William Blake, Taxi Driver 4

Good lord, is it May already?

Hello friends and, in particular, new subscribers!

Just to recap, in my free posts at the mo I’m sharing comics from my archive, namely episodes from my first attempt to tackle Blake in comics form, William Blake, Taxi Driver. The full, somewhat unlikely, story is told here, but very briefly, I created these (usually) four-panel newspaper-strip-cartoon format strips for Time Out London, where they sat alongside articles about weird bits of London history and profiles on burlesque evenings (there seemed to be a lot of burlesque going on in London at the time!) in the opening Big Smoke section of the magazine from 2007 to 2009.

Before I share this month’s goods, a brief plug for my current Blakean endeavour, an epic graphic novel about the life of the actual William Blake (as opposed to the strange taxi driver character I invented). It’s called LOS and I’m serialising it here on substack as I go (hence LOS highway). You can read the opening excerpt for free here. If you like what you read and it’s something that you’d like to help exist in this troubled old world of ours, then please consider giving me a few pounds/dollars/(insert relevant currency) each month.

Right, back to William Blake, Taxi Driver. It’s early 2008 and this is the mad stuff pouring out of my 30-year old brain. It’s funny looking back on stuff that you made almost 20 years ago. This selection of strips marks the point that I can just about bear to look at the artwork. There are even some drawings that I actually like! 😅

I still quite like this gag. The Comedy Store is a long-running stand-up comedy venue that, in its early years, facilitated the rise of beloved ‘alternative comedians’ including Alexei Sayle, French & Saunders, Rik Mayall & Ade Edmondson and Paul Merton. It started out in Soho in the late 70s, sharing premises with a strip club, but by the time I was drawing this it had moved to its current premises between Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square.

Lenin knocked around in London quite a bit in the very early 20th century, fomenting what would become the Russian Revolution. Apparently he liked the beer and the music hall. The second congress of the Russian Social and Democratic Labour Party took place in hired pub rooms off Tottenham Court Road in 1903. It was during this conference that Lenin’s faction was established as the Bolsheviks (‘the many’) as opposed to the Mensheviks (‘the minority’). Iskra (‘the Spark’) was the RSDLP’s fortnightly newspaper. published by Lenin from 1900 to 1903. I expect I thought I was being very clever with the backwards Rs.

Hogarth, the other great London artist called William of the 18th century. For the purposes of the strip I’ve played up the differences between the Williams, but Blake actually has a lot in common with Hogarth. One of my favourite Blake poems, ‘London’ is like a Hogarth print in poetic form. What makes Blake interesting is that for him London is both a festering pit of sin, cruelty and hypocrisy and God’s holy city of Jerusalem. Hogarth, though less spiritually inclined, also had an ambivalent attitude to his city and nation, on the one hand depicting the ravages of poverty, neglect and addiction (most notably in his famous Gin Lane) and on the other drawing jingoistic celebrations of English culture (for example in the paired print Beer Street). One thing we can be confident that Hogarth did love is his pug dog, although I’ve just discovered that it had the unfortunate name of Trump.

In February 2008 I sodded off to Guatemala for a month or so to see the Mayan ruins and learn some Spanish (all of which I have now forgotten). In order to keep the (ahem) legions of WBTD fans happy while I was away, I conspired with my editor Pete Watts to run four consecutive parts of this Samuel Pepys epic. As all self respecting British primary school children will confirm, Samuel Pepys lived through the Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of 1666, chronicling both in his diary. And yes, he did bury a parmesan for safe keeping before fleeing the capital. The battleship in the penultimate panel is HMS Belfast, permanently docked as a tourist attraction a little to the east of London Bridge.

Queen Victoria’s beloved consort gets his own chance to shine seven episodes after Her stony-faced Majesty The memorial in panel 1 was commissioned in his memory by Victoria and is situated behind the Royal Albert Hall. There’s a subtle joke in panel 3 about the 1851 Great Exhibition, organised by Albert and housed in a ‘Crystal Palace’ in Hyde Park (which was later moved to the part of South London that now bears its name) but the main gag is, rightly, a knob joke.

Dear old Peter Ackroyd, chronicler of London history and its denizens, including one William Blake. His 1995 Blake helped fire my teenage enthusiasm for dear William. Ackroyd’s boozing is legendary, which makes his ability to martial and interweave huge swathes of London history, lore and legend all the more incredible. The punchline to this one is a nod to the similarly inebriated and semi-coherent Rowley Birkin QC from the Fast Show.

I seem to remember wanting to do one on Bentham for ages. Jeremy Bentham is one of those bizarre characters who you stumble across when you start looking into weird London history. He was actually a contemporary of Blake’s, an important and influential philosopher and social reformer, now celebrated as the founder of Utilitarianism. But more important for our purposes is that the ultra-rationalist Bentham stipulated that after his death his body should be dissected, mummified and preserved as an ‘auto-icon’, dressed in his clothes and hat and seated in one of his chairs as kind of inspiring objet d’art. This was duly carried out and Bentham’s auto-icon is now displayed in the entrance to UCL’s Student Centre, although, after one student prank too many, his actual shrivelled head has been replaced with a wax replica.

Right, I’m off to get some weekend sun on my aged, shrivelled head. More William Blake, Taxi Driver next month and new except from LOS in a couple of weeks for my lovely, paid subscribers.

Bye bye Blake-heads x