I’ve been doing this comic called Glop sporadically since about… I think it was 1992, but I didn’t have a blog then, so I can’t search the archives to find out. Whatever year it was, I do recall that I was traveling in Kiribati with other Baha’is, and I had been unable to develop the skill of sleeping in the afternoon so crucial to the Kiribati lifestyle, which combines staying up all night for the singing with getting up very early in the morning for the fishing. So one afternoon, a few days after reading a big book of 1960s alternative comix that belonged to Mike Fudakowski Senior, I was sitting in a maneaba on a bright tropical afternoon with everyone around me asleep, and I had some paper and a pen. So I decided to start a comic.
Or rather, not so much to start one as to make one concrete. The characters in Glop had a history several years longer, having begun in a couple of exercise books in a fifth form biology class. One of the exercise books was mine, and one belonged to my best friend Duane, and in them we drew epic tableaus of Sillyputtyman, Stirako and a bunch of other goodies fighting complicated battles with Lintman, the Smusheriser and the Diabolical Mr Springy. In fact, the dinosaurs had a still longer history, having been based on stuffed toys Duane’s mother had made years earlier for Duane and his siblings. In addition to those dinosaurs who were firmly on the side of good, there was the morally ambiguous Cutie, a triceratops who had been outgrown by Duane, adopted by his younger brother Bruce, and subsequently gotten very smelly and become obsessed with all things of a grimy biological nature. I’m pretty sure that Cutie’s personality as developed by Duane and myself was a sort of asexual archetype of adolescence, and Stirako’s represented an idealised childlike state we aspired to maintain as long as possible. Or something like that - mostly we had fun making up funny voices.
When I returned from Kiribati I showed the three pages of Glop I’d drawn to Darren Schroeder, newly installed as editor of Funtime Comics Presents, a publication of the University of Canterbury Comics Society. He was sufficiently enthusiastic to encourage me to draw more, and episodes of Glop gradually trickled out over the next few years, usually finished in a rush when Darren warned me that a new issue was about to be published. The cohort of people publishing Funtime Comics eventually moved on from university and became an independent organisation, revolving around Darren’s remarkable willingness to compile and edit comics produced by a very wide range of people. We developed a tradition of monthly gatherings to draw comics and drink tea which continues to this day. Darren and I become good friends, along with many others who came to the workshops.
Over the years, I progressed from planning Glop a panel at a time to planning it a page at a time, then two pages. But there was really no clear plot ahead, any more than there was when Duane and I were drawing the characters in biology class. It began to drag a little, and I started to think about leaving it behind. My life had changed dramatically. I’d been married and I’d been widowed, and Glop seemed like something from a very long time ago that I ought to put aside. But every now and then Funtime would get a letter from someone, or I’d meet someone at Armageddon, and they’d say how much they enjoyed Glop. So I figured I’d keep going a little longer, and see if I could bring it to a satisfactory resolution. Then I continued to make it up as I went along anyway.
Finally last year, I decided that it really was time to get Glop sorted out. I sat down and began to make some tentative plans for how the next few pages would move the plot forward. Surprisingly, this brought back my enthusiasm for Glop. It was no longer a thing I did occasionally when Funtime needed pages, it was a proper story with a beginning and a middle which I could see through to a conclusion that would be much more than merely satisfactory. A few months ago, having sent Darren two more pages with which I was very pleased, I took the planning thing to the next logical step: no more pages would be inked until I had written and pencilled the story all the way to the end.
It now looks like there will be about another twenty pages of Glop beyond what’s already been published. I’m making rapid progress on them, and they have comedy and character development and pathos and pace like I’ve never achieved before. My aim now is to complete the inking by the end of the year, and release a collected volume of the whole thing. It will, of course, continue to be serialised in Funtime right through to the end.
We must have paid a fair amount of attention in biology class, because Duane now has a doctorate in Zoology, and I’ve spent quite a few years as a teacher myself. Bruce is a rock star. Darren lives in my house in Christchurch, and I live in Auckland just down the road from a woman with whom I have the sort of relationship I never imagined would be possible a second time. She’s so enthusiastic about Glop, it makes me wonder what I was thinking back when I was ready to call it quits. I’m looking forward to having a big book of Glop collected together in the not-too-distant future, and to me it’ll look like a big book of years.