The year 2000 was a big one for me, as I’m sure it was for many people. For me, It was the year that I decided to get my shit together. I had spent most of the late 90s in various altered states and I could see that unless I did something drastically different, I would be stuck in the small town that I hated. By this stage, I’d already done (and failed owing to my slackness) a GNVQ in art and design, so I knew that the quickest route to university was to do a foundation in Art and Design.
I didn’t see myself getting into the college (and passing) unless I pulled my finger out, so I stopped smoking pot, got a job, and learned to draw. Drawing was what I did instead of smoking, keeping my hands active while I hung out with friends. As part of my application I made and sold a comic, flogging enough copies to recoup the cost of a long-handled stapler. It’s a comic based on the sort of conversations I used to have with my friends, but looking back on it I was a bit dubious about putting it online. However, it took me so long to find it that this might be the best chance I have of being able to find it in 2020!
Making the comic was incredibly hard – it took me somewhere around three months to get done, probably due to a massive depression when I stopped smoking pot. Another thing that was hard was learning to draw well enough to be able to make these very basic characters different enough to tell a story. Finally, compiling the pages in the right way to print, using my dad’s printer, was a complete mindfuck.
Like a big hypocrite, I’m pretty anti-drugs these days. It’s not so much for what they are, but for the reason that people who take drugs are criminalised, forcing them to act in ways that end up hurting them as much as the effects of whatever they’ve taken. If we accept that hanging out in pubs (smoky or otherwise) isn’t healthy, why do we force casual drug-users to become radical law-breakers?
Having moved back to that hated small town after ten years, I think my friends and acquaintances who’ve suffered the worse are the ones who found themselves with something to hide through casual drug use. For me though, I’ll never touch any drugs again and I’m happier for it, making this comic an interesting view into who I used to be.
Really great to see this, Pete. I love your drawing style and direction. The way you framed/chose shots was very effective. Funny, too. I buy self-published comics like this quite often and I’d certainly have bought this had I seen it way back then. The only comic I ever made was from that time — ’99 I guess — but it was off the back of an exceptionally bad relationship and was really nasty. Haha. I wouldn’t show it to anyone, even if it still existed ;-) After seeing this again, do you feel like making another?
Hey Kerrin! I’m glad you found it funny – I was worried that it came across a bit too much drug-humour. I only sold it to people I knew, people who were involved in the same subculture as me; there wasn’t such a market for things like this, although these days with Travelling Man’s fanzine section and the internet I might have been able to sell it in a few different places.
The drawing style is actually a very crude version of how I ended up drawing. I think my next blogpost is going to be about my massive stack of notebooks, and what’s in them.
Would you sell it in Travelling Man now? I know you’ve moved on but the world hasn’t :-) What you say about the drug-humour is interesting. It doesn’t come across to me like that, I just think it’s funny. The humour noticeably comes from another place. I hope you do write a post about your notebooks. I’d really like to see that. My notebooks are abstract and confusing even to me. I think their only purpose is to momentarily make thoughts physical enough for me to understand them.
So now the dark truth about ‘Young Pete’ has emerged!
When I used to take stuff I never managed to draw more than individual pictures, or perhaps a party invite now and then.
Now with coffee as my drug of choice (to which I have such strong feelings of affection that it could even be mistaken for a love relationship) I draw loads of stuff and produce bucketloads of papery output.
I had exactly the same reaction with drugs… it was just impossible to get things done artistically when stoned. There is, of course, the rumour that artists are all wild drugs and rock and roll, but it seems to me that the people who make good things are actually really hard workers.