My Unrecognisable Halloween Pumpkin - and other October posts

 I made my annual pumpkin and no-one could tell who it was supposed to be. Can you? Oh come on!

See if you have more of a clue when you see the pumpkin Heather carved...

And there it is. Yes, obviously mine is supposed to Claudia Winkleman. And every time I show it to kids in a school they are mystified by mine and they're all over Hev's. Honestly! Here, for posterity's sake, is a montage of nine pumpkins I've carved over recent years.

Oct 3: What metaphors did we use before we started saying “doing the heavy lifting”, “pivot”, and “lean into”?

When did we start using them and why?

Oct 6: Another busy record-breaking weekend at comic and book events. Thanks to Leena at Script Haven in Worcester for organising the Indy Book Fair in the Guildhall, where I did quite well and met some lovely people, and to George Burrows for the Plymouth Comic Con where I sold another record amount of books. And frustratingly would have sold more if I hadn’t run out of stock again.

Having to wait a fortnight for print on demand books is a bugger when you get a run on a title. Yesterday one guy asked how many of my Eurovision books I had and bought the lot. Of course the most I had was three copies. He’d have happily bought half a dozen of each cos it’s Christmas and his friends love Eurovision. And of course if I stock up more than usual, I can guarantee that’ll never happen again. Oh the hard life of the small press market trader.

Next weekend a literary festival and another con like Sunday’s. If I order the stock now I might get it by November.

I don’t know anyone in my business(es) who doesn’t recognise this, a history of rejections. Then every once in a while they let one through.

Of course my history is slightly different. Having started to get used to rejection when I was still at school, I got my first stuff in 2000AD when I was still in sixth form. After a brief run of which, everything I sent after I left art college got rejected.

But luckily for me along came Oink. After a year of submissions I was accepted. Joy. 18 months later they folded

But then I got a weekly strip accepted by Sounds. Joy. 18 months later they folded.

This reminded me what had happened when Dez Skinn accepted my strip Worrier for his comic Warrior. They’d folded the very next issue.

But then Viz accepted a couple of strips and along came the Viz lookalikes Gas and The Damage. Suddenly not only was I accepted, I was making a living. I was able to go full time freelance as a comics creator.

Bet you can’t imagine what happened 18 months later.

You can pretty well cut, paste and repeat that pattern for the subsequent 35 years and you’ve got my life in comics.

You can include the time I got accepted by Marvel, worked as an inker, then a penciller, then worked my way up to the dream job of writing. Then Marvel, the biggest comic company in the world, filed for bankruptcy and fired two thirds of its employees.

Don’t get me started on stand up comedy.

What I’m saying is getting accepted is not all it’s cracked up to be. Getting accepted by someone who’s going to stay in business for longer than the gap between Adele albums would help.

A little earlier I rather cruelly compared Beano's value for money to Spirou's value for money, in a reply to a post which I can't now find.

I suggested both mags cost the same but that Beano had 40 pages and Spirou had 96. I'd like to correct myself.

Beano has 36 pages for £3.49, Spirou has 52 pages for €3.20. We're still not doing badly keeping our comic side up, if only we could attract a readership like theirs. Allons y Alonso!

https://www.spirou.com/le-journal/

A fun night at the authors dinner with my fellow Isle of Wight Literary Festival authors. All notably more famous than me. But I’m the only person who took a selfie.

I was looking for sales figures and I found them. Very interesting, and it reflects what I find in schools, where I resumed classes this week after the summer hols.

In answer to to the questions “who reads..?” or “who’s heard of..?” various titles, I’m getting:

Dogman 99%

Bunny vs Monkey 60%

Beano 20%

With the demise of newsagents and magazine racks, kids know comics through bookshops. A game that The Beano set out to lose when I started telling them “we should collect this stuff up into graphic novels” twenty years ago.

***

Oct 13: The resistance. I honestly cannot believe there are people in this country (& a couple still on my Facebook) who stand up for and defend Trump. This list of the things that make up Fascism is a good reminder of what appears to be genuinely happening in the USA

I’m usually Pollyanna and believe things will turn out good. But I am currently predicting Trump will steal or cancel the mid terms and by 2028 the chance of another election in the States will have been ruled out.

***

Oct 14: Excitement, fans, I’ve found where I am at Thought Bubble in November and I’m in the Kids Zone, just over from The Phoenix and in spitting distance of a big purple dog. Might not be a real dog.

See you all there, kids!

***

Good news fans, my Richard The Third graphic novel full colour edition is now available on Amazon.

End of public announcement, just thought you should know.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1326663224

***

I'm all different, according to Ancestry DNA. Last time they said I was 75% Scottish and 25% Irish but now it's all...

25% one bit of Scotland, 12% another bit of Scotland, 50% another bit of Scotland with a bit of Ireland in it for some reason, and the other 11% are other bits of Ireland.

Oh and 2% Spain. Random.

Just say "No English, despite the sodding accent". That'll do.

Does everyone have photos of generations of their family on the walls? Or we just quite vain, and have also realised none of us is going to get famous enough to be on Who Do You Think You Are?

I Clean Toilets For A Living - more comics by kids

October's Comic Art Masterclasses continued this week by keeping it close to home. Having ventured as far afield as the Isle of Wight, Twickenham, and Clevedon last week, these three schools were all very helpfully clustered in South Wales, within an hour of home.

At Plasyfelin Primary in Caerphilly, the 6-7 trend continues from last week. No I still don't quite know what it means, but if you say it and do a kind of shrug with your hands as if you're weighing a pair of melons, the kids think it's hilarious.

At Ysgol Y Lawnt in Rhymney (pronounced in the way that doesn't rhyme with chimney), the teachers all speak Welsh. Which, I hasten to add, the kids all very helpfully understand. Luckily they all speak English too, which they ably demonstrated by buying 14 copies of my Richard The Third, for which many thanks.

The week was rounded off with two Year 4 classes at Herbert Thompson Primary in Cardiff, where they produced these joyous little numbers. They had the comic I'd made with them last year still on the wall, along with the "treads on a worm" demonstration strip from last year too. Luckily none of the kids seemed to have memorised it as they saw none of the routine coming. Spookily and coincidentally they chose exactly the same celeb as last year, despite being a totally different group of kids.

The celebs these six groups chose to star in said demonstration strip were Ariana Grande, Cristiano Ronaldo (twice), Michael Jackson, Sabrina Carpenter, and Billie Eilish (that's the one that the same class had also chosen a year ago).

My Books And Where To Find Them...

Richard The Third (Colour) Paperback • signed	Doctors Who? Colouring Paperback • signed	Socks Do Shakespeare Paperback	Kids Comics Annual 2026 Paperback
Richard  The Third (bw) Paperback • signed	Findlay  Macbeth Paperback • signed	Prince of  Denmark Street Paperback • signed	Midsummer Night's  Dream Team Paperback • signed
Shakespeare Omnibus Paperback • signed	Comic Tales From The Bible Paperback • signed	Joseph, Ruth & Other Stories Paperback • signed	Space Elain Paperback • signed
Book Of Esther	Who Notes	Sweet Smell Of Sockcess	Attack Of The Sausages
My 1975 Diary Calendar	Colouring Books Paperback • signed	Scottish Falsetto Socks Annual	Tales Of Nambygate

Colouring Books: Doctors Who, Hollywood Legends, Punk, Cult TV, Eurovision Vol 1, Eurovision Vol 2, Eurovision Best Of British & Irish, 1960s Pop, 1970s Pop, 1980s Pop,  1990s Pop, 2020s Pop, Bowie, Scottish Pop, Royalty, Rom Coms 

6-7 - the first kids comics of term

Do you know what 6-7 means? Of course you don't. If you're a grown up, in this the Autumn school term of 2025, you're hearing kids saying it all the time, and you've no idea what they mean when they say "6-7". Neither, it seems most of the time, do they. But say it they do. And write it on the front cover of their class comics, in my Comic Art Masterclasses, they also do. It first cropped up as a suggested title for a comic in the first class of term, and has been a constant since. If you're reading this in the future, of course, you'll have no idea what "6-7" ever was, and if you're a historian you'll start making up some spurious nonsense to explain it, like you do with most things.

The school where I first heard 6-7 was Lady Eleanor Holles in Twickenham. A posh girls school, I was teaching the equivalent of Year 8, though they call themselves the Upper and Lower Fourth. Of course they do. Anyway, they introduced me to, but couldn't adequately define, 6-7.

I then did two days of classes, across four primary schools, in the Isle Of Wight where you can see from the second cover title they came up with that 6-7 is part of their vernacular too. Also Bob Ate My Bum, which was refreshingly childish.

Two more Isle of Wight primary schools, and actually no visible mentions of 6-7 here, just the usual nonsense from kids. I'm grateful to the Isle Of Wight Literary Festival for having me back for the umpteenth year, putting me up in a sterling hotel, and organising a smashing Authors Meal where I got to meet and chat with quite the assortment of top writers (none of whom, I'll be honest, I'd heard of before, but all of whom are way more famous than me!)

Another return booking, this time the Clevedon Literary Festival, where I did a lovely if slightly poorly attended class. There were only eight of them, but they came up with a fine comic.

The celebrities these 6 groups chose to appear in my demonstration strip were Taylor Swift, Michael Jackson, Dwayne The Rock Johnson, Billie Eilish, David Attenborough, and one I failed to make a note of.

My Books And Where To Find Them...

Richard The Third (Colour) Paperback • signed	Doctors Who? Colouring Paperback • signed	Socks Do Shakespeare Paperback	Kids Comics Annual 2026 Paperback
Richard  The Third (bw) Paperback • signed	Findlay  Macbeth Paperback • signed	Prince of  Denmark Street Paperback • signed	Midsummer Night's  Dream Team Paperback • signed
Shakespeare Omnibus Paperback • signed	Comic Tales From The Bible Paperback • signed	Joseph, Ruth & Other Stories Paperback • signed	Space Elain Paperback • signed
Book Of Esther	Who Notes	Sweet Smell Of Sockcess	Attack Of The Sausages
My 1975 Diary Calendar	Colouring Books Paperback • signed	Scottish Falsetto Socks Annual	Tales Of Nambygate

Colouring Books: Doctors Who, Hollywood Legends, Punk, Cult TV, Eurovision Vol 1, Eurovision Vol 2, Eurovision Best Of British & Irish, 1960s Pop, 1970s Pop, 1980s Pop,  1990s Pop, 2020s Pop, Bowie, Scottish Pop, Royalty, Rom Coms