During the 1980s, when I was something less than ten years old, my brother and I auditioned for roles in a stage adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s Junglebook. Despite the fact that, as far as I could tell, I was the better actor, my brother was cast in the lead role of Mowgli while I was given a non-speaking role as one of a chorus of monkeys. I understood that my brother seemed more wild. He had a restless energy that he found hard to disguise, he was more energetic, less self

1948 reconstruction of Louis Slotin’s 1946 criticality accident (with physicist Chris Wright posing as Slotin) Last week, after literally months of research and development, my graphic essay ‘The Blue Flash’ was published by BBC Future . Sitting somewhere between web-comic and illustrated essay, I developed the piece after seeing photographs of a reconstruction of Slotin's accident commissioned in 1948 by Los Alamos National Laboratories (formerly the 'Project Y' bomb develop

This year is the 30th anniversary of Madonna's photo-book Sex . I was an adolescent when it was published but I clearly remember a conversation between some critics on the radio at the time. One of them said Madonna's boobs were 'lower' than they'd expected: the intimation being that her body was somehow not as 'good' as they had anticipated. Another said "It's like she can't get naked enough," suggesting, as I understood it, that the images came across as effortful in a way

In the summer of 2020 I started revisiting Jack Kirby's artwork for Marvel Comics. In particular I was looking at his early drawings for his masterpiece of nuclear-gothic, the Incredible Hulk , first published in May 1962: My first attempts to copy Kirby's drawing were not, in my opinion, excellent. This one just looks wrong: This one's head is way too wide and squashed: Still having trouble with the shape of the head here - having to add more hair to make it bigger, ending u

During lock-down last year my cousin asked me to do some Zoom classes with her kids. In one session I set them the task of drawing...

In the winter of 2019 I attended Emily Haworth-Booth's Drawing the Graphic Novel course at the Royal Drawing School in London. Here are...