RIP J.G. BALLARD

I was saddened to read of the death of the writer J.G. Ballard, one of the most visionary authors of the 20th and early 21st century.
For those not familiar with his work, Ballard began his career writing science fiction short stories for anthologies like New Worlds. However, to call him a science fiction author would be misleading. He usually described himself as a writer of "speculative fiction", or as an author of books which pictured "the psychology of the future".
What so inflamed my imagination reading him in my teens and early twenties is that, unlike the galactic adventures of many conventional sci-fi authors, Ballard's stories are often concerned with inner space and the often surrealistic experiences of characters with often very uniquely disturbed psyches.
In works like The Atrocity Exhibition Ballard drew even further away from conventional science fiction themes into the literary avant garde.
A number of his novels were adapted into very successful and often controversial Hollywood films. Empire of the Sun, a semi-autobiographical account of his experiences as a child in Shanghai during World War 2, was filmed by Steven Spielberg, and his novel Crash, about the lives of characters who all share the same bizarre automotive fetish, was made into a controversial 1996 movie by David Cronenberg.
If you haven't read Ballard his short stories are definately the place to begin, partly for the simple, lucid and often beautiful descriptive quality he brought to the most intensely subjective material, and partly for their genuinely mind expanding quality.
Better than drugs.

J.G. Ballard 1930 - 2009

Scott McCloud on TED.com

No pictures to share with you just yet, so instead I'm posting a link to this fascinating talk given by Scott McCloud, author of Understanding Comics.

Automatisms

Here's an automatic drawing from my sketchbook archive. I think this style of drawing is sometimes known as "taking the pen for a walk", because you're not making any conscious decisions about what you're trying to say with a given piece. You kinda give your unconscious free reign. For this reason it was quite a popular past-time with the Surrealists back in the 1920s, as well as the English artist and magician Austin Osman Spare, who likened it to a kind of trance.

My favourite subject

A new approach I've been playing with. Note the position of the signature, which probably signifies something or other...

Amber Nectar

I created Amber as a one off when Ben "Doctor Simpo" Simpson asked me for some pages for the fourth issue of his surrealistically satirical underground comic Freak. Turns out she was far more appealing than the degenerate stoner characters I'd been drawing up till then, and so his associates at Glasgow's Hope Street Studios asked me to revive the character for their dope humour mag Northern Lightz.
She's been revived more recently for Lightz' successor title Wasted. I went along to the launch signing in London in autumn of 2008, which was a tremendous buzz because most of the people involved, folks like editor Alan Grant, cover artist Frank Quitely, Jamie Grant and Jon Haward, are far more established in the field than me.
You can find out more at www.wastedcomic.com

World's End Comics

"World's End" was a comic strip I created for a Leeds-based independent magazine called The End is Nigh, published by writer/journalist Michael Molcher. As you can probably guess from the title, the whole mag has an apocalyptic theme. It also has interviews with the likes of Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie, and quite a few high profile contributors as well, including Boo Cook, Leah Moore and John Reppion, and many, many more besides. You can still buy copies from http://www.endisnigh.co.uk/