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Comic Strips

I’m not your hardcore graphic novel sort of comic strip artist. I do what I do, and some people like it.

I used to do some quite rude ones back in the seventies and eighties, but I stopped, as it was a waste of good humour. Time was I’d have been over the moon to have had a strip in one of the red-top tabloids, but the days of the Great British Newspaper Strip are gone. I have no idea why. There used to be some really good ones.

 Anyway, I have had some fun with strips in magazines and newspapers over the years. Although some were promotional, such as Space Doubt and Pimania, which were meant to advertise early computer games (this was the eighties!), there was Young Doctors in Space, which ran monthly in Starburst for more than a dozen years, Lavinia Laserblast, my daily intergalactic romp in The Glasgow Evening Times a while back, and more recently, Middle Age Spread, a mediaeval silly show, and Browser, about a computer literate border collie, which was syndicated by N5 group.

My longest running strip is Great Moments in Computing, scripted by Mel Croucher, and that’s been rattling on monthly for over 21 years in Computer Shopper, which must be some kind of record (for a monthly strip in a consumer mag).

 Another favourite was Mercy Dash, a chain-smoking, hard-drinking shiftless PR woman, several years before AbFab, again scripted by Mel. She ran wild in a mag called Games Machine for eighteen months, until she was put a stop to.

 I’ve been trying to revive her ever since, and in the late nineties did a new set, which I never sent out, and is making its first public appearance on this site. 

 A note on the panel arrangement: as the mechanism of this web site is favourably disposed towards portrait rather than landscape images, the only way to display the strips in order that they may appear larger than a postage stamp is to stack the panels thusly, although they were designed to run in a horizontal strip. This becomes a problem if the panels are themselves panoramic, or of varying sizes, but I’ll try to make the pictures as large as possible. Eyestrain isn’t good.