REBECCA TEALL

This is Havanna old-town September 2005.

It's that time again. Tshirt time. Tiny mites are lined up in neat little rows with different coloured inks ready to neatly  squit your chosen image onto your chosen shirt. 

Ejected, we venture further into unchartered territory as that clicking gets louder.

Yes. So I just wanted to do something small and different today. So there is that. And now there's this. 
Click the strip to read it aaaaall.

After getting disproportionately nervous and working disproportionately hard for the presentation of my preview at the Bristol convention, I felt a need to refresh, reconsider and renew. In short I thought I might do something else for a bit, get all goggle eyed and big on the world by looking at tiny things and then return to my central task anew. So this week I will be mostly studying insects and the like. I am sure you feel better now that you know that. Good. Carry on.

Here is the six page preview of Longship, out next year! 

I have been hanging out in a train shed looking at art -not a bad way to spend a day. I actually went to meet my lovely publisher as I have finished my six page preview and I took the first four hand bound copies (sewn on the train in green yarn) to give to him and the writer of the script I am drawing, Lawrence Rider. 

The convention was guarded by three storm troopers and a baby, and it was sunny and great. 

The very first person I spoke to for any length of time was an incredibly nice man - Sydney Jordan who drew the classic science fiction - Jeff Hawke for the Daily Express in the sixties. Interestingly he had left his original job as an aeronautical engineer to become a cartoonist. He was very kind indeed and encouraging! I will read his work with interest as it is so tightly drafted it's as though his training as an engineer actually prepared him for communicating what was a new imaginative frontier, made real with men on the moon for the first time, it was no coincidence then that all of his strips were about astronauts and aliens. 

I caught up with the Comic Book Alliance posse, GM Jordan, Kalie Stanton my peer and a writer called Jasper Bark whose website speaks for itself. I saw Andrew Wildman who was selling his book Frontier with the writer Jason Cobley. I met an interesting artist whose portfolio is over at the Welsh El Doro. I stood and stared as Roger Langridge casually produced an incredible sketch, he resides at Hotel Fred. And Lastly I met Simon Bisley, who I think might have made me laugh quite a lot not least because of a small gun he was wielding. It was actually about 1cm long and he was quoting something about a colt 45. It was funny, I forget, he liked my preview, seems to know a lot about Vikings. That made me happy.

It was a good day, I was a bit nervous showing my work for the first time but I needn't have been. I'll post it online tomorrow for you to see it too.