For a long, long time, I’ve been banging on about John Welding and especially the absolute mass of unpublished, unavailable material this great artist has sitting around. Since first seeing his Goathland comic in the late 90s, I’ve been a huge fan, and recent comics in The DFC and most recently in The Phoenix issue zero have merely made me desperate for more work by such a talented artist.
And now it seems Welding is teasing me. He’s been going through the archives and putting up old work at his blog. A lot of it. And I know there’s more, much more. Will someone please, please go round to his house and not leave until you convince him to republish these. Please? Pretty please?
Anyway, here’s a selection:
Angry Ant Man (circa 2005?):
Thick Or Thin / autobiographical Shropshire (2005):
“Helen and I spent a week in a cottage in Church Stretton, Shropshire. We took our bikes on the train from Wakefield, I remember most the stunningingly steep Shropshire hills and the changeable wet warm weather. I kept a note book of the trip, which over the week degenerated into embarrassing stick figure drawings as I became more and more native, adopting a lifestyle of eating, drinking, exploring, cycling, sleeping. I am not sure where the title came from, I’ve a feeling it was from my universal creativity theory and drawing style at the time of using thin lines with thick brush strokes to achieve what I thought was balance in an image.”
And finally (for now) and best of all we have a set of Welding’s diary comics, from May to August 2007. These are the sort of things I remember him doing so well in Goathland; developing a storyline with each moment, each day or event, building a cumulative life in the reader’s mind. Four months worth of stuff on his blog – May, June, July, August.
Here’s a couple from June 2007, but you should go and see and read the rest for the full effect:
January 14th, 2012 at 3:33 pm
Back in the mid-eighties John Welding featured in Avalon #2 (Harrier Comics) with the strip ‘The Real Thing’. I remember this because my pal Eddie Maddock wrote the script. I’m guessing that John has accumulated a scary amount of work since then. (I don’t know where he lives.)
January 14th, 2012 at 7:24 pm
Thanks again for the support.
The archive pages found their way onto my blog because it was christmas. Exposing old work seemed like a nice thing to do, and I’m not very busy at the mo. So you never know, ‘that book’ may not be as far away as you think (tease):)
January 15th, 2012 at 11:34 am
I loved Goathland back in the day and would love to see a collection of John’s other work, especially as I’ve never seen any of it on the printed page.