en route to complete destruction

The Shiel St building when I passed it last night. Not entirely demolished just yet. In other news (see below) I have been asked to revisit an old character and last night you know I was finding it really difficult to get into because I made the classic mistake of having a few good ideas which I am now wedded to but I either didn't consider how to put them together or I did and have forgotten. So we'll see where this ends up. Things like this usually take on a life of their own. 

I'm going to have to get him into some other clothes (or naked) soon because I'm already sick of that cable knit jumper. 

wash, rinse, delete

...or perhaps wince, delete I don't know. 

I have just gone back in time ten years deleting 5000+ emails most of them junk from my first, largely now ignored, gmail account. As I have explained here before, I set up this blog using that email account and as far as I understand it that is not transferable - i.e. I will have to keep that email account forever, if I want to keep this blog going. But that doesn't explain the current weird problem which is that after an update a month or so ago my computer has decided that that old email address is what I want when I select gmail. It isn't. But it always comes up as the default, until I log out and select the tab that takes you to other possible gmail addresses - including the newer one, incidentally labelled 'default'. 

So I keep landing on my old address and seeing thousands of random junk emails so this evening, as a palate cleanser between marking first year students' work, I decided I'd delete some. This turned into a bit of a campaign and I got rid of many. There were quite a lot of emails from old friends in there who hadn't realised they were writing to an old address, and possibly wondered why I had ignored them, but they are all people I still know/consider friends, so it can't have been that much of a disaster. Although that said I didn't read them all, just skimmed. There were messages and/or relics from people who have since died (by 'relics' I mean there was a time, seemingly now passed, when every time a fb friend launched a campaign or petition or something, you'd get a gmail notification of it; so one person in particular whose funeral I was remembering only last week, was heavy on the campaigns in or around 2014 or so. That's just one example there were a few. And a lot of people as well who I don't talk to anymore and am pleased that's the case... 

Apropos of nothing except it's Sunday night, I'm kind of mentally bereft after marking student work, it feels like voices in my head, here are a few more old drawing bits and bobs from various times:

sentimental jamboree #2

A few more interesting bits and pieces:

I don't recall at all what I did this for, though I am pretty certain there was never any music of any sort to go with it. There were quite a few stories about Winky as singer in the band Long Pig. I think there was also a boofy boy bass player in those stories, or maybe a male drummer to replace Melissa. I'm a researcher on my own long-lost output lol. 

I do not know what I was driving at here but I note that Winky in the first frame is taking the same attitude as I take to beer. It hasn't happened yet. I have no recollection of whether 'shit-lipped' was a term I heard or whether I just made it up. It's in the Urban Dictionary and ostensibly either means someone who 'talks shit', someone who likes shit around their mouth, or a practical joke on someone who's passed out. In every way, classy. 

In a manner of speaking, the Winky world was one of eternal possibility, and I think I did conceive of one strip where he was much older, had children and stuff, how much of it I got into I don't remember. But Fastidious Frog was a much more enjoyable character to work with. This is a page that I drew and then rejected a redrew later, I think, because the last frame was rubbish (the wheel for instance). I don't seem to have any other FF things to hand. But, you know, if Winky wrote himself, Fastidious Frog was beyond that. I could sit around extrapolating FF stories all day. One good thing about him was he talked all the time so you didn't have to spend time trying to figure out drawing stuff, you could just put his head in the corner and fill the frame with his speech/thoughts. This is not an example of that but just take my word for it. 

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.  
 

box of crap - treasure #1

The box of crap included a sketchpad with almost all the pages torn out, except this beginning of a comic strip. 

fastidious frog

The good old days before blogs were invented and you had to do comics to tell people how you felt. 1998 I had been back in Melbourne for a couple of years and at the tender age of um 33 I thought it was fine for me to be rude about the scene. (Bindi were a band who I don't really remember, sorry Bindi, though I'd love to hear either of their releases, the cassette EP with 'Purified Arse' on it or the one vinyl artefact, 'Crazy Bitch'). I had nothing against Bindi in fact I possibly even liked them. The meaning of the third last frame is lost to me now, sorry. 

Fastidious Frog here is not being at all fastidious, just an egotistical pissant, pissanting on his loyal acolyte from a great height. I have to say even though I'm me, or I was this person, however you want to put it, I do like the drawing here and I'm annoyed I can't do it this well anymore.