photo by Clayton Cubitt

I’ve been doing these yearly wrap-ups for a good seven years.  What I really mean is the sorts of work slavery I broke myself against.  Increasingly, work IS life, and life just the cups of tea with those I love, that I’m able to steal from the ever-growing pile of drawings.

This won’t be in order.

Last year, I celebrated my birthday in the Grammercy Park Hotel, where I covered the walls with a 290 foot inky, tentacled fantasia called Week in Hell.

Two days later, Occupy Wall Street hit New York. I’d been following people take to the streets from Tahrir to Athens to London. Never thought it would happen here.

When it did, it changed my art and life. I started drawing it.

People took some lovely pictures of me

photo by Ellen Rogers

Travelled obsessively- to Paris (x3), London (x6), Athens, Amsterdam, Angouleme, Chicago, LA, to the point where London’s Groucho Club feels like a second home. The Groucho shortlisted me for an award in the field of Mavrickey-ness, and I got to hang out at Parliament drinking champagne and talking comics with Tom Watson MP

Masked people’s librarian holding my poster on the streets of New York

George Whitman, the proprietar of Shakespeare and Company, died in December. When I was 17, he invited me to live there, changing everything I believed about art and life and possibility. Thank you George

Hosted a documentary on erotic comics, for the French TV Channel ARTE.  Got green screened next to Milo Manera goddesses, wearing a dress so short it had to be pulled down between each take

Sick of waiting for galleries to notice me, and wanting to create giant art, I put Shell Game on Kickstarter.  It closed with 65k, and I’ve been spending most 2012 painting the damn show

IDW published two books of mine- Week in Hell and Devil in the Details

Filled dozens of sketchbooks

Drew a poster for the May 1st General Strike that was wheatepasted on walls around the world

Took part in a mysterious project with Stoya and Clayton Cubitt, Stoyaville

photo by Clayton Cubitt

Read obsessively. In French and English. The books I always meant to read

Got a private tour of the Louvre, courtesy of my sponsors at Royal Talens

Ran off to Athens with motherfucking muse and comrade Laurie Penny, to create Discordia together

Drew many things

The list and iphone snaps don’t really sum up the joy and exhaustion of the year. The late nights with whiskey and conspiracies. The feeling that I couldn’t pull another 16 hour day, and then doing it anyway. The constant insentity of work, of loving that work. But I tried. It was a good year. Am proud of it. Made big things. And next year will be more of that.