William Blake, Taxi Driver 6

I’m still buzzing (and rehydrating) from the inaugural A.R.C. comics festival in Peckham, just down the road in our scorched corner of south London. Enormous thanks to smilin’ Tom Oldham and all the other organisers. It looked to me like a massive success so I hope it’ll be back again.

Thanks also to everyone who came and chatted and who picked up a copy of LOS Chapter 1. As you may already be sick of hearing me say, you can buy a printed copy of the complete Chapter 1 from my online shop.

And, of course, you can always take out a paid subscription to this here substack to see the latest pages and to help me create the rest of this ambitious project.

Right, hard sell over! On with the free shit!

It’s more from everyone’s favourite mystical motorist, William Blake, Taxi Driver!

A hard one to explain now! The Telectroscope was a temporary public art installation installed near London’s City Hall in 2008. This steampunk-styled device claimed to be a restored Victorian invention that linked London and New York with a rather long tunnel and a series of mirrors. In reality, of course, a live video feed showed you what was going on in New York nearly simultaneously (and vice versa), or at least it did for everyone but William.

Normally WBTD ended up revolving around the passenger in William’s cab each week, but this was a rare instance of me riffing on some actual Blake lore. This one goes right back to Blake’s first biographer, Alexander Gilchrist, who reported that Blake’s patron, Thomas Butts came to visit the Blakes in Lambeth, only to find them naked in their garden, cosplaying Milton’s Paradise Lost. ‘‘Come in!' cried Blake; 'it's only Adam and Eve, you know!’’ Probably not actually true, but it’s a great story!

One of my abiding memories of the period in which I was working on William Blake, Taxi Driver, was turning up at the day job after a new issue of Time Out had come out, and well-meaning friends saying ‘I saw the new strip! It looked great! I didn’t understand it!’ 😅 John Stow was one of the (relatively) obscure London figures that I’d been looking to work into the strip from the beginning. He was a 16th century historian and antiquarian, best known for his A Survey of London, a historical and topographical description of the city ward by ward. Stow amassed this information by tirelessly walking all over London, making him the founder of a London tradition of walkers and surveyors that takes in Phyllis Pearsall and Iain Sinclair among others. In case it’s not completely clear, William and John are singing to the tune of the hymn Jerusalem.

This must have been timed to coincide with that year’s RA Summer Exhibition (for which the general public are invited to submit their artworks for consideration) so this would have been June 2008. The actual William Blake attended the Royal Academy after completing his engraving apprenticeship in the late 1770s, and indeed exhibited paintings there a number of times, but his unique and fiercely held artistic convictions did not chime with the more conservative views of the Academy and its founding President, Joshua Reynolds. Blake’s extreme antipathy to Reynolds survives in his scathing annotations to Reynold’s published lectures, and in his notebook epigrams.

Thatcher was still a few years away from shuffling off in 2008, so I think this strip was inspired/provoked by speculation in the press at the time that the (then still Labour) government had plans to give her a state funeral as and when she did kark it. Was all this Thatcher speculation inspired by the BBC drama The Long Road to Finchley, starring Andrea Riseborough as the young Maggie, which came out that year? I can’t remember, it was a while ago.

In terms of execution and pure cartooning I’ve always liked this one. Charlie Chaplin was born in Walworth, close to Elephant and Castle. I always used to get lost negotiating the many underpasses beneath Elephant and Castle roundabout. The depiction of the Elephant roundabout and shopping centre here is almost as much of a period piece as Chaplin now. After the extensive redevelopment of Elephant and Castle, it’s marginally easier to find your way round!

Not the Channel 4 newsreader but the Victorian epidemiologist, who, a century after Blake’s birth, traced the ground-zero of a deadly outbreak of Cholera in Soho to the water pump in Broad Street, very close to Blake’s childhood home (and to the pub that now bears Snow’s name). This strip imagines him in the vein of TV daytime pathologist and social crusader, Quincy M.E.

You’ve heard of Shakespeare, right?

Time Out was founded in 1968 as a kind of hippy guide to London happenings and goings-on by Tony Elliot (co-edited by whispering Bob Harris apparently!) and thus celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2008. I think I was probably asked to do something on this subject, I can’t quite remember. Of course, as we now know, the future was shitter than we assumed it would be, and Time Out now survives mainly as a crap website ☹️

The guy hailing William’s cab is, I think, meant to be William Cecil, Elizabeth I’s chief adviser, not that it really matters. The punchline is, of course, based on the speech that Elizabeth supposedly gave to her troops at Tilbury: ‘I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too’. Sometimes the stupidest jokes are the best.

OK, that’s yet lot for this month. Another leisurely drive down Memory Lane next time. Bye for now!