Think of a comic strip and, chances are, you will have a variety of mental images. Comics are a broad church.

Whether it's Desperate Dan, Finbarr Saunders from Viz, the Furry Freak Brothers, Japanese Manga or the graphic novels of Frank Miller, it's an art form that appeals to all ages and intellects.

As a means of expression, it's been around for centuries, enjoying its first taste of fanboy cultdom with the vicious social commentary of Hogarth in the 18th century.

As a career, the comic artist's is notoriously difficult to get into. A case of who you know in a tightly-knit intellectual community, Britain is full of bedroom draftsmen working away on strips that usually fail to see the light of day.

In Birmingham, however, that situation is changing. The city, or Handsworth to be more specific, is home to two internationally-respected cartoonists: Hunt Emerson and John McCrae. And thanks to a new initiative, there will soon be a lot more names to add to that list.

Hunt, a long-time doyen of the comic underground, is best known for his surreal and hugely witty strips which have appeared in magazines for three decades. He currently draws for The Beano, the most enduring of British comics.

John is one of the top artists at the American DC imprint and has worked on 2000AD, Spider-Man and Batman.

Technology allows them both to work from home, transmitting their work to publishers via broadband.

Maybe to compensate for the essentially solitary working life of the comic artist, John, and later Hunt, initiated the StripSearch project, a course aimed at promising cartoonists and illustrators with the aim of bringing them up to a professional standard.

With funding sourced with the help of Hi8us, StripSearch proved a huge and unexpected success, with hundreds applying for the limited places.

"It basically started with 15 people," explains McCrae. "Every two weeks we taught them the nuts and bolts of