All-new comic published September 20205, available now.
Windy is one of my oldest characters. He first appeared on the drawing paper in 1981. The earliest full-length adventure of his was Land of the Jackanapes. In its first incarnation, my biro drawings were too crude to show to anyone; so I redrew it in 1983, and put it out as an A5 photocopy zine in the short series Moving Sagas. Later still, I replaced the sketchy lettering with computer typesetting. What I liked about the original story was Windy travelling below the ground, coming to the aid of the strange Grinning Jackanapes creature without question or hesitation. The rest of the population beneath the earth were hostile and silent, and though the story appears light-hearted and whimsical, I hoped to touch on darker themes of deception and miscommunication.
When times are hard, I send Windy below. At another difficult stage in my working life, I sent Windy below the ground again; this time he seemed to vibrate into a bleak underworld almost against his will, where he met a mysterious shouting homunculus with whom he failed to communicate on every level, despite his best efforts. Windy was utterly alone, and unsure why he was there or what he was doing. But his energy never flagged.
For this new story, some themes from the original Jackanapes Land are revisited, only now things are darker and even more uncertain. The animals are emerging as a cross between a dog, a kangaroo, and a coyote, with striped markings. They can change their shape. They speak incomprehensibly. The original Grinning Jackanapes, now understood to be one of Windy’s oldest and best friends, has become a pariah; he too has changed, into a horse. A lot of the story elements from the 1981/83 story are repeated; I like to aim for consistency in Windy’s world.
My Windy stories tends towards the very wordy, or the very elliptical. The 12 Labours story was overly verbose. The Fortress of Language story was overly concise. Today’s story contains very little dialogue, and minimal captions. To give some semblance of form and structure, I devised a grid pattern in my sketchpad where I inserted my images, symbols and themes in a series of overlapping rows, and moved them around until I achieved some symmetry in the flow. I don’t like to be too exacting or rigid about ring-composition, but the elements are there to be discovered by the reader. I also edited out a lot of material, including an early meeting with Captain Beefheart, and a widescreen vision of the fiery disasters befalling our earth. The original first page, when sketched out, had Windy thinking to himself for five panels and then speaking out loud in the last one. I liked the idea well enough to see if I could carry it off across the entire book, and here we are.
