The paperclip problem, except none of the paperclips can actually be used to hold paper together, and only sort of look like a paperclip from a distance and people are telling you how brilliant the paperclips will be eventually even though they never seem to get any better.
I’m quoting myself, which is TERRIBLE, TERRIBLE form. But I’m largely doing it to see if I can get “Press This” working again, a feature I used for years on word press that seemed to have slowly disappeared. It allows me to blog on whatever website I’m looking at, straight in to my blog.
Anyway if this works, maybe I’ll tempt me into more reliable blogging.
Slightly big oopsy doo there, I connected the blog to my patreon and did not anticipate 150 blog posts coming across. Yikes. Apologies if you were thinking I’d gone post crazy. Don’t think it’ll happen again (but then I didn’t think it would happen in the first place)
My studio is located facing the outwards at the front of the house, behind me my bedroom and my son’s room. So I heared what I thought was my son come up the stairs when the following took place:
me: “hello Thomas”
Wife: “It’s not thomas, it’s me”
Me: “Oh. I’m heading out at 3 for a walk with Jim”
Wife: “3? that’s earlier than you thought”
me (thinking) “that’s a weird way to respond to that”
me “Yeah. just the usual”
wife “Do you need any money?”
me(thinking) “Why on earth would she offer me money?”
Turns out she was having a conversation with Thomas (also going out at 3) and I couldn’t hear him, but I could hear her.
Speaking of Thomas, owing to the appearance of the Sidemen on netflix (which I keep mispronouncing to sound like spider-men) we’ve resubbed to netflix. So we’re cancelling paramount+.
One in one out for streaming for me from now on. Though even when you do cancel you end up with around a couple of weeks of streaming on credit (easily the best thing apple ever did for subscriptions, and I’m quite sure no company would’ve ever let you do that – have you every tried to cancel an adobe subscription early? madness)
Our tv watching is so diffuse now we’re all watching different things, nobody watches anything together, and honestly, it makes me a little sad. Sitting watching quantum leap with my brothers was one of my fav things growing up as a teen. Or star trek, even. Shared watching was great.
Another fine example of technology doesn’t always make things better.
(Have decided to try and burn through the last series of Star Trek Discovery, which I liked the first series of, and it got more and more weirdly convoluted each series. Star Trek: Brave New Worlds is a banger though)
One of the things that became obviously harder over the pandemic was the need to cook two meals every single day for a family of four. I suppose we could get away with sandwiches at lunch but even then you’re still cooking at least seven meals a week, 31 meals a month and 365 meals a year (and double those numbers of a sandwich isn’t going to cut it). Obviously, It can’t always be spag bol. Though it frequently is.
And I actually enjoy cooking, but it’s time consuming. One great thing about being in the new house (over a year now) is getting the new kitchen complete with dishwasher. It’s only small, and we frequently need to run it twice a day, and god knows what that’s doing to our electric prices, but suddenly a big chunk of the dishwashing burden is removed, and you have more time to cook.
So, to that end I’ve been trying to do one from-scratch side dish every so often with a regular meal, and seeing what new things I can do. At the moment I’ve had a right old go at Hassleback potatoes (almost no hassle at all and so pretty!) and potato dauphinoise, a little more work, and need some basic ingredients, but actually pretty simple and very nice, especially with steak (or chicken … or any big chunky main thing)
Anyway I grabbed both recipes from the bbc here: https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/dauphinoise-potatoes (I find about 250 cream and 250 milk with three large potatoes does three/four people comfortably) and https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/hasselback-potatoes (it calls for garlic and rosemary, I just did mine with a bit of butter and again a big ol’ baked potato) and actually if you’re doing a nice dinner, I do recommend doing both kinds of potatoes cus it’s pretty easy and dead impressive…
And despite spending two days traditional paper and ink, I’ve gone back to digital. This constant oscillation between these two states annoys me more than you’ll ever know. I lack the space to give over to both fully, and even traditional is tight for space, but it’s so much more satisfying to draw a GOOD line with ink, and yet I’ve got to face facts, I think my digital inking is better than my pen and ink…
Forgive me father, it has been two weeks since my last confession.
This sometimes (no, I mean, this frequently) happens. My record keeping gets sloppy as I slow down and things are a little less structured and more chaotic.
Let’s take the 13/March – 19/March Dred Judge Dredd strip for Rob Williams, episode 1 (of 8) decided to go analogue with the inking of this… that was, it turns out, a bad call. Pure greed on my part. I can sell Dredd pages. Unfortunately I’m just no longer equiped (literally, physically and mentally) to draw on paper any more. I just wasn’t happy with the results. I was getting no-as-good-results drawn much slower and for no real positive outcomes. So, two pages in I abandoned it and went back to digital. Monday/Tuesday I managed to do two pages, like cleaving the art out of stone. One page of inks per day. Then Wednesday I inked three pages digitally. Thu I finished it. But then had a whole bunch of corrections to do to Bad Magic – a hat band that had got progressivly larger as the strip went on, needed to be pulled back a bit.
Thursday I had three scripts on my table and I had no idea which way to proceed. So I planned out which I’d do, then abandoned that plan immediately, and instead started on another episode of the Leopard from Lime Street.
I think I have two more episodes of that to draw then it’s on hiatus, sadly.
Outside of that all, we had a wall yanked down and replaced with a fence. I bought a house and this is the start of me trying to make it my own. I’ve wanted to do this since we bought the place, and as my wife likes to remind me, I was out chatting to those guys all the time (I thought they enjoyed it! I just needed the company)
Nice to watch people who know what they’re doing, do stuff I know I’m not even remotely capable of!
WE BUILT THAT WALL!
Anyway, also had visitors to the house that week or so too. So in all bit chaotic.
Total completed that week: Inks 1 page, pencils 9 pages.
The next week – 20/March/23, the builders were still building and I’d got in to a slow, but reliable pattern. Really I operate on a two page thing per day minimum. Two pages of pencils or two page of inks. That way I can reasonably say I can do one completed page per week, and I can predict about six completed pages per week. OF COURSE, I’d like to go faster (and often do) but also life throws the odd random factor in your face and you’ve gotta dodge it.
This week has just been me finishing the Leopard from Lime street, and starting a new 10 pager for Ahoy with Paul Cornell. Featuring goofy cryptids.
I didn’t find time this week, though I should have (and might do so tonight) to sketch out some character designs for this image pitch I’m planning on (which I’ve had to scale back from 16 pages – a full story – to doing six pages – a “pitch” amount, because… well… time really)
This week’s work was Inks 6 and pencils 9.
This month to date, I’ve drawn 37 pages of inks and 21 pages of pencils. Which… wow, slightly surprised by.
Year to date: 107 pages inks, 115 pages of pencils.
Putting me on course for 428(ish) pages this year, if I can keep it up. (I don’t think I can)
Anyway, next week’s plans are: finish this ahoy strip, and see if I can find time to do this Image pitch and then MORE DREDD.
(SHH! TELL NO ONE… I have a story about the below first page – which won’t see print for blooming ages, so please don’t spread this around – but I’ll tell it to you all next week.)
Dentist today. Possible one of the most painful visits I’ve ever had to the dentist (marginally beating the last visit when I popped in to replace a bit of a filling that had popped out only for the dentist to announce I needed a tooth removed, that is a day that will live long in infamy)
AND WORSE! Nothing got done. It was literally too painful. So we’re giving it a day or two to rest before proceeding.
My dentist is also one of the ones going private. I find myself entirely frustrated about this, firstly I genuinely believe in the NHS and am willing to pay more for the damn thing to work properly, second of all, sure sometimes I can afford the odd private dental treatment, but I’m a freelancer, at some point I’ll be faced with needing dental work and not be able to afford the damn thing, and finally – and this is particuarly frustrating, now I have to be an expert on what detnal plans are best for me. I don’t want to know the difference between dentplan and bupa dentists. I DON’T CARE. I just, occasionally, want a dentist.
(Back on friday)
My patreon is still sort of functioning, obviously I haven’t updated it in some time, and I feel a bit guilty about that, but I’ve decided to consider it a gift from some people to me to keep you know… internetting. (I’ve given people lots of opportunities to cancel!) There’s a bit of a chunk of change once a year in there that I can download to my bank account (not serious money, but enough to make the effort worth it) and I don’t like locking my posts behind a paywall, though I do like having somewhere I can consider off-the-record (for advance looks and so on)
I’ve just linked the patreon to the blog, not sure how that will work out, we’ll see I suppose.
What does this mean to you? absolutely nothing. If you wanna sign up for my patreon, I can guarantee you nothing beyond my forgetting it exists and then suddenly remembering, but equally I can guarantee as little as you might think it is, in this perilous freelance life once a year it is actually make a quantifiable difference.
Youngest son had a sleepover, well, more of a talk-over last night. First time he’s hosted. Kept wife up all night from yakking, so may also be the last time for that.
The radio DJ Steve Wright died, he was a fixture on radio in the UK since the 80s, and as a spotty teen working my first day job in the mid-to-late 80s, he was the background noise of every single afternoon in work.
The shop, Botanic Computer Centre, was a family owned/run shop that started as a radio hardware shop, in 1949 (originally called Ideal Radio)- run by two brothers Bert and Davey (though actually Davey did a lot of the legwork, it was almost certianly Bert’s shop). By the time I started they were old men, in their 60s and Davey, who spent a surprising amount of time driving me from job to job (we’d sell Amstrad PCW8256s and PCW9512s – giant beasts of machines, with integral crt monitors, and often with vast daisy wheel style printers) and in the process he’d turn on the radio, hear Steve Wright, then complain about “bloody yaya music” and turn it to radio ulster (which was more talk radio)
I find the older I get the more I hear music and think “that sounds like bloody yaya music”.
Me at work in the sister shop to Botanic – A&F Corner. I suspect this was actually around early 90s?
It’s weird when a company you worked for for so long no longer exists, especially an IT company, but then Bert – a very smart man, with – even in to his lates 60s/70s was fascinated by tech (I remember us looking at the images from the first rover on mars) always thought the internet might be a flash in the pan.
I’m gonna preface all of this with I am NOT a lawyer, and copyright law, especially, is one where frequently the winner is the person in court with the most money. So below is largely my opinion…
Copyright isn’t a god given right – there’s no mention of it in the bible and humanity flourished specifically because it didn’t have IP laws of any sort for a long long time (someone had a good idea? we’d take it and build on it).
But it was really the invention of the printing press and the ability to mechanically copy materials that set up the start of what we come to know as copyright – the first true copyright laws are called the Statute of Anne (enacted in 1710) and set copyright as 14 years with a possible extension of 14 years by either the publisher who the materials were licensed to or the author.
Ostensibly the point was to ensure the copyright holder could make money for their material, for a limited time and they would be encouraged to produce new material.
Of course over time copyright has gotten longer and longer, and with some notable exceptions, authors will generally had that copyright over to a publisher so they are no longer the owners of the copyright and the publisher can get all the extended goodness of owning it. Different countries cover it in different ways, the UK mostly follows the US lead. The US lead mostly follows what Sonny (from Sonny and Cher) and the Disney corporation want (mad, isn’t it?).
The French, btw, are the most friendly to authors on this front – their droit d’auteur laws developed sort of in parallel to the UK laws prevent an author signing copyright over to anyone.
The US has a thing called Fair Use (in the UK our equivalent is called Fair Dealing), the idea being that as long as you only use a piece of the material (for example reproducing an image for review) that’s fine. There are other areas of exceptions (the UK allows you to use large amounts of material for research for non-profit – in theory how google uses it’s data, as it’s commercialised is outside of this, but we all used to find google useful so it’s been largely left alone, plus who could afford to fight them on this?).
AI companies are leaning on fair use and fair dealing for the bulk of what they do – swallowing up great gobs of copyright material and then regenerating something “new” from the result. Like chopping up every word in every book ever written and then mixing it with a user’s prompt to get a whole new set of words.
And there’s lots and lots of reasons why they might be right and they might be wrong – if the produced work doesn’t even have a faint echo of any of the material? If it was trained on out of copyright work? If the prompt was say much bigger than the generated output? And i’m sure there’s a whole bunch of other exceptions, and there’s so much money to be had on the AI front that companies will spend a fortune fighting you in court.
BUT, I think what we’ve all forgotten is what the point of copyright was in the first place – a way to give people the ability to earn a living from their creations.
On that front AI holds the keys to a much more dystopian world.
We’ve already started to see Ai’s trained on Ai output that amounts to gibberish, it still needs new inputs, but ai as it stands is likely to hollow out the middle or low ends of the creative industries. Students who would learn the basic craft of drawing might end up training on ai prompt generation and never actually learn good image composition, designers who would be expected to ply their trade on consumer advertising before they’d get a sniff of working at apple, might lose work/income because ai design software can do work that is just-good-enough. We’re in danger of an air lock in the plumbing of the creative industries.
Even without creative stuff AI tools can still be powerful (and useful) but I think governments have to recognise that they don’t want to hollow out the creative arts, and while ai fanboys can argue the bit out as to whether what they’re doing falls under copyright fair use or not, the fact remains it might be good for them, but it’s not good for creatives.
It’s burned my retinas off, and given me horrific third degree burns.
I was a child of the 70s/80s, my golden years I grew up with computers that used punch card (for those people that had computers) and televisions that were deeper than they were wide (when the bbc still would announce a programme was “IN COLOUR” in case your tv wasn’t)
I grew up optimisitic about the future, about self driving cars (that hovered), computers that could fit in your hand and robots with ai that promised to relieve humanity of all the aches and pains of work and its associated worries.
Which is stupid really because I also grew up reading 2000ad and it very much spelt out what that world would actually look like. Hovering drones used to surviel your every move. Dredd? Robots with smart AI likely to destabilise employment leading to a world where people can’t work even if they want to? Dredd? A class of people so bored by work free life that they attend ultra violent sports to numb their day? I mean, come on.
The thing is, maybe it’s my age, but it feels like I’ve run out of optimisim for science. There was a while there, when I’d read about the potential of CRISPR-9 (described as a copy and paste for DNA edits) you could hold some optimism, and then my god, the miracle of being able to decode the dna of the COVID-19 virus and swiftly build a Vacine in record time. Self driving cars looked they were on the cusp of happening, AI! Flip CHAT GPT!
All of these incredible technologies appeared and suddenly you’re faced with the crushing reality, CRISPER-9 still has some hope, I think, if we don’t turn entirely into a planet of the anti-intellectual anti-vaxxers. Self driving cars, turns out that last little 5% or so of getting these things to work properly? that’s the real hard stuff. That’s the getting the last bit of sauce out of the ketchup bottle that’s still stuck to the sides of the bottle, there’s no easy way to do that. Chat GPT? AI? Turns out that’s basically a chinese room that doesn’t really know what’s saying and will just make stuff up.
(A Chinese room, is an old metapor about intelligence, which suggests that intelligence might be like putting a person who doesn’t speak chinese into a vast room filled with boxes with chinese characters on them, and a slot that he receives input from – the input are chinese characters and he goes and builds a response by matching his input with the boxes around the room. Needless to say, the man doesn’t speak nor read chinese, but the responses he delivers to the inputs make sense, because he knows how to build answers based on the input – and that’s what’s sort of happening with chat gpt, a little computer man who doesn’t speak any language is getting input in english and going to his massive database of boxes and matching a response to what he’s been asked, he doesn’t know or understand the question, but he does know that if he gets the words “What planet is this” he looks it up in his big ol’ database and gets answers from box 1, box 255, box 1090 and together they read “it’s planet earth”.
On reflection this is a terrible metaphore but I suppose we needed it before everyone had autocorrect, which, in essence is also a chinese room and as such prone to being useless)
Anyway, turns out Chat GPT will lie, and WORSE it turns out, people respect a certain authoriatative voice which means it lies convincingly.
I still cling to a certain tech optimism, I have my Iain M Banks books, thank you very much.
But it was all so much easier to believe the future would be perfect before we started living in it.
One thing I’ve been mulling over recently is about how to get better, but specifically it’s how to get better at comics and get better at being yourself, I suppose, and one of the problems I have with it, is… well, how do you measure where you are compared to where you want to be?
One of the earliest ways I tried to get better as a comic artist was a fairly simple metric, comics require an artist to produce 22 pages per month so the question was… could I draw 22 pages per month? I got a script off my pal Mal Coney (this was around 1997?) and set about trying to draw one comic in one month, I was working (and I may have been at university too at the time) but i certainly had no other larger commitments (no kids!) so I sat and tried and … I did it. 22 pages (actually think it was 25) and that proved to me, that whether I had the quality of art to do comics at least I knew I could draw enough pages in a month to do it.
One of the second metrics I used to use was about storytelling. Very hard to tell where you are with storytelling – because you’re sort of part of it, but one thing you can do, is you can ask someone you know and trust who doesn’t read comics, to look at a page of art and describe what’s happening on the page – let them walk you through what they think is there, try not to nudge them – let them tell you. You’re not after a subjective opinion (“this is good/this is bad”) you’re after objective stuff (“That guy is talking to this other guy and it’s night. No, it’s day time. Wait, is it night or day?”) that will really help you improve.
Now, it may be a coincidence, but years later I think I have two strengths, one is speed (at my best I can hit 50 pages per month) and the other is clarity in story telling (I think my storytelling chops can be rock solid).
So the question now is what other metrics can I measure, what subjective elements can you tease out of comic art (not a rhetorical question, I’m genuinely curious if you have any answers) and if you can tease them out can you work on improving them?
The truth is I have no idea, numbers of lines on a page? The Mike Mignola-Jim Lee scale. Is your perspective convincing? (does it matter?) white space/black space balance? (that’s a metric you could measure, but literally does it mean anything?) Is the art delicate / beautfiful or blocky / brutal (and what use is that metric if one thing doesn’t neccessarily make it better than the other)
There’s long been the old two-of-three things (applied in comics, but in pretty much every industry you’ll ever read about) You have to be fast, good or easy to get along with – as long as you’re two of those things!
I can control fast (well, I can measure fast).
I can control how well I am to get along with (which really in this means, are you a nightmare or a pleasure for an editor / writer)
Can I control if I’m good? I dunno.
There’s a part of me wants to make a radar chart of a bunch of different, very successful artists and then plot myself in amongst them to see what I could do to improve (sure I could try and make better art, that seems easy … but how HOW?)
Look at Jock – amazing artist, and then look at Bilquis Evely and see the gorgeous filigree noodling of her line and realise that those artists both amazing but polar opposites in some regards. So how do you push yourself?
Anyway these are the thoughts filling my head the last couple of days. The truth is I’m a decent, sometimes great (sometimes not) artist who may never rise above journey man (which you know, that’s not bad) but I do wonder if I could figure out what I need to unlock to get really good, would I be able to do it?
I think my earliest memories of Doctor Who are pretty clearly Tom Baker, but less the tv show and more the cut out and keep weetabix models. Toys were a scarce commodity in those toys and tie-in toys to tv film or tv even scarcer.
I mean look at this advert from 1977 – this, for the period looks like incredibly high production values for something printed on the back of a cereal box
Yahoo advert
There are earlier DR WHO cardboard cutouts, but this is the one I remember, and it spurred in me a need to make more cardboard cut out toys. My earliest memory of 2000ad is also cardboard related. Making the Justice-1 spaceship out of computer punch card with my uncle (not only were tv/film tie in toys a rare commodity but even paper and cardboard was hard to come by in the 70s)
I remember creating a little motorbike bay area for the Justice-1 spaceship that was perfectly to scale and had Judge Hershy, but memory is kind sometimes (and cruel other times) and thinking back there’s absolutely no way it was anything but rubbish.
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Around the time of Return of the Jedi (1983, and by this stage I was 13 and probably still a little too juvenile for my own good) I went with the next door neighbour to go to a toy shop so he could measure the snowspeeder toy they had so he could go home and build one out of cardboard (these things were wonderouly expensive, way out of my family’s budget – at least for another few years until we were doing ok and my young brother – by then the perfect age for all things star wars – ended up getting things like the millenium falcon and the deathstar…)
The papercraft landspeeder met a fiery end as many of his papercraft toys did. Me? I’d’a held on to that thing. Again memory being what it was, I remember it as being a perfect 1:1 replica of the plastic toy.
Anyway this has all be spurned on by the fact that the BBC have just put online all of the Dr Who’s it’s within their power too. To be honest, this is what I want from the bbc – every tv show ever produce stuck online, give it to me! let me press pause on getting older and wallow in the nostalgia of my childhood viewing (way back when dr who was appointment viewing, when any random channel at any random time of day I could wander past and tell my parents exactly what it was on tv, because man I had not much else going on).
I thought I’d start by going back to the Sylvester McCoy era, because I did NOT enjoy that series – but I was 17 turning 18 when it aired, and man Dr Who was uncool enough without this goofball turning up and ruining it all. (I mean, he probably didn’t, the beeb was desperate to destroy doctor who by that stage so who knows). I never looked fondly at the over the top drama-school-ness of some elements of Dr Who, but boy I loved mad scifi ideas.
BUT! BUT! I didn’t – I’ve gone back further to Colin Baker (like many who watched at the time, Baker’s choice to play a deeply unlikeable doctor stung, especially since I LIKED Davidson Doctor Who was like a kindly uncle or something, Baker was too much acid after the calming balm of Davidson). So I’ve started watching Series 26 The Trial of the Time Lord. Some shabby acting (from actors I know can do better) some obviously massive budget constraints (the doctor was forever fomenting revolution in places where the local tribe was like 15 people) and a big ol interesting-silhouette-but-obviously-man-in-a-suit villain, and a plot that is so typically doctor who that it feels like a big old dr who cliche. But I’m overlooking it all, because deep deep down, the sight of Dr Who and the cardboard sets always brings me right back to being 12 years old.
The 5th of November is the twentieth anniversary of my mum’s passing. It’s been a raw wound for a long long time. She died aged 50 and so I’ve outlived her by three years so far.
She passed three months after my wife and I married – Annette and I had been together nine years by this point and mum and my younger brother (Who was exactly 25 years younger than me, and born a couple of months after Annette and I started dating) had become part of our entourage when we went places. To the point that mum used to joke that she’d come with us on honeymoon. We got married in Barbados, and mum came with us. Well, for a bit. We’d booked two weeks in barbados, the wedding would happen one week in and we invited everyone who wanted to go with us (they were all paying their own way, though we had secured a bit of a deal) so in the end we had a fair number with us. All for one week. Except mum “well, if I’m going that far, I might as well go for two weeks – so I’ll just come with you” No, mum. I love you, but you can come out one week early and stay for the wedding week and Annette and I can have a week alone. And that’s what happened.
When mum died, I was working in IT support for a charity and got a phone call telling me to come home. I can’t remember a lot of what happened, it all became a bit of a blur – there was a 16 year age gap between me and mum, and in an odd way we grew up together, I think. Mark, my brother one year my junior, died age 26 and so I felt very keenly that with mum going there were memories that I had that were shared between her, me and mark, that no longer existed for anyone but me.
It was a rough time. I think on the day, I ran into the bathroom (multiple times) just wanting to hide. I found it very difficult.
And for years, there was a numbness. I remember I used to day dream about what would happen if I won a million quid, and I remember one day, after mum died, having the same thought and suddenly cutting it short with “Well, if you’re going to make any sort of wish, you dickhead, why don’t you wish your mum were still alive”.
Mum was cremated and her ashes put in a grave with my brother’s ashes. A grave that, after his death, I used to go with mum to so she could clean it. We’d joke about stuff and it was far from a sombre thing (mum and I shared a very dark and dry sense of humour), it was kind of joyful. Mark and her never got on as he was growing up, it wasn’t until he left home at age 17 that they started having any sort of respect for each other. And at the grave mum would fuss around it with a tenderness I think she wished she could have expressed to him when he was alive.
(As a side note, and since I’m baring all here, Mark died aged 26. Mum and Dad were in Canada, and one of his friends had been in touch to say they hadn’t seen him, so they contacted me and got me to pop round the house. It was locked. From the inside. So I phoned the police, who came and knocked the door in. Once the door was down, I asked if I could go first, because – well, it felt like it would be more appropriate. And Mark was lying on the floor, having fallen off the sofa, eyes open and long passed. I had to phone them in Canada to tell them. It was awful. Coroner reported death by natural causes, Mum and Dad were convinced it was Sudden Adult Death Syndrome – which, at the time, wasn’t something many people had heard of or believed in. Northern Ireland being the centre of crackpots though, and Mark, at the time knowing pals who were in to witchcraft, the Judge decided there may be something more sinister going on – I stood up and pointed out that had he died two months earlier he’d’ve found a bunch of star trek books and that’s as likely as witchcraft to be the cause of his death.)
But, that, of course, made me visiting mum’s grave all the more difficult. Bad enough it’s where mum’s ashes are but it’s also – the drive up, the standing at the grave, the tidying of it – all reminders of mum being alive.
So I’ve been a handful of times, usually at the suggestion (if not prodding) of my wife. And it’s been difficult.
But this year, twenty years, the wounds don’t hurt. There is, of course a gap in the heart where my mum is, but it’s a gap that’s slowly grown over with new tissue.
I’m going to go up, say some goodbyes, and phone my aunt – her sister – who she used to talk to pretty much every day and I’m sure felt the loss as keenly as me.
And I think the hurt will stop.
Here’s the comic strip, I bring out every so often when I talk about my mum, that I drew now five years ago. It all remains true. There are, of course, more things I’d add, I’d like to tell mum about the house, about my brother John about Nathan going to university, about Thomas’s starting GCSEs. But she knows. She knows.
I was pleased with how this page turned out from Episode 2.
(It’s an eight parter running in 2000ad right now)
Rob wanted a lot of stars, and I wanted to give it a lot of texture. so there’s about three layers of stars that I gave Pete (doherty) to do with as he will. Also gratuitous butt shot for those that are inclined.
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The paperclip problem, except none of the paperclips can actually be used to hold paper together, and only sort of look like a paperclip from a distance and people are telling you how brilliant the paperclips will be eventually even though they never seem to get any better.
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