For various reasons, I needed to do some research into my own career, and therefore dug through the hundreds (or more!) of original comic strips that I have drawn over the years. What a delight! It was great seeing strips that I haven't thought of in a while, and seeing the originals of some favorites, and totally awesome to find some strips that for some reason or another were never finished or published!
Okay, you're thinking that maybe they were rubbish, if I never got around to drawing or finishing them, and truth be told, I thought the same thing. Then again, you probably don't know me like I know myself. :0) I try to hide the fact that I make mistakes on occassion, and that I can't draw everything no matter how hard I try, and especially that I can sometimes get terribly disorganised... a state that is very hard to recover from.
So... if I didn't finish drawing a strip, it was probably because I got swamped with other projects, or was moving house, or something earth-shattering like that. It is entirely possible that I could have forgotten I was in the middle of a strip. Of course, it's also entirely possible that at the time I found the strip to be challenging, or that at that moment I did think it was rubbish. Who knows?
What I can say is that finding them now I really like them! Nostalgia? Possibly. Change of heart? Probably. I'll leave you to judge whether they are good or not. I've finished The Inquiring Minds strip and colored it, even though the original was a mess of smeared ink and random notes. The Sunday Knight and Day I just redrew it neater, but it is far from finished, but worth a read. The Knight and Day daily was finished, but never published for some reason. I truly think it was just lost in the shuffle. Then again, this was from a time when I was trying to figure out if I should pursue The Inquiring Minds, Knight and Day, or both. A tough time for me, mentally.
There was some other stuff, but these ar ethe strips I thought worth sharing, and I am pretty sure that there are no more 'lost' strips to share. Knight and Day and The Inquiring Minds are now all caught up, discrepancies in number and continuity repaired, and all is well... except that I really need to find time to draw some new stuff and to finish The Ghost Pirate Skeletons of Three Craters Lake!
But, another big deadline looms, and there are last minute changes to the beautiful magazine cover I am illustrating, so new strips will have to wait a few more days. But they are coming! Promise. :0)
All the best, JOHN ;0)
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2 comments:
"What I can say is that finding them now I really like them!"
Artwork and stuff always looks better in retrospect, probably because it's easier to view it without your own immediate and personal drive for perfection -- or to put it another way, through everybody else's eyes.
That's a good point, Brian, although I doubt i can ever see it exactly how everyone else does. I try to be tough on myself, and often am. :0)
There's definitely an element of nostalgia going on... I mean, this isn't my strongest material, yet there's an element that I can no longer capture, being a different person than I was years ago. Kind of looking at yourself in old school pics. Funny, but cute.
Cheers, JOHN
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