Did I ever relate the story of how I was approached by the people who were in charge of Howard Marks' publicity, asking if they could develop the "Spliffy the Clown" strip as a recurring feature on his nascent website (Mr Nice had just been published in paperback and was doing well)?



That a bunch of hash heads couldn't see that the strip was, albeit in a pretty asinine way, criticising hash heads and their dated, dopey counter-culture, and were giddy at the very mention of spliffs, regardless of context, in exactly the same way as the 'zinesters the I was mocking, gave me an irony-induced nose bleed.

Oy.

I've been taking advantage of the new machine and making uploads aplenty over at my artwork site (link at left).

Seeing as how it's ten years since I begat the little comic from whence the title of this blog came, I thought I might put some extracts from it in my new, neither fish nor fowl Morgue gallery.



Um, no.

It's bizarre, but one short decade later there's not a single drawing in the whole damn thing I can associate myself with. It's like someone else made it. Don't get me wrong, there where no surprises in there, I remember it all in terms of content, but execution? Yikes. And the humour? Well, it's mostly either warmed-over Evan Dorkin pop culture wise-assery:



Or sub-Jhonen Vasquez cute/nasty:



Schism Schasm was subtitled "A Can't Letter Comic", and by god, at least I was honest. Post-Kubert, where I'd been made to feel very self-conscious about my undisciplined and curly hand lettering, I can see myself going overboard in an attempt to make my alphabet legible, clear and consistent. This results in all lettering being over-sized, and in some cases completely throwing the balance between artwork and language in panels and even whole pages. This phenomenon reaches its apotheosis in the "slice of life" centre spread, which I reproduce here at a small size because it emphasises the over-bearing slabs of grey atop each panel:



That's atrocious. Even today, I struggle to keep my lettering proportional (only by drawing nice and big can I keep the letters as minimal as they really ought to be), but I'm a damn sight better than that. My only defence of that particular story is it did generate a bit of patter that I still hear used by certain people who read it:



As if further proof where needed, the most succesful page- as a bit of cartooning- among the thirty six I did is the least verbose of the lot (and one that weirdly prefigures how large France would loom in my later career):



I dunno, the past is a foreign country... Anyone else care to share past creative cringes?