Tobias and Jube – Autumn 2017

FIVE WEEKS. FIVE CHAPTERS. SOME JOKES.

Yes, as promised, an all-new Tobias and Jube comic will be delivered to you soon, via Stela! There’s a little more info over on my tumblr. Short version: EXCITEMENT TIME IS HERE, ALL AROUND US.

In the meantime, you can LAY SOME HYPE PIPE by putting this illustration on your wall, wearing it on your body, or your lower body, or hiding your own shameful drawings inside it, or gripping it with your gross sweaty fingers as you text that special someone. Or any number of rituals of devotion only made possible by my new redbubble shop, where wonder and delight await you. (Also, you can get prints at society6 too, in text-free and textful versions.)

Crane bros. and coffee

Furrowed brows and pouting lips
Analysing tiny sips
Consternation and dismay
The brew is somehow off today

A recent commission. Or rather, an old commission that I finally got around to doing recently. You can buy prints of this, as well as bags, pencil cases, decorative chunks of plastic, miniskirts, and all kinds of nonsense, at my marvellous new redbubble shop. And prints are available at society6 too. What a great day for you!

Oh, and of course you can have this on a coffee mug too. That’s only appropriate.

Lesson materials for English teachers in Japan

This Die Hard lesson is really, really popular

I never got around to posting about this, here on my main website!

For two years, from 2013 to 2015, I worked as an ALT (assistant language teacher) at a senior high school in Utsunomiya, Japan. During that time, I put a lot of extra hours into creating illustrated worksheets, games, and other lesson materials for my classes. I shared some with other teachers and got some enthusiastic feedback, so I started compiling and formatting the materials into PDFs, with full instructions so that any teacher could download and use them.

Those PDFs can be found here, at Patrick-sensei’s gumroad store!

(At the time of writing, there are still some materials yet to be formatted and uploaded. I’ve been busy!)

These lesson materials represent two years of my work as a cartoonist and creator, and include some of the best and most worthwhile illustration I’ve ever done. I even made a board game! So even though it’s not comics, I’d encourage you to take a look, if you follow my work. I feel like this is my humble equivalent of Will Eisner’s army manuals — those actually useful things he made, in between The Spirit and helping to invent the graphic novel.

And along with creating lesson materials, it was also a part of my job to do… The Morning Speech. (Again: Volume 2 yet to come!)

(More) Tobias and Jube illustrations

*blows dust off website*

*cough cough*

I had an extremely busy 2016, and a quite productive one — just not obviously productive; a lot of it was taken up with a new Tobias and Jube comic that I can’t show you yet (among other projects). But I did manage to squeeze in these two lovely illustrations…

Print available. Tobias and Jube come across a garden of eyes whose attention seems to be anywhere else.

I used a pencil for ‘inking’, here, for the first time, which is something I’d wanted to try. It matches the watercolours and feels comfortable to me. (In fact, no actual pencils or paints were involved — both of these illustrations were done entirely on my ipad pro, in Procreate.)

Print available.

On the whole I take my Christmas thoroughly Anglo, with as many pre-Christian rituals and ornaments as possible bleeding through, but of course also with proper carols, joyful and mysterious, about magic baby God, born to be sacrificed to himself, or, alternatively and ideally, about Wenceslas, a nice king with hot feet. No Santy Claus, no holly jolly jingle dingle, no crooners, no divas. But these are mostly aesthetic preferences; religion and spirituality have something but not so very much to do with it — consequently I’m happy to incorportate whatever ideas and symbols and activities happen to catch my fancy into my personal concept and practice of Yuletide, which is really the only way to do it nowadays, isn’t it?

So what have we got here. We’ve got some carolers who are a bit Peanuts and a bit Dickens. We’ve got some Japanese-style winter illuminations. We’ve got some holly wrapped around an old-as-fuck stone monument of the kind that dot the landscape of Tobias and Jube’s little world. What does it mean? Does anyone remember? And perhaps candles always burn with blue flame at Christmas, which is why no-one’s FREAKED OUT about that. Perhaps it’s got something to do with the Ghost of Christmas Present, or Father Christmas, or whoever it is, lurking in the background there, inspecting the scene with what we should hope is an approving eye. (Or maybe Leroy, the wizard, did it.) The ginkgo tree, like the ones here in Tokyo, is nearly bare at just this time of year. And I wonder if El Bobba, down the front there, is on his way to plop that yuzu into a hot bath, in line with the Japanese winter solstice tradition.

The new Tobias and Jube comic I mentioned earlier? You can meet all the carolers pictured above in that comic. Stay tuned.

Tobias and Jube’s Quality Assortment

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LINE STORE: Tobias and Jube’s Quality Assortment

オーマイガー!! Moderately beloved cartoon double act Tobias and Jube have arrived on Line Messenger! WOW your acquaintances and very professional business contacts with this odd, colourful sticker set, featuring a fun mix of English and Japanese.

オーストラリアから漫画のキャラのトバイアスとジューブ(トバジュー)を紹介!かわいくておかしい生き物だ。永遠な友情を目撃してください。英語と日本語が混在される。

Click right here, or search for ‘Tobias and Jube’ or 「トバジュー」 in the Line Store. おねがいしまーす!

There will be more Tobias and Jube news coming very soon.

Big Steps / Just Resting My Eyes

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Technically, these are numbers 54 and 55 in my long-running coaster/postcard project, but the first was coloured partly digitally and I threw out the original because the messed-up colours were so upsettingly ugly, and the second was coloured entirely digitally (and it took bloody hours), so… I feel like we’re quite far removed from the original concept at this point, which was just to doodle Raymondo-type drawings on beer coasters and splash some colour on them later.

Both of these are available to buy as prints via society6 — framed or canvas-ised; big or small; however you want ’em:

DIE HARB / Betsy and Ronaldica

DIE HARB Betsy and Ronaldica

I don’t do a lot of fan art, and when I do I don’t know if ‘fan art’ is a suitable term for it because I’m basically making fun of everything 100% of the time, even the stuff I like. Well, here are a couple of pieces from my sketchbook that I ended up going all the way with. I love Die Hard with all of my heart, and I have mixed and complicated but broadly affectionate feelings about Archie comics.

Both of these pictures are available to buy as prints from society6:

Business Cat Adventures

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Marconi secures a major deal with an independent contractor in Thailand — but is appalled to discover his new partner rules a private empire built on murder and slavery!

“Just the same as yours,” laughs Bison. “The difference is, I have no illusions!”

He orders his minions to haul Marconi onto a jumbo jet and fly it into a volcano, but our hero escapes and returns to the dictator’s lair, probably to make a speech about democracy/America and then chop his head off with that sword.

From 2013, for an exhibition. Buy it as a print here!

Medicare Co-payments Infographitoon

I collaborated with some fellow political tragics on this info-thing about the Abbott government’s proposed changes to Medicare and the pharmaceutical benefits scheme, based on this study from the University of Sydney.

Please share it with your own personal bits of the internet, in the handy format of your choice:

Accompanying links:

 

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Patrick Alexander’s Enormous and Impressive Doodle Book

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I put together a big, fat sketchbook PDF, featuring 190+ pages of doodles, notes, sketches, drawings and miscellany, from 2009-ish to 2012-ish. You can buy it for a single god-fearin’ dollar at gumroad.

Featuring:

  • Raymondo Person wearing hats
  • Phrases of Power and Mystery (incl. MP3)
  • Margin doodles from university
  • Life drawings, too
  • A comic I drew on a box of asian groceries
  • An early, not-yet-Al-Hartley’d version of Charlie in Truth or Dairy
  • More than a few Garfields
  • Weird stuff I can’t explain easily
  • All known things in the cosmos

If you’re a fan of my work, including/especially the dodgy stuff, there’s something in here for you. If you want a better idea of what’s inside, I’m posting some of the contents under this ‘doodle-book’ tag on my tumblr.

Buy that for a dollar.

 EDIT: Now you can buy it from sellfy, too, if you prefer to use paypal.