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Ron Birks's Discussions

Help us go Viral

Started this discussion. Last reply by Ron Birks on Friday. 54 Replies

Hi All, Germany calling.I am sat using a tiny friends Notebook ins Vaterland, so I am hoping just to get the ball rolling: The Art Department has launched the first of a 16 page online monthly Art…Continue

Tags: ron, birks, sfn, magazine, art

Something for the weekend?

Started this discussion. Last reply by Ron Birks May 6. 9 Replies

I love a good game...not footie, snooks, but a word game. We used to play the TennisElbow Foot  ( Game ) but slightly more difficult...Person A says Tennis            B says  Elbow            C says…Continue

Tags: sfn, animal, party, House

SFN Brains Trust

Started this discussion. Last reply by Andrew Hearne May 6. 55 Replies

SFN Brains TrustI think it's about time we gave a big Thank You, not just to Admin, but to the extremely knowledgeable and…Continue

Tags: SFN, Trust, Brains

French Letters

Started this discussion. Last reply by Ron Birks Apr 27. 13 Replies

I was going to entitle this 'Room 101' but that will clash with other entries....But that's the thrust of the Post-ette.... What 3 French things would you like to see committed to Room 101? ....…Continue

Tags: garson, letters, French

 

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Ron Birks commented on Catharine Higginson's photo
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Kitchen SFN Towers

"eeerrr, in hindsight...I have rollerskates bigger than that!"
25 minutes ago
Ron Birks commented on Catharine Higginson's photo
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Kitchen SFN Towers

"dig that, dudes!"
25 minutes ago
Ron Birks replied to Steven Kendrew's discussion Advice on Estate Agents/Property Marketing Methods (Charente Maritime)?? in the group House Hunters
"umm Cap 'C' for Christmas Andrew...!!! Jesus would not be happy!"
27 minutes ago
Ron Birks posted a status
"and again for the Twits!!! http://ning.it/M8WAXw"
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Ron Birks posted a status
"I must have over a million followers... so do yourselves a flavour!! http://ning.it/M8WAXw"
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Ron Birks commented on neil whitehead's group Design Lab
"hoping you can all view this page on >Pinterest"
1 hour ago
Ron Birks commented on Glyn Pope's group Philately
"Hi all, I'd forgotten about the post below, and now I have in my possession 4 volumes of the collection subscribed... there are some 6 or 7 more. The stamps range from mint first editions to 'Riechmark' issues, superbly kept and…"
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Ron Birks posted a status
"ich bin ein bissel ab-gepisched!!!"
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Ron Birks commented on Sheila Walshe-Blackmore's group Website Building
"that there Val is like ... er well-famous!!!!"
yesterday
Ron Birks commented on Sheila Walshe-Blackmore's group Website Building
"bored now! cheap blog themes looky looky!"
yesterday
Ron Birks replied to James Higginson's discussion Random Image Posting in the group The Darkroom
"caught crabs once... but they are so sweet those things... I want one!"
yesterday
Ron Birks commented on Sheila Walshe-Blackmore's group Website Building
"Ah... that'll be THE Valerie Skinner.... huh?"
yesterday
Ron Birks replied to James Higginson's discussion Random Image Posting in the group The Darkroom
"very nice pics Mike and Neil... love the humming bird ( moth? )"
Monday
Ron Birks posted a status
"New Art Department Banner by Neil Whitehead http://ning.it/AouRo6"
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Ron Birks commented on Sheila Walshe-Blackmore's group Website Building
"ooo sorry Kathryn, there are plenty of other bright sparks here.... have to rush now . Good luck"
Monday

Profile Information

Department eg. 33
34
Web/Blog Address
http://www.thewebcircle.net
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captionphoto
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http://www.facebook.com/naldi.birks
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GENSENMULLER
Length of time in France?
More than 5 years
Searchable Personal Info (Hobbies, interests etc...)
Guitar, Art, Graphics, Web Design, Design competitions, Apple products, Open source Apps and software, playing live music, painting, art history, sitting down, speaking Franglais, to contact www.best-ring.me
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British

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Ron Birks's Blog

Logo Train

Posted on April 24, 2012 at 2:26 18 Comments

LogoTrain

— DECEMBER 7, 2011

A plastic building brick toy for kids? No, that would be Lego Train. Jogo train? hmmm interesting, a fitness …

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In the back of the Tranny with Freddy Mercury

Posted on January 1, 2012 at 10:13 0 Comments

Sarah Fiske…


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TANK-GIRL

Posted on December 31, 2011 at 9:00 1 Comment

MR HALE’S MATHS LESSON 1979. Durrington High School, Worthing. Monday morning, beginning of the autumn term. Mr Hale’s maths lesson. I’d been made to sit at the front of the class to keep me away from Michael Jones (who now owns a very successful estate agents in Worthing), as we had been causing a disturbance at the back of the room and had been found to be missing from class altogether on several occasions. So I had to sit up front, next to the New Boy. He was an exceptionally quiet chap, with mousy hair and glasses, and seemed to be very engrossed in his exercise book. Upon a second look I realised that it wasn’t logarithms and square roots that he was focused on at all, but his own drawings that were rapidly filling up the cover of his new book. I’d never seen anything quite like it, he was an incredible draftsman. At the tender age of thirteen, this boy had anatomy, shading, perspective, and facial expression down pat. He told me that his family had moved down from Southport, near Liverpool, because of his dad’s work (he was a professional cartoonist, well known in the seventies for his work in Roy Of The Rovers and several other weekly Brit comics). This was my first meeting with Philip Bond, who would become my best friend through the rest of my school years, entice me on to art college afterwards, and then go on to share with me experiences of success and disaster in the comics industry in our “adult” life. We soon set about subverting the high school magazine, with a one page comic based on our art teacher, Steve Frith, whose alter ego was as muscle-bound superhero “Captain 73” (73 was the number of the room where we had our art classes). A BLIZZARD OF COCK Fast forward six years and Philip and I were starting our forth consecutive year at Worthing Art College. There was a new kid in the graphics class a couple of years below us, name of Hewlett. Word was he could draw comics. Hewlett and Bond were instantly drawn (no pun intended) to each other and started trading sketches and drawing tips. At that point, Philip had a lot more to offer in the way of honed talent and accumulated artistic knowledge, but Jamie was rapidly catching up on the inside track. I kept my distance at first, alarmed at the amount of penises Jamie drew. I mean that guy drew a lot of cocks; they were absolutely everywhere, a veritable blizzard of knobs and ball bags. Eventually I came to terms with all the cocks and softened (no pun intended) towards Jamie. Before we knew it, the three of us were spending every waking hour in each other’s company. It was just a matter of time until we plopped out something solid. And plop we did – after gathering various other talented sorts from our circle of college friends, we stole the staff photocopier key and ran off fifty copies of our twenty-eight page comic “Atomtan” (a title pinched from the song of the same name on The Clash’s album “Combat Rock”). The main bulk of the work was drawn by Jamie and Philip, with the rest of us stuffing up the spare pages with our own…erm… “idiosyncratic” styles of comics and stories. On page twenty there was an advert for a forthcoming comic strip that we had no intention of ever getting around to doing, thrown together from scraps on the studio floor and random ideas that had been rattling around for some time. The tagline read, “Tank Girl – she’ll break your back and your balls!” She had a big gun, big thighs and big hair. We forgot all about her, thinking that Philip and Jamie’s lead strips “Atomtan” and “Max Nasty” would be the eternal stars of our humble home made comic. In our final term at college, we were blessed with a day’s worth of lectures from 2000AD artist Brett Ewins. He was an old friend of our textiles tutor, Julie Westbury, and had come down from London to talk about working in the comic industry. We mobbed him like a bunch of Beatlemaniacs and made sure he left with a copy of Atomtan #1 clutched firmly to his bosom. ENTERPRISE ALLOWANCE For the next year, as we hurled ourselves onto Thatcher’s much missed Enterprise Allowance Scheme, Jamie and Philip kept themselves busy working on strips for the computer magazine Commodore User and other jobs, while I kept myself slightly less busy running a silk screen printing business from my dad’s garage. We maintained close radio contact with Brett, until one day in 1988 he popped up with a request for submissions for a new magazine called Deadline, that he was starting with his friends Steve Dillon and Tom Astor; specifically, from Jamie and myself, he wanted to see a fully realised version of the Tank Girl advert he had seen in Atomtan. We sat down in the conservatory of my parent’s house and mapped out our first story. Jamie already had a big chunk of Tank Girl’s world in place; it was to be set in Australia, there were mutants, she would have a haircut just like Mick Lynch from the C86 band Stump, and there would be a reverential nod to Aussie comedian Paul Hogan. I threw in my ten pence worth of dialogue, obscure lyrical references, and the “she snogs the kangaroo” twist on the final page. We chuckled to ourselves, happy with what we’d come up with, and Jamie went away to start the almighty task of drawing the five pages “two and a half up” (meaning on huge sheets of card, 2.5 times the final printed size), in incredible detail, and mainly all done with brushes and Indian ink. It seemed to take forever as I paced around his drawing board like an expectant father. Finally it was finished, ferried up to London, and plonked down on the editorial desk at Deadline. The impact was palpable; somehow, without any of the usual formularising, editing, and marketing, Tank Girl had what it took to be an instant comic book icon. Schedules were quickly shuffled and Tank Girl was given pride of place on the front cover of Deadline issue one. IGNITE BLUE TOUCH-PAPER AND RUN LIKE HELL From the moment Tank Girl first hit the newsstands, people couldn’t wait to grab hold of her and claim her as their own - from political causes, to fashion-tribes to, individual comic-obsessives. That was fine when she was in her infancy, but as time went on it became more and more tiresome for us to have to constantly stake our claim in our own character and qualify our ideas. As this book will show, it was this never-ending struggle that would shape Tank Girl’s personality and determine the trajectory of the arc of her original seven-year life span. Without it, she would still be happily driving her tank around the outback, blowing up barbeques and snogging kangaroos. With it, she was yanked in every direction by a thousand possessive hands. But we needed to posses her too and we always ran away in the opposite direction from where people wanted and expected us to go. It was her uncategorisable character that left her wide open to interpretation and misinterpretation. That was how we liked it, it gave us the freedom to go where the hell we liked. Ultimately a combination of misinterpretation and too much freedom would provide Tank Girl’s demise, as Hollywood tried to nail down her wild, chaotic, surreal, and random nature, failing miserably on a worldwide scale. The imposed mother-figure morality and sexist locker-room humour of the movie script sealed her coffin firmly shut for more than a decade. As my Worthing art college tutor Dave Mills used to say, “Loose briefs fall down.” Edited from the introduction of the coffee table art book “The Cream Of Tank Girl” (Hewlett & Martin/Titan Books 2008).

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Undercover

Posted on December 28, 2011 at 18:40 4 Comments

Some of you won't have heard of us. We are a discreet Division of Rapid Action Specialists who operate behind the scenes at SFN.

We are in communication, operate a 24/7 system, and our cell comprises every type from Granny to Grape Picker....we are recruiting now, send in your details and please highlight…

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Comment Wall (34 comments)

You need to be a member of SURVIVE FRANCE NETWORK to add comments!

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At 23:39 on May 6, 2012, Cristina Sanchez said…

Thank you!

At 1:08 on April 29, 2012, Shirley Morgan said…

hi Ron, happy to be 'a friend' via SFN!

Shirley x

At 11:55 on April 27, 2012, Jon Lisle-Summers said…

Hi Ron, yes I'd be delighted if you did an article; this is is only the third time that's ever happened.  If you need any info: E-M is jaguarjon@googlemail.com, phone is: 05 53 40 65 92.  Just gearing up to instal at Fumel show today; no matter how many times I exhibit I never get any less nervous....

 

At 20:10 on April 23, 2012, Jillian Wasiewicz Baudry said…

Hi Ron, a very, very belated thanks for your message and tip to check out the Art Department. Great stuff, thanks!! 

At 23:34 on April 16, 2012, Mirela Bustrevic said…
Hi Ronnie it is I -I am in now
At 12:49 on April 13, 2012, John Parsons said…

I have thought of joining Pinterest ...and hope I to get round to it fairly soon - I've joined so many things, though, and there always seem to be more - I get about 100 e.mails per day and I'm soon gonna have to get someone to answer the phone for me ......

At 13:17 on April 12, 2012, John Parsons said…

Ron - Thanks for the compliments. The amount of work I put into construction varies a lot. I often do plenty of research, even for quick, simple jobs, and then I do quite a few sketches before deciding on final construction. I may then get friends to pose and go out taking phoos of locations before doing a finished drawing which I then enlarge on a photocopier before tracing onto board, panel, canvas etc ......at other times I just wing it and make things up as I go along

 

At 14:42 on April 9, 2012, michelle birks said…
Hello to you to
At 12:00 on March 28, 2012, Patric Guentert said…

Yes although I should have an Umlaut uber the U in my family name

At 11:33 on March 23, 2012, Trevor Bridge said…

Hello Ronald. I'm looking forwards to getting involved with this.

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