During the second year of my illustration degree and shortly after completing the original version of Pretty Girls Make Graves, the artist and (renowned cat drawer) Jim Medway came to give what was a very interesting talk at the college and then spent the afternoon looking at students’ portfolios. On seeing this comic, he suggested that I could have done it on record sleeves. Typical – it now seemed so obvious that the panels should have been square at the very least!

Fast forward to the summer of 2011 and I took his idea on board for my degree show. Thirty of the original thirty-six panels were reproduced or re-imagined and printed onto 7″ sleeves, complete with (random surplus) singles kindly supplied by Max Hambledon from his extensive tours of car boot sales in search of rare grooves.

Each image was drawn in pen and ink, tone added with black watercolour pencil, scanned and converted to duo-tone to match the associated Smiths cover. In order to qualify this as an ‘installation’ (it was an art degree, after all), I sampled the appropriate line from each song and faded these in and out on a constant loop through headphones for that multimedia experience.

Click on the image to see the comic, or each panel may be viewed separately on Flickr.

The original version of the comic can be viewed here.

N.B. There will be no third version – you can only re-issue, repackage, repackage so many times. Unless you’re Morrissey, apparently.