Chapter: Blight

I live near a smallholding and enjoy observing the animals. There used to be a rooster who had a crow like a donkey’s bray, “HEE HAWWWW” all day long, but alas he was eaten by, I believe, “some bastard fox”.

I passed up on the opportunity to have that bell go “ding dang” rather than “ding ding” but this is a mark of my latterday restraint. Don’t worry – momma’s little baby still likes shortenin’ bread.

A historic j’accuse, delivered with a pipe stem by… my notes say “Farmer Finch (no relation”) so we’ll have to go with that. If I was a real writer, he’d have a name, like Atticus Aloysius Smith. Of course, they used to teach you how to j’accuse in schools in Yorkshire, but it all went out with the National Curriculum.

A lucky escape for Davy, who I fear is the sort of wide-eyed young shaver who will end this story missing a large part of his neck area, if he’s not careful.

Esther has gone full Fox Mulder. These were my favourite drawings of the first half of the story. Unlike snakebite and black, the chupacabra was invented in about 1995.

I once made a print with a chupacabra on it, alas the artwork is lost to history.

I had to do some research on the origins of “snakebite and black” for this comic, and find out when it emerged. Wikipedia said it was popularised in the 1980s but like power-ups in video games, every time I thought I’d found the earliest instance, I then found an earlier one.

Esther has long been one of my favourite characters to write because she is so confident. She’s largely untroubled by anything other than transient concerns. She’s very sure of who she is, a magnificent and spooky manifestation, and this gives her a certain benign power over people.

I had a good go with the last panel, I got out my 1950s copy of Black Bob – The Dandy Wonder Dog, but I spent so long just reading it that the pastiche may have suffered.

The night time is forever Esther’s time and no one tells her what not to do when it comes to her nocturnal wardrobe. The results are inevitably baffling.

My parents’ kitchen in the mid 1970s was magnificently orange. As is so often the case, if I portrayed the exact luridity of something in the real world in my comics, I would be accused of being over the top.