Shire! Shire! for April

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March 31, 2014 by phicks2012

If you’re following this interminable BLOG, you doubtless know that back in 2002 when I had a half-page to fill in my monthly SCA Newsletter “The Equinox” I created a comic strip for that issue only — expecting never to draw another one. I picked a real person (in SCA persona) for inspiration, and to my everlasting amazement the strip was a hit and people other than my original victim also wanted to be included. People are unexpected sometimes. They gave me huge piles of great ideas for things they thought they ought to be doing in the comic strips, and I kept drawing, and after a couple of years I wound up doing four single-panel strips a month just to simply keep up with the flood of ideas. The suggestions and inspirations, obviously, are still coming – and so, therefore, are the comics.

I’ve made improvements over the years, hopefully better capturing the likenesses of the people who’ve inspired me and of the pop culture characters who continue to serve as additional incidental inspiration. I hope you agree with that assessment, since I’m going to continue sharing these images.

In earlier BLOG installments, I reprinted small selections of strips from the various years of their publication, but now that I’ve reached the present time, it has become my plan to run the comics only once a month, and in their entirety as they are published.

The comics continue to be archived at http://www.covingtoncastle.com/solhaven/sscom.htm for anyone wanting to check them out, and I do allow them to be reprinted in other SCA newsletters if the local Chroniclers let me know and make an attempt to send me a copy of the newsletter in which they appear.

It’s unlikely that Art Historians will ever subject first year art majors to learning about my work, but I do love the on-going fun of doing the strips! Below, therefore, are the comics released in April, and I hope you enjoy them.