Understanding Web Comics

Boris Karloff
Boris Karloff, drawn in Procreate on my iPad Pro. I’m trying to echo the style of the original 1964 ‘Thriller’ comic.
The Broken Leg
From my homemade comic from January 1965
broken leg

Boris Karloff makes an appearance in my homework for my latest free online FutureLearn course, Infinite Canvas: Making and Understanding Web Comics from the Comics Studies department at the University of Dundee.

We spent the first couple of weeks defining web comics and discussing how they might be used. There were also practical tutorials, including a run-through of my favourite comic-making program, Clip Studio Paint, plus suggestions for getting started with free programs, notably Madefire, where you can compile and publish your web comic, complete with animations.

Now, in the final week, we’re given the opportunity to develop our own web comic.

The Broken Leg

fall in the ice
broken leg

We’ve been looking at a few medical public information comics, which got me thinking about the first time that I landed myself in hospital. On Boxing Day 1964, when I was aged thirteen, I was hurrying home to watch Fred Hoyle’s Universe when I slipped on the icy pavement and broke my leg.

My spell in Ward G gave me a fresh insight into the world of comics. As a child, I’d always read a weekly comic, starting with Playhour during my infant school days and moving on to the Eagle at junior school. Shortly before starting at the grammar school, I’d been wowed by the use of colour photography and illustration in the new educational magazine Look & Learn, so I’d moved on to that.

ambulance
casualty

The newspaper trolley, which made a daily round of the wards, gave me the chance to dip into American comics for the first time. The black and white Weird Tales was a favourite, because of the variety of stories packed into one issue but it had a rival in Boris Karloff’s Thriller, illustrated in colour.

I’d love to draw a web comic which combined my experience in hospital, as illustrated here in my ballpoint pen and crayon drawings from 1965, and combine that with the escape that I was able to make into the world of comics and science-fiction short stories (I borrowed books from the hospital library trolley). I can still remember a dozen of these stories: performing ants, hypnotic pebbles, post-apocalyptic New York (yes, even back then New York was the go-to city for apocalypses), a dimensionally unstable house, a time-travelling mystery hound, space age weather manipulation, assorted aliens . . .

nurse
G ward
Our G ward art class

I’ll draw a few sample frames but I won’t have time to illustrate the whole comic because a week from today I start my next FutureLearn course, Invisible Worlds: Understanding the Natural Environment, based on the Eden Project’s Invisible Worlds exhibition.

Link

My dad
My father in his office at the National Coal Board,Newton Hill, Wakefield
return home
Discharged

Infinite Canvas: Making and Understanding Web Comic from the Comics Studies department at the University of Dundee

The Broken Leg my wildyorkshire.co.uk post for 27 December 2005.

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Harvest Mouse

Harvest mouse

With its meadows now full of wild flowers going to seed, Rodley Nature Reserve, to the west of Leeds, is a perfect habitat for harvest mice.

My photographs were taken in the visitor centre there where a large vivarium contains a captive colony. Since 2012, 900 harvest mice have been released here.

Harvest mouse

They build tennis-ball sized nests amongst the stems of reeds and grasses.

As it clambers about amongst vegetation, the harvest mouse uses its long tail to grasp stems.

Link

Harvest Mouse Introduction at Rodley

Goldfinches’ Nest

Drawn in Procreate on my iPad Pro.

One morning last week, after a wild and windy night, we found this nest, which I think was made by goldfinches, on the lawn at the foot of the rowan in the front garden. It’s just three inches (8 cm) across and very light. There were no signs of eggs or chicks in or around it, so I think that it had been dislodged by the wind, rather than raided by a predator, such as a magpie or cat.

goldfinch

It’s composed mainly of frizzy wool-like material, which might be dog hair, wool or even some manmade down. It is too long and curly to be thistle down. The nest is decorated with strands of moss around the outside with a few long threads curled around the inside of the cup, which are possibly horse hair but more likely textile thread. As I went out to measure it just now, a week after it fell, I noticed a tiny rove beetle amongst the fibres in the centre of the cup.

A month or more ago, a goldfinch was singing from the telephone cables near the rowan tree and sometimes there would be a pair of them perching there, so I wondered if they had a nest nearby.

It’s been a good year for goldfinches and garden birds in general, with young bullfinches, chaffinches, blackbirds, starlings, blue tits and great tits coming to our back garden bird feeders, but goldfinches are the most numerous. Yesterday a flock – a charm to use the collective noun – of goldfinches flew up from feeding on the fluffy seed-heads of creeping thistle in the meadow by the wood.

Tracking Tunnel Activity

tunnel tracks

Even by boosting the contrast, I can’t really pick out any definite tracks at the entrance to my animal tracking tunnel, which has now been sitting amongst the long grass by the hedge at the end of the garden for two days. The damp paper along the edges might have been nibbled by slugs.

vole

As I moved in to take a close-up photograph, a vole ran out from the tunnel. It happened so quickly that I wondered if it really had been in there or whether it had been hidden in the grass at my feet but when I slid out the bait tray I could see that half the sunflower hearts had disappeared.

nibbled sunflower hearts

One of the sunflower hearts had been nibbled at one end to expose the seed inside.

In the milk bottle top that serves as a bowl for the bait something has been nibbling away at what I think might be fragments of peanuts in the peanut butter. Traces of slime suggest that slugs or snails have been visiting the tunnel.

I’ve topped up the bait with sunflower hearts, so my tracking tunnel has now become a vole feeding station.

Robin Hood and Thomas of Lancaster

cover rough

Looking back at this rough for the cover of my Walks in Robin Hood’s Yorkshire, I think that I prefer the drama of the arrowhead design to the oak tree dotted with characters that I finally went for. The king, Edward II really at the centre of things, trying and failing to keep the peace between two of his barons, Thomas, Earl of Lancaster and John, Earl of Warenne. One of them was destined to lose his head to the executioner Hugh de Muston, a villain of London, on a hill to the north of Pontefract Castle.

Robin Hood
Adam
Adam Hood, forester.

In my booklet, eight walks follow in the footsteps of Robert Hode of Wakefield, who we guess was the son of Adam Hood, a forester, charged with protecting the lord of the manor’s deer. As a forester, like Robin’s outlaws, Adam wore a livery of green in summer, grey in winter.

From Wakefield’s Manor Court Rolls, we know that in 1316 Robert and his wife Matilda rented a plot, 30 x 16 feet, at Bichil, Wakefield and built a house of five rooms. This was in what we now call the Bull Ring, which in medieval times was the town market’s Butcher Row. Bichil probably means ‘beech hill’. Beech was used to make butcher’s blocks because beech acts as a natural antiseptic.

booth

I’ve been re-reading my 2010 booklet Walks in Robin Hood’s Yorkshire, because Radio Leeds invited me to be interviewed about the Yorkshire Robin Hood. It was so difficult in two or three minutes to strike a balance between a brief summary and going into the arcane details that bring the subject to life.

Link

Robin Hood booklet

Walks in Robin Hood’s Yorkshire is still available on my Willow Island Editions website, £2.99, post free, in the UK. Please contact me if you’d like me to send it further afield.

Nine years later some of the walks have changed, particularly ‘The Pinder of Wakefield’ walk, as there’s been a lot of house building to the north-east of the city.

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Animal Tracking Tunnel

Tracking tunnel
I’ve tied the tunnel down in case a fox, cat or magpie investigates it. Even so, it wouldn’t surprise me if one of them doesn’t pull out the margarine tub lid to investigate.

It’s the final week of the University of York’s free online Future Learn course The Biology of Bugs, Brains and Beasts and for our ‘Beasts’ practical work, we’re using a homemade tracking to tunnel to discover – if it works – whether we’ve got rodents or hedgehogs in our back garden.

assembling the tunnel

I’ve slotted two cut-down 4-pint plastic milk bottles to make the tunnel. Our long-handled stapler came in useful here.

covering the tunnel

I then covered the tunnel in black sugar paper because small mammals prefer darker places to forage. Black plastic would have been more weatherproof, but I had the sugar paper to hand.

baiting the trap with peanut butter

Finally, using one of the milk bottle tops which I’d saved, I baited the tunnel with organic peanut butter and a few sunflower hearts from the bird feeder. That should be more than enough to tempt any passing rodent.

The sponge is soaked in green food dye and hopefully, in the morning, I’ll see a few small footprints on the paper. I’ve left it in the quietest part of the garden at the back of my little meadow area, in the long grass near the hedge. A small hole amongst the grasses at the far end of the tunnel might well be a vole hole.

Links

How to make a tracking tunnel, backyard conservation with Ana.

The Future Learn Biology of Bugs, Brains and Beasts course run by the biosciences department of the University of York

Ex-Indian Army Plimsols

In the spring of 1978, I’d just finished a big black and white project and I was ready to burst into colour. I went back to the acrylics that I’d used at college and set about painting ever-more ambitious still lifes, flowers and landscapes. At one stage I remember setting myself the goal of one painting a week, but I think that it was after meeting up with my old tutor Bryan Robb at the Royal College of Art, that I speeded things up. He had chuckled and said he’d done a similar thing but he had set himself to paint one a day.

I painted these ex-Indian Army plimsols, which I remember had cost me just fifty pence at the Army surplus stores, on a primed postcard size piece of hardboard which was most likely recycled from a previously abandoned painting. An unfinished painting of South Kirkby colliery and another of my mum and dad’s back garden got recycled in this way.

Of course, I couldn’t afford to have the paintings framed professionally so I made my own, not just to save money but because I thought each frame should be a one-off for that particular painting. This one was dropped into a small tray-like frame of recycled materials, the inch or so around the glued-in board painted in a matching or harmonising coat of acrylic.

Once I’d got a dozen or more paintings together, I arranged to show them to the assistant curator at Wakefield Art Gallery. I packed them in the backpack that I’d used in Iceland and cycled to Wentworth Terrace. I got shot down in flames. One thing the curator rejected, rather scornfully, was that I’d framed the paintings, as if I was expecting her to offer me an exhibition there and then (I was!)

So that was the end of my fledgling career in fine art, at least for the present but some years later, in a new tasteful professionally-made frame (and I’m sorry that I haven’t still got the homemade version) from John at Art of Oak, Tammy Hall Street, Wakefield, this went into my first one-man show at the City Museum, then housed in the Mechanics Institute on Wood Street, Wakefield.

My dad insisted one buying it, and I’m so glad he did, because it’s now come back to me, and I couldn’t bear to part with it now, because it’s such a reminder of those early days.

The plimsols are on a workbench that I’d constructed in my small room in a shared flat. The plant box behind was made in my student days at the Royal College of Art for my room at the college hostel at Evelyn Gardens, South Kensington. And, no, I don’t still have those plimsols: I’m afraid that eventually, I wore them out.

Broad Bean and Courgette Bruschetta

broad bean bruschetta

Still enjoying our broad beans and concocting new recipes every day. With beans and mint fresh from the garden, this is a perfect summer lunch.

  • 3 cups broad beans, podded
  • 1 small courgette, grated
  • 2 spring onions, chopped
  • 4 sun-dried tomatoes, cut into small pieces
  • 4 tablespoons chopped mint
  • 4 thickish slices of sourdough
  • 1 clove garlic, peeled

Cook beans in microwave with dessert spoonful of water for three minutes. Drain and let cool, then slip off the outer skins.

Using a little olive oil (we used the oil from the jar of sun-dried tomatoes) sauté onions, grated courgette and sun-dried tomatoes for two minutes. Add broad beans and mint, stir together and warm them through.

Brush both sides of the slices of sourdough with olive oil and cook on a ridged griddle pan until toasted on both sides. Rub each piece of toast with the garlic.

Pile on the bean mixture and drizzle with a little balsamic vinegar.

Courgettes and Beetroot

vegetables
Today’s colander from the veg beds: broad beans, dwarf French beans, onions, beetroot (we sometimes use the tops like spinach) and courgettes.

Barbara is using a recipe in the latest, August, edition of Healthy Food Guide, ‘Spicy chicken kebabs with sweet potato wedges’ as a starting point but substituting whatever is available in the garden today, so Maris Bard potato wedges instead of sweet potato and beans instead of cucumber.

recipe

In Friday’s Gardeners’ World, BBC2, Frances Tophill mentioned that she’d been growing sweet potatoes in her greenhouse, so we might try that next year. Sweet potatoes might stand up to us neglecting them for a week when we head off for the Dales better than our cucumber and tomato plants did.

We didn’t plant tomatoes this year after two or three years of them being shrivelled in searing summer heat when we went away but in Healthy Food Guide, Jennifer Irvine suggests that it’s still not too late to grow a few:

“Experienced gardeners reading this are probably rolling their eyes, thinking that if you wanted to plant tomatoes you should have done it months ago. If you’re growing from seed, that’s true. But there is no shame in leap-frogging straight to a young tomato plant at this time of year.”

She suggests begging, bartering or – what we’ll do – buying a plant or two from our local garden centre. They can go on producing fruit until October, so it would be worth giving it a try.

Links

Healthy Food Guide

Jennifer Irvine

Broad Beans

wigwam
The runner beans have yet to flower but we’re picking dwarf French and broad beans.

It’s got to that time of year when the veg beds are at their most productive and we can wander down the garden and gather beans, lettuce, beetroot and herbs.

seeds

We’ve done well with a selection of seeds that came bundled with the April Gardeners’ World magazine in an offer at Sainsbury’s: coriander, mixed lettuce, zinnia, cosmos mixed and black-eyed Susan. The zinnias have done well, they’ve now been planted on and are filling up the border, but we’ve yet to sow the Sarah Raven calendula, which were also included, as we already had plenty of those: in the spring as I weeded the lower veg bed I found a cluster of calendula seedlings from a few plants that had been growing there last year. I transplanted them to grow on (in the corner of the L-shaped bed in my photograph, above) and we’ve now got at least a hundred flowering and attracting hoverflies.

beans
De Monica broad beans

The Gardeners’ World offer also included a decent pair of lightweight gardening gloves (Barbara’s size, but I can’t have everything) and a half-price garden pass, which we’ve already used at St Andrew’s Botanic Gardens, so in effect, we’ve already saved the cover price.

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