Once upon a time...

About three years ago I started a strip called Chuffin' Billy with my friend and long time collaborator from the nineties Noel Hannan. I did layouts for the first five pages and then had a nervous breakdown. The two occurrences were not related.

By March 2020 I was in a slightly better place both physically and mentally and decided, with Noel's gentle persuasion, to give the Chuffin' Billy project a second go. Then Covid-19 hit. Work suddenly became erratic in an unstable world. Thankfully I managed to hang on in with employment but the old brain fruit problems from the previous years returned, impacted by isolation, anxiety and depression it took me a year to do 7 pages of layouts. New world, same old problems.

Which is kind of why I took the Slung Low 'Never Ending Story' commission on recently, as a way of getting me back in the game. It was something I knew I could complete and enjoy drawing again. It gave me momentum to get back into working a certain way. I swore that I would never do comics again. They are too involved with the layouts, pencilling, design, inking, speech bubbles, colouring and... I'm too old. Although something keeps drawing me back  to want to do them.

I used Clip Studio and Photoshop to do the speech bubbles, something I've rallied against in the past preferring hand drawn over digital, but it works here. I've completed the first four pages, on with the next four and so on. At this rate the 12 page Chuffin' Billy strip will be ready by mid 2023. It'll be worth the wait.