I’ll forgive you if you haven’t come across the Cartoon Network series - Ben 10, about a boy (Ben, natch) who finds a device that allows him to transform into different aliens (cue action, fun and adventure!). I imagine it’s not really aimed at you unless you a) haven’t started secondary school yet or b) just act like you haven’t started secondary school yet (that’ll be me, then). I use the excuse that my son likes it to sneak a peek every now and again and it also seemed like a good idea for his birthday card this year. Just change the hair and eye colour, substitute his own trainers, make the alien wristband like the one he makes out of his Magnetix and tweak the name. I hope he likes it

Well, I guess this is it; first post and all of that.

The name? Well as unwieldy a URL as it may be I did think about it a bit. Firstly, I just always loved the bits in Japanese anime and live action sentai shows where the hero/heroine would go through their ‘henshin’ sequence and transform. It didn’t matter whether it was a magical princess, giant robot or whatever. Those were my favourite parts. It also, hopefully, means I might (and stop me if I’m getting too pretentious here) transform myself a little bit. This is meant to be a blog to give me a bit of a kick up the backside. As with most people who do this so-called ‘creative’ stuff for a living my head is always full of ideas and potential projects I’d like to do and, like most people, I never get around to doing them. Having a bit of outlet on the web will hopefully prompt me to get my finger out a bit more often and not just draw for work.

So I guess I should also have a piece of artwork to go in here, just to get off on the right foot, but I’m not sure what.
Hang on…

This is something I did recently for a fantastic small press comic called Solar Wind. It’s a great, affectionate, parody of those classic UK comics of the 70s and early 80s. I tried my best to treat the image so it looked like it was printed on old newsprint (click on the image for a dotty close up) and I thought it came out, sort-of, ok. Alas, this was the last issue of Solar Wind but if you have any fond memories of Battle, Action and early 2000AD I urge you to seek it out and snap up any back issues.