the predatory bird

Tag: Jon Horner

  • Why So Sad? Scotland, Summer 2025

    Gull Skater pushing onwards through life, Freehand by Jon Horner

    The last time I was in Scotland had been 2022. During that trip, Sam, from Skateboard Scotland helped organize an event in partnership with The Loading Bay skatepark in Glasgow.

    Early in 2025, I have another trip planned to visit Scotland. Should I pull back the hammer and launch the pinball of a Why So Sad? event? I want to, but hesitate. It’s a lot, to organize and pull off an event.

    Is it even worth it?

    Why So Sad? That dumb simple question remains dumb and simple but it still feels like a worthy question — a perennial question that no matter how many times we ask it, there’s always some new knot of an answer to untwist.

    When we take it as a serious question…

    (because we are in such a dire emotional state that we need to, or because we have arrived, even-keeled, at a junction in the labyrinth, and we have the capacity to soberly consider our path)

    …when we follow that question’s thread, we find it has an inevitable follow-up:

    “And, what are we going to do about it?”

    Ok. Sleep. Breath. One step at a time. Start with some minor research. A Whatsapp message to an old friend:

    “What are our options for getting a wee event space to put up a set of posters and host a little talk?”

    “Jon’s the GM at Peacock Print Studios now. I’m sure he’d be down to help if they have the space available.”

    And that was it. Decision made to continue…

    So, I put together a talk, with slides as visual aids to guide the points I wanted to make.

    The talk went something like this: years ago, in my twenties, I thought I had things figured out, but then I lost my sister and realized that I didn’t know shit.

    Since then, I’ve spent time and energy learning. First by reading the work of people who have cut through the jungle ahead to form a path, and then by looking for their lessons in my own experience of this thing called the human condition.

    A critical piece of the puzzle I have been fascinated by is the fact that ‘mental health’ as an idea feels elusive, immaterial, hard to grasp hold of, ghost-like, BUT it is entirely physical. Our mental and emotional experience is the interplay of our brain taking its inputs from our nervous, hormonal, vascular, and other physical systems and firing back commands to those same systems.

    It happens at lightning speed, and much of it requires practiced skill to notice in the moment, and gain some agency over, but this knowledge provides us solid ground to finally stand on.

    When it comes to understanding ourselves, how we function, how emotions work, how they drive us for better and worse—here is an image showing a selection of books I’ve found immense value in:

    Honorable mentions to How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett and The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins.

    As with events I’ve pulled together in Scotland before, my cousin Liam who works in Suicide Prevention with Scottish Action for Mental Health attended.

    Along with his colleague Justine, they provided some valuable info for services available in the North East of Scotland.

    Below you can find links to that info as well as some of the bits and pieces covered in the talk and the event:

    Scottish Action for Mental Health

    The Original ‘Why So Sad?’ Comic

    Your Brain on Sport | A Comic for Coaches

    Audio – Flight Response | Me Banging on About Stuff I Find Interesting 

    Mental Health First Aid

    Through a multi-week campaign as well as tickets and sales at the event we got Jon Horner up to Aberdeen, and raised a respectable chunk of change for both The Ben Raemers Foundation and for Push to Heal my friend Joel’s initiative under Hull Services in Calgary Canada; a great model that we’ll hopefully begin to see replicated. 

    A final thought for now: If life is excruciating right now that is because life can be excruciating. This too shall pass.

    You can get through.

    🔄 ❤️ 💔 ❤️‍🩹 ❤️ 🔄 

  • The Good Egg Patch

    The patches came in. Designed by Mario Paint wizard Jon Horner, these embroidered amulets are precision engineered to brighten your day.

    Patches available here.

    Donate to the Good Egg Just Giving page here.

  • The PB Comic gets Physical!

    the comics float into spaceIn light of recent activity in Vatican City we feel the world has never been more perfectly primed for the release of our first edition print run of THE PREDATORY BIRD COMIC.

    Here’s a list of fun background info regarding the comic:

    • Set in the aftermath of a family death the tale takes our kid on his inevitable, abject, journey through the grieving process.
    • Luckily the world he inhabits contains a constant array of encouraging beacons to guide him through the dark times; these are all the vibrant characters and details that create and symbolize our culture of the wooden toy.
    • The collaboration with Jon Horner was initially sparked by a shared disquiet regarding the Frankensteinian biomechanoid feline nightmare that is Orville the Cat Helicopter.
    • The gulls are our reminder to be realistic. No matter how nice we’d like life to be, life is, as the great orator Nasty Nas has explicitly stated, a bitch.
    • If you’re trying to come up with a big word to describe the PB comic and you hit upon “phantasmagorical” then give yourself a round of applause because seriously, that is a fantastic word.
    • The good folks at Thrasher Magazine were kind enough to print the story over the course of a year or so.
    • This edition of the Comic is for sale here and also here.
    • In the unlikely event of any profit being generated exactly half will be sent to Jon.

  • The Comic Part 5: Death is a bummer.

    Probably the darkest strip in the 12. Thrasher featured it in their January 2013 issue opposite Pedro Barros in a G-Shock ad – do people still wear watches?
    I suppose Pedro Barros must and that dude is straight-up gnarly. Remember that article Rhino shot where him and Grant Taylor went to Portugal?

    Grant Taylor Ollies into a mental bowl in Portugal

    So anyway, Part 5 of the comic. The darkest point. The kid is on the way to his old man’s funeral and it’s raining. Death, like rain to a skater, is a bummer. But, there’s always a bright side, right? So, can we learn to laugh about death? Maybe not laugh, that sounds callous and callous is not the laughter I’m talking about. But what am I talking about? I’m talking about the inspiration for an entire genre of Metal.

    When friends and family die it’s definitely painful. If it’s not then something is wrong. Loss leaves a gaping hole. It’s disemboweling. Laughter is probably not the healthiest immediate response. But from a distance, I mean with the perspective that time passed provides, we can see death and loss as the brief insignificant things they are and we can get on with enjoying all that we still have.
    Okay, blah blah, cliche, cliche, yeah I’ve had losses. We all have; or are going to. What I’m getting to is that this comic grew out of a shitty grieving process that seemed to utterly dissolve any interest I still had in playing the pro-skater game.

    I’m fairly certain that the process of writing the comic helped me come through one of life’s tunnels. For that I am eternally grateful to Thrasher, especially Michael Burnett, who was kind enough to champion the thing and encourage the process despite its rambling, stumbling through the dark, story progression.
    And obviously, always, to the brilliant Jon Horner.
    And of course to the gulls who have no idea about any of this. They’re just hungry, looking for food and in the process they sound like they’re laughing; and sometimes, depending on the circumstances, the direction of the wind and whatnot, they sound very, very callous.

  • A Forest in a Land filled with Trees
    The Last of the Jigsaw Decks
    and
    And Ambitious Photo Essay with a Loose Data Aggregation Theme: Part One

    When you spend time staring at all the small fiddly bits of a project – the individual trees – you can often lose sight of the bigger picture you’re building – the spooky woods, the deep forests and the vast, dense, jungles.

    Looking up at the brances of an old tree

    This is an old problem resulting from our only possessing two eyes and them being rooted in sockets located strictly on the front of our skulls. Luckily we have invented tools that allow us to see the forest as a whole; or at least get a decent impression of it.

    View over treetops at Culbin in Nairnshire

    So, what am I going on about? (more…)

  • ANTISOCIAL SKATEBOARD SHOP attacked by PREDATORY BIRD!!!

    If you are ever a pro skater in your 30s, from Aberdeen, Scotland, in the year 2012 then the chances are you’ll find yourself standing in Antisocial Skateshop with a bag of tees your friend has designed for your small-ass, home-grown, aggressive-gull-themed brand. Luckily your friend is none other than the prolific, A1, prime-cut British comic book artist Jon Horner and together over email and sci-fi-style video chat you’ve been developing a laughter plot to take the street wear market by storm!

    What is it?
    It’s street wear!

    Which is clothing to wear…in the street.

    Check it out. (more…)

  • Storytime Part 2

    The genteel folks over at Thrasher Magazine have been kind enough to print a short Predatory Bird Comic story each month with the experimental title of… The Predatory Bird.
    It’s become a morbid tale and in the first 3 parts there is heavy, unimaginative use of the word fuck.
    kid getting shit on

    I’m a grown up, or I appear to be most days, and (more…)

  • Storytime Part 1

    The Predatory Bird comic is the result of a troubling social media exchange between a morose, desperate, aging pro skater and a bright, talented, young artist.

    The benevolent souls over at Thrasher Magazine have been kind enough to publish the print version each month (more…)