Tube Surfing: 5 June 2009

• Busy racing between secret locations in an effort to find an internet connection that worked, we missed out on wishing Garen Ewing, creator of The Rainbow Orchid, a happy birthday yesterday (4th June) but there's still time to enter his competition to win a signed and sketched cover proof of the upcoming collection from Egmont UK! The deadline is midnight GMT on Sunday 7 June. See this post on his official web site for details.

• Talking of competitions, Garen reports Sarah McIntyre decided to celebrate his "40th of June" birthday celebrations (along with the likes of Jason Cobley, Gosh! Comics, Forbidden Planet, Paul Harrison-Davies and many others by holding her own competition - you have to draw a suitably extravagant moustache on this terrific portrait of Garen she's drawn. See Sarah's blog for details - and again, the deadline is Sunday evening (7 June).

• Matthew Badham has a brilliant interview with artist John Higgins on the Forbidden Planet International blog, talking about his new book, Razorjack, and how his comics career. "There was a certain element of lucky accident when it came to my art, particularly with colour," he reveals. "I was spending ages and ages on my painted art, probably a week on each page. But what I was doing in those days was learning on the job. You’re experimenting and you’re trying new things and if it goes wrong, then you have to start all over again. Or you discover something that’s completely and utterly wonderful by accident that you wouldn’t have been able to think through." Read the full interview

• Warren Ellis talks about "the dubious virtues of ebooks" in his latest column for wired.co.uk, which you can read online for free on the new magazine's web site. It's titled "The Kindle is a mewling, crippled, pining thing" so you can guess the gist. Warren argues that right now, British book publishers have less to fear from ebook publishing (the Kindle doesn't even work in the UK, apparently): their worry is that "the threat to reading comes only from our education system – and the fact that most children are born to 15-year-old foetal-alcohol-syndrome cases." (Episode 57 of Freak Angels is live now, by the way, just as an aside...)

• Lee Robson reports there's a great review of Accent UK's Robots over at Newsarama where it's compared very favourably to the Popgun anthologies from Image Comics. Read the full review here.

• And finally... Rob Jackson reports that with the arrival an awesome page for the Pasty Anthology from Jim Medway, his long-awaited collection is almost finished, and hopefully he'll be sending it off to the printers next week. It sounds like a fun assembly of creative talent!