I went to google and now imma draw a comic.

I met with Selene Daswani, head of business development at Google Asia. I met with her because the night before I’d been struck by something she said about using the resources at her workplace to help with the social justice projects she was interested in. The following week we met for lunch and I got a tour of the google offices as well as good material for what will be the first graphic review I’ve made for a long time. Sketches above. I think I’ll be finished next week. Drawing this has reminded me of why I like comics – so much attention must be paid to organisation, and organisation is hot.

Patterns of trade/work

I visited the Patterns of Trade exhibition today. The relationship between poetry and patterns is obvious; the intricacy of some of the designs, their beauty and their unity is what we all try to do with words. I was thinking more about sequential art. I’m currently working on five pieces for an exhibition tentatively called “Graphic Poetry”, and I am playing around with the idea of a comic that is exclusively made of patterns, as well as some Islamic influences on the typography.

Breathe in & exhume

I just posted this over on the My Place or Yours blog, alongside a brief apology and all the poems I’d written during that residency. I was originally going to draw this with the character discovering her head, but I much prefer the idea of an EarPerson, especially if we’re illustrating poetry, and given that in general I read much more than I publish.

Budo 5

I didn’t make any resolutions for this year because my life already looks like this.

Eyck / Titian / Imkaan / ‘Cypresses’

Some of the slides I used for my presentation at Imkaan.

Some might recognise this from another comic I did about moving in to an ex-nursing home.

Happy Obama Day!

I’ve been feeling good.

As the results were being announced, I was working on a piece for the Poetry International Blog which I called ‘On Listening’. Check it out. Both the election and the piece were well worth staying up until five for.

Literary Stamps

Stamps and literature are a beautiful union. It’s a nice change when something other than the profile of an unelected monarch appears in the top right hand corner of your letter. How about Toni Cade Bambara?

In Budo

Psyched because the first issue of Litro under the tender hands of Tom Chivers is out and my first ever outing as a cartoonist is in it! W00t!

Hegel / Google / Manual

So I’m moving house again. I was going through a pile of lecture notes and found something I’d made to help me revise Hegel:

I thought this was very funny.

Skeletal / Swiss

Cartoon skeletons – Telegraph

How excellent is this? The skeletons of cartoon characters.

It is a welcome bit of humour: I was up until half past six this morning working on a submission that could still come to nothing. I’m glad to say that I can operate under pressure. In fact I rarely produce anything unless there is some looming deadline. I’ve heard it’s a student mentality. I suspect it’s the mentality of a poorly disciplined creative. A deadline forces you to make a decision. If you miss the deadline, you don’t get paid / published or whatever. It’s a very lucid argument, one that few of us could contend with.

And what have I been doing to procrastinate?

- Hanging around on Britain from Above
- Playing Free Rice (which you should too)
- Reading Brewer’s dictionary of phase and fable
- Checking out Johann Hari (whose surname I keep spelling as ‘hair’)
- Planning an epic journey from Ealing to Epping Forest.