Jeremy Dennis

Journal | Cleanskies | A Tour of West Pier | I Love my Toys | The Weekly Strip

My name is Jeremy Dennis, and I'm a female cartoonist (yes, Jeremy is a strange name for a woman, isn't it?) living in Oxford, right in the middle of England. Oxford is town full of music and people, two things I like very much. I also like comics. I've been drawing since I could hold a pencil, a comics fan since I started to read, and producing minicomics since I was shown how in 1989. I also run workshops, collect curious old books and adapt them to my needs, take photographs and make extraordinary things.

But my first love is comics, and I've devoted a lot of my life to creating and promoting them. Probably the biggest thing was, over ten years ago, getting together with some of those nice people I mentioned earlier to start up the UK's longest-running alternative comics convention, Caption, a weekend-long celebration of the UK's weird and wild alternative comics scene. We hold it every summer in Oxford. You should go, it's fun!

I've also (deep breath) done things at UKCAC, Comics 200x, and the glorious Independents Day at the UK's most amazing comic shop, Page 45; run comics workshops at Ladyfests, Captions, and any number of local schools and youth centres; and inbetween all that found time to co-edit QZ, a UK listing of gay, queer, grrl, fem and related zines with Damian Cugley, my partner in comics. That was before the internet, when finding life and love was a lot harder. Oh, and I've been in a few exhibitions.

Whether I'm running workshops or making comics, I'm mostly talking about minicomics: small, photocopied zines and booklets. 'Grubby little photocopied whatsits', we used to call them, but photocopying and printing is such high quality today that you're unlikely to get better from a published magazine; and everything I do is finished by hand. A8 is my favourite size, but I use A5 for the serious stuff, like The Weekly Strip.

The weekly strip is published almost every week here on alleged literature. You can read it here or as an RSS feed. It's mostly autobiographical (some people call these "stripblogs" or "journal comics") and it is presented as a nine panel grid. This is the fault of my comics hero, Eddie Campbell. After meeting him at the last ever UKCAC, I wrote a series of nine-panel pages about the convention, myself, comics and meeting Eddie Campbell. I didn't know it then, but something had kind of clicked, and I started to gather more; about Glastonbury, my shitty temping jobs, strange monsters, stuff and dreams. Every now and again, I collect them onto paper. You can mail me about how to get hold of these.

You can see some of my weirder stuff (illustration, web-stuff, installations, toy camera photographs, scanner collages, bonkers book adaptation projects like my massive, 2-year-long defacement of the Good News Bible, The N Testament) on my other website, Cleanskies.

If you want to keep up to date with what I'm doing, ask a question, or just leave me a note you can visit my journal.

But right now, you should go and read The Weekly Strip; it's fun. Just ask the experts:

Drawn in a fragile scribble at once confident and neurotic, like many of the strips themselves. The armchair psychologist could have lots of fun interpreting the preponderance of birds and other avian-forms. David Goodman, Bahala-na.

The extremist absurdist, the pleasant quirkiness, Jeremy Dennis and her works are those things. ... I cannot recall why I liked it a whole lot yet still do. Check out Jeremy's website or send her some money or send the money to me and I'll spend it on cheeseburgers. Andrew Luke, Bugpowder

See you in the funny papers

Jeremy

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Photographs 1 and 3 by Matt Brooker. Photograph 2 by John Wood.