October 2025
The story I'm creating about a group of mice that has them, at various points, explore a factory making a breakfast cereal like Wheatabix ®, and a home with an exercise area and where food is prepared with scrupulous attention to hygiene, and a home in that home for the mice, and a desolate landscape by the sea with an ice cream van and tins of sardines scattered in the gutter, and little glimmers of inedible nature, and a bee's eye view of these settings, and an office in the Wheatabix-like factory, and a street cleaner. So a lots of settings for me to conjure up.
As an exercise I copied a milt gross cartoon from The Kilroys issue number six called Kiddy Katty-Korner, because it had lots of ways of having a story inside another story (which my mouse story also has) and some good little tricks to having a setting. Copying meant I didn't have to think of composing a scene or how many panels to draw on a page or where to put them, I didn't have to think about the balance of speed and pleasure as you do when you draw your own things. I just drew what Milt Gross had decided on to see how it felt. I see Milt Gross as draughtsman who had a wide understanding of art and was throwing together drawings for the jokes. For example he draws characters in the Kiddy Katty-Korner comic standing on a coloured diamond of carpet from the point of view that you are looking downward. It reminds me of the medieval artists who drew saintly figures with just a square of stone beneath their feet for example in The Codex Aureus of Lorsch or The Saint-Sever Beatus. In these cases there is a trust that the viewer knows where this character is and in the case of Kiddy Katty-Korner we know the children are in school but their imaginations are taking them into new settings that are surrounded in a little pattern to distinguish it as unique to them.
The mouse story I'm drawing is partly about the innocence of being in places for the first time and trying to make sense of them. I am drawing it with a sort of innocence like I'm seeing for the first time funny things and want to share them, drawing a big scramble of things all busy in the way things seem very overwhelming when they are new, drawing with little aside details to share some story background, trying stretched out perspective to fits lots in, but also trusting that, when it is needed, I can use a little short hand for the places. It's all an adventure.
Next month I would like to share some of the short stories I have written recently.