The Common Swings

Idle Thoughts...

2012-02-11T04:34:00.000-08:00

So... if I want to take this whole blog and drawing and minicomics thing a bit more seriously, I'm going to have to start pondering some seriously scary changes to how I do things. In chats with friends and neighbours and friendly neighbours, the idea of a web comic came up. Now... this is a problem to me, because web comics strike me as not the sort of think you start thinking to do, but kind of come about fully formed. Well the successful and good ones at any rate: Hark a Vagrant!, Cat and Girl, Nedroid etc etc. These are things which came about because the creator had a strong idea and then put it down on paper. But I don't really have as strong an idea... as such.

I have an idea for a sort of loosely connected series of sequential narratives though. I have tonnes of short story ideas and have always struggled to find a way to illustrate/ write them. Am wondering about some sort of loose framing narrative for such things and just... get them out. Not to be the next great web comic, because I doubt I'll ever be that. No. Instead so I can get things on here regularly which I have created. I'm doing well at updating this place regularly but, as you have no doubt noted, with the work of other people rather than my own. I'm still very cautious about my own skills and in my brief attempts today to cook up some ideas I'm already being too harsh on myself.

But, and this is the real reason why I'm writing this, I need to get the slightly off attempts together to form a slightly better whole... and maybe just to see that my initial struggles did get better. After all, by turning off the interior editor and critic inside myself, I got "The Bombardier's Eyes" finished. Maybe it's time to turn that to other forms as well...

The pondering continues.

Ionicus Part One: The William Kimber Covers

2012-02-07T08:02:00.000-08:00

A few days ago, my good friend Nick of the blog A Pile of Leaves mentioned picking up a book of ghost stories because of the cover. Before I even saw what the book was I already kind of suspected what it *might* be. Knowing enough of Nick's taste and his description of the title in question I thought, rightly, that this may well be a William Kimber book with an Ionicus cover. Books which I have something of a long standing fondness for.

Now I've been collecting ghost stories for about seven years now - it's an interesting hobby because, unlike crime fiction, it's frequently about picking collections which have lots of doubles (at the very least) of stories you already own because of the odd one or two you don't... and all because that little, neglected gem may end up being something truly special. And during my detective work in trying to find these things I soon realised I had a particular niche in the genre all to myself - Kimber.

Most fans of supernatural fiction really don't rate William Kimber collections or editions. They think them a bit bloodless and lifeless. The Ionicus covers particularly figure highly in this disdain, possibly because for a generation of book collectors he's an artist who really seems deeply linked with PG Wodehouse reissues. They find him a bit limp and polite and - almost literally - a little bloodless, which is true if you're after lurid covers. But if, like me, you don't mind a bit of the softly sinister to go with the ridiculously overblown covers then they're an absolute treat. And besides, the fact that Kimber published so many books by R Chetwynd Hayes should be a giveaway - he's also often thought of as a little bloodless and "safe" compared to someone like, say, Ramsey Campbell or Robert Aickman (this is a little unfair: "The Day That Father Brought Something Home" is one of the greatest bits of supernatural fiction ever in my opinion). I will admit a lot of Kimber books are a bit... lacking in places, but I have such a fondness for them because of the design that I snap them up whenever I see them.

This is my collection of Ionicus Kimber covers - I will do a few more Ionicus entries during the week, particularly explaining why I love him and his art so much. In the mean time - enjoy!

Fairly obviously this last book is not particularly supernaturally themed, but it still does have a rather splendid Ionicus cover. So in it goes! More of these later this week hopefully....

How To Deal With Criticism the James Kochalka Way...

2012-02-06T10:48:00.000-08:00

From the back of "Little Mister Man" #1 (November 1995)

Discontented Peggy, and How She Was Cured

2012-02-04T07:31:00.000-08:00

When I posted sundry scraps from "Mr Teedles" the other day, my friend and neighbour Gavin - of the most excellent Arkhonia blog - paid me the greatest of complements: he thought I'd made it up myself. I can see why - I do go out of my way to find books and ephemera of such mind boggling oddness so I can make my own fake books and films and the like seem just that *little* bit more likely. so it seems fitting that Gavin encouraged me to buy "Discontented Peggy" from Todmorden market

It's an odd little thing - very obviously an "improving" playlet for young ladies. One of over 500 of the things as well! Part of me wants to collect them all (in some sort of early twentieth century melodrama take on Pokemon, maybe) but i know the wife will have stern words about such things...

i'm rather delighted, by the way, that the publisher has a "play department". my mind wanders off into a wonderful image of a whole office of workers dedicated to improving the minds of the young through the medium of sentimental nonsense

I like how productions seem to be mainly aiming at "a decent "fairy glen"..." rather than something with any degree of competence. And I'm also quite fond of this too:"don't let "Peggy's" face look rosy in the "glen scene". It must be made up to look white and woe-begone." Bless...

Have any of you met anyone who's actually been made to swallow Castor oil? Is this entirely the sort of thing popular culture of the late nineteenth century to late seventies British comics have propagated for generations... is there a thesis in this at all?

Peggy: "... Nurse is a horrid old cross-patch, and I hate her."
Nurse: "... I'll punish Peggy when I find her. She richly deserves punishment."
And thus the circle of violence continues... how very sad.

Is "lightly tripping the lea" some kind of euphemism?

Nothing much to report here beyond yet more lea tripping...

My favourite line here is "so trip we a measure in happy content" which smacks of the sort of thing someone writing verse comes up with when their existing line of poetry doesn't scan quite well enough.

More tripping here, but also the promise of "a dish of dewdrops". I think most organic shops sell these nowadays, as well as larger branches of Waitrose.

I'll leave these pages as they are, but all I can say is that one-two emotional punch of "Peggy's Song of Repentance" and "Sprite's Song" must have overwhelmed contemporary audiences. Very popular in Sammy Davis Jr's Vegas set as well...

And then it all ends in dancing. I don't know if it's just me, but I think the ambiguity of some of the lyrics here remind of me of the breathless outpouring of imagination in Dylan's "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands". Moving.

Fairy plays were obviously very popular weren't they? I'm also quite amused that the gauge of success of these plays was how easy the things were to repeat... Meanwhile "Cruel Jack Frost" seems unduly precious about his "artistic pictures". Always was a prima donna that one...

And obviously, before we leave these pages, I think it fairly obvious that there is no better title for anything ever is "Princess Jonquila's Necklace". In fact I think everyone should be called Jonquila... or failing that the majestically suggestive Violet Methley.

And finally...."The Truth About Tarts - if you are looking for a fairly short children's play which is full of good material you will find what you want here. This play is packed with good situations and cannot fail to get over." No further comments are necessary I feel.

Bottle Rocket

2012-01-31T06:58:00.000-08:00

Sometime in late 1999 I found myself facing the prospect of job loss for the very first time. My job as medical librarian had come to an abrupt end due to the closure of my department by the asshats who ran 3M. So one December morning I took myself round the job agencies of Nottingham in order to find a job (wasn’t successful as it happens – the next job was so awful, I decided to quit to do my MA in Cinema Studies instead) with the promise of an afternoon at the Broadway Cinema as a treat for my efforts. The second film I planned to see was “The Straight Story”, because I’d liked David Lynch ever since I first saw “Twin Peaks” on my crappy back and white TV and I was amused at the prospect of him making something approximating a family film. And the first? Something I’d read about in the paper called “Rushmore”.

Let’s get “The Straight Story” out of the way first. Of course it’s great and it contains one of my very favourite scenes in cinema ever – the one above if you’re interested – which I always used when teaching film and, in retrospect, probably made me wonder whether my brain was wired up in a way where I should study cinema in some way. But that’s not why we’re here. We’re here about “Rushmore”. I can’t locate the exact moment in the film that it happened, but certainly it became very apparent very quickly that “Rushmore” was going to be something extraordinary. If I was to hazard a guess I’d say it was the opening montage of Max’s clubs to the Creation’s “Making Time” – exactly what kind of madness was this film going to be?

Up until that moment, if I’d ever idealised about making a film it was going to be along the lines of “Gregory’s Girl”. It’s still my very favourite film of all time because of the performances, the writing and the absolute love of the characters – it basically sets itself the task to be the ultimate film about teenage love and manages to say everything (and more!) about it. I adore it and would be proud to make anything that made someone feel even the tiniest iota of the joy that this film brings me. But it’s almost entirely about the content… Bill Forsyth would go on to make at least two films (“Local Hero” and “Housekeeping”) which would be visually interesting, but “Gregory’s Girl” really isn’t it apart from the moments in the park late in the film. But “Rushmore”? Somehow this Wes Anderson bloke had managed to peek inside my head and find a way to put it up on the screen.

Mainly this was through the music. I’ve always sort of heard music visually – not synaesthesia as such, but more using it to soundtrack the images in my head which I’d then end up mentally editing to fit the music. Being a solitary type, as soon as I had a Walkman I was taking it off for long walks and somehow mentally fitting what I saw to the music and using it as an adjunct to the stories I would be working on in my head. I always thought I was a little mad for doing this, but suddenly here was a film maker pretty much using the music as I did – and in fact constructing the images to the music in exactly the same way as I had been imagining doing. When I listened to the soundtrack that I had rushed out to buy in between the showings of “Rushmore” and “The Straight Story”, I realised that what I remembered of the film was about 80% the music and how Anderson used it. And visually the way he framed the images, the care he put into setting up the images almost as if on a stage, the way in which the camera seemed to glide through shots both fluidly and statically. This was how I’d do it. This was exactly how I’d dreamed of doing it.

And much as I loved all this, I also knew that the film was fatally flawed especially in narrative terms. Much as I love Max’s theatricals and how they sort of bring out his fantasy world into the real world, the film sort of stumbles too much with them as if it doesn’t know how to fit them into the narrative. And every film Anderson has made has been in some way somewhat lacking as a story – but visually? Textually? Musically? Sonically? Perfect. Which is why watching “Bottle Rocket” for the first time was such a revelation.

Something that has always fascinated me is the juvenilia of artists and writers – those moments where you can see the talent they’d become in the midst of something where they’re still struggling to find their voice. Perfect examples of this for me is the works of the authors Scarlett Thomas and Jonathan Coe. The former’s crime novels and “Popco” are fun but ultimately flawed books and it’s not until “The End of Mister Y” that she really manages something extraordinary. And similarly the leap from his first three novels, which are always interesting but a little flat, to the masterpieces of “What a Carve Up!” and “The House of Sleep is a massive one (sadly, Coe falls flat with the awful “Rotter’s Club” where at least Thomas’ flawed but challenging “Our Tragic Universe” is trying something a little new). Similarly the leap from “Bottle Rocket” to “Rushmore” is incredible.

“Bottle Rocket” is like a tentative demo – similar tropes, scenes and set ups to what would follow but just not quite there. The camera is a little restless and never seems to settle for long enough; the edits are too quick; you never know the characters quite enough; the music is almost right for each scene but just not quite there; James Caan’s Mr Henry is like a rough draft of the roles Bill Murray would make his own. The ghost of what to come is just there in every scene.And that’s both fascinating and endlessly encouraging to me. To see someone who I consider a great artist, for all their faults, trying to find his way as a film maker but not quite getting there is just what I need as encouragement. I’m not saying I’ll ever be someone as talented as Anderson (or Coe or Thomas) because it’s very, very unlikely… but I can try.

Three years ago I was still beating myself up for not finishing anything and now I have three comics and a novel to my name… that they’re not quite there yet is by the by. Going back to Nottingham, people who followed me on livejournal will know that about seven years ago I got about 80% of the way through a novel about one Warren Bond but gave up. I’ve long since decided that Warren’s natural home is going to be through one of my comics. It’s going to start off as a heavily fictionalised version of my life in Nottingham and initially use the peg of second hand record shops a la “High Fidelity” before jettisoning it to focus on the characters themselves. I want to make you think I’m telling one kind of story, and then veer it off into something wilder without you really noticing the join. I want to tell stories about the people who neither belong to cultures or subcultures, but those who fall in between the cracks… the lonely, the shy, the inarticulate, the boring.

But I’m not able to tell that story yet – partly because music is involved heavily in what I have planned for Warren, Hector, Dave and Jen and I can’t work out how to do that in graphic terms… and partly because I’m just not skilled enough yet to tell sequential stories. Odd little short stories and ideas punctured by illustrations? Oh yes. But something of heft and weight? Not yet. This is why “Whatever Happened to Cosmo Mandinsky?” has never materialised despite being promoted on the back of the first issue of the Common Swings (it’ll probably end up being the dry run for whenever I try Warren… my first attempt at a proper, sequential art narrative). But will I give up? I hope not. Because things like “Bottle Rocket” show to me that even people I deeply, deeply admire don’t come out as fully formed talents. They take their time too. I just need to learn patience…

The Unbearable Lightness of Being...

2012-01-30T01:15:00.000-08:00

...A 1920's bounder. This is me in my conflicted youth, trying desperately to become a character in a Wodehouse novel. I never much cared for the modern world...

David Shrigley Again

2012-01-29T07:19:00.000-08:00

An Academic Writes: "What Browning does here is cleverly skewer society's norms in a trifold manner. Firstly, there is religion. Jesus, as son of God, is omniscient but seems unable to answer the protagonist's desire for butter. This is ironic but the irony becomes yet more sublime when it is considered that Jesus tells us in John 6:35 that he is the bread of life. Does the protagonist seek the butter to accept the bread of life? Does he find the bread alone too difficult to accept - to swallow, in literal terms - alone and need butter to sweeten it? Is Jesus' apparent inability to provide the figure with bread because he needs to accept the bread in and of itself?

"And then there is the other meaning of bread - bread as money. Again, this figures into the religious reading above. The figure finds himself unable to accept a world without money - as in Matthew 19:24 - in order to follow Jesus. Similarly he finds himself unable to consider a world without financial gain. What is life without money to him? Surely there must be some sort of financial aspect to Jesus' plight? How could one man be so altruistic with no financial gain? Is there some way that the man "butter" up Jesus in a figurative sense? There is also a sly nod towards a more carnivalesque reading of this as seen through the works of Mikhail Bakhtin. I trust I can remain somewhat coy on what this is... but it is thrillingly transgressive for Browning to even suggest this.

"The third and final reading is that this is simply a scribble done when watching the telly late at night and is purely a load of old nonsense thrown together at random. But surely that cannot be... can it?"

David Shrigley

2012-01-28T14:15:00.000-08:00

I try not to be unduly negative about people. In the comics' world I may think Craig Thompson and Chris Ware are unduly self obsessed, but I cannot for a moment deny the beauty of their art. I try not to moan too much - but part of me enjoys snark far too much. It's easy for me to translate mild annoyance of someone such as, say, Devendra Banhart being such a vocal, irritating, showy bit of pantomime nonsense masquerading as a musician into a full on rant (see? It's starting already!) but I have heard songs of his that are, damn it all, lovely. For all the half arsed, idle scraps of nonsense he records he sometimes knocks out a properly beautiful bit of music (don't expect me to find out what it is, because that would mean subjecting myself to his output. Just take it from me he occasionally does something a bit worthwhile). I was discussing this with friend/ neighbour Gavin of the excellent Arkhonia blog just yesterday. He was talking about how what he hated in music was just that sense of... laziness, of half formed ideas, of settling for just "okay" rather aspiring to do something new. He was saying this in the context of music - he was startling me with the music of This Heat at the time - and comparing it to countless lazy bands who aren't trying to startle or do something new.

I'm not so bothered by this as Gavin is I think. My interest in books, in cinema and in music is to find something new and wonderful in it rather than it be entirely new and wonderful. My reaction to, say, hearing "Firebird" by the White Noise for the first time - or indeed the above This Heat song - is rare, because you only expect to be properly steamrolled by something so new and exciting on the very rarest of occasions. I'm happy in music to be excited by just a harmony or a noise or a middle eight that's exciting - even just a texture. Similarly, I'm happy to watch a middling film like "Exorcist 3" just for that extraordinary hospital scene that just sucker punches you. I'd like to think the best of anyone creative and that for the most part they don't really want to phone it in. Those who do, I just sort of dismiss as of no interest to me (Oasis is a good example of this, again in musical terms, and so, so many film makers) and don't really let them bother me.

But what I do hate is the willfully lazy and half formed. And especially when those people are formed. And today's burst of anger? David Shrigley.

The Guardian have just posted the most ludicrous bit of nonsense about the man here and the piece is peppered with the most incredible hyperbole from the title onwards ("one of the cleverest, funniest conceptual artists...simple but profound"). Now, if you're happy with Shrigley, then we may agree to disagree. But people who I know and have regard for like him and his work. They say it's funny. I don't go along with that. I look at something like this...

That to me is an idly amusing doodle. It's not terrible, no... but it is a bit lazy. Especially as he never seems to be interested in developing his art skills. Let's look at another ostensibly lazy looking cartoonist for a moment: Jeffrey Brown...

Jeffrey Brown is an incredibly important figure for me because his simplicity and spontaneity are matched with an obvious artistic skill. Only someone who doesn't really look at his work closely would mistake it for lazy. There's a lot of simple artistic skill to it but it still looks immediate. Another similar talent, and possibly the closest to Shrigley in terms of the surreal humour, is Vic Reeves' drawings...

Again - simple, spontaneous and silly. With a gag. But the difference is that this is but one facet of what Reeves does. His jokes can also take the form of paintings and, again, his artistic skills are obvious to those who look carefully... there's a lovely pastiche of Francis Bacon's "Screaming Popes" on the back of "Sun Boiled Onions". I haven't seen any obvious progression in Shrigley's work.

Lezard in that Guardian article does though - in fact he claims a stuffed dog and cat with a "I'M DEAD" sign is, and says of it "First, you notice the audacity. It's a work of what seems like blinding obviousness. But in attributing the ability to express a condition to something that is manifestly unable to do so." No. It isn't. It's a simple gag, like so much of Shrigley's work. Whether or not you think it's weak or not is irrelevant - it's a joke, not art.

Lezard makes so many claims that I find so hard to understand. So much of it can be aimed at so many other people who I like on the web who are simply trying to make people laugh. But Shrigley has somehow managed to be mistaken as having done something important. And I don't really understand why. Why is this anything more than a doodle? Why?

Two more quotes from Lezard:

"by adopting the aesthetic of the disturbed adolescent who can't draw particularly well, or the disturbed man in a pub toilet with a pen, a blank surface to draw on and a bit of time on his hands, Shrigley sneaks profundity in under the radar. He is adept at blurring boundaries, as everyone who thinks about him notices: "naive/sophisticated; whole/part; framed/unconstrained; to scale/in perspective; naturalism/fantasy"... To which one can add, among other things: funny/not funny."

And then:

"the thing about Shrigley is that he produces insider art: manifestations and expressions of an interior weirdness to which he grants us access, and which we can, at some inarticulate but immediate level, identify with and understand. In the vile and unending struggle against futility, shame and violence, you gather pretty quickly that Shrigley is on your side."

I know plenty of cartoonists who blur boundaries, who mix naive and sophisticated and naturalism. In fact dozens and dozens of the cartoonists online I follow do this very thing. Why aren't they art? Why is Shrigley? And as for the second quote about articulating inner weirdness - isn't this what people like K C Green's "Gunshow" do all the time? Gunshow is a particularly good example because it seems like a fever dream appearing on the page of the rate Green can write it.

What annoys me about Shrigley is the claims made for him. The claims he's doing something important. Claims that ring hollow because others do it better and are still struggling. Yet Shrigley just seems to sail above it all, recording records and having people fawn all over his work... and why? Is he the ultimate Emperor's New Clothes for a new century?

In what I do, all I am trying to achieve is something that amuses me and other people and find new and better ways of doing it. New and better forms to do it in. And to improve and improve and improve. If it's what you consider as art, then bless you. But the moment I coast and just provide you with what I doodle in the side of a newspaper as the finished article, you're well within your rights to call me an asshat. And accordingly I now feel I am more than able to say that both Shrigley and Lezard are pretty much that thing as well.

Ugh. Sorry. Rant over. For now.

some books for you all...

2012-01-26T10:36:00.000-08:00

The Afterlife

2012-01-24T09:05:00.001-08:00

hello all! the brief silence has been due to medication changes and a sickly cat, but i'm back now with a couple of items from a ludicrous book called "the afterlife", cowritten by jenny randle of "the fortean times".i picked this up at todmorden station's book share shelf and it was too damaged to do anything with other than rescue bits of for collage work. but before i did that, i found the best two moments in the whole book - enjoy!

firstly the dullest of strange entities you could ever imagine...

and secondly, the closest thing i have seen to "look around you" in print. oh those polo poltergeists... or in fact those polotergeists...

next up: improving victorian whimsy in the form of "discontented peggy, and how she was cured"... bet you all can't wait!

amazing heroes preview special 1985: part one

2012-01-20T12:38:00.000-08:00

hey everyone, look at me! i'm uploading bits of comics now, you know, like all those comics' blogs do... woo hoo!

one of my odd pleasures in comic buying is old interview/ promotional comics. this stems from buying various old issues of things like "the comics journal" and finding the adverts and promotional stuff as fascinating - or in some case more fascinating - as the actual articles and interviews. and this issue is one of the most enjoyable of all such things i've found in comic shops or fairs... the "amazing heroes preview special" of 1985. i shall continue to post bits of this over the next few days and weeks...

first up of interest is a listing for something called "alan moore's comic". you don't need me to say much more about this other than the possible provisional title. honestly, do we really think something by mr moore called "dodgem logic" will catch on in any way at all?

and then here's one for something odd callled "mike spammer". i think it speaks for itself really... i've looked this thing up repeatedly online and there's nothing about anything called this by someone called joe murp... in fact there's very little at all about anyone called joe murp. is this some kind of elaborate practical joke then? or is just a rubbish attempt to jump on the probably rather small "flaming carrot" band wagon?

if anyone knows, please write to the usual place.... more from this issue next week. enjoy!

faffing for piphill

2012-01-18T10:47:00.000-08:00

more foolishness from piphill... enjoy!

scanning shenanigans...

2012-01-17T12:56:00.000-08:00

more from my note books... includes landscapes! lawks!

mr teedles: the gland old man

2012-01-15T12:25:00.000-08:00

i'm a sucker for crap. if it has a stupid name and looks ridiculous, then much to my wife's horror and disgust i can find a home for it. it's the only reason to own something as terrible as "mr. teedles: the gland old man", a novel so bad the cover and spine don't even name the author (thomas le breton) but instead state "by the author of 'a sister to assist'er'" which is about the only pun worse than the title itself. the plot? see if you can guess from the pictures and the title. suffice to say, there's something intangibly... off about this book. something disturbing i can't quite express... it's just a bit creepy. you'll see what i mean. anyway. to keep the wife happy, i'll be occasionally dusting down works of madness from the collection to jolly you all. enjoy!

not so much direct from the dream factory, as direct from the dream maisonette...

2012-01-12T11:03:00.000-08:00

more sketchbook fun

2012-01-12T02:46:00.000-08:00

this is from my bedside sketchbook which often seems better than my other sketchbooks because i seem to care less what goes in it. it's more self indulgent but also has more "silly" ideas in it as well. i'm quite fond of these

more! scanner! fun!

2012-01-11T02:01:00.001-08:00

i know it's a tad self indulgent to put "note book" sketches onto a blog for a somewhat obscure mini comic, but pah! time to play with my new toy... here are three such pages of brain farts and general idea thrash outs... hopefully someone will enjoy something from these

in other news - my first ever blog spam yesterday! does this mean i've made it or something?

more scanner fun!

2012-01-10T10:12:00.000-08:00

here's some more scanner fun - a picture of our cat cluedo from a few weeks ago. not quite got it, but i've not been a cat drawer for that long. i don't think jeffrey brown or james kochalka has much to worry about at the moment...

i have a scanner!

2012-01-10T03:07:00.000-08:00

thanks to the highly esteemed sam parfitt, my good friend and neighbour and the yarn mogul responsible for dark nights and yarn dreams,i have a fully functioning scanner! and here for your delectation is a single, choice selection from "the illustrated police news" direct from one of my very favourite ever books: "'orrible murder: victorian crime and passion" by one leonard de vries. years of pleasure to be had from this classic!

brotherhood of satan

2012-01-04T10:40:00.000-08:00

now here's an interesting one. tipped off by the wonderful "toys and techniques" blog, i rewarded myself for job application forms by watching this odd seventies horror film. in theory, if you look at the plot in black and white (ben, his girlfriend nicky and his daughter KT, are all travelling to a birthday party when they find a crushed car. they stop off at a nearby town to let the populace know and find a town haunted by mysterious deaths and missing children) this should be the hoariest potboiler ever made. but somehow the film makers - acolytes of sam peckinpah, and partly responsible for brilliant post apocalyptic sci fi film "a boy and his dog" - manage to turn this nonsense into something rather brilliant

mainly this is because the film manages to almost entirely buck every cliche the screenplay offers up. i say almost, because the coven stuff towards the end is all a bit sub-hammer, but even the odd digression can be forgiven. otherwise what do we have? killer toys. a truly scary dream sequence. some great performances (again, slightly against type: the screenwriter l q jones particularly makes a nicely against type sheriff). a lovely, haunting little score by jaime mendoza-nava. some set design which would nicely set the film up as a precursor to "suspiria" if they weren't flatly directed. and a couple of moments which really stand up as something special, both at the beginning of the film

the first is the opening sequence which seems at first viewing - as it cuts from toy tank, to real tank crushing a car - seems to be all style over content. the second is the arrival into the small town itself. here the director and screenwriter decide, like with the opening sequence, to just not bother explaining what's going on. it takes about half an hour for us to sort of realise what's really happening, and even then it's just sort of implied rather than told us. instead the film makers just chuck us into a hysterical town filled with panic and fear... and we're not far behind ourselves

it's this approach (which also provides us with a rather sudden, disorienting ending) which makes the film so special. these are people who are obviously seeing if they can turn the hoariest of ingredients into something special and, while they don't always succeed, when they do... blimey. does it hit a target quite unlike anything else going on in horror cinema at the time. put it this way: i recently watched the mixed "lemora: a child's tale of the supernatural". and what that film wanted to be, but tried far too hard to achieve this film manages with what looks like very little effort at all

oh! and the closing credits have people down as "nepotists" - what more could you as for?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqwTajK35L8&feature=watch-now-button&wide=1

ronald searle

2012-01-03T05:45:00.000-08:00

better people will have more to say about the sad death of ronald searle: more knowledgeable, skillful, learned people who either knew the man or had studied his work; more eloquent writers; more passionate writers. but what i will say is that anyone in this country who has any interest or love of illustrations or cartooning should hold searle in the same regard as william hogarth. to say he was a genius is an understatement - on one level he's much a part of british culture as a thelwell or hoffnung or giles or quentin blake. on another level he's easily one of the greatest comic artists as edward gorey or heath robinson. on yet another level he was an amazing artist... there's so much to him

some will remember st trinians. some - like me - will remember molesworth, who is as vital to the very core of my being as anything else i can think of (and it really is a book which shows the best of both willans and searle: the perfect marriage of collaborators). some will think of the illustrations for gilbert and sullivan or baron munchausen or flanders and swann. some will think of his war art (haunting and beautiful). some will think of the countless artists he has inspired (obviously steadman and scarfe, and more lately someone like richard thompson's "cul de sac). others will remember his brief and brilliant career as a publisher, with perpetua books (seriously: buy anything with the perpetua logo on it as i've yet to be at all disappointed by his choices).others will remember... actually... i think searle is one of those artists who means something to almost anyone with even a passing interest in cartooning or comic art or art. even if you don't know it, he's almost certainly influenced someone or something that you love

and ninety years of such peerless art! i see searle as almost part of a venn diagram of my interests in art and culture. he has had involvement with illustration, children's books, punch, music, cinema... so many things i hold dear to my heart. and sad as it is that he's no longer with us, i'm glad he lived long enough to be taken seriously as what he was most importantly: one of the greatest artists of all time. a true genius and master of the form

a castle of bone by penelope farmer

2012-01-02T12:11:00.000-08:00

i've always been pretty much a voracious reader, but the events of 2011 seem to have numbed my desire to read considerably. in an attempt to force myself to get back in the habit again, i've recently been haunting local bookshops in search of puffin books of a certain age. the more modish among you may use the term "hauntological" to describe the buzz i'm looking for, but i'd just describe it as looking for something "a bit susan coopery or alan garnery or catherine storrish or just a bit... odd". my first attempt - "the ivory anvil" by sylvia fair - didn't really work, as if someone had given fair the idea for a magical little novel but she'd decided to write it in the dullest way possible.... but "a castle of bone"? crikey...

the general concept for the book is pretty much the stuff of countless knockabout kid's books over the years: a magical cupboard that turns objects into a prior form. hence some comedy nonsense about a leather wallet becoming a pig and the family cat returning to kittenhood. it has all the requisite cliches: a bunch of friends on holiday, a magical antique shop that isn't quite what it seems and a series of haunting dreams of the titular castle

but it's also one of the strangest books i've read in... ages. if the content is sometimes reminiscent of "marianne dreams" or "elidor", farmer's style of writing is more like that of alan garner around the "red shift" period (or, if you like, the reason why i won't be lending it to sarah to read). for example, here's a passage towards the end of the book:

"Hugh felt he was a tree: he felt rooted, fibrous, with branches; with sap flowing through him, through every vein. He could feel the whole of himself, both tree and human, his human body like one drawn by an old-fashioned anatomist: so that he could feel the paths and strength of each vein and bone and muscle. He held up his hand and against the light of the fire it looked transparent. He could see the glow of the blood, and the bones of his fingers, knobbed at the knuckles."

the book is apparently for readers of eleven and over, but really it seems more as if charles williams, circa his headiest phase of religious mania, has been given the book to read. it's such a weird, heady little book. it's going to haunt me for ages that i can promise you, but whether or not it's a good children's book or not i've not decided. i do like the idea farmer thought her readership could take on ideas as complex as this, but at other times you get a vague notion that she's getting a little carried away with herself. i think russell hoban managed to achieve much the same thing as "a castle of bone" does in a far pithier, wittier and more haunting manner in his children's classic "the trokeville way". they're definitely of a kind, and make for fascinating reading partners, but i suspect hoban's the one i'll keep coming back to

a quick word on the editions: the puffin cover i have looks like some bad 1970s sci fi cover and has little at all to do with the book in question. i found another even worse cover on abebooks which seems to show someone being transported in some sort of boat by a wizard outside some magical castle which is about as relevant to the book in question as a cover showing, say, a pirate would be. none of these things appear. the best cover, the one which sort of prepares you for the heady contents within, is the american edition also above. but that also looks like the pricey one. in my case i just ignored the cover and gazed longingly at the incredible skill that made the old puffin book plate that lay inside (inscribed to one jocelyn lavin, which seems to be entirely the sort of name for a child who'd have enjoyed this book)

more oz!

2011-12-31T08:55:00.001-08:00

first things first, a hearty thank you to matthew dick over at exquisite things for including me at number nine in his comics of the year. i used to work with matt in a soul crushingly awful job in lincoln and he was one of the saving graces of the job. i don't think i've been in any kind of top ten before in my life, other than perhaps top ten feckless librarians or hoarders of tat...

anyway. one final bit of archive.org/ oz fun for you... i'm going to try and do more posts like this just to keep this blog bubbling over and get me back in the important habit of updating regularly. so without further ado...

the emerald city of oz

2011-12-31T05:36:00.000-08:00

look at me! i'm doing one of those fancy illustration blog entries - alright, i admit i'm cheating and going straight to archive.org rather than sweating through scanning my own items, but still... while i looked for raw material for "piphill" i stumbled across these glorious images by john r neill for "the emerald city of oz". because we brits don't really know oz or baum that well beyond the judy garland film, this stuff is all new to me. but it's also all beautiful... enjoy! more neill later!

bulldog jack

2011-12-28T04:05:00.000-08:00

coming at some point next year, "the bombardier's eyes" will start being serialised in monthly (or so) installments. and to get people in the mood for it, here's possibly one of the finest bits of 1930s british b-movie nonsense ever made. jack and claude hulbert take over from an indisposed bulldog drummond to fight the nefarious villain played by ralph richardson, and defend the girl played by fay wray. it has two spectacularly good set pieces which are entirely the sort of thing which i try to permeate throughout my writing and drawing: a skirmish in the british museum and the ending sequence which, if cinema history was in any way fair, would be considered as highly as the best of hitchcock. it's a london underground chase scene which entirely captured my imagination as a child and is still every bit as good today. pacey, pithy, witty, silly and thrilling: entirely what i want to capture in what i do. a classic. please do watch it

sounds of young piphill 2

2011-12-19T10:21:00.000-08:00

the sounds of young piphill part one...

2011-12-16T09:00:00.001-08:00

blimey...

2011-12-14T04:09:00.000-08:00

i hope to have something up later today or tomorrow to keep on with this regular blog updating malarkey, but in the meantime two lovely things have come of the gorey/ neumeyer book review. firstly the publisher messaged me to say how pleased they were by how much i enjoyed it and then today... and i can scarcely believe this... peter f neumeyer himself sent me an email saying he was "deeply touched". wow! this is like sarah mcintyre slight return! this has made my week.... if not month!

Cat Getting Out of a Bag by Jeffrey Brown

2011-12-12T08:25:00.000-08:00

The best review of "Cat Getting Out of a Bag and Other Observations" by Jeffrey Brown from “Big Deal Lucille” on Amazon.com: "I currently have 2 cats, lovingly referred to as "my boys". They are quite spoiled and healthy, physically and emotionally. In fact, one cat accidentally got outside recently, and not due to my neglect. I was so distraught I called in sick to work, cried most of the day, and did everything I could think of to find him. I hit the jackpot and found him 24 hours later. I've had cats all my life and I always will. I still think this book stinks, yes stinks. And I do believe the author of this book states he has no cats, but has known a few. Just because I don't agree with your glowing review, don't assume I'm not capable of being a cat lover. The world is not that simple. I'll give my cats an extra kiss tonight just for you."

So anyway, now we have a cat at home. I grew up cats but I also grew up with something of a nascent mad cat lady: my sister. She currently has either five or six (I forget) including the only cat I have ever met with severe psychological needs. this cat would get up at three or four at the morning, mewl plaintively and drag a fritz the cat toy around with her that represented her lost litter she gave birth to when very young. She’d also sneeze a lot and leave a worrying brown/ grey stain on the wall but that's another story for another day. even a cat loving friend of mine when she asked to see this cat, to see if it was as bad as I’d made out, said of the photo "I can't see the cat - is it behind that lumpen, misshapen bag in the foreground?" without realising said bag was said cat. Anyway. I was stuck with this cat for six months or so and it kind of... put me off. But lately my wife and I have met some strange, crazed local felines who've changed both our minds on matters feline - and so we've ended up with Cluedo, a six month old bag of energy who is currently leaping into the air trying to conquer a ball of my wife's wool.

I’ve been a fan of Jeffrey Brown for some time now. I have been since I accidentally knocked into a copy of "Clumsy" in Forbidden Planet, Nottingham, and it fell on top of me. I kind of thought that I should take this as some sort of sign and bought the thing. And it ushered for me the first wave of my renewed interest in comics, particularly in this hitherto unknown format called mini comics. Something about Brown's balance between self-pity and self-ridicule (I picked up "be a man" at the same time I picked up "clumsy", which helped a lot) appealed to me where people like Chris Ware and Craig Thompson’s similar wallowing didn't (beautiful but whiny and self-important). I’ve been very loyal to his output since, but have left the cat ones out of my collection because, being catless, it didn't seem so relevant to me.

And now (Cluedo, should you be interested, is sat atop the telly and is idly batting at the head of Jeff Stelling, as well she should) I have a cat. So I thought it's as good a time as any to get hold of a copy of one of the cat books. And it is, rather predictably, brilliant. There has always been two sides to Jeffrey Brown. First there's the painfully self-lacerating, self-mocking autobiographical cartoonist who takes fragments of frequently staggeringly awkward moments in his life to weave together a greater whole. And then there's the tongue in cheek mocker of that sort of pomposity, especially of his *own* pomposity. That part also is the brilliant comic mind behind "big head" (which works, like "mega change bots", because Brown knows how ridiculous the real stuff is) and "I am trying to be small". And the cat book is the marriage between the two. As the other, better Amazon reviews point out - it's definitely no “Garfield” or “Simon’s Cat” (whatever their various merits may be). This is in every way what it says on the title page. Observations. But when is it anything but that with Brown?

And how good is it? Well, for a start the art is as great as it always is with Brown. Maybe it's because Brown is part of the pantheon of comic creators I’d like to one day compare myself to, but I’ve been looking at his art of ages now and am still amazed by how easy he makes something actually technically quite complicated seem. He’s an excellent draughtsman and his art has a spontaneity that only really works because of the scruffiness of his art but it's a scruffiness that belies a lot (and I do mean *a lot*) of technical skill. This book needs to show a cat in action and have it be recognisably a cat. There’s a lot of motion in the book and whereas my attempts to draw Cluedo have rather needed her to remain static, he's managed to knock off a lot of very accurate cat in motion comics at probably great speed. The real trick to Brown’s art is that his scruffiness is purely a stylistic decision. Like his most obviously similar peer, James Kochalka, it’s the best way to show immediacy and intimacy and build a rapport with the reader. The stilted beauty of a Chris Ware I find deeply alienating as if it’s a world dipped in aspic. You don’t get that with Brown.

And the content? Let’s look at some evidence.

Okay. Cluedo does that. A lot.

She also does this, especially at night.

She did this the first time she saw me draw (and still does) and does it to Sarah when knitting too.

And she also, sort of, does this most of the rest of the time.

So this is where me and Big Deal Lucille sort of part company. For her cats are obviously more than just furry, food guzzling scruff bags who are as affectionate and caring as they are stand offish and stubborn. They’ve been elevated to another level of being where sentimentality has taken hold. Probably the simple fact that there’s a strip in this book about cat litter trays will immediately alienate Big Deal Lucille. She doesn’t want to think of that aspect of her cat’s life. Meanwhile Brown will continue to deal with cats as he does with everything else – as fragments of a wider story.

I have a weird fixation with “You’ve Been Framed!” during my most depressed periods. Not for me worries about people falling over cakes or throwing children into greenhouses - no. My worry is about the tumultuousness of my life in comparison with the moments caught on camera that otherwise would never be seen: a family holiday here, a barbeque there, a Sunday dinner, a stroll in the wind… moments of such banality for most of the time but for them precious snapshots of a wider story. That’s what depresses me – seeing people just living and living happily. And this book has a similar sort of appeal (as does most of Jeffrey Brown’s work). It’s about the moments in between the big moments. Life in microcosm. Unlike James Kochalka's more whimsical (but equally wonderful) "Peanut Butter and Jeremy" books, this is literally just a collection of observations. But sometimes all you want in life is to watch the simple, uncomplicated joy of a small bag of energy fascinated by the usually boring realities of a plastic bag. And that’s why this book is such a gem.

"floating worlds: the letters of edward gorey and peter f neumeyer"

2011-12-09T04:59:00.000-08:00

The last time I got a review copy of an Edward Gorey book from librarything, I went on a bit too much about my Gorey-less childhood and how bereft I felt growing up without this incredible talent when my wife, bless her, did. So this means that, no, I didn’t grow up with him as part of my life but it did mean that when I did discover him properly in my mid-twenties I truly appreciated this peculiar, wayward genius that I had found. And I’m proud that the UK has slowly begun to grasp his peculiar – and frequently very British – sense of humour to the collective British heart.

This volume is a collection of letters between Gorey and a collaborator on a series of children’s books, called Peter F Neumeyer. It’s not only fascinating in the way it opens a hitherto unknown window into part of Gorey’s life, but also because the very nature of the friendship between the two men sort of begins to take on Gorey-esque proportions when you look at it closely. But my theory is that once you’ve been touched by the genius of Gorey, you start to look for clues to the central enigma of this curious man even where this is none to find. You look for connections when fundamentally there aren’t any. Yes, Neumeyer’s children’s book was on a housefly (it was called “Donald and…”) and Gorey loved all animals so much (the introduction by Neumeyer pretty much starts with a quotation from one of ‘Ted’s’ letters which says “I am really more and more tolerant to all insect life as life goes on”) that it seems a marriage made in heaven. And then there’s the curious first meeting between the two men: stony silence from Gorey during a day on Neumeyer’s editor’s boat that was only broken by Gorey’s spectacular failure to get out of a dinghy on to dry land. They bonded pretty much in casualty. The thing is, you can imagine a Gorey-esque story which goes along similar lines, but it’s not a very Gorey-esque set up. A bit more like Wodehouse actually. You end up looking for the Gorey in these things, always hunting for possible clues.

But if we’re guilty of reading too much into events in these letters, the correspondence that the meeting ignited is a feast of clues and possible ways into the Gorey enigma. Over a particularly heated period in 1969 this artist and writer and his new found friend the academic bonded over philosophy, art and literature. The book is a catalogue of pointers towards what makes Gorey Gorey, and is also riddled with particular hints as to what made the man tick. And just when you think you’re onto something – like perhaps the Kit Williams’ “Masquerade” books – you suddenly realise the jig is up and Gorey begins to go silent and enigmatic as the letters peter out. It’s one of those rare occasions where a series of letters basically has a form of narrative arc.

So. The book itself…

The best books of letters out there – I’m thinking of Chandler and Wodehouse primarily – are the sort you dip into. Frequently they’re grouped together by theme or correspondent. This book is different because it’s primarily the whole friendship from beginning to end – envelopes included. For the Gorey fan those envelopes are almost worth purchasing the book for in itself. They’re works of art in themselves and its kind of humbling to see Gorey could knock off things this lovely just for letters.

The subjects covered: every time you dip in something new and fascinating takes your fancy. Just a cursory look at the index should give you some idea of the range of subjects covered… Edward Ardizzone. Barbarella. Jorge Luis Borges. Walter de la Mare. Thomas Hardy. Hermann Hesse. Kafka. Flann O’Brien. It’s a quite literary conversation this: high art, cinema, literature, theatre, music. It would be fascinating to see what other correspondences with people who weren’t, say, English academics would be like. I know for a fact Gorey was a massive fan of Doctor Who so a more low art correspondence would be equally as fascinating. Gorey seems like a massive polymath… but then again didn’t the books themselves tell you something of that? Surely part of the enigma of the man is the wealth of peculiar sources that became mingled into this heady of stews.

It’s also a bit unfair that Neumeyer, in any other circumstances, would be a fascinating man in his own right. Fair game of him to take the back seat for Gorey. This is his book and part of the joy is that Neumeyer, whether he did it consciously or not, teases the best out of Gorey. Maybe that’s why Gorey goes silent in the end (there I go myself, looking for clues and patterns where there aren’t any) as he realises how open he’s being and how unlike him it is. I could quote it endlessly and given the time I probably would and each time the essay would be on a different subject: and that seems quite right too.

And then just when you begin to think you’ve worked out the clues, or have gone along with the cliché that there are clues to somehow find, towards the end Gorey starts to almost disappear. The letters are still beautiful, but more enigmatic and distant. They almost remind me of those annoyingly precious “Griffin and Sabine” by Nick Bantock but obviously not so precious. Postcards mostly with tickets and ephemera taped to them. The writing itself becomes spare and fragile, almost like haikus… considering Gorey’s love of Japanese art (which he goes on about repeatedly and at length, with great passion, in the letters) this could almost be deliberate.

A few final thoughts on the volume sent to me by Pomegranate books. Firstly it came in a WHOPPING box which was packaged in so much tape it took about twenty minutes for me to dig into. And when I finally get the book out after all that anticipation… it’s beautiful. Truly beautiful. A lovely, hefty, lovingly illustrated and designed book which – like their single volume Gorey reissues – really the master deserves. And more than just that, even the Pomegranate catalogue is a lovely thing to behold… AND there’s another Gorey postcard. Are they trying to bribe a good review out of me? If so it worked. I’ve had some good books through librarything. I’ve had some bad books through librarything. I’ve had some occasional great books through librarything. This? This was worth me becoming a member alone. It’s gorgeous and glorious and I’ll treasure it forever.

A masterpiece? Yes. Definitely. I cannot recommend it enough.

more on st axiom

2011-12-08T08:08:00.000-08:00

there is a point to all this silliness, honestly

more pre-piphill

2011-12-07T07:36:00.000-08:00

"st axiom at hillier's gate (unknown): c. 1385, st. axiom-by-the-marsh, lower piphill

here the hairy guild of boatswains conspire to kill the saint at prayer. note the presence of axiom's constant companion ulrich, the holy chimp. a fourteenth century addition to the story of the saint, ulrich is in always steadfast, faithful and hairy. the hairy are as blessed by axiom as the hairless are. as the saint remarked in a letter to his accolyte, fritz weishenct, "the true love of the lord is hair blind"

piphill precursors

2011-12-06T05:06:00.000-08:00

and a little nod of the hat that i haven't in fact forgotten about "the eyes of mr pepper"...

Thought Bubble Thoughts Three

2011-12-01T13:38:00.000-08:00

That I'm writing my final thoughts on Thought Bubble during something of a low mental ebb seems quite fitting. Again and again during the day I was faced by people who basically repeated the same mantra: there is no simple way at doing this, you all have to keep on and on until you get somewhere. Initially it won't be a big shift but that shift will become something else. Logic tells me that this then means that everyone has struggled and everyone has had to battle on with their creations. So this means that i am now, during a self indulgent pity fest about how my meager offerings will never take on, only doing what the other people who have "arrived" in some way have also gone through. They may have not had depression or some of the crap going on in my brain of late, but they've still battled on.

I need to remember that. I need to remember that mostly I'm writing these blog entries to crystalise these things. To remember that I can bloody *do* this and that there is no magic bullet.

Anyway.

One of the best things for me about Thought Bubble is that it's a very inclusive festival. By this I mean that isn't just a narrow mainstream comics based event. There are plenty of people - and cosplayers! - who are there to see that and there's no shame about that at all. I wish I'd had something for Pete Milligan to sign for example, and my local comic shop - 2Tone - are always inspirational to me in finding new stuff in the Marvel/ DC etc worlds. But the comics' world has moved on from that - in fact when I was a kid I was probably closer to where comics are now than I realised. I moved away from comics because it seemed limiting - but now my love for Punch cartoonists and people like Ionicus, Fougasse, Ronald Searle etc is entirely chiming in with what Fantagraphics and Drawn and Quarterly put out (although I do wish they'd do more British stuff - a Ken Reid book, can you IMAGINE?). And my abiding love of children's book artists... all of this is entirely there in comics now. And there at Thought Bubble.

So if you wanted to meet Pete Milligan or D'Israeli or Gail Simone you could. If like me, you're a bit more excited at the prospect of meeting someone like Bryan Talbot (would liked to have met him, but queue was too long) or Roger Langridge (who my god, wild wolves would not have dragged me away from: I got him to sign a volume of "Knuckles the Malevolent Nun" and was as impressed by the art as I was the fact he was a peer of Chris Knox - imagine that! CHRIS KNOX!) you can do that to. Then there are the children's book people as well.

It's a fact that the long winded route to me arriving at "The Common Swings" finally coming out was stumbling across Sarah McIntyre's "Vern and Lettuce" in the Guardian's mini versions of the DFC. Here was such wit, skill and joy that I suddenly felt energised at the idea of drawing again. None of my stuff is anything near the league of McIntyre's (and as far as bloggers go, she's pretty much best practice for what can be achieved) but her books always make me want to try. It's probably quite interesting that the closest to being star struck was when I got "You Can't Eat a Princess!" signed by her (and her co-writer Gillian Rogerson). I rambled on about the pride of a blog comment from last year from her when I praised "Vern and Lettuce" and made a bit of a fool of myself, but still... it was a handy reminder of what can be done in the comics' field. She's something of a polymath and the joy in her mini-comics is entirely there in her kids' books. It's entirely one of the reasons I threw myself into childrens' books with such passion last year and kind of have veered off into those worlds with the Hadrons and the eventually upcoming Bunny McSniff.

And that enthusiasm was matched by her fellow DFC writers the Etherington brothers. I picked up "Baggage" to get signed by them because an idle stop off at their stall had revealed the two of them to be the sweetest, nicest, most encouraging people I could have dreamt of meeting. Now I've read "Baggage" I can entirely say that my five year old self is all the poorer for never having had this book. Much as I think Sarah McIntyre is slightly closer to my own tastes, the detail and anarchy and comedy in every single page of that book would have exploded my tiny brain. I've always erred towards the more is more school of drawing since my childhood love of a good Leo Baxendale double spread or a bit of Tom Patterson nonsense and I think this book sort of guides me into seeing the best way into matching enthusiasm into result. It's an incredible, incredible book - so much fun! - and Lorenzo was particularly lovely, explaining how easy it is to pick up things like Photoshop from Youtube. See? Another person who has "arrived" reminding me how much of the journey to finishing something is down to absolute persistence.

In the main hall of Thought Bubble, the small press people were smattered about. It was good to see how the panelists stuff was being sold, and yes a lot of what I was doing was seeing how other people sold their wares. It was good to see Philippa Rice's diorama after it was spoken in hushed tones of admiration by almost everyone on a panel during the day, for example. But the best of all of them? Timothy Winchester.

Almost every panelist, when asked who they thought did conventions better than anyone said "Timothy Winchester". Now I knew his comics reasonably well - I follow his blog - and liked them, but not in the way I love, say, Banal Pig's comics. But where the Banal Pig stall seemed somewhat... subdued, Timothy Winchester was, as everyone heralded him, one of the most whirling of all dervishes you could ever imagine. All panelists said "watch him - he never stops. He engages you in conversation, he gives you flyers even if you don't buy comics. He's friendly and warm and interested in people and it's completely contagious". And my god were they right. Almost entirely the most single handedly exciting figure I saw in the whole day, I still am not the biggest fan of his comics but as a comics' creator? He made me feel at ease and welcome on his stall and I'd even promised to do something for his Angela Lansbury week (which I've entirely failed to do - hence one of the reasons I've been at a low ebb) because he seemed so enthusiastic and warm. And sort of, kind of, wise...

Because his advice? Simply: "keep at it. Do it regularly. Get a scanner. Post it. Get yourself known. Get yourself out there. It's scary but we've all done it."

Which is probably in one sentence far more succint and pithy than the whole of these three days of rambling could ever be.

So yeah, in essence - Thought Bubble. Loved it. I'll be there next year. All I can try and do is be there in some sort of creative capacity. I better bloody be, or this sort of low ebb will be an even bigger stick to beat myself with... but that's another story for another day.

I'm done now. Goodnight all.

The Silent Traveller

2011-11-30T07:24:00.000-08:00

One of the benefits of having two good second hand bookshops in my town is that I know the areas of expertise of both shop owners... and even better those two areas overlap entirely into mine. Border books is obsessed with obsolete popular culture, so if I want to find old crime, old ghost stories and especially old children's books (particularly of the hoary old Billy Bunter school) I'm entirely spoilt for choice. As for art books though, it's a slightly disinterested pile of books stuffed willy nilly into a shelf between the two ground floor book rooms. And within that only the ones with sort of ties to Punch or Vanity Fair or the like are priced properly. Everything else is a sort of vain rummage for anything of interest.

Lyalls on the other hand is run by an artist. She either subsidises her art with her book selling or vice versa, depending on how well she's doing in either field at the time. She knows her stuff which means, yes, you have to pay on the nose for what you find... but dear god she also can spot a good purchase from a mile off. And today's? "The Silent Traveller in Oxford" and "The Silent Traveller in London" by writer/ artist Chiang Yee. I've never heard of the man and my heart skips with the thrill of the hunt to know that he was reasonably prolific. The books are a combination of travelogue and art - lovely full page watercolours (some of the ones in "Oxford" are *gorgeous*) and small pen and ink studies - and are entirely lovely things to behold.

I've always intended to look more at Chinese and Japanese art a bit more closely. Some of the blogs I follow frequently post artists whose names I always intend to follow up but, good lord, I literally have volumes of artists and books and comics and children's writers to follow up *at some point*. It's nice to wander into a shop and immediately see a possible new area of obsession almost waiting for me. I'm going to be poring over these volumes for some time I think...

Thought Bubble Thoughts Two

2011-11-30T07:09:00.000-08:00

Second day of this blogging regularly lark and it's still not coming any easier to me. Plug on, Chris, plug on...

So. Thought Bubble again. I won’t get to the general convention hoo ha until tomorrow. The main reason I went to the festival in the first place was because of the panels. There were about five I had earmarked of possible use for me, but in the end I whittled this down to three… the first called “Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Self-Publishing”, the second “Paper/ Science” and the third “Comic Economics”. Whether by accident or design, the structure of the panels basically meant you had the first lot of panellists being well established but still definitely mini-comic people, the second those who have made more a name for themselves in the field and are on the cusp of “proper” success and the third those who are have arrived at some degree of critical or popular success.

The first session had some really interesting and useful points about the first steps of getting yourself known. Things like getting your work out there, how to deal with the whole online/ physical comics dichotomy, tips about printing, how to transport your products to events etc etc. All really useful, but slightly tarnished by the fact that about one third down the page of my notes there appears this sentence, variations of which turn up throughout my jottings for the panel: “the Fetish Man bloke is a complete tool”. This turns out to be one Dr Geof Banyard. Please note that name. In the brochure he’s understandably down as Geoff but no, his webpage confirms he is entirely a Geof. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to say anything about his work which is probably fantastic if you like that sort of thing, and he did indeed say some very useful things (in fact I made an effort to write down one statement about cock ups that I really liked: “accept what it is as part of the process” and wrote next to it a good point from the tool and underlined it twice). But you could have probably not created a person more likely to cheese me off than a man who thinks it appropriate to knock an f off of his name for shits and giggles. The other four panellists – Hugh “Shug” Raine (a Leeds mini comic person I’d not previously known of, but whose hourly comics I later picked up and really enjoyed), Hexjibber (not really to my taste, but precisely the right side of wacky) and the two people I was most interested in, Steve Tanner (who’s a small press creator of more mainstream content) and Katie Green (who’s responsible for Green Bean and in my mind some sort of genius, which probably shows my bias from the off) – had stuff to say , but none were quite as loud as the big fella in the stupid shirt and bleached weird hair. It’s a taste thing, but I really, really struggled with this man far more than I really ought to have done. Maybe my intolerance levels need to be addressed once the depression and autism are dealt with. Actually, scrub that. Not maybe. Definitely.

But still, you know… even though Geof with one f (do you see? What a card! Hilarious!) tried his darndest to keep on talking and talking and talking, I still got to hear a bona fide genius in the field talk about her craft. Katie Green was utterly inspiring to say the least. The second session was very much in the same vein but thankfully allows me less room to show how shallow I can be. Here we had Kristyna Baczynski (the artist in residence of the weekend, and a great illustrator in her own right) and Philippa Rice (of “My Cardboard Life” fame and sort of a figure of awe to all panellists during the weekend for her ability to cook any sort of story together with any sort of images seemingly in a matter of minutes. Then we had Tom Humberstone (of Solipsistic Pop, who was possibly a little on the overly earnest side but turned out to be very much the necessary idealist to go against the next panellist’s pragmatist) and Morten F Thomsen (of Oxi Comics, an online e-comics bod who wanted to help alternative comics type make the link to new technology. He was also the sort of de facto antagonist of the session for reasons I’ll come to in a bit). And then we had closest the session came to an irritant, Joe List (of Annotated Weekender fame, and as well as being the quietest speaker I’ve heard in years was sort of slightly too indie kid by numbers for my liking. I had horrible flashbacks to flirting with the outskirts of the Belle and Sebastian Schmindie community over a decade ago with his shambling mannerisms. Not really his fault though that he tended towards being the sort of person just sort of winds me up a lot).

Thomsen was the most interesting figure here. A lot of the time I disagreed with him on almost everything he said, because he’s very much a pragmatist and a businessman at heart. I suppose, like many of the other people in the room, I am sort of a painfully earnest idealist, but boy was I glad he was there. His view is that of a businessman and as such he pushed, needled and gently quizzed the other panellists at every turn about their sort of vaguely unformed anti-technology views. Philippa Rice at one point said she had no problem with advertising on your blog as long as the adverts were sympathetic, and there was a sort of H M Bateman gasp from the purists… and a knowing smile from Thomsen. Let me make myself clear: I didn’t agree with him on a lot of what he said. I am at heart a technophobe and am about the least likely person in Christendom to ever get some sort of Kindle device. But his knack was to clearly and repeatedly ask the panellists why they had similar views to mine. Sometimes they defended themselves articulately and passionately but at other times it was obviously some sort of gut feeling they weren’t so able to express. For what it’s worth, my view is let people have e-books if they want them. Just ensure that the hard copy is somehow even more fun and enjoyable for those book lovers like me. And I suspect Thomsen would be happy with that response. All he wants is to question knee jerk reactions… and it truly helped that he was so charismatic in doing so.

And then on to the final session of the weekend. This included the endearingly sleepy John Allison (who, the session claimed, alongside Philippa Rice is the only person to make a living from their online comics. I like his style, but sometimes his content isn’t quite to the level of his stellar artwork), Howard Hardiman (of Badger and Lengths, who I thought was fascinating and who I must investigate further forthwith), Ellen Lindner (of Whores of Mensa and Strumpet, who was again fascinating and now high up my list of people to investigate) and Emma Vieceli (want a hint here? It rhymes with mascinating if that helps…). The reason why I keep using the word fascinating is because I didn’t know much of the work of any of the three of them but they were so passionate about their work and what they were trying to do that I deeply, deeply wanted to rectify this. Vieceli was the most interesting for me because her love of the form was obvious in all she did, and even though she mostly does Manga style stuff – a genre which with the odd exceptions does precisely nothing for me – I really wanted to read her books. This was the panel where the creators have plugged and plugged away and got to some level of success, or at least success by the form’s standards at any rate.

And how they got there? Well, interestingly almost all the points from all the sessions seem to be variations of the same themes: keep on going; update your blog and use social media; make yourself known to people; have faith in your stuff; network; be realistic in what you do. In essence: just do it. If you’re proud of it, if you think you have a unique voice and aren’t necessarily doing it to make a massive amount of money (the best comment on this was made by Vieceli was “there’s a difference between making a living in comics and making comics your living”). All of them seemed to agree on this final point – just keep at it. If nothing else, you’ll get closer to whatever your goal is the more you do. And if not, you’ll have fun doing it and develop yourself as a person and an artist.

A few people whose blogs I follow seem to have been a bit disillusioned after Thought Bubble – their stuff didn’t sell very well or they realised that they’d got their priorities in the wrong place. They were following others’ leads and not following what they wanted to do themselves. I guess I have to sit down and work out what I’m doing the Common Swings for – and I suspect I already know the answer. It has been, mostly, something of a source of pride that even though I’ve not entirely set the world on fire with my stuff, I’ve got close to getting some of my… how shall I put this… odder ideas down on paper. And the more I do it? The better I get.

And I suspect that is why I should be doing this. More in the final instalment.

Thought Bubble Thoughts One

2011-11-29T06:35:00.001-08:00

Once upon a time I used to blog a lot. Not just regularly but at great length on a wide range of subjects. Obviously recent events – dad’s death, my depression worsening a bit, work stress and the recent Asperger’s/ autism diagnosis – have made this a bit trickier than I remember it being. This bloody entry has taken almost a whole week to write, like chipping away at a constantly moving object to get it into some sort of shape I’m happy with. But it’s an important thing to write. I wouldn’t keep badgering away at it if it wasn’t. I’m talking about Thought Bubble.

Thought Bubble was an interesting proposition for me. For someone trying to take his comics/ zines more seriously it should be a no brainer to attend the biggest convention in the country which is also pretty much on my doorstep. But it wasn’t that easy. See, I’m not very good at taking part in things like this and never have been. I’ve had a track record of this since childhood – I think apart from a brief foray as a Seconder in the cubs, I’ve been pretty much on the outskirts of anything ever since. If I had my way I’d probably never turn up to anything – it’s only because I’d never hear the end of it if I didn’t go that I try. And when I try, I tend to make only the tiniest of efforts. The words self-fulfilling and prophecy spring to mind.

Case in point: my last couple of attempts to dabble into the world of mini comics and the comics’ scene have ended… not particularly well. I tend to assume the worst of a situation in advance, that in some way of course I’ll end up not talking to anyone (first attempt: mini comic thing in Preston) or barely selling a thing (second attempt: comics fair in Bradford). Never mind the fact that during the former I never bothered initiating any conversations with anyone or at the second I just dumped a couple of issues of the Common Swings on an anonymous looking group table and legged it to Waterstones to hide for the afternoon. It’s not really a surprise that I only sold two copies of the Common Swings.

That second attempt at Bradford has become something of a stick to beat my own back with. It turns up again and again in justifications as to why I shouldn’t bother doing anything, why I’ll only make a fool of myself again if I try and blah blah blah blah blah. I completely mean it when I say these things, and can conveniently forget such things as, oh, the fact I didn’t stay with my stock or promote it properly or anything. In the same way, I can get maudlin about this blog whilst usefully forgetting how little I have updated it or, you know, only sent out one copy for review of the first issue.

So yeah. Hollow excuses or something. For some reason the wife wasn’t happy with me using them for Thought Bubble so, regretfully, I decided to at least make an effort and go to thing. If nothing else, I’d deliberately set up in my more worrying moods meet ups with my fellow old Lincoln DVLA survivor Matthew and old Livejournal pal Andrew. I kind of had to go after saying I’d meet them. Plus I’d said I’d go to support my local comic shop, the highly esteemed 2Tone Comics of Hebden Bridge. Eventually I found myself in the rather odd position whereby I actually wanted to go to this thing. And then…. And then…

And then I was hit by a nasty bout of insomnia and hand pain the night before so feared I couldn’t go… but despite myself I managed to drag myself out of bed and to Leeds and, bless my hat, I had a grand old time. Seriously. You need to look at the above and realise how unlikely it being a grand old time was… I have a considerable track record of self-scuppering and now had an actual excuse not to go. Yet before I knew it, I was handing over my tenner whilst surrounded by more cosplay types than you could shape King Ottakar’s Sceptre at. I’ve no idea why.

Reasons why it was great… will follow in part two. (And yes, there is a part one to force me to write a part two!)

lulu!

2011-11-15T06:12:00.000-08:00

been a bit of an odd week - family issues, doctor's appointments and the like - but am slowly getting back to normal. am pushing myself to do a sort of fishing/ exploratory trip to "thought bubble" this weekend to sort of see ways in which i can take this whole common swings way more seriously. and in a similar vein i have updated my lulu shop as a starter... hopefully "mr pepper" will return soon - sorry for all this folks!

an interlude of sorts

2011-10-28T09:52:00.000-07:00

am slowly climbing out of the medication change stupor and hope to try writing a bit more during the course of next week. in the mean time here are two practice sketches for xanthes paraflax... of the erstwhile mr paraflax himself no less. oh, and possibly his peppery alter ego...

in the mean time thank you for your patience! i may pop some other piphill sketches on here over the weekend as well...

xanthes update

2011-10-24T02:05:00.001-07:00

am in the middle of a crappy medication dosage change so... may be a few more days until i level off and the next chapter turns up. apologies to all! am working on the illustrated matter for the issue instead and trying to keep as normal as possible... sorry all!

Mr Pepper - the cast

2011-10-17T09:58:00.000-07:00

before you read this bit: an explanation. i had done a much more thorough episode guide and cast list for this a few weeks ago (before i was signed off work). i have now lost said notes on my memory stick and have had to piece it together again from memory (and using aveleyman online). i hope it works - sorry if it doesn't! anyway...

***

“No one believes there is no script available anymore,” said Bamford to me, earlier that day. “But then again no one believes there is no copy of the soundtrack or pictures of the set or production photos or even episodes left. No one believes Mr Pepper existed. Apart from us. Because we were there. And this is what we remember…”

The Cast of The Eyes of Mr Pepper

Lorna Andrews is probably the best grandmother in the world. Organising, remembering and finding things seems like second nature to her. Although she is now comfortably over retirement age (she actually threatened me, jovially I hope, if I revealed any more) she still is as sharp as a pin (“If not sharper!” laughs Carmichael) and three times during dinner managed to locate my notes from my gargantuan collection of papers I’d brought with me with seemingly no effort at all. Thus if anyone was going to gather all the extant scraps of information on The Eyes of Mr Pepper it would be her. For the record, her colleagues all gathered here – and some of the agents of those actors below – all agree that this is the most accurate cast list for the show.

It’s an interesting list by any standards. A mixture of surprisingly famous actors – Laurence Naismith, Dinah Sheridan and cult favourite Alexis Kanner – are immediately noticeable. And mong the usual famous names from British 1960s and 1970s television, there are a handful of names that have been heard of neither before or since. However, there does appear to be a reason for this. None the less, it is no wonder the likes of James Cazabon have repeatedly pored over the fragments of the series. It is a fascinating cast, one which feels like it belongs to something more akin to a large budget BBC drama rather than the small scale ITV children’s series it appears to otherwise be. But again, as with so much connected to The Eyes of Mr Pepper, all is not quite as it seems…

Cast

Jenny Bolton - Dilys Ralston
Paul Bolton - Cavan Ramage
Bill Jellicoe - Molly Raske
Tommy Jellicoe - Dudley Sutton
Lily Jellicoe - Sheila Fern
Gideon Jellicoe - Michael Bilton
Gordon Cantabile - Richard Hope
Emily Blasky - Gloria Walker
“Mr Pepper” (Brett “Titan” Elkan) - Laurence Naismith
Reverend Murray Bilton - Peter Jeffrey
Susan Bilton - Fernanda Marlowe
Timothy Sunshine - Alexis Kanner
Saul Carob - Richard Hurndall
Esther McMurdy - Dinah Sheridan
Norman Elkington - Johnny Vyvyan
Inspector Hugh Prawer - Edward Judd
Sally Ramsey - Susan Jameson
Squire Reginald Maidment - Terrence Alexander
Chief Inspector Monroe - Terrence Bayler
Dr Allchester - Preston Lockwood
Betty Persevant - Susan Coleridge
Io Zendro - Edwin Finn
Zendro Pepper - Nino Aygar

Particularly of interest is that final name. Nino Aygar? Playing the title character of a television series? What kind of name is Nino Aygar? And why are there precisely no references to him, Dilys Ralston, Cavan Ramage or Molly Raske anywhere? By which I mean online… or in Somerset House… or apparently anywhere…

Xanthes Furthermore

2011-10-14T08:15:00.001-07:00

We have now moved onwards to a nearby pub, the Head of Steam, situated on a leafy lane just outside Lymington itself. Present are myself, Bamford, Baxter and Bingham and our new guests – Jonathan Carmichael, director of The Eyes of Mr Pepper and his production assistant, Lorna Andrews. When I mentioned to James Cazabon that I’d managed to arrange a meeting with Carmichael and Andrews, he promptly eulogised for some moments as to their importance in British Television history and how their role has always been thwarted at every turn.

I mention this to them both and aside from a momentary wince at the mention of Cazabon’s name (Carmichael: “after a while the gratitude for these people keeping your work in the public imagination takes a back seat to their constant, unending attempts to second guess your every creative process.” Andrews: “I think what Johnny is trying to say is that they’re a bothersome pain in the arse.” Carmichael: “well Lorna, that’s an approximation of what I was trying to say… I just wanted to inject a little class into it.” Andrews: “but Johnny dear boy, you instead ended up entirely missing class and just headed straight to the square marked pompous arse…” Andrews and Carmichael managed to turn almost any conversation into similar fond bouts of bitching), they agree with almost every word.

Jonathan Carmichael is a big man, and a grand man. His laugh is a rich, deep thing which reminds you of all those dinner parties you’ve been to where one man dominates everything. He’s a born raconteur. “but a bloody unlucky raconteur, it must be said,” he chuckles. Item number one: every time he tried to get a film made at Hammer, Amicus or Tigon in the seventies something happened, be it cast members pulling out at the last moment or funding collapsing or, as Andrews delights in telling it, “Johnny just having a hissy fit”. Carmichael sighs and nods. “I did do that a lot.” Instead, a cinematic career never came out of the promising theatrical and fine arts background Carmichael had prospered so well in. Instead it was TV all the way. And even that was a struggle.

“I did a handful of Armchair Theatres and Thrillers and the Roald Dahl things, but I was always told off for trying to do a Ken Russell sort of thing but on a typical British telly budget. It either looked like I was taking the piss out of the script…” Lorna Andrews laughs, “Which you usually were doing, Johnny.” He chuckles, “well, yes… but anyway. Either I looked like I wasn’t taking it seriously or I was taking it all too seriously or, as was most often pointed out, I was just going a bit mad.” He sighs and drinks his glass of wine, “so then I thought I should initiate my own project, with some backing from some decent, high profile writers – some chaps Brian Clemens put in contact with I think – and we cooked up this mock documentary about governmental conspiracy and space exploration. And it was just going through the final planning stages when I heard about Alternative 3 (the infamous faux TV docudrama made under the apparent aegis of Anglia Television’s Science Report) which would have completely stole our thunder. So, yes, unlucky isn’t the half of it.”

That project, Project: CROCUS, was halted early in 1977 and Carmichael was just about to give up and go to Europe to work when he was offered, at very short notice, a rather unusual project. The Eyes of Mr Pepper.

“The way I remember it,” says Carmichael, “is that a group of rather intense young people, including Denny here, had seen some of my work and liked it. They had had another director in mind, another one of the Paraflax people I seem to remember, but he had panicked at the last moment and fled the country fearing… whatever it is that those Paraflax people really do I suppose.” There is a pause and everyone in the pub looks at each other for a moment. It is what I believe is known as a frisson. “Anyway, getting ahead of myself. They needed someone at short notice, they liked what I did, they’d give me almost complete freedom to do with the show visually what I wanted as long as I didn’t try and challenge the music, the script and certain elements of the design. I was a bit anxious about those stipulations at first, but I soon worked out why… and history was sort of made.”

Here conjecture becomes reality. Here we actually begin to see the project take fruit. And from the memories of those involved we can begin to really see what the bizarre, lost tale of The Eyes of Mr Pepper was all about.

And... more Xanthes!

2011-10-11T07:12:00.000-07:00

Denny Bamford is a proud man. He is not haughty or arrogant, but simply exudes pride in his work. Born and brought up in Lymington, on the outskirts of the New Forest and the cusp of the Isle of Wight, Bamford has returned there in his dotage. “It suits me and my temperament, “ chuckles this quiet, exacting man, as he leads me across the yard of his large, red brick farm by the sea. “I can bury myself out here. Just me, my animals and my music...”

I am being led to a large, red brick barn, which dominates the yard. “I pretty much live alone these days. Just me, my dogs...” he gestures at a trio of giddily friendly mutts circling our feet, “my farm stock... and this.” And he opens the door.

I get the impression that Bamford is used to doing this. There is a look of expectant amusement playing across his face as he opens the barn. I have had many friends who have been musicians over the years but never have I seen anything quite like this. From top to bottom the room is bedecked with instruments – guitars, sitars, things with strings, keyboard, Moogs, mellotrons, wind instruments, things that look more like artwork or sculpture than they do something that can make melodies.

He can tell I’m breath taken and with a hint of amusement, but mostly that sense of pride he wanders through the room showing me various things of interest. Including, most intriguingly, a handful of instruments he has actually made himself. “If you’re aware of Harry Partch, that’s the sort of thing I’m after. New sounds, unheard sounds and they can only come through unseen, previously unbuilt instruments.” He passes by large drooping frames that look more like looms than instruments. He holds up strange, prong shaped objects that seem more like pitchforks than something you can blow into. And then he finally stops at what looks like a keyboard with a box on the top.

“And this thing,” he says with a smile, pulling up the cover of the keyboard, “this is the instrument I used to create the music for The Eyes of Mr Pepper.”

He moves to the box on top of the keyboard, opens up the lid and, applying a key, winds the thing up. He connects a few leads from the box to the keyboard and after a few clicking and whirring sounds spreads his hands out, preparing to play. I will freely admit, as much as I love music, I rarely know the technical terms for what is going on in a piece of music. All I can say is that the music that Bamford is now playing is both strange and unfamiliar, yet also haunting and naggingly like something you have heard somewhere before. There is a low droning keyboard sound playing the bassline and part of a woozy, dreamlike melody and then the box itself – now humming and whirring and clicking away happily to itself – plays a second one. A strange, music box like motif. Separately the two melodies would be pretty and odd – together it’s like something from a forgotten dream.

Bamford beams with pride as he finishes playing. And then he looks somewhat lost – in reverie, in sadness, in thought. This is music that means a great deal to him. And I am about to find out just how much that is.

Denny Bamford has a curious musical pedigree. In his late teens, highly influenced by the Canterbury scene of Caravan, Soft Machine and Gong, he and his friends began to slowly build up a network of likeminded musicians and perform in village halls and country pubs. “I suppose we wanted to perform whimsical, experimental music.... but we were never quite right at it. We either overdosed on the whimsy or on the experimental. The marriage was always a little awkward!” he laughs suddenly.

Bamford did have a moment of fame though. The bands who made up the loose New Forest scene – Whittaker Fidget, Spruce Duck, Frolf and the Hounds, Zenck – began to fragment or split up. In the end there was only a handful of extant bands still going by the tail end of the sixties. And probably the most successful of these, was Continuum.

Continuum recorded four albums in the late sixties and early seventies – Please to Eat You, Verdegris Bank, The Songs of Lilith Stackhouse and Frolf! – many of which are now coveted by collectors. But the most collectible of all of them are the first two albums, where Bamford’s innovative keyboard work, and nascent skill at creating unusual instrumentation marked them out as a band that could definitely go somewhere. But at the peak of their success – “We’d just recorded our second session for Peel, so it was going well” – suddenly Bamford disappeared. And not just from the music business but seemingly from the world as a whole.

“It was 1971, I’d dreamed of making a success of music for five or six years and here I was at the cusp of success and suddenly I felt...” he pauses for a moment, visibly moved, “empty. As if there was something missing that I desperately needed to fill.”

One of the places that Continuum gigged at during those early days, was a small village tucked in the corner of the New Forest called Lower Piphill. “It’s a fairly pretty place,” explains Bamford, “but nothing exceptional. It has that weird, earthy, dank flavour that so many places in England that are based in woodland have. Something hard to put your finger on. Like it’s perpetual autumn or something. I felt... weird in that place. And the only place of any clarity when we stayed there was Mesmo Towers. And part of that was Paraflax...”

We will return soon to the subject of Xanthes Paraflax. At this juncture though, it’s worth meeting the next two people in our narrative – Tilly Bingham and Saul Baxter.

TIlly and Saul met in their late teens in their native Southampton. “How we’d never met before that fateful day is beyond me,” chuckles Baxter, an avuncular bear of a man with a bald head, rosy cheek and massive, snowy white beard. “Southampton wasn’t exactly a progressive city at that time, so I’d have thought being a fairly loud and dominant sort of chap, I’d know everyone a bit weird in the city. Apparently not. Took till I was seventeen to meet Tilly.”

“You were looking in the wrong places Saul,” cackles Tilly. “You were scanning the skies and not studying the gutters.” And she cackles. It really is a cackle as well, a rasping sound of joy and a life lived.

Saul and Tilly divorced some twenty years ago, but have remained close. “You don’t go through what we went through,” says Saul, “and not stay close. But we were more like brother and sister really. That’s what we realised.

“Just a brother and sister who happened to have slept together a few times,” cackles Tilly. This is the sort of comment she makes a great deal, I soon realise.

Their courtship was intense. They met at an open mic night at one of the more bohemian watering holes in the city. They soon realised that they knew a lot of people who knew a lot of people who knew both of them. They’d both been performing folk music for a couple of years as well. But they’d not only never met but never heard of each other.

“it seemed to be one of those things where we just kept missing each other by the skin of our teeth,” chuckles Saul. “So close so many times. But fate chucked in its hand that day in 1967 and we were inseparable.”

Both Tilly and Saul had a keen interest in the folk scene and rather than singing solo, decided to become a duet in the manner of other duos of the time such as Maddy Prior and Tim Hart. And like that duo, they eventually fell into the late sixties vogue for folk rock and formed, with a few likeminded musicians, a band called the Maundy Folk.

“We were never big or anything, but we did good business gigging around the south coast,” starts Saul, “And occasionally venturing as far as the north,” cackles his ex-wife. The way in which Bingham and Baxter finish each other’s sentences so freely shows you how close they still are. Tilly continues, “And we put out one album which is now pretty valuable to people who know no better.”

Bingham understates the case. That album, The Death of a Sentry at His Post, is now one of the most collectable of its era. Only a hundred copies were ever released and sold and, despite Saul and Tilly having “a literal shed load of copies we’re using to fund our old age”, collectors still are willing to throw extraordinary prices at it. But at the time, nothing.

“So we weren’t famous at all. We plodded away though, got a slight name for ourselves, just got about our first Peel session and then... we left the band.”

It is an echo of Denny Bamford’s story in more ways than one. One of the places that the Maundy Folk gigged at during those early days, was a small village tucked in the corner of the New Forest called... Lower Piphill. “It seemed... dreamlike” says Bingham, suddenly sad for the first time in our conversation. “A place I’d been to somehow before.”

Baxter nods. “It had an effect on us. It felt... odd and peculiar. The rest of the band were eager to get away to a festival, but Tilly and me stayed on a couple of days. Wandered about a bit. Met the locals, who were and always are, lovely. But then we found... the house.... Mesmo Towers. And... Paraflax.”

Tilly nods. “Paraflax.”

And so does Denny Bamford. We are, after all, in his kitchen at his farm. The three of them are close now, although they didn’t know each other during the peak of their musical careers. They met, however, in Lower Piphill. To be more precise they met in Mesmo Towers. And they met under the aegis of one Xanthes Paraflax...

interlude: some relevant record covers

2011-10-10T10:36:00.000-07:00

these are the record covers for the two bands mentioned in the next chapter of xanthes. they'll need a bit more of an authentic period look to them, but for the moment they'll give you something of what i'm trying to achieve with the bands continuum (prog) and the maundy folk (folk rock)... enjoy!

xanthes part two

2011-10-09T07:05:00.001-07:00

James Cazabon is one of those people who would be the first to admit they spent too much of their childhood in the seventies watching television. “I remember the thrill of the new issue of the Radio Times would be just as big as the new copy of Buster or Whizzer and Chips. Sometimes I knew what the programmes were and other times… just the picture would be enough. I mean in the case of Doctor Who the picture would be often better than the actual show. And one of those pictures that haunted me, really haunted me, was of this 1977 image of two hands spread out on a table with this weird eye motif in the middle.”

Cazabon is talking to me from his home cum office in a small Bedfordshire village. He has turned his childhood fascination into something of a job, and now does professional research work on TV history. “Just the jobbing research stuff – not having any truck with that academic nonsense. Sometimes an episode of Doomwatch is just an episode of Doomwatch you know?” he laughs.

And in his travels, whilst doing research for a history of Richard Carpenter’s seventies TV work, he came across a copy of the Radio Times with a familiar image in it.

“I guess I’d forgotten about the hands and eye picture. But when I saw it I had this massive Proustian rush – time seemed to suddenly fall back and I was eight again, longing to watch this programme. And I remember vividly I never did because of that picture. That picture of the hands and the eye gave me such vivid, vivid nightmares my parents never let me anywhere near the actual show.”

And that programme? The Eyes of Mr Pepper.

Cazabon pauses for a moment and looks out of his window. He looks to the untrained eye rather more troubled by what should be a simple television programme than he ought to be. He continues. “You see, I thought it would be easy to find a copy. I have lots of friends with lots of contacts and apart from, say, programmes we all know are missing from the archives (and even then I have some friends who know more than they should about those) I can usually get hold of what I need or want to watch. But not this. Not The Eyes.

“I mean people had heard of it. Some people had it on top of their wish list of things to find copies of. But no one knew anyone who had copies of it. And it got weirder. Another TV historian, who’s not exactly a friend but more a friendly rival, had also been looking into the show and he told me that he’d found… not so much obstruction in trying to trace the history of the thing as just a complete… absence of any information whatsoever.”

Cazabon chuckles. “Like I said, this guy’s a friendly rival you see. So I thought to myself, if he can’t find anything about this damned show then I bloody will. I can be really bloody minded about stuff when I want to be. And so I started the usual trail of information research and found… not a lot.

“First of all it was fairly obvious that most of the archives which should have contained information on the show didn’t. I usually go through the paperwork and stills archive first because they’re easier to access than the actual physical series itself. But not for The Eyes. I felt like I was in some kind of spy thriller… a massive gap where the stuff on the show should be. Literally at times. As if the box files had been taken away. As if someone had edited the micro-fiche or computer catalogues. As if someone had gone through and removed all documentation about it.

“I plugged away at that route for a couple of months, eventually obsessing over this show. All I could find were newspaper bulletins, Radio Times articles and other promotional stuff. All from the time. Since then? Not a sausage. Nothing. Not a jot.

“So then I decided to try and track down the cast and production crew. Which is where it all begins to get…” Cazabon pauses for a moment and visibly strains to find the word he is looking for. He laughs nervously. “Basically it’s like this. Up to the moment I tried to track down the people who made the show, the whole Eyes of Mr Pepper thing had been like a weird, very British spy thriller. And then it became something much darker. I’d wandered into a horror story. I was now in an episode of Tales of the Unexpected.”

xanthes part one

2011-09-29T06:54:00.000-07:00

The Eyes of Dr Xanthes Paraflax
A Peculiar Story
By
Julian Furnival

A pretty English village, snuggled deep in thick woodland. A bunch of eccentric locals who amuse and worry in equal measure. That strange young man, dressed so peculiarly and so oddly familiar. The grim faced figure of a bearded man with piercing eyes. The strange country house with such tall, tall walls. The figures whose faces can’t quite be seen as they dash to and fro in the night. Possible hints of time travel... and those eyes! Those eyes!

If you are of a certain age and grew up in Britain and have a particularly strong memory, all the above may ring some kind of bell. Hopefully those peals will lead you back to Thursday teatimes on ITV back in 1977. That peculiar music box theme tune, that opening sequence of hands and eyes moving erratically as an animated collage... anything stirring for the late thirty and early forty somethings? Would a name help? The Eyes of Mr Pepper perhaps?

The Eyes of Mr Pepper is seldom talked about these days. Yes, people of a certain age on a nostalgic journey to the past will frequently bring it up after so many drinks. And indeed, a cursory online search will reveal either a petition to release it on DVD or perhaps asking to locate a copy for personal use... but they will find it hard to do so. For a show that was considered one of the highlights of that peculiar strain of 1970s children’s television in the United Kingdom – The Changes, The Children of the Stones, Ace of Wands, The Tomorrow People etc etc – has not been seen since that initial broadcast.

Why not? There are many reasons. Neglect initially, then when it came to possibly repeat it or prepare it for home video release the slow realisation that no one could find a copy of the thing. And further to that, not even an off air recording or telesnap or audio tape version of it exists any more. And for a series that commanded a higher than average budget and such acting luminaries as Laurence Naismith, Dudley Sutton, Susan Jameson and, in a rare appearance, the charismatic Alexis Kanner of The Prisoner fame, this is highly unusual indeed.

There have been some reports of people who actively remember having made copies of the soundtrack or photographing the programme on original transmission now being utterly unable to find a trace of it anywhere. The archives have been stripped of publicity material and all that seems to remain on public record are TV listings pages and the memories of so many people of that most peculiarly memorable series.

Yet this is not even the end of the mass of oddities surrounding the series. If you try and trace the programme through its production history, you find yourself both constantly facing dead ends… and also beginning to see strange links between the people responsible for it. Are those links there or are they imaginary? What is the truth behind The Eyes of Mr Pepper?

And more importantly quite what has any of this to do with one Dr Xanthes Paraflax?

Read on, dear reader, read on!

"the eyes of dr xanthes paraflax" - a preamble (and ramble)

2011-09-28T09:38:00.001-07:00

you'd think being signed off work for depression and stress would mean i'd be easy on myself, but oh no! instead i've decided to pre-empt some sort of melancholic dip by starting now what i intended to start last week: my latest bit of writing "the eyes of dr xanthes paraflax"

before i start posting the actual story itself, i thought a little explanation to what i'm trying to achieve with it might help. the fourth issue of "the common swings" is following what is slowly becoming a tradition: not being what i've advertised on the back of the previous issue. "bunny mcsniff and bruiser mcgann" is still a going concern (as is "cosmo mandinsky" actually), but after almost nine months of continuous chugging away at one narrative with "the bombardier's eyes" what really appealled to me this time was just something a bit more spontaneous and odd... like the first couple of issues. i also wanted to continue the debt i have to j l carr and also a rather swish oddity called "the todholes aisle", a mysterious book from the nineteenth century which is a rather detailed, and lovingly compiled, private joke about a make believe family history whose author is lost to the mists of time. the idea formed to create a village - lower piphill - and have the issue as a collection of rum ephemera i could create as and when the whim took me

so that's the context of where this comes. it's one of two properly narrative parts of the issue, and one with a few connections to other projects of mine i should probably explain. firstly, the story purports to be a bulletin from the benton hoy society which is an analogue for the fortean times. benton hoy is a character in the thursday night league and is a tip of the hat to j l carr - he populated his books with a wide collection of characters who would take minor roles in one novel and then a major one in another. the books would not be connected at all, but it gave the idea of a wider universe behind the individual stories. and in the same vein, the author of this "study paper" is one julian furnival, who isintended to be an aged version of a character in my yet as unfinished first mrs bramley novel

you don't *need* to know any of this. in fact you probably shouldn#t be told all this. it should all just be left to the story itself, but if you can't show off the pointless efforts you go to in creating unecessary complexity in your body of work in your blog, then where can you?

tomorrow? the first bit of the actual story. promise

piphill progress

2011-09-21T07:39:00.000-07:00

life has been tough these last few weeks - home front and work front. i'm applying for lots of new jobs and the like, and have been more than normally exhausted. work has been ticking over for the new common swings though, but i've not really got properly into the habit of this blogging lark. to kick start it, i'm posting the postcards which will come with the lower piphill issue. so far there are eight different designs, with five copies of each. i aim to make more before it's done too. also, the current centre piece of the issue - "the eyes of dr paraflax" - is slightly overtaking the rest of the issue and so i'm going to possibly issue it as a separate issue. in the meantime though, i'll post the draft here to make sure i keep posting SOMETHING here... anyway. enough of me - let the pictures commence!

random doodlage

2011-08-16T06:05:00.000-07:00

bombardier's eyes images #2

2011-08-15T05:29:00.001-07:00

my copy of the book has now arrived! even though it's a not entirely complete first draft, i am more excited than words can adequately express about this. after a trail of unfinished novels going back years, i have now as good as finished something other than an issue of the common swings for the first time since i was 16. that was when i battered out comedy time travel nonsense "neil redburn in aulis" for my own amusement whilst waiting for my GCSE results. it wasn't very good. this probably isn't either, but it IS better. and after a few more months the serialisation and next draft will commence! HUZZAH!... so onto images now i suppose!

bombardier's eyes images #1

2011-08-12T04:48:00.000-07:00

been ill this last week, but am still trying to update this thing more regularly. as such, here are some of the chapter images i did for "the bombardier's eyes", the epic that waylaid me for so long these last few months. someone has foolishly ordered a copy who isn't me - i hope they know what they're in for. in the meantime, this is a flavour of what the next draft will be - a pastiche of old boys' magazines and the like as i serialise properly the first "thursday night league" novel

in the meantime - enjoy (sorry they're out of order. not got the hang of this blogger mullarkey yet!)

early ideas

2011-08-05T07:03:00.000-07:00

early ideas for the non bunny mcsniff project are developing slowly:

more as and when...

The Story of Horace

2011-08-04T07:11:00.000-07:00

so. i'm working on two projects at the moment. one, is by definition, a very bitty and eccentric idea which allows me to pop down the maddest of concepts as and when i think of them. but the other, tentatively entitled "bunny mcsniff and bruiser mcgann", is much more structured. it is also, to all extents and purposes, an extension of what i was trying to do with the hadrons - me having a go at children's picture books

my interest in children's picture books has been slowly but steadily developing over the last couple of years. partly it was a way of extending my interest from simply comics, to the punch cartoonists i grew up with (i was an odd child) and then onto other forms of graphic art. and also partly because i began to realise in no uncertain terms that the best picture books are among the greatest pleasures anyone of any age can have. it's been an absolute delight to uncover new and wonderful things and chief among those joys is finding something like "the story of horace"

i can tell you *exactly* where i first came across "horace". i follow a lot of children's book blogs for inspiration and ideas, and one of them posted this image below:

now, maybe i'm judging unfairly here but i suspect it takes a peculiarly uninteresting sort of person to read a page like "horace has eaten great-grandma!" with a picture of a bear nibbling at an umbrella and not be even a *bit* intrigued by what comes next

thankfully, archive.org came to the rescue. orginals of the book seem to be a bit tricky to come by (and we have heard tell of versions of it drawn by other people - my wife and i have become rather zealous in our evangelism for this book), but you can find it online here. i won't detail the plot because... well frankly by the time i have done so you could have read it and i PROMISE you i couldn't do it with the same level of wit and style and humour as alice m coats does

i will admit i know very little about alice m coats beyond what i can find online and mostly that is with regards to her more famous life as a gardener. yet she does seem to have popped out a couple of other children's books as a sideline. i've yet to find these because they're pretty much out of my price zone, but i do hope to discover them one day. but even if "horace" was her one effort in the genre, it would be enough to make her an all time hero of the form

as a child i disliked any book with the remote whiff of self improvement about it. i liked something a bit more... dark or silly or mysterious i suppose. my preferences were pretty much roald dahl, the uncle books of j p martin, the mr browser books of philip curtis, the mcgurk mysteries (the british version i hasten to add - i was mortified to find an american one in my late teens), enid blyton (but only when poking around a castle or pursuing smugglers), tintin etc - all this was what i read before the grip of sherlock holmes, susan cooper, the three investigators and countless doctor who target novelisations set in. i liked things a little off beam and any book which seemed even slightly improving or had a looming moral got particularly short shrift. i can't really remember what my picture book tastes were, but what entranced me in the ones i can remember - the alfred bestall ruperts, the what-a-mess books of frank muir and joseph wright - were again the slightly off kilter stuff: the fact that anthromorphic bears lived in happily middle class co-existence in a typical english village or the strange details in the background of the what-a-mess books. it had to be something *more* than just a simple story for me

as such i'd have loved "the story of horace". i'd have loved how the dawning reality of what the book is about creeps up on you. i'd have been fearful we were up for maximum tweeness with the family set up at first, and then slightly bemused by the sudden twists and then absolutely DELIGHTED by the outcomes. part of the joy of the book is the way coats repeats the central joke so many times, and uses her pictures to build the joke. every time you have another "incident" involving horace and the family and the dad, the joke just grows and grows. also, i adore the way in which the family genuinely don't seem to be too upset by what horace is doing - every time they approach after father has gone out hunting (even the fact father still hunts after what has happened the *last* time he left the house alone is ridiculously funny) they look just as happy as they did before. just... well... happy but one less in number. and then the wonderful understatement of how much they all "took on so"... beautiful

as much as the pictures are perfect (and they are - sparingly, beautifully drawn, all variations on what has gone before but also full of such life and humour), it's the choice of words that makes the book. "took on so" has become a catchphrase in our house, and the delightful touch of the phrasing on the last page of the book is (so beautifully phrased! coats is such a brilliant example of using sparing prose with maximum impact. if any of the text had been even slightly overcooked, the thing would collapse. it's a delicately written and drawn creation that really only works because of understatement. overstate the text or the art and it would be a lesser creation. something like "not now bernard" works because it is very much one kind of book (and drawn and written consistently in that manner) until the curveball that takes you to the end. this is what separates the wheat from the chaff, the true bits of genius from "lady milksops' magical geese" or whatever

and what can i learn from this book? that i'm nowhere near as good as coats. not even close. but it's good to have aspirations isn't it?

2011-08-02T03:20:00.000-07:00

and so just as i was wondering how to start work on the next project, simone lia reads my mind and presents us with a beginner's guide on how to draw bunnies

it's a very close fight between lia and sarah mcintyre for who's best bunny artist at the moment, but i think lia just edges it. much as i love "vern and lettuce", i never got moist at the eyes at it like i did at "fluffy" (a bit disengenuous - "fluffy" doesn't have the same anarchic genius that mcintyre does, but you get the general idea of what i'm saying...)

bunny mcsniff won't reach the heights of either, but it's good to get a bit of guidance from one of the masters

in other news: to get this blog being used a bit more, i'm going to write about children's picture books i've discovered in the last year or so to get me in the right frame of mind for the new project. first up? the best of the best - "the story of horace". keep eyes peeled...

and he's back...

2011-08-01T02:07:00.000-07:00

goodness - it's been a good seven months since i last updated this blog. there have been various reasons for this but they mainly boil down to three:

firstly i moved house, which in itself wasn't so bad as it was only two doors down the road... but still meant i have had to trim books and records and focus on housey things...

secondly, my dad's period of ill health peaked in may as he was hospitalised and eventually died. the disease - lewy body disease, a particularly nasty strain of dementia which combines alzheimers and parkinsons - claimed him in june so it's been a strange old time. i knew it was coming, but even then it's been a difficult time for me and my family

anyway

thirdly: in november i rather foolishly decided it might be a good idea to have a crack at a NANOWRIMO again. fifty thousand words in one month? easy. i had a nice, simple plot for a pulpy crime novel which i could use... what could go wrong? wel... 300,000 words later it's sort of rumbled to an end. sort of. because of the above two it's not as complete as it should be, but i took the end of july deadline offer of a free copy of a book from lulu as as good a point to finish the thing. it's about 90% finished with the rest of it in notes forms... so i know what's happening and where

"the bombardier's eyes" is now available in overwhelmingly dense lulu form, but for those sensible types who want to wait until i've taken scissors to it and pruned it down there will by the end of this hopefully be a newer, easier to deal with version. because the idea of the book is to do a sort of tribute to pulpy british writers from the beginning of the twentieth century, i intend to issue "the bombardier's eyes" in a series of pamphlets/ booklets which will be illustrated and full of diversions in the manner of the first couple of issues of "the common swings". once THAT is done, there'll be a further edit and another version, hopefully the ultimate one, which will be the end of this damnable book!

but in the meantime, if you enjoy lulu type things, go here:

http://www.lulu.com/product/hardcover/the-bombardiers-eyes/16371999

in the meantime, i'm going to hopefully spruce this blog up. i want to add more entries hither and thither and focus on it a bit more. i also have two new smaller projects i'm working on - one is a tragic children's story called "bunny mchuggles and bruiser mcgann" and the other is... a bit odd. i'll leave that til after the more normal one. it's a nice thing to think of twenty to thirty pages as your finishing point... rather than six hundred or so

madness

hope all are well!

wonderful things!

2010-12-10T13:25:00.001-08:00

so! you may be pleased to know that if you've bought a copy of ANY of the common swings recently, then the money has gone to a very good cause

from this shop i treated myself to two sets of cigarette cards - the literary pets above and the military monkeys below, and TRUST ME these are two of the most incredibly beautiful objects i have ever owned. they are almost completely the dictionary definition of aspirational for me. the attention to detail and love in these things are incredibly. i cannot recommend them enough

more when i wake up and feel properly better over the weekend (oh! and the nanowrimo has reached over 100,000 words! WOO HOO!)

review of the year: children's books

2010-12-02T01:35:00.001-08:00

my first list is children's books of the year - particularly children's picture books. this year as i've slowly developed my style of art, i've been creating a massive folder of reference images on the laptop at home. these are for inspiration and for ideas and i've noticed increasingly they're from children's picture books. i've never really considered children's picture books since i've, well, stopped being a child although i must admit i have always had a soft spot for the art. a few have made their way into my consciousness, like jane hissey's gorgeous little bear books and "not now bernard" but other than that it's just been something i assumed wasn't really my sort of area to be bothered about

until i found a copy of "george and martha encore" late last year. something about james marshall's ability to mix simple illustrations with genuinely *hilarious* stories really appealed to me and so i ended up forking out last christmas for "george and martha: the complete stories of two best friends" which is the complete output and is page for page some of the funniest stuff you could imagine. i think it's the fact marshall really does focus on the two hippos as friends - with their own particular foibles, in jokes and fall outs - that makes it work. the best story by far is one where george decides to ruin martha's dinner by telling her an "icky story". she repeatedly warns him against doing so, but he refuses to listen. she then tells him an even *worse* story which results in... oh i won't spoil it, but suffice to say it's one of the funniest single pages of a book i've ever seen. it's a thing of supreme beauty...

another christmas favourite of last year, is a bit more like a children's book rather than a picture book although it is illustrated with some of the most *gorgeous* art imaginable (and even then it's a little... rich for many children in some ways). this is "the bears' famous invasion of sicily" by dino buzzati. i'd stumbled across a couple of pages of art from this book and fell madly in love with them. and the book is *incredible* telling of a campaign by the sicilian bears against the humans who have kidnapped the son of king of the bears (and also because the winter has knocked out their food supply). unfortunately it all goes a bit pear shaped and corrupt before the seemingly utopian bear kingdom is revealed for what it really is... it's a lovely book, very funny and full of rich, mad ideas. get the copy with the lemony snicket introduction as well as it really captures the tone of the book magnificently. oh! and NEVER FORGET the glorious, glorious pictures

next up, something a bit more mordern with sarah mcintyre's "vern and lettuce". there's an argument to be made that this is the artist and writer that sort of tipped me off to giving mini comics a go again. this is because she used to have "vern and lettuce" serialised in the guardian's digest version of the lamented DFC comic at roughly the same time that audrey niffenegger's deeply tiresome "night bookmobile" was being printed in the review. one was leaden, obvious and predictable and the other... had anarchic small bunnies and a slightly overly worried sheep in it. i knew which i preferred immediately. she's been doing a lot of vaguely conventional children's books for a while now, but my heart really belongs to "vern and lettuce" because it's sweet, funny and brilliantly inventive. her blog - on livejournal no less - is also brilliant and i'm always very tempted to send her a copy of the hadrons as a sort of fan letter, but i probably never will. she's a genius though...

a bit of a classic this time. i've been slowly appreciating more and more the work of beatrix potter, ever since i stumbled a book called "the art of beatrix potter" and realised what an astonishing draughtsman she was. i mean her skills as an artist are second to none, and realising that i went back to the originals and slowly began to appreciate them more and more. but it's "ginger and pickles" that won me over to considering her as a bona fide genius. it's basically potter does satire, with the titular cat and dog running a small village shop (lots of potter cameos from classic characters from this point) which is extremely succesful purely because it's run on credit. then they try and call that credit in (pickles needs a dog licence you see) and everyone is loathe to pay up. it culminates in a change in career for said dog and cat and possibly one of the funniest single lines in the english language: "And when Mr. John Dormouse was complained to, he stayed in bed, and would say nothing but "very snug;" which is not the way to carry on a retail business." a work of genius and available here

on similar lines, but not quite a children's book, is the classic "a dog day: or the angel in the house" by walter emmanuel and cecil aldin which is basically "a diary of a nobody" with a dog. it's a spectacular bit of work, hilariously funny (witness the amount of times the dog claims to be "off his food") and really resonates with anyone with even the remotest fondness for pups. too many highlights to mention, but this is the sort of genius we're up against: "2.00 to 3.15 - Attempt to kill fur rug in back room. No good. 3.15 to 3.45 - Sulked. 3.46. Small boy comes in, and strokes me. I snap at him. I will not be every one's plaything." etc etc. it's a brilliant bit of lovingly observed comedy and, again, available here

another classic writer now, one wanda gag. i stumbled across "the funny thing" in the local antique shop and was immediately taken with 1. the title, 2. the author and 3. the artwork. and it never fails to keep up to the heady standards of those three things. bobo, the hero, lives in the mountains and jollies his day by making food for passing animals. suddenly the funny thing arrives and claims to only eat dolls. bobo thusly sets about trying to trick it into a brand new diet. it's a brilliant book, a classic example of trying to get a simple message (picky eating) into something alltogether more hilarious and creative. you never once feel you're being lectured at, but instead you're being witness to an ever escalating series of mad ideas. "the ABC bunny" is pretty great too

one more classic writer and that's judith kerr. i was always going to love the wife of nigel kneale wasn't i? and it's hard to pick just one book out of the output. probably "the tiger who came to tea" is the best of the lot, and "goodbye, mog" the most affecting (probably the best single representation of mortality in a children's book ever) but my favourite is the first: "mog the forgetful cat". i think this is because it sets up so beautifully what's to come - mog wanting an easy life, mog prone to idle dream sequences, mog eventually (and frequently by accident) becoming the hero. mog is such an expressive creation and the family are beautifully observed. i unequivocally adore all these books and cannot recommend them enough

a more modern classic now which gets in because 1. it's about jazz and 2. it's got a big monkey in it. there's definitely a slight suspicion with me about some modern children's writers that they're frustrated graphic artists going for an easy penny and selecting their most appropriately child like work and then working some rather twee narrative around the pictures. this book could be VERY close to that with it's big, modern, chunky artwork but ed vere's "mr big" works so well because it's so full of lovely, warm, slightly melancholy comedy and secondly has a great, not too cheesy or flippant moral at the end. basically mr big is a gorilla who is very lonely and can only express this through his jazz trumpeting. needless to say everyone who is scared of him in daily life feels *very* differently about him through his music. it's a lovely piece of work and the art is spectacularly unique. i can imagine dozens of rip offs of this quite easily, but the original is so good it will always stand out as a work of art

and finally? "anno's journey" by mitsumasa anno. i picked this up on saturday having vaguely remembered looking at it when i worked in lincoln and - dear god! it's a thing of serene, almost zen like beauty. it's like a tremendously slow moving, historical "where's wally" with various historical characters tucked away in the corners of these beautifully designed pages. anno wordlessly crawls through historical europe and it's such a gorgeous, gorgeous journey. these pictures are stunningly draughted and, again, you can imagine so many cheap rip offs of this style none of which could even come close to the supreme, peaceful beauty on these pages

can you tell i want to write children's picture books very badly?

2010-11-08T02:57:00.001-08:00

they're ready! issue three - in three handy formats:

£2:50 for bogstandard black and white

£5:00 for full colour with extra added spangly bonuses

and the lulu edition too. if you opt for lulu PLEASE email me and i'll send you your extra freebies from the colour deluxe edition

hurrah!

hadrons VERY SOON!

2010-10-29T13:17:00.000-07:00

variously:

1. delayed slightly because i've been sick, got better, spent that time finishing off the hadrons... and then got sick again (thanks sinusitis) HOWEVER...

2. i am now 98% finished with the hadron issues. i say 98% advisedly because i have noticed that the final draft is missing one sentence and has a few tiny formatting problems to correct. ONCE DONE then "on the hadron" is finally complete. it'll come in three editions - the simple black and white issue with colour covers (about £2), the deluxe edition in full colour with FREE second issue, "hadrons of history", a cut out cardboard toy hadron, a certificate of hadron ownership AND a bookplate. this will go for about a fiver. then there'll be the spangly lulu edition which will need a new cover doing and a certain bit of creative thought concerning how to get the "hadrons of history" issue incorporated into it. i'll let you all know as and when

whatever happens they should be ready to go by the middle of next week and the lulu edition somewhat later than that

3. this will then free me up for the NEXT couple of projects. the next issue proper is going to be "the sad story of bunny mcsniff and the terrible tale of bruiser mcgann" which will be a sort of - kind of - mentalist version of a kid's book. sort of a bit on the black side until the sudden, euphoric denouement. or that's the plan. but that will be december... probably

4. because november is nanowrimo time. and this year i'm trying to one up "boodle up" from 2005 and actually FINISH the thing. it will be called "the thursday night league volume one: the bombardier's eyes" and is a sort of tribute/ pastiche of pulp british sci fi and crime writers from the first half of the 20th century. as such the plan is that once i finish the nanowrimo - and take a month off for "bunny mcsniff" - i will start to edit and release "the bombardier's eyes" in twelve, monthly supplements "as they did in the old days". i'll illustrate it copiously AND put in odd supplemental details like essays from issues of magazines like "book and magazine collector" and "the fortean times" about characters from the story. ie make it worth your while to buy it on a monthly basis

but 5. this means - do people want to read the nanowrimo as i go along with it? do you want a blog just for it so you can read and comment as i go along? or it's own livejournal like i did with "boodle up"? any thoughts? if you just want me to forward bits as and when i go along then i'm happy to do that too

finally 6. this all keeps me nicely distracted from possibly the worst dip yet in my father's health. seriously. the conversation i had with him today was... utterly the most heart wrenching conversation i've ever had. really not very nice at all

ah well. hopefully better times next update. hope all are well

VERY imminent hadrons

2010-10-21T03:50:00.000-07:00

hadrons will be ready *next* week. the extra supplement for the purchasers of the "deluxe edition" - "hadrons of history" - is finished, and now i need to go back and tweak the main book itself and... think of an ending. i may actually now have an ending now, but it's a bit silly and odd and tricky to pull off. i also need to work on the cut out and make hadron as well for the deluxe edition. and then - i'm done! i can get ready for nanowrimo AND "bunny mcsniff"

in the meantime, here are some of the book covers - in the manner of "i evader fish" - that i've papered the endspapers of "hadrons of history" with. they've come out a little small in that volume, so this is an advance showing and an attempt to rectify tininess in the finished article

enjoy!

the city of beautiful nonsense - part one

2010-10-18T14:05:00.001-07:00

well gosh, this is one of those proper blog entries that people do with archival images and EVERYTHING

on my way to tarting up the supplement to issue three of "the common swings" (ready in the next week or so! keep your eyes peeled), i've been doing some research for victorian/ edwardian book illustration and - miracle of miracles! - i stumbled across a great favourite of mine... "the city of beautiful nonsense" by e temple thurston. it's not a great book if i'm fair. the first part of the book has some lovely moments, but it soon sort of fritters away into sentimentality and whimsy. but it's still a gorgeous book, mainly for the illustrations. i picked the book up for the title but the images - oh my! i ended up buying huge stacks of thurston books after this hoping to find equally lovely illustrations (by emile verpilleux it appears) but sadly not! ah well...

anyway rambling aside - here's the first batch of images...

hadron update!

2010-10-01T01:52:00.001-07:00

hadrons are coming on nicely - probably by the middle or end of october it'll be ready. it's coming in three different issues:

1. budget black and white bogstandard version

2. deluxe colour version, which will come with free stuff like cut out hadrons, a certificate of ownership and recently discovered historical hadron gubbins

3. the usual lulu version for the fops among you all

in the meantime, here's what will become - hopefully - the bookplate for the deluxe edition, a weirdy montage and collage of doodles from my sketchbooks i've thrown together as an experiment. i'm quietly chuffed with it, even if the blu-tac was coming off during the photocopying process:

on the way to hadrons...

2010-09-22T06:13:00.001-07:00

...this bit of silliness came to mind

The Common Swings Department of Cryptozoology and Study of Wee Sleekit Cowrin Tim'rous Beasties Present...

2010-09-14T07:16:00.000-07:00

after our summer break, here comes what comes next...

i'm still bringing stuff together and fiddling with the text and how it looks, but the common swings issue... well i guess it's issue three even though TECHNICALLY i still haven't done issue two yet... anyway. the next issue should be ready next month just in time for me to foolishly commit myself to a month of nanowrimo madness in november. so - yeah. here's a preview!

And we're back...

2010-07-28T06:42:00.000-07:00

and so are the hadrons. my pretty rubbishy response at the bradford mini zine fair knocked me down, but i'm back to hadron fighting weight. and here's a little taster...

ENJOY!

influences and inspiration

2010-06-21T13:05:00.001-07:00

it's always nice when you stumble across a cartoonist whose existence has slightly faded - british comics and cartoons are full of people who deserve full on rehabilitation and fantagraphics/ drawn and quarterly styled reprints. in every way the "world wide weirdies" of ken reid are the equal of the much more famous work of basil wolverton, for example

anyway - the most recent example of this had been something called "phoebe and the pigeon people" which was a rather sweet and lovely bit of alternative/ underground comix business from the seventies. it had a nice gentleness to the hipster humour which you usually find missing from the underground of that period. the latest find, though, is nothing short of miraculous. i bring you "reid fleming, world's toughest milkman" by one david boswell. not only does boswell's cartooning definitely appeal to me, the humour from this stubbornly pig headed anti-hero (catchphrase? "78 cents or i piss on your flowers!") is sort of the apex of the "let's repeat the same formula and see what happens" school of writing. and it does it WONDERFULLY. consider me a fan already!

2010-06-09T06:34:00.001-07:00

a preview of a work in progress:

by the way, i simply have NO idea where chess grandmaster flash came from. sorry

teaser 2

2010-05-26T03:46:00.001-07:00

another teaser to encourage you to buy a copy of "i evade fish". this is my mock up of a cover of william cobbett's political register. cobbett is a fascinating, maddening figure - a contradicting polemicist, whose opinions and deeds seemingly change like the weather. no wonder the similarly mercurial and maddening richard ingrams wrote a recent biography on him

anyway. as part of "i evade fish", i fancied making at least one cobbett joke but wasn't sure what to do with it. the gift was that once i found a copy of "the political register" online, i noticed that this particular edition was printed by one thomas dolby. the rather one note joke then sort of wrote itself

as it happens, the image resolution on this isn't that much better than the version in the issue itself - but you can just about make out most of the text this time. plus it makes it look more beat up like an old edition of the paper. or at least that's what i tell myself

(annoyingly, as a postscript, i simply CANNOT find the copy of the register printed by dolby so am now wondering whether i simply imagined it...)

2010-05-24T05:55:00.001-07:00

as a brief tempter to those who have yet to pick up the new issue of the common swings, and also as a help to those who have, this is the full front cover of an issue of the magazine's main rival "the pennywise" starring "fnord the smug methodist"

one of the reasons it's so small and unreadable in the issue is because i didn't think the art was really that great. it was an attempt to do something in the style of the "illustrated chips" or ally soper, but missed by a considerable margin. thought it may be useful to allow people to see it properly though

hope you enjoy!

inspiration #1

2010-05-20T13:45:00.001-07:00

so i''m now gearing up slowly to the drawing of "cosmo mandinsky" and i'm finding myself trying to "set the tone" for the project. usually, when i start with some sort of half arsed novel or other, i spend ages looking for visual references or music to sort of get the tonal sense of the project right. and i think this is pretty much the best way to spend the early planning stages of what, at the moment at any rate, seems to be quite a daunting project: a proper bit of sequential bit of story telling for the first time. i've been sort of splitting the narrative up a bit and thinking of the best visual references for those: photographers like henri cartier-bresson, artists like edward bawden and... well, others that i thought i'd occasionally ramble about hereabouts

i came across the current major tonal influence when listening to music actually. i've always considered brian eno's greatest record to be "before and after science", a view which i understand is something of a minority, mainly because of the way the raucous side of the album suddenly tapers off into the gorgeous, dreamier, hazy pastoral size of "spider and i" and "by this river". as far as i'm concerned, the whole of the second side of the album is one of the most glorious sequences of music i have ever heard and that dreamlike, woozy quality is something i'm trying to articulate in "cosmo mandinsky". not that i can believe for a single second that my third bit of completed work, my first attempt at a narrative bit of sequential art is going to be anywhere near as good as eno at his best, but... you've got to have a sort of target to aim at haven't you?

anyway - and i should point out at this moment that i'm rambling primarily because i've had a smidgeon too much to drink at the moment - listening to this album at work this afternoon reminded me of how gorgeous the inner sleeve art of "before and after science" is. so a bit of pottering about online later, i've utterly and totally fallen in love with the beauties of peter schmidt's watercolours. i'll not be able to approach anything this good for, god, years... but this sort of thing really drives you, you know? drives you to try and improve and strive for a way to articulate something even slightly as beautiful as these haunting, powerful images

anyway, enough of me - here's a couple of bits of brime schmidt stuff. i urge you to scurry to the webpage and read more about this fascinating man...

2010-05-17T12:44:00.000-07:00

lulu "i evade fish" is ready! hurrah!

2010-05-17T06:12:00.001-07:00

on the back cover of issue one of "the common swings" i proudly advertised issue 2 - "whatever happened to cosmo mandinsky?" and, i promise, it will be what issue 2 is *properly*. however the second thing to come out under the title "the common swings" is an all together odder beast, a rummer state of affairs known only as "i evade fish"

my thinking for doing this is threefold. firstly, issue one was very much trial and error and done without realising i could access a lot of word packages through work through citrix for free. instead it was a case of printing stuff off, rescanning it, printing it off *again* and rescanning it once more every time a change needed to be made. hence the really faint reproduction of bits of it and why i had to print it all off in colour (so you can read the thing!). now i've done this one in black and white, fiddled with word and photoshop a bit and have been able to do it *so much cheaper*. so part of why i wanted a risk free issue 1.5 was to fiddle with the format a bit, quite literally

secondly, and why it was 1.5, it's a sort of clearing house of silly ideas before the meat of issue 2. it's 1.5 partly because "cosmo" will be issue 2, but partly because it's very much the companion piece to the first issue. the conceit of a magazine that has existed in a hinterland of eccentrics and oddness is run with here, and it's allowed me to indulge in what's basically a slightly stress free world of william cobbett jokes rather than pushing myself in the way "cosmo" will. it's the second thing to be produced because, well, ten years was a long time to wait for the first and i wanted something immediate and more easy for me to produce to keep up the momentum. *now* i know i can produce something in a pretty much three month turn around, i don't have to worry so much about finishing "cosmo". also, i've experimented a bit and can really push myself with the second issue. if that makes any sense (which i doubt!)

and finally... i was showing the first issue to some friends, and one of them (the wife of my old RE teacher of all things!) immediately said, "goodness, it's really like j l carr isn't it?" which - well - pretty much made my year. carr, as many of you may know, was primarily an author, most famously of "how steeple sinderberry won the FA cup", "the harpole report" and - adapted into a pretty okay, but not great film - "a month in the country". after wodehouse, he's probably my favourite author. but he also had a second, far odder career. he printed his own pamphlets and maps and other odd ephemera, selling them from the back of his house. by day he was a headmaster in kettering, and the rest of the time a really passionate producer of self published ephemera. key among these are his little directories and maps, both of which are filled with loving asides and eccentric potted biographies of strange characters and events. i have the yorkshire one - a signed and numbered edition no less! - above my desk in my study/ book dumping area and it's one of my most prized material possessions. anyway, when daphne suddenly saw the link with carr, my heart skipped a beat. truly a bit of praise! a pioneer in self publishing and an unruly genius. see byron rogers' masterly biography for more. anyway. "i evade fish" is very much my tribute to his masterpiece, "carr's dictionary of extraordinary cricketers" even if it isn't worth an ounce of that bit of true genius

"i evade fish" will be available later today from the blog and lulu. i'll keep you posted as to issue two as it progresses too!

2010-05-11T10:54:00.000-07:00

yowser! i actually own the spangly lulu edition now and... it's gorgeous! i can't believe for a single *second* that i was responsible for this thing... madness!

issue 1.5 should be ready by the end of this week. shall keep all posted!

2010-05-07T12:41:00.000-07:00

the first draft is done! just need to proof read and tidy up - should be ready by next week! just in time to cheer all up from tory hell!

2010-04-30T06:44:00.001-07:00

a review and a preview!

2010-04-26T13:33:00.000-07:00

the first review is up! - and it's pretty much doubled the hits for the site when you google "the common swings"

"i evade fish" should be ready in early may. here's a quick preview:

firstly, an extract from the adventures of "carl the splendid horse"

secondly, let's see what's on at the wisbech hippodrome shall we?

2010-03-23T13:15:00.000-07:00

BEHOLD

the spangly proper lulu edition is ready! TREMBLE WITH FEAR!

2010-03-17T02:16:00.000-07:00

i've always slightly been in awe of artists with notebooks. you see on their blogs all these brilliant, brilliant images cast off seemingly so easily and think when you look at your own page of nonsense... how can they be so effortlessly gifted?

well... i am now offering for the first time pages from my own notebooks which are effortlessly... copied from things on the internet. effortlessly... filled with lame puns and half baked ideas. effortlessly... full of much effort and hopefully belying the fact i've only copied select pages from a bulging notebook the rest of which is frankly all pretty much nonsense. but i hope these bits are fun at any rate... enjoy!

Some Correspondence:

2010-03-12T03:00:00.000-08:00

Dear Minty Puffgoat,

I am interested in obtaining a copy of Modern Dissonance July 1976 issue - Apparently there was a fascinating interview with the reclusive triangle player Horst Fuerhereren. It detailed his life growing up in Ogburg to dwarf parents, his longing to be taken seriuosly on the Triangle club circuit, the heady days playing to sold out railway waiting rooms in Scotland and his eventual decline into mediocrity and appearances on "Ready, Steady Slow", the radio programme for people who struggle to hear quickly.

Let me know if you have it

Philip M Smith

***

Sir,

I find myself somewhat bemused and a not a little offended by your correspondence date 11th March 2010, 13:57. I do not wish to decry a new acquaintance as a practical japester of the sort much in vogue with the lower classes, but I find myself unable to accept any other reason for your extraordinary missive.

Firstly, as any collector of Modern Dissonance will know, there was never a July 1976 issue. This was due to an ill fated attempt in March of that year to rebrand the journal as Modern Assonance magazine. Similarly anyone aware of this sorry incident in Lord Beany's publishing career will know that in October 1976 the magazine reverted to the original name after legal wrangling involving the well know children's character, and property of the ever litigious Milk Marketing Board, Gustav the Assine Ant.

Secondly, as any one with even the most basic knowledge of triangle players of the 1970s will know, Horst Fuerhereren had been drummed out of even the most lax of triangle playing unions after his infamous "going electric" performance at the Newport Pagnell Folk Festival in 1975. His experiments with electric and steam powered triangles rightly caused a fury within the triangle playing community and he is now considered a complete outsider, performing in small scale fusion bands with a pick up band including "Admiral" Barquo Wemslow on spoons and Golden Barry Selmwig on the alpine horn. This sort of nonsense is frankly frowned upon by Associated Mallards and it is of no surprise to us that the trio - under the name "Taste the Wind" - have been recently sponsored by, who else!, the dreaded Milk Marketing Board.

We are however about to issue a part work for the series "Ready Steady Slow", which comes with free iron girders with which you may erect the famous sound trumpet of Dr Jonty Q Vorhelm over the course of the magazine's publication. Once erected, it will provide a handsome feature for any house with which to play again and again cherished episodes of "Ready, Steady, Slow" - including pre-electric Fuerhereren.

Regards,

Minty Puffgoat

***

Don't hold out on me - I see Horts's rival, Mitchell Wanger (The Triangle-Banger) has got to you too. Why oh why can't he excel in the Triangle sphere through sheer persistence and ingratitude? Why must he poison and defile those around him with spurious lies and angry denials? Horst clearly has the most talent I've seen for a long while, and so I implore you to issue this issue to me so that we can settle this issue without further issue. I have friends in spry places you know...

Philip

***

Sir,

Experimentation is all well and good in theory but in practice? I mean who regards such records as Thaddeus Tamquist's "A Hootenanny of the Aeons" anything like as highly as Braden Whiskyfeet's masterful opus "Triangles, Prisms, A Kitten and Lord O'Reilly's Backpack?" I cannot help that such experimenting gadabouts as Fuerhereren, Tamquist, Zak Harare and the Rhubarb Forcer and the Anthony Trollope Blues/ Triangle Marauders seem so willing to disguise musical inability with shock tactics and "experimentation". Wanger, Whiskyfeet and Buster Merryfield's Button Boys are the true home of traditional triangle playing - and long may they do so!

Yours etc,

Minty Puffgoat

***

Dear Minty, the absurdity of your thinking re the triangle music art form offends all but the puniest of minds.I am amazed you can even find the right kind of wax for your moustache in the morning, or that you have ever conversed with the legendary Horst, because frankly Sir, you are to Horst, what acorns are to figs.

I bid you good day.

Philip

(thanks to Phil Smith for this)

the first sale!

2010-03-09T01:18:00.000-08:00

my first sale! (thanks jo and dan!)

a little history

2010-03-06T14:39:00.001-08:00

so... a little history

some twelve years ago now, a friend at university played to me with visible glee a rather nondescript flexidisc he'd found lurking in a charity shop. it was put out by the open university, britain's premier distance learning organisation, and on first listen seemed to be little more than a jolly, if rather bizarre, series of folk songs for children. but then... this one singer came on who just seemed to be *not quite right*. there wasn't anything discernibly wrong with him, but he just sounded... a little too severe, a little too testy, a little too grumpy and even a little too camp to pass as harmless comedy fluff. his handful of songs stood out for this faint air of menace, giving off this image of a man who probably believed himself to be a born educator and entertainer for children but deep down probably felt he was slumming it. and the apex of this record, the most bizarre and unsettling moment of them all, was a folk song called "we will go to the common swings". certainly it wasn't any kind of folk song i'd ever heard of before, but what seared it into my mind on first play was how sinister the man made these common swings sound - so that you spent the whole duration wondering whether it was a location or simply a class issue

i taped the record (stupidly fiddling with the speed every now and then because i foolishly thought this would make it funnier - nothing of the kind. it ruined the thing really) but have long since lost it. but that one song... that one vivid and peculiar song has never left me. the image of "the common swings" became so vividly bizarre and unusual, that i sort of co-opted the title as to be used for an ongoing project of uncertain content. at first it was a fanzine, based solidly on my view that there was nothing funnier than very tenuous puns on rock stars and british comic characters from the 1930s to 1950s. that died on the vine. then it was to be a webpage of some description, again with vague puns and badly written reviews of whatever enthused me that day. that vaguely struggled into being for a few weeks and then, similarly, died a death. then it was a more general thing for a while - an aim to be spontaneous and just jot down a week's worth of ideas and have some product at the end. it became soon very apparent that i didn't do spontaneity very well. so that died a death as well (although i do have a lot of it still lurking around the place. it's very odd and seemingly 70% obsessed with the idea that jandek is intrinsically a very funny subject for comic strips. worry not - they won't be seeing the light of day in any hurry). and then it just became... well, basically a stick to beat my own back with. this looming title of never discernible content that i just never finished. at all. ever

and then blow me down. if i didn't go and complete something. various little amusements all seemed to come together and as it was basically ten years since i first had the idea to do something under the title of "the common swings", it was wheeled out again. but this time... this time, it's actually finished. something special. something tangible. something you can hold in your hands and read - well less read, more squint - at your leisure. and here it is. for you. to enjoy, or at least gaze at quizzically for as long as you see fit

i hope you enjoy it

and as a rather nice coda to this story, the woman i get a lift home with from work was telling me about a month or so ago of an unusual record a friend of hers had picked up. she knew i liked my odd records and thought i might be interested. some sort of open university flexidisc of undetermined origin with strange, unsettling folk songs for children on it... needless to say once i get my hands on it, i'll be ripping it to mp3 so you call join me on a trip to the common swings

soon to come!

2010-02-10T11:23:00.000-08:00

i'm new to this non livejournal blogging lark, so i'll tread gently for now - but soon i'll post the details of the first issue of "the common swings" and how to get a copy. plus, a little background on the long, laboured history of production. oh and some random silliness too...