![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Lots of things.
Jul. 3rd, 2012 12:02 pmFirstly, at the moment I am, as our younger American cousins put it, so full of fail that I'm inclined to put my head down and pull the blanket up for a week or two. Alas, I have responsibilities and those make a chap steel himself for the day. I reckon more sleep will result in less baby brain. Maybe.
Secondly, I have been pondering on my relationships with satire, cartoons, comics, and the drawn narrative in general.
Thirdly, as a result of my second point, I am embarking on a small essay describing the basis of these relationships and celebrating the whys and wherefores of a relationship that began when I could first read and make out pictures.
My father worked, from 1965, for the Daily Express, which published the pre-eminent British cartoonist of its era (Giles) and also a narrative cartoon children's story (Rupert the Bear). But prior to that, I had learned to read, like almost all of my generation, through picture books: which were alphabetical rather than narrative based. So I guess I came to the single picture-and-word format before any other, which inclines me to suppose that such accounts for my continuing fondness for the form.
[I hate sentences with too much alliteration - smacks of exposure to Swinburne.]
In all things, even this, I am a dilettante and enthusiast (in the best sense) inasmuch as I engage with these things from an emotional perspective, whether noble love, or mawkish sentimentality; or sometimes an admixture of both - debased though that may be. I don't strive to be professional: I am content with my gentlemanly amateur status. The burn when you get something wrong still hurts: but it is rarely a case for the loaded service revolver, the bottle of best malt, and the library locked from the inside. (I mean to say, think of the poor folk who would have to clean up the mess - I know they get paid an' all, but it's still a bit frightful for them. And besides which, I hear it's damn difficult to aim straight after a whole bottle of Ardbeg.)
My Father, like most folk we knew in London at that time, was a fan of Giles: and I have a collection from about 1958 to Giles' death in '95 which I inherited from Dad. [A link to Giles at the British Cartoon Archive.] In '65 I was three-going-on-four, and I "got" Giles and the Giles family well before I got Disney. Well, actually, I still don't get much of Disney - too mawkish and sentimental even for me.
Secondly, I have been pondering on my relationships with satire, cartoons, comics, and the drawn narrative in general.
Thirdly, as a result of my second point, I am embarking on a small essay describing the basis of these relationships and celebrating the whys and wherefores of a relationship that began when I could first read and make out pictures.
My father worked, from 1965, for the Daily Express, which published the pre-eminent British cartoonist of its era (Giles) and also a narrative cartoon children's story (Rupert the Bear). But prior to that, I had learned to read, like almost all of my generation, through picture books: which were alphabetical rather than narrative based. So I guess I came to the single picture-and-word format before any other, which inclines me to suppose that such accounts for my continuing fondness for the form.
[I hate sentences with too much alliteration - smacks of exposure to Swinburne.]
In all things, even this, I am a dilettante and enthusiast (in the best sense) inasmuch as I engage with these things from an emotional perspective, whether noble love, or mawkish sentimentality; or sometimes an admixture of both - debased though that may be. I don't strive to be professional: I am content with my gentlemanly amateur status. The burn when you get something wrong still hurts: but it is rarely a case for the loaded service revolver, the bottle of best malt, and the library locked from the inside. (I mean to say, think of the poor folk who would have to clean up the mess - I know they get paid an' all, but it's still a bit frightful for them. And besides which, I hear it's damn difficult to aim straight after a whole bottle of Ardbeg.)
My Father, like most folk we knew in London at that time, was a fan of Giles: and I have a collection from about 1958 to Giles' death in '95 which I inherited from Dad. [A link to Giles at the British Cartoon Archive.] In '65 I was three-going-on-four, and I "got" Giles and the Giles family well before I got Disney. Well, actually, I still don't get much of Disney - too mawkish and sentimental even for me.
