1998 Death of a Salesman / Neo Lux

To cut a short story long, by the middle of 1998 I had given up on cartooning. I had all but destroyed my brain with drink, could scarely remember how to draw properly. But after I finished university and stopped drinking five pints of cold booze a night, I started drawing again. And I was rubbish at it.

Despite the awful nature of the stories my poor characters had had to endure, I saw a brighter future for them.

Unemployed due to the incredible shortsightedness of employers, and in no way due to my terrible interview technique, I thought I might make a professional cartoonist of myself. So for the first time in mylife I scripted a batch of strips, carefully following Bill Watterson's instructions in Calvin and Hobbes 10th anniversary, and made a sample pack of 25 three panel strips, the first 25 I had ever done.

I called the strip 'Bobbins', from the northwestern slang for "crap". I liked the irony of sending off my submission packet labelled 'crap'. And looking back at those first 25, how apt the title was!

But what fun was to come! The reviled 'big nose' period, the wretched drops in form, the amazing second half of 1999 where everything seemed to go right, the terrible first half of 2000 where the strip deteriorated into a shambles, and then came right back atcha after a month up a mountain meditating with the maharishi.

Coming later this year I'll be doing a continuing Bobbins sketchbook series, featuring the best of my sketches of Holly in dominatrix gear from the last two years, and maybe a few other etchings... be there!

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