what goes around comes around

In the late 70s-early 80s I started to get into the mainstream media in minor ways. My uncle Paul got me to write a book review for the Sun, which he worked for at that time, of Leo Baxendale's Willie The Kid Book which by the way I still have enormous fondness for (and Baxendale himself, what a wonderful generous man and an extraordinary artist). (One of those people whose influence is far and wide and a billion people don't even realise the genesis of the humour-aesthetic that infuses their life, though mind you, he was in part at least relaying I suppose The Goons and related zany radio shows). (But they weren't so visual). 

Then somehow, but no-one knows how, I started drawing comics for Willo Papers, which was a really terrific comic book that was coming out of Adelaide (not exactly mainstream, but it took me to the mainstream after a fashion). Michael Kneebone ran it and his own drawings proliferated in it. From that, oddly enough, in 1983 I had a strip included in Phil Pinder's Penguin Book of Down Underground Comix. Honestly, it wasn't one of my best and I think it was probably chosen for all the wrong reasons, and it was called The Brady Bunch Kill Each Other. Looking back on that (not literally looking at it, though I might have a copy of the book somewhere because I was gifted one, I think by my mother, a few years ago) the strip was the kind of thing I would come to resent not long after as so unsubtle, but what can I say, I was 16 or whatever when I did it and 18 when it came out and didn't give much of a shit either way I suppose. I did not see drawing comics as my future (I was easily the least skilled artist in the whole book, yet ironically almost certainly the only one still producing comic work in 2020 with perhaps the exception of Fred Negro). 

Anyway, it was a long way into my work on the graphic novel before I realised that what I was doing, in working up a super-long narrative about sitcoms/soap operas and their impact on 'real life' of both viewer and creator, was a kind of long-car-crash version of The Brady Bunch Kill Each Other. Hence the obscure, but not out of place, reference above. 

I'm still on track, I would say, to finish this thing in time, cleaning up and shading pages in photoshop is taking time but I am more or less succeeding in doing about 10 pages a day. I am keeping the main figures, largely, black and white and giving various shades of grey to the backgrounds (the above people are not black and white but grey, because they are in a darkened lecture theatre watching a film). I think there's a limit to how much greying I can do anyway because the pages are going to be reproduced quite small, a saving grace really.