Keep on Shakin' it

Solo decides to turn tail and get the hell out of there and then...
POW! Grabbed by the Death Star's tractor beam. As always, the very oldest pages keep getting to me. Sentimental old fool that I am.

Art Notes

Drawn in black biro and featuring the amazing highlighter pen that my dad brought home from the office stationary cupboard. I was amazed at their fluorescence. Seemed perfect for lasers and spaceship engines. Closed away in the dark for 30 odd years the ink's retained its luminous green colour perfectly.

I wonder where I was when I drew this? Often, I was kneeling on the bedroom floor - the way kids do. Remember that? Blissfully unaware of the existence of arthritis but with your feet going numb. "I'll just finish this bit first..." Then on hearing the call for dinner you'd struggle to get up on floppy ankles and struggle down the hallway on alien feet.

"Well, don't go getting all mushy on me"

It's a fact that that the comic was begun when propped-up in bed at night (That Tantive IV-hyperspace page!) I busily drew away, by the bedside lamp, excited about my new epic comics venture, until I grew sleepy. Hoping that I'd dream about Star Wars.

I never knew then how many pages it'd grow into, or how many years I'd spend on it. When I did start drawing the first page that night, my dad was away working in Killarney in County Kerry. He'd be gone 5 days a week for many many months, and he says that I cried the first Sunday that he set off for the 5 hour, 143 mile journey on Ireland's primitive 1978 roads. There wasn't a single motorway in the whole country back then.

He was a management consultant with a firm called MSD near Kill village but hired out to the Liebherr Company (hence the brown sticky tape on the cover). Er, yes. Another stationery cupboard acquisition. Each one a veritable cornucopia. It was MSD's paper that I worked on, for most of the early version of the comic. It's a slightly shiny, waxy sort of paper that the biro glided over very nicely. Isn't it amazing the sort of sensation-related detail you can recall after many decades? Do you have any recollections like that?

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