Cherubs Hardback out this year!

It's the end of he world as we know it. And I feel fine.

Finally! From the E-mails flitting back and forth it seems that Cherubs! will come out as a hardcover book from those lovely people at Dark Horse later this year, probably around October. The book will collect the Desperado volume and 100 odd pages of new Talbot/Stafford material under one cover, completing the tale as Armageddon is realised on the streets of New York, the dead walk and the cherubim literally go to Hell. With dancing girls.I’m busy creating a cover for the beast at the moment, I’ll let you know more when I do. In the meantime here’s a suitably apocalyptic scene from chapter 3 of the new stuff.

Everything is on sale!/ update post

Ahoy hoy. Long time since I posted. Awfully sorry about that. Update: I’m currently scanning and toning the last couple of chapters of  Cherubs! , and it looks like the whole shebang will be published by those lovely people at Dark Horse next year. Whoop Whoop!

Also waiting on confirmation that Me and Dave Hine will be collaborating again for Self Made Hero, on a literary adaptation, don’t wanna curse it by blabbing too much. Watch this space

And lastly, I’m in the messy process of moving house, and in a bid to raise the necesary funds  and slim down the sheer amount of  stuff I’m lugging about with me I’m going to sell off a load of my art, haven’t prepared the full list yet, but if  ye see anything you fancy on this site, make me an offer at marxtafford@yahoo.com Most of the art from Cherubs! book One is available, as is the Lovecraft adaptation. Most pages will come in the form of A3 pencils +A4 inks+ a digital print of the finished page. Go on, give a home to some inky splendour.

Here’s a gallery of sellable stuff on Bleeding Cool:  http://www.bleedingcool.com/2011/11/25/one-of-the-greatest-comics-creators-youve-never-heard-of-mark-stafford/ 

Thanks Rich!

strips for sale, if ye know my stuff;

In the Days of the Beer Jesus, A Hard Day’s Death, all Glyph pages. Promotion, Fine Art Funnies, If I Stumbled Fron your Party at Three in the Morning…., The Prick, Well, That’s All Right Then, Beertalk, Graham’s Lousy Day,Those Darn Cops, Great Moments In Dope History: Isaac Newton & Archimedes and more… 

Cheers

Mark stafford

All hail the new prints!

That sound you hear is my sweet heart breaking...

Don't have nightmares. Unless you want to...

Self portrait. God help me.

Above are my new babies, three new A3 size pieces I created thanks to my mate Simon having a bigger printer than I’ve got. After a couple months of rendering all manner of complexity at A4 size,( yes, I’ve finished inking Cherubs! Book two! Only the tones and covers to go…) it felt great to splash ink around on something foolish and non- sequential. I have wrists again! The top two are for a book I’m thinking of pitching around detailing the looong terrible history of the sadly non-existent Hocus-baloney publishing concern. The bottom one is my part of the Orbital self portrait show, which will be up in September after the current damn fine Stool Pigeon show comes down. Hope ye dig ‘em. There’s more where they came from, if simon plays ball…..

The End, an electric sheep anthology book out

the End, an anthology about cinema for the end times, and such, has been published by the lovely people at Strange Attractor press. Fine collection of new writing in a good looking book, and I’m not just saying that because it’s got a couple of my illustrations in. details here;

http://strangeattractor.co.uk/books/the-end/

Jesus ran my projector.

War – The Human Cost book out

Great anthology from Paper Tiger, with an impressive line up of cartoonists. I provided sleeve and disc art for the accompanying CD. Buy it.

http://www.papertigercomix.com/?page_id=9

Congratulations! I think…

Aww. Think I'm going to cry now...

This is the wedding poster I knocked uo for a couple of Circus of Horrors fans, commisioned by a friend of theirs. Can finally reveal it now that the day has come and gone. Think it came out looking pretty cool. That text at the bottom is the spiel the Circus of Horrors have on their stuff, in case ye were wondering. Nice little job.

the Mutton Dressed as Lamb show!

meet ye at the crossroads at midnight...

Hoodieland

Three old portfolio pieces given a digital makeover for your pleasure. Top was an unused cover for a music zine.  Middle was part of  ‘Hoodieland’ a nasty story I wrote and illustrated for a Scar comics anthology. Bottom, a bit of nonsense, though I’d like to read that story….

Diary of a Madman

Poster/ promotion image for ‘Diary of A Madman’, the Gogol short story, about to be performed as a monologue by me mate Matthew Jure. The character writing the diary is obsessed with sharpening quills, so I decided to break out the scritchy old nibs for the lettering. Looking forward to seeing what Matt does with the piece.

it's all about the nostrils

Realism in comics (1)

C.B. Cebulski  from Marvel comics was due to come over to this side of the pond for the Kapow convention,  I knocked up this piece to drop into his lap, based on an idea I had a couple of decades ago. Have no great nostalgic love of superheroes, or any massive desire to work for The House That Jack Built. But anybody who’s picked up a brush has gotta love Kirby and Ditko. C.B. never made it. ah well, mailed it to the editor of Strange Tales, who knows…

could easily create more pages of this. Hmm...

The Fate Of The Black Oak Minotaur

Another  piece from the Orbital show, dig it.

Dead Hillbillies; A series of unhealthy paintings

The Fate of the Black Oak Minotaur

Acrylic on canvas, 2008, 300 x 240mm.

Dan’s story was that the blasted thing just came out of the woods whilst he was

 out hunting with his brother Matthew, and that the both of them just opened fire

 without thinking twice about it. He denied actually searching out the beast or

bearing ill will towards it. But by the number of shells involved they must have

reloaded those rifles a couple of times apiece, and damn sure nobody forced them

to drag that  corpse back into town and string it up for all to see whist they posed

away and that photographer took his pictures.

Everybody cast knowing glances at each other and nobody said what was on

 their minds, but nobody was surprised when Matthew broke out in boils and

came down with fever the very next day. And no-one was surprised when he

died the day after that, about he same time that Dan, his wife and children and

their whole damned house was swept away by a flash flood that came out of

nowhere on a clear day. If they hadn’t known before then, the people of Black

Oak sure as hell knew now that you don’t do nothing to piss off your mythical

 creatures.

Wheeee doggy! Acrylic on canvas

El Dios di Luna!

Another piece from the Orbital show. Sold this one to me mate Stagger Lee Fisher of Randy and Earl’s Old Record Club, it’s one of the first of my Hocus-Baloney series, depicting artwork from non existent films and books. Think this one’s the cover to some kind of Mexican Narco comic produced by the CIA for strange reasons circa 1978. Probably…

Versus Diabolo-Christo! Acrylic on canvas

Enoch! (on canvas)

Current progress on Cherubs! book Two: All pencilled, half inked, One quarter fully toned and finished, looking damn fine. Did this lil’ painting of my favourite Cherub for the hell of it, ended up in the Orbital show. Awww, he’s kind of anti-cute.

acrylic on canvas. Not-so stupid cupid.

Dead Hillbillies (1)

Just scanned the canvases from my Largely Unseen show at Orbital, so here’s my first Dead Hillbilly work to reach the web. Enjoy

aint she purty?

Dead Hillbillies; A series of unhealthy paintings

“Damned if she didn’t raise that thing like one of her own.”

Acrylic on canvas, 2010, 300 x 420mm

If any of the O’ Keefe’s knew what it was or where it came from they weren’t saying. Luke pretty much climbed into a bottle after it turned up, the first son Joseph just didn’t talk anymore , both avoided anybody’s gaze, just moped around with their sad moon faces looking more and more unfed and neglected as she spent more and more time with the thing she called her “moonchild.”

If  Hilary was aware that that thing was anything other than the most beautiful baby in all the world she kept it well hidden. Anyone who cared or was supposed to care tried to make her see reason, tried to take the damned thing off of her, but then the headaches and the bleeding would start in on them and they had to stop trying whatever they were trying and get the hell out of there, whilst it sang that chittering song to itself and laughed at them with it’s one good eye. Soon everybody stopped visiting,. The O’Keefe house was left well alone for near enough a year. Until finally curiosity overtook horse sense and a posse of well armed concerned citizens went to call.

The place was devoid of life, Luke had clearly hanged himself in the workshed some months before, whether he had taken Joseph’s life beforehand, or whether the poor little bugger had starved or died through other means was impossible to discern, given the condition of his body. Of Hilary there was no sign, and the house was in good order, save for an overturned chair, and the presence of several foul smelling glistening trails, like those of a slug or snail, but measuring from one to four feet across, that covered the walls and floor of the back porch and kitchen . Rain had washed away most of the trails after leaving the porch, but with hounds they were tracked to a sinkhole near 100 yards from the back of the house.  The sinkhole was dynamited in short order, and the house burned down a week after that. As for the O’Keefe’s and the “moonchild”, well, Marthasays that’s what you get when Baptists marry Catholics, but don’t you pay her no mind.

Lovecraft anthology event

The Lovecraft Anthology, with 15 pages of ME, is coming out soon, here’s an event at the magnificent Horse Hospital which is going to function as the launch. Sounds great.

http://www.selfmadehero.com/news/2011/02/news-flash-2011-belongs-to-cthulu/

urban poetics

Just produced a couple of pages for a friend of a friend, ilustrating a poem called “Cinderella,” Apparently somebody’s going  to insert live footage of the man performing the piece into the empty panels. Hope it works, but here’s one of the pages sans text. Or poet.

second page of cinderella.

Orbital Show On Until 13th Feb

Ok , show’s up and running, and you’ve got until the 13th of February to catch it. Good reaction so far, according to Karl orbital anyhoo. So check the damn thing out!

Nut of the living dead

Lil’ piece for Piers, my sister’s bloke. she commisioned it based on a conversation they’d had. I have no idea what it’s about. Ours is not to wonder why, ours is just to paint zombie squirrels…

nut of the living dead

And more paint

Here’s a detail of the xmas thang I made for me sister. Cover to her first novel, as I’ve informed her. Get cracking, Jo! Sure fire bestseller, I think…

Calamari de L'amour!

Season’s Paintings

Damn near everybody I know ended up getting a li’l painting from me for Xmas, because I’m cheap. here be the one for me mate Sue.

happy happy joy joy

Popcorn and Tribulation

Jesus ran my projector.

Just produced these illustrations for the upcoming Electric Sheep anthology. The article’s about the apocalyptic christian films produced by the MarkIV company in the 1970’s, which depicted the end-times and all their polyester and formica horrors on low low budgets. They were generally shown to doubtless traumatised children and clap happy parents in a tent near you. Think I’ll copyright She-sus, there’s gotta be a few stories in that dame…

Just call her... She-sus!

Lewisham Housing Strips

Finished my part of the work on some strips for the Housing Options centre in Lewisham, through the Cognitive Media company, came as an utter change of pace from my current art on Cherubs! where I’m having a whale of a time drawing the various cirles of  Hell in an ornate Dore style, trying to make  these simple little  stories of housing hell work graphically, and as stories, was a real challenge. I think they look alright though. Here’s one of the four.

Lovecraft Title Page

In addition to the story art, Self Made Hero asked for a title page for the Colour Out of Space adaptation. went a bit 70’s rock poster for this one. Groovy. Hopefully I’ll become the “go to” artist for freaky looking trees…

Lovecraft Sketches

Just sent off the last of the artwork for an anthology of Lovecraft adaptations being put together by Self-Made Hero. I’ve rendered the Colour Out of Space from a script by Dave Hine, and it’s been stygian, crepuscular fun fun fun! These are pieces from my sketchbook that I drew after reading the original story but before reading Dave’s version. I was just trying to sort out my approach to the story in my head, and get down some of the images that emerged whilst trudging through H.P.’s deathless prose. Enjoy, if that’s the right word…

Nahum Gardner

farm and fauna

twisted trees and freaky fruit

The Gardner family

first pass at the effects of the meteor

The thing in the well

2D Festival

Quick post to confirm that I will be a guest at the damn fine 2D festival in beautiful downtown Derry/Londonderry, Northern Ireland. Here be link:  http://www.2dfestival.com/

All a bit last minute, so my duties are uncomfirmed, apart from drawing little kids as monsters for the “Monster Me” event. I was a guest at 2D a couple of years back and thoroughly enjoyed it, it’s a gorgeous little laid back thing, with a little comics education, some great guests, and a whole lot of boozy socialising. Most events are held at the Verbal Arts Centre, but the panels are sensibly held upstairs at Sandino’s bar. It’s well worth a visit , hope to see you.

Deadline for the Colour out of Space Lovecraft adaptation is imminent, and I’ve got a couple of pages left to colour. Should be working on it, instead I’m going to check out the MCM Expo. Where the preponderence of cheerful adolescents in Anime costumes will make me feel especially ancient, out of touch, and curmudgeonly. I don’t understand myself either.

Bad Lieutenant/Move Orgy in Current Sheep

My pieces on Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant, and Joe Dante’s Movie Orgy, are now on the Electric Sheep site, go see, had a blast writing them.

http://www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk/news/2010/05/17/cine-excess-2010-the-movie-orgy/

http://www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk/reviews/2010/05/19/double-take-bad-lieutenant-port-of-call-new-orleans/