Tilting at Windmills

Sure, I used to read comics.
It started with the Beano: good, innocent fun, time locked at some point in the 1950's, with a jokes page and, if you were lucky, a fruity chew glued to the front. 
Then there was a Beezer and a Whizzer and Chips annual at my grandmother's house that I would read by lamp-light having managed to squirm free from a savage tucking in.
Then there was Asterix.
Then there was Tintin.
At some point around 1990, having been introduced to Marvel Super-Villains Top Trumps in the playground, I confronted my father in the kitchen, presented him with a copy of X-Men Classics and made a well rehearsed and persuasive argument:
"As you can see, the art-work and story lines really are significantly more sophisticated. I think it would be much better for me as, frankly, I've been finding the Beano rather puerile of late. Plus, I think this comic and others like it will really help me in my development as an artist. In conclusion, I think it would be best if you allowed me to subscribe to the X-Men, or perhaps the Amazing Spider-Man- I haven't decided yet."
My ploy worked, and for a few years I amassed quite a collection and became something of an authority in the school yard. God, I really loved those comics.
But then my favourite artists started to drift away, forming Image Comics in the early 1990's. I tried to follow them, I tried to enjoy Spawn and the Maxx but they had nothing of the colourful Marvel characters I had loved, which themselves had lost something now they were drawn by others.
Then I got bored.
Then I grew up.
This is also the point in their lives at which most other people stopped reading comics too and, I would argue, the reason that comics are so often seen as more of a genre than a genuine artistic medium. I have lost count of the times I've been asked "What, like Batman?" or some variation thereof when I've sheepishly revealed to someone that I draw comics.
But the story doesn't end there. It was the new millennium and I was at art school, trying desperately to reconcile my decidedly old-fashioned, academic technique in drawing and painting with the conceptual demands of contemporary art. Inevitably, I started producing portrait miniatures.

My first attempt at a miniature. About 5cm diameter

It was at this time that I stumbled upon a book. No, a comic. "These are both behind me and beneath me, if that's dimensionally possible." I probably thought, but I read it anyway. It was From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell and it fucking rocked my world. Literate, complex and exhaustively researched with a 42 page appendix of notes to prove it, I wasn't aware that such an object could have existed in the superficial medium of comics I had left behind a decade before. Perhaps it was an abberation. So I carefully selected a different comic, this one had won a Pulitzer prize, like To Kill a Mockingbird, or The Grapes of Wrath, it had to be good. It was Maus by Art Spiegelman, which is still arguably the pinnacle of artistic and narrative achievement in the comic book medium and I started to wonder whether there was something in this comics business after all.
Then there was Jimmy Corrigan by Chris Ware.
Then there was David Boring by Daniel Clowes.
Then there was Hicksville by Dylan Horrocks and It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken by Seth and Louis Riel by Chester Brown and Blankets by Craig Thompson and Black Hole by Charles Burns and Palestine by Joe Sacco and I Killed Adolf Hitler by Jason and Jimbo's Inferno by Gary Panter and Berlin by Jason Lutes and Garage Band by Gipi and Epileptic by David B and The Six Hundred and Seventy Six Apparitions by Killoffer and Alias the Cat by Kim Deitch and Fun Home by Alison Bechdel and Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi and more by these writers and many others.
I became something of an authority.
And I started to think that maybe I might quite like to have a go at these comics.

My first comics page as an adult

I drew a comic strip. It was 5 pages long, based on an existing character, Hellboy by Mike Mignola, and was drawn purely for the purpose of trying my hand. It took ages, and it wasn't very good at all.
I'm not sure why, but I was reading and loving 'alternative' comics, but for a good few years I was drawing stuff that was a lot more 'mainstream'. I seem to remember the logic being that if I could work for one of the big comics companies, it would be easier to produce my own work later on when I was more experienced and had garnered some sort of following. To this end, a couple of years after my first go at comics, I downloaded a sample script from the 2000A.D website and started work. I never finished it and found the whole experience torturous. If you wish, you can see the results here.
It just wasn't working.
In frustration I cleared my drawing board, got out a fresh sheet of paper and started drawing. Not Batman or Judge Dredd or Hellboy, but something I just made up as I went along that combined my love of 1950's tiki culture, my knowledge of second world war uniforms (don't ask.), a recently discovered taste for sushi and a collection of the work of Dashiell Hammett. I completed four pages of Bali' Hai P.I. very quickly which can be seen here.
Maus it ain't, but to me it had been something of a revelation. I'd never produced work so quickly, and never enjoyed drawing comics as much.
And that's kind of where it begins. Make no mistake, I'm not writing this from the position of a professional cartoonist. My work has not so far been published (and I would argue that comics are nothing until they see print), though that's something I aim to rectify this year. I write instead as someone who's still learning, (hopefully) improving, and excited by the potential of what I might possibly be able achieve in the medium I love.
Future posts may well not be as ramblingly wordy as this one, and if anyone stuck with me this far, I thank you for reading.