ROMO 2, Week 24 (Part One)
In which the not strictly weekly posting becomes slightly more or less occasional…
Hello. As you may have noticed (You did notice, didn’t you. Tell me that you noticed), it has been 14 days - scratch that - 15 days since my last info-dump. Now, that’s a not very nice way to put it, is it. Since the last… divertissement. I think I’ll be taking things from hereon to a bi-weekly schedule, or, as I like to call it, ‘schedoodle’.
Biweekly as in, once every 2 weeks or so, and not twice weekly! Good lord that really would be insane, wooden tit.
I propose this because… well, I would imagine you are feeling it too. There’s just too much Everything Everywhere All At Once for comfort. We’re all at risk of becoming Info-Sick (a thing I very nearly wrote a book on way back in the year 2000 as the prospective third volume of my End of The Century Club cycle of stories, with that very subtitle).
You are receiving these missives presumably because you Want to (and a few of you are even Paying to - and thank you so much for showing that level of support: you know who you are). But I can sense in my waters the era of the Big Switch Off looming on the horizon - and I don’t mean the literal new legislation being tabled here in the UK to disallow social media access to anyone under 16 years of age. Rather, that the constant flow of information - largely due, it has to be said, to the rise of the mighty algorithm and an increasingly bot-controlled feed stuffed to overflowing with distracting filler - is beginning to not only send us ALL batty, but also, to get in the way. Of work. Of life.
So, here begins a slower, kinder relay of what’s up in the world of New Work from me.
There’s been a wee flurry of exhibitionism on. As one display that my artwork has been a part of closes (THIS show at the London Cartoon Museum just coming down):
Another one opens: (poster artwork showing an excellent satirical strip called SATYR)
(Ignore the dates shown there. A slight delay meant the show actually opened on June 5th, while the Opening Night Preview happened on Thursday, June 3rd. And what an almighty wing-ding it was…)
Here I am menacing the Quentin Blake Centre’s director Lindsay Glen on the night. Not auditioning for the role of Andre the Giant in the remake of The Princess Bride, honest. That’s some kind of weird perspective trick of the camera… I think. Photo credit to the wonderful and glamourous glamourpuss Vyla Rollins (my inamorata).
(NOT me. And uh, NOT Vyla either, I can assure you… er whoops. Bad segue there.)
Here’s me, talking to UK Gay Comics Legend David Shenton, pink gin in hand.
(We are comparing notes about which is the best beard oil on the market. Go BULLDOG!)
And here, with Dutch legend and Comic Art Master Théo Van Den Boogaard (artist on the longstanding strip album series and its titular star, Léon La Terreur - ‘Leo, the Terror’), as he shows me something quite unnecessary in such a public place (by now those pink gins are really kicking in). Photo courtesy of Edwin Jansen.
If you’ve never experienced any of his superb Léon La Terreur, you really should:
Reimagine a mix of Jacques Tati’s sublime creation Monsieur Hulot with the irascible and often unreasonable Captain Haddock from Hergé’s Tintin (the analogue is perhaps here obvious). Much calamity ensues. Of course it’s not in English! What is!!
And here’s one of my strips on the wall! Just one out of 56 or so episodes…
There were about 65 contributing artists to the show, whittled down from hundreds, and of which, I am just one. And no bias, I have to say the curation is wonderful, with the final display really something to see and read: make your way to the brand new Quentin Blake Centre in London’s Islington between now and October if you can!
Then, just last week, Vyla and I took ourselves off for a quick flit to Basel in France. Or is it Switzerland. Or is it Germany. (Seriously, it appears to be in all three!) There, we took in the mammoth retrospective exhibition for Argentina’s lost son, Jose Muñoz (Alack Sinner, Billie Holiday, Sudor Sudaca and so, so much more):
Jose is primarily known as a master of black and white inkwork (Encres), something like this:
Or this:
And yet now that bossy algorithmic bot interrupts to tell me that I am near to my limit for this post, so I have to draw a line under it all, for now.
I always liked the work of Jose Muñoz. Hey, I think we can do longer posts on here, but we are warned that for some people their emails will be 'truncated' - odd word.