Please Support The Lengths

Please support my new comics project by pre-ordering copies of the comic, prints and other saucy perks from the fundraising page I've set up for The Lengths. As I think I've probably explained already, it's a comic that I'm drawing the first issue of at the moment and it's about the world of men who sell sex to men in London.

It's based on personal experiences and interviews from a couple of years ago and it's quite a philosophical story about how far you can go before it's too far to turn back to the life you've left behind.

I'm asking for help with funds to cover the printing costs for the first print run and in return you get comics, posters and personal services (not like that...).

If you don't have money to spare, perhaps you'd be kind enough to tell people about the comic or click on the "Feature It!" link at the bottom right of the page.

Thank you.

http://www.indiegogo.com/The-Lengths

After having a nightmare weekend last weekend (um, as opposed to when, on Tuesday, Howard?) where I had awful pain stuff going on, I had to go to hospital for scans and things on Monday because there's a worry I might have had a little kidney stone or something going on. I'd thought it was that, so I've been drinking enough water to make Leah Betts impressed and it looks like the agony I was in over the weekend was us missing the boat with the Monday scans because, if you'll forgive the oversharing (but under-Cher-ing), I'd pissed it out as sand already. That was fun, let me tell you. So, my week started really well. I got to work at the Maritime Museum to find that loads of things I'd thought were really straightforward have turned out to be intensely complex, which wasn't what I wanted to discover when I was still feeling grit shifting around inside my back. That was nice. I think the being ill has knocked me a bit and it's put me behind on working on The Lengths a little, which is frustrating at a time when I want to have my head down and I want to be able to keep working to get it finished soon. That's pretty much all that my heart's telling me I should be doing at the moment, just working on creative stuff and I'm so happy to be able to say that the balance is shifting that way more and more; I just need to make sure I'm not blowtorching the candle at both ends. Of course, the end I want to be flamethrowering seems to be made of dynamite at the moment, which is pretty good - this week I got some very interesting emails about ways to distribute The Lengths, I've been invited to go to the AltComics Festival in Malmö in November and then the day I get back from that, I have to go straight up to Leeds for Thought Bubble where I've been asked to present a paper at their Academic Conference just before the festival itself. I was at the Comica event yesterday and as well as getting to hang out with some lovely people, I got to chat with the very nice Paul Gravett, who gave me some excellent tips for The Lengths, so I'm feeling good about where it's heading now. Saturday night was a performance at Duckie with Jay Hirst where we let people record bespoke news. That was fun, but the best surprise of the night was someone coming up to me and saying, "Didn't you used to have red hair and a spiky rubber bag?" We were at art school in Norwich at the same time! Amazing. Phew. I need a break!

In the best tradition of people who work from home, I’ve been looking around the flat at how much clutter there is that I don’t need any more and wondering why I’m not streamlining my possessions a little bit. The big revelation was that by having a subscription to the amazing t-post for the last couple of years, I’ve accumulated  an extra 24 t-shirts on top of the ones I’d had already and the ones I’ve picked up during that time, taking the total to a draw-cramming and jaw-dropping total of about fifty t-shirts.

Time for a clear-out, I think.

Everywhere I look, there’s clutter. There’s a mountain of comics I don’t feel like I can throw away, even though I’ve not read them again (Runaways, Knights of the Old Republic, far too much Ultimate and X-title stuff, BPRD and early Buffy stuff) and lots of Trade paperbacks and I don’t quite know what they’re there for when someone else could be reading them.

Even the pen drawer is a bit too frightening to open, it’s a catalogue of all the phases I’ve been through with drawing where moments of anxiety about my ability to draw get eaten by a feeling that if I change pens, something magical will happen, but I always end up back with the same basics of technical pens and brush pens and confidence.

There’s a box of balls of yarn that it breaks my heart that if I try to knit it burns my arms with nerve pain, still, even after years of physiotherapy and having had a chunk of my elbow cut away to relieve the pain. I should just sell that.

I was in Muji yesterday, looking at one of those pens that writes in black, red or mechanical pencil and I just wished I’d lived my life like this, sticking to the philosophy I’d learned when I lived in the tiny flat where I set Badger’s tale where the most precious thing was space, so everything I owned had to be multi-purpose and I thought of all the clutter in my rucksack and now I’m looking at all the rubbish that I’ve spent money on that I could have used to print more comics to keep on shelves I’ve filled with clutter.

Yes, it means having a rucksack packed tight like a secret agent’s briefcase, but who wouldn’t want a lightweight, multi-function life like that?  Now I’m not in quite suck a crisis with money, I’d like to be able to buy things I know will last and will work well for longer.

I just need to work out how to let go of these things without it feeling like a waste, then I’m living by the maxim that fewer is more from here on in. Any suggestions for the best use of the stuff that’s cluttering up the flat?

Shop Back Online

My shop was offline for a little while while I changed providers, but I've got a new shop back online that I'm trying out for a little while. I've kept it simple and bundled things together, so you can get both Badger books and a Badger Badge for the discounted price of £10 + postage and you can get the three short sad comics for £5 + postage.

http://cutebutsad.bigcartel.com/