Geeks In Space #1

Geeks In Space is a single-page B&W comic series I started in 2004 and continue on and off. Mostly off. Let's see – of the 36 strips done so far, I did seven in 2004, ten in 2005, three in 2006, two in 2007, one in 2008, twelve in 2009 and one in 2010.

The entire lot used to be on my nonesuchdesign.com site (which goes offline forever on June 16 – just a heads-up). I'm now going to run them all on this blog, starting from the very first one. Hang in there. It gets better as it goes on. I have to add that the strip is intended for readers with a certain level of maturity. Consider yourself warned!

X

I've spent the last 16 days in Sydney, the longest trip there I have had so far. The following is a pictorial account of some of the highlights (that I had a camera in hand for). These are all digital shots; Lomographs to follow in a later post.

The Harbour Bridge on New Year's Eve. The theme for the night was 'Make Your Mark', and so the motif on the bridge was a giant X. It also changed to a smiley face, a hand, a tick and a peace sign, but I liked X best, as a theme for 2011.

Sparks shoot out from the bridge.

This, oddly enough, is the underside of the Harbour Bridge. I took the photo lying on the lawn underneath, looking up.

Bendy Em, a contortionist. She squeezed into this box, 43 centimetres square!

This artwork was one of many on display in the courthouse foyer. It's called Jar Heads by Sunderland College student Jessica Mills. The accompanying card says: "Slipcast lidded jars with underglaze colours". I like the one in orange – he looks a tad confused.

On January 5th, the bridge is still lit up with its 'hand' sign.

Vintage rock/blues trio Kitty, Daisy and Lewis performed on the first night of the Sydney Festival.

Festival First Night – the stage in The Domain.

Panoramic image of Bondi Beach. I'm 38th from left, in front of the randy Swedish backpackers.

I'm In Sydney

Happy New Year! I'm here in Sydney, and as expected, the city put on a massive fireworks show. 7500 kilograms of them. One and a half million people turned out to see it. We waited twelve and a half hours having staked out our position on a grassy patch close to the Harbour Bridge. Well worth the wait I'd say. In the next post I'll upload some photos I took, but unfortunately, I won't be able to upload the atmosphere of the night. Especially the way you think the sky is going to crack open with all that noise.

Aside from the festivities of 1/1/11, other things are happening which I hope to capture on film and get it uploaded. I managed to shoot a whole roll of film using the Lomo camera of just long exposure shots of fireworks. I managed to do two of these on New Year's Day last year and they turned out pretty good, so this time I decided to blow a whole roll on it. Why not?

Anyway, Sydney's awesome and I hope the start of 2011 was just as spectacular in your city. But it probably wasn't.

Tintin Movie

The countdown begins! If you're a fan of Hergé's The Adventures Of Tintin, mark the date on your calendar, or put it into that poncy phone of yours if you're over the whole 'writing on paper' thing. Today makes one year until the release of Steven Spielberg's film The Adventures Of Tintin: The Secret Of The Unicorn. (Actually, Wikipedia says the release date is December 23, Empire magazine says December 26. I'm going with Empire because it was printed in Australia.)

Am I a Tintin fan? Am I heck as like! It was what got me into making my own comics in the first place. I have all the books, yes, even the Lake Of Sharks one that was based on a French cartoon no one's even flippin' seen. One of them I had to get on Amazon. The timespan in getting all the books you see in the picture below was 13 years. But enough about that. My previous encounters with the other Tintin films made has been pretty dismal. I've never seen the Blue Oranges one, and the one time the Golden Fleece one was on SBS, I had to tape it and the tape wasn't worth watching because the reception was so bad.

Come Boxing Day next year, though, the 3-D animated film will be out, the animation done through motion capture. The photorealistic look of the characters as shown in Empire is really impressive; they look like real people and Hergé's cartoon characters at the same time, and given Hergé's attention to backdround detail in the comics and his theatrical sense of drawing settings, the film is something to really look forward to. So let the countdown begin –

365:00:00:00

364:23:59:59

364:23:59:58...

Cel-Out

I've just done (well, earlier this month) four new drawings of the main Airbury cast using a graphics tablet to render them all in a cel-like non-photorealistic style. It gives a nice effect to the backgrounds. The above is a composite image which I hashed together in 8 nanoseconds, but you can see the four individual drawings on that art gallery site with the puke-green backgrounds.

I don't know how long the comic will be on hiatus for, as it will be a long time before I finish writing any stories. Run out of ideas? No, quite the opposite, old paint. Too many. But problem is, how to take these story threads and spin them into a lengthy yarn, like yer granddad did when telling you about how he used to put porcupines down the back of his pants before getting the cane at boarding school – except the stupid bugger put 'em with the spines facing inwards. Cuh. Typical.

Anyway, a couple of people have asked me what Airbury Academy: Aluminium Edition is. No, it's not a comic drawn on sheets of tin-foil (although that would be pretty cool). The idea came to me when I was going through some old shite, er, sorry, precious archival material, and found a heap of old artwork that somehow survived my move interstate. So it's a PDF with old and unused artwork, rejected design ideas, sketchbook scraps, photos of turnips, stuff that was taken out and other fun stuff. It's like you're having a perv into someone's journal – which, in fact, you are.