Stuff I've done in the past!!!

Well I suppose I better use this bit to show what I've been doing over the past number of years. Um, here goes. At nineteen I worked for the Evening Echo in Cork for six months while in art college drawing full page strips based on people's jokes that they sent in on a weekly basis. We had two problems with that.

1) People didn't send in any jokes (I still managed to get jokes from sources and put fake names and addresses to them for six months).

2) I was nineteen which meant I was a silly boy.

Anyway here are two such beauties by a nineteen year old just making the deadlines and probably scribbled together in about an hour:

I was let go from said position and ploughed through art college till I left. I did get a few odd jobs here and there like this one from the French News an English language magazine based in the south of France. They wanted a stereo typical French man. Really they did!

A year after leaving art college I applied to every newspaper in Ireland there was to apply to. Then every magazine. They all said no so I got a notion I could do religious cartoons and sent them to the Irish Catholic our weekly catholic newspaper here in Ireland. What was done as a bit of craic and with no notion of getting a yes turned out to be a position that kept me scribbling for a year and a half.

After that I managed to get a small job with the Clare People one of the newspapers here in County Clare where I was told to read Arlene Harris's column about motherhood and provide her column with a strip (or illustration but we made it a strip in the end). I also was sometimes called upon to do illustrations for feature articles.

Then I managed to get a small job with a monthly commercial fishing magazine doing a short-lived strip called Crew Cuts. I am first to admit the puns I used probably scuttled the strip (get it!! Do you see what I did there!!!).

I also managed to get a job with the Irish language newspaper Lá doing panel gag cartoons. The panel was called 'Agus Sin Sin' which in English was called 'And That's That.'

After that I went backpacking in Canada and came back a year later back where I started with no illustration work but had a short story on BBC Radio 4 for 15 minutes which was nice. Then I started submitting to Phoenix Magazine which is almost like Private Eye in the United Kingdom.

Lately though I have been mostly doing work for the Irish Times and their supplements designing characters and drawing colouring in pics of scenes for their Art in the Classroom supplement which has been fun.

But the main thing that excites me is the fact that we are bringing out an Irish language comic anthology in the next few months with help from Forás na Gaeilge. We have a great bunch of people involved like Bob Byrne, Declan Shalvey, Ian Whelan, Alan Nolan, Mike Lynch, Ian Cullen, Stephen Downey, a few other Irish cartoonists and two French comic strips translated for the first time into Irish. We also have a a very talented graphic designer on board called Muireann Lalor and Malachaí Mac Amhlaoibh is our brilliant Irish translator. We also have confirmed that we will be assisted by Gabriel Rosenstock who is one of Ireland's top writers 'as gaeilge.' I have started a company called Coimicí Gael and we have put together an eight page sample for people to look at. I drew the cover but the layout was by Muireann (who did a great job on designing the whole thing).

And that's me in a nutshell really as far as the cartoonist side of things goes. There have been other projects but these are the main things I have been involved in.