JUST A COLLECTION OF ANTIQUES AND CURIOS I
So, I thought you might get a kick out of seeing some rare stuff that’s been knocking around for many years (and, I was working on something else and didn’t get a strip done).
The first is an unpublished “Nucleaire Romantiques” strip. “Nucleaire Romantiques,” along with “Hallow e’en Boulevard,” and “Blue Moon,” is one of the names for strips with all these folk. So this is Eleanor and Nelson (who used to be called Mac) and one of her moneymaking schemes.
I was gonna crop it, but I thought you might like to see what one of my sketchbook pages looks like, with all the scribbles, doodles, and rewriting involved. Believe me, this is a pretty bare sketchbook page.
The second is the first page of what was gonna be an attempt to re-write “Utopia, Unlimited,” as just a funny space opera-ish comic, without all the, ahem, “adult” shenanigans that go on in the regular comic. This is as far as I got.
Next week-either a new strip, or more unpublished goodies, like a never finished Groovy, Kinda page, with real hand-lettering! You’ll just have to stick around and see what shows up!
It IS groovy!
As groovy as I could make it!
Thanks Charlie, it’s so good to see the insides of a mind. I look forward to the space opera as well as Groovy going onwards. Good luck with the something else. Chris
Thank you, Chris! I’m not sure it that Utopia will ever see the light of day. I still have to scan the three I have and post them online first.
Thinking of the word “teleportapotty” and then developing an elaborate joke around it is EXACTLY the sort of thing I would do; my wife rather wishes I wouldn’t.
And I must say I’m certainly glad I own the unexpurgated edition of Utopia, Unlimited. I shudder to think that it might ever be any other way….
Wait! Waitwaitwait! “Real hand-lettering?” You mean what we usually get ISN’T real hand-lettering???
Oh Pops, I haven’t hand-lettered a full comic since here. If I still hand-lettered, I’d have to post every two weeks. It’s a long, laborious process. I’ll show you next week.
While I love my unexpurgated Utopias, I do sometimes long to tell the story without all those, ah, adult scenes. Though it probably wouldn’t be as much fun, and certainly not as profitable as U,U was.
I hand-lettered architectural drawings for decades before adopting computer aided drafting. It wasn’t pretty, but it wasn’t slow. And I admit it was pencil, not ink. Oh, well. Hand-lettering is just another dying craft.
I’d love to see a huge collection of “Nucleaire Romantiques” strips.
I’m also interested in what Utopia Unlimited would look like with out the adult shenanigans (nothing against those). Somewhere in my collection of stuff I have a copy of the pilot episode of the Cheech Wizard newspaper comic that Vaughn Bode thought about writing. It’s almost as funny, but in a different way. I suspect that a Bowdlerized Utopia Unlimited would also be humourous in a new and interesting way.
Still loving your work Charlie.
Hey Jim! I missed you, my chum.
I’ll have to look up the newspaper Cheech Wizards. The thought of Cheech in a daily newspaper is mind blowing. Yeah, they would be mighty different.
As would Utopia. It’d be a different strip in so many ways-more focus on the relationships and the different alien races that Eleanor would take to the cleaners. Who knows-we may see another side of the Utopiaverse in some upcoming strips. It’ll be a bit different than the crew of the Iolanthe. But still groovy.
Thank you for the kind words. I have a big announcement to make with the next strip. Don’t worry, it’s all good, and Groovy, Kinda is definitely not going away.
That is the greatest wordplay the English language has ever witnessed
He-hee! Thank you, my friend! If I remember correctly, it came to me while walking my dog.
This was one of those landmark strips. When I pencilled it, I accidentally gave Eleanor a double chin in the last panel.
“Hmmm,” I thought, “that kind of makes her look older, more her age. Let’s keep it!”
So, like the squiggle of noodles that became Robespierre, Eleanor started to look her age (before the crew of HMS Iolanthe de-aged her a bit) based on an accident.
Sometimes you just gotta listen to the pencil.
I knew it was gonna be cool, but I couldn’t have guessed just how cool!
I must confess to having never read your previous works, so this may be the most obvious of observations, but this iteration or Eleanor seems more… playful, perhaps? It seems she’s always some plan or another cooking away (or a plot or a scheme even!), but something about that smile of hers in the last panel is positively disarming. Usually she makes me feel like I need to double check that she hasn’t nicked my pen when she leaves the room.
Oh Dandi_Andi, you make a great point. We don’t see the sillier side of Eleanor often enough. She’s usually got some agenda going, and, well, everybody knows it.
I think I can dig up some strips from a sillier time.
And she wouldn’t nick your pen. She’d convince you to give it to her, along with the pocket you were carrying it in.