My eyes! My eyes!

I like to think that when KISS sang the song "Crazy, Crazy, Crazy, Crazy Nights” they were referring not to evenings of mind-blowing Bacchanalian excess, but to the sort of night I enjoyed last night: the kind of night where the worrying about a single, tiny detail of a drawing keeps you awake till the wee small hours, where even the tiniest bump, creak, rustle and scratch in the night jerks you from your fitful, dissatisfying doze, and where it feels like the assembled hordes of all your darkest fears and desires threaten to wash over you like a great big tide of... I dunno. Calcium, or something. Anyway, I feel like ass, which is the long and the short of it – and to make matters worse, I didn’t even deploy my twilight nutter-imaginings in the service of doing anything creative. No, I just lay there and screwed my eyes up and hoped for the best.*

Sleep is – and you’ll have to bear with me here – a dirty little tease: it flirts with you, tempting you with long yawns and big stretches and practically demanding you go to bed RIGHT NOW. Then when you finally acquiesce, and manage to tear yourself away from late night showings of Seinfeld or whatever else is keeping you up, and actually go to bed... it won’t come. Damn you sleep, you filthy whore! If I ever get my hands on you, I’m gonna pull a Macbeth, just see if I don’t!**

So annoyed/beat am I, I’m not going to even apologise for the tedious, self-indulgent invective above. I think KISS would want me to stick to my guns.

Anyway: drawings by gum. This dude was created by my pal Niall for a comic book which he's writing and I'm drawing. Dirty slack bastard that I am, I've done not nearly enough for this in the time we've been working on it (about a year), but I always enjoy dipping back in. The story's about lots of things, but it's nominally about this guy, who's a dwarf gun-for-hire who never uses a gun (click to enlarge).



Dude, I promise I'll get back into this soon.

Also, there's this, which is for another project I'm working on, this time for my pal Debbie. She's developing a lovely, wintry children's epic, of which the character below is the heroine (click to etc.).


I think this looks pretty keen: worked up in pencil then tweaked in photoshop to tighten the lines. There's a sepia-tint version knocking around somewhere, and if I'm feeling particularly bountiful then by God I'll post it here. You lucky, lucky people.

OK, that's it. Gwan, get outta here!




*Just like with my ex-wife. Ho ho.

**Boring classical allusion. Please ignore.