Sunday 28 December 2008

Reflections (and retro-dabblings)

I've just begun a 3-page comic strip for the first time in ages, after pondering the point of it all in the absence of traditional forms of motivation.

It seems that cash, kudos, career or sheer competitiveness are the main reasons for embarking on just about anything these days. The basic interest or amusement value and sense of accomplishment to be derived from producing artistic material to the best of an individual's capability, tends, in itself, to peak and ebb over the years.

For whatever reason, I just haven't been able to muster a grain of enthusiasm for drawing in recent years. And it's not for lack of leverage (or at least attempting to trick my brain into being motivated) but somehow the desire to turn a blank page into anything else just hasn't seemed worth an evening or ten. I'd sooner learn Spanish, ju-jitsu or the synths but haven't; so time to discard or develop something already underway.

Eventually, I was tidying and stumbled upon a page that I began in 2001 which put the buzz back in my fingertips! It opens with a panoramic shot of the cafe from 'Friends' which is where the strip is set with a Chandler-centred script that may even ape the ultra-humour of Matthew Perry's character with an element of success, in the modest era that it'll take to complete the actual artwork.

It may be a while before preview panels start to appear on my main blog 'Artistic dabblings' so in the meantime; here's a selection of the least embarrassing unpublished stuff (well it's all 'unpublished', I suppose but by that I mean the truly unpublishable but artistically salvageable, in one way or another) that I've otherwise hidden away since the 1980's.

So while the 'Breakfast Club' were imparting the type of harrowing proverb that provides the title of this somewhat shabby showcase; here's what it was all trudging towards in my school lunchbreaks circa 1985. . .

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