"Pooper Man" by Simon, aged 6 or 7

 As with yesterday's untitled Jaws parody, I start out with a straight steal, this time from Mad's "Superduperman!" (viewable here, although our paperback version at home was in black and white, making Lois Pain – far right - far more prominent in the opening splash)...

 

 ... and then I wander off. It's possible nevertheless I was at the height of my creative powers here. I would have had to come up with my own solutions to depicting stuff before I was proficient enough to start copying styles, and both the grizzly robot/monster hybrid and the balding, pot-bellied editor are surprisingly elegant, I think, considering – like the ripples yesterday. I'm also reminded of these fish I drew...

 

 I'm not sure I could design anything so simple and effective now.

 The Tarzan's just background, I think. I still don't really understand muscles. Sorry there was so little poop.

Untitled "Jaws" parody by Simon, aged 6

 Or maybe seven. That's my excuse for the "you're"/"your" confusion. The first page is missing, as you can see, so I don't know now what pun on Jaws I used as a title. The layout's based on paperback reprints of EC's "Mad" which we had around the house, as are some of the panels:

 

  Characters in Mad parodies would occasionally break character to ask "How's your mom, Ed?" I didn't know why*, but it hopefully explains some of what follows. I hadn't seen Jaws, obviously, but I assumed the film followed the plot of King Kong, which Mad had also parodied, (source):

 

 I didn't follow the plot of King Kong either though, because I was six. Clearly I stuff every frame with as much extraneous detail as my felt tips would let me, in the Mad style, but the way I depict things emerging from the water is actually quite minimalist and, I'd even go so far as to say, elegant. I'm pleased. Minimalism and elegance were big in 1980, as were were sharks. I remember, I had a big book that taught me how to draw "sea monsters" in four steps. A shark was a cone with two eyes and gills. It's all coming back now.

 This is too long an introduction for what follows though. Sorry.

 

 

 Did you guess the twist?!

* I've only just now looked up what the line refers to, and it's perfect.

The Annotated "The Empire Strikes Bac" by Simon, aged 9

  Continuing this blog's Star Wars long weekend: One of the things I used to make as a child were unfinished pastiches of Mad Magazine. I'd write and illustrate parodies, articles and little Sergio-Aragonés-type doodles in the margin, just like Mad, but laid out in landscape, because I was using the gum of the notebook to hold the pages together, and that's how they opened. I had definitely read Mad's parody of The Empire Strikes Back (above) by the time I came to make my own. I'd also read the photobook, the behind-the-scenes book, and bought the action figures. I knew the names of the bounty hunters, and what "AT-AT" stood for. I'm just not sure I'd actually seen the film but anyway, knowing all good parodies subtly and hilariously change the name of the title, I began work on "The Empire Stikes Bac" without a "k" below. Exelanto!

 Pithy punchline from C.G.P.O. there. I wouldn't be aware of "Quee-er" as a gay slur until I saw Five Go Mad In Dorset a few years later. And I remember being shamefully aware of how little Pham Shmoelo looked like Harrison Ford, but also quite excited to have accidentally captured the likeness of Jack Lord from Hawaii 5-O. I am pretty merciless in my depiction of Mark Hamill's new nose...

 

 "Fab on" indeed! Frame seven of this page contains the first evidence of me knowing that rude body parts and functions are, in theory a staple of comedy, without actually knowing what any of them are called. I would later learn that an appendix is not rude. Barbara Woodhouse was of course a celebrity dog trainer at the time – television's always been turning out reality stars – but I might have spelt her name wrong. However there seems very little guesswork in the design of either the snow steed, the snow beast or the AT-AT, so I was probably using my own toys as models. I also notice. Nice foreground/background stuff in the frame with the spy droid by the way. Nice gag too. I'm also particularly proud of this next visual gag...

 Another cracking panel seven, politics of course also being a staple of comedy. Dusty Bin's there too, great. Giant nostrils, yep. Puke is in his vest and pants when he gets kicked off the ship because he was definitely wearing a vest on Dagobah in the photobook so I assumed he was doing PE. Which he sort of was. And I've clearly abandoned any hope of making Pham Shmoelo look like Harrison Ford now and am just doubling down on the Jack Lord thing.  Panel two of the next page features another botched bodily function joke: Is Puke farting, sneezing, burping, shitting? No idea...

 "You nerdy jerk!" "Baboons' pants"! What filth was I reading? And why is "a matron" asking for money for seats. Do I mean "usher"? I know jobs have names, again I'm just not quite sure what any of them are. "Your Tallness" is a valid honorific though, and knowing how unpublishable my drawings of Short Round from the The Temple of Doom were, I'm hugely relieved to see how handsome I've made Landoff...

The light sabres here were drawn with a rubber. Now Vader carbon-freezing Solo just to test the kit, was that an actual plot point from the film? Seems weird. There's a little misunderstanding here about who is being fined for not having a driving license, but nothing remotely comic. But I'm really filling these frames with research: Boba Fett, Slave One, Ughnauts. I don't know where I got "I must only use the Force for defense and thought" from, but I applaud the simplicity of itssentiment. It's a good mythos, isn't it, Star Wars, though I still maintain Leia doesn't get nearly enough to do in this one.  Oh, there's a little marginal Aragonés-type doodle coming up top left...

 

 "Michael Foot". Heh.

Unfinished in '87: SIMON KANE'S HERACLES

 To celebrate the book that actually got me reading again this past fortnight - Natalie Haynes' brilliant Theban novel The Children of Jocasta - here is a classical adaptation of my own from 1987. Consider it an accompaniment to the similarly unfinished super hero comic and bivalve samurai epic from the same year, the year I met my mate Tom in fact. He didn't finish his comic of the Odyssey either. I went for Heracles, the original Greek name of Hercules, and a subject I'd visited before, back when I was eight. Thinking about it, it's surprising I didn't visit him more often; he was big, dumb, super-strong and fought monsters, the perfect subject for a comic book. His newly nobbly nose is proof I was by now healthily into Sergio Aragonés' Groo the Wanderer, a pre-Homer-Simpson comedy barbarian, and I can also spot the influence of airbrush fantasist Rodney Matthews in the thorniness of my monsters. 

 

 In keeping with my previous treatment of this material (particularly here) I have not shied away from the more tragic elements of Heracles' story, although I do now take the piss. And profuse apologies for my depiction of Tiresias; my only reference material for gender studies at the time was Mad Magazine.

... and that's as far as I got. (Why have I made all the sexy women look like Garfield?)

Mort

 Now I think of it there were bats flying in the Tuileries as well, over a decade ago now. The only light came from the Eiffel Tower which was serving as a lightouse, I assume decoratively. We sat on deckchairs by the pond and she asked me what I was thinking about, and I told her the truth, which was "Mort Drucker". Specifically, I think, this picture, which I've just looked out again:

 I explained that Mort Drucker was an artist for Mad Magazine, which I'd started buying when I was eight, and that I remember this drawing of his particularly confusing me, because I knew that human chins and cheekbones didn't actually look like that, but I also knew without a doubt that this was a drawing of Roger Moore. So I went to my mother and asked how a cartoon could be recognisable as a specific human being, and that's how I leant what a caricature was. And I can't remember why I was thinking about that, but I do remember how happily I answered that question in the Tuileries beneath the bats, even just saying the words "Mort Drucker" aloud, sharing that memory, made me excited, felt like the last door opening on something. It's weird what one remembers. Weird, but not random. Arty. I'm sorry to hear Mort Drucker passed away today, but ninety-one is a good age. Mort wrought magic, I thought. Here's today's Defoe:

Power Socket 7: "Aw, sneck!"

This issue must have taken me ages. I was heavily into 2000AD by now, and who can blame me? My imagination had been pretty traumatised by a sudden move to public school at the age of nine, starved suddenly of mythology, baffled by "catalytic cracking" and "the ablative" and the absence of girls, sectioned by separate desks for every boy and separate teachers for every subject, sustained only by the scraps afforded by Mad Magazine and Oink. But then, in 1985, for just 24 pence a week, it found its salvation.

The late Massimo Belardinelli, just doin' his thing.

In fact it was struggling now to keep up. My hatred of that school had become so bad that I persuaded my parents to send me to a therapist, and of the one session I finally received the only detail I can remember now is me confessing my frustration that my imagination seemed so tiny compared to these guys'. How did they do it? Where - as Alan Moore was often asked, and possible went on to suffer a nervous breakdown trying to find out - do you get your ideas from? And it wasn't just the Alan Moore's stuff. There were the richly researched and nightmarishly illuminated worlds of Pat Mills, the surrealist panache of Peter Milligan's teen-friendly metaphysics, the aspirational shopping-mall dystopia of John Wagner's Mega-City One which teemed with poor, beaming, fad-chasing bastards seeking their fix of fun even in the cannon's mouth, and all of this served with wit - with jokes even - and monsters! So many monsters.

 

"Get off my back, Father!" Some Kevin O'Neill

There were no supermen, or at least none I was interested in. There were wanderers, terrorists, deserters, smugglers and surfers, very few of whom looked recognisably human. Everything 2000AD was teaching me was stuff I wanted to learn, and to this day I'm still playing catch-up as a writer. (The scifi pilot I've been hawking around, subtitled "Prog 1", has perhaps as a consequence been deemed "too dense" for Radio 4. Which it is, but that's another post.) Yet for some reason Issue 7 of Power Socket was to be the last I completed. I'm not sure if I gave up, or decided to wait until I was better at it, or maybe I just started enjoying school a bit more. I suspect the truth is - and my "visual notebooksW back this up - that there was just so much out there now to copy, why bother sticking with a super-hero serial? In the Autumn of 1986 Dad suggested we take Power Socket Issue 7 along to show to my new heroes at a signing. I did. "What do you think?" he asked. Alan Moore said "Um, I'm more of a writer," and was lovely. Kev O'Neil (responsible for the image above) said "Do you lay it out first? You should try laying it out." And Pat Mills, to my surprise, turned out not be a woman. I can't remember what he said. Or John Wagner. But I've got the signatures. And all have remained my heroes.
And one day I hope I'll get to show them what I've made since.

1925-2013

 Two days ago we arrived in France, took in the two-thousand-year-old Pont du Gard in perfect light along with its boob-heavy, garcon-silencing supplementary educational film, then headed back to Puisallicon to find out she was dead. My first reaction was "Ah. Oh." Now I'm at a computer here are the other thoughts. Feel free to join in.
So, secondly, I always thought it curious as a nipper how none of the caricatures looked like her. She didn't have a nose like a scythe. She had a high, wonky forehead. But when I came to caricature her in my visual notebook - along with the rest of the cabinet, many of whom I'd never seen outside of Spitting Image or Steve Bell - I went along with it.

 

The exception. Note: normal sized nose.

 Thirdly, I found it odd to have a government whose message so flatly contradicted the basic demarcations of right and wrong being instilled in me as a future adult, to have a PM so boldly mean and incurious. I don't know what I thought a government was for, but when they started privatising the utilities it reminded me of Tom Sawyer charging kids to paint his fence.
 Fourthly, it also bugged me when I was being driven into school to hear politicians on the radio say "We can't just wave a magic wand." Nobody was proposing that. They're doing it again and it's still annoying, which leads me to -
 Fifthly, I was educated in a Church of England school in Tory Wandsworth, then Westmister Prep and Public Schools - I know, lucky me - and in every one of those conservative establishments nobody liked her... Nobody... Actually by the time I was fifteen that's probably not true. There were of course a few vocal Tory children whose arguments remain unchanged over twenty years later, "fully-formed" as some describe Michael Gove, or just ungrown-up, and it's possibly a fault of my upbringing but I couldn't begin to understand where they were coming from. I still don't. I do try. It's something to do with ninety-five per cent of capital being invested in property or something, yes? Anyway my point is when she was finally ousted - just round the corner from us - the glee resounded up and down our toast-scented corridors pretty much unopposed.
 Sixthly... and yet, somehow nowadays "being taken serious politically" seems to mean operating on her terms. So she can't have started the fire (self-interest isn't transmitted from above). But don't tell me in your obituaries she didn't know the meaning of the word "can't". For many she embodied "can't". Her talent was for recognising strength and siding with it, and I'd say sticking to those kind of principles is pretty easy. She served her idea of justice by doing everything within her power to sell this country to her heroes, and that idea hasn't really gone away, this is still the eighties and Thatcher's passing seems like just another of those endlessly replicating shadows cast by street lamps as you walk home, hence perhaps the feeling of "Ah. Oh." And her heroes were dicks.
 Seventhly, her funeral procession from Westminster to Saint Paul's via St. Clement Danes - the procession we can definitely afford because in spite of my sixth point we can afford anything we like if there is the political will, of course we can - will follow exactly the route of the Ghost Bus Tours. Tickets here.
 Finally, I keep thinking of something Clive James wrote in 1975: "In real life, Mrs Thatcher either believes that everybody can help himself without anybody getting hurt, which means she is unhinged; or else believes that everybody who can help himself ought to do so no manner who gets hurt, which means she is a villain; a sinister prospect either way." I don't know if he still stands by this remark, but I can't see why he wouldn't.
 This is also good.