Merry Christmas from Phones 4 U

Christmas themed wrapping paper with a twist for mobile phone people...gobble gobble!

Holland Diep magazine

I was asked by Holland Diep to draw a comic strip based on a short passage from any book I loved. I chose this bit from Roald Dahls, 'My uncle Oswald', I was asked some questions about it, incase you cant read the dutch article here are the answers I gave....

I read all of Roald Dahl books when I was a young boy, as everyone does (or should), so i feel a good bond with his stories. I read this book on holiday in spain with a group of friends this summer, and everyone loved it so much. We all thought it would make a great film, and we tried to imagine who would play all the different characters from the book (there's so many !) The story is wonderful, and made me laugh alot, Roald Dahls writing is brilliant and it lends itself so easily to visual media. There were so many scenes to choose from, so i reread it and highlighted bits that i thought would make good visual statements. The first sketches I did were from a scene at the Ambassadors reception, where Oswald is being introduced to all the ambassadors from around the world, i thought it would be good to draw lots of ambassadors, but in the end it didnt have very much narrative and was a bit plain, so i scrapped that idea and looked for something else with more of a story. There's some really funny scenes so it was hard to choose, but in the end I chose the bit when Oswald sneeks down the corridor of his Parisean landlords late at night to their daughters bedroom for some sexy times. This scene didn't really pose a challenge as the sentence structure lends its self so well to comic book format. The dialogue is word for word from the book, and its broken up into short visual sentences with enough scope to draw funny things. I love Roald Dahls dark sense of humour, so maybe there are parallels in that way. I didn't think about Quentin Blakes illustrations when I was doing this project, I mean, the story speaks for itself and could be illustrated by so many different styles. Quentin Blakes drawings are iconic and so linked to Roald Dahls childrens books, so i guess it was nice to take something that Roald Dahl wrote for grown ups.