DFC issue 27!

I was really happy with how today’s Vern and Lettuce came out. Eight weeks ago, just before it was due, I was pulling my out my hair trying to get it written. I decided to relocate to a cafe in Brockley for a change of setting, and plunked myself down in a good hard chair in front of a big window with lots of light, facing a blank wall. But the magic only started to happen when DFC’s Woodrow Phoenix came and sat with me and we had a really nice morning of working on our strips together and Woodrow helped talk me through some of the problems I was having. (‘Nip and Scritch’ was his idea.) So thanks, Woodrow!

The other bonus was seeing his sketchbooks, with almost all his That’s a Horse of a Different Colour pictures drawn into it. I hadn’t realised how much Woodrow draws by hand, I’d assumed he’d done everything completely in Illustrator or something. His notebooks looks amazing, full of sketches and hand-drawn lettering samples.

Oh, I meant to tell you about my Thanksgiving! Whenever you get a bunch of women from Bryn Mawr College together, the conversation’s always fascinating. This year we talked about forensics, avionics and astrophysics. The forensics expert is Kimberlee Moran, who’s offering six once-a-week classes for adults about forensics in Islington – all the stuff you see on CSI, but the real thing. It’s only £75, so if you have a friend or family member in London who’s obsessed with crime television, book them on this course! It’s hilarious talking about decomposition and maggots while eating pumpkin pie, really! 😀

Another remarkable person at dinner was an astophysicist at Oxford named Susan, who’s fairly elderly (late 60s?) and flies herself in her own Mooney airplane to various astrophysics conferences all over Europe and the Mediterranean. She’s the kind of person I love to ask leading questions and then just sit back and listen to amazing stuff about the stars, black holes; the fact that they’ve closed the maintenance garage at the Oxford airstrip so she has to fly all the way over to Biggin Hill to get her plane serviced; emergency landings; different strategies for how not to get ice particles stuck to one’s wings, etc. I’ve had Thanksgiving with her for at least the last three years and each year I always hope she’ll be there. And that Kim will make her best-ever rum cake, and she did, hooray!