The bushes scream when my daddy prunes.
It's taken a long time for it to get into print but it's great to see my story h=G+V+C in print in New Horizons issue 3. Maybe my mum will actually believe I'm a writer now.

"Either that wallpaper goes or I do."
- Oscar Wilde on his deathbed.

My annoyingly brilliant friend.

I've wanted to post something on this subject for a while but exam timetables have intervened and stopped me. Finally, all that’s out of the way so as I sat here twitching and pulling blue fluff out of my navel I realised that now was the time to write something about my annoyingly brilliant friend.

Warren Pleece and I have known each other for about twenty years. We met at college in Brighton where he was doing illustration and I was doing something unspeakably dull by comparison. My abiding memories of that time were of me working as hard as I could (which was not very much) to stay on my terrible course (something I spectacularly failed to do), rehearsals for the ropey indie band Waz and I were in and the occasional break to run down to the news-agents on Thursdays to buy Britain's only half decent comic at the time, 2000AD.

Waz on the other hand seemed to spend most of his time sitting around eating cream cakes until the last three days of each term during which he would disappear into his room (a place we gleefully referred to as the “Pleece station”), drink copious amounts of gritty instant coffee before returning triumphantly with a number of brilliant “hopper-esque” paintings. These allowed him to breeze through to the next level of his course like Super-Mario with an unlimited power-up. (Bastard).


Once he left college it didn’t take too long for the comics world to work out that he was good. Really good. Based on the excellent, self-published Velocity co-created with his equally annoyingly talented brother Gary, he ended up providing the pencils for loads of quality comics: Hellblazer, Deadenders, Kinetic and most recently the excellent Incognegro and Life Sucks.

Waz is a charmingly modest man (unlike ... oh me ... for instance) and a ludicrously talented one to boot and it provides a nice sense of symmetry that these days you're just as likely to see his distinctive work in 2000AD as anyone else's. That plus the fact that he lets “Funny uncle Phil” over to upset his kids and never mentions my opium pipe or overly tight britches only make him even more of a hero to me. (I love you, mate.)

You can catch up with Warren Pleece’s excellent Montague Terrace here and follow one of his creations, clapped out pop crooner, Paul Ian Gregory on Twitter here.