i really just don't know (box of crap)

So you remember the big box of crap? I got to a certain level in it and I was like, OK that'll do (pig). But today I was a bit gripped by a checkout fever, for instance, I threw away a few jumpers that 'the cat' had clawed up (they were old anyway) and some shirts and shoes, etc, into the brotherhood bin. Then I thought I'd tackle the box of crap a bit more, and found a lot of (bizarre!) blank A4 paper, and a bunch of unopened mail (bank statements, etc) from about ten years ago, and old train tickets and receipts - all very throwawayable even if they hadn't been on that thermal paper that rendered them virtually unreadable. Anyway then I found the above - the complete layout of a comic book with two stories, one by me (done in, lol, MacPaint or something similar) and one by Gregory Mackay I am a bit blown away that I actually got Gregory to donate or create something especially for a comic book... it's very cool. But did I ever publish the fucking thing? Seriously did I? There must have been some copies but then what happened? This comic book has everything but a front cover. I must burrow down into the crap a little more and maybe a finished version will be there. I should print it up and make it the only thing available on a website. That would be hilarious. 

By the way those Fastidious Frog comics totally wrote themselves, which was a bit scary really.  
 

rainbow coalition

Poor old Rainbow, no doubt the delight and even passion of millions of Empire children particularly at its 1920s peak, and today conspicuously unable even to get someone to write a wikipedia page for it (though it is in this list where we see it existed 1914-1956 and it is discussed here). Presumably it was called the Rainbow because, whereas many comics were still utterly black and white, it had a colour cover (I think that's all it had but maybe there was some spot colour inside). How the little ones must have chuckled with joy when they saw a publication with a range of colours on it, like, you know, real life. Except how grey and sombre was their real life really. 

Anyway I am interested in the way that the Empire and race (-ism) were reflected in popular publications of this nature in the first half of the 20th century (and even beyond) in part because of my long ambition to write about Colonel Pewter in Ironicus, so when I was looking for something else entirely in my bookshelf this morning my '1925' (would have come out in 1924, dated for the year ahead) Rainbow annual caught my eye - it's in really poor condition, and also, it's fascinatingly on the nose in other ways. Let's get the worst one out of the way first, at least I think it's the worst:

I'm sorry but what I really want to do is get that machine that not only takes you back 96 years in time but also turns you into a fly on the wall with a brain big enough to understand human language and to resist being swatted, so I can hear the discussion about this two-frame comic strip and how it was conceived and the end product received by the editors. I can't even begin to imagine. Like most English comics from, you know, 1900 to whenever Leo Baxendale showed up,* I am pretty sure no-one ever laughed in any way at any of this shit. The casual racism was clearly not even remarkable to anyone, but was there some discussion perhaps about the appropriateness or wisdom of calling a character like this 'Nanny' considering all decent English children were assumed to have a nanny, and wouldn't this lead to a certain amount of disrespect to nannies? 

To be honest my main take home reading this now is: what became of the big bird? Was it stuck there forever to die? The other question is, why doesn't Nanny speak in that patois so often attributed to people of colour in these kinds of portrayals? That is really, really interesting to me and I'd love to know what the background to that decision was. Because it suggests on some weird level, to me anyway, that Nanny while obviously being a figure of fun and, I guess, derision, is also a little girl (?) like any other and not to be othered by her speech (I mean she is othered in other ways but her fine English subverts that somewhat, in my opinion). Indeed, the 22 words/four sentences attributed to Nanny here, though simple, at least don't feature that parlous grammar error of the shitty 'it's' for which I guess the buck stops at a bad typesetter/bad proofreader, if these publications were proofed.  

Next example: I'm intrigued by this household

I'm guessing these people (eg 'Gretchen') are somehow derived from The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls, which I had a facsimile copy of at some time in my life and which I have to say is a charming book in many ways. I don't know enough about these characters/their world to be certain who lives in the house, but it does appear it's a kind of share house where girl dolls and boy toys (and a parrot) cohabit.  I'm assuming it's a pretty sexy arrangement worthy of a late sixties movie/ late 70s sitcom/ Helen Garner short story but that's my upbringing. 

Marzipan, a magician with prodigious powers residing (I gather) in a candy-cane/walking stick wand which can make things bigger or smaller, is to me the most interesting character. It's the fine line trod here between a caricature of blackness with all its underlying fear and ridicule, with the fear, I guess, of introducing any style of talking, other than the English spoken by George V, into the family living room. 

There is another story facing this one across the pp. 34-35 spread in which Marzipan, wandering the streets, encounters a naughty boy playing with a hoop rather than come in to be put to bed by 'Mary' (surely the maid or even the Nanny, obviously not his mother); 'and off he ran, the naughty boy'. 'You must learn to do as you are told, Johnny' says Marzipan, touching the hoop with his wand to make it so big that Mary can pull Johnny, inside the hoop, into the house. 

'Marzi' is a second-string character to Tiger Tim and the Bruin Boys, who were the main stars of Rainbow. They are a whole extra problem for anyone interested in colonial representations, being as they are students of Mrs Bruin's jungle school (are there bears in the jungle? Well... obviously yes!). There is a story in this annual where Marzipan and Tim et al interact, and magic, fun, larks and corporal punishment ensue, ending rather boringly with Marzipan promising to come and watch Tim and the Bruins play cricket, then doing so. Once again, Marzipan is himself entirely benign, but also an adult with power (not just magic power, but a kind of banal authority) who speaks in the most white, middle class way imaginable: 'I hope they will beat Mr. Lion's school at cricket, because they are nice boys. I will come and see them play,' he tells Mrs. Bruin on p. 7 (she calls him 'Mr. Marzipan', incidentally).  I will put aside the fact that the 'boys' have been anything but 'nice' up to this point in the story, it's not important, take my word for it they have been little jerks for three pages (they audaciously demanded Marzipan hand over his magic wand, which I admit they may not have tried on a white man, but by the same token - they are animals from the jungle, and yes, this is where it gets too hard to make a real pronouncement on what's going on). 

Look there is probably even more extraordinary nonsense in this book, the problem is it is a slog, dull but also dense in the weirdness of the assumptions and ideas and the suggestion that nursery rhyme characters are funny or engaging, and all the tropes that no-one surely gave a loose root about even in 1924 let alone any time since. However, one last thing, when we're looking at certain representations, I mean I can well understand that golliwogs were a benign, 'safe' interpretation of blackness in a white colonial system, so I'm not confused, exactly, (although: Marzipan is not a golliwog, clearly, but a powerful free agent - was that in itself meant to be amusingly bizarre???) but it is in any case interesting to me that on the cover we find 29 figures, 13 human(oid) to 26 animal (did someone insist on that 1:3 ratio? It's hard to imagine they didn't, particularly considering the Dolliwogs' parrot friend is absent! Was Foxwell paid per character and 40 went into a higher pay grade?) and of those 13 human(oid) creatures, there are 3 females to 10 males (this is a guess, some I'm not sure about, but when in doubt I'm assuming male). It is clear that the teddy is completely naked, I am going to suggest so too is the pig on the left of the turret and maybe the little dog** on the far left. Everyone else is very clothed, including the parrot right at the front with a pair of trousers Donald Duck would have killed for (and spared us all a lot of embarrassment seeing his big hairy duck dick swinging about but I guess that was the character). But perhaps more interestingly, there is a lot of racial/ethnic characterisation there. I don't know who the figures are looking out of the window at the lower right hand side of the castle, but I do know they are meant to be Asian in some way. At least one of the Dolliwogs along the top row of the castle (I guess it's Gretchen) is supposed to be Dutch. And, of course, we see four stereotypical black caricatures, including Marzipan very prominent on the right in the central turret.   

I'm going to leave it to you to figure out (I think it's partly a matter of personal opinion and not really clear) which characters are looking us directly in the eye, and whether that is significant. But as you can see, one of the key Dolliwogs is flying the flag for the future.  

I mean, everything's significant about all of this, and also, nothing is. 

*1953

** Fluff, seen here with his owners Peter and Pauline 'The Two Pickles'. I'll spend another two hours another day picking them to pieces. 

more sketchbooks

The world is riddled with horrific events, though also some people are having a really good time and think life is OK. I have been looking through another sketchbook. It perturbs me to realise how many graphic novels I have started and not finished. In many cases I have done a lot more writing in sketchy form than the finished art. Here is one about Winky Pinstripe who was the character I invented when I was at university as a mature age student and finding it a compelling but in some minor ways disturbing experience, particularly the hormones in the air but also I guess it was the first time I was thinking (and I was late to come to this opinion because I was in my late 20s) 'young people's music is actually often shit'. So Winky was this aspirant singer in a grunge band, who I could poke fun at a lot because, well, he clearly had no idea about anything. There was a small degree in which he was a version of myself ten years earlier - he was embracing everything - but the thing I really liked (and like - which is not to say I think it was brilliantly successful) about these stories was that everyone was equally ridiculous. For instance, Winky only had to set himself up as some kind of 'rock god' and lots of other people took him at face value, and he got a lot of kudos and sex. For all that, though, he was often shown up and tricked and was shitted on from a great height, but he tended not to realise. I talk about these comics in this way and make them sound great but I think in most cases I didn't get the full message across or exploit the whole thing to its nth degree as I should or could have. A lot of people seemed quite perplexed by the WP strips and there is the possibility that they weren't that funny. There is also the possibility that they were too grumpy-old-man (before that concept properly existed) or that I didn't really understand what I was parodying; that's quite possible. Someone I was close to at the time who found the whole WP universe highly disturbing used to try and persuade me to make the whole story about Winky's guitarist and long-suffering friend Mal who would be revealed to be a good and valid person. In one sense I was already doing that - he was a kind of alternative version of Winky's 'fanboy' thing and much more levelheaded, a kind of Andrew Withycombe type, but I didn't want to do comic strips about wonderfully neutral people doing good things - it seemed to lack drama.

Here is a picture of Winky which I drew but plainly didn't know what to do with, it's very weird, I don't know what I was thinking, he has some model jungle animals. It looks like I was planning to put something on that television screen. He's not sitting right in that beanbag, really, which is possibly another reason why I abandoned whatever I was thinking of. Here is a comic strip I did early on about him, sadly whatever I was planning for the words they are lost.

This sums up the Winky world fairly accurately, it was quite gross, clearly he is having some kind of thing with a schoolgirl. I think I spent more time on the border than the actual comic. I came across another strip that was incomplete where I think the girl must have dumped him. I am sure he bounced back.



These are some pages from a work that I apparently titled Sydney Novel. Honestly I have no idea what I was thinking about when I did this, but it seems to link a few ideas I had already worked out and maybe I was going to try and rehash some shorter Winky stories into a longer work. There are at least six pages. The one with the girl playing drums I was particularly pleased with and still am, as you might be able to see through the pixels I really went to town with the liquid paper on that. This was all from about 1994 and it's pages 1, 2 and 6 (I know the last one is labeled '7' but trust me).

After I abandoned Winky as a downer (more or less; I started work on a strip about five years ago where he had become, well, exactly what people like him would become, a straight upper middle class pain in the arse who pined for the old days) and moved on to Fastidious Frog who was in one of the drawings I scanned yesterday - the incomplete page with the wonky wheel. I found the whole of that story, actually, it is about night soil collection and it is sort of amusing. Here is another failed or incomplete or whatever page from that project. It is quite cinematic, if you want to read it that way.
I suppose as I have been sitting here scanning I have been thinking, wow, this is all a bit self-indulgent, but then I also have to think, if you can't be self-indulgent on your own blog... well, you have to be self-indulgent on your own blog, don't you. Anyway, I'm not the one who said all media had equal value; I only know my blog is better than Andrew Bolt. (I don't just mean better than his blog, but better than him).

So, here is one more notebook thing, like all of the above I have no recollection of drawing it or where I was headed with it. It is the central section from a nearly page-long strip that carries on in much this vein. Obviously I changed pens between these two frames so who knows? There might have been two years between drawing what's on the left and what's on the right, or two minutes. Not that this is valuable in terms of 'understanding' what might even be regarded as misogynist silliness (but only silliness).
Alright that was a bit crude, I'll go and do something constructive now, so should you OK.

rooney

jan

obviously i didn't really finish this one, or perhaps i finished before the end.

alan bird

found inbetween pages of an old sketchbook. click on it.