Professional Irish comic book artists Declan Shalvey (Marvel’s Thunderbolts, 28 Days Later) and Stephen Mooney (Angel, Half Past Danger) talk about their experiences in the comic book industry – everything from creator owned work to the importance of social media in getting your name out there – on the latest episode of the Comic Cast. Listen here.

Above image: front cover to issue 1 of Half Past Danger by Stephen Mooney

The Blog of Kells - Cartoon Saloon‘s production blog for their Oscar-nominated film The Secret of Kells – was a fascinating 8 year read into the behind the scenes of making an animated feature film from start to finish, warts n’ all! So I’m delighted to discover that they’ve created another production blog for their current feature – Song of the Sea (of whom Scamp’s very own mr steve mccarthy has recently joined as part of the key background team).

Cartoonist Paul Hornschemeier has written a great post on what he uses when he’s working. Everything from paper to pencils. You can read it here.

Linotype: the film is a new documentary about the Linotype typecasting machine. Culture File on RTÉ Lyric fm has an interesting interview with the film’s director, Doug Wilson, who calls the machine “the Twitter of 1886.” You can listen to the podcast here.

Visualized is a conference taking place in New York on Nov 8 & 9 to explore the ‘evolution of communication at the intersection of big data, storytelling and design.’ A series of videos have been created for the conference including this one where graphic designer and artist Peter Saville talks about the squiggle cover art for Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures album.

A great many years ago I was browsing in a shop called Yellow Rat Bastard in New York. At the time I wasn’t really into comic books at all and I certainly didn’t even know comic books about everyday life even existed, when I picked up a copy of Adrian Tomine‘s Summer Blonde. I brought it back to my hotel and read it cover to cover. It’s so often difficult to pin point exactly when a love for a particularly medium or genre takes hold of you but this was it for me. Tomine’s art – those clear black line drawings - mesmerized me and have done ever since. So I’m ecstatic to learn that Tomine has a new collection out this month entitled ‘New York Drawings - a decade of covers, comics, illustrations, and sketches from the pages of  The New Yorker and beyond‘.

Chris Appelhans has been an artist stuck in my head ever since I saw his bare bones animated Superman short a few years back so I was delighted to see he currently has an exhibition entitled RAINBOW MONSTR at Gallery Nucleus with some really lovely watercolours. You can see the full exhibit online here.

American illustrator John Hendrix  has a very interesting blog post about his recent cover illustration for The Journal of the Norwegian Medical Association which you can read here.

Nice animated video of illustrations by Carson Ellis for Colin Meloy‘s (lead singer of the Decemberists) book Wildwood.

Myself and Craig talk to illustrator BRENB about Offset 2012 on the Comic Cast Christmas Special podcast as well as chatting with artist Declan Shalvey on his recent work for Marvel and Northlanders. Suffice to say, there will also be reviewing of comics and plenty of giggling. Listen here.

Illustration by Jordie Bellaire.