Dudley Watkins Addendum (but added to the top, as it were).

The Dudley Watkins piece below is one that I have wanted to post for some time, and I wanted it to have a little extra because I really believe we are talking about an exceptional cartoonist, but I really didn't know what that "little extra" would be. Well, as luck would have it, two cartoonists who you will all be quite familiar with have given me permission to reproduce their posts on a simultaneous discussion we are having in another place on this piece on Dudley, and I couldn't be more pleased. I'm particularly delighted with Steve Bright's anecdote about Dudley's Crucifixion painting, the Dundee Courier's heading is hilarious.

Roger (Beau Peep, Andy Capp) Kettle

As I'm sure I've mentioned, Rod, I joined DCT just two weeks before Dudley Watkins died. As an 18 year-old junior, I was given the wonderful job of sorting through all the old Broons and Oor Wullie originals for dating and re-printing purposes. I shared this job with two other kids, Morris Heggie and Euan Kerr who, of course, went on to edit The Dandy and Beano respectively. The artwork in the flesh was staggering and some of the storylines unthinkable in this day and age. (Stopping for a smoke on the way to school and a black kid called Sambo moving into the street). I still feel privileged to have done that job.

Steve (Bananaman) Bright

As another DCT 'kid' of a slightly younger vintage than Messrs Kettle, Heggie and Kerr (the boys done well!), I joined the company several years after Dudley Watkins death, but of course, his legacy and influence on the comics I worked for was still very much alive and plain to see.

I'm particularly pleased to see you make the point about how much he improved over the years, and that not all great cartoonists are born. I can only think of a few who appear to have been the real deal from Day One (the third of Watkins successors on the Broons and Oor Wullie, Ken H. Harrison, being one of them - consistently brilliant throughout his career). Rather than the "solace" you write of, to be taken from those early Watkins years, I'd hope those of us who struggle with our own early years (I was certainly one) can take inspiration from DDW's work, although I agree that usurping the master at his peak would be nigh on impossible. Perhaps I lack that particular ambition, but I still delight in seeing the evolution of the greats (and Baxendale's growth was perhaps an even more marked contrast), and take inspiration from that. And hopefully I never stop learning and improving, but my target has always been to be half as good as those greats, and I've never looked to better any of them.

I turned down the opportunity to take on The Broons and Oor Wullie back in the 80s. At that time, they were being ghosted by Tom Lavery, a fine comic cartoonist, but struggling to fill the great man's shoes. He had a thankless task. I was very flattered to be asked, but scared stiff at the prospect. I'd have taken on Oor Wullie, but the Broons was way too daunting, with something like ten family members in most frames. But both came as a package deal, so I declined. I was right to do so - I'm not good enough to do it justice now, never mind back then, and the artists who eventually took it on (Pete Davidson, Ken Harrison, then Davidson again) were far better equipped to do the job than I ever will be.

Interesting to read about Watkins Biblical ambition. Only last year, a rather curious depiction of The Crucifixion, drawn by Watkins over 50 years ago, was discovered in a house in Fife where it had hung for decades, having been given to the house owner by Dudley Watkins as a personal gift in 1951. Unmistakeably in Watkins' style, it shows children in contemporary clothes and hairstyles of the 1950s, queueing up at the foot of the cross. It caused quite a stir in the press at the time, but DCT's own headline was typically understated.


The Dundee Courier website reported, "Unusual Work by Oor Wullie Artist".

A Comic Strip Culture

Let me first apologise for two things, I kept promising to do a blog-piece on these strips long ago, and now that I finally get well again and get round to it, newspapers in the US are dropping strips and some are even dropping comics pages, and secondly, I'm sorry about the scans, but I really wanted to capture something of the scale of the broadsheet-sized comic sections so they lose bits of strips - what can you do?

On the other hand, it looks like a good time to finally get it up here because one of my fellow British cartoonists, the talented Alexander Mathews, has a strip called King Monkey that he is hoping to place with a syndicate in the US, soon, and I'm also sending a strip, that I'm very excited about, to the US in a week or two. Now, even at the best of times the comic strip business is very difficult to break into, never mind during these challenging times, but I think that both Alex and I should at least give it go. The usual cartoonist maxim should apply, "if you don't send it in, it's already rejected".

I'm a huge fan of US strips, and by that I mean strips that the US syndicates distribute because some of my favourite strips are produced in Canada, but there are a good few cartoonists out there who can't say a good word about them. I have to say I think that on the whole, the syndicated strips are underestimated, especially in the US, where people seem to take the things for granted. They should try living here in the UK, in Edinburgh, for instance, a city of 500,000 people, where the local paper, the Edinburgh Evening News, carries two comic strips, Hagar and Garfield, and it shrinks them to about 3/4" x 5" and it really doesn't care how squished and squashed those two strips look. They are an afterthought.

Despite coming from this comic-strip-challenged culture, young Alex and I are willing to take our chances in the spiritual home of comic strips, the US, where a tiny handful of British cartoonists already have their strips syndicated. One of those pioneers is Roger Kettle, one half of Beau Peep and the writer of Andy Capp, who, like me, is amazed that the fantastic collections of strips that the US readers enjoy is regarded by them as too few, or too small, or unvaried. Oh, to be sure, I understand where some of the older strip fans are coming from because I once had a collection of vintage Sunday Funnies that were as big as an old British Topper comic, and as thick as a phone book, but come on, these things are a joy, rich and varied and colourful and a testament to an art-loving culture.

There is a serious point to this, of course, the US is, I think, as is clear from the samples of the newspapers below, much more comic, or comic strip, literate than the UK. The papers I've posted below, from 2004 and 2005, supplied by Mike Lynch, Dan Collins and Jay Nocera, show the sort of daily and weekly diet of comic strips that US beginning cartoonists, and would-be comic strippers, grow up with. Picture it, as the beginning cartoonists in the US are practising their craft the sheer variety of the visual language of the comics, the beat of the language, the form of the jokes, the cleverness of the language, is all there to be soaked up even before they first pick up a pen and dip it in the ink. And what is crystal clear to me, looking at the comic pages below, from the Boston Sunday Globe, the Hartford Courant, the Columbus Dispatch and the New York Daily News, is not just that comic strips are taken much, much, more seriously in the US than they are over here, that's a given, but also that there is a very real respect for the cartoonists and the reader, and a clear attempt to run comic strips that will appeal to a very wide audience.

The following full colour comic sections are about the same size as a Sunday Times broadsheet and as thick, if not thicker, than a British kids comic, with a wide range of strips covering everything from Dilbert to Prince Valiant.

I once asked, on Darrin Bell's old Toontalk forum, why American cartoonists often thought they were not real bona-fide cartoonists unless they had a syndicated strip out there, especially since lauded cartoonists like Chris Ware and Jaime Hernandez and Daniel Clowes were clearly world-renowned cartoonists without working in that oeuvre. Of course it was a rhetorical question, the answer for me was that comic strips are part of the American psyche.

Copyright of the comics pages above rest with their respective publishers, and the various cartoonists and agencies.

So, should we pity poor Alex and poor Rod as they send their creations of to be measured and judged? Well, no, not really, you see the work is done and the syndicates are the top market for main stream comic strips, they are the Super Bowl, the F.A Cup final, the Olympics, they are the ultimate test for a comic strip. How on earth could we resist sending the work to them? It may seem like a cliche, but it is the turning up and taking part that counts and you never know, one of us or both of us might just sneak one by them. Wouldn't that be something?

National Treasure; Roger Kettle.

Well, maybe some day. I certainly think Roger Kettle gets nowhere near the recognition he deserves. You know, we don't have a lot of indigenous comic strips over here, I think in the last 50 years you would be lucky to spot 20 home-grown strips, national ones, so maybe we should make more fuss about the ones we do produce. Sandy Graham created Fred Basset of course and Reg Smythe created Andy Capp, but most of the strips that we make over here never make the leap to national and international consciousness and have little or no impact on popular culture. Roger Kettle is a little different though, his work has made an impact, and I don't think you can aim any higher than that, as a creative soul, it's about the most important contribution you can make - I think. Not only does Roger write Beau Peep, and A Man called Horace, but he also writes Andy Capp these days, and the strip has certainly begun to attract the attention of critics and writers in a way that it never has before. Which I put down to a combination of great writing and great drawing.

Beau Peep by Roger Kettle Andrew Christine

Anyway, our national treasure, Roger Kettle, did me an enormous favour and read over my Sunshine on Leith preview and picked up on a mistake and even offered some help with the wording and I am, honestly, overwhelmed that anyone, let alone someone with Roger's credentials, would take the trouble. You see, and I try to explain this to anyone starting out in cartooning, that sense that you maybe are as bad as the Cartoon and Art Editors make you feel, never goes away. You just have to get used to it. Nothing makes it go away, not money, not fame, not daily validation through daily publication. On some level, you will always feel that you are maybe The Ed Wood of cartooning, or of writing - that you are the only one too blind to see that your work really is awful. So someone, anyone, paying attention to your work is marvelous, but when your fellow cartoonists do so, it's just the best feeling there is because you know, no matter what the Editors say, that your fellow workmates are the true yardstick.


So, I've reworded the thing and to be honest it is much better, and it lends more depth to the narrative. And hey, who knows - I may not be Ed wood after all. Here's how it reads now, I'll put it up on Word Press later.

The fact that I've added so much worries me. It means I didn't achieve a good balance, with the earlier page, between the story I'm trying to tell with words and the story I'm trying to tell with pictures.

The whole episode got me thinking about words and pictures in a new way. That's because I'm usually concerned with how writers who who have no experience writing for comics have a problem when they approach this genre. They tend to overwrite, and that's why people like me just stare at disbelief when a writer approaches with a 2,000 page script. On the other hand, illustrators are used to using a few visual symbols to encapsulate pages of descriptive writing - take for example Ernest Shepard's drawing of Pooh, grimly clutching his balloon, being blown over the treetops of the Hundred Acre Wood - that scene takes Milne a lot of lovely descriptive chapters, the drawing takes half a page of pen-strokes. When the two appear together in the form of the Pooh book they both illustrate the same thing. They are working together, but they are also separate and independent. That's how picture books often work. But that's not the way comics and graphic novels work. You don't just illustrate the text, you don't want a character opening a door saying 'I'm timorously opening the door now', you can learn that from the drawing. In comics and graphic novels you have to show and say some things with words and show and say some things with pictures. Getting the correct balance between the two is difficult. Take this drawing for the second chapter of Sunshine on Leith, Down Town:

What's going on here is the protagonist has been left on his own at the top of the largest boulevard in Scotland whilst his aunt, a teenager herself, has slipped off for a coffee and a ciggy with friends. It's early evening and the sound of Down Town is belting out from the surrounding cafes and bars and the street lights have gone on and suddenly the eyes on the buses and cars have lit-up. The chatter of people leaving work at the nearby factories and shops and bonds and yards, all at the same time, overwhelms him and he races around frantically looking in windows to find his protector.

Now at first, I wasn't really going to have too much writing here because this takes part in a fully illustrated part of the story, but that's me forgetting that my 'ideal reader' is me. I will have to do some more editing, I think.