The Day after Brexit in 24 Comic Strips
Starting with the last gasp of Brexit Day. The reason I'm linking to Station to Station by Bowie is because this is the song where he sings about the "European Man", an archetype of international glamour and sophistication I have emotionally internalised. In this live version from 1978, there's a tiny addendum where he talks about Europeanness.
My fat fingers have rendered Brexit as brex.t, brilliant. Here and there in these I've added tones in later, often to reinforce that the strip is happening in darkness as otherwise the pencil lines give the impression of lightness.
There's a meme that this strip is vaguely based on, but I can't find it now. A sort of e-harmonyesque profile for a cat seeking a loving owner. Sadly google's search function is now so fuzzy it can't find direct quotes of things any more.
So, yes. I don't have a head at all for gag strips, so I selected 3-panel gags as my genre for this year specifically to challenge me. As it turned out, I got quite challenged by other things during the day, but this is one of the standard 3-panel gag "cheats" - black panels. This directly quotes a repeated motif in Matt Groening's Life in Hell comics where Binky is lying in bed awake, haunted by something (most memorably "infotainment"). I didn't really bother drawing it, because why would you, so I did a lot of post-fixing and even sorted out my shitty handwritten lettering, lucky you.
Foreshadowing!
I never used to need bedsocks. Guess that's me getting old.
The duvet cover does actually have vaguely futurist patterns on it, there's also a woven bedspread for extra warmth, because I get cold.
Accurate view of my cat's repeated attempts to wake me up. At least no claws are involved.
Seiso refers to the Japanese practice of daily cleaning in a manufacturing environment. I clear my kitchen every morning, in quite a ritualistic way.
The silly breakfast. The pain fired off as I leant over to take the photograph, making completing this instagram post quite the challenge.
I was pretty ill. Not good. The breakfast painkillers barely made a dent.
Normally I'd post these to twitter, or facebook, or instagram. But this year I felt tooo weird and shaky to do so, and I wasn't sure anyone would want to see the subject matter, so I just posted a single image of my panicked face.
I'm still in a lot of pain, bleeding heavily, and not feeling confident to get dressed. Yoga sometimes helps with this sort of thing, but my body was having none of it.
I couldn't go to East Oxford Farmer's market, which I normally would, but I couldn't leave the house.
Little list of all the comics on my reading list at the moment. Nice to see sexy sexy Hawkeye back.
I'm better! I think. I go into the garden to prune the vine (much delayed garden task). Jeebus. I'm not better.
An hour's lie down later, I'm largely recovered. It was a lovely day, so we went for a walk to check I was well enough to go out that evening. I'll do.
Marvel just rebooted Excalibur and picked up some of X-folk I follow (hello Jubilee!). I'm enjoying it so far, though it's part of an event, so it may not last. But then again, what does? Nightcrawler's not in it, but he's not the swashbuckling funster I first fell for in Excalibur so many years ago nowadays anyway.
And here I returned to worrying about whether I should post these strips, and decided to do so once I had a little distance from the moment, so could censor things if need be - although icky autobio is definitely a genre, and I could have been a lot less restrained.
It's funny how hourly comics day leaves you remembering the previous year in quite forensic detail, even down to the weather, where there were snow days and ice-rink slippery pavements last year.
Here's the Pina Colada song. You're welcome.
Just some ordinary talk with friends, who have cooked us delicious stew, with dumplings.
We discussed a lot of different hiccup cures (including the risks of being held upside down and shaken) but I actually ended up feeding Tim the water, which did seem quite funny. My personal preferred cure is drinking water backwards, which apparently is a lifehack now.
This is getting quite vague, late and drunk, but I'm playing Pokémon Go, as we walk home along a route which is now our usual route, but has been declared shortest by Siri, and the Pick me up bus passes us, which (if we had the app) we might have been able to call on to take us home.
Day's end. We meant to go straight to bed but ended up drinking chocolate. It's actually Chilli Willy drinking chocolate.
