Dorian Gray

Nobby is changing quite quickly. His hair is growing and the lucky b*stard is getting younger.

Happy Halloween

One of my favourite strips so far. Shame I have to wait another year to get it out there.

Happy Birthday Esme

I'm sure every cartoonist has one main person they test their cartoons out on. For me it is my lovely daughter Esme who is 16 today. Happy Birthday Esme
All my love
Dad
XXX

Teenagers

I have a teenage daughter. She MUST go to every party or the world will end. Telling her that she was going to have to miss a party recently she stormed off in a screaming temper, stomped upstairs to her room... and gave me this idea.

Rugby

So close!

Rugby

I feel a terrible traitor here. I'm a big Rugby fan and shouldn't be drawing an American Football! Especially as England are in the World Cup Final this weekend.

Come on England!

Another great sale: The Detroit News. Daily and Sunday.

Not yet

Ollie and Quentin kick a football into Evil Mrs.Cadaver's backyard. At one point I wanted to write some jokes from the ball's perspective which I really liked. However King Features would prefer not to include them just yet as neither of my main characters appear in them. I can see their argument but it's a shame for them not to see the light of day so here they are in rough pencil form.

Evil Mrs.Cadaver's Introduction

As promised, this will be the introduction to the Evil Mrs.Cadaver who lives next door. She is nasty but isn't really a werewolf or a vampire or a zombie. This is the persona Ollie and Quentin will create for her.

Great news, The Denver Post will be running my strip.

Rex by name Wrecks by nature.

Meet Rex, Quentin's Bodyguard. He's a Venus Fly Trap and acts as Quentin's guard dog. The plant equivalent of a Rottweiler he is stupid and aggressive with absolutely no sense of humor.

Evil Mrs.Cadaver

The Evil Mrs.Cadaver lives next door. Ollie and Quentin are a bit spooked by her but, like the time my son hit a wasp nest with his stick, they can't help goading her whenever possible. I am now writing a series of strips to introduce her to us properly.

The wasps stung my daughter.

Jerk?

Brendan Burford, my editor at King Features, said I could come up with something better than "Jerk"... but I can't.

First Sale!

I have my first sale in the US! The Minneapolis Star Tribune. Daily and Sunday. Fantastic! My thanks to John Killian at King Features. What a star!

Coincidence

I drew this strip the week before my trip to New York and would you believe it, one of the Sales Team I met there was called Richard Heimlich.

Launch Date

I have a launch date! It's January 7th 2008 with the first Sunday being January 13th.

New York

I'm back! It went really well. Everyone seemed very positive. I was made to feel very welcome by some very nice people. Fantastic to meet Brendan at last. The Hearst Tower is incredible with wonderful views. Even managed to do some sightseeing including a run round a hot Central Park. Much hillier than I expected and SO many people at 7am. Remember to buckle up in the cabs and don't pay $150 for the ride out to Newark airport like I did!

So, back to drawing strips and it's now up to the sales guys to do their stuff.

New York

At last! It's been almost a year but I'm off to New York for the sales launch. Finally get to meet Brendan Burford tomorrow evening for dinner which I'm really looking forward to. Then meet the sales team and do my presentation on Wednesday morning. Don't fly back till Thursday evening so a chance to do some sightseeing and maybe a run in Central Park. Well, both my brothers have done it so I've got to complete the set.

OK, so it's a fairly predictable premise but I wanted to draw Quentin's head on Ollie's body and a grumpy Ollie disgusted that he's now a wriggly worm.

Don't try this at home!

Now this is REALLY nerdy... I've discovered the most gorgeous notebooks to write and sketch out my ideas in. They're called Moleskine® (as used by Hemingway, Van Gogh and Picasso). I'm using the 240 Plain page 13x21cm acid free paper notebooks. Beautiful.

One of my all time favourite Sunday strips. Really pleased with the 'timing' in the last 3 panels. So satisfying when it all comes together like this. Wish every day could be the same.

So, back to colouring up the approved strips after a month of designing my sales brochure, finalising my syndication contract and preparing the presentation I have to give to the sales team in New York. Only 3 weeks away now.

New Website for Ollie and Quentin

A new website just for Ollie and Quentin. www.ollieandquentin.com It's a work in progress but you get the idea. Some links don't work yet, Eventually there'll be a shop section. The samples are just my favourites but will probably change to some that give new readers a good introduction to the feature.

8th August 2007: Signed Syndication Contract

BIG day today. Nearly 10 months after Brendan first contacted me I have FINALLY signed my syndication contract with King Features. This is mainly due to the agreement I had to reach with the RNLI before I could sign with Kings. My thanks to my lawyer Stu Rees www.stus.com for all his hard work.

Seemed an anticlimax actually signing it. Shouldn't there be cheering and bells, flags and trumpets? Instead I signed it as I was changing into my cycle shorts just before I biked home.

So I've completed my sales brochure artwork only to discover I've got to do a 15 minute presentation on my strip to the King Features sales team in September. Getting a crash course on Powerpoint from my 15 year old daughter.
It's quite fun.

With my 'launch' date fast approaching I've been working on my sales brochure. Here are the cover and spread illustrations. Obviously logos and type will be added later. This is the easy bit, doing the stupid bio photograph is far harder.

Still doing Sundays. This one came about when we found a huge spider in my daughter's bed. As you can see we've decided on a name and logo.

Quite proud of the drawing in this one. I'm especially pleased with the way Ollie is holding the dreaded banjo.

I really enjoy the Sunday format. Shame it takes so damn long to colour them up.

In fact Ollie got his name from an ankle ring he had put on him as a young chick. When he looked down at it (ie. upside down) the number 31770 looked like OLLIE to him.

My thanks to Brendan Burford at King Features for his input here. I had Ollie put the earpiece in Quentin's mouth. It's only when we discussed maybe distorting Quentin's speech that it occurred to me that it would sound funnier if his nose was blocked.

Apologies to Teresa's uncle Keith and all very exciting uncle Keiths out there.

Seagulls are hooligans! I'm surprised it's taken me this long to come up with a strip like this. It's so obvious. If ever you visit coastal towns you'll see seagulls attacking tourists for their chips.

I originally drew this with Quentin telling the story but something wasn't right. I think I have to be careful about how "human" Lugworms can be. Somehow a gull having a tummy tuck seems more believable than a worm whose body is simply too different to ours.

I've been thinking about using the frame gutters for a while. I had meant it to be where the ghost of Quentin's boring Uncle Keith is stuck. Maybe Quentin and Ollie would use a ouija board to summon him? Boring uncle Keith could talk for an eternity so this gutter is pergatory for him 'cos he can't get a word in edgeways. Thing is I couldn't get it right and this one just leapt into my head a couple of hours before I had to show King Features what I'd done this week. Amazing what a bit of blind panic will do.

Quentin: "Rory's made a mess on the carpet".
Ollie: "Well Rory can clean it up".
Quentin: "Rory IS the mess on the carpet".

Well, at some point I had to do a bird poo joke.

Well I finally got a ventriloquist joke out (see previous). Gottle o' Geer anyone?

This is unusually cruel.

Hmm, might be a problem with the name "FlopFlip". Could be inviting trouble having the word 'flop' in the title. Not too upset about changing it again. Perhaps I should simply use the character's names as previous. Didn't do Calvin and Hobbes any harm. Either "Quentin and Ollie" or "Nobby, Ollie and Quentin Too". Quentin and Ollie looks nicer. As Esme, my daughter, says it might help me remember Ollie's name for once.

Hang on... it should be Ollie and Quentin! Dammit, I'm gonna have to redo that logo again!

I could have filled in the first two of Quentin's speech bubbles here and just left the final one blank but I couldn't resist it. When I drew this up I did put all of Quentin's words in just so the speech bubbles were the right size.

Guess what he said in frame 4. I felt like a naughty schoolboy using such foul language in a cartoon strip.

This is one of those rare occasions that we see Ollie and Quentin interacting with the outside world. It won't happen that often.

I know this is absurd but Quentin is new to the outside world so everything is a bit confusing. This is how I explain this ridiculous joke. It'll be the first Sunday strip.

Unfortunately I can't use "butt" in the states. It has to be the lame "rear end"...yawn. Shame 'cos it ruins the flow of one of my favourite strips. Here it is as it should be.

Ollie and Quentin's neighbour is called the 'Evil Mrs. Cadaver'. We'll never see her.

Jay Kennedy

Very sad news. Jay Kennedy, Editor-in-Chief at King Features Syndicate has died whilst on holiday. My condolences to his family and friends at Kings.

Ollie's a Seagull but he spends next to no time on the sea. Sofa gull, TV Gull, Fridge Gull?

Again, this would have been difficult to fit into 4 frames.

Sunday strips are great. There have been a few times when I've struggled to fit a joke into 3 or 4 panels so the ability to use 6 or even 9 is fantastic. I'd never have got this story into 4 frames.

Boy, what a dull day. I've spent it doing about 40 black and white versions of my approved colour strips. Trouble is, when I look at some of the older ones they look so poor I can't help but change the really bad bits.

I used to own a hideous waterproof jacket that I called Colin. "Colin, Care in the Community" was it's full name. Boy, did I look like an idiot. Kept wearing it though despite it smelling of sick towards the end. Think it was going mouldy.