So I finally got all the jpgs in order and sent the link to Steve who came back with the usual Steveish questions which were all eminently sensible and good examples of why he's the best editor I've ever had the pleasure of working with, by far (also the best publisher but that's not relevant at this point). One of his questions was: he wanted the chapters to each start on a right hand page and all of them 'naturally' fell as such except for chapter 5, so I thought, OK I'll add another page to chapter 4.
In one sense I don't care if there's a blank space between the end of chapter 4 and the beginning of chapter 5, but I think if you have no blank space up till then, the inclusion of a blank space looks like it's meant to mean something - 'pause for effect' or similar - and I don't want that. Also, I am kind of aware that the whole thing is kind of breakneck (if I do another one of these, I'm going to think a lot more about pacing) which maybe is not the worst thing in the world, but considering I'm creating a universe so to speak (as pretentious as that sounds) I could do worse than put some context in. So I decided to do a page explaining Billy's world as a Quiglet devotee, and have a little look at how he keeps the flame burning.
To be honest this hurt a little because it leans somewhat towards an element of my own personality that I try to suppress. My father's father was a hoarder/collector, of a range of what now seems like a very unimaginative array of items (stamps, coins). I really feel a bit ashamed, sometimes, of my records and books, and many other things I continue to own only for sentimental reasons (usually, that someone I value gave them to me). I don't really have a lot of 'collector's items' kind of things, or if I do, they're just weird tchotchkes accumulated randomly and gathering dust. I was going to draw Billy dusting his Quiglet memorabilia but then decided it needed to be more everyday and not so fetishy.
This page is I guess sometime in the early oughties (so for what it's worth Billy is in his mid-late 20s and Elyse, who he is now living with, is in her mid-late 30s). I spent two seconds worrying about what a 2000 (say) TV looked like and what a 2000+ computer looked like (but Billy is now using Elyse's old Apple Mac there, for some reason).* The bottom left panel is him writing an irate email or blog entry or something, in response to some idiotic mistake he's identified in the book he read in the top right hand panel. I don't think he's likely to be writing to the actual author, just an inchoate cry to the universe.
Just to point out the bleeding obvious, the clock with Quiglet antlers for hands (I guess I will have to make the vertical hand bigger than the horizontal) looks kind of cool at 3 o'clock or 12:15 but most of the rest of the time it surely looks terrible, almost painful, imagine what 20 to 7 looks like, argh.
* I'm trying not to try hard to be true to a historical timeline, it's not that important, anyway, appliances/technological items have a lifespan. If Billy's using a 90s Mac in 2005, that's not ridiculous. I used a 90s Mac until 2001, 2002 or thereabouts, at least, I remember buying the replacement in 2001.
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