How did all this happen?

One Little Paperback Book

Funny how little things change lives.

For me, that little thing was a small purchase from a London bookshop  in 1991. I bought a paperback book called "Life In A Medieval Village" by Frances and Joseph Gies, a couple of American historians. It looked like a friendly little book and it dealt with  a part of history that has always fascinated me.

Medieval history is a proper delight for me but I'm not interested overmuch in kings and queens, I'm much more of a social history man. You know the sort of thing; how often people washed, what they ate, what they wore, how they kept house and home together, that sort of thing.

I devoured that book on my daily commute from north Essex into London Liverpool Street and when I'd finished it, I read it again, right through. You know you're hooked once you do something as daft as that, don't you? Then I bought some more books on the same subject. Never books about kings or politics, though. The whole medieval world came alive to me through these books and I still read them regularly and with huge pleasure.

One Big Hardback Book

Even longer ago, though, when I was but a boy, my mother bought me the first Asterix album. A big, colourful hardback book called "Asterix The Gaul". If you don't know Asterix, I'll be shocked because you must be a lover of cartoons, or you wouldn't be bothering with this site!

I was used to Batman, Superman, boys' comics like "Hurricane", "The Beano", "The Dandy" and all the rest but this was something on a different level. The artwork was superb, the characters funny and loveable and the stories swept me away to first century Gaul, with the Romans occupying the country and one village full of brave Gauls holding out against them, mainly, though not exclusively, due to the magic potion brewed by their druid.

I knew that the books were French but the translations by the late Anthea Bell were breathtakingly funny, especially in the way she dreamt up the punning names of the characters. There's Asterix, of course, then Obelix. These two unchanged from the French. But after that, there's the centurion Crismus Bonus, another called Curius Odus, the druid called Getafix, Asterix's British cousin, Anticlimax, the wine seller called Dipsomaniax and on and on it goes, a procession of brilliant originality the like of which I had never come across before.

All my working life I had it in my mind to brush up on my drawing, create some characters of my own and then get going on a cartoon strip. I couldn't slavishly copy Asterix and just have some little Briton fighting off some Danes, for example, that wouldn't be original enough. And in any case, my working day was taxing in the extreme. I had a two-hour commute each way, including about an hour on the train and sandwiched between that, a full working day in a highly challenging advertising sales department. If something didn't give, I would never get to do what I had always wanted to do.

But something did give. Thirty years ago I got together with a colleague and friend, Bernie Stewart, and between us, we got our own business off the ground. It was still pretty taxing but in the end, I was able to find the time to get creative, do some proper drawing and finally, to create my own scenario and set of characters. I'm not as clever as Anthea Bell with the names but I didn't want to seem like a plagiarist, simply copying Asterix. 

Nowadays, I publish the strip through Substack. My subscribers get regular cartoon strips, usally with a gag at the end of each one and occasionally, a link to one of my YouTube cartoon drawing tutorials. You can find the tutorials here.

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