Wham, Bam... depressing.

A long time ago, it seems, I entered the Observer/Random House graphic short story competition. I'm pretty much relying on winning some such competition, some illustratorial X-Factor, to springboard me into career success. (And I don't mean just beating a bunch of nine year olds in a colouring in competition, as in my previous post). So I put a lot of time into writing and drawing this, and was then bitterly disappointed when I didn't win.
Looking at the winners and other entrants though (conveniently collected here) I'm less upset. Most of them are stylish and bleak and have a single figure word count. That's not really what mine is about. Mine's more Beano than 2000AD, or whatever it is serious graphic story-tellers are into. Mine's a comic, and I think that's what I prefer.
There are definitely far too many words in there though. I need to save those up for my novel. In Crumb, the Terry Zwigoff documentary about Robert Crumb, you meet his older brother Charles who is psychotic. You are shown Charles' cartoon strips he made as was growing up and see that as he gets older, and more mental, his panels become more and more crammed with words. The characters have to hunch down in the bottom until eventually the pages are just panels filled with tiny words. That's what mine reminds me of. That, but with more shit puns.