Leslie Arliss, Max Savage and Doreen Montgomery. In one memorable episode "The Unwelcome Stranger" the plot of "Bad Day at Black Rock" was deftly compressed into one thirty minute episode.

All of which now gives me an opportunity to reprise 9 illustrations from the 1961 "William Tell Annual" illustrated with considerable brio and panache by Ron Embleton's younger brother Gerry.

Don O' The Drums - Embleton's Monochrome Masterpiece

As I await the arrival of the proofs for the epic Book Palace Production of "Ron Embleton's Complete Wulf the Briton", I thought it might be timely to look at one of the strips touched upon in the introduction to this book.

As a young artist Ron Embleton was incredibly busy throughout his twenties and even when he commenced Wulf he had various other projects on the go and one of his most beautiful strips was a subject close to his heart, "Don o' the Drums".

This strip which is even less documented than "Wulf the Briton", shows how well versed Embleton was in the very then (1957) vogueish "U.S. Comic Book" school of comic art. This kind of work in U.K. boy's comics  in the 1950's just looked so damn good and even now the strength and dynamism of Embleton's artistry is undimmed.

Once again I have to thank David Slinn for supplying me with some truly outstanding scans of these rarely seen pages from Mickey Mouse Weekly.

Thanks David - and thank you too dear reader for taking the time to check these out.

Strongbow the Mighty - Ron Embleton's early strips

Here's an example, courtesy of David Slinn's archives, of some of Ron Embleton's pre and in tandem Wulf work. By in tandem, I'm alluding to the fact that when Embleton commenced work on Wulf in May 1957, he was still in harness with a couple of black and white strips and this; "Strongbow the Mighty" is one of them. These pages show just what a master of dynamic art Embleton was. And by dynamic, I'm not just referring to his figure work, but also his innate sense of design and his disposition of solid blacks and mid tones. All rendered with a brush, some of which were so fine that they were but a single strand of Sable.

Amazing stuff indeed!

Ian Kennedy - More of the Early Stuff

Back in the days when the young Ian Kennedy was breaking free from just confining himself to working for DC Thomson. The editors at Thomson would have kept Kennedy busy but as an ambitious and driven young artist, Ian wanted to explore all the opportunities that were available to talented young artists, with confident figure work and the ability to handle a variety of subject matters as his early work clearly displays.

So here is his take on the good old days of motor racing:

Ian Kennedy - The Early Stuff

Courtesy of David Slinn, who worked as a comic artist during the U.K.'s "Golden Age" of adventure comics (late '50's - 60's) comes scans of an early Ian Kennedy aeronautic strip. It was published in 1961 in the "Collins Boy's Annual", but bearing in mind the long lead in time for such stories as well as the fact that the annual would have appeared in the autumn of 1960, this strip was probably created in 1959 or early 1960.

Not quite in the league of "Day of Reckoning: - but getting there!

Noo Yoik Noo Yoik!

As visitors to this blog will have noticed there has been a bit of a hiatus while the blogmeister (that is yours truly) has been away on a week's vacation in New York. As a result the old editorial head is still in a bit of a spin and today's blog posting is going to take a consequential lurch in the direction of self indulgence as I post some holiday snaps courtesy of my little brother who also came along (my battery died and it's back up cousin is still awol in NYC).

Observations about New York, is that despite the freak heatwave that arrived with us, it really is a lot more chilled than walking around London. One is not aware of legions of morbidly obese people waddling down the streets - in fact quite the reverse. The whole dynamic of the city is that everybody is out there walking and this activity does in the end keep you pretty fit.

Buttercup yellow taxis are everywhere, but unless it's somewhere bloody obvious then you  need a). to know how to get there so you can direct your cabby and b). to enunciate very carefully your desired destination as some of the taxi drivers are only slightly more recent arrivals than the tourists and their knowledge of English might not be that proficient either.

All adds to the adventure!

It was really wonderful to meet up with our eldest lad and his lovely wife and we did get to see a couple of Soft Skin gigs, the first being at Manhattan's Mercury Lounge and the second at the delightfully scuzzy Don Pedro  bar in Brooklyn. This latter show was truly surreal, as we were joined by another member of the family firm, the lovely Tess who was over on an Amnesty jolly as she described it.



All in all a great way to spend a week - it's all beginning to seem like a long time ago now.