Here's the next page of the Brigadier Gerard story...

This was the first page in which I had to draw Napoleonic uniforms in any great detail. By the end of the strip, I'd become something of an expert. Reference was easy to find - there are an awful lot of war gamers and model-makers out there on the Internet - but I had a problem because Conan Doyle didn't specify which brigade of light infantry Gerard was in. The uniform differs slightly in detail from brigade to brigade. In the end, I decided on the 3rd brigade, since this was the uniform I had the most detailed reference for. It was a lucky guess - in the second story we did, the 3rd Hussar of Conflans is specifically mentioned by the author.

Gerard has never appeared in colour, but his uniform should be a really bright orange with a dark blue coat and blue and red shako (it helps if you take LSD at this point). Unless it's dark blue all over. I've also seen versions of the uniform with cream trousers and a red coat, and a painting of Gerard, by Eric D'Antin, with a uniform that was bright blue with red bits all over. God knows which one is correct. I decided to stop worrying at this point and get on with drawing the strip.

Later on in the story, Gerard wears a busby rather than a shako. It's black.

Credit is due to Tex Avery or possibly Chuck Jones for the corny joke in frame 3, by the way. I think it comes from a Bugs Bunny cartoon. If anybody knows which one, please don't tell me.

Wednesday, February 28, 2007 10:53:47 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

Here's the latest episode of the Greatcoat...

There's a bit of a kerfuffle surrounding the Greatcoat strip. For the full story, check out John freeman's blog. The story has also been covered in Forbidden Planet's blog, and also in Journalista, but briefly, last year John set up a page about the Greatcoat in Wikipedia, which was then deleted by a Wikipedia editor on the grounds that it was insufficiently "noteworthy". The decision has been contested, the page has been re-instated but it's status is now open for discussion. If you're a Greatcoat fan, and you'd like to contribute to the debate, please, follow the links to the wikipedia page and add your two-pennorth. John and I would welcome your input.

Tuesday, February 27, 2007 9:42:46 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

Here's page three of the Brigadier Gerard story...

The French general Massena (the one using the telescope) is based on an engraving I found on the internet. I can't remember where I found it so no link this time, although there's a nice entry about him in Wikipedia.

It's basically a nineteenth-century publicity shot. Apparently he had these printed up so that people would recognise him. By the end of the Torres Vedras stalemate, which was the French disaster in which this story is set, he may well have wished he had remained anonymous.

Tuesday, February 27, 2007 10:20:45 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

Here's page two of the Brigadier Gerard story The Crime of the Brigadier; or How Brigadier Gerard Slew the Fox.

You will notice as the story progresses that Etienne Gerard is a man unencumbered by false modesty. Therefore, we decided to give him a big entrance, with a whole third of the page to himself. In fact, the frame 2 entrance is inspired by a popular series of adverts for a French car, starring Catherine Deneuve, which Antonella remembered from her days in Italy. The tag line of each ad was "Oui, je suis Catherine Deneuve!" When she writes, Antonella always works out the page layouts very carefully, and credit belongs to her for the appearance and pace of the story.

Monday, February 26, 2007 10:23:59 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

Here's a strip Antonella wrote and I drew which was published last year in Graphic Classics in the US. It's an adaptation of one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's comical Brigadier Gerard stories, in which he has an encounter with an English fox-hunting party.

This is set during Napoleonic times, during the Penninsular War ("Sharpe's war"). Conan Doyle seems to have done quite a bit of historical research when he wrote the original story, and because the action takes place during actual historical events, I tried to make things like uniforms and kit as accurate as possible. Some actual historical figures are included, like Wellington, Massena the French commander, even minor figures like Sir William Murray and Sir Stapleton Cotton, Viscount Combermere, and I based these on portraits I found in places like the National Portrait Gallery's website. Other characters are based on people whose images Antonella and I found elsewhere on the Internet: the older Gerard, for example, is partly inspired by Gerard Depardieu as he appears in Cyrano de Bergerac (but without the nose!

Our French cultural advisor was M. Prof. Ronan Jouan de Kervanoel, a French academic who quite usefully happened to be living next door to us at the time we were doing this. Credit is due to him for all the French swearwords, which but for him we would not have known how to spell.

Anyway, there's another 17 pages of this, and I'm going to post one every day until somebody tells me to stop.

Antonella and I did another Brigadier story, 21 pages this time, for a later edition of Graphic Classics, and I'm thinking of posting it after this one is finished. Consider yourself warned.

Sunday, February 25, 2007 8:25:41 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

If you have enjoyed this strip, you might like to consider reading other strips by this artist. Check out the TEAM SPUTNIK website www.teamsputnik.co.uk for further details.

Friday, February 23, 2007 7:31:16 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

Here's the next episode of the Greatcoat "student party" saga. Sorry.

By way of explanation, the British government were actually issuing these 'Five-a-Day' leaflets at corner shops and supermarkets at one point. If you're a vegetarian, you may not have noticed. Sorry.

The cat's name is Dennis. He has his own spin-off strip, which I may decide to post later. Sorry.

Sunday, February 18, 2007 10:54:10 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [1] 

I've been working on the Really Heavy Greatcoat 20th anniversary strip all day, but it's going slowly because there's so much detail. In the meantime, I thought I'd start posting a few old strips... 

This is part one of an eight-strip story arc I did last year. The whole eight strips are currently up in John Freeman's website (just click on the links on the home page) and on the LUKO website (ditto). Because the various people involved were busy, and there were techinical problems, this series was never seen as intended, i.e. with each new strip appearing on a regular basis, so I think I'll take the opportunity here to publish a new strip in the series every few days. This is also a naked attempt to get people to visit the blog, you understand.

OK, here's the premise of the strip. The RHG is an old ARP Greatcoat, bought by John from a charity shop. It was worn by a hippy throughout the 'Sixties, and years of having illegal substances stuffed in its pockets led to it becoming self-aware. In other words, it can talk. John and the Greatcoat got up to all sorts of adventures over the years, until John Freeman and I decided the character was getting too old, so we introduced John's student lodger Kevin and gave him the Greatcoat to wear. Now read on...

Wednesday, February 14, 2007 7:04:47 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

NICK MILLER was born in Oxford, UK, and grew up in the depths of rural Shropshire. The son of two artists, he learned to draw from an early age, but received most of his formal training as an artist from Shrewsbury School of Art. Having worked as a graphic designer throughout the 'Eighties, he switched to cartooning and illustration full-time in the early 'Nineties and has been deleriously happy with his choice ever since. He currently lives in Lancaster, UK, which is handy because that's where he keeps all his stuff.

ANTONELLA CAPUTO is a native of Rome, Italy, where she worked as a restorer of paintings and ceramics, and in the cinema and theatre, before turning to writing. Her first published script was Casa Montesi, a twelve-episode family drama which appeared in Il Giornalino. Working in Italian and English, she has written plays and short stories for children, a recipe column and over 200 pages of scripts for Graphic Classics, a series of graphic novelisations of works by famous authors published in the US. She shares a home with her partner Nick Miller, and is ruled by three cats.

TEAM SPUTNIK is the professional partnership of Antonella Caputo and Nick Miller. Although they continue to work with other artists and writers, Nick and Antonella's Team Sputnik collaborations take up most of their time, and have now been published in the US, UK, Italy and Luxembourg (listed in descending order of GNP). The Team Sputnik on-line portfolio can be viewed at www.teamsputnik.co.uk

Tuesday, February 13, 2007 10:06:03 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0]