Socks All Request Zoom Party - the videos

The Socks first All Request Zoom Party was a resounding success, with positive reviews all round, and the next three shows already lined up throughout August. And I've now uploaded most of it, so you can enjoy it if you missed it. In order of appearance (having failed to record the opening routine, I'm A Sock song, Halloween and the Michael Jackson tribute routine) we begin with Period Drama (above). Then we have...

Macacque and the UKIP song

An Actor Prepares and Walk On The Wild Side

Casablanca and Word Association

Dead Ringer For Superman

Always A Bastard, and rounding off with...

Star Wars. We ended the show with Sweary Poppins, but I won't upload that so we always have it for future live gigs, whenever they return.

By popular demand, the Socks are reviving three of their classic Edinburgh Fringe shows to perform throughout August. All three are on sale now:

Aug 13  - Socks In Space  - Their 2013 sci fi extravaganza, including Star Trek, Alien, Star Wars, and a song about David Bowie's 65th birthday which we're sure hasn't dated at all.

Aug 21 - Boo Lingerie, the Socky Horror Show - Their 2012 horror special, including Frankie Valli and the 4 Horsemen Of The Apocalypse, Burke & Hare, Jekyll & Hyde and more.

Aug 29 - Socks Do Shakespeare - 2016's Shakespeare anniversary classic show, attempting everything fro Hamlet to the sonnets, Romeo and Juliet to Othello, and so much more. In fact, you name it, they'll try it.

All shows are at 8pm and are hour long shows (though they may overrun). One ticket admits as many people as can fit round the screen, so get the whole bubbled family in the room (then chuck the kids out, it's for age 12 and over only, some strong language).

Socks August Zoom Specials - on sale now

By popular demand, the Socks are reviving three of their classic Edinburgh Fringe shows to perform throughout August. All three are on sale now:

Aug 13  - Socks In Space  - Their 2013 sci fi extravaganza, including Star Trek, Alien, Star Wars, and a song about David Bowie's 65th birthday which we're sure hasn't dated at all.

Aug 21 - Boo Lingerie, the Socky Horror Show - Their 2012 horror special, including Frankie Valli and the 4 Horsemen Of The Apocalypse, Burke & Hare, Jekyll & Hyde and more.

Aug 29 - Socks Do Shakespeare - 2016's Shakespeare anniversary classic show, attempting everything fro Hamlet to the sonnets, Romeo and Juliet to Othello, and so much more. In fact, you name it, they'll try it.

All shows are at 8pm and are hour long shows (though they may overrun). One ticket admits as many people as can fit round the screen, so get the whole bubbled family in the room (then chuck the kids out, it's for age 12 and over only, some strong language).

We look forward to seeing you at our shows. Keep in touch with the Socks on Twitter and Facebook. And when live shows return, we look forward to heading your way in person again.

★★★★ 4 stars Daily Record

★★★★ "Astronomical fun" - Broadway Baby

"A must see show yet again" ★★★★★ 5 stars from YorkMix...

★★★★ Edinburgh Spotlight "Some of the finest-writt...

★★★★★ 5 STARS A Younger Theatre - Boo Lingerie

★★★★ "A riot of laughs" Broadway Baby - Chunky Woo...

★★★★ "Sock It To 'Em" - Broadway Baby on Boo Lingerie

★★★★ "Never mind the stand-ups" Edinburgh Spotligh...

★★★★ "More groans than Babestation" 4 Stars Giggle...

★★★★★ "Genius!" "Hilarious" etc - Edfringe Reviews

"Wee gem of a show" - Scotsman (reads like a ★★★★)

★★★★½ "Make you glad to be alive" - Liverpool Sound...

★★★★ "Eat your heart out, Olivier" - What's On Midlands...

★★★★★ "Accessible, contemporary and ridiculous" - Brighton Argus

Animals Revolve Around Boris Johnson - new comics by Zoom kids

Zoom classes are indeed a different kettle of fish from being in the classroom, and nothing quite equates to making a roomful of kids laugh, but my latest spate of Comic Art Masterclasses delivered long distance have been fun, and a reassuring indication that I might be able to keep working in this way until normality returns. This bunch of classes have included a birthday party with the most time-zone-diverse attendees ever, my very first self-set-up classes, and a couple of classes that technically haven't happened yet.

A phenomenon of the current season is the one-off class, or what would have been a half-day back in the days of travelling. These morning or afternoon session are easier to do than ever before. Indeed I could do one in Inverness in the morning and one in Cornwall in the afternoon, should the need arise. God, I do hope some needs arise in the new school term. This was for an after-school group organised by Surrey Explorers.

These novelties are from two classes that, sort of, haven't happened yet. I have pre-recorded three half hour classes to be shown to kids in Waltham Forest. I've done them exactly like my normal Zoom classes, filmed on my laptop, the difference being there are no actual kids present. So when it comes to the naming of the comic, I react as if they're shouting out suggestions - and I would love it if some of them actually do that - then I put the comic together as if they have. Whether the finished items will be sent to the kids I don't know, but the client has them. I did a class for 6 to 9 year olds, one for 8 to 11 year olds, and one for 11 - 15 year olds (which didn't include naming a comic).

The first Zoom classes that I've set up and promoted myself ended up well enough attended, and were well worth doing (though at time of writing, their successors aren't selling too well. It's an irony that, when I turn up at a remote art centre in the middle of nowhere, they've usually sold out 60 tickets. But with the whole world as my potential audience, I struggle to pull in a dozen at a time). The kids were from as far afield as Boston Massachusetts and, I only discovered afterwards, one lad in Kinshasa. It's the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and now I can say I've taught comics there.

I'm supposed to be doing two sessions for Bexley Libraries, but only one's happened so far. This was it.

And the class with the most widespread audience was this, for a 10th birthday party. The birthday boy and friends were in Abu Dhabi, with guests in Dubai, South Wales, Oxfordshire, and one lad all the way over in Sydney. For me it was midday, it was mid afternoon in Abu Dhabi, and for the lad in Australia, the two hour session finished at 11 o'clock at night.

The celebrities these seven groups chose to star in my demonstration strip were Ariana Grande (twice), Robert Downey Junior, Kim Kardashian and Donald Trump (though those two shouldn't be counted cos they in the Waltham Forest classes, so I just pretended kids had suggested them), Donald Trump (once for real), and Stan Lee.

My next Comic art Masterclasses on Zoom are on August 5th and 28th, 10am and 2pm. Two hour sessions at the end of which everyone goes away having produced a comic together, and with a caricature by me.

Tickets are here:

Aug 5 10am 

Aug 5 2pm 

Aug 28 10am 

Aug 28 2pm 

Socks All Request Zoom Party - a success

Thanks to everyone who came to the Socks' very first All Request Zoom Party last night. It was a great turnout and we've had nothing but good feedback so far, with no-one seeming to mind the technical hiccups that I was so aware of. If you didn't see it, the line up - drawn from requests by the ticket-buying punters - was:

New opening routine

I'm A Sock song (inevitably)

Halloween (2nd most requested item)

Michael Jackson Tribute

Period Drama (unseen since 2010)

Macaque (09)

UKIP Song (14)

An Actor Prepares (from the most requested show, Shakespeare 2016)

Walk On The Wild Side

Casablanca (09)

Word Association (09)

Dead Ringer For Superman (from Superheroes 2018)

Always A Bastard (10)

Star Wars (09/13 from 2nd most requested show, ...In Space)

Sweary Poppins (09)

Popular items that we didn't include were I Change The Key, Horror Movie Cliches Song and Go To Greggs, because they'd been done so recently on Dean Friedman's Live Stream and are fresh on Youtube. We could have included more, as I realised when we got to the closing number and the show had only been 55 minutes long. The lack of live laughter makes a real difference to the length of a show, as we discover every year at Edinburgh when we find we trim a good five minutes of material in the first week as certain bits grow funnier and thus longer. That's not an issue on Zoom, where pausing for laughter is kept to a minimum, ergo over 60 minutes over material flying by in under an hour. It's okay, we padded and did an encore.

Mind you, I don't know if people were voting for material just cos they liked the sound of it, but the two votes for Kraftwerk Do Improv from 2008 didn't tempt me to dig that long-forgotten experiment out of the bin!

The three most popular shows chosen, and the ones that we're going to perform through August, were:

Socks In Space - which we'll do on August 13th

Boo Lingerie - which we'll do on August 21st

and Shakespeare - which we'll do on August 29th

The runners up were Superheroes and Minging Detectives, with mentions for Roll Up and another Best Of, and no votes for 2014's And So Am I (though people remembered the UKIP song fondly).

Missing the live experience - Comicons and Edinburgh

A very interesting breakdown of this past weekend's virtual San Diego Comic Con that can be summed up as "you had to be there - and no-one was".

This is what we've all felt, when trying to emulate the experience of a gig, a party, or even a drink with friends. Nothing but nothing equates to the 'buzz' of real people together in a room.

Zoom is proving annoyingly inadequate in allowing more than one person to speak at the same time. Though I'm having great experiences with my Comic Art Masterclasses and am looking forward to my first Socks Zoom gig on Friday, frankly having to 'mute' your class and your audience all the time, and unmuting for questions and applause, is really not the most satisfying feeling.

Comedy and theatre, and indeed the Edinburgh Fringe that I would have begun performing in a week's time, really are demonstrating the big difference between live shows and watching stuff on a screen. When you're in a room with an act there is a constant back and forth between performer and audience, even those who are sitting silently. Yes, even in the case of my comedy show (Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre) where I can't even see the audience and can only hear them. You can still feel them, and their every response - or, importantly, lack of one - affects what you do next and how you feel about it.

Thinking of comic conventions, the first I ever attended being around this time of year (maybe later) in 1979, every memory I have of it is something that simply couldn't be recreated virtually. We stayed up late in the bar surrounded by comic professionals whose names we'd only ever heard before, including Dez Skinn in a Captain America costume; I got to speak face to face with the biggest names in comics, including Jim Steranko and Chris Claremont, and Frank Brunner signed my Howard The Duck comic (in fact a whole load of people signed a whole load of stuff); I bid a quid for a rubbish item in the charity auction, the star prize of which was a 10 foot high movie poster that someone ended up having to try and take home on a train; and me and my mate Steve got to have a coffee with the entire staff of 2000AD. And we spent a record-breaking amount on comics (over £17, yes I said £17! That was a lot, when your weekly Marvel comic still cost 10p).

Try emulating any of those experiences on Zoom. Exactly. Man, I miss live stuff.

Did I mention my Zoom Comic Art Masterclasses are on August 5th & 28th? Almost as good as real life, on sale now. 

My next Comic art Masterclasses on Zoom are on August 5th and 28th, 10am and 2pm. Two hour sessions at the end of which everyone goes away having produced a comic together, and with a caricature by me.

Tickets are here:

Aug 5 10am 

Aug 5 2pm 

Aug 28 10am 

Aug 28 2pm 

Midsummer Night's Dream Team - work in progress (continued)

Having plotted, treatment, scripted and pencil-roughed my new 120 page graphic novel The Midsummer Night's Dream Team (as detailed in this earlier blog) the next steps are a bit of rewriting, and then the artwork. And it's the artwork that's turning out to be the revelation.

The rewriting mostly concerns the opening silent sequence. Both of my script editors, Heather and Steve, have concurred that the opening sequence is hard to follow. In the treatment (which very much suggested I was approaching this as a film as much as a comic book) I referred to that opening sequence as 'slow motion'. And whereas that might have given a dream-like effect that might have led us into the story, were it done on film, in comic strip panels it's ended up with people who you don't recognise yet, doing stuff you can't quite work out. I fear I may have to cheat it and put some words in to make it work. Those 15 pages are work in progress. The other script changes are just in the dialogue I think.

But the art, oh the art, that's a big step change. You see for the past two books (Findlay Macbeth and Prince Of Denmark Street, both available on Amazon) I've done A5 pencil roughs which I've blown up and traced through to the Bristol Board on a lightbox, then pencilled and inked. Because, as you can see from this example page of PODS, the roughs were very rough, and the bulk of the drawing was done at the pencil stage.

But with MNDT, the cartoony style of the characters, and the limited number of settings, has meant that for most of the book the pencil rough layouts are good enough for me to start inking over. Which realisation is when I hit on the idea of blueline. A lot of people do it, and I never have. Blowing the roughs up onto the Bristol Board as blue lines, inking over those and cutting out the re-pencilling stage. And it worked. Here's the blue line...

And at the top of this page you can see my attempts at inking, scanning, tweaking and finishing. I am indebted to my fellow artists on Facebook who replied with their tips. Dave Shelton passed on this tip: Image/Adjustments/Channel Mixer...

Then from the "preset" dropdown menu select "Black & White with Blue Filter"

Then click "OK"

Then they should disappear, though you might want to monkey with levels a bit to remove the last traces.

David Leach, Paul Holden and others had tips along similar lines which, when combined variously, seem to have given me a method that will work. Let us see how we progress. I shall keep my usual worksheet below...

Monday July 27th - Pages 36 - 41. 6 pages inked and assembled! How's that for a good start? On the first day of Findlay Macbeth art (Jan 2nd) I got two pages drawn, and on the first day of Prince of Denmark Street art (April 14th) I just got one page pencilled. To be fair, not only are the MNDT pages simpler, and these were 6 of the simplest ones, they're also not totally finished as I have backgrounds to drop in a couple. But still, 6 pages on the first day. If I did this every day I could finish the book in 20 days! (NB: I will not finish the book in 20 days. With a half dozen days of Masterclasses, a handful of Socks gigs and guest appearances, and the mailing out of over 100 Prince Of Denmark Street books in the coming weeks, we can look forward to this artwork being spread out over a goodly while yet).

Tuesday August 4th - 4 pages inked (34, 35, 42, 43), and the backgrounds drawn and dropped in for the interview room. No work done for a week, thanks to a day and a half of classes, the Socks first Zoom gig, another Dean gig, a day trip to Exeter, and two days packaging up Prince Of Denmark Street books and posting them.

Thursday August 6th - 7 pages inked (29 - 33, 52, 53).

Friday Aug 7th - 3 pages (26 - 28). So that's 20 pages done, 100 to go.

Monday Aug 10th - 7 pages almost finished (17 - 23).

Tuesday Aug 11th - 6 pages (24, 25, 46 - 49). 33 pages done, 87 to go.

Weds Aug 12th - 2 pages (44 & 45).

Thurs Aug 13th - 3 pages (50, 51, 54)

Mon Aug 17 - 1 pages (55)

Tues Aug 18 - 3 pages (56 - 58). 41 pages done, 79 to go.

Weds Aug 19 - 5 pages (59 - 63)

Mon Aug 24 - 2 pages (64 & 65)

Tues Aug 25 - 4 pages (66 - 69)

Weds Sept 2nd - 6 pages (70 - 75)

And look, I made banner ads too. Get me, I'll be starting a Kickstarter before you know it.

Here are some panel grabs...

My next Comic art Masterclasses on Zoom are on August 5th and 28th, 10am and 2pm. Two hour sessions at the end of which everyone goes away having produced a comic together, and with a caricature by me.

Tickets are here:

Aug 5 10am 

Aug 5 2pm 

Aug 28 10am 

Aug 28 2pm 

I Change The Key & The 4 Horsemen - new videos by the Socks

Dean Friedman has been kind enough to ask The Socks to appear on his DeanZine LiveStream every week now, having previously appeared fortnightly, which means we're getting the chance to record and upload new songs every week. I say new, obviously they're hits from the back catalogue, with new vocals to accompany our "as live" appearances. This technique, of pre-recorded clips, looks like the best way of us doing musical numbers for our first live show next Friday. Above is our Johnny Cash tribute, from the 2008 show, and below...

Frankie Valli and the Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse, as seen in 2012's Boo Lingerie (The Socky Horror Show), and which stayed in the set well into the next year. A very popular number, and a pleasure to dig it, and its prop, out again.

DeanZine's LiveStream can be seen every Sunday night from 8pm on Youtube, Facebook, and all points inbetween (technology we really must master ourselves someday). We'll be doing another song this weekend stay tuned for that.

The Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre's All Request Zoom Party takes place this coming Sunday, July 31st, at 7pm. Tickets still available.