Thursday, December 29, 2011

INTRUDER (unpublished)

Intended for either one of the Tangoes or Hysteria #3, this one was ready to go until I saw a particular Hollywood movie that told a story too similar. Happily that movie was utterly trumped by a Hong Kong film using the same premise but taking it far further. Enjoy!






Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Emotional Baggage


A friend of mine had a book of Charles Addams cartoons which made me try my hand at single panel cartoons.  It didn't take but I liked a few of them. This is one.

MARIA


A friend, Diena, gave me a box of coloured pencils just after Hysteria #1 was released. I wore them down to stumps in a fortnight. After that I never really had much to do with colour. The Cintiq is changing that ... slowly.

Maria was a composite of a few exes and the eternal pair bond of Drada, a composite of me and a few friends. They had a rotten relationship that could never quite end. I put a little of this into the two editions of Hysteria that I published. They'd come from a novella I gave up on when I was particularly good at giving up on things. It was called Spring and was about the pair's mutually idiotic relationship. It was meant as a kind of nostalgic dig at the auld Fitzroy scene but just seemed too auld when I started describing it. Anyway, Maria....

Tuesday, December 27, 2011

Undeveloped monster


There was a bloke in my social circle with the worst case of unexamined rage I've ever known. He moved among polite middle class people secure in the knowledge that when they gathered he could encourage himself with massive doses of alcohol and start flailing, first with verbal abuse and then (depending on how reptilian he got) all out physical harm. He did it this way because he knew two things: all those well reared folk would forgive him through fear and a little middle class guilt and; he wouldn't remember any of it once he emerged from his hangover. No one approached him with the notion that this behaviour was effectively criminal and wouldn't be tolerated. It was always tolerated.

Most people are the same when they get drunk. They just get slower, repetitive and boring. I do. This guy went from being an affable part of the convivium to a violent cretin in a shockingly short space of time. If you knew what was going to happen, watching him drink was like seeing Popeye down a can of spinach and suddenly burst into a musclebound  proto-Hulk. I never did a story about this as I think it was just too close to people who might have been upset by it but the idea worked. He'd be a kind of super anti-hero. His head started as a brick and became a brick wall.

Didn't even name him. Well, here he is.

Personal archeology: "I'd Rather be Creative than Competitive"

Something I heard a friend of mine say when he wanted to trump another friend's statement about getting a competitive edge. I hate sloganeering and stock phraseology posing as impromptu wit. No one in the room mistook this for earnestness but it was still crazy to see him try it on.

It's summer holidays and I'm going through the clutter of my studio. Everything loose or non essential is getting scanned and the paper recycled or (if it's not presentable as potential pulp) binned for landfill. My Cintiq is being put to more monsoonal use so I'll fill the days with a few o' these.

Thursday, December 1, 2011

Smith Street commando

I saw this bloke a long time ago now but have never forgotten his palpable forcefield of pure selfprotective aggression. Anyway, I needed to draw something, thought about it and he turned up.