Unfinished in '88: "THAT FOOT! WHOSE IT IT?"

 The Art Department called these "Visual Notebooks" when they gave them out, as if a thirteen-year-old me was going to fill it with sketches of passers-by or bark rather than a page and a half of an unfinished Watchmen spoof. But here is all that remains of all that was started of something I seem to remember I called "The X-Ceptions". Also an obvious influence on these few frames is The Dark Knight Returns, and possibly The Killing Joke, which is why I'm dating this 1988 (and I appear to have thought that giving the Joker an upturned nose instead of a pointy one counts as pastiche). Having lovingly referenced these three core works however – note the wobbly lines around Pscychoe's speech bubble* – I seem to have immediately run out of ideas, so who knows what role in this dark epic "The Lilac Librarian", "Incy-Wincy-Splat" or whatever that Swamp-Thing-looking thing on the left were meant to have played? ("Doc God" I like.)

 

 

* Sure, I noticed that. But not the fact John Higgin's colours weren't totally boring. I think this must be why I got a B.

THE GOOMB

 In my first night's sleep after being hospitalised for smoke inhalation in 2009, I had three very vivid dreams. I recorded the details of them as best as I could when I woke up, with illustrations, and here's one of them:

 

 "The freighter that picks me up from the Ice flow is manned by tall silver men with long waterproofs, square heads but aquiline profiles, smooth black dishes for ears and receding chrome spirals on the head. Maybe the cube swivels to accomodate the face. Anyway a nice kind image. THE GOOMB-MEN"

 

 I don't know where I got the name "Goomb" from, but they stayed with me. I tried to put them in a Mitchell And Webb sketch later that year (it was never filmed, maybe I submitted it too late), and I was still contemplating casting them as saviours in some children's book or other until today, when I was knocked sideways to see this image pop up on pinterest: 

 

 

 This is a two-headed Martian from the Twilight Zone story "Mr. Dingle the Strong", an episode I have no recollection of ever seeing. Their heads aren't exactly cubes, and their ears aren't exactly dishes, and their antennae aren't exactly spirals, but that's the Goomb alright, right down to their cheekbones. The clincher for me is that, while I describe them as "silver" in the notebook, I actually dreamt them in black and white.

 Emailing that sketch to Gareth Edwards back in December 2009, I wrote: 

"Hopefully you might find some joy – far too late as it is – in this sketch about aliens I mentioned ages ago, and then didn't write because it seemed you had loads about aliens, and now have written simply because it might turn out to be the very-odd-but-actually-useable sketch I have so far failed to produce." 

 And now UPDATE (April 27th 2023) It looks like it might actually be used now! All hail the Goomb...

 

Quick Hot Take on the Durability of Physical Materials

 I don't really throw things out, particularly not notebooks, as this blog attests, so it's perfectly possible that in twenty years time I'll come across this page, and wonder why I repeatedly wrote the words "Dog" and "Sex" under the name Sarah, and then awarded myself eight out of ten. Particularly since there are nine ticks. The sixty-six-year-old me might notice that my anwer to question 2 has gone through multiple revisions, with both "Dog" and "Sex" crossed out, and deduce that as my first answer was correct, I'd decided to retract the second and give myself a tick anyway, only to later change my mind when I learnt how well I'd done on the rest, hence the eight out of ten. This much could be deduced. But maybe, dear reader, you have deduced the rest: that these are my answers to Sarah's picture round "Dog Toy or Sex Toy?" from yesterday's zoom quiz. And maybe my writing this post will mean I remember that too, twenty years from now. In which case I'm only sorry you had to be a party to any of this.

 

 

 One technique we used was to ask ourselves if we'd leave them on the carpet if we had guests round. None of us got ten out of ten.

Notebookery: CITY and CITIZENS (1993ish)

 I need new shoes again, so I've been out less, the ground being wet, and in the evenings I've been winding down in front of youtube, sometimes for seven hours or more, so my thoughts are a little unravelled. Don't worry though, good times are being had, I just don't want to post too many youtube recommendations on here because I know some of you have lives to be getting on with. Here's another notebook then. These pages are from my A-level Art project, on a subject of my choosing. I can't tell if London looks different now or not, apart from the crowds; I wish I'd taken more photographs of the south bank, back when it was scrubland to the east of Blackfriars Bridge. I think the project got me a B. No. I know it did. But it hadn't yet been through a housefire, so didn't look nearly as handsome. It was almost definitely that kind of glibness that helped get me a B, now I think of it. 

 You should be able to click to enlarge these.

"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 YEAR IN REHASH: SEPTEMBER - Darwin's Bassoon Wasted on Worms

One of the notebooks I didn't post in September. 

 Last one for today. I'd always wanted to be prove useful to a museum, so participating in Ships, Sea and the Stars this year was a huge treat for me. Thanks to Dr. Helen Czerski, not just for inviting me aboard, but for her entire online output this year, much of it in collaboration with Robin Ince whose work on the Cosmic Shambles provided the kind of schooling I would previously only have expected from life on a star cruiser. In a year spent so otherwise sedentary, it felt a bit like being rescued, and I haven't yet seen Helen's Royal Institute Lecture on the Oceans which aired yesterday, but I hear she enters on a wire, and that sounds apt. I could have picked any of these, but here's the final one, from September the 21st...

 

 The mainly non-mythological constellations of the southern hemisphere, 

including Chameleon, Compass, Toucan and Telescope (source.)

 

 The final Ships, Sea & The Stars of this series is up now, in which you can hear me read an A. A. Milne poem that was completely new to me (at 29:00) and a terrific account by Charles Darwin of his attempts to test the hearing of worms (at 4:17). The theme of this episode – in coordination with Heritage Open Days – is "Hidden Nature" which, according to guest and "preventive conservator" Maria Bastidas-Spence, unambiguously means bugs. It's rare to see an insect expert who actually hates insects, and weirdly rewarding. In addition to carpet beetles and constellations, the team discuss ship's mascots. It seems pretty much every species has at some point been considered for mascothood, including a polar bear. 

 This isn't him though, this is "Trotsky". As soon as I learnt of his existence, I whatsapped my Finnemore colleagues and... well, long story short: John has finally decided on a name for his first child. Unfortunately though, Trotsky – the photographed Trotsky above, not the putative Trotsky Finnemore – would be shot dead by a sailor tragically unaware that "ship's bear" was a thing. A very sad death then, but I can't say he was necessarily on the wrong side of History.

 

Taking A Page or Two From Angela Carter's Book

This cover's a bit "Run For Your Wife", isn't it? 

What's that coming put of her stomach, a leg? No I don't like this.

 

 Re-reading Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber I kept trying to remember how old I was when I'd first read it, or more specifically, how much I already knew about - you know - sex. I'd certainly gone through something of a Fay Weldon phase after my A-levels, devouring She-Devil, Praxis, Life Force and Joanna May in a bed-sit in Battersea before I'd ever so much as kissed a girl offstage, but I'm pretty sure Bloody Chamber was after that.

 

 I sort of knew what to expect though, having grown up with films of both The Magic Toyshop and The Company of Wolves on VHS, but there's more to Angela Carter's writing than the subject matter - to quote Helen Simpson's introduction: "To say she is wonderful at surfaces sounds a little disparaging, as if to say she is superficial. No; she is good at surfaces as the Gawain poet is good at surfaces." Or, to put it another way, sexy. 

 Even if I didn't find the writing itself sexy, at least the first time around, I found the possibility it was intended to be sexy sexy, and that's probably what strikes me most re-reading it: the realisation that, as someone who grew up finding boys talking about sex unpleasant, what attracted me most to the work of these Second-Wave Feminist Magical Realists may simply have been the promise of a good sexual education. and given these were fantasies, and the men in them often literally beasts, that's a potentially awkward realisation. These pictures are from the pages of Angela Carter's journal, which turns up in the BBC's excellent Of Wolves and Women here.

Notebookery 10 (2006-2005)

 Here are earlier pages from the same notebook, including, in reverse chronological order - and not that I encourage you to go looking for them -  rehearsal notes for the show that took me to Japan, Sulayman Al-Bassam's Kalila Wa Dimna, (hence the recurrence of jackals and murk), and Shunt's Amato Saltone and Tropicana. Two pages down is a polaroid of me (far left) in the lift on the Tropicana's last show before I shaved my head and took over as the operator. The shaved head was to make it easier to produce a silicon replica of me for the lift operator's autopsy. You can see both it and me four pages down. The replica's nostrils are narrower because of the clay pressing down as the mould was made.