I'm a dedicated admirer of the vanishing art of hand-painted signs and actually make part of my living from doing sign-writing. These lovely examples were found today on a drive in North Yorkshire. You'd think the wide availability of computer technology would have made effective sign communication open to everyone but sadly this hasn't happened. Both of these hand painted signs display a naive elegance and colourful charm which wasn't evident on the virtually unreadable PC produced A4 black & white roadside notices for village fetes which I also spotted while out and about today....

Talking of the MoCCA Arts Festival, it's now just over a month since I got back from a New York trip which included sharing a table at the fest with Ed Pinsent, Marc Baines of Kingly Books, and from Boston, Pshaw. With hardly a superhero comic in sight this annual comic art convention has no British equivalent (sadly) and this year displayed a staggering explosion of comic activity. Much of it highly ambitious - gone are the days of shoddy xeroxed mini-comics it seems. Lots of talks, panels and interviews also...but we missed most of those as we dutifully promoted our wares from the Kingly table in Room B.

Here's a New York snapshot from the MoCCA trip. L to R: Jeremy Novak (of band Dymaxion), Ed Pinsent, Marc Baines and Pshaw at an amazing exhibition of new paintings by Gary Panter.

Here's the cover of Bagnall's Dailies, the companion comic to Knitting For Whitsun. The fold goes horizontally across the middle of the cover, making a narrow landscape format mag suited to the four panel newspaper style strips inside. Don't know if the format is much of a winner though: I had both Knitting For Whitsun and Bagnall's Dailies on sale at last month's MoCCA Art Festival in New York and sold plenty of Knitting.... but only about three of these!

This is the front of my newest self-published chap-book, Knitting For Whitsun. I'm fairly pleased with this sober looking cover. The "knitted" sections feature musty mugshots of a few characters to be found in its twenty A5 size pages, including a pub landlord with his over-sized glass eye (based on a true story!)