SLANG part 2

Here's a page from SLANG issue 3. By the time we got to the third issue of SLANG in 1991 both Sean and I had developed our obsession with the 1970s into a complete approach to comics. You still see this in my Dinlos stuff today. Although there was nostalgia to what I was doing my thinking then as now was that the 1970s was a bit like a modern costume drama - a contemporary and yet strangely alien looking time that makes for a great setting. Something many films and TV series have realised since then. The Robbers was a bit uneven but reading it again I can see ideas I'm still interested in now; the power of the liminal spaces - the half seen, the misunderstood.

In other places the cultural references crept in too much (see the Ogron on the cover), but this was before the internet and just drawing things from another time gave them a kind of power. Now all of these images are at our fingertips and retro is so pervasive.

SLANG issue 4 never really happened, shot in the paddock, though I think we had planned to do an issue without my Dad on the cover. I was trying some madly ambitious stuff before being dragged kicking and screaming into the real world to draw comics for money. Below is an example - it's part of a page of music (yeah, I know). This is The Jam playing something from Setting Sons and/or Sound Affects by the looks of it.

And finally the ultimate synthesis of my obsession with 1970s culture was The Watermen, the story of three miniature Dennis Watermans who smoke fags and do 1970s stuff. It's very silly. I coloured it on a mate's computer in the mid 90s.