A winter ninja demonstrating good covert snowballing technique.

There’s a new Fudebakudo cartoon in the gallery, which appears in the latest (December) edition of MAI magazine. It shines a cold light on the different snowballing styles to be found in the martial arts.
Somehow, snowball fights never really worked for me when I was little. I used to [...]

The Fudebakublog lurches back into life after a long sleep . . .
I’ve been giving all my attention to the release of the latest Beholder project, The Knot-Shop Man. Unlike the Fudebakudo book, The Knot-Shop Man is a limited edition art project. No martial arts*, no comics, not even a flick-man in the corner of the pages.

The Knot-Shop [...]

Cartoonist René and special agent Sung doing something too obscure to explain, which seems to involve holding up tiny, tiny jars of tiny, tiny things.

I am back in the UK after a seven-week trip to Bangkok. It was good to catch up with old friends in the Big Mango. Special thanks to Ben (and Buddy [...]

Finally, an announcement! Exploding Pen is publishing a special edition of The Knot-Shop Man on 09/09/09.
This is a Beholder project, celebrating the tenth anniversary of the story-puzzle Planetarium. And there are no martial arts in it. Sorry.
For more information, go to www.beholder.co.uk/knots/

Martial art without boundaries

There's a new illustration in the gallery on the topic of Shapes in the Martial Arts. This was drawn for the May issue of MAI magazine so you won’t find it in the book.

This one really span off from the well-known oddity that a boxing ring isn’t round.

I had some problems with the old blog software (so I’ve moved across to WordPress, if you’re nerdy enough to care). Currently this means some comments from old posts are missing. All in good time these will be reinstated. There are some other small tweaks still to be done, but generally I think most things [...]

The Portland Aikikai dojo is itself so aesthetically pleasing it's a wonder they let ugly visitors on the mat at all.

The sign said "SHUT UP AND TRAIN" when I first turned up. A week later, it had been changed. Not by me.

It's been quiet on the Fudebakublog because I've been busy — just back from Portland, Oregon, [...]

A final, sad view of Mr Bike being taken away in a van. I've obscured the number-plate so you can imagine it was FBD 1. For what it's worth, "Honda" is a genuine samurai family name.

This weekend saw the retirement of a much-loved member of the Exploding Pen team . . . Mr Bike was the unimaginatively named, two-wheeled, [...]

Trophies at Seni08. I didn't win one. Based on what I saw, it might have been because I wasn't being silly enough.

This weekend Seni, the UK's big martial arts expo, was held in London. Exploding Pen didn't have a stand this year and the event was, of course, poorer as a result.
I did attend though, to [...]

A lady takes a bow

There's a new illustration in the gallery on the topic of Women Fighting Men. You won't find this one in the book — it was drawn for the May issue of MAI magazine (the one with Shannon Lee on the cover).
Working on this one reminded me of something that I didn't have enough information [...]