Jamming With The Console Cowboys

Just a quick newsletter to say that I'll be tabling at Glasgow Zine Fair this weekend (Saturday July 5th and Sunday July 6th).

The fair is part of the excellent, week-long Glasgow Zine Fest - organised by the Glasgow Zine Library. If you're nearby, and even vaguely interested in zines and zine culture, this weekend is a great time to take advantage.

The fair itself will be open between 11am and 6pm. Held at the Tramway Arts Centre (closest station is Pollokshields East).

I'll be tabling both days with the new Introduction to Charts reprint, my comic about the Luddites, a collection of riso prints, the first Grave Offerings zine (Billy and Stu Would Like to Talk to You About Horror) and the new Grave Offerings zine: Jamming with the Console Cowboys in Cyberspace! (I do like an excessively long title)

That's right, I've made another zine! This collects my four essays about The Net, Sneakers, Enemy of the State, and Hackers. I mentioned that the idea for these essays was that I wanted to read a Verso book that explained the Tech Broligarch Dystopia we're living through by investigating 90s cyberthrillers - and now it exists as a physical book! This was about nine months of research, drawing and writing. I'm super happy with how it's come together.

As an aside - if there's ever a piece of culture or art that you want to exist, but it doesn't: make it.

I've edited and rewritten the essays to make sure they're as current as possible (there seems to be new tech and AI news every hour, so it's hard to keep up), modified the illustrations to look their best as riso-prints, and even drawn a few extra illustrations for it.

The whole zine runs to 48 pages and is beautifully riso-printed with two colours throughout (blue and aqua) by Out of the Blueprint in Edinburgh.

If you're wondering what the title and cover art is in reference to, I am excited to introduce you to this clip of a young Julia Stiles as a hacker in children's TV show Ghostwriter.

Pre-orders for the zine are open on my online shop here. I'll be posting orders out starting next week. If you're a top tier paid subscriber of this newsletter, you'll get a copy posted to you for free as a thank you for your support.

If you'd like to become a subscriber, you can do that here.

There are also prints available of the Hackers and The Net illustrations. Plus some badges that I'll send out with any orders.

I Have No Mouth and I Must Ramble On At Length

A couple of interviews with me this month. First, this piece with the Mindless Ones where I discuss poetry comics, colour theory, and this very newsletter.

And also this piece with Amaris Ketcham for Autobiographix about my origin story in comics, finding a style, and the challenges of non-fiction comics.

Commissions

Some other bits and pieces from the past month or so...

MIT Technology Review were kind enough to commission me to rewrite a version of my piece about The Net and digital isolation for their latest issue. I framed it around Zuckerberg's nonsense "solution" for the loneliness epidemic: AI friends. You can read it here.

I also had a couple of other illustrations in the previous issue of Tech Review. For their Creativity issue, I was asked to illustrate a piece about attempts to dissect, measure and quantify creativity:

I was also incredibly chuffed to be asked to illustrate the cover of the issue:

Fittingly - with everything I wrote about Thiel, Palantir and Tolkien in my Sneakers piece - I got to illustrate this article. The piece is by Alex Skopic for Current Affairs Magazine and is all about how the right abuses Tolkien:

I've also just finished an illustration for another Current Affairs article by Etienne C. Toussaint about the author's visit to the West Bank in 2014. I don't think the piece is online to read yet, but I was happy with how the illustration came out and wanted to share it:

After 13 years of producing excellent short-form audio storytelling and documentaries - the Short Cuts podcast (hosted by Josie Long and produced by Falling Tree) was cancelled by the BBC.

Luckily they got to celebrate an amazing run at the Tribeca Festival earlier this year. Falling Tree were kind enough to reach out and ask me to illustrate their banner:

You can see some photos of the event (with my art in the background!) on Falling Tree's Instagram feed here.

Finally, here's a quick spot illustration for a recent issue of Doctor Who Magazine. The piece was about the history of music and needle drops within the show. It was a pleasure to get to draw the 7th Doctor and Ace since that was the era of the show I watched as a child.

That's all for now!