WOLF like me.

If you pay attention to the monthly comic book solicitations, you'll notice that my name is absent from the listing for issue five of Image Comics WOLF (the book i have been drawing with Ales Kot, Lee Loughridge, Clayton Cowles and Tom Muller). If you were to look into the future and see the solicit for issue six, you wouldn’t find me there either. And you might then think: ‘hey, what’s up with that?' 

So here’s what’s up with that. After four issues of surly private investigators, tentacled down and outs and, well, wolves, i am leaving WOLF for pastures new. Which I know isn’t all that common on Image books where you have a creative team locked in and they tell the story they wanted to tell. You’re probably thinking: “maybe there’s some behind the scenes shenanigans that they’re not telling me about." 

So here’s the behind the scenes shenanigans that they’re not telling you about. Comics are HARD WORK. And as it turns out, they’re harder work than i ever anticipated. Also harder than I anticipated: trying to maintain a full time gig as a freelance illustrator alongside a monthly book (in the same time I have been working on WOLF i have produced somewhere north of fifteen portraits, eight movie posters, four book covers, a bunch of editorials and comic book covers and full artwork for three albums). The reason for the full time job is because, I only got my first cheque for WOLF about three weeks ago and I’ve been working on it since January (that’s just the way it works with Image books, where you won’t see money until a couple of months after the first issue). Even harder still: doing all of this with a new baby (her name is Nico, she is one year old, and she is wonderful - thank you for asking). 

I’m pretty sure I should have listened when seasoned comics friends told me how much hard work comics could be, but I was way too confident that I could juggle everything and still get to bed before midnight every night. I have a newfound respect for monthly artists having tried and only just managed four months of it! 

WOLF had a difficult birth with some changes in personnel as we were just getting started, then a first issue which was 28 pages, then 39, then kept on growing to eventually 58 (and there was some great stuff which was cut after it had been drawn and some sequences were reworked and moved to different places and in one case a different issue - including, i kid you not, a zombie Heidi Klum which was one of my favourite pages and I hope will surface somewhere). The release was initially scheduled for April, then moved back to July. None of this is uncommon, but for someone who is used to working on fairly rigid deadlines with illustration, being one part of a machine like this was a bit of a shock. And that’s before we even get to moments of my own stupidity like leaving half the pages for an issue on a different computer and completely forgetting to upload them to be coloured. Before issue one had dropped I was already very aware that it wasn’t going to work on an ongoing basis and so we agreed that I’d do the first arc and then hand over the reins. 

I’m immensely proud of the story we have laid the foundations for and i’ll be continuing to read the book now that Ricardo Lopez Ortiz has joined the team.

  And so for now, my brief flirtation with monthly comics is over. But not with comics in general because I have a few things lined up already to keep me busy over the next year. Things I can work on slowly and surely and not have a monthly panic attack over. 

To be continued.

It feels like it has been an age since i posted anything on here - in my defence i changed computers and lost my password. Anyhow - back again, blogging will continue in earnest.

Last year I wrote and drew a one shot comic called The Great Salt Lake, which was released at Thought Bubble convention in Leeds. I was pretty happy with it, and people seemed to enjoy it, so this year I thought i’d do the same again. Unfortunately time and money conspired against me (not enough of either), and so this is currently all you’ll see for the time being of my latest effort which was to be called The Wild Frontier.

I’m vaguely thinking of reviving it next year as a web comic, but even if i do, i’ll invariably redraw these pages so for now these are just an insight into my attempts at comic making. I hope you like them.

Portrait of a handsome gentleman shaving for this month's German edition of GQ.

The very talented and wonderful Becky Cloonan invited me to draw a variant cover for her new book Southern Cross as a retailer exclusive for The Big Bang comic book store in Dublin, and I was hardly going to say no, so here it is.

At the moment I am taking all and any opportunity to draw seventies flavoured sci-fi pattern weirdness, and this totally fit the bill (albeit with a bit of a more modern color palette). This will be available exclusively from The Big Bang and a small handful of other retailers in March 11th.

A quick lil thing for Nautilus Magazine to accompany an interview with Andrew Wier about his novel The Martian.

Initially they asked whether I could recolor an old illustration of Neil Armstrong to make it relevant to the article, but I started tweaking and before I knew it I had redrawn the whole thing. I'm pretty darned happy with how it looks now (not that I wasn't before, but it was a couple of years old).

Happy new year by the way! More blogging this year, i promise.

I'm oh-so behind in blogging, so this is the start of a festive glut of things that I meant to post (but have been busy with my new baby instead).

So, first up - these are covers for issue 3 & 4 of Deep State from BOOM! Studios. I'm the regular cover artist, and i've handed in a couple more of these, so expect some more on a regular basis from here on in...

Those of you who follow me on instagram and twitter will be aware that over the last few months i have been writing and drawing a comic. Well that comic is now finished, back from the printers and ready to head towards your hands. Up there is a four page preview of the book.

PRE ORDER YOUR COPY HERE

The Great Salt Lake is a story i've had circling my head for a year or so, and in it's simplest form it's about a man lost at sea, looking for a way home. I wanted it to be a physical object that justified it's existence, and It was printed by the quite frankly wonderful Calverts and has that lovely fresh print litho smell that old school print enthusiasts will get excited about.

Pre orders will be posted out at the end of November, so if you're coming to Thought Bubble in Leeds next week, that'll be your first opportunity to get one in hand (and you can come and say hello to me too!), but the rest of you can order it here.

- £5 GBP (plus shipping)

- 28pp

- full color cover, black and white interior

- litho printed by Calverts in London

- edition of 750

Hey tumblr, it's been a while. One of the great things about illustrating is the range of awesome projects I get to work on; one of the frustrating things about illustrating is that a bunch of these are done on really long schedules so I won't be able to share them for a bit.

But at the other end of the scale, here is an illustration that I put the finishing touches to last week and I can show you now because it will be on sale next week through the good folks at Grey Matter Art (both regular and variant versions). Follow them on twitter for the drop details (which will be at some point on Tuesday 28th October).

I tried to capture that mid-sixties lifestyle illustration feel to match the tone of the movie and it was nice to take a swing at such a classic movie (and seriously, who doesn't love The Graduate).

Monday morning, time for some new art!

I honestly thought I had posted some of this already, but I guess maybe I instagrammed or tweeted it? The lesson here is: stay on top of your social media-ings otherwise things get lost in the shuffle.

In any case, as you've probably gathered, I am taking tentative steps into the world of comics and this is one of those steps. In November, Justin Jordan (who you might know from the fantastic Luther Strode miniseries) and Ariela Kristantina will be launching conspiracy thriller DEEP STATE at Boom! Studios, and I am drawing the covers.

Up there are the first two issues, one more is in the bag and sketches for the two after that got sent off this morning, so there will be plenty more down the line (probably on a monthly basis when the solicits get released).

You can find out more about the series by reading an interview with Justin over at CBR NOW. And by now I mean: this interview is from August - I told you I was disorganised.

More things from my Instagram!

In case you haven't been following it over there, I have been posting more snippets from my comic The Great Salt Lake. All things being well, this will be on sale at Thought Bubble convention in November (and my website soon after), then on Comixology whenever I can work out how to do that.

As ever there will be more previews, along with other pictures of my wife, my cat and things that I find interesting, over on my instagram.

www.instagram.com/matttaylordraws

We Need To Talk About Money (part 2)...

I started writing this blog a few months ago and then got distracted for the usual reasons (deadlines, holiday, my wife and I are having a baby soon, etc), but I was reminded of it today and as it turns out there wasn't that much editing that needed doing to make it intelligible, so here it is:

It's frustrating to me that this should even be a conversation we're having about why design competitions are wrong, but I think it needs saying again, especially for the benefit of illustrators who are just starting out in this industry. 

Illustration competitions that require you to create work on spec ARE A BAD THING. What is spec? Speculative work - ie: work that you create in the hope that you will be paid for it.

But why are they a bad thing? I hear you ask. At their best, they allow me to maybe have my work used by *insert-band-name-here* or used as an unofficial poster for *summer-blockbuster-of-choice* or on a t-shirt made by *your-favorite-brand*. They say I'll get great exposure.

(Oh God, exposure. The dangling toxic carrot of the young illustrators life. If I had a pound for every time I had heard think of the exposure then I probably could afford to work for free. But I still wouldn't. I'm starting to get off topic, but you should read this wonderful piece by the very talented Jessica Hische about working for free.)

Back to the point I was working towards. Yes, all those statements above are true, but they all hang on you doing a piece of work on spec, for free. They reduce our industry, our studies and our skills to a hobby that can be rewarded with shiny things.

I think that one of the (for want of a better word) 'problems' with creative industries is that ostensibly we enjoy what we do. We might even be inclined to do what we do for fun - I would certainly be drawing even if I was doing something else because I love drawing. But it is STILL YOUR JOB and you deserve to be compensated for you time. I hate to use the plumber analogy, but you wouldn't expect a plumber to fix your cracked pipes for free 'because he enjoys it' or because you would tell all your friends about his work.

If you're thinking of running a design competition, here are some better things to try instead. Take the prize fund and use it to commission someone whose work you like. The end result will be the same - you have a piece of work you can use - but in the mean time you wont have wasted the time of EVERYONE ELSE WHO WOULD HAVE ENTERED.

But I'm only starting out you may say. You still deserve to be paid, don't let anyone suggest otherwise. If you worked in a shop, you'd still get paid even if it was your first day.

Here are some things that are a better use of your time than entering a competition:

- set yourself a brief and answer it. be challenging (for example, if your forte is drawing owls, don't set the brief: draw a cool owl). treat it like you would a job and then blog it - show your process maybe, sketches you tried before you settled on a final.

- practice your craft. spend some time drawing, researching. make a zine, make a product that you can sell through your website (preferably not infringing on someone else's IP - that's a blog post for a whole other time).

- bake a cake. personally, I find baking hugely satisfying and I do some of my best thinking when I'm doing something that isn't drawing.

- look for potential clients and send them links to your work

- go and do some exercise. we spend most of our time sitting in small hot rooms, so make the most of the fact it's summer and go for a walk. also, see above - if you've just made and consumed a cake you could probably do with some exercise.

I could go on and on, but you get the idea. As long as people continue to enter competitions, there will be competitions, so just stop. You'll be better off for it. Value yourself. You and your skills are a commodity. This isn't a hobby, this is a job and you don't do your job for free.

There's a new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles out in parts of the world right now (and coming to the UK imminently-ish), so this seems like a good time to share a piece of art that i produced to accompany the release, alongside a bunch of other FANTASTIC artists (Nicolas Delort, Tomer Hanuka and Amanda Visell amongst others).

You can see the whole collection online here.

Time for another compilation of bits from my Instagram (which you can find here).

This time around it's all snippets from a comic I am working on. I am painfully aware that I don't actually have much in the way of proper experience in drawing sequential work (or to be more accurate I have drawn a meagre 24 pages to date). In order to get a bit more practice in before I start work on an ongoing series this fall (more on that later), I'm taking a leaf out of the book of Becky Cloonan and drawing a mini-comic with a view to having it available to buy for those of you attending Thought Bubble this November.

You will be able to see that all my favorite tropes are covered - beards, boats, skeletons, the sea and it's mysteries - and there will no doubt be more snippets posted between now and November.

www.instagram.com/matttaylordraws

This impossibly handsome man is Romain Duris, and he's the star of Michel Gondry's Mood Indigo which is out this month, and as such is the cover star of Eurostar's Metropolitan magazine.

And I drew him, obviously (otherwise this would be an amazingly pointless blog post). If you travel on Eurostar this month, you can see it there, on in the online archive at some point this month.

The second image is an alternative color scheme that didn't go past sketch stage, but I liked it so I worked it up for my own benefit. In retrospect it probably was way too blue.

It's going to be a Matt Taylor-stravaganza over at Comic Con next week! In addition to the Sunset Overdrive print I just blogged about, here's something else from Mondo.

Batman: The Animated Series is rightly regarded as one of the high-points of animation of the last twenty years, and as part of the ongoing Batman 75 celebrations, Mondo are releasing a limited 7" of the title score for the show. There are going to be a bunch of variants, of which my Harley Quinn piece above is one.

This was a huge amount of fun to draw, especially the Joker singles scattered across the floor. As before, these will be on sale at San Diego Comic Con next week - follow Mondo on Twitter for more info.

Mondo have been making awesome movie and TV posters for a hot minute now. You are probably familiar with them, not least because I've done a few this year and I won't stop going on about it.

Anyhow, something they haven't done until now is video-game posters, and when they asked me to illustrate something for one of the years most promising title, Insomniac Games Sunset Overdrive, of course I was going to say yes.

This will be available at San Diego Comic Con next week - follow Mondo on Twitter for details. I might have some to sell at a later date too...

Last night, Austin's Alamo Drafthouse cinema's threw a three-location-celebration of all things Stallone in honour of his 68th birthday with a Rocky triple bill.

For each of the movies, Mondo produced a poster to accompany the screening, and I was invited to draw two of them (alongside César Moreno's TOTALLY AMAZING poster for the first movie).

If you missed the shows last night (or don't live in Austin), i'm pretty sure that any left over will be showing up online at some point in the not too distant future.