Four
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.
I’m basically on team “vaping is 1/20th as bad as smoking which means it saves many lives through substitution effects, therefore society should not stand in the way of the vape craze”.
Also it makes people look like they’re sucking a robot’s cock, which I find oddly charming.
I was with you right up until you besmirched my beautiful clean website with your robot cockery. Now I’m going to have wipe the whole thing again for the second time in two months.
Spank mag material, that. Or that one webcomic about the sexy robot butler? Chester 5000 or something? Anders loves Maria but for steampunks? I am my own wayback machine
Now Tom has used the phrase “spank mag” I am going to have to move to a new webhost :C
Won’t happen again! I’m not a perpetually foulmouthed person, but in this case it was unavoidable.
Your joy in drawing Susan P is quite clear. The variety of expressions (e.g. [spoiler alert] Page 96) is wonderful. I also annoyed my wife during her much-anticipated first trip to the British Museum by parrotting Susan’s “Show me the Mummy!” when entering a new room.
(Feel free to delete or censor this if I am in any way spoiling I timed reveal)
I propose we name this plot device Allison’s Trunk.
“If a trunk introduced on page four has not had its contents revealed by the end of the series, you know the writer simply forgot it ever existed”
I always liked that Susan smoked- it’s such a weirdly contradictory habit for a medical student.
That was my feeling when I created her – the smoking doctor! She was meant to be “hard boiled”.
Also, doctors are somewhat renowned for not taking their own advice, aren’t they? Both of the parents of my best friend growing up were doctors, and neither of them were/are especially healthy people. I mean, I’m a teacher and I avoid homework/doing the reading on a regular basis!
Giant Days is still my favorite. Could be because they were my introduction to JA in paperback form? I just recently bought the full hardbound volume set, too. Anyway, I too now wonder what crazy things would have emerged from Daisy’s trunk.
Been a while since I read the start of Giant Days in any form.
I knew there was a reason I felt an affinity for Susan, when I first started Uni I didn’t sleep properrly for a month or two.
I love Giant Days so very much – my favourite of all your work – and Susan the most of all within it. What a fun thing to see this today.
Always loved your take on Susie P! The hair, the pointy teeth, everything just worked. Also, these original Giant Days reruns really bring me back… it’s been a while.