Thirteen
THE BOBBINS (2013-2022) ARCHIVE IS BACK UP!
Bobbins coming back started, like many of my projects, as a joke with a friend. He had been an early reader (while he was still at at school) and is a Beach Boys nut. There was a famous campaign in the mid-70s that was meant to show that Brian Wilson, the architect of their hits, was back in the fold and the good surfin’ times were about to start rolling. Brian, at the time, was very unwell and looked it. The campaign was titled “BRIAN IS BACK!” All Beach Boys heads know this phrase because it is an empty promise that led to dead-eyed nostalgia music followed by such gnomic songs as “Roller Skating Child”, “”Johnny Carson”, and the deathless “Ding Dang”. As a jape I sent Jeremy a text that said “BOBBINS IS BACK!” and a crude drawing of the original characters. I think that within a week or so I had begun making the first few new strips. They originally ran alongside The Case Of The Forked Road (which concerned time travel, it all made sense at the time).
The great gift was the original body of work from 1998-99, the first comics I ever made with any serious intent to publish. I barely knew what I was doing, which meant that ideas weren’t developed. A character or situation would be introduced, some wrinkle would be very briefly entertained, then I’d move on. I wasn’t thinking about storylines, partly because I didn’t know how to even start writing them, and partly because I was ostensibly making a “newspaper strip” and the ones I read didn’t continue material for more than a day or two except in very rare circumstances. Now I could take one idea and stretch it out for days, weeks, months if I wanted, and all the ideas that were potentially concertina’d inside would stretch out to fill the gaps.
The first thing I did was examine Shelley and Amy’s friendship. This took a long time to develop in the original comic. Their interactions were initially forced, to the extent that in one story one of them, drunk, punches the other in the mouth and knocks out a tooth. I find this pretty mortifying now, obviously. We depict a softer world today. But it was based on something I actually saw in a nightclub in my early twenties. Dental mishap aside, early on I never explored the early relationship between Shelley and Amy, who were best friends a couple of years later, so I dug into what they seemed to be as younger people. Shelley has a big heart, sees the damage in Amy, and wants to look after her. I explored this side of her further in Expecting To Fly.
Interesting to hear your evaluation of your evolution. From my perspective, the *it* was there already from the first strips (I might not have been on the first strips as they were published, but early enough to have gone to the first). Whatever the *it* is (perhaps the quirky sense of humor?), it is still there, and better packaged.
I think I am still the same person I was when I started. My intent has never really changed – to open a window on a fun place to visit a few times a week.
It *is* sad to think that the days when Christopher Walken danced in “Weapon of Choice” – and the whole world danced with him! – will never come again, isn’t it?
So true :/
Ultimately I think it was a better choice to reboot the Shelley and Amy friendship origin rather than the broken teeth in nightclub story. Younger readers would have a hard time understanding our Late Gen-X/Early Millennial sensibilities. We were of a cruder and more savage era. I do like though while Shelley is befriending Amy out of compassion she’s also doing it for Machiavellian office politics too. I’m guessing this is right after Shelley discovers that Holly is evil after all.