One of the dangers of this story was giving Esther a bun, because I worried that she’d end up looking like Lottie. Their designs aren’t so different, Esther is just longer and pointier. Though they have very different energies in my head. But I had to make her look bookish and severe. Esther is a charmer but she is also capable of being very severe when she wants to be.
Rural intrigue.
In 2008 I took a trip to the USA and had to buy some insect repellent in Philadelphia. I was excited to see that it promised to ward off “chiggers and no-see-ums”, which is a promise no British repellent has ever made me. In the UK, these flying pests are known as “Jamie and Spencer” – but may not be exactly the same animal.
Learn more about these made up animals created as a US psyop.
When I was drawing this page, I had to look at a lot of pictures of cows’ eyes being examined, it was gross, some of those eyes were in poor health. And this song played in my head the whole time I was pencilling this page:
A camel isn’t a cow, it’s the ship of the desert.
I don’t know what to say about the composition of this page, other than that I don’t think anyone’s ever tried a handshake corner cutout before, and for good reason. Anyway, time to meet some loveable new relatable characters, some of whom I failed to assign names to. Enjoy concocting your own until I get round to it.
Peter Brier has the kind of rural solidity needed to stick your hand up a cow’s fundament. And he has been given the greatest gift of all† : a meeting with Esther de Groot.
† Debatable
Esther and Nemulon are back together. Back together again, put the world in a spin. This isn’t Nemulon-13, who was specially designed for a particular purpose (see NEMS 1968 for more details). It’s Nemulon-14, who looks the same but lacks a lot of the more expensive features. I’m sure there’s an automotive analogue here but I can’t think of one. PEEP PEEP!
What is BLIGHT about? Why did Destroy History take more than a decade to “really get going”? Why is Esther riding a cow? Isn’t “blight” on potatoes not beeves? All of these questions will be answered.
Like all my projects, Destroy History was thinly conceived and required a certain amount of actual pages to be made to start to make sense to me. When I try to do things the opposite way round – to pre-build things in the woodshed until they’re ready to emerge, it never works. It takes making something – staring at each page for 3-4 hours as I draw it, dozens of dozens of them, day after day – to fully connect me to a story and its characters. I can’t play the game in my head.
If you’re an Early Reader on my Patreon, the first half of the story available to read in full right now.
In the mighty Marvel tradition, I present the state of play in the Scary Go Round cinematic universe this month. It’s entirely possible that at least ten of the titles in the check list are stories that I have “worked up” and subsequently set aside (for a different reason every time) in the last 12 months. But which? Some may surprise you. I don’t know if anything on that page is canonical, except Esther’s interview, which I conducted in the lobby of the Savoy.
BLIGHT starts tomorrow. If you’re an Early Reader on my Patreon, the first half of the story available to read in full right now.
