As threatened the other day, a short blog-musing about the excitement of having a comic of mine drawn by a proper artist. (This could well be pretentious. I’m sorry if it goes that way, I did try. The good news is, I’m meant to be going out inside the next ten minutes, so this will be nowhere near as tediously long as it could have been.)

Anyway, as reported in the newspost of Behatted episode #5, an aspiring comic artist/cartoonist called Aaron Bir drew a cartoon of mine. And I could well be embarrassing him by going on about it, because he can actually draw, whereas I can’t and occasionally am a little bit too awe-struck by those who can’t.

Plus, the writing of comic scripts has long been a heavy aspiration of mine, and having them illustrated by proper professional artists of course, and anything which brings me a step closer to this goal is automatically very very good.

The comic in question can be seen here, it’s called “Scruff”, and it’s about a boy, a cat and a zebra. I did consider trying to attempt some kind of massive philosophical epic, but the remit was 3-6 panels, and I didn’t think going beyond comedy would end well. You may also note that there’s a lot less dialogue than I normally cram into these things, because I don’t feel the world is missing much if I cover my own MS Paint backgrounds with speech bubbles. Not to mention, I was shooting for a picture-book effect, and that means leaving space for the actual pictures.

(This is starting to get a little pretentious isn’t it?)

Anyway, it’s a fragment of a dream come true, one small step for a man, one giant leap for Nick-kind, etcetera etcetera. Fortunately I have to go to the pub now, but I just wanted to enthuse a little. I suppose I should mention that, if you aspire artistically and enjoy Behatted and/or Scruff, and think you might be interested in working on some kind of a comic project, be it another short strip, a short story of a few pages or whatever, feel free to email me and we’ll see if I can think of anything. If there’s anything you particularly want to draw, I imagine I can make something up.

Right, the pub beckons. Despite the approaching annual death and return of the Lord, the Behatted schedule will march on. See you tomorrow for episode #6.