January 2007

Jan 1 2007. Strip 127.
Colour!
My main inspiration for my use of colour is Herge’s adventures of TinTin - ie flat areas of neutral colour with a few highlights. I’ve always wanted to be able to do flat areas of colour but until I got my graphics tablet I’ve been unable to do it in a way that I’m happy with. Watch me experiment over the next few months until my palette calms down around March.
And, for pedants, yes I do realise that the new year starts with the FIRST of the twelve bongs of Big Ben. And I raise your pedantry by one by reminding you that Big Ben is just the bell, and not the clock tower. So ner.

Jan 6. Strip 132.
Is it just me?
This year’s novelty Christmas book trend was for rather cynical celebrations of everything bad, headed by a delightful volume called ‘Maybe it’s just me, but isn’t everything shite?’. This was followed by the book of crap towns and the book of crap cars. Next year look out for the book of crap books about things being crap.

Jan 7. Strip 133.
Pantomime Dames.
I was appearing in Aladdin at the local theatre at the time I drew this. If you’ve never seen panto, then it’s a bit hard to explain. It’s a sort of mixture of fairy tale and vaudeville, with stock characters playing the main parts. Thus we have the Principal Boy (Aladdin, Dick Whittington, Peter Pan etc) played by an attractive young woman in shorts, a bumbling old man (Emperor of China, Alderman Fitzwilliam etc), an evil villain (Abanazer, King Rat, Captain Hook etc), a love interest (Princess Jasmine, Alice, Snow White etc), a comedy animal (Dick’s cat, or a pantomime horse or cow played by two people), and a Dame (or in the case of Cinderella, two). The Dame is played by a man in the most over the top make up and costume imaginable - the final effect should be that of a bricklayer in drag.

Jan 8 - Strip 134.
Tracey’s first appearance.
Watch her mutate over the next few months until she reaches her final form.
I’d realised that I had a good set of characters, but that it was very hard for them to get out of their shops and meet each other. So Tracey was my first attempt at giving existing characters something to react to. She’s also part of a long game I’m playing with Debbie’s character.

Jan 13 - Strip 138.
‘Is it raining?’
I’m always being given gags to use in my cartoons. I normally never use them. This was the first one I accepted. I won’t do it again - when ComicsSherpa had a ratings system this got the lowest rating I ever received.

Jan 17 - Strip 141.
Gitwizard!
David Blaine - or in Marcus Brigstock’s immortal phrase: the Gitwizard. Something about him just gets under the average Brit’s skin. Maybe it’s because he takes himself so seriously. Remember when he decided to fast for forty days and forty nights in a perspex box suspended from a crane next to Tower Bridge in London? It very quickly became the rule for people to eat their burgers and kebabs underneath his box, just upwind enough for the smell to carry. Best of all was the man who rigged up a Big Mac to one of those radio controlled airships and then made it hover just out of reach of his perspex cage.

Jan 20 - Strip 144.
Your childhood lovingly reprinted in hardback for twice the price.
Another publishing trend of last Christmas was the repackaging of childhood magazines into books for nostalgic adults. Jackie was a girls magazine of the 60s and 70s; my sister used to get it. It was full of make up tips, advice about boys, romance comics and posters of Brian Poole and the Tremeloes. My Guy came about a decade later and added photo love stories to the mix (“I hate Kevin because he went out with Sharon... but his eyes are so dreamy...”). Smash Hits was the ultimate pop magazine of the 1980s, famed for it’s irreverence and for printing the lyrics to all the songs in the charts whether they deserved reproduction or not. And Eagle was a boy’s comic of the 1950s, full of square jawed heroes like Dan Dare of the British Space Force, and cutaway drawings of grain elevators.

Jan 27 - Strip 150.
Lash extending mascara.
Six months later it turned out that the TV ads for this lash extending mascara were filmed using false eyelashes. The curse of Riverfields strikes again.

Jan 29 - Strip 151.
Life on Mars.
This weeks strip is based on a British Drama series called ‘Life on Mars’, soon to be re-made for American consumption by Showtime. Pray it turns out like All in the Family, and not like Coupling. Anyway, it’s about a Manchester cop from 2006 who gets run over by a car and finds himself in 1973. Is it a coma induced dream or it is real? And how will he cope with the rather different attitude to policing the Manchester CID had back then, the racism, the sexism, the corruption?
This week is about the 70s I remember from my childhood, a decade of awful music, artificial flavours, the slow death of the British film industry, inflation and constant strikes. It wasn’t the golden era some would have you believe.

Jan 30 - Strip 152.
A list of nostalgic brown things.
I also get to indulge in a few bits of period detail. In the previous strip you got to see the car that killed off the British car industry, the Austin Allegro. It’s the bulbous thing in the last frame - it had a square steering wheel, need I say more? In this one you can see the kind of big glass container full of coloured water that used to be in the window of chemists up and down the land. And behind Peace, in the last frame, an entire rack of Penguin paperbacks with uniform spines.