I am delighted to have finally scanned in a comic I made waaaay back when I was 10 years old. (If I remember right, I completed these early episodes at the start of the year, before my birthday.) Here begin the adventures of Nogard the Dragon!
This was, I think, the first strip comic I ever created and it actually shows some ability to work with panels and pace gags. Any semblance of technique was of course hoovered up from the comics I was reading at the time. These were Marvel’s Avengers (at this point, deep in the Roger Stern era) and IPC’s 80s revival of Eagle (firmly into its decline), of course, but of more relevance: the legendary British humour comic Oink!, whose humour I was eagerly trying to emulate, and the backmatter strips in the gamer mag Dragon Magazine: Larry Elmore’s Snarfquest and Dave Trampier’s Wormy. If you’re gonna steal, steal from the best.
Note that some skills weren’t picked up so readily: for example, I couldn’t draw or letter for tuppence. I remember some of my classmates who were just so talented on the cartoon front. Luckily this didn’t hold me back. And also, I couldn’t actually structure a story for tuppence either. That dramatically-named “Scarlet Castle” in the first panel? You’ll never hear of that again. That mid-strip fight-sequence? Complete filler. And that weird interstitial creature talking directly to the audience? Well – there is a reason for him but lord knows what I was thinking at the time.
So, here it is. The remainder of the story will turn up on Flickr in due course, and will be linked in a future post or two. Unsubscribe now!
