Today's doodle is a reaction to all the line art I've been doing recently. I feel like I've been shirking my responsibilities a little by under-drawing (or under-filling) my work; however, with a busy work and home life at present, I haven't really got time for big, detailed pieces, so today's contribution isn't too far a stretch, and it's monochrome again - but for good reason this time.
Cydonia was a comic strip I created back in the mid-Nineties for a small and plucky local Doctor Who fanzine called Telos. Taking its cue from Alan Barnes and Adrian Salmon's Cybermen one-page series in Doctor Who Magazine around the same time, Cydonia started out as a potted history of Doctor Who's resident Martians, the Ice Warriors. Within a couple of years Telos folded, and after a few more years I felt strongly enough to resurrect Cydonia and finish it, this time in another zine, and Telos' virtual successor, Reverse the Polarity!, which survives to this day as NZ's last remaining (semi) regular Who zine. In RTP! the strip was rebooted and ran for four years - easily the longest sole illustration project I've undertaken, and in that time the story evolved into something of a elegy, with a little more depth and character than the original strip had contained. I'm still rather proud of it, though I must resist the temptation to revisit it again!
The above illustration, then, is an idea of a 'cover' for an imaginary compilation of the strip, incorporating an Ice Warrior, 'clamps' aloft (a familiar pose to anyone who's seen their eponymous debut story), main character Haaga, and the skull of a Locust, the series' creepy prehistoric bogeymen, inspired by the alien Martians of Quatermass and the Pit. The 'C' formed from the clamp is my nod to Salmon's contemporary cover for the charity zine Cosmic Relief!
...well, you've done it now. Now there will have to be an actual compilation!
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