CBM.com users and readers I present to you a personal friend of mine, a great person, beloved Cbm.com user and "The Greatest Artist That Ever Lived" Doopie! and this...is his story.
Why do I like comics and how have they influenced me? Wow, that’s quite a question. It might be a slightly lengthy tale but here goes....
When I was a kid I was raised on the likes of The Beano and The Dandy – British comics with a distinctly British sense of humour. Albeit a slightly childish one but hey, they were meant for kids after all. I suppose as a child of 4 or 5 I was attracted to the pretty pictures as well as the ‘jokes’ and the stories were mostly told from a kids’ perspective with the characters always getting one over on the adults .
I soon tired of these things and found ‘real’ comic books (and by that I mean ones starring superheroes). This was largely helped by the release of Tim Burton’s Batman films in the late 80s/early 90s, as well as the cartoon series, so it should come as no surprise that Batman was my first comic proper.
I suppose I was attracted to the medium in a similar way to most other children and adolescents – these were tales of extraordinary men and women, gifted with powers and abilities impossible in the real world that were unbound by the limitations of everyday life. It was escapism. Same as most other forms of entertainment, be it My Little Pony, James Bond or Bugs Bunny. But what I found, and this may be where my tale differs to others, was that it wasn’t the who was saving who or what the bad guy’s plan was that spoke to me – it was the art.
The ability to tell a story with pictures was something magical to me. At the age of around 10 I had no way of really expressing this interest (it wasn’t until several years later that I heard the expression ‘sequential art’) but in those panels, and indeed between them, I found something miraculous. Whereas with a novel the reader must create the picture entirely in their mind, and with film the pictures actually move, comics required the reader to put the pieces together to make sense of what was going on – they required an active reader.
It was around this time I started to draw. At first I would copy from comics and do mostly pin-ups, but before long I found I had my own stories I wanted to tell. The pictures would come into my mind in sequence – just like a storyboard – and I just had to get them down on paper.
At 15 I decided I was going to be a comic book artist. I read anything and everything looking for new ways and ideas of how to tell stories and discovered some truly great books that changed the way I look at the world. Watchmen, V for Vendetta, The Adventures of Luther Arkwright, The Dark Knight Returns – all of these books blew me away and opened my eyes to what is truly possible with sequential art and the storytelling opportunities afforded to comics which are not found in other mediums. It was no longer about how the hero would save his girlfriend and keep people finding out his identity - things got a little more complex.
So here I am umpteen years on and still not working in the comic industry!
“Damn it Doopie, what happened?” I hear you cry.
Sadly my life didn’t quite pan out the way I had hoped when I was 15, I’m not sure many do, but I still draw and revel in the chance of people reading a story I have created and the hope of professional work is still very much alive!
I sit here now at a junction in my life. Behind me is everything that has made me who I am and ahead the road forks. There are many possibilities of how things could turn out, the future is not set just ask Sarah Connor, but my aim is on utilising my artistic ability. I am looking at becoming a concept artist for video games – something I would find incredibly rewarding – and it is comics which have got me to this point. Without those first issues of The Dandy I may never have picked up a pencil and tried it out for myself. Without the magic between those panels I would have lived a much poorer life and that is why I like comics and how they have influenced me. Thanks for reading and I hope all of you find your own magic. Doopie