Q&A 20: making things that aren't comics (Patreon)

John Smith asks:"Do you ever think about adaptations of your work? Not necessarily movies and TV, and not necessarily as a business venture, just as a fun thought exercise. Like action figures or board games or what-have-you."

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I was going to give one my traditional grim answers to this along the lines of "I'M A VERY BUSY MAN NO TIME FOR SUCH THINGS" or "I DON'T BUY OR PLAY WITH TOYS SO WHY WOULD I MAKE TOYS" or "BILL WATTERSON WAS RIGHT, NO SPIN OFFS, LET THE COMIC BE ITSELF IN THE WORLD," and you could have imagined me kicking a waste paper basket across the room with my fists clenched and that would have been that.

But it would not have been a truthful answer. Because I often think how much fun it would be to use some of the dense world-building that is in my work in a different format.

I particularly like high-end vinyl figures and statuettes that are commissioned of some indie comics' protagonists. I loved the figure based on Andrew MacLean's Head Lopper. And how about this beautiful rendition of CROM's Bird King?

Now, we must be realistic here. I am a successful and established cartoonist, but I did a signing last year right after CROM, and the line for the Bird King hitmaker was a lot longer than mine. CROM works hard for that love, slaving 24/7 behind a sweaty plastic mask. He's a brilliant artist.

I am realistic that I am not going to get the same opportunities. Also, things like this are usually designed (and bankrolled) by wildly enthusiastic men with neatly manicured beards, in immaculate $100 tshirts and baseball caps. I have never managed to sell myself to this "demo". They do not see my tables at conventions, even if I am on half a table with a great and talented friend who is beloved of them. This is the same reason I am never asked to design cans for craft IPAs, because it's the same men. I'm realistic about why this is. We are not getting the Susan Ptolemy figure we all hope for any time soon.

Someone 3D-modelled a Shauna Wickle from Max Sarin's cover for Great British Bump-Off and that may be as close as you get.

(ASIDE: My friend Andrew Bell has been making vinyl toys since the mid/late 2000s, I can remember us running the numbers on one back when Scary Go Round was at its peak - financially it never made sense.)

The thing that makes a project like this (or any other) seem exciting for me is the chance to work with someone talented, and nice, who can do something I patently cannot. I love people who are better at things than me and cleverer than me. I feel drunk in their presence and long to learn at their knee. The opportunities to do this when you work at home, in splendid isolation from your peers, for nearly a quarter century, on an idiosyncratic personal project, are bloody fleeting.

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Then there are the things that realistically, I could do myself. i often think would be fun to make a little text video game with pictures, some kind of narrative experiment, an exploration of all the possibilities that weren't available to me (or were much less accessible) when I started telling stories. I could teach myself how to make them, but I can tell you with enviable self-awareness tat if I got into it, I'd really get into it, and you'd never see another comic, and I'd go broke because Johnny's Sub-par First Indie Game is not what anyone is looking for right now. I work in the most efficient way possible as it is. But there are lots of fun Bobbins Universe games you can imagine, right? And let us not forget Shelley Winters' No Glove No Love, a game so high concept that I dare not reveal its nature to you oh all right then you might as well see it.

 I've been asked to work on other people's video games a few times but the requests never came at the right time. The juiciest requests always come when I'm at my most burnt out and enfeebled.

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I don't play many board games (no one ever asks me to, even though I am pleasant company and a good-humoured competitor) so I look at the array of brightly coloured boxes in the burgeoning bookshop section like a wallflower at the school disco. However, during the six months I lived with my elderly parents in 2023 (be warned: this isn't for everybody) I did a lot of jigsaws. At one point I was buying a jigsaw puzzle every two weeks. I got addicted to a bad brand of jigsaw puzzle whose art was exactly what I wanted from a jigsaw but whose Q.C. was terrible and often lacked 1-2 pieces. Let's not beat around the bush: it was Lawrence King. I had a go at designing a jigsaw puzzle for Topatoco but ran aground because it had to be history's best 1000 piecer and I was (see above) burnt out and enfeebled. Have a look at my shamefully abandoned WIP: I was not going to complete this (rather like a Lawrence King puzzle, haha!!) It featured every major character from my comics that I could think of, some of them multiple times. I bit off more than I could chew, perhaps. But I like a lot of little people on a puzzle! I'll try again another time.

Have I answered the question? I think I've answered the question. These are the fun things I have thought about making. I'm a very busy man, no time for such things. I don't buy or play with toys so why would I make toys? Bill Watterson was right etc etc etc (kicks waste-paper basket, fists clenched).