Last Hours » Edd

Sketches on tour day one

Edd — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 23:55:13 +0000

Some pages from the visual diary I’m keeping (apologies for poor image quality. I’ll try and work out a better way to photograph the pages tomorrow)

Travelling – day zero

Edd — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 00:43:50 +0000

Ten hours into the tour. Through Dallas passport control, one veggie burger down, and on the final leg to Portland.

Death of a salesman

Edd — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 07:16:33 +0000

It was going to be too expensive to ship lots of copies of Excessive Force across to the USA so I decided to re-publish the ‘Ian Tomlinson, G20 and Bad Apples’ story as a stand alone comic, along with the afterword, and one of the anti-police essays alongside it. Anyhow, I decided to redo the covers. Above: the front cover; below: back cover…

The Wall: an allegory

Edd — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 06:58:40 +0000

I’ve been working on this off and on for a coupla months now, and just got it finished in time to print the first 32 pages for tour in the USA. It’s a silent comic re-imagining the Wind in the Willows from a bucolic idyll to a dystopia full of walls, checkpoints, bulldozers and trigger happy conscripts. I’m pretty happy with how it’s turned out so far – I’m excited to see it at how it will look once it’s printed by the cool people at 1984 printing.

I’ll have copies on tour in the USA if you want a copy (http://zinesontoast.org) if you live Stateside, but will hopefully have some to bring back to Blighty in five weeks time!

Birmingham zine fest postcard

Edd — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 07:40:10 +0000

I finally got this done for the Birmingham Zine Fest postcard exhibition. Not 100% happy with it, but I didn’t have much time, so you know! Both the Birmingham Zine Fest, and the exhibition, look like they’ll be great though. It’s happening the 10th – 12th of September.

In other news, I finally got my zines finished for the USA tour. I’ll post some info on them later this week.

Ian Tomlinson afterword

Edd — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 09:48:22 +0000

I’m going on tour in the States during August/ September (www.zinesontoast.org), and am going to print up some copies of the ‘The G20, bad apples and Ian Tomlinson’ story as a stand alone zine (it first appeared in Excessive Force) because sending out Excessive Force was gonna be too expensive.

Anyhow, I decided to write an afterword to the story after Keir Starmer, the Director of Public Prosecutions, declared that there would be no charges brought against PC Simon Harwood in connection with the death of Ian Tomlinson. The whole thing looks like a complete stitch-up, and the comic runs through some of the inconsistencies. If you want to read more about it I think Keir Starmer’s speech when he announced there’d be no charges brought is the most insightful – it’s a fairly brazen argument about why the CPS won’t be recommending prosecution. The Guardian newspaper put it up in full here.

Click the images to see a version that’s easier to read.

The cut banjo string

Edd — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 13:49:34 +0000

My friend Chris 12o5 is putting together a zine called ‘Once more with morphine’. I’ve not had any experience with morphine, but I do seem to have spent too much time around hospitals in my young adult life. Anyhow, I thought I’d draw a short comic about having my frenulum cut – the short bit of skin that connects the foreskin to the head of the penis – because it was too short (Frenulum breve). According to an article in the Guardian Frenulum breve affects 5% of uncircumcised blokes, but I guess doesn’t get talked about much so thought I’d draw a comic about the process (which was thankfully much less painful than Jonathan Cope who wrote the article on the Guardian!).

(click on the images to see a readable version)

p.s. I should point out that some of this is exaggeration, especially the photo of the exploded penis (I found it online whilst looking into the operation, I believed it at the time, less convinced now. It was easier for the consultant to tell me about it in the comic!)!

Birthday presents

Edd — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 20:56:07 +0000

Still busy with getting comics ready for the Zines on Toast tour (which hopefully I’ll post up here soon). In the meantime it was the birthday for both my Dad and sister last weekend. I made this for my sister:

It’s making fun of her new house, and DIY plans.

Then for my dad:

A travel ticket for an adventure we’re going on in October…

Est-ce que tu peux parler un peu de français?

Edd — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 21:20:39 +0000

So it’s a week until my French exam. Hence the lack of new updates with real illustration work. At the moment any spare moment is being pored into these sodding cards. I have hundreds of the things now with random bits of vocabulary I think I should know. Here’s some of the ones I made this evening. All about negative emotions and TV (points if you can decode what the little symbols mean!). It’s good, I guess, I’m learning lots of new words (who knew the French decided to Francophone Sauerkraut?). But this whole learning another language is way harder than it’s cracked up to be. Anyhow, hopefully next Tuesday/ Wednesday I’ll pass the DELF B2 I’m sitting and be able to have a break from it for a while. Long enough at least to work out how to get from my fumbling intermédiaire avancé level to somewhere approaching fluency without moving to the country… Anyhow, card illustrations:

A quick guide to Israeli-English

Edd — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 21:34:06 +0000

There’s been a curious language barrier when listening to Israeli politicians and military personnel talk about the recent murders of nice peace activists taking aid to the Gaza strip. Perplexed? Well I’ve created a brief visual summary of translations between Israeli-English and the everyday language most English speakers use so that everyone can better understand what the likes of Mark Regev, Ehud Barak and Benjamin Netanhayu are going on about…
[N.B. The poster still needs to have footnotes added in. I just wanted to get it online; I'll add footnotes tomorrow.]

I think this needs some more work, but you get the general idea: Israeli politicians use logic that doesn’t resemble earth logic… Oh, there’s a 300dpi (high res) version here if you’re interested! Or, if you just wanna see the text bigger there’s a version with 1000px width here.