Mike’s Pith & Wind
cont.
..satisfy his thirst for things Hampson and had acquired (from Wales I think)
some volumes of Frank Hampson’s work for Eagle in the ’50s.
Frank Hampson inspired me too. As a youngster I could scarcely wait for the
weekly copy of Eagle to arrive so I could devour the latest adventures of
Dan Dare – Pilot of the Future. And it was Frank Hampson’s drawing that caught
my imagination: the meticulous attention to detail, the luminosity he was
able to achieve with ink and water-colouring, the seriousness and unsensationalist
approach, all of which lead me to believe (in my youthful evangelism) that
the comic-strip medium was a legitimate form of artistic endeavour. (A view
not shared by my grandfather, who pooh-poohed comics – and jazz singers, with
equal venom. My Mum could never get a handle on comics either, but she actually
has difficulty making sense of them. She has had no problem adapting to the
new information technology however, and is an accomplished digital photographer
and e-mailer, bless her cotton socks).
A
panel from Dan Dare’s Venus adventure – check one of the many sites
dedicated to Frank Hampson for more..
It was no accident therefore, that most of my childhood was spent doodling
in the comic strip style, which lead to various of my relatives suggesting
I should follow my bent and consider a career as a cartoonist, which ultimately
decided me to go to Art School for lack of anything better to do.
And it was Art School that taught me enough about the subject to accurately
describe my irritation with the bad and the ugly, just as it was my love of
music and my educated ear that caused me to be terminally irritated by the
child carolers that infest the streets of Camberwell over Christmas.
So, you might say, who needs aesthetics? Ignorance is surely bliss etc.
Well, it isn’t, and like me and my wincing newsagent, you are going to be
constantly irritated, maybe even moreso now you’ve read my gripes. We’re just
going to have to learn to handle it ..
Shit happens..
1) See, I told you!
Give ’em a choice and they stuff it up. I notice they’re issuing more of
the bi-sexual eights (they work both ways) these days, but there are still
enough of the old ones around to set the teeth on edge. 2) As a corollary
to the newsagency story, I noticed when I went past the newsagent other
day that the sandwich board had been altered (pic) and the ‘A’ crudely replaced
with the appropriate ‘E’. It wasn’t the sign I’d been referring to (the
one I was talking about was a hand-written sign in the shop) but it highlights
yet another phenomenon – the sign-writers’ guild’s apparent aversion dictionaries.
When I was young, I used to trust public signage implicitly. No more.