Tintin and David Attenborough Are In A Clown Car…

…and go for a drive along the Wild Atlantic Way, except their car is a joke and they don’t get very far. That’s the elevator pitch for my new comic, Wild Atlantic Ink. Tintin for the line and art style, David Attenborough for the focus on the natural world and the clown car for my inability to be too serious…and I will mostly write about my immediate 50 miles or so.

Issue #1 has now arrived with all the subscribers, and with a great many who didn’t request it.

When I told my best friend about it, she was a little dubious. “Sixteen pages, Ro? Every month? That’s a lot.” I said it was going to be easy for me, but she was unconvinced. I passed on her words to my husband Marcel because I thought perhaps she had a point, and I was looking for reassurance. He is NOT the type to give reassurance for the sake of it, and if I hadn’t developed a really thick skin when it comes to his comments, I’d have gone crying back to my mother a long time ago.

(He first coined the classic phrase “negative encouragement” back in our early days of marriage, nearly thirty years ago. It involved me being berated and shouted at for not having finished my Masters’ degree yet. I asked him if he thought that was going to achieve results and he said he believed in “negative encouragement.” He was clearly delighted with himself for coming up with the term, but it kind of lost its power when it was clear how giddy with his own cleverness he was, and now it just makes me laugh. My favourite one, surely the most classic of classics, was “you’ll sell three copies to your whingeing women friends” – about my memoir of our six months in Mauritius. His comment was (a) defensive, because he was worried I would write about him (true) and his cousins there (also true) and (b) rhyming, because British people cannot help but speak in nursery-rhyme prose. At this comment I laughed like a drain and said I would put it on the back cover. This was not the response he had hoped for.)

This time I thought his answer was pretty good. “Because each month is different,” he said, “if you stop loving it, you’ve stopped loving art.” Spot on.

And yes, sixteen pages each month is a big commitment. It’s a completed page every two days. Issue #2 is much more polished than Issue #1, but that’s because I was feeling my way during the making of my first comic. I even got the size wrong at first, before I realised I needed the etra space of A5 (5.3″ x 8.3″). And I was going to make 20 pages before Monica, my incredible litho printer in Dublin, told me 16 pages was one sheet of paper and made financial sense.

But a template goes a very long way. There are many elements that are the same each month, within which I have complete freedom to do something fresh and new, inspired by the season. Then there are three pages that have no structure, to allow for flights of fancy.

Here’s a list of what appears every month:

• Cover – has the same title and so on
• “Flyby with Féilim” – Féilim is a rook, and he shows you a map of somewhere he thinks you should visit
• “Beachboy: Explore the Shore with Reuben” – Each month Reuben searches for his ball along a different beach
• “Ebb and Flow” – that’s my editorial, describes what’s going on each month according to the seaon
• “Brine the Oyster Catcher Snatcher” – that’s a serialised story about a fat, wicked seal who lives on an island near me
• Painting activity – either two or three pages
• Illustration activity – either two or three pages
• Foraged food – setting and description, and a recipe how to prepare it
• Coming soon – a new character I’ve thought up who will bring the history of the area to life
• That only leaves me two pages for random things and I want to use them for an interview or a profile of a local product or service that I would like my readers to know about.

And there you have sixteen pages – easy! Since my subscribers have all received their first issue by now, I can confidently share a couple of pages from Issue #1, Late Spring…

But you can see what’s in Issue #2, Early Summer by showing you the cover…

There’s good and bad about a huge monthly commitment.

Good

1. I have wanted to be a comic artist for decades, and now I am.
2. I can’t scroll mindlessly on my phone anymore because there’s no time to do that.
3. I am happy as a clam when I am doing it.
4. I am fulfilling my artistic ambitions.
5. I am obliged to explore my immediate surroundings and be a tourist in my own townland.
6. I commune with nature in a much deeper way: the birds, the beasts, the flowers, the foliage. I must keep my ears and eyes open all the time, rain or shine.
7. I get to eat amazing free food: I have always made food from foraged deliciousness, but I will be stepping it up as a result of this comic. You will not believe how delicious the nettle dishes I made were, and my freezer still has divine sea beet in it, with which I made a saag paneer dish using sea beet and halloumi that no one in my family could stop eating.
8. I have a formal reason to draw Reuben a lot, and run around on the beach with him.
9. I get to reconnect with people I have loved in my life by sending them a gift of a comic in the mail.
10. I am going to win the Ignatz Prize someday. I have never won anything but that’s only because…well, I didn’t deserve anything.

Bad

1. What about my other commitments? Where do they fit in? Teaching abroad? Helping my mother across the country? My kids, also across the country? Can all this be managed by becoming super-efficient?
2. Will my readers mind if I bring non-Wild Atlantic Way content in? Toulouse this July? The Pyrenees a week later? As for Italy in October – there won’t be a spare second. What about Greece next May?
3. Will I have to cut back on teaching abroad? I do not mind if I do: much as I love meeting my wonderful students, the Muse is queen of my soul and I am a mere subject that must do her bidding.
4. Will my eyes go the distance? They aren’t what they used to be. Will my brain go the distance?
5. Does it matter that I will lose money over this (albeit not a lot)? Of course once I win the Ignatz Prize everyone in the USA will sign on and I might turn a profit!
6. How am I going to sell my SketchPockets? They won’t sell themselves.

I know that I will never run out of inspiration (see Marcel’s negatively encouraging words above, about loving art) and as my late father always said, “paper never refused ink”, so I can never be stopped. He also constantly cautioned me, when I would tell him I was writing a new book, “don’t be boring!” For him, and of course for you, my valued readers, I will endeavour never to be boring.

You can send me €10.99 as a once-off payment to receive a back issue of Wild Atlantic Ink #1, Late Spring: https://roisincure.com/product/roisins-gift-fund/

And if you trust my promise never to bore you, you can subscribe to the comic here, making sure to do so before 13th June to get the next issue: https://roisincure.com/product/wild-atlantic-ink/

Wild Atlantic Ink

I hope you would like to meet Tintin and David Attenborough as they drive along in their clapped-out clown car.