[Editor’s Note: Never a quiet day here at Nexus HQ! Perusing the interwebs, we stumbled upon a new landmark in the history of Awesome, mega-talented illustrator Neill Cameron’s daily ‘A to Z of awesomeness’! From today and for the next 3 weeks the Nexus will be collecting Neill’s weekly output (updated daily on his personal blog) in 6 special twice weekly features, kicking off today with the first six Letters of Awesomeness. We’ll let the man himself introduce his concept. Don’t forget to follow us on our new Twitter: @comicsnexus and @neillcameron ]
My name’s Neill Cameron, and I make a living by writing and drawing stuff. Why not go and look at some of it? My Mecha Action Schoolgirl Comedy Opus ‘Mo-Bot High’ appeared in weekly children’s comic The DFC, and I’ve recently been working on some comics stuff for Panini, the BBC and a couple of educational publishers. Anyway, a recent rash of deadlines had left me feeling a little tired and burned out, so I decided I needed to just draw something for myself. Something fun. Something… Awesome.
Which brings us here. This project was inspired by my friend and fellow creator Garen Ewing, (whose book The Rainbow Orchid is being published in a couple of months by Egmont UK and is going to be absolutely fantastic, incidentally). Last year Garen did an A-Z of Comic Strip Characters, drawing a character each day based on suggestions from Facebook. I thought this looked like a fun challenge, and decided to give it a go myself, but widening out the remit from just comic strips to characters from the wider world of pop cultural entertainment: film, animation, TV, literature… anywhere, really, so long as it meets the basic requirement of being AWESOME.
I decided it would be fun to encourage people to include imaginative alliteration in their suggestions. As you will see, this rapidly got completely, spectacularly out of hand.
If you’d like to play along, more suggestions for what to draw are always welcome and we’ve got a whole lot of letters to get through yet. You can post suggestions on my blog, on the Neill’s A-Z of Awesomeness Facebook Group, or in replies at twitter (I am @neillcameron). There are no rules, really, I would merely ask that people keep their suggestions (relatively) clean and keep it to one or two characters in each drawing – no requests for an army of Daleks Destroying Davenport, please.
[Click on each of the boxes for full-sized images (recommended, trust us).]
- A is for… Aztecs in Atomic Armour Attacking Anomolous Amphibians.
- B is for… Buffy Bravely Battling Beelzebub
- C is for… Captain Britain Cuddling Cerebus
- D is for… Doctor Who Defeating Doctor Doom in a Deadly Disco Dance-off
- E is for… Evil Edna Evolving Emu into an Educated Erudite
- F is for…the Fantastic Four saving the Finnish Ambassador from Fred Flintstone, who’s Flinging Flaming Fajitas at his Ford Fiesta
Haven’t decided what to draw for ‘I’, ‘J’ and ‘K’ yet, so why not suggest something Awesome yourself? Here in the site’s comments section, on Neill’s blog, on the A-Z Facebook Group, or over on Neill’s Twitter. The more suggestions, the higher the probability of Awesomeness. That’s just SCIENCE.
(added content alert: for commentary and credits on each entry, check back on Neill’s blog)
