'Quick on the Draw'

And what a fateful misnomer that turned out to be!

The title, in fact the whole strip was taken from a stylish series which originally appeared in IPC's 'Speed' comic during 1980.

So it was supposed to be a sequel but the script limped along from one lame cliche to the next and if I'm completely honest; it donated several new ones of its own to a genre that had already been exorcised by 'Blazing saddles'!

Yet it was a delight to be given an opportunity to produce a 5-page comic strip within the syllabus of my final year at 'O Level' art. I'll always be grateful to our tutor, Mr. Brown, for whatever administrative strings he was able to pull that enabled such a trashy artform to be presented to traditional examiners; even if the end results could easily have reinforced the prejudice of the period towards what is today known as the 'ninth art' and all the rest of it.

There were eventually 6, A2 pages comprising 96 panels of which these 3 are about all that should ever be let loose upon the world again. The work as a whole was a delusional attempt at disguising incompetent draughtsmanship with a less conspicuous form of ineptitude and enough layers of ink and coloured pencil to imply at least a passing resemblance to the very worst work in print.

That's probably what the editor of 'Victor' made of the first 5 pages when I submitted them for an appraisal in the summer of 1985. However his advice was superbly practical yet so devoid of encouragement that it got me to put some genuine effort into the last page.

(There was a hiatus of over a year while I was faffing about at 'A Level' art and the story was put out of its misery in December 1986.)

I began the strip in September 1984 and for all its endless shortcomings the project was a truly wonderful escape from the intense drudgery of 5th Form education. I'll always look back on it fondly but I'll never look at it again!