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So my Jampires co-author David O'Connell has just released another picture book! This time he wrote the book, and HarperCollins teamed him up with illustrator Francesca Gambatesa, and it's all about fathers, and out just in time for Father's Day! :) (Here's a link to it on Francesca's website, where you can see some early sketches of When I'm a Monster Like You, Dad!.)



So a bunch of us went along to Gosh Comics in Soho to celebrate! Gosh are awesome at not only stocking comics, but also a range of other illustrated books, often by people who also make comics. Here's a photo nabbed from Gosh's Facebook page. (I wore my new flourescent jumper, wahey.)




A big congrats to Francesca because, while she's done lots of other illustration work in different formats, this is her first picture book, and it's lovely. Hurrah! (We agreed that picture books are quite a lot of work and take quite a lot of time to illustrate.)



Here's Dave doing a dramatic reading with one of Francesca's pictures on the screen. It's about a little monster who thinks he can have fun being big and scary like his dad as a grownup, but the dad shows his kid how they can have fun together right now.



And then there was a big signing. (Stuart got our copy dedicated to both of us and we shall treasure it.)



Fab to see writer-illustrator friends Laura Ellen Anderson, Jamie Littler and my studio mate Elissa Elwick:



And the crafty artists Sami Teasdale and my former studio mate Lauren O'Farrell (aka Deadly Knitshade):



Side note: did you see the amazing phone box cosie that Lauren and Sami knitted for The Clangers?


Photo by David Jensen from Knit The City Facebook page

Thanks to Gosh's lovely Steven Walsh, Nora Goldberg (and Tom Oldham who was manning the basement) for hosting!



And since I was practically the only person who'd never tweeted a selfie from the Gosh loo, that was WHAT I GONE AND DONE.



Huge congrats, Dave and Francesca!

Today was Jampires painting day! My co-writer/co-illustrator David O'Connell and I had fun mucking about with Posca pens in the front window of Gosh Comics in Soho.



Painting on windows is strange, the opposite to painting on paper, because the first colours you apply to the glass are the ones that show in front. So I kept running around to the front of the window to check we were doing all right. The other thing about painting on windows is that you have people watching you! Which is actually quite fun, because you can wave at each other and see them heading off with their freshly signed Jampires books. I love this photo of Lily with her new book, tweeted by Charlotte Hacking:



Ta-dah! All finished! We're keeping our fingers crossed that Gosh will leave it up for Christmas as well as Halloween. You can knit a Jampire to go along with your book if you want to download the free pattern (along with lots of other activities) at jampires.com.



Maybe they will; Neill Cameron's lovely Pirates of Pangaea painting is still in the window!



Dave and I signed a lot of stock, so you can still get copies of the Jampires picture book and mini comic, Dave's Monster & Chips series, and my Dinosaur Police, There's a Shark in the Bath, Morris the Mankiest Monster and You Can't Eat a Princess!. We also met a nice Scottish chappie named Mark Millar who also makes comics and film stuff, and ladies in nice costumes like to pose for photos with him.



I'm off to Norway for a week packed full of school visits and a festival, so I'll have more news soon (but I might be a bit slow getting back to e-mails and things).

I had a nutty dream last night and decided I'd turn it into a comic and penciled some notes. But then I realised I have WAAAY too much work to get through today to draw comics. But then I remembered that I'm doing an event at Gosh! London comics shop tomorrow where I get to... draw comics! Perfect.



So if you fancy a chilled-out day of sitting around drawing, lots of different creators will be taking official shifts to lead half-hour sessions, but mostly we'll all just be sitting around drawing with kids and people who aren't going to act too grown-up on us and say, 'why are you drawing a meandering pointless comic about a dream when you could be drawing some intense academic narrative dealing with relevant socio-economic issues of today?' Ha ha... Do come along. You can draw awesome, intense stuff if you like, or just hang out and make your pencil move around. It's the weekend. My shift is from 1-1:30, details here.

This was the first part of the Gosh! London comics shop window project for Nelson Week, a scribble on a dinner napkin by our Nelson editor Woodrow Phoenix, after we had finished two full days in Leeds at Thought Bubble comics festival. (Well, Woodrow doesn't really scribble, he draws quite carefully.)



And here's an excellent video shot by Gosh's Tom Crowley! You can read all about it over on the Gosh blog! And do come to Gosh tonight (1 Berwick Street in London's Soho) at 6pm for our Nelson signing party, it'll be good fun!



I'll post a few more photos from our Monday painting session. Woodrow has posted a bunch more on Flickr here. I was just going to show up at the shop and paint something, but on the train ride in, I thought, hmm, I think I'd like to do a bit of pre-planning. So here's what I sketched on the stretch between London Bridge and Charing Cross stations.




Woodrow was stuck on messy trains from out of town, so I had a chance to grab a muffin in the lovely coffee shop next to Gosh, Foxcroft & Ginger and work on my Nel sketch a bit more.



When Woodrow arrived and Tom at Gosh gave us our supplies, Posca pens, I remembered them well from my mural painting session at Game City (blog post about that here) and how much they need shaken to get the paint running. Shake, shake, shake. It turned into a sort of dance session, while Hayley Campbell tweeted this photo.



Then Will Morris arrived, with much more polished preparatory sketches. Will studied on the same MA course at Camberwell art college as I did, a few years later, under Janet Woolley, and we're both big fans of her. Will's work is lovely.



We decided the lettering had to come first, before the character paintings. And no one does lettering as well as Woodrow, he's very exacting.



I asked him if 'e' was the hardest letter to draw, and he said, no, that 's' is much trickier, getting the two curves just right.





We were painting on the inside of the window (so passers-by couldn't pick it off) but I did a quick sketch in white on the outside of the window as a guide.



When JAKe arrived, here's the sketch he made, drawing straight from the book:

Thanks to Mike Medaglia and Mark Haylock for organising the first Comic Gosh!p book club meeting at Gosh! Comics in Soho. And to David O'Connell for presenting his comic, Tozo, as the first book of discussion, along with Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons' Watchmen.



We had a good discussion of both books, and it was great having David there to be able to answer questions about his comic, which he's been working on for five years. (You can see some of my Tozo fan art here.) Dave Gibbons recorded a video for us, talking about Watchmen and then trailing off as he got absorbed in reading Tozo (nice segue into the other Dave's talk there...). Here's a doodle I made of the whole group.



If you're on Facebook, you can join the secret Comics Gosh¡p group and the next meeting will take place on 9 Nov, discussing Batman: Year One, written by Frank Miller, illustrated by David Mazzucchelli, coloured by Richmond Lewis, lettered by Todd Klein and Hemlock by Josceline Fenton.

Hurrah! Knit the City launched last night in a spray of yarn, cake and sparkles, and now is set to take over the world! Giant squid wrestler, Deadly Knitshade (whom I suspect might be my studio mate Lauren O'Farrell), launched her book chronicling the yarnbombing shenanigans that she and her knitting buddies get up to in London. Great photos, funny captions and right in the back, some simple creature knitting patterns.



Plarchie the giant squid (who even has his own blog) got his own window display from the gang at Gosh! London comics shop, who hosted the party. Here are Fleece Station studio friends Alex Milway and Katie Lee cowering in fear behind him. They were both eaten shortly after this photo was taken. ...And here's the lovely book! It's surrounded by woolly friends, including one of Alex's Mousehunter mice and our studio mate Gary Northfield's Derek the Sheep.



Lots of strange little creatures popped up everywhere during the evening! I took a sip of bubbly and the Moomin's Little My sprang up in front of Ian Culbard's At the Mountains of Madness.



Here's a little video I made of the launch speeches:


YouTube link

Here's Deadlyknitshade herself, just before everyone arrived, trying to coax the little critters to hang around for the party.



Here's Perri Lewis, sticking last-minute stars on to Wonder Woman's bum. (You can see Perri's blog post about the evening here.)




Gosh! London was such a fab venue for the party, our studio - The Fleece Station - has long been combining knitting and comics, so it felt just right. Here's owner Josh Palmano overseeing the pre-launch ruckus.



Gary's sister, Susannah Northfield (pouring champers here) made the most amazing Knit-the-City-themed cakes. Gary's dad helped her bring them over, a real family affair.



They looked fabulous displayed on Gosh's table made out of a sign for the Central Line. Look, there's Plarchie! And phonebox tea cosy cupcakes! There was even a map on the cake from the Knit the City endpapers, which were drawn by The Fleece Station's own Gary.



Whoo hoo! *Snoopy dance* (Deadly K does a lot of Snoopy dancing on Twitter.)





Super-glam Noëlle Davies-Brock, illustrator of Andy Stanton's