Comics by Mike Walsh
Doodling in Merrie Olde Englande: 1969-70
During my time in England, trying to find a full time career in book publishing, I came up against the country of my childhood, holding on stubbornly to its past while it struggled with a new reality. I was an unemployed stranger, a North American interloper trying in vain to be English again. The times had changed since my departure in 1956 and the England of the late 1960s had become a challenge to my future possibilities, ever changing: changed. Because I didn’t fit in anymore I began to doodle away my uncertainties with a pen and a cryptic view of what I saw in the new England.
I had always wanted to illustrate my thoughts but my artistic skills had ended abruptly when I left my aspirations behind to the capable hands of John McDermott at Clapham College in 1956. Nevertheless, self-deprecating humour and my attempts to confront the daily absurdity of my dilemma became a series of images on topical stories and the values they implied. A collection of cartoonish reflections that became a daily obsession for a few months, while I tried in vain to find a job in publishing, for such was my life and there was much to vex my spirit.
“What’s old is new; what’s new is old.”
became my daily mantra as I tried to resolve my confusion. My doodles rescued me and gave me the time to reflect on who I had become and how I would strive, to seek, to find and not to yield in the future.
Without further commentary, here are those doodled musings on themes that still
challenge me today. You be the judge.
Mike Walsh, Burlington, Ontario, Canada in the Winter of 2018.
