Artithmeric 9 Issue #2

44 I drew a daily comic strip once, it was called the Daily Dave and was based around the characters I worked with a long time ago. I drew five strips a week for about three years - pretty much non-stop - and it kept my work colleagues amused and quite frankly gave me something to do while I was chained to a desk between 9 and 5 every day. But even then I didn’t always want to draw it, wasn’t in the mood, or got fed up with my self-appointed superiors constantly berating me for wasting the company’s time. It was fun, really quite popular with my workmates, but amazingly draining to come up with something fresh and amusing day after day, particularly on bad days. And we all have them. Years later I was paid to draw cartoon strips, but only ever drew weekly ones. That said, for a nine-year period or so I was drawing five different strips a week for different publishers and that more or less amounted to doing a daily strip I suppose. I did that for much longer than I thought possible, I think I may even have hoped at the time that not all of the strips would last very long and I can still recall the sense of absolute relief I experienced when some of them came to a natural end (usually due to a change of editor) and I could get on with doing normal things instead of constantly having to come up with funny cartoon strips. I still draw a couple of regular weekly cartoon strips now, but that’s nothing like a daily commitment.