Well it's been a busy year filling up the Topatoco store with some lovely gubbins, but now we're circling the Christmas shutdown already they've posted up their final delivery dates. if you want something and you're outside the US, make sure you order before november 22nd (for cheapest delivery), if you're in the US its december 15th. you can leave it a little later if you wanna pay for priority delivery, all the details hhhherreee

and here's a reason why you might wanna bag something soon! The first TEN people who order the Looshkin 'fwap' tshirt, will not only receive their fwappy fwappity tshirt...



but as a chrimby present i'll also send you the EXCLUUUSIVE bohda te Skull Rock Death Army gold badge


(seriously this badge is the tits, and i'm running out for good now. they're about 3.5 cm wide and satisfyingly heavy)

Also i'll throw in a signed copy of Ubu Bubu issue 2 (arguably the best one :p), and if i can find anything else to chuck in i will. not sure if i got anything though, i'll look.

If you wanna win these things, email me (sixtyfootmonkey@yahoo.com) your order confirmation email which proves you've ordered a Looshkin Fwap tshirt. Soon as I get ten confirmed, i'll post up here that the competition has ended. If you've already ordered the tshirt, email me your order confirmation email and you'll be one of the ten winners. i'll try and send all the prizes out before xmas, but don't blame me if post is y'know, all bananas and ting.



blam! BLAMMO! That aside, there is some awesome stuff piling up in the Topatoco store, we gots Bear toys, books, a whole range of tshirts, and the massive 1,242 panda print poster! Come have a look in the store, and if you wanna get anything for christmas make sure you order soon! Yay! Fuck yay!

The DANDY annual is out in stores now, and I'm pleased to report it's bragging over 20 pages of exclusive Desperate Dan funs, including one special 8-page story. If you're in the UK (or even abroad, sure it'll be on amazon) please do pick up the book and have a look, its pretty tasty (incidentally, Asda are selling all their annuals for £4. proper bargain!).
I even did a front and back cover for the annual, but alas they didn't make it to the final book (woulda been a real buzz to see them, shame), so here they are anyway.


kfanksisntit!

Also, i'm sorry to say Kochi may not be ready in time for January 2010 like i originally said. i've spent the last five weeks working on this book full-time, not on the drawings (they're all done) but on bringing it all together into a cohesive whole and trying to make it, yuh know, purdy. And I've still got a fair amount to do. Fact is this book has taken about four years to get here, so I want to get it right. I'm determined it'll get out in 2010, and my plan to serialise it as a webcomic still stands, but stick with me a little longer?

jx

ps. thanks for all the brilliant hamster names! ^_^ though we STILL haven't decided!
pps. the Looshkin Fwap t-shirt has been changed last minute to printing on black tshirt, not blue. now even more fwappy!

Great news for Bohda Te today, i'm very pleased to say that we're now stocking Bear stuffs! You can now buy the Bear plushies, books, and even this BRAND SPANKING NEW EXCLOOOOOSIVE Looshkin T-shirt all in the same place!



(if you fancy the Looshkin Fwap tshirt, best put in an order fast to ensure swift delivery! :)

Along with all the usual Ubu, Whubble, ALR and such assorted t-shirts in the Bohda Te store, not to mention my first ever print, the Find Chaffy 1,200 Panda Roll poster!

Yayy. Yayy. FUCKING YAYYY! ^_^

jx

There are over 1,200 pandas rolling down this hill, and in amongst them are hidden 10 Chaffies. Can YOU find them all?



This 22" x 11" print is printed on super-high quality semi-gloss photo paper, and available now exclusively at Topatoco, click the linky to visit the Bohda Te store and pick up your very own Find Chaffy print!

I've been thinking a lot about Bear recently, it started what about 6 years ago now (holy teets! really?) and was obviously what got us all to know each other, so it's safe to say Bear and Looshkin are a huge part of me. Though clearly I haven't done anything new with them for a while, and even now I hear from a lot of people who can't get hold of the individual issues or the books. So it made sense to me to make Bear more accessible, to put the strips up online, all of them. One by one every week, until we've built a complete catalogue of the nearly 300 pages of fuzzy boink boink hitty.

The point would be for those who already know Bear to enjoy them again, and for people who hadn't seen Bear (or had maybe missed issues) to discover it. To breath a little life back into Bear, find him a proper home on the web.

What does anyone think, good idea or no? I've got so much to sort out before i can start it (getting Kochi up for starters) but i'd hope to do it by spring next year, if not sooner.

jx

To celebrate the new Find Chaffy store being open, here's a big ol' pile O' Chaffies!

Pick this up as a poster, postcard or mug, or have a look at all the other great Find Chaffy goodies in the new store, click heeere

If you've not been checking Find Chaffy recently, you've been missing some fantastic sightings from all over the world! Here are some of the highlights, as Chaffies are spotted in..

The UK!



Rome!



Boston, USA!



Taiwan!



Majorca!



Norway!




Check out findchaffy.com for all the photos from each country, and all the new sightings coming in! We're also working on ways YOU can get your hands on a Chaffy, more soon!

jx

ps. The Whubble I.T. strip was listed as one of Gizmodo's top ten nerdy strips? . Suddenly Whubble gets 30,000 hits in 24 hours, what an honour! Thanks Gizmodo!

dunuh dunuh...duh duuh duhhhh...dunuh dunuuh...gonna fight you...and bum crunch your skull...dunuh dunuh...lets all have fish...i've got angry fingers...duhhh duhhh....my hate is a pyramid, a pyrhatemid.

PYRHATEMID. DUHH DUHHH DUHHHH. FEAR THE PYRHATEMID! build it first. then fear it. IT FIRES LASERS.

you write a better metal song. no, you can't. jamie wins already.

Work in progress photos from the last month, a coupla large scale pieces i've been working on (as wittered on twitter)



first, 1,242 pandas, and then



over 1,000 Angry Little Robots.

They take forever to draw, but so much fun. More to be revealed soon!


jx

wotcha.

the house move all went well ta, surprisingly well, apart from a box packed full of monitor, scanner and all other computer periphs falling from the top of the van onto the drive (thanks man with van!). now i have my new workbase and while i'm adjusting to finding a schedule again, it feels comfortable. i think this will be very good, and i will be very productive once more.

just a note to say Topatoco, they who not only distribute the finest array of webcomic tshirts but also mine as well, are opening their doors this weekend for a tag sale. so if you live in Mmmerica check out details HERE (what do you mean you don't live near, Mmmerica can't be THAT big! stop making excuses!). Not sure yet if they'll have any of my Bohda Te, Ubu, ALR or Whubble tshirts in the sale, they may do, but they got so many great tees anyway certainly worth checking out!

Incidentally, i've been working on a nice handful of AWESOME coming your way for christmas thanks to the sexy angels at Topatoco. more news when we can!

Lastly, science is the TITS!


jx

Phew. thats the sound of all of my possessions duck taped up into boxes around me. pheee-yooo. tomorrow morning at 8.30 am the hopefully not criminal man with a van turns up and helps me move everything i own two hours up the road into sunny kent. he won't just drive off with it all. repeat, he won't. always weird seeing your stuff in boxes and wondering quite how you built up such a vast collection of rubbish. also, when you die, will it just get stomped on? probably.
tomorrow night i relax, in my new home with Sarah, presumably being stuck to my seat by the ginger wizard on telly (your Lottery predictions were a sham, ginger wizard). The weekend will be unpacking and arranging, and then i have a new home! It's actually pretty exciting, I'm really looking forward to it.
That said, I'm pretty tired of moving house. i've done it nearly every year now for the last decade, and more so before that. i've got used to not settling anywhere, and even get a bit restless if i'm in one place too long. but i'd like to find a place and call it home now. i'm like The Littlest Hobo. although more accurately The Bitter Hairy Shouting Hobo. With Issues. And Not A Dog.
this winter once settled, i plan to really bunker down and churn out a lot more work than i have been doing the last year or so. paid work has really disappeared over this summer so i've been spending a lot of time working on projects i hope to really nail down before the end of the year. obviously it's worrying not getting paid, but creatively it's been such a buzz to have this enforced free time.
There will be some new things on the horizon relating to Looshkin, Chaffy, some new comics i'm SO excited to start drawing, and fiiiiinally a Kochi announcement before the year is through. Amongst that the usual shit. really, toss. you wouldn't believe the artistic bum nuggets i'm going to abuse you with.

So see you on the other side, y'all. If you want a more up to date following of my rubbish, come and banter on Tweeetter (twitter.com/jamiesmart) although usually it's just full of shouting demands that people fight me. welcome to the FUTURRRR.

jx

Sad news to report, as children's comic Toxic have dropped Count Von Poo with immediate effect from today. The Count has had four(?) adventures so far in their pages, with maybe 7 or 8 left to print. These however won't be shown.

The reasons why CVP has been dropped, were an unease with the kid-playing-with-poo interface, which i always anticipated but we'd been tweaking the strips so as to be careful, and I thought we'd found a nice groove. CVP was an immense amount of fun to write and draw, obviously. It's a vampire who has imaginary adventures with faeces. How could that not be fun?

As to why it's been dropped, a fair few people I've mentioned it to have suggested the recent wacky e coli outbreak over here in the UK this weekend, making the subject of kids handling poo maybe a bit sensitive. I dunno. What I can happily say is that Toxic said there'd been no complaints about CVP. NONE. Again, it's a vampire. Who has imaginary adventures with FAECES. and NO ONE complained? Brilliant ^_^

Anyway, I don't know whats going to happen with the remaining strips, Toxic own the copyright but hopefully there may be someway to show them online or summat. And in the meantime, I'll be discussing other potential ideas with Toxic in the near future, so lets hope the relationship can continue. They are very lovely people.

But for now, farewell Von Poo. Proper sad you're going.

The search for Chaffy is picking up speed at findchaffy.com!

So I was curious if people could come up with cute little Chaffy emoticons for people to use, and already we've had some great contributions! Here's the first from Alistu


<a href="http://www.findchaffy.com"><img src="http://fc01.deviantart.com/fs22/f/2009/252/1/b/Chaffy_by_Alistu.gif"></a>



and this one from beigedirigible blinks every coupla seconds! (the background is transparent)


<a href="http://www.findchaffy.com"><img src="http://fc02.deviantart.com/fs22/f/2009/252/2/0/Chaffy_Icon__by_beigedirigible.gif"></a>



the code below each emoticon is so you can paste them into your own blog posts or wherever you want!

Anyone else want to have a go at making a Chaffy emoticon? it would be BRILLIANT to have a little collection of new emoticons people can use, he's the perfect round shape!



jx

So last thursday night I turned up at London's Forbidden Planet store to sign some Ubu Bubus. I'll confess I spent the day kinda nervous, successfully transferring these nerves onto Sarah through a hurriedly scoffed sushi dinner, before slinking into the store and being welcomed into the bowels of the FP megastore itself. With a sensible haircut and sharpies i was ready to say hello. HELLO.



Thank you to everyone who came out, it was a real good turn-out and we ran over our time slot by an hour. You were all quite exceptionally warm and lovely.



I didn't just sign like this. I swear.



Thank you to Lou, Jon, and everyone at FP for being so welcoming and even preparing biscuits which, through some kind of madness, i turned down. and now regret more than anything in my life ever.



Me attempting to draw Space Raoul. I'll happily admit, I'm shit at signings. Turns out I can't socially interact, talk, and write my own name at the same time. I have no idea what I wrote in people's comics, though I seem to remember making endless mistakes. brain no work so gud. apologies if i ruined any worth of whatever I signed!



(thank you to Frankie for the photos!)

After the signing I finally got to meet some fellow DFC-ers, including the exceptionally and almost-sickeningly talented sarah mcintyre and gary northfield, along with some lovely people from the Cartoon Museum, not to mention the few good friends who still talk to me. Oh and the angry drunk growelling man, who was from the north and would have killed someone if his limbs could understand his brain.

For the next four days after that I was enjoying Frightfest, london's annual horror film festival. And it was so much damn fun. Highlight films that I'd thoroughly recommend were Dead Snow (of course), It's Alive (terrible, but good), Trick R Treat (one of the most fun films of the year) and Human Centipede, which is possibly the most bizarre and disturbing movie you'll ever wish you didn't see, yet somehow it works.

And now I am home. Ahead of me, two weeks of practically being a hermit again. In about two weeks time I'm upping sticks and leaving Brighton after 18 months living here, to go and live with the alarmingly tolerant Sarah. I'll be very sad to leave, but excited for what may come, and keen to find a thorough working schedule again. So i'm up to my teets in boxes and duct tape trying to pack everything, and still trying to get some great new secret Chaffy stuff ready as well as keeping on top of other work. it's gonna be a mad coupla weeks.

sensible news update ends. back to your meatballs.

jx

Right! So I'll be at London's FORBIDDEN PLANET megastore tomorrow (thats thursday 27th august) between 6pm and 7pm, signing copies of Ubu Bubu. I fully expect it to go like this.


So do come down and say hi! I'm not a one for signings, did one at the science museum which was fun, but otherwise i don't plan anymore in the near future (partly cos i ain't got no new books out after this, i spose!). I will be the bewildered looking one drawing on his hands in the corner.

Full details here!


jx
ps. MORE find chaffies today, check em out!

i am VERY pleased to say the UBU BUBU collected book, 'Filth', is OUT NOW. With all four horrific issues bullhorned together along with some awesome guest art and a few other scribbles, 'Filth' is a tome to the nasty disgusting yet nose-sickeningly cute whuppies what we all hug but would never tell the police. HERE'S SOME BLURB..

"Hey Gobby! Think you've seen everything? Well wait till you clamp your eye-chompers on UBU BUBU, the most enjoyably deranged romp through an apocalypse since, y'know, that other one. Had bees in it. When the evil daemon Lord Bubu possesses the body of an innocent cat Ubu, they become UBU BUBU! Romping around killing, maiming, and riding humanity like a donkey! Add to their reign of terror ringmaster Stig, an array of increasingly more revolting new daemons, and the fast impending ACTUAL end of the world, an you got yerself a catalogue of brutality and chuckles, crashing and slapping its way towards our imminent destruction! HOORAY!"

Ubu Bubu : Filth is available from your comic store, book store, online through amazon or wherever the hell it is you normally get your comic books. you know better than me. it's not like i'm checking your bins. or aaaam i? yes i am. get over it.

wanna see the full colour version of Patt Kelley's amazing Ubu Bubu guest art? Check it out on today's FUMBLOG

also on thursday i am of course doing this signing malarky in london's Forbidden Planet, but more about that tomorrow.

hooray! please buy my fucking book. i have to eat, just like you. only difference is i ingest through my nipples, but that only earns me pocket money :(

jx

ps. FIND CHAFFY is scoring its first sightings, with some great ones coming in the next coupla days! Keep checkin on the search :)

I am very pleased to say the FIND CHAFFY website is now open!

What started as a fun idea a few years ago has now become a proper nice worldwide search! We've sent out a number of real Chaffies, who will then be passed on, and on, and so on from person to person till possibly one day they find their way home! Along the way, we want photos of everywhere they've been and everyone they've been with, along with every other curious Chaffy sighting, and findchaffy.com will update with all we collect!

It's taken a coupla months of work to get to this point, so please do have a look around the site, enjoy, and even contribute if you want to pitch in with a Chaffy sighting! There's SO much more planned in the next few months that I can't even tell you about because i've gotta get it done first! But keep your eyes on Chaffy! ^_^

jx

Sorry to say Fumblog will be becoming a little more irregular in the future. I set this up to show new stupidity every day, and we've been going strong for nearly 8 months! But I just don't have the time to sort everything out and keep it up to date, so posts may be more erratic. But rest assured there is still a healthy bounty of material to appear, including the remaining Hoeben strips and a couple more full comics!
So please stay tuned, or RSS so you can be kept updated. And thank you everyone for your support in the time we've been daily, it's been so much fun!
Jamie