Ryan	Emily	Asia	Sarah
Toby	Roxie	Angie	Jim E
Dannel	Adam	Neil	Toshia
Patricia	Mitchuation	Liz	Evan
Elliot	Garret	Kendra	Katie
Robert	Tobias	James	Thomas

DAPHNY

Twitter: @jamesharveytm

tumblr: harveyjames.tumblr.com

I have some announcements to make soon regarding Zygote, folks, but I promise not to leave you in the dark for too long. Meantime I’ve been uploading a lot of images new and old to my Tumblr, so you should keep an eye on that- http://harveyjames.tumblr.com

I thought I’d show you some of the art from my section of the book. I was far outside of my comfort zone with this, and I feel like I’ve learned a lot about making comics in the 6 months since then- but all the same, I’m pleased with how parts of it came out.

Here’s the first page. My chapter is set in 1989, and I wanted to show that this was a time when people held onto their old things more than they do now- the ancient transistor radio, the Gnasher badge. I remember my sister’s 20-something friends still had all their old Beano annuals.

Nel also has a badge that says ‘A Good Mate Of Ted’ – this is a badge that Ted Chippington, a local comedian my eldest sister dated, would give out. Ted is sort of a cult figure. You can see a short BBC documentary on him here.

I wanted my chapter to be a breather from the previous few, so I took Nel out into the countryside and had her meet a whole bunch of new people. I tried to give every new character I added to the book a backstory.  Force, Kerry and Robbie all have a history and a reason to be hanging out. I imagined them to be friends who grew up next to each other, and that Robbie, the youngest, never quite caught up to everyone else mentally or emotionally. They take him along on their adventures right now, but there’s the sense that they’ll inevitably drift apart.

I have no idea how much of that bled onto the page. I’m gonna suspect that like the farmer’s white power t-shirt and missing finger, which I think are covered by a speech balloon on the final page, these will be nuances that got lost in the mix.

I truly wonder how much of what I tried in this thing I managed to pull off. The character dynamics were so clear to me- Kerry’s motherly instinct to Nel and Robbie, her platonic relationship to Force, Force’s tentative sexual attraction to Nel, Robbie’s asexual relationship to everyone- but I guess I just wasn’t confident enough of my abilities as a writer for it to truly shine through. I think that day by day, I’m getting better at this stuff.

Finally, here’s the cover of the ‘zine that Nel hands to The Force at the campfire on the last page. It’s based on the ‘zine I made when I was 19, the age Nel is in the strip. I didn’t want to fall into the trap of turning Nel into an autobiographical stand-in, but since a lot had been made about her liking and making comics in the previous chapters I decided it’d be silly not to run with that.

Yeah, the book is making a lot of waves! I can’t deny it feels good to be a part of the thing everyone seems to be talking about right now. We were graphic novel of the month in The Observer, and a few other places. I’m hoping it’ll help put Blank Slate on the map, and I’m very proud that the logo I designed is on the spine. If you want to buy it, go here. All proceeds go to Shelter.

Zygote’s coming on good, by the way. As far as I know, Walk Don’t Run is good to go for January. I’m gonna be starting a web-only series on here shortly, too. I’m liking what I’ve got for it so far. Stay tuned- I’m @harveyjamestm on twitter, as always.

As a comic book artist, I listen to a lot of podcasts while I draw. I can’t help but build a mental picture of the radio personalities I listen to, so I’m going to illustrate and examine this process- what did they look like in my head, and how did my perception of them change once I knew what they looked like?

I listened to the show once,  and drew five of the hosts. I’d never heard of the show or any of the hosts before, so I sketched them as I was listening. Then, I looked up their photographs on the internet and sketched quick portraits of the real people, as a point of comparison. So: very fast work, based on snap judgements! Let’s see what happened.

I’m trying to place the actress the imagined woman on the left looks like.  A very distorted Joan Cusack, maybe? Whoever she is, she’s far more severe and unapproachable-looking than the real Linda Wertheimer. Linda’s voice exudes a professionalism and confidence. I wonder why I made her look like such a bad person?

Self-realisation: I’m probably a secret misogynist.

Steve Inskeep, in reality, is far more… DYNAMIC-looking than the guy I imagined. I’m from Britain. It’s a pretty different world! Over here we don’t usually get dudes who look like Wall Street traders or car salesmen reading the news, so I guess it’s natural that I imagined this guy who looks like a kindly uncle, as comfortable a presence as an old pair of slippers.

Self-realisation: I’m British.

It seems strange, too, that I imagined Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, this beautiful and professional-looking woman to look like a slightly batty community librarian. Where do these character types from? What caused me to socially debase this woman so thoroughly- why did my imagination take away the status and respect she’s worked so hard for all her life?

Self-realisation: I’m also a secret racist.

Jeff Brady, then. Something in this man’s voice made me imagine him to be a lot younger than he is. That… is flattering, perhaps! My mental image of the guy is possibly not so flattering. I’d have to listen to the show again to figure out exactly what it was in Jeff’s voice that made me imagine this albino ghoul of man, who one can only imagine holed up in his mother’s attic, stalking around at odd hours eating slimy yoghurt from a brass receptacle.

Self-realisation: I need to move out of my mother’s attic.

Finally, what happened here?  On the right, there’s  venerable and golden-voiced broadcaster Corey Flintoff- but on the left, what a hunk. But no surprise, this time. Corey Flintoff’s voice is masculine.

This man gets laid. This is fact. You could stick a tank of lab rats on top of the speaker and after Corey Flintoff had finished speaking, they’d all be pregnant.

Self-realisation: I wish I was Corey Flintoff.

Hey, if you liked this, I’m @harveyjamestm on twitter. If I drew you, please feel totally free to use my image for whatever you like. Later on!

That was one of the take-away messages from my time spent helping out on the Blank Slate stall at Thought Bubble on Sunday. Annie Koyama’s wonderful books, which we help to distribute, were irresistible to visitors to our table- their colorful and playful colours begged to be picked up and thumbed through. My own book, however, needed a bit more of a push.

As I told the people I sold to that day- I can see why that is! Its gloomy colours, its seemingly morose subject matter- it seems grim. It seems like no fun.  The cover perfectly compliments the book’s contents, and yet at the same time drives consumers away. It’s a tough hard sell to the average reader.

See, the thing about that is- everyone who gives it a read seems to love it. Those who have have told me that it’s funny, moving,  memorable. They’re noticing it has layers of meaning that they didn’t unpack the first time around. It seems to be hitting all the right notes. Check out what people wrote about this thing:

Woodrow Pheonix told me lines from the book have become catchphrases in his household, even. That… is something I’m proud of! You can buy the book right here.

I wish I could do what I did at the Thought Bubble con and just put an advert for my stuff above a rollerskating girl’s butt, but that isn’t possible on the internet.  So, if you like the book and you want to join my legion of honorary rollerskating butts, you can:

- tweet this blog post!

-or, retumbl’ it

- you can also follow me on twitter: @harveyjamestm .

-if you’ve read the book, it’d be way cool if you could write a review of it, and let me know.

More comics will be posted here soon!

Comedy Bang Bang is one of the highlights of my week. At best, it’s what I always wished radio was. It reminds me of the Chris Morris Music Shows from the early 90′s- there’s a blending of fact and fiction, improvisation mixed with scripted material that gives you a sense that anything can happen. I feel like the host, Scott Aukerman has created something both magical and hilarious with this show.

(update: man, this thing got like a thousand hits! Well, if you’re still reading this, please follow me on tumblr or twitter, you [insert appropriate racial slur])

The first time I heard Scott was on Jordan Jesse Go!, a show I mentioned yesterday. On Bang Bang, Scott’s job is to drive the show, which means that comedically he often hangs back on the “base line”, giving the guests as much room as possible to be funny. On JJGo, however, he had the freedom to take the spotlight, and I so I heard a side of Scott that Bang Bang listeners don’t often get to hear. You can read about how I arrived at the drawings above after the jump.

Scott seemed to have a big personality on the show. For my money, he was probably the funniest guy they’d ever had on, and I warmed to him quickly. Some combination of his voice, his larger-than-life catchphrase adopted for that episode only (‘Hello, Baaaby!’)  and his purposely bad R+B song parody alter-ego ‘Weirder Scott’ gave me the impression that Mr. Aukerman had a physical flamboyancy to match his radio persona.

I listened to more of his show, Comedy Bang Bang, and grew to love it. But the more I knew about this guy, the more my picture didn’t add up. Wait, this deep-tanned, bouffanted, slab-faced flamboyant comedian has a Laotian wife and loves showtunes?! I started to imagine his house with decorated with gold taps, water beds and black marble cladding, perhaps with a water feature depicting a cherub in the middle of his Hollywood Hills mansion.

A big bubble was burst the moment I found that Scott looks like… a totally normal dude.

My fantasy image of the guy dissipated, but the new Scott totally worked as a replacement. I guess Scott’s relative normality makes him the perfect anchor to a show like Bang Bang, giving the guests a more robust framework within which to be hilarious.

Scott Aukermann as he is is extremely likeable. Now the question is- was the flamboyant and ambiguous character I imagined, who was starting to seem more like a gay movie villain day by day, more or less likable than the real Aukerman?

I’d say more, but only by a whisker. I’m not saying the real Scott should probably try to make himself more like that character. Satin dressing gowns and hair bleach are very easy to come by, however, so if you’re reading, Mr. Aukerman- it wouldn’t be too much trouble to consider giving it a shot.

Well, that’s it for now! Holy crap, though- I really drew a lot of these, so I may post some more up from time to time.

By the way, I was in Birmingham yesterday to be interviewed about Nelson, the book I contributed to for Blank Slate. I saw that my book is available on shelves, already- I’m stunned! I only got my copy a week ago. Here it is on the left, along with Nelson in the Birmingham branch of Forbidden Planet:

If you’d like to read a preview of my James-Teacher book, you can do that right here. Or buy it (why not)

The Sound Of Young America is maybe the first podcast I ever got into. TSOYA and its sister show Jordan Jesse Go! were the first time I heard the format that I’ve since heard repeated many times- in-depth interviews with creative people who might not get the attention they deserve, and informal chats with comedians and other funny people. There’s a thousand shows doing the same thing, but man! It’s a good gateway podcast. It introduced me to a lot of stuff I went on to check out and love to this day.

[UPDATE 17/11/11] I feel like it would be remiss not to add a disclaimer, here: a couple of people (not least the subjects of the caricature themselves) have expressed their distaste at these drawings. It’s been pointed out to me that my caricatures are unfair and severely unflattering- having checked their photos again, I realise that there’s a ring of truth to that. These drawings may be just too negatively slanted to be taken in the spirit with which they were intended. Jordan and Jesse are two normal-looking guys! It’s entirely possible that my radar was totally off. The write-up below reflects my initial impressions of the two hosts- it seems, though, that my impressions of the ‘real’ Jordan and Jesse suffer from just as much funhouse mirror distortion as my imagined versions.

As before, I’ve written a bunch about the thought process behind today’s image after the jump.

So the show painted a very clear picture in my mind of who these people were. Jordan and Jesse have perfected a very traditionalist, old-timey style of radio which serves as a counterpoint to the pop culture references and boner gags that are the backbone of their comedy. Jesse Thorn has a honeyed, golden radio voice that British humorist Chris Morris once accused him of affecting for the show- Jordan Morris’s voice sounds very young and chipper, and provides a perfect counterpoint. I guess it’s easy to see where their nicknames, ‘America’s Radio Sweetheart’ and ‘Boy Detective’, respectively, came from.
I imagined them looking like this:

All right. Now- later I checked them out and saw a photograph of them. Predictably, they didn’t have the movie-star looks I expected. They’re easy to find pictures of, though- they’re both TV hosts for Fuel TV and IFC respectively. Now- I’m not the greatest caricaturist I know. People tend not to like the drawings I do of them, so take this with a pinch of salt, but they basically look like this:

Though they’re not bad-looking dudes, Jordan and Jesse don’t inspire the same kind of confidence with their personal appearance as they do with their voices.  Perhaps as a result, I started to pick up on things in the shows I hadn’t noticed before.  I started to notice the disdain and lack of respect that certain guests on Jordan Jesse Go! occasionally show to the hosts. A number of professional comedians who came on the show seemed to never miss an opportunity to belittle one or more of the hosts- particularly Jesse- or treat them as low status, in a way that often seemed more like bullying than playful ribbing. Maybe now I knew what they looked like, I was looking out for this.

As someone who spent his life up to about age 25 with tremendously bad skin and crooked teeth, I know a thing or two about physical insecurity. Noticing their appearance led me to question their overbearingly self-confident way the hosts carry themselves, and my mind jumped to the conclusion that it might be a way of compensating for their own insecurities and lack or self-worth. Perhaps I was just projecting.

Furthermore, on the show Jesse’s sexuality is often called into question. At first, I thought nothing of it. When I saw what he looked like, however, I think I understood- he really does have the appearance and demeanour of a fancy gay gentleman. Jesse married his childhood sweetheart who he’d dated since school- was Jordan really only joking when he suggested on the show that they were a ‘couple of beards for each other’? I now began to wonder!

Even if they don’t look like movie stars from the 40′s, nothing could change the fact that Jesse and Jordan seem like genuine class acts and nice guys. Their show is an institution in podcasting. If you’d like to listen to their show or go to see about getting tickets to one of their MAXFUN conventions, go to http://www.maximumfun.org .
Tomorrow, the final installment- my drawings of Scott Aukerman from Comedy Bang Bang!

Today: WTF Podcast’s Marc Maron

I find it hard to read a book without imagining what the author looks like. I’ve never seen a picture of Charles Dickens, but just the syllables of his name conjures up this rotund, ruddy, pleasant faced-man, dressed in gentleman’s finery with his remaining hair neatly kempt and lacquered. Where that image comes from, I’m not sure- but I think we all do a form of this, whether we’re conscious of it or not.

I remember being 10 and being a huge Terry Pratchett fan-  I had a distinct vision of him as this wiry 30-year-old man with a thin moustache, like a cockney spiv. When he got famous enough to be on TV in the mid-90s, I was disappointed- it turned out he was fat and bald, with a white beard and a lisp- he would hit on his young female fans, and his sense of humour that played so well on the page fell flat in the real world…

And of course, finding out what he looked and sounded like changed my perception of his books, as much as I didn’t want that. It just happened. If I’d been tuned-in enough to analyse why my view on his books changed, I might have said it was because while before I could see him as a friend or a father figure, I now saw him as a creepy old eccentric, a deluded Bill Oddie-like figure of indeterminate sexuality and motive. I was yet to grow out of his books entirely- I just found it harder to identify with Pratchett’s world, and belong to his club. My view of the artist affected the way I viewed the art.

I want to examine how this process plays out now I’m an adult, so I’ve turned my eye to something I have a lot of familiarity with, as someone who works from home- the world of podcasting. Read about the thought process behind today’s image after the jump!

WTF Podcast’s Marc Maron.

Like a lot of people, I love listening to Maron’s show. I’m British, so I’d never heard of 90% of the comedians Marc interviews before he had them on as guests. For that reason, the show is like a portal to another world for me- who are these characters they refer to, like Lorne Michaels, or Mitzi, Dice, or Rodney? They could have been talking about Narnia, for all the sense it initially made to me. But like any fantasy story, you begin to learn who the characters are, and feel familiar and at home with the world the show transports you to.

The first time I heard Maron was as a guest on Comedy Bang Bang, and it was before Maron’s show had really started to really pick up. Maron spent much of the episode talking about his grisly life immediately after his wife left him- three months spent jerking off and eating junk food. He got involved with an improvisation with sketch troupe The Birthday Boys (playing a bizarro version of themselves, the ‘Wacky Ding Dongs’) , but it was clear he wasn’t entirely at home with that kind of comedic dynamic.  Since I wasn’t at all familiar with Maron’s stage persona or material, for all I knew he was just an angry, difficult guy who talked about jerking off and eating snacks.

So, maybe this is why I went into my first episode of WTF  imagining him to look something like this guy, here:

This guy- he kind of looks like a legacy silicon valley computer programmer, maybe a dude who sold Steve Jobs his computer design in 1981 for three tabs of acid and a stack of Dr. Strange comics and was never the same afterwards. My imagination was not giving Maron much credit, here!

Of course, I got a better sense of Marc’s personality after listening to a few episodes of his own show. He’s a comic who’s seen by his peers as having the potential to be truly great- who spent his first 20 years of his career starting regrettable beefs and resentments with said peers and who uses his show to try and smooth things over, and undo the damage. Maron’s insightful interview style, coupled with this narrative of penitence and making amends makes for very revealing and unguarded interviews.

It’s easy to see why his show is so wildly popular. Despite (or perhaps because of) his angst, he’s a generally lovable guy and judging by the reader mail he reads out on the show, he seems to provide some kind of a surrogate father figure for his male and female fans alike. So I wasn’t too surprised to find that Maron really looks something like the picture below.

Visually, Marc has a kind of Frank Zappa, Lenny Bruce thing going on. It makes sense. He’s a huge admirer of Keith Richards, Bill Hicks, and the visual image he projects lines up with that. I’d say there was a strange dichotomy between the rebellious, classic rock ‘n’ roll way he styles himself and the cuddly, baked goods scarfing, cat-adopting comfortable life he’s snuggling into now his show is popular. In this instance, I’d say Marc’s actual appearance didn’t change the way I perceived his radio persona, besides lend it more charisma- but holy heck, what a break from my first impression of the man.

This one was pretty straightforward. Over the course of this week I’m going to post a couple more of these- you might find the results of some of them to be pretty surprising.
Tomorrow I’m going to show you my drawings of Jordan and Jesse from The Sound Of Young America. Do not miss it (/|:=|)

I made these wee posters to promote ‘em. Click through to order the books. There’s also a preview of the James-Teacher book down at the bottom, after the jump.

Alright! So- after the jump, you can read a 7-page preview of the James-teacher comic. Hit it!

All right. Welp, this is my first proper book- I’m pretty pleased with how it came out, so please pick up a copy when you can! Click here to order.