A Committee Nightmare

One, two, an inept gang of middle-managers is coming for you!

In August 2019 I moved to Gainesville in northern Florida to attend the Sequential Artists’ Workshop (SAW) - a school set up and run by Tom Hart, a uniquely inspiring cartoonist and teacher. I went there to study on the Comics Year, and lived in Gainesville until the pandemic curtailed my visit (and that school year) in March 2020.

Leaving party invite!

I would love to make some posts about some of the brilliant inspiration I got from Tom and my classmates, and that’s a future plan. The comic below came about primarily from an exercise we did one day in the second semester. Tom had us draw panels on separate bits of paper - I can’t remember the order we began in, but each panel had a different instruction. For example: the internal monologue of one character; now go 100 years into the future; from the point of view of an inanimate object in the scene.

This resulted in lots of choices I wouldn’t make if left to my own devices. My panels were lost in the hurried move back to London, but my original idea was: three people, in a tent, waiting for someone. As the number of panels grew, so their personalities expanded, and it was clear they were in some kind of sect, expecting their leader to arrive. I remember my favourite line that one of them said, which was “Why are you being such a castrating harpy”, so I’ll use that somewhere in future. Although it sounds like something one of Jilly Cooper’s (big fan!) repellent “heroes” might have said, so perhaps I pinched it from her!!

From that comic I mostly just used the idea of characters sitting in a tent. I’ve been drawing demon-types for another story (any chance to draw characters from Leonora Carrington, Bosch or Bruegel paintings is a good time for me!) and once they appeared in the tent, their mission seemed pretty clear.

The ending is *abrupt* - but I’d kind of had my fun by then. I hope you enjoy it!