Lancaster Comics Day started in 2015 and has been running every year since. A small, friendly event, it has built up a good reputation in the comics community and is providing an appealing alternative to some of the larger, less… Read More ›
Nick Miller
Lancaster Comics Day 2017: Full Line Up Announced (it will be more than a Roy of the Rovers moment!)
This year’s Lancaster Comics Day will be bringing some “Roy of the Rovers” moments to Lancaster in June, when special comic guests artist David Sque and writer and editor Barrie Tomlinson recall their time working on Britain’s best-loved and most… Read More ›
The Really Heavy Greatcoat Year in Review 2016 Part One
Nick Miller, co-creator of The Really Heavy Greatcoat cartoon with me, which we wrote on a regular basis for some years, delivers the first part of this year’s “Year in Review” early, in response to the US election results… Nick… Read More ›
Remembering “The Cartoonist”, Britain’s short-lived broadsheet comic paper
Yesterday, I did a quick interview with Lee Thomas at BBC Radio Stoke (starts about 11 minutes in, eventually), prompted by the sale of a rare first issue of Action Comics #1, for an eye watering price. The 1938 comic book,… Read More ›
Blast from the Past: The Zambaquons
While scurrying through some old projects at the weekend, I came across this Zambaquons comic strip, based on characters I originally created for my first comics fanzine, SCAN, back in the 1980s. (The zine’s name, should not, by the way,… Read More ›
Lancaster Comics Day 2016 – Comics, Cake and REPAINTED Cybermen!
The Second Annual Lancaster Comics Day was a lavish and star studded event (smiley face). Full of eager comics buyers, readers, sellers, creators and cake, lots of cake (thanks, Katie White). Whilst not exactly a red carpet event, it evoked comics… Read More ›
The Really Heavy Greatcoat Review of the Year 2015
The Really Heavy Greatcoat by myself and Lancaster-based artist Nick Miller was published fairly regularly for about 20 years in alternative Lancaster print titles such as On The Beat and Off the Beat and online on virtual-lancaster.net. The strip’s last regular appearance in print was in the… Read More ›
Forgotten Comic Characters: Pip, Squeak and Wilfred
A look back at a newspaper strip classic
Creating Comics: The Battle for the Backing of Online Readers
If you follow me on social media, you’ll know I’ve been regularly plugging my SF comic project, Crucible (co-created with Smuzz, lettered by Jim Campbell), which runs on the web comics platform Tapastic and is embedded here on downthetubes as… Read More ›
Exploring Tapastic: The Weird and the Fantastic
As regular readers of downthetubes know, we regularly post new episodes of our SF adventure strip, Crucible, to the web comics platform Tapastic. The series, written by me, drawn by Smuzz and lettered by Jim Campbell (and which has had an… Read More ›