On the evening of the 21st of
July 2012 I made a casual decision.
For several days, I had been grappling with
a problem that was getting on my nerves: how to get across my ideas about
imperialism, war crimes and capitalist evil in a way that communicated what I
wanted to say without writing 5000 word essays which nobody read. Also, I had
been itching to try out cartooning again.
Again?
Way back in the mid 2000s, I’d drawn a very
short lived comic strip called Dana The Dozer Driver, which I published on Multiply.
It was, even by the standards of amateur comic strips, hopelessly amateurish,
and died a swift and deserved death. Now, six years after I’d given up
cartooning, I thought about starting it again.
Only, there was one big difference: I
wanted to cartoon from a perspective that someone else hadn’t tried already,
that as far as I could see nobody had even thought of: I wanted to cartoon from
the point of view of a terrorist.
And so, sitting down to draw, I put pencil
to paper, and Raghead the Fiendly Neighbourhood Terrorist was born.
This was how he appeared, right out of my
imagination, the first panel I ever drew:
At that time I never thought I’d stick to
cartooning. In fact it was strictly something I’d done to work off some
frustration. But for some reason it struck a chord with people who used to read
me then (now I know what that chord was: plummeting attention spans and the
switch from reading to visual oriented media). And so I began drawing more and
more. And the next day I set up a WordPress site, purely for cartooning.
Soon I realised that Raghead, alone, wouldn’t
be enough: he’d need a foil, a sidekick. And so Towelhead came along. And once
he was there, the rest, as they say, is history.
Towelhead was, and I admit this, a much
nicer person than Raghead. At that time Raghead was a fully amoral
international terrorist, though as time went by, he became more and more
nuanced and multi-faceted, until it got so that I couldn’t even cast him as the
evil antagonist any longer. But Towelhead was always nicer than him.
I have found this happening with my
cartoons over and over again: each time I create a character, there is a
sarcastic foil who appears almost spontaneously. Towelhead was the first of
those, and, until the advent of Jihadi Rose, by far the best.
Of course Raghead and Towelhead weren’t
enough. With them I could only keep the action where they first appeared,
Syria; if I were to discuss happenings elsewhere, I either needed to introduce
other characters, or only have the two of them (and a few sidekicks who
appeared over time) discuss said happenings between themselves. I have never
been a proponent of tell, don’t show – I needed to show things happening.
So, other characters made their appearance.
Raghead and Towelhead were joined by a Saudi commander named the Mullah;
Jihadhead, a far more radical character; and a drone named Jack the Reaper.
Then, a couple of interchangeable American soldiers, Red and Ted (of whom Ted
was slightly more intelligent and less trigger happy), who deployed in
Afghanistan with an interpreter called Shuja. They used Shuja as more than an
interpreter (to the extent of sitting on him while taking a coffee break).
Finally Shuja shot up a unit of American troops in an insider attack and
defected to the Taliban, becoming a commander (with a deputy called Hadeed who
despaired of his inability to comprehend that being a Taliban commander also
involved such things as oppressing women). And in Ukraine there was Stepan,
boorish and boozy, and his own sidekick Andriy, a reluctant Nazi desperately
trying to stop things from going too far.
By 2014, though, ISIS was on the rise and
Raghead was no longer adequate. I couldn’t have him joining ISIS because by
then he was in all but name on the government side, having even allied with a
Syrian soldier named Bashar in a battle against al Qaeda. I needed fresh
characters, fresh ideas.
And so Jihadi Colin was born.
To this day I can’t quite believe Jihadi
Colin is purely a product of my imagination. Yes, I drew him, originally as a
throwaway background character – yet within a couple of strips he took over not
just the storyline but the entire strip. After he acquired his own sarcastic
foil, the strip’s first regular female character (Jihadi Rose), he became the
only real recurring character of any importance.
Jihadi Colin was everything Raghead no
longer was; nuanced (he was far from a bloodthirsty headchopper, but he was a headchopper), a brutal fighter
when necessary, with enough sensitivity at the same time to be disgusted by
such tactics as human shield use, and sarcastic enough to etch stone. And Rose
took that sarcasm to a further level, to the point that they are the only two characters
of mine to make the jump from cartoons to fiction. I have written a novella
featuring them and intend to write more.
By 2015 I’d begun drawing more and more
single panel cartoons, too, as comments on particular happenings, and slowly
these became more prominent. It helped that single panel cartoons tended to get
republished on other sites, though of course I never got paid for them or
anything.
All this time I’d been drawing in black and
white, but in early 2016 I began to attempt colour. Until then I’d been using
the Woodcut function on Corel to create the grainy background that was characteristic
of my cartoons. But the grain was getting on my nerves, and cleaning it up took
a lot of erasing.
I was hampered by the fact that I literally
had no idea how to colour; Paint was all I knew, and Paint was awful for colouring when you
have any kind of blemish on the paper. I still don’t know how to use most
functions on any colouring programme at all, except Paint, which I finally
taught myself. But at first my colouring was amateurish and took forever; and it
shows.
Anyway, at this time I’ve probably reached,
after five years of effort, the style that will characterise my cartooning for
the foreseeable future. I don't know that I'd choose to change it any more even if I could. I'm comfortable with it, more or less, though I wish I had easier software options.
And so, with thanks to everyone who has stood by me
during these years, here is your five year anniversary cartoon:
I hope the next five years will be as
grand.
