Exciting news! The first issue of ink+PAPER is out this week. This is a brand new comics magazine put together by the fabulous David O'Connell, and it includes a photo essay by yours truly. I haven't seen a hard copy yet, but David assures me it looks fantastic. That's his cover illustration up there. London Underground nerds can have fun trying to work out which tube line he's illustrated, but it's a bit of a trick question because he's incorporated several elements from different tube lines (the seating is the Design Research Unit's 1970s District Line moquette design, though).

If you're in London, come to the launch party at Orbital Comics this Friday from 7:00pm.

ink+PAPER will also be on sale at Saturday's Comiket fair on Saturday as part of this year's Comica Festival (another brilliant line-up of events this year). This year Comiket is being held at the newly refurbished Bishopsgate Institute. I'm looking forward to seeing what it looks like.

If you can't make either of those events, it will be on sale in Orbital Comics and Gosh Comics, or you can buy it online from here.

The other big comics news this week is of course the release of Nelson, the ambitious comics anthology/exquisite corpse story told by over 50 of the UK's best comics creators, with all profits going to homeless charity Shelter. (You may remember I made some fan art of the cover.) I've been looking forward to this one for months, not just because loads of my friends are involved or because it's for a good cause, but because everything I've seen of it speaks to the dedication and creative brilliance of the people involved. I'm very excited be getting my hands on a copy tomorrow, courtesy of Alison at Space In Text. (I will be buying a copy as well. I just haven't decided whether to pick up a hardcover from the Blank Slate table at Comiket on Saturday, or one of the Frank Quitely bookplate softcovers from the Nelson launch/signing at Gosh Comics.)

November 19-25 is Nelson Week, so look for more about the book then. I strongly suspect that you're going to be hearing a lot about it in the run up to Christmas!

You can still buy Mackenzie's these days. I'm not linking direct to any shops, but the label is still pretty old-fashioned (this version is nicer)

More smelling salts. Boots is still around, obviously. Same logo as always.

Parke Davis still exists, so presumably they're still selling some kind of inhalant.

It's pretty hard to find out if this still exists due to the difficulty of googling the brand name. There is a health company in Rickmansworth bearing the same name but I haven't worked out from their shiny website if they have anything to do with the company that made this product decades ago. Whatever it was, it was really sticky judging from the residue on the bottle.

Googling brings up a few shops still selling this, though I haven't trawled through them all to see if the bottles are new or not. But back when it was a best-selling cure, it seemed to have been used for everything from sprained ankles to tired horses.

Googling for "Paul Bossoney" doesn't bring anything up, so I don't know if the shop still exists. Although I bet if Google thought I was in France I'd at least find lots of people with that name… (stupid filter bubble)

This is what inhalers used to look like before they invented plastic ones. Imagine the horror if it broke when you really needed your medicine!

And lastly for this post of vintage bits, here's an old box of Borgois rouge that my granny used to use. There's still some inside.

And an unopened pack of Gauloises from the 70s that I think must have belonged to my grandfather (he died in 1975). I'm not sure why the logo features Mercury's helmet, although I have an old book on cigarette packaging that might tell me (I shall dig it out and have a look).

More vintage stuff soon.

Jules Borel moved to America from Switzerland and started a business selling watch parts, which is still in business today, although the design of their website is no way near as pretty as this tin (which I now keep pins in).

According to the Science Museum, Holloway’s Ointment "was a popular universal cure for a number of ailments advertised on the pot, including gout, rheumatism, ulcers, sore breasts and a sore head." Inventor Thomas Holloway sponsored the building of Holloway College for the Higher Education of Women, which was later renamed Royal Holloway College (now part of the University of London). I had no idea it had started out as a women's college.

Iodex is still available in India, and according to this article from 2004, some kids eat it to get high, which must be like eating a vaseline and ibuprofen sandwich. Ick.

My granny did a lot of sewing at one point, so she needed a lot of pins. You can still buy tins of Iris Superfein pins with the same design. The tins are pretty big.

Waterman still make pens, and although they don't make the 88 ink anymore, you can buy vintage bottles in mint condition for only £6 from Vintage Waterman Pens. I think the bottles are really pretty.

I couldn't find much information about these, except on some poorly translated French pages (which might just be an example of the filter bubble rather than because there's no information online). According to the French wikipedia page — Rustines have become the generic name, like Hoover, so that might make it hard to find information. Anyway, I like the rounded edges of the tin. It still has some "rustines" inside, but there's no glue. I expect they might be too dried out to patch a puncture, anyway.

Another one I couldn't find any historical information on, but if you do a search for their name you can find hundreds of websites selling their tea. This box is stuffed full of old things from my grandparents' medicine cabinet, including the two ointment pots above, and the bottles in the picture below. I'll save those for another post.

Anyway, I realised that the bus I was on went fairly close to a shop that I'd been meaning to go and take photos of for a few years, so I jumped off and walked the distance (just over a mile) to where the shop is. I'm very glad I did, because I discovered that the shop in question is closing for good at the end of July. After 50 years of trading, the owners are retiring. I can't help but wonder what's going to happen to this fabulous signage:

No one seems to know if the owners deliberately gave their shop such a provocative name, or not, but you can't help but love it, especially when this camp statue is but a few metres away:

There's some other nice signage nearby, too.

Last week there was a launch party for David B's Black Paths, at Clerkenwell Tales, a lovely little bookshop in Exmouth Market. I'd only heard about the launch the previous evening, which meant I was a bit late in getting a place — in fact I didn't get a response until 6:30 that evening, which was exactly when the event started. Oops! As a result, I entirely missed David B being interviewed by Paul Gravett, which was a bit annoying, but at least I got there in time for some free booze, and also a chance to catch up with Dan Lester before he flew off to teach English in South Korea the following day, as well as lots of other people.

I did have a flick through the book, however, and it looks pretty good, with lovely paper stock and full colours throughout. I have to say publisher Self Made Hero really excel at good production values, compared to some other publishers. Having only seen David B's work in black-and-white, where it works so well, it was nice to see that it translates well into colour too (you might think that's a given, but it isn't always). I definitely want to give it a proper read at some point, even though a couple of friends read it over the weekend and said that although it's visually stunning, the story isn't very compelling. I wondered whether this might partly be to do with translating a work from another language, and having read this fascinating post by the book's translator, it seems quite likely. On the other hand, I do remember that, as much as I appreciated the artwork in David B's Epileptic, the story did lose me along the way (although it's been almost 10 years since I read it, so I may feel differently now).

After waiting for friends to get their copies signed, I went to get some food with Woodrow Phoenix, Rob Davis and Glyn Dillon, which I mention only because it gives me a good excuse to plug Nelson again, as I discovered over dinner that even more amazing creators have signed up to participate. It's a shame I can't say who, because I'm sworn to secrecy, and if I told you I'd have to kill you, and there's no easy way to round up a bunch of mostly anonymous readers on the internet and quietly bump them all off, but trust me when I say NELSON IS GOING TO BE AWESOME. Glyn's new book (his first foray into comics publishing since, what, the 90s?), The Nao Of Brown looks likes it's going to be really good, too. If you want more proof than just my word, then have a long browsing session on Glyn's blog, which is chock-fulla-pretties. There's more on Space In Text, too.

Monday saw the launch of Reinhard Kleist's Castro, in the gallery upstairs at Foyles, which had a bit more space than Thursday's bookshop, but wasn't quite as well attended — even though there was the promise of free mojitos! And such promise: this is the pile of mint and limes at the start of the evening. A couple of hours later, the mint was all but gone and there were only about six limes rattling around the basket. The mojitos seemed to get exponentially stronger, too (my third drink was stronger than the first two put together!).

I took a few notes while Reinhard was being interviewed by Paul, which I've tried to knock into some kind of sense rather than the stream of consciousness that my notes read like. I should say to start with that I've not read Kleist's biography of Johnny Cash yet, and I'm not especially fascinated by Fidel Castro, but I am quite interested in the general history of Cuba, as it seems like a interesting country, albeit often romanticised, and in a constant state of some sort of flux (plus, I'll be honest, it is hard to say "no" to free mojitos!)

Kleist himself admitted that he initially had little interest in Cuba — "Cuba was for the old guys" — but he ended up visiting after a German editor asked him if he wanted to go and make a book about another country. This book was Havanna, which doesn't seem to have been translated into English (yet). In Cuba, he sometimes had trouble understanding people because "the Cuban people have horrible Spanish. It sounds very beautiful but they swallow all the syllables" (this made everyone laugh).

Kleist is pretty good at talking in snappy, visual soundbites. Describing some of Castro's early life, he said that "Havana university must have been like a Mafiosi melting pot" and that Castro has a nose "like a Greek statue." He'd wanted the art to look "a little bit more rough" than his art in Cash, but to keep it black-and-white because "you can do so much with black-and-white and create such a strong atmosphere." I'm inclined to agree, but I also think you can create strong atmospheres with colour too. His Greek publisher felt strongly enough that it should be in colour that they showed him a colourised version, but he hated it. (I'm curious about that, because Cuba is so strongly associated with colour in almost all media. Havanna is full colour, though, so maybe that'll get an English translation soon.)

The book was lettered in Photoshop, and Gravett pointed out the speech balloons are more "emphatic" than in Kleist's previous work. Kleist admitted that in earlier work he had tried to "erase" the balloons, but it didn't really work, as he realised that "text is important". This was an interesting point for me, because one of the things that has put me off reading his books are the cluttered-looking speech balloons — which is only exacerbated in something that is filled with pages of long political speeches, but is evident even in earlier work like Havanna (see pic below). I also noticed from looking at some pages displayed on the gallery wall, that, although Castro is lettered with capitals, there is also an inconsistent use of lower-case i's for no apparent reason other than whimsical idiosyncrasy, which doesn't really fit the general theme of the book and therefore irritated me a bit, because it kept distracting me from what was being said. But maybe most other people don't notice stuff like that.

The interview also touched on some other aspects, such as Cuba's ongoing political situation, and whether the state of the country was doing good for people or getting more corrupted. "Everything raised more questions." There were some comparisons made with China, and Kleist said "we might have a Chinese edition, but I don't know if we'll be allowed to print it." He also mentioned once being asked to sign a copy of Castro "to Fidel" and then learning that it was actually for Castro himself, and that Castro already owned a copy of Havanna, which was a bit nervewracking to discover.

The story itself is a fictionalised biography of Castro, using the character of a young idealistic journalist from Germany, whose look was based on a young French journalist that Kleist saw at an event in Cuba. (I don't know if the young man ever learned how he'd been immortalised), and of course other characters like Che Guevara appear in it as well. According to Kleist, in soundbite mode again, "the main point of the story is how to deal with your ideals" because "there is always another position and you have to show both if you want to be objective". With that in mind, I am quite interested in reading the book now. I quite like his artwork, which in moments reminded me of such disparate artists as Jose Muñoz, Hugo Pratt, Scott Morse and even a touch of Paul Pope in the brushier panels. Overall, it was a pretty interesting evening — and I'm not just saying that because of the free cocktails! Thanks once again to Self Made Hero for the invitations.

Which just goes to show how wrong you can be, because I totally bodged the first attempt on the face, and got started on another face. My second attempt dissatisfied me too, because I'd made the mouth too wide, so I made a third version. Third time lucky on the mouth, but I'd messed up the eyes and ended up going back to the second version, adding the hat, hair and lettering. (It's slightly three-dimensional because I padded her hat and her face.)

In the end, what was supposed to be a quick exercise took much longer than I anticipated. Rob's design looked deceptively simple to copy, but  probably took me longer to sew it than it actually took Rob to draw it, and that's despite me bodging it in places because I was trying to speed the job up. (I always forget that often my favourite part of making stuff is working out how to put it together, and sometimes I find the actual putting together a bit, well, dull. I suppose a lot of creative people feel like that, too.)  

Here it is with Rob's original version, to compare. Looking at them together makes me cringe because I can see all the places I got it wrong, but then that's an occupational hazard with all creative work, not just the stuff adapted from other sources. (You might ask why I would copy someone else's work in the first place, instead of creating something brand new. Well, sometimes you just have to get your creative juices flowing somehow, and like I said, I wanted to pay tribute to all of my friends' great work.) 

As an exercise in creativity it had an interesting result besides the finished product, as it reminded me that, while I can draw in thread (better than I can with a pencil, go figure), some things that look very simple to make an exact copy of aren't that simple after all. In other words, don't take anyone else's work for granted, even if they do have a knack for knocking brilliant drawings out in the space of seconds.

(oh, and I'll probably end up doing something with the two bodged versions, so they're not a total loss, either) 

The frustrating thing is that I had the same problem yesterday, when I had a whole day with no plans, a big pile of old magazine pages and various bits of paper ephemera, a nice sharp scalpel, a big creative desire and absolutely no bloody inspiration. You ever get days like those?

Finally, after an unsatisfying evening of unfulfilled creative urges, I decided to clear up, and in the process of clearing up, I made this:

I rather like it. I rather like this song by the Rosebuds, which gave this post its title, too.

(sorry the picture quality isn't great)

They also had a couple of pieces of original artwork. I don't know who did this one:

Elsewhere, I spotted this fantastic bit of packaging. I love the hand-drawn lettering. So fun!

More Margate photos here.

Friday night at The Miller.