Collage Comix

A chance to trace some of the precursors of 'A Severed Head' (a title borrowed from the novel by Iris Murdoch - not to mention the 1971 film of the tale starring Lee Remmick and Richard Attenborough). The original idea of producing a linear comic strip by drawing on obscure material from many sources then rescripting these images, has a slightly subversive aspect which appeals to me. I would have to pay tribute to the following:-

1. The extraordinarily original animations created by Terry Gilliam for the children's (but just as much for adults) television programme 'Do Not Adjust Your Set' in 1968 and later for the equally iconoclastic 'Monty Python's Flying Circus' (Gilliam has, of course, gone on to great things in feature film direction, not least the brilliant 'Brazil' - interestingly, he recently said that he didn't know where all that early animation inspiration came from; he - like me - led a fairly hermetic life surrounded by mountains of cuttings and clippings);
2. Some of the agitprop collages in Situationist publications of the seventies, such as Christopher Gray's prescient 'Leaving the 20th Century';
3. Chris Garratt and Mick Kidd's creation 'Biff', which I saw grow from underground publications like 'IT/Maya News' to take a regular slot in 'The Guardian' newspaper in the U.K.;
4. Max Ernst's revolutionary collage novels such as 'Une Semaine De Bonte' and 'La Femme 100 Tetes' (either 'The Girl With A Hundred Heads' or, phonetically, 'The Girl Without A Head') which wallow in the bountiful steel engravings of cheap Victorian fiction and technical/ medical textbooks: once seen never forgotten.


'The Greatest Sin'(1984): the themes of vegetarianism, homosexuality, freemasonry and opium abuse proved too strong for the local arts association.

Without realising it, I was adopting a decidely postmodern approach with shades of the hip-hop driven sampling ethos which entered music in the early eighties. I have always been one for the magpie approach to collage, sampling and the intermingling of mainstream and oblique sources: basically cutting up hundreds of bits of paper and scripting the strip as I go along, drawing inspiration from the images I find by serendipity or which I can remember having in my files. This approach reached its first fruition in the Birmingham Arts Lab publications 'Street Comix' which dated from the late seventies and were driven by the fertile brain and flowing pen of my old chum, Hunt Emerson.

When I was asked to contribute to their forthcoming title 'Heroine', which dealt with feminist issues and mainly female contributors (except, I'm proud to say, for me), I went into overdrive and the following three pages popped out fuelled by punk lyrics, sexual politics and satire. It also gave me the opportunity to use the linear development of each story to comment on itself and the strip conventions - there is a long and honourable tradition of this throughout twentieth century strips.
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From 'Heroine', AR:ZAK press, (c.1978)

I have written a two-part article on 'Comix For Grown-Ups', quoting many of my favourite comix artists, including several illustrations. It appeared in an edited form in the U.K. Association of Illustrators journal issue dated January, 2000. You can read it in its full, two-part glory on the creative-freelance website: see Links page.
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