Cold Comfort

And really silly bugbears

I’d love to include a ghost/scary comic set in the Arctic in my gothic comics anthology. Arctic exploration seems a perennially fascinating topic - so many stories use it as a setting.

I wanted my comic to be about a man left on his own in the polar night, in the early half of last century. I thought he could have a long-wave radio, and he would hear a woman on a cooking show, and fall in love with her like in The Who’s song, Pictures of Lily, only to find she was long-dead/a ghost/his mother… But I’m struggling to make it work, so it’s on the back burner for now.

For the short comic below, from 2019, I took a slightly different tack. Something I enjoy a bit of in my life is cultivating small, pointless irritations. I have firm opinions about fairly irrelevant things, which I like to nurture, à la William Blake:

And I waterd it in fears,

Night & morning with my tears: 

And I sunned it with smiles,

And with soft deceitful wiles. 

I have a strong irritation response to modern cold-area explorers of the Earth. I don’t mean scientists, and people doing climate and other important research. I mean people who become “the oldest British person to climb Mount Everest* ” and other dubious achievements. It seems an unnecessarily risky, self-involved thing to get up to these days. What stayed with me when I read The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe, about the first American astronauts, was the terrible anxiety their families back at home felt about them all the time. The wives and children, the real MVPs of the space program.

Anyway, my archetype for this particular bug-(polar)bear is *Ranulph Fiennes. It’s completely irrational - I know really nothing about him, perhaps he’s a great guy (although a quick read of his Wikipedia suggests he’s annoying) - but pictures of men in thick hooded coats and with snow in their beards are guaranteed to rile me right up.

Annoying

Annoying!!

ANNOYING!!!

Why do their expressions always suggest they’re doing us an enormous favour by leaving their partners to clean the loo while subjecting themselves (and 50 poor souls in their support teams) to this horror, instead of doing exactly what they most want to be doing?!

So this is a comic about that kind of person after the expedition. It’s quick, and silly, and snowy. And if you think it’s weird to spend hours making a comic to assuage a weird, personal mini-vendetta… you’re most probably right!

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*Cold Culture Corner*

Some tales I’ve enjoyed set in the frozen North!

• Ice - first season X-Files episode in which Mulder and Scully investigate deaths in an outpost in Alaska, and have to avoid anger-worms crawling into their ears and making them furious and murderous!

  *Rating: -15 Celsius!*

• A Woman in the Polar Night by Christiane Ritter - non-fiction, written by the author in 1933 about her time on Spitsbergen, an Arctic island north of Norway, where she spent over a year with her scientist husband. The privations are awful, the cold relentless and they fear the madness brought on by the long polar night. Why, Christiane, why???

  *Rating: -3 Celsius!*

• Dark Matter by Michelle Paver - a ghost story set in Svalbard, where a young man on an expedition is haunted by a presence outside the hut…

  *Rating: -10 Celsius!*

• The Terror TV series - wasn’t this great, those who saw it? I really loved this show, for me it hit every correct note for Scary Arctic Story.

  *Rating: -35 Celsius!!*

Are there any sub-zero stories you’ve enjoyed? I’d love to hear about them!