'Hit Kid' (1987)

Perhaps to lighten the mood a little, I embarked on a 'Vizzed-up' homage to a character from Krazy - the first comic that I ever stumbled upon; the quaint old way, at a school jumble sale in 1977.

There was a pinch of Rorschach ("hurm") from Watchmen thrown in for good measure but the whole thing was relatively innocuous apart from the last few panels where the villain of the piece 'Luke McPuke' was all but drowned in a phone box full of his own vomit.

(A "taste of his own medicine" - as 'Hit Kid' put it with characteristic tenderness in one of those panels that was just a bit too awkward and rubbish to scan.)

I was still using A2 Daler Board and the page was never reduced (on what appeared to be the only commercially available photocopier that could cope with the task in Cardiff during the mid to late '80's) before it was coloured with a simple wash.

I couldn't really get into a 'cartoony' style again but it was quite refreshing while the somewhat more serious stuff required to get into Art College was already underway. And for about a year, I turned my back on comics altogether.

It was clearly beyond the pale but then so were employment prospects within the industry; even for those that were capable of delivering the goods to the point of dazzling those of us that prowled the conventions for a peak at their portfolios.

However the world of 'state-of-the-art' graphics (which sounded quite cool in those days) was similarly better left to the few that were genuinely glad to make the workplace a way of life.

This sort of stuff got what it deserved until blogs began to make a mockery of natural selection in such matters!