By way of clarification, I feel I should offer a few introductory words to explain why I deemed it worthwhile to produce the pages currently the subject of your perusal.
To be perfectly honest, I’m not entirely sure why I started this. I know I wanted to compile, for myself, the various bits and pieces of things I’ve written or drawn over the course of the past quarter century – kind of a mid-life landmark type thing.
I also felt I should put on record my sense of gratitude for how good life has been to me. It’s an odd thing, but when times are bad, as they sometimes are, counting your real blessings is a powerful help, and having them in black and white in front of you serves to drive home viscerally that there are things in the world worth drawing breath for.
Also, and finally, I wanted to explore what it is that compels me on a regular basis to pick up a pencil or pen and commit my weirdnesses to paper. Let’s face it, it is eccentric behaviour, this tendency of mine to break into poetry, prose, or pictorial self-expression at the drop of a pun or verbal quirk.
So this bundle of nouns, verbs, adjectives, weird syntax, warped grammar, punctuation, prose and pictures you are looking at with a glazed expression on your face is a compendium of vanity publishing, prayer and self-medicated psycho-therapy.
I’ve been writing and drawing all my life, a fact for which, as usual, you can blame the parents. They are the ones who gave me access to the world of books and pictures and they must shoulder their share of the blame for the outcome. Words and images have been the wallpaper in the room of my mind since as far back as I can go.
I can remember finding a copy of one of the old Fleetwood comics under the pillow in my cot when I was about four years old. Lord Snooty, Biffo the Bear, Roger the Dodger… words and pictures and stories all together in one package. I was hooked.
Comics and books – The Sparky, Noddy, The Beano, Whizzer and Chips, Superman and Rupert Bear, Spiderman and Richmal Crompton’s William and Enid Blyton’s Famous Five and Franklin W. Dixon’s Hardy Boys, and then, of course, Hergé’s Tintin and Goscinny and Uderzo with Asterix…
I started reading really early, before I started school, again thanks to those aforementioned parents, and devoured everything I could get my hands on at the time that was even marginally worth reading. I’m not claiming any kind of high art for those early comics I read – the stories were strung together on a weekly basis for kids who were completely unsophisticated, but they entertained and educated and interested and stimulated my imagination with their weird and wonderful art and their completely uninhibited sense of anarchy and fun.
And comics presented challenges – I remember the thrill of figuring out what speech balloons were versus thought balloons versus captions – comics gave a completely different set of insights into the art of story telling in such an entertaining and streamlined package.
On top of those, I started collecting “serious” books , because that was the kind of “serious” kid (read pain-in-the-ass know-it-all) I was – the Look and Learn series gave me pictures and words about science and dinosaurs and history and all kinds of fantastic facts. The writing was a bit dry, but the pictures were great. Encyclopedias in my school gave me stories about Napoleon and Genghis Khan and Julius Caesar, and those little bible books in our classrooms gave the images of the Middle East and Egypt. I was a Time and Space Traveller!
Then my Dad introduced me to two of my most reliable friends and fallback failsafes – P.G. Wodehouse and Isaac Asimov. The former arrived into my life as two old books from my grandfather’s bookshelves when he moved from Kerry to Ballincollig in Cork. Love among the Chickens and Uneasy Money landed on the floor of my bedroom where I was lying on my belly reading a Micky Mouse comic one afternoon. I was about eleven at the time. Dad thought I “might like them”.
He was right. Wodehouse is the unshiftable core of my book collection, and short of fire, flood, or famine, will remain so. Asimov came with a similar lack of fanfare, in the form of a slightly battered copy of I Robot that a friend had loaned my father, and again he thought I might be interested in “the science fiction stuff in it”. Again, he was right.
Messrs Wodehouse and Asimov influenced me irrevocably in my perception of the nuances of language and humour and narrative structure. Wodehouse gave me a love of the fluent and flexible use of words and an appreciation for the work that needs to go into seemingly effortless elegance in prose. Asimov showed how simplicity of style and clarity of language can be the most useful tools in any entertainer’s or educator’s toolkit.
I’ve discovered many more writers since, of course, – Alistair MacLean and Frederic Forsyth, Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Ellery Queen, Iain M. Banks, Ian Rankin, H.G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, Jules Verne, Poe, Robert Silverberg, Mervyn Peake, Shakespeare, Dickens, Alistair Reynolds, Henry Kuttner, Ian MacDonald, Philip K. Dick, Garth Ennis, Alan Moore, Flann O’Brien… I could, and frequently do, go on for hours.
I’ve acquired a weird and wonderful variety of interests over the years. Particle physics, dark matter, evolution, philosophy, detective stories, the poetry of Yeats and Heaney and Tennyson, science fiction, superheroes, vampires, werewolves and witchcraft, the warped and wonderful world of Gary Larson’s Far Side, Charles M Schultz’s Snoopy, Berke Breathed’s Bloom County, the books of Terry Pratchett, the art of Michelangelo and DaVinci, El Greco and Picasso, Gainsborough and Constable and Pauline Bewick and Jim Fitzpatrick, Harry Clarke and Barry Windsor Smith and Jim Lee and Steranko and Buscema and Colon and Kane. These lists are in no sense intended to suggest that I’m either a prodigy or a polymath. If anything, I’m a dilettante with a penchant for bullshit.
But I do consider myself blessed and privileged that through the simple skill of reading I have been afforded so many windows into so many wonderful worlds.
In the past few years, I’ve bumped into quite a few people from the dim and distant past, and the invariable question that arises is “what have you been up to all this time?” Now, the answer is fairly complicated because the last quarter century of my life has been, by turns, very boring for long stretches but then subject to bouts of change fraught with excitement.
By way of chronicling these varied events and diversions, I have failed singularly to keep any sort of formal record. Instead, I marked certain periods with attempts at poetry and prose. I also drew cartoons and things.
Basically, and boiling it down to its essence, I have spent the latter twenty-five years of my life being unbelievably lucky compared to the bulk of the human race. My wife (who has put up with me for that entire stretch having been in at the start ) is still absolutely wonderful, still my wife, and still my best friend. My three daughters are gorgeous and gifted. We have survived the eighties, endured the Celtic Tiger, painted signs, murals, and an eclectic range of odd commissions, written, worked in a variety of jobs, moved from bedsit to flat to house, bought a few cars (all second-hand – We’re not ostentatious…), visited France and Spain and Italy and Greece and generally had a whale of a time – when we weren’t having an awful time, as happens from time to time.
But all I have to show for your delectation is the doodles and scribbles and daft derelictions of paper I produced over those years
This here what you are looking at is a bit of a compendium of those there.
I can only say that I thought they seemed good at the time.
To be perfectly honest, I’m not entirely sure why I started this. I know I wanted to compile, for myself, the various bits and pieces of things I’ve written or drawn over the course of the past quarter century – kind of a mid-life landmark type thing.
I also felt I should put on record my sense of gratitude for how good life has been to me. It’s an odd thing, but when times are bad, as they sometimes are, counting your real blessings is a powerful help, and having them in black and white in front of you serves to drive home viscerally that there are things in the world worth drawing breath for.
Also, and finally, I wanted to explore what it is that compels me on a regular basis to pick up a pencil or pen and commit my weirdnesses to paper. Let’s face it, it is eccentric behaviour, this tendency of mine to break into poetry, prose, or pictorial self-expression at the drop of a pun or verbal quirk.
So this bundle of nouns, verbs, adjectives, weird syntax, warped grammar, punctuation, prose and pictures you are looking at with a glazed expression on your face is a compendium of vanity publishing, prayer and self-medicated psycho-therapy.
I’ve been writing and drawing all my life, a fact for which, as usual, you can blame the parents. They are the ones who gave me access to the world of books and pictures and they must shoulder their share of the blame for the outcome. Words and images have been the wallpaper in the room of my mind since as far back as I can go.
I can remember finding a copy of one of the old Fleetwood comics under the pillow in my cot when I was about four years old. Lord Snooty, Biffo the Bear, Roger the Dodger… words and pictures and stories all together in one package. I was hooked.
Comics and books – The Sparky, Noddy, The Beano, Whizzer and Chips, Superman and Rupert Bear, Spiderman and Richmal Crompton’s William and Enid Blyton’s Famous Five and Franklin W. Dixon’s Hardy Boys, and then, of course, Hergé’s Tintin and Goscinny and Uderzo with Asterix…
I started reading really early, before I started school, again thanks to those aforementioned parents, and devoured everything I could get my hands on at the time that was even marginally worth reading. I’m not claiming any kind of high art for those early comics I read – the stories were strung together on a weekly basis for kids who were completely unsophisticated, but they entertained and educated and interested and stimulated my imagination with their weird and wonderful art and their completely uninhibited sense of anarchy and fun.
And comics presented challenges – I remember the thrill of figuring out what speech balloons were versus thought balloons versus captions – comics gave a completely different set of insights into the art of story telling in such an entertaining and streamlined package.
On top of those, I started collecting “serious” books , because that was the kind of “serious” kid (read pain-in-the-ass know-it-all) I was – the Look and Learn series gave me pictures and words about science and dinosaurs and history and all kinds of fantastic facts. The writing was a bit dry, but the pictures were great. Encyclopedias in my school gave me stories about Napoleon and Genghis Khan and Julius Caesar, and those little bible books in our classrooms gave the images of the Middle East and Egypt. I was a Time and Space Traveller!
Then my Dad introduced me to two of my most reliable friends and fallback failsafes – P.G. Wodehouse and Isaac Asimov. The former arrived into my life as two old books from my grandfather’s bookshelves when he moved from Kerry to Ballincollig in Cork. Love among the Chickens and Uneasy Money landed on the floor of my bedroom where I was lying on my belly reading a Micky Mouse comic one afternoon. I was about eleven at the time. Dad thought I “might like them”.
He was right. Wodehouse is the unshiftable core of my book collection, and short of fire, flood, or famine, will remain so. Asimov came with a similar lack of fanfare, in the form of a slightly battered copy of I Robot that a friend had loaned my father, and again he thought I might be interested in “the science fiction stuff in it”. Again, he was right.
Messrs Wodehouse and Asimov influenced me irrevocably in my perception of the nuances of language and humour and narrative structure. Wodehouse gave me a love of the fluent and flexible use of words and an appreciation for the work that needs to go into seemingly effortless elegance in prose. Asimov showed how simplicity of style and clarity of language can be the most useful tools in any entertainer’s or educator’s toolkit.
I’ve discovered many more writers since, of course, – Alistair MacLean and Frederic Forsyth, Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Ellery Queen, Iain M. Banks, Ian Rankin, H.G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, Jules Verne, Poe, Robert Silverberg, Mervyn Peake, Shakespeare, Dickens, Alistair Reynolds, Henry Kuttner, Ian MacDonald, Philip K. Dick, Garth Ennis, Alan Moore, Flann O’Brien… I could, and frequently do, go on for hours.
I’ve acquired a weird and wonderful variety of interests over the years. Particle physics, dark matter, evolution, philosophy, detective stories, the poetry of Yeats and Heaney and Tennyson, science fiction, superheroes, vampires, werewolves and witchcraft, the warped and wonderful world of Gary Larson’s Far Side, Charles M Schultz’s Snoopy, Berke Breathed’s Bloom County, the books of Terry Pratchett, the art of Michelangelo and DaVinci, El Greco and Picasso, Gainsborough and Constable and Pauline Bewick and Jim Fitzpatrick, Harry Clarke and Barry Windsor Smith and Jim Lee and Steranko and Buscema and Colon and Kane. These lists are in no sense intended to suggest that I’m either a prodigy or a polymath. If anything, I’m a dilettante with a penchant for bullshit.
But I do consider myself blessed and privileged that through the simple skill of reading I have been afforded so many windows into so many wonderful worlds.
In the past few years, I’ve bumped into quite a few people from the dim and distant past, and the invariable question that arises is “what have you been up to all this time?” Now, the answer is fairly complicated because the last quarter century of my life has been, by turns, very boring for long stretches but then subject to bouts of change fraught with excitement.
By way of chronicling these varied events and diversions, I have failed singularly to keep any sort of formal record. Instead, I marked certain periods with attempts at poetry and prose. I also drew cartoons and things.
Basically, and boiling it down to its essence, I have spent the latter twenty-five years of my life being unbelievably lucky compared to the bulk of the human race. My wife (who has put up with me for that entire stretch having been in at the start ) is still absolutely wonderful, still my wife, and still my best friend. My three daughters are gorgeous and gifted. We have survived the eighties, endured the Celtic Tiger, painted signs, murals, and an eclectic range of odd commissions, written, worked in a variety of jobs, moved from bedsit to flat to house, bought a few cars (all second-hand – We’re not ostentatious…), visited France and Spain and Italy and Greece and generally had a whale of a time – when we weren’t having an awful time, as happens from time to time.
But all I have to show for your delectation is the doodles and scribbles and daft derelictions of paper I produced over those years
This here what you are looking at is a bit of a compendium of those there.
I can only say that I thought they seemed good at the time.
No comments:
Post a Comment