2014 in Review: Richard Fairgray

What have been your personal cartooning/comics highlights of 2014?
Releasing the 3rd volume of Blastosaurus in print. It's the first standalone story and it's about a haunted house so that combination hit a lot of buttons for me. Also releasing a spinoff series about Blasto doing really boring stuff like playing with trains and ordering shoes, it's the kind of storytelling I don't get to do much of in the main title so having a forum for that was really satisfying.

We also made a huge change to the rules of I Fight Crime this year by having the characters vanish from their universe and end up living in our world. It sounds silly but it's really cool being able to play with the format of something that seems so limited like a 4 panel strip.

What are some of the comics you've enjoyed in 2014?
The Deep by Tom Taylor, Exo Comics vol. 3 and (most excitingly) getting to read the Roddy's Film Companion graphic novel that almost no-one has even seen.

What is something non-comics that you have enjoyed in 2014?
I've been listening to a lot of podcasts this year. I'm way behind on this sort of thing so until the beginning of this year I really didn't know what a podcast was (like I sort of knew, but in the way that your grandma knows, like that it's sort of like the radio). The one I'm enjoying the most is Go Bayside, it's where April Richardson watches and breaks down every episode of Saved By The Bell. I love it because I watched that show obsessively as a kid, it was on ALL the time when I was growing up so I know every episode, it's just weird watching them again and hearing other people talk about them 20 years later.

What are you looking forward to in 2015?
I've got my first picture book coming out worldwide in April, in October I'll be finished on the Funny Books project with Theo so I won't have to be stressed about the whole weekly comic thing every spare second, I'm working on a bunch of new projects with a lot of really cool people and I'm hoping to start finding ways to bring those to the world at large.

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