Sketchbook 2010/sketchbook 2019 (Patreon)

This morning I was looking for something I'd lost moving house (again) and went into the big box of sketchbooks (again; it contains only sketchbooks and that was not what I was looking for) but my loss is your gain because I found some gems. Some of these may be reruns but some are definitely not.

First up are my preparatory sketches for the first Giant Days mini in 2010, I will have drawn these immediately prior to writing the issue. I had a good sense of the shape of the story, the players and the key scenes, but there are things here which obviously got cut.

  I really liked the Spanish people I met at university and here is an early indicator of this, though mature student Fernando did not make the cut. This appreciation of Spain was later rewarded by the series' success there. It all worked out. The fellow bottom right is intriguing but I suspect I drew him and wrote his gnomic little utterance while on the phone.

 I lost Susan's shape a little bit between the sketches and drawing the final version. I like the quality of these drawings, very different to my digital artwork at the time. It was hard to translate that quality, I'd only been working digitally for about two years at the time and the hardware was quite primitive compared to the tools I have now. I often felt like I was fighting it. But there are always trade-offs.

 This isn't the first picture of Ed Gemmell, top right, but it might be the second. The Esther drawing titled "REGISTRATION" felt like I had really nailed down what I wanted Giant Days to look like. A very satisfying feeling!

The next batch of drawings are from early 2019. I have a poor sense of what I was working on when during this time, because I was so overworked. These all seem to stem from a trip to Cornwall in February which provided a much-needed break. My brain, however, would not stop.

 This is the sketch I sent in to Dark Horse for the cover of Steeple issue 4. I've drawn a rectangle below it, indicating that I might have thought about offering a second version, but plainly that was not on the cards that day. Anyway, they liked this one.

The other notes relate to what I seem to have thought would have been a second arc of issues (there was no second arc of issues). They ended up being used for "Clotted Crime" in 2021. It all began at Gylly Beach Café when I sat with friends on the terrace next to a table where a young actor was holding court. He was talking exclusively about his new phone. The images below are not a verbatim transcript but they're not far off.

I could not present this preening dandy exactly as-is but later that week I sat on a rock near the water and over the course of about 40 minutes, in the trance-like state that the sound of the sea induces in me, wrote down all of this:

What this tells me is that I hadn't written issue five of Steeple at this point (or radically reworked what I had), because the side-switching went into that issue. That's a real last-minute switch-out that completely changed the series. Based on the original plan, it would have been a brief problem resolved in a couple of issues. There are a lot of small ideas on here that were made into bigger things later, arguably the seeds of almost every story that followed. That's a pretty good 40 minutes.

But they can't all be winners. It would be weird if they were. My sketchbooks of this period particularly are littered with what I call "blown eggs" - they look like what they're meant to be, but contain nothing. There's one below called The Italian Jaunt, or The Savage Shelley Winters, there were no ideas here worth exploring at the time. Just a very tired mind going through the motions. But doesn't it look good? When I look through old workbooks, the tidier the notes, the less likely it is that they contain notions of merit.

This was a bobbins.horse spin-off. Can you imagine? A spin-off of a fill-in for a spin-off of a spin-off. It could have been good - anything could - but sometimes it's better just to think of something at least somewhat new.