Here's a strip Antonella and I did for a while for the Italian magazine English4Life (Casiraghi/Jones, pub.) This was a magazine aimed at teenagers, using a unique method for teaching foreign languages, in this case English.

We came up with the concept for the strip, a horrible, flea-bitten hotel (based closely on a three-star seedy flophouse I once spent a night in in Kensington), run by a constantly bickering married couple not unlike Margaret and Dennis Thatcher... 

The original idea of the strip was that in each issue, a hotel guest from a different part of Europe would turn up, and thenceforth have a terrible time because we Brits just aren't very good with foreigners, are we? However, we soon abandoned this concept in favour of humour about the everyday goings-on in a seedy hotel.

Part of the concept of the magazine was that each issue had a free CD featuring an actor reading the lines from all the cartoons. It was a odd experience, hearing an actor reading out the lines Antonella had written and I had drawn, especially when he did the voices. When I drew the Margaret character, I had Thatcher's false emphases and strained low tones running in my head, but for some reason the actor chose a screeching falsetto, something like Monty Python's "pepperpot" female characters. I don't know, but somehow I feel that if Thatcher had actually spoken like that in real life, she would never have been elected and we would all have been saved a great deal of trouble... 

Tuesday, June 26, 2007 9:34:36 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0]