Phlegmatic

As alluded to earlier, the main focus for the rest of the year as far as personal projects go is a new graphic novel I received an advance for after pitching it during my recent jaunt overseas. This one is pretty autobiographical save for changing names and likenesses (kind of the opposite of 'Mitchells In England', where all the characters were named after real people but the stories were completely fictional) while hopefully being sort of amusing.

The working title was 'Throatfukt' which has been shortened to 'Throat' as my first concession to its potential publishers, it's also a little less on the nose. The story is essentially an illustrated adaptation of thoughts I'd jotted down during a pretty significant and sobering health scare I went through earlier in the year, with dialogue added and a lot of the plodding, self-involved, morbid streams-of-consciousness shit edited out. Apart from this blog I generally don't keep journals - not being either a girl or, y'know, twelve, - but this was kind of done on impulse as a coping mechanism. It took a lot of the drama out of the situation and helped hugely when it came to moving on.

Concept/(possible) cover art for 'Throat'

The drawing style is kind of new territory for me. It came from a rather stressful period during a work commission where none of the concepts we were coming up with were quite hitting the mark, so I wound up just throwing out as much variety as possible, including this loose, thick-line style. In the end we went with something more conventional, but the style really appealed to me as it doesn't really look like anything I've done before. There's something Ralph Steadman/Dave McKean/John Callahan-ish about it that seems to complement the medium of graphic novels and the writing style rather well, so I decided to pull it out.
Here are some character designs, not coloured or properly textured at this point but they should more or less set the tone.