Merry Christmas from the Scottish Falsetto Socks

A Merry Minging Christmas everybody, from the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre. Here's our specially drawn card, we do hope you enjoy it.

Special thanks to anyone who came to see Minging Detectives, either at Edinburgh, at any of the previews, or in the Autumn tour. It's been a fun old year with a show we enjoyed putting together and performing, though I confess I'm looking forward to devising an all new show for 2016 on a subject that I think you're going to recognise and enjoy.

Here's the printed version of the card. If you were lucky enough to get one of these through the mail, you were most likely a venue that hosted us last year, or someone we want to suck up to. Enjoy it. And a Happy New Year when it comes.

 

Merry Christmas from my Comic Art Masterclasses

A Merry Christmas to all comic readers young, old and everywhere. Thanks for a lovely year of giving me stuff to write and draw and people to teach. Happy New Year when it comes.

Here's the printed version of the card, which very few people were lucky enough to be sent. (Hint: they employed me this year. Actually there were 75 of them, so not a quiet year by anyone's standards. So if you want a card next year, well, you know what I'm saying.)

 


Kev F Sutherland, as well as writing and drawing for The Beano, Marvel, Doctor Who et al, runs Comic Art Masterclasses in schools, libraries and art centres - email for details, and follow him on Facebook and Twitter. View the promo video here. 

Reviewing Peanuts

Yesterday I was on BBC Radio 4's Front Row reviewing The Peanuts movie (or Snoopy & Charlie Brown The Peanuts Movie to give it its full UK title). It was a pre record which will be on next week. I did it as live in the studio with Samira Ahmed and great fun it was too.

Of course in our 4 minute animated chat, I managed not to squeeze in most of the bon mots I'd made in my notes, so here are thoughts that largely failed to make the radio review.

What might stand out, when you think about it, is how social mores have changed. The kids come dangerously close to bullying Charlie Brown. If you were in a real classroom and a 6 year old kid like Lucy was screaming "You blockhead" into the face of Charlie Brown - who face it looks like he's got enough problems, with that bald head and only a tiny kiss curl, if you saw him in real life it'd be a toss between whether that was ringworm or chemo - parents would be called in.

Reading the briefing notes I see the actor who plays Charlie, Noah Schnapp, "discovered his love for acting at a particularly early age". He's only 10 now. Obviously by Hollywood standards that makes him a latecomer. The kid who play Linus, Alex Garfin, "started acting professionally at age 3". At age 3 I hadn't started walking professionally.

The movie brought to mind Watchmen and Asterix, in that they raised the question of how a remake of a comic strip comes across when the source material means more to one culture than to another.

The music by Vince Guaraldi has survived intact from the 1965 Charlie Brown TV special, and all the specials and shows since, and is uniquely haunting. I've had it in my head since I saw the movie at the weekend. It's unlike any movie you'd get in this sort of kids movie today. Although the rest of the film's music is by Christophe Beck who also did Frozen and Ant Man, so the kids won't find it totally unusual.

The adult voices are produced by trombone sounds played by Troy "Trombone Shorty" Andrews, who with a name like that really only had the one career option.

Most of my other notes, including getting a mention of producer Lee Mendelson and animator Bill Melendez who made the original TV specials 50 years ago, made the recording, though I wanted to mention that those two are name-checked in the delivery van that brings the Red Haired Girl to her house, and wanted to credit them with details like the music, the Snoopy & Woodstock and adult voices etc. Also didn't mention how Charlie Brown animation began as a series of Ford adverts for the Tennessee Ernie Ford show. Small thing, about L'il Folks.




Kev F Sutherland, as well as writing and drawing for The Beano, Marvel, Doctor Who et al, runs Comic Art Masterclasses in schools, libraries and art centres - email for details, and follow him on Facebook and Twitter. View the promo video here. 

Star Wars and me

I was a teenager and my best mate Steve went to see it and was so exaggeratedly excited that I thought it must be shit. Then, being 1977, it had gone from the cinema before too long and there was no VHS yet, so that was that. Steve still had a Millennium Falcon* hanging from his bedroom ceiling which was the only reminder of this film that otherwise was a non event in my memory. 

Then I saw Close Encounters Of The Third Kind and underwent the mind-bowing experience about what a sci fi film could be that changed my expectations forever. Surely no scifi film could ever top that. Then I saw Alien which remains one of my Top 10 favourite films of all time. It was realistic it was unlike any sci fi film there had ever been. This was the future and I was there to see it. 

Then, a couple of years later when I was a student, I saw Empire Strikes Back. The experience was marred by being there with fellow students on magic mushrooms whose trip through hyperspacewas accompanied by louds "shiiiiiiits" and "fuuuuucks", giving the 8 year olds in the adjoining seats quite an education. The film itself left less of an impact. It began in a polystyrene cave with a man in a monkey suit, and went on to feature Fozzie Bear's voice talking over a wrinkled Kermit. 

Whatever it was, it wasn't Alien, and I realised Star Wars would never be for me. (Years later I saw Star Wars on VHS and thought "you had to be there.")

*PS: Steve Noble writes: It was a *TIE Fighter*!!!!!

(In response to a post by Doug Segal, re never having cared for Die Hard, I write:)

There's the making of a good thesis here somewhere. The religiosity I've seen around Star Wars and other obsessive cult media is fascinating. I realise there are things about which I cannot be totally objective (Doctor Who in my case, Batman in yours) and others that people try to persuade me towards that hold no attraction, or that I try and appreciate but just find don't work for me (Pink Floyd and Star Wars would be top of my meh list). Where in the brain does this lie? What in our cultural development forges these tastes and affiliations? Oh for another life as a neuroscientist.

Scottish Falsetto Socks Go To Hollywood - the Graphic Novel

Announcing a brand new graphic novel, that some people have been waiting for for the last 7 years* - The Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre Goes To Hollywood! 80 pages of pure comic strip by Kev F out of The Beano adapting 10 of the Socks best movie-related routines in full glorious glamorous technicolour (except for the two that are in marvellous, and deliberate, monochrome).

80 amazing pages of graphic glory and comic magnificence, the glossy Magazine version is only £9.49 - you can preview it for free (no obligation) and order it here!

And you can get it for only 99p as an eBook, and read a third of it for free! The Amazon Kindle version is here!! Am I using too many exclamation marks? Even better it's available as a paperback and a hardback!! Wow! I'm not saying the hardback version is dirt cheap! But the softcover magazine version is just £9.49 and eBook's only 99p. Have a look at a third of it for free, see if you can resist it.

There are comic strip adaptations of familiar Socks routines Star Wars, Christmas Carol, Period Drama, Cross-Channel Interference, Western Movie and Casablanca, along with the little-seen Robin Hood and straight-to-Youtube classics Bank Robbery and James Bond. All killer no filler. Here, have a sample on us.



The Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre Goes To Hollywood is available now and is, needless to say, the ideal Christmas present. And unlike the Beano annual, it'll remain on sale right through the year too.

eBook only 99p
Softcover magazine only £9.49
Kindle version
Hardback. You know you want it.

*2008. That's when the original Socks comic came out. You can still get that too. (Here on Kindle)

PPS: The Socks Christmas Carol is available on its own on Kindle here.

PPS:You can still get Socks Minging Detectives t-shirts, last few left, in time for Christmas.

 


Kev F Sutherland, as well as writing and drawing for The Beano, Marvel, Doctor Who et al, runs Comic Art Masterclasses in schools, libraries and art centres - email for details, and follow him on Facebook and Twitter. View the promo video here. 

Who's 2015's most famous celebrity with kids? The winner is...

My Comic Art Masterclasses in 2015 have taken me further than ever before, with visits to Jordan and Switzerland as well as classes on the Mull Of Kintyre and the Isle Of Wight, in Nairn in the Highlands and Looe in Cornwall, in libraries all over Edinburgh, Intu shopping centres across the country, an unprecedented number of literary festivals, and two weeks in Barking and Lincoln producing special Magna Carta themed magazines.

And in all of these classes I do my "treads on a worm" demonstration strip, an example of which you can see above (in the American Community School of Amman's library, since you ask). I ask the kids to suggest a celebrity, the most famous person they can think of. They give me 4 names, then we choose the favourite from those to go into the strip. As well as being a bit of fun that gives me the chance to vary the content of what I draw,  and to demonstrate my enviable improvisation skills (he says ironically), this process also gives us some idea of who kids think are the most famous people in the world today. So, who did they suggest the most?

Mentioned in Dispatches - only chosen once:

Alan Carr
Albert Einstein
Bill Gates
Boris Johnson
Bruce Forsyth
Bruno Mars
Cheryl Cole
Daniel Craig
Danny Dyer
David Attenborough
David Tennant
Elvis Presley
Eminem
Gordon Ramsey
Harry Hill
Isaac Newton
Jack Whitehall
Jennifer Lawrence
Jeremy Kyle
Jesus
Joseph Stalin
Judge Rinder (TV judge)
Keith Lemon
Lady Gaga
Leonardo DiCaprio
Lewis Hamilton
Martin Luther King
Megan Fox
Meghan Trainor
Michael Bay
Mick Jagger
Nicholas Cage
Nigel Farage
Olly Murs
Pablo Picasso
Pixie Lott
Prince Charles
Rick Walker (wrestler)
Robert Downey Jr
Sabine Schmidt (racing car driver)
Samuel L Jackson
Steven Gerrard
Vladimir Putin
Warwick Davies
Will I Am
William Shakespeare
Zac Efron

Runners Up - chosen twice

Ant (out of Ant & Dec) - 2
Ariana Grande - 2
Benedict Cumberbatch - 2
David Cameron - 2
Dec (out of Ant & Dec) - 2
Donald Trump - 2
Dwayne The Rock Johnson - 2
Ed Sheeran - 2
Jackie Chan - 2
Kim Jong-Un - 2
Morgan Freeman - 2
Sam Smith - 2
Stephen Hawking - 2
Tom Jones - 2
Vin Diesel - 2
Will Smith - 2

Joint 9th Place - chosen 3 times
David Beckham - 3
James Bond - 3
Roald Dahl - 3

8th Place - chosen 4 times
Miley Cyrus - 4
Lionel Messi - 4
Barack Obama - 4

7th Place - chosen 5 times
Nicki Minaj - 5
Katy Perry - 5
Taylor Swift - 5
David Walliams - 5

6th Place - chosen 6 times
Johnny Depp - 6

5th Place - chosen 7 times
The Queen - 7
Beyonce - 7

4th Place - chosen 8 times
Cristiano Ronaldo - 8

3rd Place - chosen 10 times
Kim Kardashian - 10

2nd Place - chosen 12 times
Michael Jackson - 12

And the winner is..?

1st Place - chosen 31 times
Simon Cowell.

As anyone who's read any of my Comic Art Masterclass blogs will know, Simon Cowell is suggested in 75% of classes, and as you can see is finally chosen in an awful lot of them. Not, maybe, the 15% of classes that I've taken to saying is the case, but nearly three times as often as the next contender. As for why Michael Jackson remains so popular with the kids, your guess is as good as mine.

In 2014 Simon Cowell came 1st, being chosen 27 times. Michael Jackson was only 5th with 7 outings, 4th was Joey Essex (not suggested at all this year), 3rd was Miley Cyrus, and in joint 2nd were Katy Perry (this year down to 7th) and Keith Lemon (an also-ran this year) with 11 nominations apiece.

2013: 1st place Simon Cowell (chosen 25 times); joint 2nd Michael Jackson, Keith Lemon and Harry Styles (where he?) chosen 7 times each; 3rd place Harry Hill & The Queen (chosen 6 times); 4th place Johnny Depp, 5th place Cheryl Cole.



Kev F Sutherland, as well as writing and drawing for The Beano, Marvel, Doctor Who et al, runs Comic Art Masterclasses in schools, libraries and art centres - email for details, and follow him on Facebook and Twitter. View the promo video here. 

Killer Christmas party - last comics of the year

How perfect that the final comic produced by pupils in my last day of Comic Art Masterclasses this year should be called Zon's Killer Christmas Party. A fine way of rounding off a busy year of classes. Two of the examples above come from Eastern Green Primary in Coventry, and one from a private party booking in a lovely ancient house in Box.


And talking of lovely ancient houses, tell me this isn't the poshest pair of backstage Sock-selfies you've seen this year? The Socks played a 50th birthday party in Wimborne St Giles at the ancestral home of the Earls Of Shaftesbury, which is in the process of extensive and very impressive restoration. You'll like it when it's finished. And there's a familiar statue in the middle of the ornamental pond. Given whose house it is, can you guess which statue?*

The celebs chosen by my last three Masterclass pupils to tread on a worm were Ant McPartlin, The Queen and Johnny Depp. Which begs the question, who have been the most popular Celebs-Who-Tread (no, got to find a better name than that) of 2015? Sounds like the subject for a whole new blog to me...

Oh yeah, I made a new banner to include in my emails to schools. Hope you like it.



Kev F Sutherland, as well as writing and drawing for The Beano, Marvel, Doctor Who et al, runs Comic Art Masterclasses in schools, libraries and art centres - email for details, and follow him on Facebook and Twitter. View the promo video here. 


*Eros, obviously.