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.
This note is about drawing character sheets. For me a character sheet is, ideally, one sheet of paper with the same character in different positions, with different expressions and from different angles along with little rules or notes about how this character can be drawn. It is a way of finding out what it feels like to draw a character repeatedly and so there is jeopardy: it could surprise me now much I find to enjoy or it could fall apart because a character is more fiddly than they first seemed. Sometimes a character is just great to draw and it makes me laugh or I am charmed with how they curl up or sniff or scratch or stretch. Sometimes you have a great silhouette on paper and then how they move in a three dimensional space becomes a bit of a game. That is the character sheet test.
I have a mouse character called sprout and it is so simple, just dots for eyes and a ball for a head and a little black nose is all it is, and the the ears are just a wiggle that I draw quickly. It is a barely there mouse and I just love drawing it. The wiggle ears vary a bit each time which works within a surprisingly big range of different wiggles but sometimes I have to redraw them and the eye position to nose can't drift too much. There is something about the string arms and legs and ball for a body that is just easy and fun.
Another mouse character that I call Perkins has a body that, as I was drawing the character sheet, just started to move like a hinge, because the top of their head and nose sort of form one point that widens to attached to their body and that goes on to form another point where their tail begins. They hinge between their head and body. Then it became a question of how wide or closed I can have this hinge and the answer is there are no limits, it all works very pleasingly.
Then I have a mouse character that came out of the marbling that I described in a the note for August 2025. It is just a wiggle for a body that I just dashed a long thin snout to and it moves really well somehow on character sheets. I had a different body shape for my main character called Stilton, but this wiggle body character is so much more fun to draw than what I first planned that it has sort of won the title role.
Next month I will describe some of the settings for the Stilton adventure comic I'm drawing and some of the perspective techniques I'm playing with.
Putting together a comic about a group of mice means you find yourself imagining what mouse-life would be like. They are all just creatures in the world: delicate, vulnerable, aware of many dangers and so there is a question that must turn up again and again, a question that is forced upon us all: what is your mouse style? That is, how far do you come out of your hole? Most mice would probably pick Only As Far As Needed (OFAN). But some more daring or curious or carefree mice might pick a style of As Far As Possible (AFAP). Every mouse must answer the question of their style through their actions and these actions will have consequences.
As the mice work through their 'mouse style' in the story it raises the question of how each mouse is styled to look in this comic? There are twelve characters at the heart of this adventure and each needs to have a distinct silhouette separate from any of the other mice no matter how it moves or could be imagined to move. It is beautiful to see how other comic artists solve these problems.
For me, making distinct characters involves a little playtime. One activity is to use a marbling kit where you drip brightly coloured oily paint into a bowl of water and swirl it and then lay paper on the water's surface to soak up the paint floating and making swirling blobbed shapes. Those paint shapes suggest character's body outlines or movements. Another game is to use an IBM Flowcharting Template which I find is listed by the Smithsonian Institution of Museums as a historic artefact. The shapes on the template are all really great and combined with a Spirograph ® you can enjoy very nice afternoons playing the game of filling a page with whatever shapes feel good and then seeing which look twitchy and sniffy and mouse-like if you add a nose or some ears or paws. After lots of tries, in the end, I'm happy with the twelve characters I've settled upon, they are distinct silhouettes and each seems to work to at least interest me. The next step is to draw character sheets which I'll describe in the note for September 2025.
Surrounded by the green mountain tops of the Peak District, the town of Macclesfield hosts a vibrant comic art festival called MACC-POW. This year I was there on Saturday 28th of June and found that Macclesfield town hall was packed with cartoonists exhibiting their work. Basically this comic conference meant a lot to me because 1. I saw people making work they seem to love 2. I never expected someone to pitch me their story as I passed by their table but I absolutely loved it when they did and so, of course, now I practice pitching my stories. 3. there were people with that entrepreneurial attitude that is so necessary and yet so difficult to cultivate when you spend your life hoping that being good at things will be enough to make a living.
Also I loved the fun touches like the comic chat show with the specially commissioned chat show music and the comic quiz. The MACC-POW festival is organised by Marc Jackson who ended the day by awarding Lew Stringer a custom made small toy in the image of Lew as a mark of appreciation for his support and talent.
Other nice memories are: Joshua J Knowles with an easel behind his exhibitors table showing pencilled intricately piped worlds, kids with tote bags stuffed with brightly coloured comics and at the very end of the day the cartoonists with their wheeled bags heading for the train station and knowing that each bag was full of their unique work that might to anybody else look like just any other wheelie bag.
It is my dream beyond a dream to have a table at such an event and share my comic wares, but all in good time. That is what these notes and this website are about: making that dream real, getting practical and making comics that I love.