Have you been out today?

A6, Seawhite of Brighton sketchbook, begun Friday 13th 1997.












The superhero stuff on this spread is the beginnings of me thinking of ideas for a newspaper strip - I think I called it Real Lives of the Superheroes - that I proposed to the Evening Standard. A fellow student on the MA course I was doing in Brighton at the time had put me in touch with the chap in charge of the Standard's comics page who was thinking about sprucing things up a bit with some new material (they'd had Bristow and Marmaduke and a handful of others running for many years without change).

I eventually cobbled together a week's worth of strips (in much, much more than a week's worth of time). The premise was essentially three flatsharing sub-par superheroes more or less living the life of TV-watching and tea drinking that I and my then flatmates Mike and Nik lived only with a bit more flying and invisibility and crime-fighting thrown in. It wasn't a terrible premise (nor, a brilliant or especially original one) but the samples I came up with were badly drawn, poorly written, in no way Evening Standard material and had about one (not especially funny) punchline between the lot of them.

The man from the Standard graciously declined them (for which, in retrospect, I am very grateful). And when I picked up a copy of the Standard on a tube a year or so later I found that the comics page had remained resolutely unspruced. Perhaps it still is.

Click on images to enlargify.