I'm definitely in the final straight with the current story. And I'm really pleased with how the final 2 episodes are shaping up.
I was a bit thrown by the Elvis impersonator appearing in the election campaign, and not as a fringe candidate either. I had planned the election into the run of the story - I could have dropped the "Election Special" into February, March or April - but I hadn't expected the King... Anyhow, I've decided to embrace the "real" Elvis and shamelessly use his song in the next episode. It was so much better than my original choice.
The Organisation looks set to enjoy a kind of half life for at least the next 6 months, so I do have some grace until I am jettisoned from the State bureaucracy. So this should allow me to carry on in my intended direction of travel as the chill wind of austerity whistles through the Agency.
And then, I hope, I should have an angle on where we go next.
Thursday, 27 May 2010
Monday, 24 May 2010
Black Tears
I suppose the Kid cried black tears back in the dumpster in Reaching the LEARNER. It seems The Organisation is going to be closed down, so I wonder how many will cry to see it go. Whatever. We won't be crying in public, though, to get sympathy.
Hearing about these things from the BBC rather than your bosses certainly makes them worse. Now I know why people punch journalists out. Surprised it doesn't happen more often.
I suppose the Organisation's epitaph is that it failed to show the agility it insisted that the whole education sector needed to thrive in the future. Poetic justice, I guess.
Hearing about these things from the BBC rather than your bosses certainly makes them worse. Now I know why people punch journalists out. Surprised it doesn't happen more often.
I suppose the Organisation's epitaph is that it failed to show the agility it insisted that the whole education sector needed to thrive in the future. Poetic justice, I guess.
Saturday, 15 May 2010
Up close and personalised episode 9
Things start to fall apart as the team encounter some popular resistance to the Goodfellow Implementation. You can find the comic in THE STORIES tab, under the heading, Up Close and Personalised. It is labelled as Chapter 8.
NB This shows as chapter 8 in the Smack Jeeves format cuz we put the election special elsewhere
Darn. I thought of it first. And everybody knows that Elvis is on the side of the people.
I've always given the advice that if you're feeling unsure about what to do in a presentation, "show them a picture of Elvis, everybody loves Elvis..." It's both heartening and worrying to see somebody following my advice, and managing to trump it so spectacularly.
The Elvis in the story comes from this press report from a year or so back. Got me thinking about vigilantes with movie-star names.
Saturday, 1 May 2010
Thinking ahead.
Three episodes to go in the current story, so I'm having to think about what happens next to our heroes. I'm aiming for a summer break and starting a new big story in September. This was my plan last year, but I just couldn't resist dropping a summer special in, so who knows...
Anyhow, in some ways timing is good. I should have time to work out just what a change of administration would mean for The Agency. Having the FED is good - everybody is calling every type of money-saving "efficiency" these days. So the FED will be there claiming credit for everything. Though they know full well where efficiency ends and economy begins.
I used to work for a bank - some time ago now - but there were some guys called the "Performance Improvement Unit". Their job was to find departments they could get rid of, costs they could cut. Needless to say, everybody was scared of them. Smart people, too. Unusual in a bank. These people were my inspration for Angelus and the organisation she's part of.
Talking of scary, I'm also aiming to get Zee back behind her desk. She's not best pleased to have had our chums covering her absence, but she hasn't worked out what she's going to do about it.
So, all I can predict so far is budgetary constraint, the FEDs, and Zee...
Anyhow, in some ways timing is good. I should have time to work out just what a change of administration would mean for The Agency. Having the FED is good - everybody is calling every type of money-saving "efficiency" these days. So the FED will be there claiming credit for everything. Though they know full well where efficiency ends and economy begins.
I used to work for a bank - some time ago now - but there were some guys called the "Performance Improvement Unit". Their job was to find departments they could get rid of, costs they could cut. Needless to say, everybody was scared of them. Smart people, too. Unusual in a bank. These people were my inspration for Angelus and the organisation she's part of.
Talking of scary, I'm also aiming to get Zee back behind her desk. She's not best pleased to have had our chums covering her absence, but she hasn't worked out what she's going to do about it.
So, all I can predict so far is budgetary constraint, the FEDs, and Zee...
Tuesday, 6 April 2010
Further adventures off the beaten track
I've just read some official election guidance for government workers. Looks like somebody, somewhere also thought about what "purdah" might say about us. They say that it is "now commonly known as 'the sensitive period'."
Commonly? And "sensitive period" sounds like something made up by advertisers to sell a rancid yogurt drink, or painkillers maybe.
Still nowhere near the beaten track.
Postscript 13/04/10. The Organisation has opted to call it "the pre-election period". I'm proud of them.
Commonly? And "sensitive period" sounds like something made up by advertisers to sell a rancid yogurt drink, or painkillers maybe.
Still nowhere near the beaten track.
Postscript 13/04/10. The Organisation has opted to call it "the pre-election period". I'm proud of them.
Monday, 5 April 2010
Up Close And Personalised Episode 8
Our heroes hit a brick wall - in the shape of the General Election. I decided to separate this one out and put it with the short stories. You can find the comic in THE STORIES tab, under the heading, Rapid Response. It's called Election Special.
For those of you who don't work for the British Government, "Purdah" is the period from when an election is announced until it actually happens. During this time, civil servants and other government workers can't do anything that could be interpreted as "political". So all kinds of things get postponed or shut down. Often at the whim of managers who are scared of being caught making a mistake.
Anyways. It's called "Purdah". It has definite hints of Empire about it. Some civil servant at some time in the past must have thought it was the height of wit.
It all reminds me of a time (nearly 20 years ago now) I was on a bus heading into Solihull. There were two black guys sat behind me, one of them obviously on his way to start a new job.
"What's Solihull like," he asked his friend.
"It's a bit ... off the beaten track," replied the other.
Just then we drove past the pub called "The Old Colonial" in Damsonwood.
"See what I mean," he added.
I've come to think that large chunks of the government machine are just as "off the beaten track".
Thursday, 1 April 2010
Prehistory
Thought I’d take you back in time. It really is a long, long time now. A different world, when I think of it. But yet, but yet…
As you can see below, the first picture is the cover of Solidarity for Social Revolution 8, dating from 1979. The role of “editor” of this journal was passed between the various small groups here and there around the country that made up Solidarity. A bunch of us based in Coventry, Birmingham and Oxford volunteered to take on the editorship for this issue. People descended on our house in Hollis Road, Coventry armed with the requisite paper, Letraset, glue, scribbled articles and a borrowed electric typewriter.
SFSR was the result of a merger between two groups, Solidarity and Social Revolution. It was not entirely a happy merger. The group was rent with internal strife, much of it carried forward from pre-merger days, but also some new conflict as the two parts tried to come to terms with each other.
The cover you see here was my work. It’s rough and ready, for sure. I did the work through the last night before the deadline for print. It illustrates a general critique of the left that we were formulating at the time that was given extra edge by plenty of internal finger-pointing, too. It went something like this. Leftism was increasingly being used as a personal therapy by largely guilt-ridden, middle-class hangers on, who were wallowing in a swamp of their own “issues” as we would say nowadays.
A valid critique, I still think, but in the end we lost the argument. Lots of reasons why, but our own sectarianism was a big contributing factor. Looking back, the “swampies” were the precursors of an approach to life that is quite widespread now. Look at all those “fix-yourself” programmes on TV. Look at all the “culture and values” organisation therapy being sold to public and private sector alike. Look at single-issue politics. Look at the widespread individualisation of structural problems.
Anyway. It’s an early piece of my work. Collage. A kind of surrealist pop-art aesthetic. And a kind of everyday satire, targeting the behaviour of people around me. And I’m still doing it.
Here’s another one of mine from inside SFSR8. It’s a Brassai photograph with a speech bubble. Essentially I’m filling in some leftover space at the end of an article. The article was a rather bad-tempered attempted critique of feminism. The author was going through a messy divorce at the time, and it showed. I guess what I was trying to do here was to lighten the mood a bit while reminding people about how predatory some purportedly leftist men could be. It was a condensed version of a three-frame cartoon I had drawn but not published. It was an idea for a series called “The Marchers: an everyday story of leftist folk.” Never went any further and the original appears lost. Pity. Anyway, people liked this one. I got a number of appreciative comments at the time.
Finally, another space-filler. This time I’ve cut together a longish quote from Raoul Vaneigem’s Revolution of Everyday Life with some illustrations from a William book. William Carries On, I seem to remember. Looking at it now, it reads like a personal manifesto. In its own little way, it kind of explains so much of what I’ve done since, this stuff included. It’s a little bit of advice on keeping your sanity in the face of the routine defeats of life. "Throw in ... your wit, your tranquility..", yep, that's me. And it says if maybe you can get just one person to see what you mean, then that’s OK.
As you can see below, the first picture is the cover of Solidarity for Social Revolution 8, dating from 1979. The role of “editor” of this journal was passed between the various small groups here and there around the country that made up Solidarity. A bunch of us based in Coventry, Birmingham and Oxford volunteered to take on the editorship for this issue. People descended on our house in Hollis Road, Coventry armed with the requisite paper, Letraset, glue, scribbled articles and a borrowed electric typewriter.
SFSR was the result of a merger between two groups, Solidarity and Social Revolution. It was not entirely a happy merger. The group was rent with internal strife, much of it carried forward from pre-merger days, but also some new conflict as the two parts tried to come to terms with each other.
The cover you see here was my work. It’s rough and ready, for sure. I did the work through the last night before the deadline for print. It illustrates a general critique of the left that we were formulating at the time that was given extra edge by plenty of internal finger-pointing, too. It went something like this. Leftism was increasingly being used as a personal therapy by largely guilt-ridden, middle-class hangers on, who were wallowing in a swamp of their own “issues” as we would say nowadays.
A valid critique, I still think, but in the end we lost the argument. Lots of reasons why, but our own sectarianism was a big contributing factor. Looking back, the “swampies” were the precursors of an approach to life that is quite widespread now. Look at all those “fix-yourself” programmes on TV. Look at all the “culture and values” organisation therapy being sold to public and private sector alike. Look at single-issue politics. Look at the widespread individualisation of structural problems.
Anyway. It’s an early piece of my work. Collage. A kind of surrealist pop-art aesthetic. And a kind of everyday satire, targeting the behaviour of people around me. And I’m still doing it.
Here’s another one of mine from inside SFSR8. It’s a Brassai photograph with a speech bubble. Essentially I’m filling in some leftover space at the end of an article. The article was a rather bad-tempered attempted critique of feminism. The author was going through a messy divorce at the time, and it showed. I guess what I was trying to do here was to lighten the mood a bit while reminding people about how predatory some purportedly leftist men could be. It was a condensed version of a three-frame cartoon I had drawn but not published. It was an idea for a series called “The Marchers: an everyday story of leftist folk.” Never went any further and the original appears lost. Pity. Anyway, people liked this one. I got a number of appreciative comments at the time.
Finally, another space-filler. This time I’ve cut together a longish quote from Raoul Vaneigem’s Revolution of Everyday Life with some illustrations from a William book. William Carries On, I seem to remember. Looking at it now, it reads like a personal manifesto. In its own little way, it kind of explains so much of what I’ve done since, this stuff included. It’s a little bit of advice on keeping your sanity in the face of the routine defeats of life. "Throw in ... your wit, your tranquility..", yep, that's me. And it says if maybe you can get just one person to see what you mean, then that’s OK.
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