Matt Millz by Harry Hill published today!

Comedian Harry Hill's new children's book Matt Millz is published in hardback today by Faber & Faber it's chock full of illustrations by me.
It's a very funny semi-autobiographical story concerning the eponymous hero & his first attempts at becoming a stand up comedian with the help of his best mate Rob & his manager, the diminutive Kitty Hope.

It was a great project to work on for me as I was given a lot of freedom to illustrate pretty much whatever appealed to me in the text, so I read through & earmarked anything that particularly made me laugh - Matt's mum's performing dog show 'The Dachshund Five' was a particular favourite which BEGGED (no dog pun intended!) to be illustrated...

...and WHO could resist drawing a chimpanzee riding a wildebeest?!!?*

*The answer is no one. No one can resist drawing a chimpanzee riding a wildebeest, this is SCIENTIFIC FACT & I will fight anybody who disagrees (probably)

Matt autographing somebody's dad's bald head.

Kitty Hope - Matt's teeny tiny manager.

Squirrel toupee for headmaster Mr Pavey.

Matt on the T-Factor talent show

(NB don't try this at home kids!)

Happy Tramp

A while back I was approached by Inbetweeners movie director Ben Palmer & Zeppotron co-founder Neil Webster who were in the process of launching Happy Tramp, a new independent production company specialising in scripted narrative comedy to design a logo which would work for print in various formats with the idea of making it move at a later stage.

Armed with only a copious amount of extra strength lager (for research purposes) I initially sketched out a few ideas... & we fairly quickly decided on the finished logo. I tried a few handwritten typefaces but we settled on trusty old Gill Sans

 After the Special Brew hangover died down a few months later I took the character & directed & animated the short clip. I sent the guys an initial animatic to which they replied -

Thanks for this. We've got a lot of notes...
1. We love it.

Why aren't ALL jobs as fun  painless as this?

You can see the clip here

Happy Tramp from Steve May on Vimeo.

Old rockers never die (they just appear in more documentaries)

I love a good rockumentary, was watching various '70s survivors in varied stages of 'ageing pantomime dame mode' telling their stories on TV the other night...


'Spurious Gack Anecdote', really ought to be a name of a band