Primitif and Feroce

This is an additional colour image produced for the Primitif In The Land of the Dead story. This may have been used when I prepared a one-off “artist’s book” edition of the story, and needed a cover image for it. But it wasn’t much of an artist’s book, to be honest – just colour xeroxes glued into a hand-made scrapbook made from art paper. I hoped it would create an impression by being outsize, and something nice to handle.

I did all this in the context of a one-day festival in London organised by the professional dealer Marcus Campbell. This took place on Bankside, not far from the then-new Tate Modern. I had a few hand-made editions of my comics and exhibited them, and even gave the name “Black Chapel Press” to what I hoped would be an exciting new publishing venture. My hope was that my comics would start to flourish outside of the comics world, and that an art-book environment might just be the place where I could find my audience.

Needless to say it didn’t pan out this way. I recall feeling bored and alone sitting behind a table all day with zero interest from passers-by. The other exhibitors had very impressive pieces on offer, much better than mine, a lot of them clearly trying to follow in the footsteps of William Blake. I handed out a lot of flyers, but never got a single order.

You can download a PDF of the story in full colour here.