Comics and Books
The pictures don’t move, and you might have to supply your own music, but comics and books are every bit as fascinating to make as animations and music videos.
The Flowfield Unity
(Webcomic and Book)
The Flowfield Unity is a hand-drawn, web and print comic which began in 2005. The strips initially appeared in several UK-based publications such as the Paper Tiger Comix Anthology and The Orphan Leaf Review before debuting in US literary journals such as The Florida Review (vol 30.2, 2005) and the Backwards City Review (vol 2.2, 2006).
Utilising my skills and interests in traditional and digital publishing techniques I have been able to develop a unique method for delivering the comics. They are all available both online and in print under a Creative Commons license, meaning that anyone can print and distribute them. Furthermore, you can visit the site and pick 80 strips out of the 400+ available and I will create a hand-printed, hand-bound and unique book.
The comics themselves deal with themes as diverse as the future, the failure of technology, social dislocation, puns and wordplay.
A review at betapwned stated:
Readily reminiscent of repetitive pop art, The Flowfield Unity is one of my favorite comics. Introspective without being cold, intelligent without being pretentious, this simple black and write strip captivated me immediately…
…Typically rhythmic, sometimes even to the point of rhyming verse, the writing has a ponderous nature. Occasionally the strip runs on highly intellectual puns, more often than not it’s fueled by introspection, memory, and imagination.
Whilst Art Patient said:
The artist captures a moment, sensation or observation that strikes you in a place within yourself that you forgot existed (or never knew.) Those are the kinds of comics you clip from the newspaper and hang on the icebox (a.k.a. fridge.) You never just stick up any old Peanuts comic, you always pick the comic that tells a truth.
The Flowfield Unity is an on-going project and acts as a sketch pad, a reservoir of ideas that informs all of my endeavors. Furthermore, it is a forum and a community, a place where I can interact with my readers and use them as a sounding board for my thoughts.
Love Come Take Me
(A Collaboration with Sean Cousin)
Love Come Take Me is the result of a collaborative exploration between myself and the photographer Sean Cousin.
We explored how the integral nature of a Polaroid photograph can be used as both narrative structure and antagonist for creating an essentially reproducible artefact from singular entities.
A seed of ten original ‘found’ Polaroids were used to create a loose sequential narrative. I then created interlinking drawings which were then interpreted by Sean and reclaimed as 52 distinct Polaroids. The result is a narrative structure that emerged without either of us being responsible for the entire direction.
The drawings themselves were each created in under seven minutes, replicating the length of time that it takes for a Polaroid photograph to develop.
The Polaroids were displayed in sequence at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Preston (2008) alongside the book which depicted the polaroids in a manner reminiscent of a traditional comic. The book also contained innovations in Polaroid representation as each individual object was represented as an integral object, requiring the front and back of the Polroid to be displayed recto and verso.