Nothing to do with cartoons, as the label says, but I've a new article up at Fuel Your Writing, as part of the new series The Writing Spaces. It's all about Mary Shelley, a beautiful Swiss villa, and how a big Indonesian volcano helped create 'Frankenstein'. Go on, give it a read.

Admiral Ackbar has some advice for you...

Do you know, I've never met anyone who actually likes Valentine's Day. Not one. Everyone I know or meet or talk to dislikes Valentine's Day and its unnecessary pageantry for a) an emotion that you can feel on any other day and b) for a saint who wasn't all that great. For the single its a torturous 24 hours and for those in a relationship it's a redundant day. I love my girlfriend, I tell her that every time I'm with her, and I don't need a grim day in February as an excuse to tell her, or to buy her flowers or take her out for dinner. We already do all that stuff, without the overwhelming glitter and hearts. That's why I always heed Admiral Ackbar's warning. It's a day for greeting card companies, mediocre Italian restaurants and rose sellers to mine profit from raw emotion, and while that's a despicably clever strategy, I think it's something to best steer clear of.

And if you need further good reasons why Valentine's Day is the worst day in the whole year, this old instructional video will undoubtedly help.

Packet In (or, The Excitement of the Empty Space)

Permit me to put on my rosy spectacles and enjoy some nostalgia.

I was clearing through an old box in my room today and found this:

Yep, it's the front of a Kellogg's Corn Flake box. A box from about 1992, a time when, as you can see, people were concerned about getting their money's worth of carbohydrate in a breakfast cereal. Finding this was quite the blast from the past. Now, when you look at this or any other packet of corn flakes you probably see just that; a packet of corn flakes. But to this day I see potential drawing space. I see excitement.

Sundays were when my little brother and I were shipped off to Granny and Granddad's house for the whole day. We used to have a great time; playing boardgames, running around in the tiny garden and building obstacle courses or looking at all the new inventions in my granddad's shed, watching Catchphrase and Bullseye and that one show that had Hulk Hogan in a boat (I forget what it's called...but I think The Simpsons based 'Knightboat' on it), and getting up to all the mischief kids who are 6 and 4 get up to. But the best part of the day was when my brother and my granddad and me would sit at the kitchen table and draw. I loved to draw, and boy would we draw.

The thing is, it was always on the back of cornflake packets.

Now, I don't know if my granddad was cheap (likely) or didn't want us wasting good paper with our scribbles (even more likely), but all we ever drew on were the backs of cut up old cornflake (or, sometimes, bran flake) boxes. It gave even our best work a colour-sapping browny-greyness to it, but I didn't care. To me, a six year old kid, a fresh piece of cut up cornflake packet was as exciting as a six foot canvas. The sort of thing I could do this on...

Yep, this is the reverse side of that corn flake packet: a drawing I did (age 6, I think) of a wooden monkey my gran owned (and still does), which I loved (and still do), and which I had evidently nicknamed Charlie. I must have thought he looked quite lonely on his own, as my gran has never owned a crocodile, snake, bird or bug ('Bertie bug' has been cut off by the scan, but he looked like a ladybird), but there he is with them all, calling them his friends.

It's an unremarkable picture by any standard, but I've decided to frame it and put it above my desk, partly as an artefact of my life, but mostly to keep reminding me of how much I loved - and still love - to draw, and so that I never forget the excitement and potential of an empty space, even if that empty space has a cereal-loving cockerel on the other side of it.

Anyway, nostalgia trip over. I'm off with my crayons and a pair of scissors. I think I spotted a nearly-empty box of Weetabix in the kitchen earlier...

Real Ale! Real Adventure!

Pintman catches the villainous Doctor Keghead in the act! This is a mock-vintage comic cover I drew for a friend of mine who likes his real ale. CAMRA (the campaign for real ale) do not publish comics about real ale, but should. I think it would help their cause. They could sell them next to the pork scratchings.