streaming through a shameful window

My second graphic novel is taking me years - years! - to complete, and that metaphor about pulling teeth, well, would be too much because it's not painful exactly, for me or anyone, but it is arduous. As you can perhaps see in the above the folding table has an overly white top, that's because I turned the picture upside down while I was doing the grass to get that good grass stroke, but because it was upside down I thought the tabletop was blank space but it wasn't (so I had to use liquid paper on it). Anyway, I don't want to give away any of the salient points of the story, I will just say that one strand, which is just incidental, is the song everyone's singing here, which is called 'Monument',* which is kind of the 'radio hit' of the early-2000s band the Waving Sticks, which the novel is essentially about, only the text of the song (like, I think, all the songs) is stolen from a small press poetry magazine published in the 1950s by the grandmother of the main songwriter of the band. So he kind of 'writes' these songs, very literary, but no-one realises (or cares?) that he has purloined his material. 

Now 15 years later the drummer of the band, who was unceremoniously ejected from it but for some reason holds no grudge on that front, periodically has parties where she plays the song on her ghetto blaster and makes her friends sing along to it. I suppose that sounds a bit dictatorial - I don't know anymore. I must have written the script for this years ago, though I'm still tweaking it as I go. The above picture was drawn this afternoon and I am not unpleased with it, though it could have been better (everything can always be so). 

It is not the case that I have only drawn 31 pages of the book, of which there are to be 200, as there are some other sections I've completed, ages ago, but also, though I have done most pages up to p. 31 there are still a few I haven't done yet for various reasons. One is that the script has called for two characters to kiss passionately and their head shapes just don't seem appropriate for kissing anything, though I am hoping that I can convey at least the impossibility/improbability/difficulty of the action. 

The Waving Sticks was a name I made up in the mid-80s when I was living in London and I was really irritated by the habit of London scenesters of claiming new bands, who had barely done anything, as the greatest thing ever. I published a fake fanzine making a big thing of the Waving Sticks. To my great pleasure towards the end of my time in London one of my friends came over to me at a Wire show at Hammersmith... Hammersmith something, and said 'theres's someone here with a Waving Sticks t-shirt' - actually, it wasn't. They were wearing a Big Stick t-shirt with a jacket so you could only see the 'G STICK' part of it. Great accidental illusion. 

* This is about all we get to read of the actual poem 'Monument', though it is apparently very daring if not obscene. One reader finds it extraordinariliy liberating.