Reading “The Diary of the Wimpy Kid” and about its creator Jeff Kinney, has given me an itch to have a go at drawing some cartoons or comic strips again. In the book the protagonist Greg Heffley tries out for the post of cartoonist on the school magazine. He got to work with his buddy Rowley…
“We banged out a bunch of characters real quick, but that turned out to be the easy part. When we tried to think up some jokes we kind of hit a wall. ”
Back in 1997 I drew a comic strip called “Betty Zapat and Yorrick“, it was to amuse my wife who was ill at the time, I had a cast of characters and eventually drew 127 episodes. I don’t have them today, maybe I can find a few on a memory stick somewhere. I also drew a strip for a football fanzine the “Leyton Orientear” called “Leyton’s O”, a surreal strip imagining a letter signing up for a football team, about eight or nine of them were published.
I’ve found a few early episodes of Betty Zapat that I scanned and put on a memory stick:
I seem to have a problem uploading them….this one is upside down…maybe it will be okay for Australian audiences. I think the problem is the files are .bmp files which aren’t allowed for adding. Just looked at WikiHow…to convert .bmp to .jpg… through the paint program….I think I might be getting somewhere…
Betty Zapat and Yorrick Episode 8. Rugbyman is critical of women’s rugby and gets no sympathy when he trips and falls.
I want a new strip, I’m not sure what yet. One idea is “ენოტი და ანა” (Enoti and Ana) based on my granddaughter Ana and her toy raccoon.
ენოტი და ანა
My favourite comic strips are Calvin and Hobbes, Footrot Flats, Peanuts, Lucky Luke and The Far Side.
It has been dangerous for cartoonists lately with the Charlie Hebdo Massacre. I don’t think I will create a strip around the Prophet Mohammed, it wouldn’t be a sensible idea, and Jesus had better jokes…”did you hear the one about the camel passing through the eye of the needle?” (Mark 10:25)…although it is probably a whole lot funnier in the original Aramaic.
ენოტი და ანა
jim holroyd 365 