Lost Masterpieces

The title is ironic, obviously. As tireless archivist of my own work, I've retained a reasonably thorough recall of all my creative dead ends - undertakings which never really came to anything, or which at least stumbled before achieving whatever fruition I had intended for them. Sometimes I simply ran out of steam, but more often than not I recognised the enterprise as bollocks before I'd fully got into the swing of it; or sometimes it was just something I had to get out of my system before moving on. Here, mostly from memory are projects - for want of a less twatty word - which deflated in the manner of a premature souffle before I could get them out of the oven. These are works on which I spent sufficient time and energy as to forge a memory of my labours, as distinct from anything less intensive such as doodles on the back of a phone book whilst enjoying the Post Office dial-a-disc service. The best that can be said of any of them is that they made sense at the time, so there are no lost masterpieces here. If Kevin J. Anderson is reading and feels inclined to finish off any of this shit after I'm dead, he's welcome to give it his best shot.

The Burps (1975, possibly earlier)
This was my first attempt at drawing a strip cartoon series, and I seem to remember churning out hundreds of these, each one a single A4 landscape format page rendered in whatever biro I happened to have to hand. The Burps were spherical aliens with antennae resembling a stove pipe topped with a conical rain cap growing from the tops of their heads, which were also their bodies, much like the Mister Men. Each strip ended with one of them doing a massive burp, possibly emphasised with green felt tip. I don't think there was ever much of a story and I remember my granddad leafing through the stack then commenting, 'there seems to be rather a lot of burping in these.' I think he approved of my productivity but was a bit disappointed by the repetition of the same punchline. To my way of thinking, the repetition was what made it hilarious.

Tiny the World's Biggest Hitler (1976 or thereabouts)
I'm not even sure what I was aiming for here, but it was my own one off magazine, or would have been, created mostly using material snipped from either the Sunday Times colour supplement or back issues of the Topper and inspired most likely by either The Goodies File or Spike Milligan. Of what little I can remember, the oddest detail was my apparently having decided to make my own artisan paper by coating A3 pages cut from a scrapbook with glossy brown parcel tape onto which I glued my vandalised images and text. I wrote the text on regular writing paper, and then cut out each individual line and typeset it with Uhu, so with hindsight it was all a bit Jamie Reid. I'm not sure how many pages I managed, but the only one I remember was Tiny the World's Biggest Hitler, which was Tiny the World's Biggest Dog from the Topper rendered more sinister by the addition of a toothbrush moustache, swastikas, and cruelly slanting eyebrows to make him look angry. I don't know if I ever gave the enterprise a formal title, and I was very much a fan of Tiny the World's Biggest Dog so maybe I couldn't take the guilt.

Robot funnies (late seventies)
I drew eight or nine of these and although I don't recall a specific overall title for the series, I had some vague idea about submitting  them for publication and perhaps even syndication. They were mostly two or three panels drawn on landscape format A4 with plenty crosshatching inspired by Paul Sample, usually some laboured gag involving robots - two robots regarding a petrol pump with concern, one saying I think he's trying to commit suicide in reference to the gun-like nozzle seated against what our boys have apparently mistaken for the pump's forehead. This particular joke, such as it is, was shamelessly recycled from the funnies pages of Doctor Who and Star Trek annuals, as were most of the others. I had some vague idea of producing definitive versions of the gags in question. A couple of them made it onto the walls of the school art room, which was thankfully about as far as it went.

Poo Corner (1983)
I'd been reading Sounds music paper for a couple of years, and particularly enjoying Savage Pencil's Rock 'n' Roll Zoo strip. Alan Moore's The Stars My Degradation - which was also a significant influence - had come to an end so I figured there was an opening. I drew about ten episodes of Poo Corner, each some self-contained tableau taking a wry sideways glance at the lighter side of either the music industry or being a teenager - only one of which I had any experience, resulting in what was more or less a recycling of Rock 'n' Roll Zoo combined with stuff other kids had said at school which seemed hilarious. I sent them in to Sounds explaining that I was ready to start work immediately but the reply must have been lost in the post or something.

 

Twenty Pages (1985)
Once I realised that I would probably never be able to afford to have anything printed, I resigned myself to the photocopy as the principal medium for my visual material; and because the double-sided photocopy was likewise beyond my means, I concluded that single-sided copies loose in a plastic wallet - actually the protective PVC covers which could be bought for 7" singles from WHSmith - seemed reasonably artistic in comparison to single sided sheets stapled down one edge like some shitty school magazine. Because my visual material was, at the time, mostly news items about local murders cut from newspapers and therefore underwhelming, I enlisted contributions from fanzine, tape and weirdy music people of my postal acquaintance - just a page the same size as a 7" single, artwork, text, whatever you like, I told them. Andy of the Apostles wrote out an imaginary interview with a generic punk rocker, which was quite entertaining, and a couple of the collages were quite good, but by the time I had twelve of the proposed Twenty Pages I realised that the thing was a bit of a waste of time on the grounds that I probably wouldn't have bought it had someone else been trying to flog it to me for the price of a stamped addressed envelope.

 

Newspaper strips
There were several attempts, mostly the same format as Peanuts, George & Lynne, Fred Basset and the rest. Having obtained my fine art degree in 1987, I soon came to the realisation that I was more or less unemployable and that strip cartoons seemed to be about the only working string to my bow in terms of making money off anything - a realisation informed by the fact that most newspaper strips were bollocks while everything I drew was hilarious. The first was a series of unrelated comically surreal vignettes abandoned before I could come up with a title (1986); then Mr. Temper (1987), a sharply-dressed curmudgeon who went about beheading anyone he didn't like the look of while politely explaining the essence of their supposed transgressions; and The Rock (1988) which was me thinking, well, if Alan Moore can get paid for Maxwell the Magic Cat then I'm quids in, and which may as well have been the Mister Men but with more sarcasm - a formula which apparently failed to make much of an impression with the editor of the Chatham Standard.

 

Avanti! (1987)
This would have been the third and final weirdy music cassette compilation from my mail order tape label, Do Easy. While the first two had failed to set the world on fire, they had featured some genuinely great music from the likes of We Be Echo, Irsol, the Unkommuniti and others, and had sold fairly well by my standards - somewhere in the region of thirty or forty copies each, often to people I didn't actually know. I'd already been sent new material by We Be Echo, Virrullex, ESP Kinetic, and Man's Hate, and it could have been great but I simply ran out of steam, enthusiasm, and disposable income; which is probably for the best given my edgily deciding to name the thing after the newspaper which first got Mussolini up and running.

 

The Dovers comic book (1987)
This was probably my first attempt at drawing a vaguely coherent comic strip, or at least one which was only 75% crap jokes strung along an improbable narrative. Inspired by an unlikely combination of X-Men comics, Viz, and the work of Robert Crumb, it was a massively fictionalised account of the adventures of my band, the Dovers, featuring Carl Glover and myself, wherein Chris, the  drummer of our previous line up, is possessed by forces from beyond the dawn of time, our manager is former US President Richard Nixon - now living in Lewisham - and I find myself recruited by Professor Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters. I drew three and a bit issues of the thing - amounting to 72 pages - assuming that I would find an affordable means of getting it all printed and that it would be worth the effort. I eventually realised that I wouldn't and it probably wasn't, but it kept me busy for about six months.

 

Berserker (1987)
I had begun to tire of my own crap jokes, as exemplified by the proposed Dovers comic books, and recognised them as a deflection from the fear that any more serious undertaking to which I might apply myself would probably be drivel; so I decided to grasp the thistle and produce a really, really, really grown up real world superhero but not actually a superhero comic strip like all that Alan Moore stuff. The main character is some dude who gets diddled in a flying saucer and subsequently develops amazing psychic powers, influenced by X-Men comics, cranky UFO literature, and the work of Gary Numan. After fourteen or so pages of heavy cross-hatching, wonky figures with stern expressions, and ludicrously portentous dialogue, I realised there was still some room for improvement, possibly not even a room so much as an aircraft hanger.

 

Small World (1988)
Unwilling to piss away all the frowning and clenching I'd squeezed into Berserker, I revised the thing and came up with this when Charlie Adlard asked me if I'd written anything he could draw so that the two of us might make our first attempts at breaking into the comic book industry. Small World was the same thing but marginally better written - albeit not by much - and certainly better drawn, but it still wasn't enough. The slight improvement in quality only served to expose the fact that I didn't actually have a story, and oblique references to Richard S. Shaver weren't much of a substitute. We took the thing to Martin Skidmore of Trident Comics who correctly pointed out that I didn't actually have a story, although he was very polite about it. Charlie Adlard subsequently went on to international megastardom as artist of Image's Walking Dead comic, the rewards of which mean he now lives in his own hollowed out volcano with ICBMs and a fleet of flying Rolls Royces. When asked about the early days of his career, Small World never seems to warrant a mention - which is frankly understandable.

 

Three Empty Chairs (1991)
I'm still a little vexed that this one never came to anything. My friend John Jasper kept an exercise book of short stage plays which he wrote entirely for his own amusement, despite which they were fucking brilliant, slightly harrowing and genuinely hilarious - a combination of Alan Bennett, Samuel Beckett and Derek & Clive pushed to an uncomfortable extreme. One of the greatest was set entirely in the hallway of a council flat and involved two characters having an argument over a packet of custard creams with one side of the argument shouted entirely through the letterbox because the other guy refuses to open the door. I was still to blossom into the world's greatest comic artist in 1991, but had developed a sufficiently capable sense of realism for the adaption of John's Three Empty Chairs into strip format, partially on the grounds that he clearly wasn't going to do anything with his book of plays. I still believe I did a reasonable job, and showed him the first thirteen pages hoping he would be pleased, or at least somehow flattered. This is amazing, he told me to my face, then later told my friend Carl that he was massively pissed off by my having decided to illustrate his work. I had photocopied the entire book of his plays, and later lent the stack to a friend with stage connections who began to murmur about actually getting one of the things performed in front of an audience, but that also made John angry, so bollocks then.

 

Tract 002 (1995)
I'd started a religious cult based around the worship of Ringo Starr. We had about twenty members, all carrying nicely laminated membership cards. Tract 001, the first official communication of thee Church ov RINGO looked decent and seemed to have gone down well with everyone who read it, particularly existing members of the Church of the SubGenius - and I'd had about three-hundred printed. The second issue was coming together with contributions from people besides just myself and the other guy, when the other guy went into the sort of creative overdrive that results from quality control going out the window. The whole idea had been something which made us laugh because it appeared to take itself far too seriously in its obsession with the Beatles' former drummer, and one of Ringo's songs was playing in an episode of Pobol Y Cwm last month and here are seven VHS tapes of all the episodes broadcast since July tee hee hee seemed to be missing at least some of the point, and this was the general spirit of the barrage of Ringo crap the other guy took to sending me on a nearly weekly basis - jiffy bags bulging with ephemera found in charity shops and page after page of stuff printed off the internet. The final straw was the print out of a full length Robert E. Howard novel wherein our man had used his find and replace function to substitute every mention of Conan the Barbarian with Ringo. It really sucked all of the fun out of the enterprise, which had started off as something fairly light and silly. So I gave up and turned my back on the thing because I could no longer stand to think about it. Annoyingly, one of the other contributions for the second issue that never happened had been a highly entertaining article by Nigel of Nocturnal Emissions about depictions of Ringo found in the early neolithic carvings of Britain - complete with illustrations - so I felt quite bad about that. There always has to be one who spoils it for everyone else.

 

 

Grudge Bunny (1996)
Partially as a result of the genius who magically transformed a Robert E. Howard novel about Conan the Barbarian into one about the guy who played drums on all those Beatles albums, 1996 was probably the most embittered year of my life. The aforementioned genius who bombarded me with jiffy bags bulging with ephemera was simultaneously in correspondence with a million other fanzine or otherwise countercultural types and therefore ended up with a ton of DIY tapes and photocopied missives which he didn't want, or couldn't be bothered to keep, and he seemingly sent most of them my way just in case there was anything of interest. Occasionally there was something good, but most of it was pure shite which left me profoundly depressed about the state of the DIY counterculture; and whilst I nevertheless appreciated the freebies, it sometimes became a real chore just wading through it all. One of the good things, however, was Outlaw Trainspotter, an A5 zine about trainspotting. Regardless of the subject, it remains one of the funniest, and most gleefully acerbic fanzines I've ever read. I couldn't even tell whether it was taking the piss or not, although I heard a rumour that it was actually the work of the late Simon Morris of the Ceramic Hobs, so probably the former. Anyway, Outlaw Trainspotter combined with the weapons grade sarcasm of David Stubbs' wonderful Mr. Agreeable column in Melody Maker brought me to the realisation that it might be fun to do a fanzine dedicated to how much I hated almost everything else that was happening in 1996. I slapped Grudge Bunny together as quickly as possible so as to preserve the negative energy with paper, scissors, glue, typewriter, scrawled ink, and swearing, taking delight in ripping apart substandard fanzines, indie comics, tapes, and bands who needn't have bothered, and then ran out of steam after eight pages. It can be a lot of fun spitting righteous truths about creative endeavours which actually aren't much good, but becomes quickly exhausting, then even a bit depressing after a while.

 

Uuuuugh! (2002)
I had been obssessed with Doctor Who when I was a kid, then drifted away by the time I discovered fags, booze, and sexual intercourse. I rediscovered it in the nineties when my friend Andrew gave me a VHS copy of Terror of the Autons for my birthday. Being well disposed towards culty things, I discovered that the series had continued in novel form by the agency of Virgin publishing and thus was my enthusiasm reignited. I was surprised to learn that the show still had a substantial following of like-minded shut-ins despite having been off the air for nearly a decade, and so I came into contact with fandom. Because the worst aspect of anything is usually its stupid fucking fans, I began to feel like someone really needed to take the piss out of the whole thing and so Uuuuugh! was born, named after the noise made by a slow moving monster as portrayed by a guy in a rubber suit. Uuuuugh! was put together on a fancy computer, the very same one by which Ed Pinsent produced the early issues of Sound Projector. He'd upgraded and sold me his old one, so Uuuuugh! also served as a means of putting the machine through its paces. I churned out twenty-four pages of sarcastic material amounting to a conflation of Charlie Brooker and Viz comic, then realised that the only people who would get the jokes would most likely be the same people who actually wouldn't find them even remotely funny; so that was thankfully the end of that.