Agent Provocateur: New World Order.

During the summer of last year I received a call from an editor & old pal of mine Brady Webb, asking me if I'd be interested in working on a comic strip series for the cutting edge lingerie manufacturer & retailer, AGENT PROVOCATEUR. Brady laid out the basic premise, that this was to be a story told in four parts, which was to run in the company's four seasonal catalogues over the subsequent 12 months. Despite my initial concerns that it seemed like I would be squeezing a lot of additional work into an already tight schedule, I decided that it was too good an opportunity to turn down, & hey, you only live once.. right.

The story revolved around a squad of female 'superheroes', each of whom wore various AP outfits as their superhero costumes.

I'll not go into the story in too much depth, basically because after completeing the artwork for the first part of it, I decided that it would be best if I pulled out. Some of the minor problems that I had foreseen prior to starting the gig, had started to manifest, & in even more significant ways than I had suspected. So I never saw the whole story, & the artist which followed me didn't either, since shortly after the second part was completed, the whole management structure at AP changed, & as I understand it, the project was pulled, & the completed second part was never even published.

Anyway, enough of such matters, this post is supposed to be a major 'art dump'.. so here it is, everything I can find on my computer relating to the project. From the initial 'warm up' sketches, designs for a spaceship, layouts of the pages themselves, the finished art, & the original versions some pages which after completion had to be changed. Hope you enjoy.

Comics For Cures Sketchcards

It's been a long time since I posted anything on here, I only hope that there's still someone out there paying attention.

Anyway, for my first post back, here are some sketch cards I did just this week for the Comics For Cures cancer charity. Click the link to see detail of the auction, in which these cards (amongst many others) will be sold to raise funds to help fight this horrible disease.

My next post (if things go the way I have planned), will be a retrospective post, covering all the major projects I have been involved with since last summer.. which was pretty much when I stopped posting on here. Fingers crossed.

The Wales Comicon

Coming up at the end of the month is the next event in this years convention calender. The Wales Comicon takes palce on 27th September at Glyndwr University, Wrexham. I'll be there obviously..(why else would I be mentioning it, right?), but along with yours truely, there will be an impressive guest list from the world of fantasy film/TV (LOTR, Star Wars, Harry Potter, Torchwood, Doctor Who etc) & comics.

I'll be doing my usual stint of signing & sketching (sketches, like the one shown here, will be charged at 10 of your Earth pounds).

Hope to see you all there.

Panini Wolverine cover

I did the cover to a new trade paperback collection of Wolverine stories recently. I'm not sure what the trade was called.. or when it's out.. but I do know that the cover kicks ass.. & here it is..

Also, the original art is currently up for grabs on Ebay.. here's the listing.

The Caped Crusaid & Hero Initiative

Recently I have been asked to participate in a couple of events for charity. Namely.. producing sketches to be auctioned off to raise funds.

For the Caped Crusaid (an AIDS charity) I did 2 sketchcards, Supergirl & Wonder Woman.

For The Hero Initiative I did a Wolverine sketch cover, for their Wolverine 100 project. The Hero Initiative raises money for former comic book industry professionals who have fallen on hard times.

Any similarity between Wolverine & Marcus off of Big Brother is entirely coincidental.

Captain Cymru Private Commission

It's been way too long since I posted anything on here..& there's a lot of stuff to post.. so let's get to it..

First up, here's a private commission I just did for Justin Gillett. The character is Captain Cymru, who is (I imagine) the 'Captain Britain' or maybe 'Captain Wales' from some alternate reality in Marvel's Universe... if I sound a bit vague, it's because I am...

A similar commission will set you back £50 + postage. However, I give no guarentees that I'll do it in color.. I just go with the flow, & do whatever feels right to me at the time..

Old Artwork #4

Continuing the theme of 'blasts from the past', here's a thing I did back in 1988. At the time I was producing comic strips & short story illustrations for an independant role playing magazine. The editors offered me a half page spot to run a promotional advertisement piece... I think as a 'payment in kind' sorta thing, since they didn't pay that well.

The piece shows a bunch of the characters I had drawn for the magazine, & a couple from another side project I was working up with a writer friend, Paul Hayes.

Amazingly this didn't generate any new commissions whatsoever..lol

The other pieces are various charater 'spot' illustrations I did for fanzines, between '84 & '87

Old Artwork #3

Back in the late 1980's I did the cover to a record by British heavy metal band Excalibur. Sadly I dont have a copy of this work of genius to show you. However, the fact that this album sleeve featured a painting of a female back side in a thong did mean that a few other bands came to me & asked for 'a cover like the one you did for Excalibur'.

Around 1988-89 I was asked to do a cover for a record by another British heavy metal band, this time called Wraith, & guess what.. they wanted something like the Excalibur thing. I completed a whole series of color roughs, all of which were based on the original premise provided to me by the band, via their record company. The record was to be called either 'Control Yourself' or 'Scarred for Life'. In the end, I didnt do the finished art, & as I understand when the album finally surfaced, the band had opted for a photograph of themselves as the sleeve image. As was typical.. I was never payed for the roughs I did. Here's a few of them, all done in a mixture of ink, colored ink, some colored pencil, conté crayon & gouache.

BTW... like I sad.. it was the 80's.

Old Artwork #2

Back in the early 80's, when I was 'working' (I use the term losely, because no payment was involved, but it was superb practice) fairly regularly producing strips & illustrations for fanzines, I decided one day that I needed to try to work the way the 'pro's did.... that's to say.. working fast!! So I set myself the task of producing a page of pencils & inks per day.. as an exercise, to see what standard I could ahieve with those time constraints.

So I took an episode of Rogue Trooper, & reverse engineered it to come to a reasonable approximation of what the working script may have been, then gave myself a week.. Monday to Friday, to produce the five pages of art... just like I knew my primary artistic influence (Dave Gibbons) could do & did.

Truth is, I didn't complete the full five pages. There was bits & peices on all that needed finishing up. A backgound that needed inking here... a face that needed redrawing there etc. But despite that it was a useful exercise, & a good learning experience.

Here's one of the pages from that experiment.

Old Artwork

I havn't posted anything in a while, so I've decided to show you a bunch of old stuff. From the 80's & early 90's. Starting with this piece.

This was a character design thing I did for a RPG back in '92-ish. Painted in acrylics. If I remember rightly, I was turned into a lifesize standee for store displays... not that I ever saw one.

Big Ebay sale

Just letting you guys know that theres a massivesale of my work on Ebay currently.
Below is a selection of some of the pages on offer.