Time management.

Yeah. You can tell there's only a couple of weeks to go before the hand-in date for my MA and that The Lengths issue 3 goes to press next week and comes out in a month? Time management's a wonderful thing. Means I get to take videos of people feeding squirrels in the park sometimes.

The Lengths 3: Ford Closes A Deal

Ford closes a deal. (Click for full-size image) 

I'm just finishing issue 3 of The Lengths, ready for it to go to the printers. I thought I'd share this one page from it with you where Eddie, in his alter-ego as escort Ford, shows his assertive side and makes a sale. Yes, there's a slight dig back at Chester Brown's Paying for It, where he, as a John, barters with sex workers, I'll admit that now, and yes, I have turned gay saunas into a Pac-Man game where you're chasing ghosts around in circles. I think I've just ruined any chance of them ever seeming sexy again - I'll just hear endless sound effects now.

Anyway, you can pick up issues one and two of The Lengths from my web shop, then issue 3 comes out at the beginning of September when my MA show goes up at Camberwell. Issue 4 will be out at the start of December. I think I might just need a party for that, don't you?

Betwixt at the Trafalgar Studios

So, last night, I got to see Betwixt!, which is playing at the Trafalgar Studios on Whitehall. I was a tiny bit geeking out about going because of the cast and had been wondering if Peter Duncan was going to be wearing a green checked suit or pushing his hand into anything squishy and poisonous to nod to the nerds in the audience, but mainly because of Ellen Greene being in it. I'll freely admit to keeping the DVD of Little Shop of Horrors though my ongoing sprees of throwing out pretty much all of my possessions and despite my misgivings about the edition I own not subtitling the songs (it's a fucking musical, what the hell are they thinking?) but that story of vaulted ambition and the grimy love story between the clumsy plant nerd and the love-bruised woman who can't see any more that she might still be deserving of love after the things she's done to survive? Totally essential education for all young people. I can't imagine for one minute why I had it on repeat, or why Sheridan Smith's Audrey had me crying when I saw it.

Still, to have the chance to come to a tiny studio theatre and hear Ellen Greene sing almost totally eclipsed any thought about what the musical might be like until we actually went in and I turned to Paul and said, "What if it's shit?"

Luckily, it wasn't bad at all. It's a really sweet story about a writer who can't find his next story and the avalanche of camp of a room-mate who flounce-tumbles into his life and how they sing their way at moments of emotional crisis into a magical world of evil princesses with supernatural powers, transplanted daytime-tv celebrities, post-decapitation romance and a fucking amazing kick up the arse song at the end from Greene about doing the things you know you should because they're beautiful.

It's a good response to a recession to react with joy and love in aggressive quantities. Yes, the bleak reminders that it's bleak are bleak reminders that it's bleak, but in many ways, a fun, camp, joyous musical about the magic of creativity is a really important call to arms right now, and I'm not for a minute going to slap that kind of sentiment down.

At the after show party, there were some people making comments about how it couldn't transfer to a larger theatre as though that were a bad thing. Some things are best kept away from that kind of machine. This is great for what it is, it's theatre that couldn't be anything but theatre and it's lovely for that. I don't think I'd have enjoyed it from a distance or in a crowd and I think the sentiment would be diluted if it were part of that kind of a machine.

I also got to meet and briefly speak to Ellen Greene at the party - much as I'd love to pretend she was some sleb or something, she came across as a wonderful, passionate woman who really cared about what she does and was engaged with how the message of her work came across, even if it involves her dressing in leather and fishnets to do it.

Yup, you caught me on an effusive day. I'll get back to being cynical soon, don't you worry.

The New Cross Code

While we were organising New Cross Turn Left, Ellen and I kept hitting these little amusing blips of panic, where we'd go from being excited lion cubs into being scattered little mice. (Ooh, mice! Cute!)

When we got emails from people saying, "Oh, I didn't realise..." or  "How do I get there?" or when we realised we'd (well, I'd) not left enough time to do important tasks, we fell back on these three lines of defence against fuckwittage, stress and general meepage, whether it came from within or without.

If we were getting even the slightest bit stressed, or people were getting stressed out at us, or even in our vicinity, the New Cross Code came into play.

1: Chill the actual fuck out.
2: It's a party, remember?
3: Bitch, please. Did you not get the first two?

I think we've accidentally stumbled on some very useful rules to live by.

Bitch please. It's a party, remember? Chill the actual fuck out.

And yes, the swearing is important. This is New Cross. These things are an important part of our cultural heritage. We're both from very posh suburban households, so when we do a "bitch, please" face, it's with the subtlest narrowing of the eyes, the pursing of the lips and the most fantastic hair you could imagine.

On (Dis) Closure

At New Cross Turn Left yesterday, when I wasn't doing the usual organiser thing of being slightly panicked and poking my head around like a meerkat, making sure everything was okay and that nothing terrible had gone too badly wrong (someone laughed at me when I went to the bar with a pencil sharpener because they'd been using the same pencil for the tally sheet for a few hours), I actually had the chance to talk to a few people about The Lengths and it's started me thinking again about the way that the story I tell about the story shifts slightly when I tell it to different people.

It's a terribly judgemental way of being, and it's based on some horribly feral fear, I'm sure. When I talk to some, I play up the angle that it's about relationships and that it's about the interplay between art and mental health; with others I'll talk about how it emerged from a time when I hung out with loads of whores and dealers and porn stars and was out clubbing every weekend and it became strange to see a body that wasn't gym-trained or pupils that weren't splayed wide. Looking back, I'm not sure if I feel more pride about being able to spot the Titian in the National Gallery's major exhibition that the curators and I thought wasn't his or getting used to being able to tell what point someone was at on their steroid cycles.

Hues of pink and the turn of a brush or the puff of bulking and burning.

Ultimately, being able to give a talk on the Baccante doesn't preclude living like one of their number, so this urge to compartmentalise myself - an urge to divide and adapt - literally (and I use that to mean "on the level of a symbol within a story" not, "this is a historically accurate truth") would tear me apart.

It's ridiculous, really, because I think it's pretty obvious that I wouldn't be able to write a story like The Lengths without some personal experience beyond the interviews I did and that the emotional core of it is bound to be, on some level or another, autobiographical. Ex boyfriends who read it give me a look and say, "This is about why we needed to break up, isn't it?"

Having a life where you have to keep more than one CV is not a life and it'd be a misnomer to say it's a curriculum vitae. Of course you can't tell everyone everything, but this way of being where you need to remember which thing you have and haven't told which person is the kind of which-craft I think is a black art that's just toxic.

I make a comic about drug using dog-headed whores in London. I'm okay with that. The chances are that my concerns about it being too personal are totally misplaced and that, like my ex boyfriends, when you read it, it'll turn out that it's about you as much as it is about me and that we're all making the same stupid mistakes that Eddie's making.

--

If you've not picked up your copy of The Lengths yet, you can buy issues 1 and 2 from your local UK comics store or from my web shop here. I'll be giving a talk about The Lengths at Laydeez Do Comix on the 22nd of August. Issue 3 will be in shops in the first week of September, which is also when I have my MA show at Camberwell College of Arts and will have a little display of my work and my sketchbooks and development work from The Lengths up. The Private View (which, of course, you're all invited to) is on the 6th of September from 6pm and I'll have issues 1-3 to sell, as well as my other books and prints and other stuff there too.

All I can ever be to you is the darkness that we know.

In a weekend overshadowed by news of death, once again comes an inevitable temptation to protest about some perception that there should be some hierarchy of grief, some way in which the news of what happened in Oslo should eclipse the death of Amy Winehouse, or that those speaking of their sadness at her death are disrespecting those who died in the insane, brutal tragedy in Norway.

There's no such thing, of course.

Of course we find our feelings about Amy Winehouse's death a lot simpler to articulate. It's closer, in many respects, to many of us. The songs she wrote reflected truths about the way I've been - and am - living; her death is once again a reminder that it's a dangerous game I'm playing by living outside of the nine to five cage that would choke me far faster than I'd gag on my own tongue from kissing cute punk boys and tasting the ketamine on their smile or from using mine to lose hours chatting about art to the beautiful people whose love without which I'd surely drown.

I cheated myself,
Like I knew I would
I told you I was trouble,
Yeah, you know that I'm no good.

The death of one intimate stranger; the deaths of hundreds of strangers. There's no hierarchy, just that one's easier to talk about, easier to relate to.

I was at Justin Vivian Bond's show at the Soho Theatre a couple of weeks back and there was a line there about listening in to some people sharing coke in a toilet, saying "take what you need and give a little back" and how that should be the basis of a new economy. I think there's a kind of resonance there. Although Justin Vivian Bond's not one of the performers where that music's as if they found my letters and read each one out loud, there were clearly people in the audience for whom it was.

What kind of fuckery is this?

One man, alienated from the people around him, motivated, it seems, by a twisted drive to cause as deep a wound as possible between faiths and his people. It makes me cold to hear people describe "religious extremism" as a term to justify terrorist behaviour. His actions were not religiously motivated, just as the bombings in London or the attacks in New York were not religious in nature. They were the actions of wounded, angry people lashing out.

To say it's the actions of one madman is to distance ourselves from his actions, to wash our hands of him and to say that we have no collective responsibility for one another's actions as a community.

What he did really wasn't that difficult. Face it, I've done a chemistry GCSE. I pissed around and spent more time making the bunsen burners into flamethrowers and wishing I could get my hands on some magnesium to watch it burn, but if I could figure out that level of simple mischief, then I'm aware that it'd be a piece of piss for me to go online, read a little, then visit the chemist downstairs, some of the hair supplies shops in Deptford and a few other shops and I could make a viable device that'd get a much better kill ratio than the ten for every suicide that the 7/7 bombers managed, proving that it was a lack of education that led them to feel so horribly alienated, more than a religious imperative.

In some ways, we can take solace and draw faith from the knowledge that we all could do what this one man did - when I saw a man kick another man to death all those years ago in Leeds, my fear for a long while was that he could have been any of us; that we al have the capacity to kill with that kind of feral brutality, without needing weapons or plans. It took a few years to realise how amazing it is that we're all carrying with us the capacity for murder, but we do not.

It's beautiful, really, to think that this kind of thing doesn't happen more often. That we look after one another well enough that when a woman loses her job, she doesn't drive her car straight through those kids crossing the road; that we don't let out those little demons we have on our shoulders all the time. That we know the wickedness and cruelty we're capable of, but that we choose to cage those monsters and instead co-exist.

Where we've let people down, I think, is with looking at people like Amy Winehouse and the man in Norway and by seeing them as different to ourselves. By saying we find a drug addict hard to relate to, then rushing out to pick up Now! to get a fix of schadenfreude is a cruel irony. To say we don't understand how someone goes berserk and attacks people, then to change seats on the bus to avoid sitting next to the person you think looks a bit weird means you're a part of the problem that creates those monsters.

I'm not saying we fired the gun or that we drove her to her early grave, but just as we let those kids down who blew themselves up in London because they felt alienated and angry and wanted to leave a mark, we have some collective responsibility to recognise that it's an unfair society and a society that divides and distances people that is the tragedy here.

We only said goodbye with words
I died a hundred times
You go back to her
And I go back to black.

The Lengths Issue 3 Preview

In a city full of temptation, you measure relationships in dog years. When you offer temptation for money, managing anything more than the hour you're paid for is a challenge. After three unexpected months with Dan, Eddie is finding it harder to keep his work away from his love life. The first encounter with Nelson in the gym that led him away from his friends plays through his mind and takes him back to the start of a story of sex, drugs and unrequited love.

Issue Three of The Lengths will be available from all good UK comics retailers at the beginning of September and from http://www.thelengths.com - be sure to let your local shop know to reserve you a copy.

I will be at New Cross Turn Left on Sunday the 24th of July  and at the London MCM Expo in October and Thought Bubble in Leeds in November. I will also be giving a talk at Laydeez Do Comix on August 22nd about The Lengths. It'd be great to see you at these.

You can catch up with issues one and two of The Lengths either by picking them up through your local comic shop or by ordering them online here.

The Lengths Issue 2 is out now.

I'm very proud to be letting you know that issue 2 of my comic, The Lengths is out in all good comics shops around the UK this week as well as being available through my web shop.

If you're not aware, it's a comic based around a series of interviews I did with male escorts working in London a few years ago and tells the story of Eddie, one young escort (working under the name of Ford), who's struggling with trying to do the job while craving both the adventure it offers him and the prospect of a relationship with an old friend from the art school course he ran away from when he was seduced by a muscular stranger in the showers at his gym.


As much as it's a comic about a handsome, troubled, promiscuous drug-using gay prostitute who struggles to come to terms with his identity, it's not actually an autobiographical story, but I do recognise that there's a lot of myself in there and this project is very much a labour of love and I'd very much like for as many people as possible to be sharing in that. Oh, I suppose that's the promiscuity showing itself there again, perhaps. Seriously, though, this is a project that's been years in the making and is something I very much believe in. This is the second issue of eight and I'd love to have your support through the duration.


Pick up a copy of the comic at your local comic shop (they can re-order it and issue one if they've run out - most places sold out of issue one), buy it direct from the web shop if you can't get to a shop, come along to see me at the Birmingham Zine Festival this Saturday or at New Cross Turn Left on the 24th of July, too.


What would also really help is that I'm doing this pretty much alone, so I don't have a big marketing machine behind me on this like a bigger publisher would have, so it's amazing that I've been able to get a distribution deal, but it means I've got to try to do the jobs of a whole company. I have some help, but getting the word out about the comic is really important, so if you can blog about it, point any journalists you know my way, tweet your thoughts, review it on facebook, +1 it on google, start a thread about it on discussion forum sites you're a member of... all of that kind of thing would be incredibly useful. People are getting to hear about the comic and it's humbling and so deeply moving when I meet strangers who know the characters I've created as though they were their own friends, but the survival of the title relies on people getting to hear about it, and while I'm a very small player trying to get a comic out where my competitors are film companies churning out 52 titles at a time, it's really useful if you could help out however you can.


Anyway, that aside, I need to get back to the studio to finish issue three, in which both the raunchiness and the wanting to take Eddie to one side and seriously have words with him reach new levels. It's the issue where we see him meeting Nelson for the first time.


http://www.thelengths.com

The Pirate King would like his crown back now, please.

I am, apparently, the total King of Scavenge. Here's me, modelling (yeah, I'm a model, remember!) a hat and t-shirt that people had left abandoned in the mud at Glastonbury. The t-shirt is a bit of a bizarre one, it's really not something I'd normally wear, but it's great cotton and it's huge, so it's nice and cool in this stuffy heat and the hat's got a nice grungy vibe to it. I'm a bit surprised that people left them behind. But then, I'm amazed at people leaving boots behind in the mud.

On the last day, I had this massive seizure which, frankly, has scared the crap out of me a bit. Collapsing, twitching on the bus with about one hour totally missing and about three hours that I can't remember even though I was up and supposedly conscious is a bit horrible. The thought of how exposed and vulnerable I was, that I didn't even remember that I had bags until a long time after, let alone realise someone might have taken them made me insanely thankful I hadn't travelled alone.

So, just like the people who were fool enough to leave their spirit animals behind just because they got a bit muddy (what were they thinking - these things are endangered!), and the weekend warriors who walked out of their boots onto nails and needed tetanus injections (not like the guy who got the poppers burn from falling asleep with the bottle open in his jeans pocket and wound up with his jeans melted into his leg - how drunk or mashed was he?), I think I left something behind when I came back from Glastonbury.

Hello, you guys! How you doing!

(Loads of introspection, Star Wars quotes and surprises follow after the jump)

Pride Sketches

I know there's some people who reckon there's all sorts of very important reasons to invest in some very expensive drawing tools and I know that I've been drawn into that kind of thinking at points, too, what with owning a Wacom and a copy of Manga Studio Pro for drawing, but I think I'm kicking back against that a little at the moment.

Maybe it's because of how detailed I'm making the work on The Lengths for issues 3 and 4, knowing that the style will shift again for 5 and 6 when it gets a bit weird (weirder) but right now, I'm kind of loving the thing of taking a £2.50 pad from Paperchase around with me and a set of pencils (2H-2B) from WH Smiths that cost the princely sum of £2 and a pencil sharpener that cost about the same.

 Okay, so I could probably have gone even cheaper, but I was in a panic at Victoria station on my way to install an exhibition at Red Gate Gallery because the person who was meant to do it was sick and their computer is in German and no-one else knew how to get anything to work, so naturally, I went along to get everything done, having previously only really planned to head along to help my friend set up for the private view. I didn't know that I knew what "clean print heads was in German", so even though it was stressful, I'm feeling pretty good about myself.

Student, overheating on Victoria Line at 2pm.

Old Compton Street, 21:45 Friday

Old Compton Street, 21:50, Friday

Costa Coffee, Old Compton Street 12:50 Saturday

Awesome Hoodie with Attached Jumper

Old Compton Street, 21:55 Friday

Dancing Women of Infidel

Pole Dancers, Northern Line 01:10 Saturday

Infidel DJ Booth (I was being jostled, so this was quick)

Whu?

Superpolicewoman with Pride Cape

Infidel Dancing Boys

Photography is so passé

You're so right.

So tired, lads, I can't be arsed drawing you.

It's combat vest and suit jacket time!

Why aren't we together now, Jonathan?

Fucking storming raver.

I got caught.

All the lines. Working.

Rainbow pants, rainbow shirt, tesco bag. Awesome.