Bumper 2017 sketches holiday special

I unpacked a box of sketchbooks yesterday and found my 2017 book, which covers a year when I was working very hard writing multiple series. It contains a lot of early versions of things that were eventually made, or weren't made, in a distinctly primitive form. So here are a few highlights.

First up, things that did get made pretty much as they appeared in the book. After Bad Machinery finished I didn't quite know what webcomics to make - or even if it was time to stop making them altogether. So I made a couple of odd little projects - "Come Home" (reworking a 2006 comic, "Oldbourne") and "End Of The Road" (featuring a lot of long-missing characters) while I kept the webcomics coming (all my best ideas at the time were reserved for Giant Days).

 "Come Home" sketches. In this story, Amy goes away to live on the south coast and Shelley has to go back and get her. They have an assignation with two men who are effectively Tim Jones and Ryan Beckwith, thinly disguised. The point being that we tend to meet or seek out the same people, over and over again, and in leaving a place, we frequently cannot get away from ourselves. Filler when I originally did it, filler when I re-did it!

"End Of The Road" sketches. A lot of old friends here. Another attempt to untie the gordian knot of Erin and Eustace's story. It's on the Patreon if you want to read it.

D.I. DES (Detective Inspector Desmond) wasn't a real series, it was what my friend Louise (who made the big Des Fishman puppet) suggested when I couldn't work out what I was going to do next. She said he should be like Idris Elba's Luther. While obviously this was never more than a few silly drawings, a troubled Detective Inspector did end up in Wicked Things and this is the start of me thinking about this.

Around this time I was still trying to do something with "Robert Cop", and the last attempt I made was an idea to have Charlotte visit America to live out her dream of solving "an American crime". I was working with what I had to hand.

 

I wasn't able to square away the different parts of the story - it was too complicated for me to work out at the time. These two things didn't need to be mashed together. But again, it got me thinking about Lottie in that police context, which was what gave rise to Wicked Things a couple of years later. I liked the idea of putting her in a squad room, in a Monk or Mentalist way, more than the idea of trying to work out Robert Cop, which I had never quite got my head around other than wanting to draw a robot man with big circle eyes. I decided that perhaps that was a private passion. It was certainly a short-lived one - these may be the last drawings of him.

Early in the year I tried out something called "Go-Kart Conspiracy", which was another 22-page special that I designed just to mock hateful ironist musician Father John Misty. This was not a good reason to make a comic, though it did get quite a way along (I've posted the breakdown and cover for it here before). For a day, it was called "Go Party", but just for a day. The day I drew the cover, then decided to go no further. The final (attempted) appearance of Mimi from Bad Machinery: Case Of The Modern Men.

 

The last drawings in the book are preparation for "The Great Unboxing" or "Wen-Tack", some fun preparatory sketches of Tom Grendel, Sunita, Georgia and Zeebus, Warrior Child.

 

A lot of the rest of the sketchbook is a lot of drawings I did when I was working with Wil Moss at Marvel at the end of 2017/early 2018 on something that had various titles. I think digging into those might put me in a black and un-festive mood, so I'll save them for another time, most likely "never".

Instead, I'll leave you with the Bake-Off related drawings that Daniel Chabon saw years later that led to him commissioning The Great British Bump-Off. I think these have run before but they're better than anything Caravaggio* did so here they are again.

 

 

And a very good day to you!

*Not that Caravaggio