John W Henry: The Cartoon Strip - Episode 3

I’ve been drawing a cartoon strip for the LFC fanzine, Red All Over The Land and this (below the usual Tuesday ramble) is part 3. I don’t know how many of these I’ll draw. I have another finished bar the lettering and the colouring but I’m beginning to wonder if I’ll make it through the entire season.

I suppose part of my problem is the lack of feedback. I send the strip off and about a week later my complimentary copy arrives. I don’t know if any matchday supporters bother to read it or laugh or simply used it to wipe the mustard off their chin after Suarez’s sublime goal on Saturday. I also suppose it’s a strange thing to draw a comic strip about but John W Henry is a bit of a cult figure in my mind. I like the guy’s humour, his non-corporate way of doing business. I love that he owns Liverpool. My new allegiance to the Boston Red Sox also means that I was up late into the night watching a strange Russian website showing the World Series.

The Red Sox won or I believe they did. The commentary was in Russian but that’s preferable to watching the American feeds. I think I’d go mad if I were American. The breaks for ads are interminable. Russians, on the other hand, don’t seem to have any and they just stayed on the coverage, watching the crowd, players, and management waiting to get the green light once the brash American advertisers have finished shouting in people’s faces.

As I watched the baseball, I was also trying to do a firmware update on my Samsung Note 10.1 which I’m beginning to regret buying. Not that I don’t love it. It’s simply the best tablet I’ve ever bought and my favourite bit of technology. However, for the amount of cartooning I do on it, the screen simply isn’t good enough. I’m pretty sure it’s why my eyes were so bad over the weekend. I compared it with a Retina display on friend’s newish iPad and the two displays are worlds apart. I was dumb. I should have waited but then I couldn’t afford the newer more expensive Samsung Note so I don’t know who I’m kidding. Perhaps I should put a price of £66 an hour on everything I do, as somebody recently suggested in the comments was the least a freelancer should ever ask. But if I did, would anything I do ever get published? I guess I’m one of those amateurs who the great Harlan Ellison says make it tough for the professionals. But the truth is that we make it tough for ourselves too.

Since I’m rambling about vague things that struck me this morning, Neil Gaiman is at it again. I’ve written before about how ubiquitous Neil Gaiman has become. He always seems to go the places I want to go and to do everything bigger and better than I could ever do. It’s like he’s a walking window into a different world where somebody with my exact tastes actually has a following. I wrote yesterday that I was a big Lou Reed fan and naturally, today, Gaiman is writing in The Guardian about how he was a big Lou Reed fan, saw Reed perform live, interviewed Reed, dressed like Reed, even named his child after a character in Walk on the Wild Side. It means, of course, that Gainman has excellent taste but it also means that he’s become even more ubiquitous in my life. He’s beginning to feel like the lodger in the corner of my psyche and what’s worse: he’s not even paying any rent.