Run

Yesterday evening I was invited to attend the Australian premiere of the NZ short film Run. Last year I was lucky enough to be asked to produce the images for the comic featured in several key sequences of the film, and it was terrific to see my work up on the big screen. Mark and the guys at Sticky Pictures have produced a wonderful little film - it won a Palme d'Or Special Mention at this year's Cannes Film Festival - and I was delighted to hear that they are now planning their first feature.

My comic pages used in the film can be seen here.

Website Update

I've just spent the last couple of days redesigning my website, and it is now considerable cleaner, and now orientated more towards my recent work. No doubt there are still several broken links and other glitches that I'll need to sort over the next few days, but at least the hard bit is done....

Who am I, do I make a difference...

Each morning I wake up, stagger over to my iMac (which, clever thing that it is, is already up and running) and over a hot cuppa joe read about ten or fifteen of the mornings blog entries. Obviously not everyone is a slack as I am with this stuff, but some of these people write blog entries every fucking day! How do they do it? OK, some of them are writers - ex-2000AD bloggerDavid Bishop wants to write for television, and is very determined he's going to get there - but how do artists like Sean Phillips or Ashley Wood do all that work, and STILL find the time to blog about it every day?

Buggered if I know. When I'm busy I don't have the time, or the energy, to keep this thing up to date, and when I'm not busy, I'm too bloody depressed to sit down and blog. Not "damn, when is the next job going to arrive" depressed, real " what the fuck am I doing here, should I just go and slash my wrists" depressed. I never used to be like this, so why should I be now? Does anyone else in the comics business get like this, and if so, how do they cope with these feeling?

Not that I've been navel-gazing for the last few months. I've finished another run of Knights of the Old Republic covers. (Yeah, yeah, I'll post some pics when I get the OK from Dark Horse). Then, about a months ago I got together with a local playwright, and we've been adapting one of his short two-handers into a ten page comic piece. It's all very well drawing colourful characters running around blowing shit up, but two character just talking - and for ten pages - is something else altogether. It's been a challenge, and I think that it has turned out really rather well. I have no idea what we'll do with the story - Tom wants to try and publish it for use in his school drama classes - but it has been fun to do, and i think we've learned something useful.

Some blogs that have cheered me up lately? Rhodri Marsden writes an IT column for the UK daily The Independant and in his spare time plays occasional keyboards for Scritti Politti, and he's such a clever and funny writer he could make opening a can of baked beans sound like something I should be doing in the next five minutes. Only recently have I stumbled across the Pete Townshend blog, and I'm still catching up on this one. Now Townsend is THAT Pete Townshend, guitarist with the Who, and he's currently writing his autobio, and serialising sections of it online. Back in the day the Who were a Real Band, and in about 1972 they released one of the all-time best live records ever - The Who: Live at Leads. Fried lots of brain-cells listening to that one, phasers set on stun. His blog entries about that wonderful period between 1965 and 1969 when rock'n'roll really grew up make for fascinating reading, and I can't wait for his next postings.

And the title of this posting? Comes from a great song Before Hollywood by Chris Bailey, vocalist of that wonderful old Oz rock outfit The Saints. They once released a song called Know Your Product. And their first album was called (I'm) Stranded. Kinda how I feel at the moment....