THE GIANT DAYS SELF-PUBLISHED ARCHIVE IS BACK UP!

FROM GIANT DAYS #1

The first Giant Days was conceived largely “on the hoof”, with a vague idea of what would occur but pretty much written a week at a time, then drawn. I wrote with a very loose story outline, a week of material at a time, right up until I started writing Giant Days for Boom, where obviously I had to hand in scripts. Writing a week at a time has a lot to be said for it, it’s like slow cooking a story. By the time I’d get to the last week of even a ~22-page story, the ideas would have developed a different flavour. With a new series like this, it helped to sit with the characters while drawing them and explore their characters slowly.

The one downside of the slow process was that I’d introduce things and forget about them a week later. Daisy’s trunk was one of those things. All sorts of delights were meant to emerge from that trunk. Whole stories. A pandora’s box. I’m not sure I ever thought about it again after drawing this page.

This page is the first appearance of Susan Ptolemy. Drawing Bad Machinery had changed my art, I pushed cartoony forms and expressions, influenced by comic jams with my friend Joe List. Susan is one of my favourite characters that I have created, and one of my few regrets in later handing over art chores for Giant Days is that I did not get to draw all her adventures. Smoking is not as popular as it was back then, replaced by smoking for children, or “vaping” as it is known. If I designed Susan today, she would march everywhere with her vape and phone held in her white-knuckled paw, the old “Derby and Joan” as it is (never) called.

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