The Girly Comic #6 cover illustrated by Des Taylor.

This cover, produced by the very talented Des Taylor has proved to be one of the most popular Girly covers. When the issue came out I was using it as my desktop background at work, which led to one student asking how he could get hold of a copy of the art… not because he was a comics fan, but because he was a collector of Jack Daniels ephemera! Of course, we would never claim that the bottle pictured here is a bottle of JD.

One of the first professional comic artists I ever met was Simon Fraser, at the Bristol Comics Festival in 1999. I didn’t really know much about comics then, and certainly didn’t know that Simon was a 2000AD artist, and co-creator of Nikolai Dante.

He was very friendly to this comics widow and suggested several comics that might be more to my taste than some of the superhero fayre on offer. So, it was very natural for me to ask if he would be willing to illustrate the cover for the first issue of The Girly Comic. He kindly agreed, and sent us the gorgeous cover above. I had been planning on producing Girly completely in black and white, but one look at Simon’s cover changed all those plans, and inadvertently led to us buying a colour laser printer!