Here and there throughout Holding's book he has included little illustrations, sometimes quite sketchy but this one has lovely detail. I can't find any info about the artist, unfortunately; the drawing seems to be signed Scott Calder I think...
I may have to re-letter both these pages. It's been quite cold in my studio and has affected my ability to write neatly! That beautiful gaol building no longer exists but I found some old photos and it seemed worth the effort of drawing it...
Needed another footnote here. I'm not sure if Holding has mis-typed 'praties' as 'prates' or if that's his own jokey shortened form of the word. But even if I'd changed his spelling to the former, that's not going to be immediately understood, is it? And look! They managed to get some buttermilk this time! I don't like to add footnotes unless really necessary as it feels condescending to explain things people already know... but in the end I realised I needed one for the first panel on page 35. Non-British and even younger Brits in my small sample didn't get what that sentence meant, so I've just added a note about public houses.
Holding himself had a few footnotes in his own text - something about history of the CTC (Cyclists Touring Club), the source for his tent poles being a fishing rod maker in Cheltenham, that sort of thing. But perhaps he only added these as footnotes because he was typing on a typewriter? Maybe I can and should just include them in the relevant panels, and avoid any confusion that way between min and his! Mine are being added in purple to differentiate, but I don't think it does the job. Alternatively I could use numbers for mine, and asterisks for his? There aren't very many of either his or mine, anyway... That station opened only three years before Holding and company cycled past it, and closed in 1963. It's now a house, which I found a photo of but from a different angle. Luckily I'd also managed to come across an old black and white photo of it as a station.
It's this kind of silly research into things that arguably don't even matter that's making this project take so long! Trouble is, I enjoy it too much. And it turns out there's another complication, to do with English miles and Irish miles, which I didn't realise until very recently! Speaking of buttermilk, as we last were two posts ago, back in August (what?? where does the time go?!), the conversation continues, and concludes with Holding's theory on why English people so often are not allowed any...
TH Holding has a lot to say about all sorts of subjects besides just bicycles and tents.
Here, as they go into a field to have their first lunch on the road after obtaining baked potatoes and jugs of water and buttermilk from a cottage, he comments at length about gaps in hedgerows, and about tin-openers. It was a lot of fun looking up the various kinds of tin-openers which were in use in the late 1890s. |
What's this all about??I'm making a true-story graphic novel called Archives
December 2024
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