Michi Mathias. illustration & comics.
  • home
  • about
    • now
    • interviews
  • DIY Vegan Cooking
  • Two Shillings
    • synopsis
  • comics
    • Just a Normal Day?
    • Up, Down or Stay the Same?
  • work with me
  • shop
  • contact

"No chain, no problem"

2/11/2017

0 Comments

 
I've reached page 15 now of my second / final (?) draft, and it's a bit of the story I've been looking forward to drawing. 

T.H. Holding has rather a lot to say in Cycle and Camp about this particular kind of bicycle and its awkward inefficiencies. Only when I reached the photos in the book did I fully understand these were barely even bicycles as we know them. 

It's incredible to think that not only was this group of four embarking on a pioneering cycling trip with camping gear, on single-speed bikes built in the 1890s, traveling many miles over hills and very difficult unpaved roads, but that two of them were riding these!

​I'm planning a trip to see one in real life soon.
Picture
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    What's this all about??

    I'm making a true-story graphic novel called
    ​Two Shilings a Day.


    Touring and camping with a bicycle is a common activity today but imagine the first time this was attempted, in the late 19th century, when cycles were heavy steel with just one gear, roads were unpaved, batteries and nylon and zippers didn't exist, and even outdoor activities were undertaken in woolen three-piece suits!

    Travel back in time to meet the master tailor Thomas Hiram Holding, a keen cyclist and camping enthusiast. He combined these two pastimes in 1897 when he invented a lightweight portable tent and embarked on a pioneering cycle-camping tour with three friends in Ireland.

    This graphic novel is a faithful adaptation of Holding's own book Cycle and Camp, bringing to life a time of horse-drawn mailcars, kitchens with peat fires for cooking, and farmhouses shared with cattle. Part travelogue round rural west Ireland and part how-to manual - including sewing ones own tent - his adventure is re-told entirely in his own idiosyncratic and rather opinionated words. 

    Holding’s fervent wish that anyone could now enjoy a holiday in the country without exorbitant cost proved so popular that he started a cycle-camping organisation, an organisation that became today’s Camping and Caravanning Club.

    (And, if you'd like to support this and receive ridiculously detailed behind-the-scenes updates: join me on Patreon)

    Archives

    January 2023
    December 2022
    September 2022
    May 2022
    January 2022
    November 2021
    October 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    August 2020
    July 2020
    November 2019
    March 2019
    January 2019
    November 2018
    June 2018
    April 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    November 2017
    June 2017
    January 2017
    November 2016

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed


Michi Mathias     illustration & comics    

Picture