I started creating cartoons of Maggi Hambling after getting inspired by her in a BBC documentary to celebrate her 75th birthday called ‘Maggi Hambling: Making Love with Paint.’

There are more cartoons and a write-up of the process used under ‘Creative Practice Notes’ Post 26.

Introducing new characters called Mardy Min (something Mum called me when I was wee and moaning about something) and the Mardy Bums. These happened while doodling about mardiness and working with cartoonist Liniers approach of working with your emotional landscape to explore types of humour – playing with black humour here.

I like their hairy feet, but would like to do more work on these characters. Looking forward to the next mardy mood to explore further….

Comics diary entry.

Dulcie Ball shared that she was mardy too that day with the observation that it was probably to do with the full moon. She is probably more sophisticated than me (I just need to avoid bread).

This is a comic strip version of a story Sarah Millican told on the radio programme ‘Women Talking about Cars’ (R4).

I wanted to remember this story, because it made me smile lots. To my mind, it also illustrates both modern relationships and also our dependency on ‘men who can’ – the wonderful people who can actually do stuff!

Kudos to… my heating engineer Karl, my mechanic Gary, my carpenter Andy, and my Dad always (his middle name is ‘Candooo’). 

This is a quote by my online yoga teacher. When she said this, I instantly thought of a newborn getting slapped on the tushy into life and breath. Breathe baby breathe!

This cartoon also illustrates my ‘hippy trippy’ side (sometimes visualised as me in hippy flares tripping over with daft hippy nonsense  – might be worthy of drawing up into a cartoon sometime).

This week, I have been doing a ‘bird-hat’ challenge creating birds-as-hats (after the illustrator Terry Runyan and a suggestion from Dulcie Ball of the Sketchy Bitches).

I have also been cat-sitting for the neighbour’s cat Hamish, who is a fluffy white ball of snuggle.

These were the two main happenings of the week (what a silly and wonderful life!), so I’ve fused these two things here.

Alexei Sayle is my favourite stand-up comedian – I love him and this is a sort of hommage.

This joke is paraphrased from ‘Alexei Sayle’s Imaginary Sandwich Bar‘ comedy show on Radio 4, where he says, ‘Sometimes I get really fed up with my subconscious – it’s like it’s got a mind of its own’ (Series 2, ‘Britain’s Place in the World’ episode).

This cartoon is not well-drawn, but it contains layers of jokes between my Dad and me over many years. I don’t like the drawing, but it makes me smile to remember the jokes. It reminds me of ex-cartoonist Corinne Pearlman saying that she missed ephemera cartoons of the family that she had thrown away over the years.

Joke 1: my Dad reminded me for years when leaving the house to ‘Remember your waterproof!’ I was a teenager at the time and didn’t bother to elucidate that I did not own one. Eventually he bought me one for my 49th birthday. He bought me his favourite brand ‘Rohan’ at vast expense even in the sale.

Joke 2: my Dad loves Rohan – friends and family like to mock this affection (he does ramble on about it). On this day, he has told me in detail about his Rohan attire and his breathable wicker vest and pants. Bemusedly I asked if he was wearing 90% Rohan that day – he proudly said 70%

Joke 3: on this day, we had hiked 10 miles in pouring rain to Warwick Books and I had made the mistake of putting my required face mask in a non-waterproof pocket (non-Rohan!) so it got soaked. This meant that it was difficult to talk to Mog and Pauline (the book keepers) and it hurt to breathe. I enjoyed my Dad’s resulting compassion.

Peter has the allotment next to me (and 6 other plots). He gives me dahlias all the time and teaches me the names (this variety are called ‘Firepots’). He is wonderful and sometimes I get over-excitedly chatty in my delight that he’s there (as today).

My friend Alyson is very silly and sometimes wonderfully mean in her jokes. Check this one out about me:

Clari: This quaker asked me if I wanted to join them.

Alyson: He probably just wanted you to shut up for a while… ha ha ha…

Notes:

This is a section from my comics diary (it’s based on an idea by cartoonist Lynda Barry of sections to be filled in each day with notes such as ‘what you did/what you saw’. This is an element of the day that is ‘drawn’ in a final section.)

Notes:

This was drawn on holiday in Lanzarote.

My best friend loves Lanzarote – he wakes up happy to do the same thing everyday. He’s been there nearly 10 times (I make a concession to go with him once every 10 years, so we’ve been together only 3 times). I’m always a bit confused why he loves it so much…

Notes:

There were discussions of cycles in my reading on action research and in my mind this connected to cycles that go up and down.

My Dad (that’s him with the lovely nose there) often mentions ‘the slough of despond’ as a cycle down to the depths of despondency and depression.

In action research, the learning cycle moves upwards as your knowledge advances. I loved this – for me it especially makes sense as learning is my main driver. I like the idea of it moving upwards. It also connects to cartoonist Lynda Barry (pictured here in the plaits), who loves drawing spirals in her work, as a way to move cartooning work forward.

Notes:

This is a theme in November, where I was stuck in theory and getting more and more miserable going around in circles. I wanted to escape and to be subversive like Wokker, the surrealist cartoon character created by Earnshaw and Thacker. Wokker is a strange yellow wheeled creature (perhaps a bird or dinosaur?) that you can see escaping to the right and saying ‘Wok it!’ I’ve drawn myself a little like Wokker, but I wasn’t surreal or subversive enough to escape the circles. Interestingly, later my research became very interested in surrealism and surrealist tools for creation – probably with the influence of Wokker.

I managed to eventually feel better during this time by making time to draw. Drawing is my happy place.

Birds are often in my research (and life) and provide sage counsel here. Mostly they provide sarcasm or sardonic comments for the absurd humans (i.e. me), as birds are clearly so much better than humanity.

Notes:

You can always tell a strip is autobiographical if the character is wearing stripes and has messy hair.

Notes:

This is the start of my PhD at UAL. I was so happy to be working with Roger Sabin as my supervisor that I felt a bit mentally delirious for a while. It was (and is) a dream come true – Roger was the first person to really get what I wanted to do and believe that it could be a valuable contribution. Later Nina Mickwitz joined the supervision team, so I just got luckier and luckier.

Notes:

For a long time, my research got lost in the dark forest (creators call this the Wagnerian forest when you are ‘blocked’ and can’t progress).

Notes:

This was an attempt to create a comics haiku.

I had taken a ‘mental health day’ trip to Oxford because work was awful. Now, I can see that the monstrous black thing is burnout, which had been dogging me for years by this time. It took me two more years of this before I managed to get free to rebuild health. To do this, I had to take unpaid leave from my post at Coventry University – everything else I had tried before to fix this situation had failed. Sometimes, you can’t fix things, you just need to stop and start again.

This is an early cartoon of a condensed memory of Dylan – our funny Australian colleague who was stuck teaching out in rural Tojo. He joked often about being stuck living alone with a stuffed monkey and a BB gun. BB guns were probably illegal in Japan, so I added a policeman saying ‘DA-ME!’ (= no way/not allowed) in hiragana. I can no longer remember how to write hiragana and only remember this from the context.

Here’s a typical Dylan joke:

Day 1 in Tojo: buy a Playstation

Day 100: ….huh…what happened to the last 99 days?

Notes:

2004 was the beginning of creating cartoons for fun (and therapy I guess).  At the time, I co-directed an English school in Miyoshi with friend Jeremy. We had a few problems with one of our colleagues and this was perhaps an outlet for my frustration.

I drew around a dozen cartoons then, and then returned to Britain and got distracted working for Warwick and then Coventry Universities. A lengthy distraction of 15 years!