Earlier in the year I collaborated with Sean Michael Wilson and Carl Thompson on an episode of their political cartoon Green Benches, which is published in the magazine Blue and Green Tomorrow.
Carl laid out the page and drew his House of Commons scenes, I then had to draw our hero’s daydream panels.
I put my pencil drawings through the Photoshop watercolour filter (a deed of which I am not proud) and assembled everything, including the lettering, in Manga Studio.
Manga Studio makes lettering a breeze, a far cry from my first attempt at same. Me and Dave Gibbons were sharing a studio (1981, Botham’s Ashes) and I was envious of his ability to letter straight on the board. So when I was asked to draw The Greatest Gamble for Doctor Who Monthly I decided to give it a go.
We’d just bought an electric eraser, a machine so powerful that it regarded the deletion of india ink as a mere baguetelle, so what could go wrong?
To cut a long story short, I had soon erasered a hole through some very thick Bristol Board before I’d even got past the first caption. Grrrr…
7 October 2011 at 15:36
Mick, why were you not proud of passing the pencils through the Photoshop filter? If the end result justified the means….
However, if the filter made your pencils look terrible, then there’s a problem. But your ‘terrible’ is probably my ‘beautiful’.
7 October 2011 at 15:48
Probably because there’s not enough angst…
7 October 2011 at 17:26
These are great drawings. They remind me a bit of Brian Lewis actually. Is the magazine out yet?
7 October 2011 at 17:31
Not yet, but they said it was okay to post the page.
8 October 2011 at 05:13
Nice to see that here Mick, i hope we get to do more work together in the future (as opposed to in the past!). Good to hear about that story of you and Dave Gibbons – 1981 is when I first discovered 2000AD.
8 November 2011 at 18:40
Now I know who the brainy one is, I\’ll keep lokonig for your posts.
8 October 2011 at 05:18
Adrian – I think that issue is coming out later this month, but as Mick says they told me it was ok for him to post it here. I am not sure what is happening with the Green Benches strip next, the publisher has had some ‘restructuring’. But I definitely want to continue this strip one way or another. There have been 6 so far, you can see the rest on MY blog. Also we just did a Scottish themed Green Benches for a Dundee University comic book project, which is also being featured in an exhibition in Belgium.