Failed Gails

An eminent Melburnian comicist swears that cartoonists really just draw themselves over and over. They could be depicting a character of the other sex, any other species or even geologically at odds with themselves but in the end it's just them in a pebble suit or whatever. I've never bought that. Even when I have to admit to styling some instances after my own physiognomy most characters I draw don't look like me at all. 

So when it came to drawing Gail I was stumped. The other three of the central cast are all based mostly on individuals I knew (Marty, is pretty much me, for example). Not only is Gail pretty much pure invention but in creating her for the original I didn't spend as much as a syllable describing her physically. It was a thing I had about allowing the reader to do all that and avoid all that nasty paternalistic cultural imposition so beloved of the dead white male world of letters.

Anyway, when it came to shaping the central character of my story so that people would want to follow her through it and listen to her version of it, I had no idea. So I started with someone I wanted to look at.

This girl is fine. Really, she looks nice. If she had lived and walked when I was her age I would have approached her at a party without a second thought. We would have talked about something interesting until the sense that my libido was being slowly deflated beneath her great golden radiating goodness. She would listen to whatever garbled message I had about the future of punk rock and the spirit of revolution in the youth o' the day. Eventually, someone would take her  to another part of the room where people could speak in tidy snippets whose message was itself, a warming anodyne proof of their connection to the great circuit board of the world. Whereas Gail would've laughed.

Too nice.

Too nice by a holy bloody nautical kilometre.

Here she is in contrast to  her boon companion, Ruth. (Oh these aren't necessarily in the order that I drew them. Gail here has her hat and sunnies which took a while to get to her head.) Anyway, here with Ruth.

Ruth looks a lot like her real life model. Here she has made a friend who keeps the cigarette on her lip when she speaks to let you know how important you are when she speaks to you.

I remember a moment from just before I left Townsville that I used for this depiction. I was coming back from the shop and the real life Ruth and her best friend were at the lights in Ruth's white Triumph sports. 

Roof down. Sunnies on. Laughing about something I wouldn't even guess at. Holy Christ I wanted to high jump on to the seat between them like in a flavoured milk commercial and go wherever they were going. They sped off with the green light before I could call out and were gone. Last time I saw either of them. But I walked back home lighter with an idiot grin so strong that I let it have have me. The pure enlivening energy of the two girls in their freedom mobile was like a shot of something surgical and expensive.

So the attitude is all there but things are still awry. Is it the hair?

Not in this case. The sharper nose and pout are what I see here. 

The attitude is probably too harsh. Maybe it was time to take her back to an environment where she wasn't in such complete control.

Hmm. A little too far back.

She is correctly unimpressed by whatever the others are reacting to but it's probably getting a little too Daria (love Daria but it's not what I need).

Harder.

Too hard. 

I was probably thinking of someone who did present herself to the world this way. Same old story there; everyone wrote her off as an ice queen but there was a nasty history behind it.

Gail is not an oppressed juvenile, she's from privilege and comfort and control. The point of her story is to have all that challenged. If she starts too low we've all had it.

Well ... not you...

Sure. 

You could discern something acerbic in her dagwood shuffle if there was a little more dialogue or story to anchor it on. The sunnies work because no one at school wore them. The choice would have involved a kind of sardonic approach to style. 

But Gail is an alpha chick. Whatever she might be able to do to in the way of mass manipulation of scale she is still bound by the terms. There would have to be an affected target who wore the sunnies to improve his or her commerce. Attacking the cultural tide is not for leaders but for all those lesser Canutes whose best magic couldn't get them noticed.

So maybe I need at least a speech balloon.

Ok, sunnies, hat, ciggy and tanktop in place and even as much humour as I could come up with in the teabreak I spent drawing this.

I'm almost there.

This wasn't intended as a scene from the story. It really was a character sketch, in two senses (no sense in ignoring that one). It was at a time when the cataclysm at the centre of the story involved a seamonster. 

The other thing I increasingly needed to steer clear of, speaking of monsters, was Joss Whedon. I was a Buffy and Angel fan and probably would be again if I sat down in front of them. This story could easily be told in dialogue of sharp but unlikely constant wit but as with the issue of the lack of adolescent patois (mentioned below) I needed to keep the thread as clear as I could.

I think I'm trying to normalise the face of the Gail with Ruth above. It's nice and urbane but kind of  ... bimboish.

Still I found this one this afternoon and there's no other way it's going to be seen by anyone.

So, here it is.

And, apart from anything else, she needs to be able to react to the things I'm going to put in front of her.

I don't know what's happening here but I started needing to draw crises around the characters even if I hadn't planned them.

I see I couldn't sustain the sunglasses for this expression.

The bun survived a lot of alterations, even going through a kind of weird bun in back and Jennifer Anniston seagull wings in front.

But the bun makes her hair too long. No running through the scrub with strawberry golden mane flowing on behind.

Gail is still being designed but everything is settling. She has her floppy hat, sunnies, tanktop, army shorts, thongs, buxomness of scale, socially lethal frown, reputation-killing smirk but now she doesn't just keep the sunnies on all the time and isn't only ever sarcastic or superior or as snooty as everyone found her when she was just a cluster of paragraphs. She's finding it a lot easier to walk through the weather and landscape, ready to narrate this bloody story. 

Soon ....

Oh, one last thing. Very sketchy but still an idea for a scene is the following. Thought I'd pop it in here in case this is as far as it gets: