Category: Mayor Don't
Mayor Don't Begin Again
You need to be introduced to Mayor Don't. So far he's had a cameo on the credits page of our fourth comics anthology, and been the subject of Gavin Haynes' delectable song, but for the most part he and his antics have only existed on the nebulous Mayor Don't Master List Dot OhDeeTee that flourishes sweetly in some ill-frequented nook of my hard drive. Sebastian and I feed it with words and scanned in pages of notebooks every now and again and you are now to savour its first fruiting.
Not much of this one was crafted in the world beyond the Wacom tablet. I drew the foundation sketch while at work, with my one foot resting on a tower of Holsten Pils, or Stella Artois, or some other horrible swill that stinks.
The aim of the game was to work on my digital brushstrokes. I wanted to get each one to be fat and thin in all the right places. This is a lot easier to do in the analogue world, it turns out, but I hadn't figured that out yet. Also present for your singular delight - the tricksy, multi-layered text that took me forever and ever to do that was, unfortunately, both illegible and ugly.
The design for the Mayor's kitchen tiles looked unnatural and weird when I laid down the standard pattern-and-warp trick, so I traced over the fiendishly exact tiles with my own, charmingly irregular lines. So now you know! There was also, around this point, a dreadful misadventure with cross-hatching. I scrapped the clean lines of the background and decided instead that I would cross hatch everything. I did pretty much all of it before I decided it was a terrible mistake and destroyed the evidence.
And now, gentle reader, we are the end of our breathtaking journey. I hope you've all learned something and are a little less angry with God or your father or whoever it was, now that you've seen this first Mayor Don't cartoon. There'll be more coming, but not for a little bit. I've a Guardian comics competition to enter. It should be exactly five hundred laughs.
- Tom
