Everything Everything: Comics and stuff

Quick drawing of Bass Robot! Around 2005ish...

It has been a while since last time I wrote to this blog. I think I have been looking for some new inspiration and actual reasons to release anything (I´ve alse been very busy). But now here is something that got me very excited again!

Here´s a short story to give some explanation: About 5 years ago we moved to our first self bought house from the former rental flat. When packing stuff I decided to put all my old drawings and weird stuff into a huge cardboard box. The box ended up to an outhouse storage and was completely forgotten there. Last autumn when we sold the previous house I found this box again and thought that I should propably just throw it away without even opening it (since I seemed not to have been missing all the stuff). I had totally forgotten that all the old drawings and specially my self drawn comics where inside. Fortunately my wife said that I should at least look into the box - and what a revelation that was! I honestly didn´t even remember how productive I used to be, specially when I was a teenager!

Anyway, the box was filled with really strange gadgets, memorabilia, stuff that can´t be described and most importantly, hundreds if not even thousands of pages full of old material from my youth. So now my scanner is in heavy use basically every evening after work just to quarantee I would not make the same mistake again.

I have also been thinking what to do with all this stuff that has never been released anywhere and only handfull of people have seen (I don´t know if anyone is even interested), but since I´m actually strangely proud of the shear amount of productions I have now available, I´ll try to push at least the most interesting pieces here.

If you have been following Everything Everything before you have propably noticed the earlier comics and graphic design in various places, like as the covers of the various mixes. I really like making all these things, but I´m definitely an amateaur in the field. Everything is basically done for just a momentarily fun. Some of the older stuff however was made with very serious mind set. I remember that I used to practice different kind of techniques constantly and I did have strict aims to get my stuff released some day. As a first example of my old comics I present here a 12 page beginning for a self published magazine that was never finished. I´ll explain the reasons why this never got where it was supposed to go.

First of all, this was made in 1996 and I was just 16 years old back then. As a teenager I had very short attention span and got bored with projects very easily. This I think is one of the finer examples of my style around that period, you can find several influences from my graphic heroes! I actually admit here in the text that my biggest inspiration came from Kosuke Fujishima for this particular episode. You can find traces for that by just looking the backgrounds that are unnecessarily detailed and made strictly with ruler in hand. Also the main character has manga style face. Other obvious influences come from Simon Bisley (other characters, the very black ones) and Jamie Hewlett (all the small things blocking the pictures, some of the composition and little bit for the main characters attitude). What makes this episode one of my favourites is that the style is actually surprisingly coherent.

The biggest problem here is that, although I do like writing and creating complicated plots, I at least uset to love drawing much much more! This often (alomost every time) resulted the storyline being improvised while drawing ahead (at the final page in the huge bubble the main character actually apologizes that this whole introduction was just improvised and she promises that the following story will be written in advance. Obviously it never got done).

The other problem was that I was still developing my style. Quite often I realised that I had changed the way I draw the characters, or background in the middle of the story and decided that I should discard this one and make the next story complete with this new style. This resulted to numerous useless pages of half done stories that were just piled somewhere and basically forgotten. Fortunately there are few stories that are actually complete, though these tend to be much older stuff and therefore less mature.

Ok, so here it finally is, the story I draw when I was 16! It´s called "When I Met Myself". I´m not going to translate this because the story is simple and quite dumb, but there are few jokes that still make me laugh! And some of the pictures are pretty good and I still like few compositions here and there. Few last pages doesn´t have final ink in the bubbles.