William Blake, Taxi Driver 5

Hello June, you (so far) soggy bastard! Terrible news that the brilliant and fearless Marjane Satrapi has left us far too young. And yet, the ever present racists and grifters continue to do their thing. Apropros of nothing in particular I have just finished watching Season 1 of The Chair Company, and I think it is my favourite telly since Twin Peaks season 3.

Right, let’s open the creaking safe door that contains the William Blake, Taxi Driver archives. See here for the unlikely story behind this underrated gem in Time Out’s publishing history (if I do say so myself).

Shockingly, I missed this first cartoon out of last months’ post. It should have followed the Samuel Pepys four-parter, which places it in about March 2008, as the campaigns were ramping up for the third London mayoral elections. Johnson won that contest of course, arguably setting us on the cursed timeline that we now occupy, and giving this strip a ghastly prescience. I can’t think why I subconsciously chose to omit this one from the record!

I have no idea what was going on in eternal BBC misery-fest Eastenders at the time. I think possibly 80s mainstays Ricky and Bianca had returned to the fray for a bit and Ricky was now leaving his legendarily gobby wife. No clever historical jokes here, this smells like one where we were trying to do something ‘contemporary’ for the more mainstream readers. That never worked! 😅

Now this is more like my home turf! I can’t help it, I bloody love The Beatles, and Sgt Pepper is probably my favourite Beatles album (Abbey Road is pretty good too!) But if I were Blake I’d be pissed off that I’m not on the cover. It’s got Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, William Burroughs, and Aleister Crowley, for god’s sake! Where the fuck is Blake?!

Christopher Wren is of course the 17th century master (re)builder of London, responsible for redesigning St Paul’s Cathedral after the Great Fire and for many beautiful churches that once dominated the London skyline, and now surprise you by peeking out from modern office blocks in their ornate beauty. Nicholas Hawksmoor was his apprentice and successor, responsible for a much smaller number of equally beautiful but weirder London churches, including Christ Church Spitalfields, St Georges, Bloomsbury and (pictured here) St Mary Woolnoth, now opposite the subway for Bank tube station. The pentagram on Hawksmoor’s forehead is an allusion to one of the mainstays of London psychogeography, that he was a secret occultist, whose churches, and their relative positions, conceal arcane magickal conspiracies. I think this was started by Iain Sinclair in his book Lud Heat, and then picked up and used to great effect by Peter Ackroyd in Hawksmoor and Alan Moore in From Hell. It’s complete bollocks of course, but great fun!

Ah, back to the mayoral election of 2008. This must have been just after Johnson’s victory, as here we see defeated Labour Mayor Ken Livingstone leaving County Hall. Livingstone became a controversial figure later and is now remembered for alleged anti-Semitic comments that were, at best, ill considered. We liked him at the time though, and the now rather obscure joke behind this strip is that Livingstone lent his distinctively nasal tones to the Blur album track ‘Ernold Same’. He was also, legendarily, a newt fancier, hence the punchline.

A brief interlude to remind you that my current BIG COMIC is a work-in-progress graphic novel about the life of the actual William Blake. My paid subscribers get new pages in their inbox each month. In a few weeks time I’ll be posting the final pages of Chapter 1 so it’s a great time to jump on board - hint hint!

I love Virginia Woolf - definitely due a re-read. I like the premise of this one - a simple, quite silly idea but I think it works. Talking of Woolf, my pal Jules Scheele has just finished a comic book adaptation of Woolf’s Orlando, which looks flipping amazing. You can pre-order it here.

Yeah, but that’s still not much of a punchline, John. I haven’t watched a Mike Leigh film in an age, but if I had to choose my favourite I’d probably go for Life is Sweet. I think the excuse to get Mike in the cab in 2008 was that his film Happy-Go-Lucky had just come out, starring Sally Hawkins as an eternally upbeat character, hence the stuff about him being happy (I’ve still not seen it!) I think I just wanted to draw his fantastically gnomish face though, and I’m quite happy with the drawing in this one. ‘The flowers that bloom in the spring’ is a song from The Mikado which is the subject of one of Leigh’s historical film about Gilbert & Sullivan, Topsy Turvy.

I still feel a bit bad about this joke 😬. This one is mainly a slightly roundabout tribute to David Lynch, probably second only to Blake in my pantheon of inspiring visionaries. The title of this blog (?) is, of course, also a nod in Lynch’s direction.

Not much to say about this one. I was hitting quite a sweet spot with the drawing around this point, I think. For what it’s worth, I quite liked the formaldehyde butchery with which Hirst made his name, but everything that came later was shit.

This one was a fun chance to experiment with the format - I always loved the mazes that you got in kid’s comics. I can’t quite remember what the contemporary stink was that then-PM Gordon Brown is alluding to - possibly the beginning of the MP expenses scandal? In any case, the historical Great Stink was the name given to the horrendous stench that rose from the en-shitted Thames in the hot summer of 1858. The following year Victorian engineer Joseph Bazalgette was commissioned to design and build The London Main Drainage, the huge and revolutionary sewage system which remains the basis of the capital’s water works to this day. He was apparently the great-grandfather of TV producer, Peter Bazalgette, who gave us Big Brother. make of that what you will.

Right, that’s enough sifting through fecal matter for this month. More William Blake, Taxi Driver next time, and for my paid subscribers, we’ll reach the end of Chapter 1 of LOS in a few weeks. Subscribe and imbibe!