sentimental jamboree

More stuff from under the house at Lorraine and more storage quandaries. Actually the storage quandaries come not from this tranche of drawing, which I can almost live with close to thirty years later (Clearly what I needed was just enough time to be a slightly more mature commentator on the very slightly younger people I was encountering as a mature age student at the University of Sydney). The real problems are with material older than this, when I just had no capacity to end anything. I would just break the fourth wall to finish the page. By this time I could at least come up with a kind of punchline, even if it was a bit non-secaturish. Winky Pinstripe never broke the fourth wall. This is half a random Winky comic strip that I suspect was never published anywhere, though who knows. The frame where Winky pushes Mal to the ground is pretty well-drawn for me. 

In the early-to-mid 90s I did a few Winky Pinstripe comic books (the best one was, I think, the fourth one which was very long and basically made for my grandmother Mavis, so it had no casual or coarse sexy stuff in it, not that she would have said anything if it did, indeed, she probably didn't even read the fourth one, who knows). Clearly in the story below I used some version of Ben-Day film, very inexpertly, to give the drawings a little bit of texture. This has now yellowed. I also cut and pasted bits out of magazines to suggest ambient background conversation snippets in the party scenes and it's so unclear that's what this was, that it took me a while today to realise it wasn't just random decoration. Obviously there was another version of this page, photocopied, which became the 'master', where I fixed whatever mistake I made in 'addressed' (frame 2 - looks like I spelt it with one D) and decided to change the music playing at the party in the last frame to 'Punky's dilemma' (as per margin note: 'If I were a 1st lieutenant').  

If you haven't seen any Winky Pinstripe comics before basically the idea is that he is a hipster of sorts a bit like Rik from The Young Ones I suppose though less consciously trying to break away from privileged roots. It was such an easy character to work with it was ridiculous, wrote itself. As I said above I encountered people like that all the time at university which was a slight eye-opener but of course also I was parodying myself, and not even myself at a younger age necessarily, though more myself at a younger age than my late twenties self. 

So, below, welcome to a conception of the internet, 26 years ago. The character Judy had a fanzine called Arsewipe thereby contriving the opportunity to write the line most authors dream of, 'Dear Judy I love your Arsewipe'. The thing that pleases me most about the Winky stories is that absolutely no-one has any redeemable qualities - Judy here for instance is absolutely the female Winky - and even  his friend Mal who appears superficially to be some kind of voice of reason is only a voice of reason insofar as he knows a little more stuff than Winky does. I feel a twinge about evoking 'Slim from Kill Rock Stars' (i.e. Matthew 'Slim' Moon who started and ran the record label) only because I have never met him and had nothing against him at all. That said a lot of the time I had an extra depth of deceptive/self-deceptive behaviour running with Winky - in this case either, 'he only thinks he was talking to Slim Moon', or, 'he thinks Judy would be impressed if he said he was talking to Slim Moon'. I also like how the next day he stumbles on her name, because he is only ever focused in the moment, and even then only barely. 

This (below) is in amongst the same stuff, so it's probably from roughly the same time, but it's a good example of not being able to finish anything. (I don't know what the last frame is/was, whether it was the beginning of an idea or what):

This below is also from the same bunch of drawings. I don't know what I intended for this but I am going to guess it's unfinished. 

This is in the Winky vein and pretty much a cheap shot, I think it's from 1995 and a time when it felt dangerous to be casually withering about Andy Warhol and Lou Reed though of course these characters are clearly not them. Creatively strange (inept?) use of Ben-Day in the fifth panel. When I see things like 'Arté Farté' (last panel) I just groan inwardly but you know, it's long ago and far away isn't it. 

I almost feel like republishing some of this material properly although to what end? Maybe I'll set up a website for it. It would seem less self-aggrandising if someone else did it but when other people put things I did online people assume it's me doing it anyway so what difference does it make.