Minor acclaim for typical laydeez, OR if one label is problematic, all labels are problematic.

Look guys it's the working cover for my in progress comic book! 

Who's this pensive sparrow? I will tell you later, but first abstract ramblings. If you're just here to see all the Drink and Draw drawings, feel free to scroll down. 

One of my favourite artworks whose title creates 99% of the genius and meaning, is Wolfgang Tillmans' 2003 exhibition and book of the same name 

If one thing matters, everything matters. 

Ok,  the content and quality of the photography was also super important I'm sure. But the meaning of the whole thing together would have such different, probably diminished power without that great title. I think so anyway. 

Why is this relevant? I'm not sure. 

Because it put a phrase in my head that feels like a sort of summary of how I feel about a lot of the discourse I encounter on the webverse recently. Around labels and problems. I have had some instances of minor acclaim recently (which will be explained shortly) but I haven't found myself in the firing line, I haven't been viciously attacked for my stance on or ownership of labels, but a lot of people have. You could say I have been lucky in this, blessed, or privileged. In the sea of hysteria I have a foot in within my bubble these things are hard to measure with any confidence, but yeah definitely I am all of those things. And since this is KIND OF the area that my book, Biscuits (assorted) is based around, not really, but if it makes people buy them let's say it is, it's an interesting area to talk about. 

Wait, what am I talking about? 

There are two kinds of people in the world, those that believe there are two types of people in the world and those who don't. 

That's another phrase (not the title of an exhibition to my knowledge, or not YET anyway) that I heard a long time ago and have literally just googled and learned that it can be attributed to Robert Benchley. 

If you put both of those phrases together you come close to my outlook on people: you can categorise and label people endlessly and a lot of the time they will fit snugly into those boxes, but also they will never fit into all of the boxes you want them to. Everyone is stupid and ignorant about some things, everyone is wise and smart about some other things. Everyone fits some stereotypes and smashes blindy through others. Everyone matters. All labels are problematic. 

Also, I hate all generalisations. 

So anyway, the first piece of news if you missed it on the twitterverse is that Biscuits (assorted) made the long list, and then got a "Judges Mention" in the Laydeez Do Comics Prize. 

It's a brand new prize for female identifying individuals working on in progress graphic novels, this was it's first year and hopefully it may have many more. The winner was announced amongst other festivities at the Laydeez Day Festival at the Free Word Centre in Farringdon. This was quite close to my flat so I volunteered to help out on the day. It was a great event and an honour to be a part of. I hung out with a lot of cool comic people and got to meet some of my heroes I hadn't previously met like Simone Lia and now one of my new heroes is the winner, the wonderful Emma Burleigh who is working on a lush watercolour autobiographical comic which will be very deservingly hurried along by her prize money I hope. 

This is the sign we made in the window. 

So that was great. Andy wrote it all up more eloquently here. 

The other thing that happened is I got to be a guest artist at Gosh Comics and Broken Frontier Drink and Draw last week, which was great. It was on the last day of term and I had run a big stressful trip the day before so I was a bit delirious. 

Here is me and the other awesome guests Elizabeth Querstret and Michelle Mildenburg holding our wares. Which incidentally you can go and buy my wares at Gosh Comics where they were stocked for the event. Get them while they are there. 

There was a great turnout (because we are so famous, and it was just after payday) so much so that quite a lot of us sat on the floor. You can see me there, cunningly sharpening a pencil into a crisp packet. 

If you live in or near London or are passing through and you like drawing and friendly geeks I do recommend this event as it's always fun, even when I 'm not the guest artist. You get three drawing challenges of about 20 minutes and you can win stuff. I have been going on and off for a few years and in that time, the instance of drawings of penises has massively dwindled to the point where you hardly see any any more. We all chose quite introspective challenges, Elizabeth asked us all to draw our ideal birthday, Michelle asked for how we saw our future 20 years from now. 

For my challenge I really wanted to channel the Biscuits (assorted) message of label introspection, so I asked all the assembled drawers to draw the way(s) in which they fit the stereotype about themselves, and the way(s) in which they didn't. Everyone moaned. That's really hard they said. Then later everyone thanked me ("everyone" is a gross overstatement in both cases) because we like to introspect and be challenged really right?

Anyway I photographed everyone's drawings that they said I could so here they all are. Everyone interpreted it differently cos we're an awesome community of creative people. I did my best with the shop of photo, but some are a little hard to see the detail sorry. 

  

  

I had to choose a winner which was hard, but I chose this one. It's by Olivia Sualdea.

I'm a sucker for a high quality deadpan. That face is so good. 

Obviously I relate, being on the shorter side of stature myself, but strangely this label didn't occur to me when I was making this illustration of myself and my labels which I plan to put at the back of the comic when it's printed. Identity is weird like that. Since I opened up with some mild personal stuff in the Hourly Comic Day, here is some other stuff about me. 

But just so we're clear, I'm also short. 

Because I was on holiday the next day I also went for an additional drinks at a theatre bar. There was a really good drag act of Disney medleys and then everyone sang bohemian rhapsody. So that was pretty perfect. 

For these two events which I have just told you about, I decided to print a zine version of all (most) of the #3point52billion drawings which I had been kind of being indecisive (classic bisexual) about printing or not for ages. But when you are minorly acclaimed you gotta have something to sell that looks like you are moving forward with your projects. 

I am you know. 

Moving forward with my projects.

So that's a thing and you can buy them now here

yay!

Women in the jaws of history

So I have in my diary for today to write a blog post about my new feminist poster and collaboration with One Beat Zines. 

Being as we are in the jaws of history this week, it feels a bit inappropriate to be writing about anything but politics. My facebook feed is full of despair, analysis, dark humour and other coping mechanisms, highlighting once again the bubbles that we live in in the age of social media. 

52% of the voting population disagreed even if some of them have switched to camp Regrexit in the last few days, and some small percentage of those people have displayed scarily violent reactions to our immigrant, and lookliketheymightbeimmigrant populations in the heady aftermath of what, for some at least, was seen as a validation of a racist agenda. 

When I hurriedly drew this cartoon at a Broken Frontier Drink and Draw night in February in response to the brief 'something topical', I remember being frustrated at the lack of information in the media about the actual arguments in the case, sadly this was not a problem that was solved in the intervening months, and if anything it got worse. 

I really don't want to write about politics very much. Only time will tell the real impacts of the referendum and its aftermath. But it does seem like a time when more than ever we need to try to understand each other. And to try to embrace our differences, the visible and the invisible ones. 

I tend to try to steer clear of making political statements on social media, partly because of the danger as a teacher of being seen as extremist, but mostly because I'm a world  champion fence sitter. I tend to believe the answer to 99% of questions is 'it's complicated'. I only feel comfortable sticking my nose past the door on issues that seem clean cut to me, as I did with the Marriage Equality comic last year. Because it just seems to me that that's a simple issue that there's a right answer to. 

But those are rare. 

So this is my 'feminist poster' that I made for One Beat Zines to go with a selection of my zines that they are selling (get yours here) , but as you'll see it's not a simple feminist message. It's more of a sort of intersectional, anti simplifying, pro individual message. 

Although I identify as broadly feminist, just as I identify as broadly a leftie, those are identifiers that feel problematic given my essentially highly privileged background, and I feel uncomfortable with the polarising implication that any label embracing philosophy has, 

creating a them by creating an us. 

But there's a core belief that has been something I've been turning round in my head virtually my whole life, and that's about people. I believe that everyone, yes, has the capacity for good and evil, wonderfullness and terribleness, but also that everyone is a bit incongruous. Everyone has the capacity to surprise you if you give them the chance. We're messed up, broken people in what feels like an increasingly messed up and broken world. Everyone has vast tracts of ignorance, because the human brain isn't big enough for that to be any other way, (I don't know what it's like to think immigration is a bad thing, also I know very little about basketball) but we also all have knowledge. 

We know what it's like to be us. 

We have to listen to each other to begin to know what it's like to not be us.

So this has all got a bit heavy for what was meant to be me talking about some work I made. 

After I made the poster, about 6 weeks ago now, I found I still wanted to draw people coming out of cookie cutter gaps in the world. As any illustrator or advertiser will know, trying to represent diversity in a group of characters has a certain ironic repetitiveness. Really you can't do it justice ever. Because of how everyone is, you know, ACTUALLY DIVERSE. So I wanted to draw some more. And I still want to. 

So I started by drawing 4 more and giving them captions.

I wanted them to be captions that could apply to anyone. So I could maybe present these in a book with the captions on separate flaps, you know like those kids books where the heads, bodies and legs are interchangeable? 

But I'm not sure if that's what I want to do with them yet. Because as much as we do all have some things in common, not every women on earth actually has an inbox, or knew their mother, so that's not really a thing. I think I might want to do something more. I think I might want to try and tell stories about them.

I'm also not sure if I just want to do them about women. I mean, Yay Feminism. But there's been a postit on my desk for over a year with an idea for a project called "7.4 billion ways it's ok to be human". It was an idea waiting for it's aesthetic. 

OH IT LOOKS LIKE JENNY MIGHT HAVE STARTED YET ANOTHER INFINITE PROJECT. 

Apologies if you are my facebook friend waiting for me to draw you. 

So in conclusion, the theme of this blog post was I managed to think of a way to make my #shamelessselfpromotion relevant to the current events of the now. Sort of. But that also, lets all try to look beyond our differences, the visible and invisible ones, and find ways to see each other as beautiful idiosyncratic ignorant messes.