About a month ago I picked up a few pages of Ella Cinders comic strips from the Dallas Morning News of 1927. They're lovely comics - very nicely drawn and wittily written. Ella Cinders immediately comes across as a strong and sassy girl who makes her own unique way through the world as an underdog that constantly comes out on top thanks to a quick mind and a not bad right hook (if required).

The strip was written by Bill Conselman (1896-1940) who also scripted for the silver screen, including an Ella Cinders film in 1926 starring Colleen Moore (with a cameo by Harry Langdon as himself!) The artist was Charlie Plumb (1899-1982), who continued with the strip into the early 1950s, though latterly with other artists ghosting in his place (I'm not too keen on the 1940s and later incarnation of Ella, who survived into the 1960s).

Here's my collection of Ella Cinders sheets (they measure 15.25 x 22.5"), with Ella herself keeping guard. There are some beautifully drawn mastheads (eg. the ogre above).

There are some lovely high resolution Cinders strips to be found at Digital Funnies, and a great archive also at Barnacle Press. Below we see Ella at the museum... which reminds me that a recent Charlie Jefferson panel (my DFC strip) has a similar view - I just noticed the coincidence while putting this post together.

Not quite! But I have put up the first new strip since November 2007, and it's something I've been meaning to do for a few weeks now. I stayed up until 3.30 a.m last night to get it done - the only spare time I can find right now.

It was really nice to draw Julius, Lily and Nathaniel once more. It's been nearly a year - I can't believe it's been so long! Thank you again, everyone, for your exceptional patience. I'm getting there - as soon as my DFC strip is done, I shall be back on to Orchid... and this time there's a book in sight. And we'll celebrate with a competition for some original art.

You can see the new strip by clicking the picture below.

A reminder that after I'd finished my comic character A-Z, the project was boldly taken up by Jonathon Dalton, who is currently up to the letter K. You can go and join his A-Z Facebook group here, or view his gallery so far on LiveJournal.

I was delighted that his letter J was represented by Julius Chancer from the Rainbow Orchid, and Jonathon's fantastic rendering of Julius can be seen below.

Just a quick entry, but I thought I'd throw this together as both a little preview of my DFC strip (Charlie Jefferson and the Tomb of Nazaleod) and an illustration of my art-working process...

Of course the script comes first (and that comes after the research and plot workings-out), but while I'm writing the script, I'll rough out the page simultaneously. As Nazaleod is in 4-page episodes, I do these roughs on A4, folded in half to give me four A5 pages.

Then I pencil the page using a Rotring mechanical pencil with a 0.5mm H lead and working on Goldline A3 220gsm bristol board. The page is inked with a dip pen (Hunt 107 nib) and india ink - as you can see from the accompanying image, I scanned this stage for some reason, with pencils still underneath, which I don't usually do. After the pencils have been erased away, the inks are scanned in to Photoshop as a 600dpi bitmap, and it's here I'll do any little corrections and add any 'white ink' (eg. the rain). Finally, the bmp is converted to colour, the black line is lifted to its own layer and colour is applied underneath, before being transferred to an A4 (actual size) master and lettered (not shown).

Click the image for a bigger view. There's a little summary of what Nazaleod is all about reproduced on the Forbidden Planet International blog - my thanks to Richard Bruton for the mention.

With that comics A-Z all focussed on me, me, me, I thought I should do a post about you, you, you... or at least some of you, anyway...

Firstly I want to mention a couple of new projects from Dave West of Accent UK. He's got a great little story on the way called 'Whatever Happened To The World's Fastest Man?', which takes a nice angle on the concept Arthur C. Clarke examined in his short story, 'All the Time in the World'. The project that excites me a tad more, though, is 'Stephenson's Robot', with the lovely artwork of Indio, and you can go and learn more about this at the website.

I also want to give another mention to the sketches of Andy (aka Konky Kru). Whenever I visit his website I can spend ages in his galleries of wonderous art, whether they're the ink drawings of various scenes and events (including several comic festivals), or the beautiful watercolours. I find them lively and inspiring and you'll find them well worth your time. While you're off in that direction, you can lose yourself further in his invaluable Early Comics Archive too.

Finally (for now), I hope you've been following the adventures of Super-Sam and John-of-the-Night by Darryl Cunningham that's been running over on the Forbidden Planet International blog. Darryl is a clever storyteller with an engaging art style. I loved the brilliance of a scene in episode 37 where John stares at a painting, only to see his grandfather appear and give him a warning. My description is clumsy - Darryl presents it as a perfect comic-strip moment, visual and with simple yet startling impact in just a few panels (see? I'm still trying to describe it!). It's language-of-comics ingenuity.

A big thank you to all the Caption team who put on yet another marvellous event in Oxford this past weekend. I could only make it up on the Saturday, and thanks to motorway congestion and misty rain-spray I got there halfway through the DFC panel (which had the room packed out and was very good).

As is usual with these events, it was great to meet and talk with everyone I did, and I'm disappointed at missing many more. My original drawings for the Comics A-Z did quite nicely in the auction, so thank you to everyone who put in a bid. I'll try and find out how much they raised (edit: £181), but the important thing is that the auction total was over £600 - amazing stuff. If I'd have been a bit more flush myself I would have definitely gone for the Lee Kennedy sketchbook... a wonderful thing to own.

Elyssa came up with me, which reminded me that our first sort-of-date involved dropping in at a proto-Caption at the Red Sun Institute in Reading in 1992 - I don't think it was called Caption then, but I might be wrong.

Selina has put together a terrific Caption video report, and Sarah has bashed out an amusing comic strip, both suffice as excellent overviews of the day, and there are more links here.

(from Sarah McIntyre's Caption strip)

The latest news on 'The Rainbow Orchid' is that the contract has been signed by both myself and Egmont UK and I'll be getting back to working on the book sometime in September, once I've finished 'Charlie Jefferson and the Tomb of Nazaleod' for The DFC (which is what I'm working on now).

I should be attending at least one of the days at Caption this year - possibly the Sunday. The great poster below was drawn by Leonie O'Moore.

If you're a registered reader at Rainbow Orchid then you'll have had access to a couple of extra strips featuring characters from the strip through the members' area. One of these strips is Sword of Truth which originally appeared in The Girly Comic 5 (2004) and is currently appearing at the Factor Fiction Press website at the rate of one page a day this week.

Sword of Truth actually started life as a script in about 1994 as a story called Stage Fight about two Edwardian actors who try their luck with a young girl new to the cast. Some of the ideas from that abandoned strip did transfer over to Rainbow Orchid. The vampish actress - called Evelyn Saxon in the original - became the model for Evelyn Crow, and the young girl remained as Lily, though originally she was Lily Lovell.

A silly one-page strip I did, Weapons of Mass Destruction that appeared in KissKiss BangBang 2, appeared on the Factor Fiction site yesterday.

A good post day... as well as a lovely package of new art supplies this morning - The DFC has arrived!

It's a superb first issue and reviews are appearing already - John Freeman at Down the Tubes, Lew Stringer at Blimey! It's Another Blog About Comics and Kenny Penman at Forbidden Planet start things off. Edited to add: Here's a review by Paul Gravett.