THE RACE ONE-SHOT

Previously unpublished comic book written and drawn in 1996. Now available in full colour!

"The Race was scripted by Chris Butler, who sent me the story from his Sheffield address in summer of 1996. We had previously collaborated on a couple of stories, ‘Miserable Slaves Of Dogs’ and ‘Enlberia’. The first was published in his Monkey Punk anthology, a collection of stories all written by Chris and illustrated by various contemporary UK cartoonists.

Chris admitted that my style of working threw him off-balance. He is a self-confessed ‘control freak’, and usually likes his comic stories to be drawn the way he specifies. When I produced an eight-page fantasia of free-ranging imagery for Miserable Slaves, he was so taken aback that he rewrote all his dialogue and captions into clipped, minimal texts to be pasted on top of my artwork. He likened me to Charles Mingus, who used highly subjective methods to motivate his musicians.

We persevered for our final collaboration, The Race. Chris knew what to expect this time and threw caution to the winds. I spotted the potential to turn his original script into an overblown, unsubtle satire on media-saturation and global commercialisation, and set to work letting fly with wild images. As usual, I completed all the final artwork before letting Chris have sight of it. As usual, he rewrote most of his story and condensed it down into tiny snippets of text, which I duly lettered into place.

When I sent Chris the unlettered pages, at one stage I tried to convince him that the pages could be arranged in various different orders – proposing three or four ‘remixes’, all of which would work as narratives. In the end I had to abandon this foolish conceit, but I was still full of effusive fizz. It had been fun to draw.

By this stage I was growing unsatisfied with self-publishing, and Chris had no intention of doing another book either. The Race was offered to Peter Pavement at Slab O Concrete, and to Fantagraphics, neither of whom expressed any interest. Kim Thompson thought the book had zero commercial potential. It remained unpublished.

I still liked The Race well enough to offer a colourised version on my website for a while. I scanned and coloured the pages in September 2001. For this 2024 print edition, I followed that coloured version to a large extent, but this time did it with added halftones. The Race contains some nice Pop-Art style images; I was taking a page out of Mark Robinson’s book, and trying to reclaim that bold heavy-outlined style back from a million Roy Lichtenstein imitators.

I’m not much good at biting, contemporary satire; in my hands it ends up warm and fluffy and ineffectual. In any case, real events always end up overtaking satire. The 1996 story was completed before debates about globalisation, the free market, branding issues, and digital television. However, I suppose the real point of interest of the tale is the contemptible shallowness of the two lead celebrity racers, the idiocy of the media coverage of their absurd antics, and the willingness of the gullible population to swallow it all. None of the characters are particularly sympathetic, but then you can’t really despise them."