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Self Published Autobiographical Diary Comics

    
 
'Goathland' issues 1 - 9 North York Moors1998. This is what started it all, I had moved from Milton Keynes to the middle of nowhere and wanted to tell everyone about it.
      
'Awakefield Diary' issues 1 - 7 Wakefield. Day by day autobiographical diary pages and local sketches 2004.
  
'A Life of Magic' issues 1- 3 Wakefield. Day by day comic strips 2006.
         
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All images © copyright John Welding

 

I started producing diary comics when I moved from my home town of Milton Keynes to the North York Moors in 1996. The title Goathland comes from the small village that was closest to us at the time. Life was a mixture of community art, roaming the moors, tending sheep and trying to keep warm.

Each issue was 32 A5 b/w pages with a photocopied card cover which was spray painted to give it a bit of colour. This really was cottage industry in a cloud of toxic fumes. At its height I was selling 150 copies a month through local book shops and the post.

In 1999 Helen and I invited ourselves to the Angouleme Comics Festival in France, we took the comic and sold it to anyone who would buy one. From doing that, we got officially invited to the Luxembourg comics festival later that year. For that I speciffically produced a wordless comic called 'The Windswept Tree', which was a more fantastical account of Goathland village.
     
'The Awakefield Diary' came from walking around and into Wakefield. I literally wanted to wake up to my surroundings and to record, in a whimsical way, what I thought was going on. After issue five I started to play around with the format and ways of drawing. The project kind of fizzled out because of the amount of other illustration work I had on at the time.
  
With issue six I was straying into 'artist book' territory. The pages were cropped and hand bound to give a more asthetic look and feel to the comic and issue seven featured black and white dip pen sketches. It is here that I can see the bones of the bigger drawing projects I later developed and created.
          
This started out as an affirmation for the year. I wanted to look at my surroundings with a sense of wonder, considering that Wakefield is not one of the most beautifull towns in this part of Yorkshire. I set myself the task of doing a page a day, the drawing style became simplified into line and the book became A5 landscaped in format. I thought that after three months I was diciplined enough and stopped the strip. Later in 2007 I ressurected the title, to mark my 40th Birthday. I published it in colour, online for three months doing a page a day, again having to stop because of the amount of time it was consuming. It can be difficult to find something interesting to say every day.
  

 
       

 

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