Christmas Winner!!!

We have a glorious winner in our "Christmas Derek Picture Competition"! And it is none other than Jordan Mooney!!! Congratulations!!!

Mrs Farmer Jack liked the use of colours and jolly expressive faces on each of the characters. I liked it, cos I look more handsome than normal.

One signed Beano 2007 Annual in the post for you old bean.

A special mention to someone called "Mad Nigel" (very familiar name that) for his nice pencil study of me and Santa:



Very nice hand-colouring in this one, although I don't look as good looking as in Jordan's pic. A special prize will be coming your way too!

Thank you to everyone who took part and don't forget to send in your Derek the Sheep poems!!

Thank you!!

ANOTHER competition!

You lucky people. We really do love competitions round 'ere, so much so, we're running a SECOND one!!! This time it's a poem I'm after.

I want you to write a hilarious poem about me and my pals! It can be as long or as short as you want. It can be a limerick or a 50 page Shakespearean soliloquy (good luck with that one).

It's probably sailing a bit close to the wind for Christmas but get your entries in to me by December 31st and the best one (as judged by Mrs Farmer Jack) will get a signed/scribbled on copy of my new French book "Norbert Le Mouton"! How's that then? Up for it? I know it's in French, but it's got me jammed in there to the rafters. And what better way to learn French than to compare French speechbubbles with English one's.

The book's due out at the end of January/ beginning of February 2008.

Mrs Farmer Jack's opinion will be final!!!

I thank you.

Christmas Competition!!

Oh yes, we love competitions round 'ere. Especially me! and Lenny. We love playing "guess the weight" of the various animals around the farm. I'm normally quite brilliant at this, especially with the fatter specimens (no names mentioned). I actually got Rodney the bull spot on with 38 stone!! What a lump! I won a curly wurly. I rule.

Anyway! It's Christmas and I want a lovely festive drawing of me and/or my pals! Doesn't matter about the size (under 10mb though) and in jpeg format and the winner picked by Mrs. Farmer Jack will win a Beano Annual 2008 signed by the creator of Derek the Sheep!!! Cor!! How marvelous. Previous winners of such prizes will attest that such a thing is lovely and you get a few more scribbles and graffitti sprinkled throughout too!

In fact ALL entries will get a free sketch of me (hopefully it's not more than five or six entries otherwise that's alot of drawing!).

So make it nice 'n' festive 'n' colourful 'n' stupid. Entries by Sunday 16th December and winner announced Monday or tuesday evening. you should get your pressies in good time for the last xmas post!

Send entries to dereksheep@yahoo.co.uk

Hopefully I haven't forgotten anything. Judges decision is final! (they always say that don't they?)

Thank you!

Christmas Comes Early!

Hooray! A new Derek the Sheep story hits the stands and it's in the new Christmas Beanomax! And, by gum, if it isn't my best story for ages! Check out those beautiful colours and hilarious gags. Aren't they brilliant? Here's a sneaky pic just to tip you over the edge, just in case you were thinking you might give it a miss...



Very nice too.

My stalker

No news on my turnips yet. I planted 5 into a little patch next to my barn and I've been watering them daily. Bernard the goat came over and had a nose. He wasn't particularly impressed and reckoned I'm more likely to grow some magic beans than turnips. Which, if I'm honest, I think I'd prefer! Imagine having magic beans!!! That would be great. I'm not entirely sure what magic beans would do, but I'm sure it would be brilliant. Lenny reckons with magic beans you could grow a big "beanstalk" and then climb up it into the clouds, enter the castle of a big evil giant and then steal his golden goose. Lenny saw it on the news once, so it must be true. A golden goose would be obviously fab, and I'd be a millionaire (I'd give Lenny a fiver to buy the latest Sugababes CD, so that should keep him happy). I could then go on a world tour of the world and learn about different cultures and discover everything there is to know about various turnips from different continents.

In other news; I think I'm being followed... by a CARRIER BAG!!! No, really. I was walking over to the chickens' place this morning and this blue carrier bag from Bob's newsagent was definitely following me! I wondered whether Bob the newsagent suspected me of stealing curly-wurlies or something and sent out a spy bag to spy on me. Well, it could happen.

Turnips

I've decided to grow my own turnips. I'm fed up with eating the mouldy old ones farmer Jack gives us, so I thought the best course of action is to grow my own.
To be honest I have absolutely no idea how to grow a turnip, so I asked Alan Horse, he knows everything!

I asked, "Alan, do you know how to grow turnips?"and Alan replied "Neigh". "Is that a "no" then?" I asked. "Neigh" he said. "So you DO know?". "Neigh!" said Alan.

By this time I was eating my own teeth with mild frustration. So I stormed off to see if the farm library had any books on turnips.

Blimey! We had hundreds!!! - "Turnips of The World", "How Turnips Can Make you Fat", "Look, A Turnip", "Are Turnips Interesting?", "My Mum Was a Turnip. From Mars", "What Turnips of The Future Will Probably Look Like", "The Curious Incident Of The Turnip".

Hundreds.

But NOT ONE on how to grow one! Ridiculous!
It was a bit of a mistake going in the library, mind you, not only did I not find the book I was looking for, but I owed them £3.50 in overdue fines. I had "Magic Tricks For Ducks" out for a bit too long. Whoops.

So anyway, Lenny suggested I get one of Farmer Jack's turnips and plant it and then hopefully a new one will grow. "A bit like when you plant an acorn and an oak tree grows" he said. Maybe, fingers crossed, I'll get a big turnip tree and I'll have hundreds of turnips! Just in time for Christmas too! yippee!!!!

It's A Derek Bonanza!!!

There's never been a greater time to be a Derek The Sheep fan than this week! All the planets have aligned, the wind's blowing in the right direction (that'll be the sprouts I had for breakfast) and there are TWO appearances of my beautiful self on your newsagent's shelf right now!!!!

Can you believe it? Me neither. I actually fainted and everybody felt sorry for me and gathered round to made sure I was ok. Then those sprouts kicked in again and everyone went back to hating me just like they did before.

1) I'm in the Beanomax!! The film special issue 5 thingy. Cecil's directing a science fiction film and me and Lenny are UFO's. It's hilarious.
Here's a lovely clip....




It's get better, believe me. It even has one of my now legendary mini-strips running along the bottom. Is it funny? You decide.

2) I'm back in the normal weekly Beano!!! Hooray!! I think the Beano ed. is just pleased to know that I'm alive after all my Beanomax shenanigans. But he'd needn't fear as I have plenty of mad stories coming out of my ears! There should be a brilliant one on his desk Friday morning, and it's brilliant. In fact it's so brilliant, he should kick Dennis out of the Beano and shove me on the front as I'm tremendously better looking than that weirdo. Sales would rocket too. Trust me.

Here's an excerpt from this week's saga...




Yep that's correct - I'm in Australia! What a laugh! Although it wasn't; it was horrible. it's a two-part story, so I'll be in there next week too! And maybe the week after!!! Who knows? Hooray!


Ta ra!!!

(And of course, if you enjoyed my strips, then don't forget to vote on the Beanotown website! Thank you!)

Er...

Watcha. Flippin' eck I'm up late. I dropped my ipod down a drain and now I've got to re-upload all my tunes and it's taking forever. Actually it's been quite a useful experience as I can delete all those rubbish tunes that clog the flipping thing up.
Why on Earth I've got Macedonian Horse Banjo music on there is anyone's guess. But it always turns up when I have it on shuffle.

Bert Worm gave me his latest MP3s the other day (he's a famous worm singer in his own right), but they're not really my thing to be honest, so I've deleted all of them. Worm music is a very acquired taste; imagine a long, thin Bjork singing through a toilet roll tube, and you'll get an idea of how worms sound when they sing (I hope Bert doesn't read this, he's a very sensitive artist).
I blame his mother; she always said he had a great voice and she hasn't got any ears!

Cor! Exciting poll!!!

I've not been able to relax this bank holiday weekend, mainly due to the very exciting poll over at Beanotown.com.

I was leading by quite a margin at one point, cos that's how great I am. But then Big Baz and Nutty Nigel rallied all those on the farm who happened to hate me (i.e. the ducks, Bernard the goat, the chickens, Rodney the Bull, Alan Horse, Colin pig, Kevin Rabbit... the list is endless), and got them to vote against me!! The rotters!! Don't matter though, my support has turned out in strength and last time I looked I was still second.

At least I'm not last. Like normal!

Life imitates art

"Ogre mistakes sheep for dog" you say? Are my stories getting more ridiculous by the hour? Well, I saw this story the other day and I thought it was strange that it wasn't too disimilar to my own Beano story that was out the very same week.
Sort of.

Although according to this article it's completely made up!

Would be funny it were true though. I've always fancied going to Japan actually, what with all their mad toys and current pop-art culture. So if any Japanese fans fancy having Derek the Sheep in their favourite Manga comic, then drop me a line and if you pay for my trip, I'll happily pop over and discuss it with you!

Quick! Buy the Beano!!

Blimey! I'd forget my head if it wasn't screwed on! (Are heads screwed on then? Who knew?)
I'm in this week's Beano!!!
It's totally insane too, with an Afghan dog, an ogre, bubble baths, wigs, er.. sticks. Even Nobby turns up, not that he does or says anything. I reckon we need a "Nobby Special" a bit like that one with Rodney a few months ago. What do you reckon?

A weird panel from this week's story...






Obscure, I know. That's me in a wig. Don't I look lovely?

My next appearance will be in Beanomax issue 4!! Cool, eh? Just working on issue 5 right now and it's really lovely too.
Just finished my adventure for the Beano Annual 2009 (4 pages of nonsense in the Australian Outback), but you won't be able to read that for over a year! How mad is that?

So what I'm saying is, my next appearance in the regular weekly might not be for some time (if they'll still have me back), but it's not like we've been lazing about or anything! What with Beanomax, Beano Annuals and Bloomsbury, we've had Derek the Sheep stories coming out of our ears round 'ere.

To be frank, I'm sick of the sight of me. And so's Lenny.

Hello! Remember me?

I've been everso EVERSO busy this last month or two. I've not even had time to watch telly or anything. You've hopefully by now spotted this week's great new adventure (I say "great"; it's not bad. That panel at the end of the first page is a bit ropey. It don't even look like me! Although it's a nice drawing of a tree in the first panel, so that sort of makes up for it.)
Here's a panel to remind you of a brilliant hilarious moment...



There are some lovely funny moments in there, so do rush out and buy it if you get a chance.

My other workload has also included working on a book collection of my early strips for Bloomsbury!!!

Yep! all the rumours are true! As many of my hardcore readers know, the especially lovely people at Bloomsbury think I'm really handsome and witty and that I deserve an even greater audience than the one I already have. They have a deep love of sheep too, so it really is home from home.

Here's a list of the stories to be included:

1. The Grass Is Always Greener
2. Field Of Dreams
3. Getting The Wind Up
4. Flies
5. It's An Ill Wind
6. He's Got The Power
7. One For The Pot
8. Let's Bee Friends
9. No Business Like Snow Business
10. Bad Hair Day
11. The Bells Are Ringing
12. Lame Excuse
13. Having A Ball

I think the only stories from that first year that aren't included are; the one with frisbee (my second appearance) and the Christmas Nativity story.
It should be 59 pages of extreme hilarity for the whole family to cherish for years to come. that's what Lenny says anyway.
Hopefully it will sell by the bucketload and I can then bring out another book with all my other stories in!!
Well, I can dream....

YOU WHAT??!!

Yes, you've guessed it; I've gone a bit deaf! You can read all about it in this week's Beano!

I'm back at last!! Hooray you all shout! I've cast off the shackles of putting together my book for the French people and gotten over a well rotten cold and now it's full steam ahead for normal Derek service!! Well, as normal as I ever get that is. Take this week's story; slugs, fleas, hairy ears, Cheryl Crow, I mean Blackbird, explosions, bogies, EVERYTHING!!! All crammed into a two-page glorious extravaganza.

Check out this hilarious moment...



Adrian slug was a right misery throughout it has to be said. I've known him for a while and he's always refused to take part in any of my stories (Bert Worm's the same; very camera shy), but I promised him a big packet of Sour Skittles if he turned up for a few panels, which he duly obliged. But unfortunately I duly ate the said Sour Skittles (seeing as I like the way they make me froth out of my nose) and he got WELL upset.
Obviously I scarpered, which if you think about it, is an idiot-proof plan; hands up all those who have been chased by a slug and have been caught and bopped in the chops?

Exactly.

Enjoy!!!

(And of course if you really love me, don't forget to show your appreciation by voting for me over at the Beanotown website! I'll beat that Dennis one day, just you watch! Thanks dudes.)


***EDIT***

By the way, did you know this week's story marks my third anniversary in the Beano? Let's have a party!!!

Can't cope waiting for a new Derek the Sheep strip in the Beano? Then check out this awesome story by one of my biggest fans, Mooneyman!

You are an evil genius, sir.

Mad Drawing!!!

I keep promising to post some of my fan drawings, so here's a completely loopy one to get the ball rolling!



Thanks Alex!!

Get Voting!

Ooh. there's some award-vote thingy happening for comics or summint here and you can nominate me if you want! That's if you love me of course. I'm already listed on "Favourite Comics Writer/Artist", but you could also nominate me for Favourite Comics Character if you wanted to too! I think. By adding my name in the white box or something. In fact you can put me in any catagory I might fit into. Apart from "Favourite Mango". I'm definitely not a mango. I've only ever won an egg and spoon race before, so please VOTE FOR ME!!!! And make a little sheep happy!
Ta dudes! you know I love you :)

Lurgy

Hello.
We had hoped to have had more Dave Carrot this week, but I'm all bogied up with a rotten cold :(
Hopefully towards the end of the week another exciting episode will emerge if I get better.
Lenny has the lurgy now too and isn't pleased seeing as it was obviously from me when I sneezed all over his face on Saturday. Oops.

Dave Carrot's Amazing Adventures!!!!

Episode 1



Click to enlarge.

Dave Carrot!

It seems that Dave Carrot's brief appearance a few weeks ago was immensely popular (at least three people told me how great he was!), so starting next week exclusively on this blog...

****Drum roll****



THE EXCITING ADVENTURES OF DAVE CARROT!!!


****sounds of cymbals clashing and crowds cheering*****


Starts Monday!

BEEP!

Watcha again! Another week, another Derek The Sheep story!!

You lucky people.

This week you meet my lovely sister Ethel (with a beard, eurgh!) and my mad little nephew Benny, who says Beep alot. The weirdo. It's a cracking story and probably the best one ever since that one about the horse last week.

Here's a brilliant moment (***Warning!! Contains spoilers!!!****)



That little rascal! Also, if you don't like spiders and are a bit soft (like Lenny), then this issue is best avoided as it stars the biggest ugliest spider ANY OF US HAVE EVER SEEN!!!!!

You have been warned...