Here’s a comic strip page I did for Deluxe Magazine, a magazine about record shops from The British Underground that’s going to – among other places – the South by Southwest Festival that’s going on right now in Austin, Texas.

Here’s the strip from its image file, click through to read it at a comfortable size: As this was an opportunity to poke my head above a parapet with a view of a landscape I didn’t have that much of an excuse to be in – record retail and collecting – and then proceed to throw my opinions around, I wanted to make sure it was half worth reading, so I wrestled with some roughs:I ended up getting two comics-worth from the preliminary brain rummage, so cut the first one free and then threw this at the Editor as a statement of intent:The poor guy.

It was nice to wang on about something using comics as a medium though. The whole thing brings to mind the increasing troubles facing physical shops that sell physical objects. Bit like your local comic shop. If you have one left anywhere near you. I suppose comic shops have people going in every week for their fix of The Big Two‘s product; something that there isn’t really a parallel to in indie record emporiums. But then again digital comics are on the up, slicing more share away from the comic shop owner. Hmm. I remember thinking to myself a while back that if there was any true future in comics they would have to become a trash medium again. Even though mail order ‘long tail’ graphic novels and collections – and even Kickstarters for the same – are fantastic, if we really want to be anywhere approaching relevance we need to jump onto the digital platform bandwagon – even if we don’t know where it’s headed – and start pedalling like crazy, and hope the mainstream takes some notice of us again.
Mind you, I do like a nice physical object like a graphic novel or trade paperback to read, so I suppose I want it both ways really. Harrumph.