This is a graphic mapping of how my body felt while I was ill – huge runny nose, streaming eyes, throbbing hip, and sharp pain on the right. I developed a sort of creative prompt over a pencil sketch of a person – it might be useful for people to record complex physical feelings (or mental ones for that matter), as it seems good at communicating different senses from rhythmic throbs to sharp pain. I might mention it to Lisa at some point…

This diary entry was after a meeting with the British Consortium of Comics Scholars (the BCCS), where we discussed Elisabeth El Refaie’s brilliant ‘Visual Metaphor and Embodiment in Graphic Illness Narratives’.

This comics diary entry is based on a lovely comment on Instagram after I posted a strip of contorting flamingoes in a serious called ‘Tasks for the Impossible Cartoonist: how to fit the flamingo neck within a panel),

‘So clever. That’s the subtleties of great cartoons, as a reader you can’t put your finger on why it makes you smile or pushing your interest, but its’ magic’

Another comment was ‘Framingoes’! i.e. Flamingoes struggling to fit into the frame. Excellent name for the series.

This comics diary entry was after the Sketchy Bitches ‘Sketchybition’ weekend and is after Dulcie’s mantra ‘draw! draw! draw!’
After this weekend, I started to cartoon everything regardless of quality of idea – it has been great. Liberating and an excuse to imagine everything into doodles.

This is a capture of a lot of words (!) from the Sky Arts Winner at his talk for Sketch Appeal at the ‘Sketchybition’ in Shoreditch on 26 March 2022. He wasn’t called ‘Curtis Mayfield’ as on the cartoon, but Curtis Holder. Also, an idea for future on capturing personalities and talks into cartoons.

This cartoon is based around two remembered conversations, one with my poor Mum (who is playful and fun-loving) where I’m banging on, and the other is in a PhD meeting, where Gareth Brooks made this insightful comment.

Comics Diary Doodle: 

The wonderful cartoonist Kate Evans talking at the LDC online meeting.

Comics Doodle Diary:

Remembering my students punning around the suffix ‘tree’ and them inventing a ‘Coventry’ tree.

Comics Diary Doodle: 
My fellow ‘Sketchy Bitch’ Pat always draws me in our drawing sessions with a bird on my shoulder. I love this! Would like to add this to all my selfie-toons, but need to figure out a quick easy icon for this in remembered lines.

Comics Doodle Diary:
Wonderful talk with Alex Norris for LDC online. He spoke of his web comic and how he aims to make ‘a little with a lot’ – excellent inspirational thought. Also, sketchnoted this in my sketchbook with other ideas.

Comics Diary Doodle: 

My cartooning circle, ‘The Leam Funnies’ got together in front of my fire for drawing and snacks. We had set ourselves the task of creating punny Christmas cards with various verbal prompts (mine was ‘robin’) to turn into Christmas cards for each other. JC drew up lots of cartoony puns (18 I think!) around the suffix ‘tree’

Comics Diary Doodle: 
This was created after giving a workshop at the Sketch Appeal Pop-Up Exhibition in Oxford Street, London. I noticed how the other artists had prepared very little for their workshops, which went swimmingly well, while I had spent most of a week of struggle and strain. Just to remind myself, it is enough to be a creative first and then trust the process of sharing and learning.

Comics Diary Doodle: 

JC making me laugh to tears of hilarity.

Comics diary entry:

A particularly stressful day completing creative tasks for my excellent (and very challenging) Scriberia course – everything got sworn at (luckily no people about!)

Card created for Mum (continuing the Shropshire of Horror theme of 6 Oct 2021)

This was created to cheer Mum up after she had a fall and broke her arm with the Leamington Rambling Club in Shropshire.

Comics diary entry:

Loving being part of the Leam Funnies…

Comics diary entry:

After something cartoonist-artist Steve Chapman said online about how he practices quantum flirting for his creativity.

Comics diary: TK visits for a work meeting (coffee, chats, and lots laughter outside in the courtyard)

Comics diary entry: following a zen ‘noticing’ walk.

Comics diary entry: always tricky for me to relax…

Comics diary entry: after Dana’s very interesting comment on how Emil Ferris uses monsters to weaponise her identity in her graphic novel ‘My Favourite Thing is Monsters’

Comics diary entry: my first attempt at a ‘comics haiku’ based on lots complex thoughts/feelings (haiku are useful for this!).

Comics diary entry:

Crazy tired!

Comics Diary Entry:

After a quote by comedian Robin Ince during the How to Academy’s celebration of 42nd anniversary of the Hitch Hikers’ Guide to the Galaxy. There are other elements that were discussed during the talk by Robin Ince, Richard Dawkins and Chris Riddle; including Douglas Adams ‘theological puddle’ on the right and Dawkins’ mention of ‘The God of Gaps’ always having a little something to do. There was also a great quote cited from Professor Haldane who said “The Universe is not only queerer than we imagine—it is queerer than we can imagine” – this quote was a bit of a challenge to cartoon!!

Comics diary entry:

After a conversation with Tina about her cats requesting fuss by showing their cute bellies and her saying ‘This is where time disappears into a vortex of fur and fuss’.

Sketchbook cartoon after being inspired by a photograph of Sketchy Bitch Susan with a disco ponytail.

Comics diary entry:

Some of my favourite funnies from the ‘Comics’ session, which was to raise money for the Cartoon Museum and Cancer Research.

Caroline as Jamie Hewlett’s Verity, Sarah T as the Joker, Rachael as Valkyrie (she had balti dishes for her silver bra), Linos as Catwoman Off-duty, and me as Giles’ Grandma.

Comics diary entry:

This is after a slightly layered story that goes roughly like this. Michele posted some photos of some of the Sketchy Bitch friends at Spitalfields Market and I asked why there was a picture of a troll doll, but no picture of Dulcie. Apparently Dulcie hated all the photos of herself (!) and posted the troll as her ‘alter ego who is a warrior for world peas.’ I wanted to celebrate Dulcie’s sense of humour with this and note that she is beautiful in more ways than the surface.

Comics diary entry:

Nice to be quoted, but even nicer to remember the ending to the quote from the not so wise and misanthropic.

Created for Women’s History Month and for my great friend Hilary who loves reading history – she has entertained me lots recently on walks with the strange stories of Sissi.

Comics diary entry:

Got a bit stressed out getting my head around new tech today, but drawing this helped me ‘get my zen on’ to solve the problem calmly the next day.

Created for Women’s History Month and my friend Caroline who likes Mary Quant.

Note: it is strange but true that she loved the mini and designed the interior of the Mini 1000.

A cartoon for Women’s History Month and for my ‘Sketchy Bitch’ friend Lene who dressed up as Elizabeth Bathory to celebrate.

Comics diary entry:

After a conversation with Dad, where he gave me possibly the best compliment ever.

Today is Michele’s birthday, so to celebrate I created a little cartoon of her based on her dressing up on Wednesday as Cleopatra for the Sketchy Bitches’ ‘Happy Hour.’ Michele is a wonderful and sweary person, hence the essential included f-word.

Comics diary entry 5/03/2021:

This is a diary doodle after something that my personal trainer often tells me to better ground me. It is a lovely consoling notion that the immensity of the Earth is supporting us.

Comics Diary 2/3/21

I’m reading a fascinating book about brain chemistry at the moment (‘Habits of a Happy Brain’ by Loretta Graziano Breuning), which just leads me to marvel that humans are ever ‘happy’ with these constant and erratic chemicals firing or holding fire at all times.

Comics Diary 27/2/21

This little cartoon captures my ‘green gilled’ feeling one Saturday after indulging in too much junk (Tangfastics with Ian in the park, and various treats for Dad’s birthday…). Felt so ill!

One of the birthday flamingoes created for Dad’s birthday cartoons this week (for more, see Creative Research Notes 36). The visual pun is the incongruous translation of the position as ‘entre chats’ – between cats.

One of the birthday flamingoes created for Dad’s birthday cartoons this week (for more, see Creative Research Notes 36) – a visual version of the classic 2 Ronnies ‘four candles’ comedy sketch.

Comics Diary 25/2/21

Dad’s birthday with lemon drizzle cake, a country walk, curry, presents – and surrounded by the women who adore him most!)

This is part of my David Shrigley experiment  (see Creative Practice Notes 33 for details). Here, I’m responding to the art prompt ‘aeroplane.’

This is part of my David Shrigley experiment  (see Creative Practice Notes 33 for details). Here, I’m responding to the art prompt ‘rose.’

Comics Diary 18/2/21

I had just rewatched the movie Groundhog Day. I read somewhere that Harold Ramis reckoned Groundhog Day lasted for about 10 years…

This is part of my David Shrigley experiment of 8-12 February (see Creative Practice Notes 33 for details). Here, I’m responding to the art prompt ‘street.’

This is part of my David Shrigley experiment of 8-12 February (see Creative Practice Notes 33 for details). Here, I’m responding to the art prompt ‘sea.’

This is part of my David Shrigley experiment of 8-12 February (see Creative Practice Notes 33 for details). Here, I’m responding to the art prompt ‘spooky.’

This is part of my David Shrigley experiment of 8-12 February (see Creative Practice Notes 33 for details). Here, I’m responding to the art prompt ‘prison.’

This is part of my David Shrigley experiment of 8-12 February (see Creative Practice Notes 33 for details). Here, I’m responding to the art prompt ‘shout.’

This is part of my David Shrigley experiment of 8-12 February (see Creative Practice Notes 33 for details). Here, I’m responding to the art prompt ‘tea cup.’

This is part of my David Shrigley experiment of 8-12 February (see Creative Practice Notes 33 for details). Here, I’m responding to the art prompt ‘triangle’.

This is part of my David Shrigley experiment of 8-12 February (see Creative Practice Notes 33 for details). Here, I’m responding to the art prompt ‘window.’

This is part of my David Shrigley experiment of 8-12 February (see Creative Practice Notes 33 for details). Here, I’m responding to the art prompt ‘paint.’

This is the animal version of friend Christina from the online drawing group the  ‘Sketchy Bitches.’ She wanted to be a cat, unicorn, or sloth. The unicorn version was too tricky and was abandoned for the sloth version. I am also working on a version of her with cats.

(See post 28 in Creative Practice Notes for more on the creation of this cartoon).

Sue preferred the kestrel version of herself and I agree – it has her power, her edginess, and her smarts. The earlier ‘Baloo’ Sue does not capture these elements of her personality (although it does perhaps capture her height and her cheeriness).

This is a 7-minute portrait of fellow ‘Sketchy Bitch’ from our online drawing session of 24.01.21, where we were posing in the style of ID magazine (i.e. with objects obscuring our eyes). I’ve uploaded a few favourites from the session here to celebrate my first session the built funnies into the extreme time limit.

She teaches art to kids, so this led to the caption.

This is a 7-minute portrait of fellow ‘Sketchy Bitch’ from our online drawing session of 24.01.21, where we were posing in the style of ID magazine (i.e. with objects obscuring our eyes). I’ve uploaded a few favourites from the session here to celebrate my first session the built funnies into the extreme time limit.

This is Michele, who is an amazing photographer. The pose was so reflective that it led naturally to the thought bubble.

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!