Artist and designer Chris Barker talks to Dan Sumption of Peakrill Press about his forthcoming comic book, Dregs of the 21st Century.
Artist and designer Chris Barker talks to Dan Sumption of Peakrill Press about his forthcoming comic book, Dregs of the 21st Century.
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Dan Sumption: Yeah, I'll stick a theme tune in.
Chris Barker: Brilliant.
DS: We've got loads to cut already.
CB: I don't know, I think you should keep all of this in. This is the best bit. It's not going to get any better.
DS: Welcome to the Peakrill podcast with me, Dan Sumption. This week our guest is Chris Barker. We've published quite a few of Chris's comics and funny books and stuff on Peakrill, which you can find on peakrill.com. And we've just launched a Kickstarter for his next comic, Dregs in the 21st Century.
DS: Hey Chris, welcome to – Oh God, that's…
CB: Is that it? Is that the start? Is that the podcast?
DS: That's really freaking the dog out. No, it's not. I can't do podcast voice. Shall we kick off with how we know each other?
Me and you?
DS: Me and you, yeah. Do we know each other?
CB: I can't remember how we know each other.
DS: …business relationship. I can't either. So let's not kick off with that. We've known each other for a long time, suffice it to say.
CB: We were about roughly the age that the characters in my comic are, perennially.
DS: Yeah, your comic, Dregs of Rudetown, which we're going to be talking about in a bit because there's a new issue coming out. So we've known each other for a long time. I've tried to write a bio for you for various different things and I kind of struggle because you kind of do quite a lot of different stuff. How would you describe yourself?
CB: Err… bullshit artist, someone called me once… Hang on, I've got a bloody call now. “Hi, I'm doing this podcast. All right.” Hi. Sorry, that was my wife. She just texted me to say Rob Brydon's on my train carriage and I said, “I'm going to say true”. Very funny joke. I think this is all good. I think we should keep all this in.
DS: Definitely keeping that in.
CB: So what was the question? How would I describe myself?
DS: How would you describe yourself?
CB: Well, I'm an art director by trade.
DS: By day.
CB: Yeah. I'm a graphic designer, illustrator. I like to write things too. And I'll come up with projects, which I do, such as the Deathstar Express that I did with you.
DS: Yeah.
CB: So that was a parody version of the right wing newspapers written from the perspective of the empire in the Star Wars movies, which was, I thought, very funny. I tried to squeeze at least six jokes onto every front page so there was value for money. And then we released it as a limited edition print run. Stuff like that. We do stuff like that too.
DS: I mean, I guess probably your best known thing is the Sergeant Pepper tribute you do every year.
CB: Oh, yes. That started in 2016 when all of the great and good departed the earth, probably because they knew what was coming. David Bowie, Prince, Ronnie Corbett, you know, George Michael, Carrie Fisher, Victoria Wood…
DS: Lemmy?
CB: Lemmy died in 2015, weirdly.
DS: He's on the Sergeant Pepper cover for 2016 though.
CB: Yeah. So basically the whole thing went more stratospherically viral than anything I've ever done before or since. I ended up being interviewed day after day after day, international press, radio, television. You know, I've done a lot with this now, but the crucial thing is within two minutes of posting the first one, someone said, because I put Lemmy right in the middle of it, “didn't Lemmy die in 2015?” So you know, that's a bit of a running joke.
DS: And you've done it every year since then, haven't you, with all the celebrities that died that year?
CB: I've done it every year since then. And this year it's the 10th anniversary, assuming we last that long, but let's keep it light, eh? This year should be the 10th anniversary. I keep a list over the course of the year of anyone of note who has sadly left us. And at the end of the year, I compile them all into a montage, echoing the style of Peter Blake’s Sergeant Pepper cover and release it for free to the world. This year, I might do some kind of celebration of 10 years and I might stop doing it. You never know.
DS: You say that every year.
CB: 10 years seems like as good a time as any to stop. As someone pointed out: “what are you going to do? Keep on doing it until you leave one half finished and someone has to add you”.
DS: In your day as an art director, didn’t you do the programmes for the Olympics, the 2012 Olympics, when they were in London? That's quite high prestige.
CB: That was great. That was full on. That was a full on daily full magazine, but it's the closest I've felt in the world of magazines to, sort of, rock and roll. You know: I was in a stadium surrounded by people excitedly looking through my designs and taking them home on the tube. It was amazing. You know, thousands of my thing in front of me. It was quite mind blowing really, but yeah, no, it was a great project to be involved with.
DS: And you've done quite a lot of magazine covers and covers for the new European. I know that you've won quite a few prizes for your magazine covers as well.
CB: I've won cover of the year twice. I've won art director of the year four times. Yeah, the new European was a great project. I really enjoyed doing that. That was during 2016 to 2019, I think, right from Theresa May through to sort of COVID and late Boris Johnson covering all of that. I've compiled that into a couple of books.
DS: Yeah, and they're kind of they're not like standard newspaper covers. They're sort of...
CB: No, he gave me kind of free reign to do more of a photoshopped versions of parodies of things that existed. It got quite tough, actually, week on week, trying to come up with a new way of describing the shit show that we were in. I used to sort of talk to Rob Manuel quite a lot about ideas for that. He was always… Rob Manuel, who does B3TA and Fesshole, and is just a constant ideas machine… I would snap through ideas with him quite a lot. And the editor.
DS: Someone else a bit like you, who seems to put out all sorts of crazy ideas, just every time he has an idea, it spouts something into the world, like the Yoko Ono bot… I can't think what other things he did. He did quite a lot of Twitter bots back in the day when that was a thing.
CB: He did, yeah. And now where you see the fesshole thing has gone pretty, pretty well for him. He's now doing stand up of that, basically, fesshole live, which I've been to twice now. It's actually very entertaining, would recommend. Should get him on the podcast.
DS: Given all of your talents and all of these popular things you're doing, why are you working with Peakrill Press?
CB: Because you’ll have me? No, I think, well, yeah, actually, I think it's great. I think it's a really good thing you're doing, you know, you're taking things that you think are worth sharing with the world and sharing with the world. I think it's really good. It's quite ironic, really, for somebody who's so steeped in the Internet as you are that you actually love print.
DS: I'm trying to get away from the Internet as much as I can, but keep getting forced back on there. But I do quite like the way you will tend to come to me, you know, you'll message me at one in the morning, having had something go viral, saying I want to make a book, a comic, print, whatever. Can we get it out tomorrow?
CB: It's usually quite tight deadline on it.
DS: Never quite as tight as when we did the Tory election bingo.
CB: Wow. Tory election bingo. That was big. That was a big thing. I think that's probably the most successful thing I've ever done. You say you talk about Sergeant Pepper, but this Tory election bingo practically paid for my kitchen.
DS: Just to clarify, that was like a bingo card with all of the conservative MPs and you could tick them off on the election night as they lost their seats.
CB: Yeah. Well, I thought I'd take advantage of this once in a lifetime historic moment where there was going to be a complete wipeout of all the Tories and it wasn't going to be to Reform just yet. And people keep saying, “oh, you should do it again. You should have done it for the American election. Next time there’s an election, are you going to do it again?” No, because that specific perfect storm of situation is never going to happen again.
DS: Yeah. I guess you could have done it in 1997…
CB: We didn't know particularly that that was coming at that point. So this literally is the only time where you're like, it's an almost guaranteed wipeout. As it turned out, it wasn't quite as exciting as I had hoped it was going to be because on the digital version of it, on the online version that Dave Bagpuss Forsey put together with me, we had all sorts of Easter eggs for when the big names dropped, like the top hats would fall from the sky when Jacob Rees-Mogg went and we had loads of stuff planned for when Rishi Sunak didn't win. And it was such a shame. We had all these Easter eggs just sitting there ready to go and hardly any of them got used. But what's important was the result. God, I’m sounding like John Motson.
DS: So moving on to your current project, you've got a comic called Dregs of Rudetown. And with Peakrill, we've published two issues so far. We've got a third one coming up. Do you want to talk a little bit about each of those three?
CB: Dregs of Rudetown. It's a real passion project for me because, as I've written on the Kickstarter page, it's “a comic 30 years in the making”. I don't mean I'm just really, really slow. Back in the 90s, me and my friend Cain, Cain Allan, we were both unemployed. We were both serially unemployed, lazing around layabouts. We were both always coming up with these great money-making ideas, but there was little or no internet back in those days, so most things just ended up just a few pages of scribbled biro on some sheets of A4. We came up with all sorts of things. We came up with, well, we formed bands, you know, we tried to invent video games. In fact, we came up with a great video game idea, which was a combination of a fruit machine and a beat-em-up game. So you would do the normal fruit machine, the cherries would drop in or whatever. If you get three, you go, you advance onto the board. You know, they have a trail board, like a board game on the top. You're aware of fruit machines, Dan?
DS: Yeah.
CB: Where you go up and you work your way around the trail and at a certain point it would activate the video game in the centre and there'd be a little beat-em-up and we called it “Crawl & Brawl”. And I still maintain, I still maintain, there's legs in this idea and someone should pick it up. Anyway, the point is we were doing things like that and we also did comics because we both liked to draw. One of the ones that we came up with was called “Kurt Cobain in the 21st Century”, like Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, but not quite as far away in time. And instead of being some kind of super pilot or like Flash Gordon or whatever, he was just a slacker. And, you know, he got transported into the 21st century and not much happened, to be honest. It didn't really go anywhere. We didn't really have an idea what the plot was, but we invented these supporting characters that he met up with who are all called Dave: Dave A, Dave B, Dave C and Dave D, and we quite enjoyed drawing them because there weren't that many picture references for Kurt Cobain in those days… We had no internet back in those days, Dan. So you're sort of relying on the odd shot in NME or your memory, which is never great. So we really enjoyed drawing these supporting characters. And so eventually, I think it was Cain, I think it was Cain said, “let's just focus on them. Let's just do another project based on them”. And so we really enjoyed drawing Dave D, who had like a long fringe over most of his most of his head. And so we carried on drawing Dave and he had we invented a main character, which I think again was Cain's idea, a main character called Dregs, who had a black spiky hair, like sort of Dennis the Menace, but sort of almost a bit more in a sort of a hash leaf sort of shape. And, you know, so he so he was he was due to be the main character. We started drawing him and and this sort of supporting cast. I think it didn't nothing really came of it. I used to stick them on the wall in the in the pub when we used to do the gigs as well. And occasionally someone might take one home. So that was that was as viral as that got. But so, yeah, so we drew that for a bit and then that sort of fizzled away. And I revisited it much later when the when the internet existed and I was drawing little digital versions of it, which got went down quite well on b3ta.com and stuff like that. And then obviously, when I realized that the characters still had life in them, I thought, “well, maybe I should maybe I could just do a comic of it”. And this was prompted by the fact that Cain started doing his own comic separately. So I said, do you mind if I do a comic of Dave? So rather than Dregs, I focused on Dave. And I think the idea was to do a sort of American Splendor Harvey Pekar type thing, really sort of mundane, boring every day: “he goes to the pub; he tries to pull the barmaid; he fails to pull the barmaid”, whatever, “he hasn't got a job… he's doing not much”. But obviously, that's a bit boring. So it fizzled and fizzled out. I mean, I did two issues of it and I sold them online. Well, I say I sold them online. I sold them by mail order online and people would send me, I think, two pounds, two pound coins in the post and I'd send them a comic. We also got them in like Gosh Comics and a few of the other smaller comic shops, I think. But so, yeah, that was like 10 years later, I started doing this Dave comic.
DS: Yeah. But you still keep returning to the same characters.
CB: I do keep returning to the same characters. I don't know. I mean, I don't think about them all the time or anything. It's not like it's something that, “oh, I wonder what Dave would do in this situation”. I do know instinctively how they would act in any situation. So in a way, they sort of have their own lives without me. So when I'm sort of writing or drawing them, I just know exactly what they do. You can come back to character. The great thing about comics is you can come back to characters and they haven't changed. You know, you could there can be a 10 year gap in between you drawing one panel and drawing the next panel, and the only thing that's changed is you're doing you're drawing it on an iPad now instead of a biro, but it still sort of looks the same. You can sort of pick up where you left off and you can retro continuity, add new characters and whatever they started off as just, you know, faces. But now they're sort of fully rounded, three dimensional, three dimensional, two dimensional characters. I don't want to get deep about it because at the end of the day, they are silly, silly stories and they're accessible, silly stories that anyone can read with a bit of bit of satire in there. But they're the characters are sort of like they're different sides of me, really. Or, you know, or different sides of anyone. But because I'm writing it, the different sides of me. I don't want to get too philosophical about it because they're still like slipping on banana skins and trying to see boobs and stuff. So you've got Dave. Dave's my favourite, really, not only because he's easy to draw, but dark side, really. He's like really worried what everyone thinks about him, although people never think about him at all, really. He beats himself up about everything in this sort of fictional world that we're in. He spent over 10 years denying reality and adulthood and just still trying to trying to get together with this this same barmaid. Whereas Dregs, who's supposedly the main character, he's more of a loose cannon. He's sort of he's sort of the id of the characters. He's very much sort of driven by impulse. Then there's hardcore. Hardcore is another one of the characters. He's just he's just hardcore. He's easy going. He… I say he always seems to land on his feet, but he isn't aiming too high. So make any difference. And there's there's the the fourth one is Techno, who is the one who wears the VR visor and he's like the brains of the outfit, which isn't saying much. I think he thinks he's better than the rest of them. But again, you know, why is he still there? If he's better than the rest of them, he lets it he lets it slip occasionally, though, in the Rudestock… in Issue 2, in the Rudestock one, you might notice that he's if you look closely, he's basically driven by an easy life and food. I think he's the most interesting one in issue three, though, because we've only ever seen him settle down with his girlfriend before happy and sort of content. We don't know exactly what's happened to him in the intervening period between issue two and issue three, but he's clearly a bit broken now. So we can we can make our own minds up, we can only assume. And then the last one is there's a guy called Nobody Nowhere who's great fun to write. He's sort of gray with a really pale face and a frown. He's basically. he basically represents sort of depression, but like played for laughs. He's a bit like Eeyore. There's always a dark cloud hanging over him. You know, I say it's not his fault. He's just cursed with a bad vibe. But what I like about what I like about it is it's not like in Winnie the Pooh, they say in Winnie the Pooh, the rest of the gang, except the depressed donkey and his faults. And he's just and they love him anyway. He's part of the gang. But these sort of in my comic, these self-centered like are also always trying to ostracize. They will go out of their way to avoid him. They roll… roll their eyes whenever he speaks. But, you know, if they're so cool, why are they still hanging out with him? 30 years later, which sort of brings me is 30 years later, which is probably. Yeah, I mean, yeah.
DS: So you briefly mentioned issue two and issue three. So the first issue, they're just kind of it's just a life in the 90s. The second issue, they relocated to a festival.
CB: Yeah, and I regret that actually, because the thing about festivals, there's lots of people there, which we said, which means lots of crowd scenes, which means thinking, thinking of lots and lots and lots of supporting characters. And the thing is, if you sit down to draw a crowd, you're like, oh, yeah, I know what people look like. Yeah. Yeah, I know what people look like. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, shit. What do people look like? What do people wear? What does what does hair look like? And everybody ends up looking the same. And you're like, oh, God, I know what people look like. What? Why can't I think of a single item of clothing? You know, there was one there's one scene specifically, and it was a full page where Dave has arrived and arranged to meet his friends at a festival in the days before we had mobiles. And obviously, they're not there. You know, they're not there at the meeting point. And he's standing there and I've got hundreds and hundreds. I must be about a hundred and hundred and fifty people on that page. And I had to draw all these people. And obviously, I was having to do things like turning on the telly to look at what people look like again, because that's right. I'd run out of any ideas. But anyway, yes. So the second one set at a festival. And it's mainly about how Dave never quite manages to meet up with Dregs and Hardcore. The other two, the other two have a great time, you know, but he's just stumbling around on his own. Apart from the one one time when he does, he does meet up with nobody, nowhere. And he goes to watch Senser of all people and then falls asleep after drinking too much and wakes up out there and everyone's gone.
DS: Did you get a tweet from Senser about that?
CB: Yeah, they were really just being included in it. It was really funny, even though I was sort of mocking them, because the joke was that in the 90s, wherever you went, Senser were playing live, you know, whatever festival you went to, it was Senser. Who's playing? Oh, Senser. Right. OK. You know, you go to go down the supermarket and there's Senser set up outside Tesco's just just playing their song. But they loved it. Yeah, they loved it.
DS: And then issue three, which is what we're just got Kickstarter running for at the moment.
CB: Yeah, yeah. I always I always had in my head that there was going to be some kind of time-travel in in this issue, which is quite intimidating, really, because I think it started because I watched Back to the Future, the first Back to the Future, with my son. And he really couldn't tell the difference between 1985 and 1955. They were both just really old fashioned and didn't have the Internet. He he sort of got bored. But then he saw Back to the Future two with the flying cars and everything. And he got into it and wanted to watch the first one again. So that's the same gap in years as between 1995 when Dregs is sort of technically set. And now, even though we don't think it's that big a deal to me, you know, as a kid, like 1955 was ancient history before I was born, you know, way before I was born. And I never really sort of thought about how weird that must have been to our parents, our parents generation at the time that their own lifetime was being treated as ancient history. And then I was thinking, “God, if they remade Back to the Future now, you know, they'd probably use a Cyber Truck instead of a bloody DeLorean”. It would absolutely ruin it. So I knew I wanted to do time travel because like who doesn't love time travel? Yeah, everybody. I couldn't work out for a long, long time which character would do the time traveling and in which direction. And for a while, I was going to have like Dave's son from the future travel back in time to the 90s. But then I thought, that's… there's only one gag there, really, isn't there? It's not much opportunity for other for humor. It'd be like, “well, you're doing that when you use an app?” “Oh, we haven't got the Internet.” It wouldn't really go anywhere after that. It'd be much more sort of much more fish out of water humor to have someone from then travel to now. But then I couldn't decide which character and who they would meet. But then I thought, well, I've never drawn Dave's face. Dave's got a fringe over his face. You've never seen the eyes behind that fringe like ever. And then it suddenly hit me like I used to have a staff ID pass at work and 15 years ago with a picture of me on it. And then and then I had to have it replaced. And I remember noticing that the picture, the clean shave and full head of hair picture of me had been replaced by the one with a full beard and like considerably less hair. And it was like my head had been rotated 180 degrees. So that was the answer. So everyone from then just now has their heads on upside down. And this idea made me chuckle for quite a while before I drew it. And then I then I did. And I sent it to you. And I said, I think I'm ready to write this now. You still don't see Dave's eyes, however, he's wearing glasses. You don't… you see him once in one panel where he he walks into a hot crowded pub and his glasses steam up and he just takes them off to to wipe them. So, yeah, I wanted to do I wanted to do like some stuff about the the the differences between then and now, because there's considerably more differences between 1995 and now than there were between 1955 and 1985. And also it felt like the Kurt Cobain in the future thing coming full circle.
DS: Yes, it's come around again.
CB: Just without Kurt Cobain.
DS: How did you decide what aspects of the modern world to include in the comic?
CB: Well, you know, I'm not being funny, but I didn't want to do a big, big story line. I didn't want him to have to save the world or change the future or meet his kids or anything like that. That's not the Dregs way. You know, Dregs is about silly little personal crises that aren't really important. Like, “oh, I've run out of fags” or whatever, you know. So I thought, what would he do? You know, and it was quite intimidating at first to try and think, “how am I going to how am I going to explain all of this?” The amount of stuff that's changed between then and now. But of course, I don't need to. You know, he just does silly little things like he goes to the pub and realizes he can't smoke indoors or, you know, he tries to operate the TV and doesn't know what downloading menu means or whatever, updating preferences. And there's that nice, nice line where it says, “do you accept cookies?” And he's like, “do I accept cookies? Of course I accept cookies!” He doesn't know what that means. He's like, “of course I accept cookies”. They're just things that would have affected him in his life, like vaping instead of smoking or, you know, shops being non-existent and prices being expensive and stuff like that.
DS: I think it's worth pointing out that you don't have to have read the other two to get the humor in Dregs three.
CB: Oh, God, no, no. I mean, it is difficult writing issue twos and issue threes, because you are going to get this law of diminishing returns. But I mean, I used to be a big Marvel Comics reader as a as a kid. And I also used to read Doctor Who target novelizations. And, you know, the phrases that the writers use to bring you up to speed really quickly with the characters, like in the Doctor Who books, Terrence Dicks would always describe the fifth doctor as having “a pleasant, open face”, you know, whatever that means. But you knew that you were you were being dropped into this world where you didn't have to know anything. He was going to hold your hand and tell you everything you need to know. And Chris Claremont was very good at the X-Men as well. And that's what I've tried to do with these is just make sure that you don't need any prior knowledge at all. I mean, these characters are very, very everyman, you know.
DS: I think it operates a bit like a sketch show as well.
CB: You kind of you do gain more familiarity with the characters and you kind of get a relationship with them. But at the same time, you can switch on any episode could be your first one. And you'll kind of stay in there. It resets to zero, doesn't it? So the wagon-train thing, isn't it? Even this one where they go in, it goes into the future, presumably at the end of it, which is going to be back to normal. He's not going to have learned any valuable lessons. You know, have evolved as a character. I quite like… I tell you what I quite like. I quite like the fact that they're cartoon characters. I quite like the fact that they're young men who are indestructible. You know, because when you are young, when you are that age, you think you're you're like Roadrunner, aren't you? You can fall off a cliff and bounce back. It just seems sort of appropriate for 20 something men to be cartoon characters with big, silly hands drinking far too much and smoking like there's no tomorrow. And you can sort of exaggerate things when they have when they have a fall. It's pure slapstick. And, you know, a piano could fall on them or whatever. At any moment, like in the one where they go clubbing, they don't just have half an E or whatever, they shovel a massive whole bag full of pills into their mouth. They turn out to be duds, by the way, so I'm not glamorizing it.
DS: And are they any more vulnerable 30 years on?
CB: I don't want to spoil too much of it for people who haven't read it, but one of my favorite bits is I've been writing, writing a little bit with my friend Sam –he says he's like my shit Bernie Taupin, he just he comes in and says “blah, blah, blah”, and I go, “oh, yeah, yeah”, and spend two hours drawing it, and then he's like, “oh, it is quite funny, actually, isn't it?” But there's a good… he said “aches and pains”. I said, “what do people talk about?” He said “aches and pains.” I said, “God, yeah, we do, don't we?” So there's this scene where all the old old versions of the characters are sitting there, like “my back's playing up”. “Yeah, my knees have gone.” The other one says, “what's that tinnitus?” It's like you can't hear him. And it's quite a beautiful thing. And I sort of laid it out eerily reminiscent of the The Last Supper as well. But what was the question? What's the question?
DS: Memory, that was another thing that goes as you get older. Why the 90s? Is it just nostalgia?
CB: Well, it's not really nostalgia, really, because I didn't really have that great a time in the 90s. You know, I didn't really know what was going on with my life. I was back at my parents' house, far too old an age. They're not joyful, happy times or anything. But that's the funny thing. Rob again, Rob Manuel, we mentioned earlier, he said he wasn't that into reading the comic firstly because it didn't work on a screen. He likes reading things on screens. But he said he didn't have like much affection for the 90s – he didn't look back on that era with fondness – and that it wasn't really for him. But I think he's missing the point a bit. These characters, they aren't like heroes, you're not cheering them on. They're not role models or anything. They're losers. You know, they're narcissistic. They're addicts. They rarely do the right thing. But I think it wasn't, I mean, it wasn't a terrible time for me. I look back on it. I think I had a mixture at the time of anger and comedy. So I remember things that annoyed me at the time. And I can sort of put a comedy twist on it. You know, like “that happened to me”. I was at a festival and I couldn't find my mates, and, oh, 20 years, 25 years later, I can make it… I can laugh about it now. But at the time, I was really pissed off.
DS: So what's your process for making it?
CB: Well, I write very quickly. I write in a big burst. You know, I'll go back and refine it. But I write it very, very quickly. And then sometimes I'll go to Sam, who I just mentioned, and treat him like a human chatGPT and say, “quick, think of 20 silly beer names, like Frotted Knob Cheese or whatever”, and it will come out with them. It's great. It's better than using AI. But then I try to spend ages drawing it, particularly on this issue, because you never know, it might be the last one. You know, so I want it to be as good as it can be. I want the art to be as nice as it can be. So sometimes I'll be sitting there and I'm really involved in drawing the perfect line. You know, I'll be there with my black pencil, my white pencil, doing a bit, deleting a bit, doing a bit, deleting a bit until it's scribbling away, until it's just exactly where it needs to be. And then, like, because, you know, I'm a perfectionist, but I'm a very scrappy, scruffy perfectionist, but I am a perfectionist. And then I'll sort of zoom out and look at it as a whole. And then I… just sometimes, if it's worked, I'll just look at it and think “oh, yeah, yeah, that is fucking funny, actually.” You know, because I've got I've been so so immersed in someone's earlobe or whatever, I've forgotten that I'm drawing someone falling on a poo or whatever. So it is. Yeah, I get quite sucked into it. And I'm trying to get like I say, I'm just trying to make it as good as as good as I can be. Because, you know, we're getting to that age now, aren't we? You're halfway through something. You're thinking, oh, shit, what if I die before I finish this?
DS: Yeah, I hope we're going to get to the end of this podcast.
CB: We've got to be nearly there. Surely… what is the time, 40?
DS: Sorry, there's some really great details in the background as well. Presumably, that's where the, sort of, 20 beer names and stuff like that comes in. It really repays looking at each panel in kind of close detail.
CB: Yeah, that's the hard bit. You know, that's the hard bit is coming up with enough jokes. Like I've got a very long scene where they're sitting in a pub. And I was like, oh, God, what the background is just going to be the same in every single one. I could put a poster on the wall, but people are going to get bored of seeing the poster. But then I suddenly realized it's like it's 2025. So it could be a digital poster so it could keep changing. So I can put different guys in at the end. But that's the bit that's the only bit I find stressful, actually, is coming coming up with the loads of gags to fill up the background. And the first the first scene where he lands in 2025, I was like, oh, I can have loads of relevant stuff in the background. Couldn't bloody think of anything. But yeah, I've finished that scene now. That's the one that I I rewarded myself with doing that animation for finishing that complicated scene.
DS: Brilliant. And you've done other stuff. We mentioned Death Star Express, which is sold out now, that was limited edition. There’s How to be Bozz, which people can still get hold of, which is…
CB: Ah, How to be Bozz, yeah
DS: …a kind of autobiography of Boris Johnson in a way.
CB: Yeah, I mean, I get… again, that was another idea like Dregs that came to me at some ridiculous hour in the morning when stumbling to the toilet in the dark. I suddenly thought “people like Molesworth, don't they?” People who know Molesworth like Molesworth. And Boris Johnson had his biography coming out. And I thought, “wouldn't it be funny to do a version of Molesworth but with Boris Johnson as the main character. With his mates…”, you know, Keir Starmer could be the weedy fop, Fotherington Thomas. And all the other Tories could be these awful, awful public school characters.
DS: I'm wondering how many of our listeners will actually know who Molesworth is was.
CB: Molesworth was the third most famous thing by Ronald Searle. So you've got the Addams family, which which he drew in the 50s [Editor: Ronald Searle did not draw the Addams Family, that was Charles Addams]. And then the St Trinians books, which both of which have been remade into modern reboots. And then the third thing he did, he's a friend of his said he wanted to write this funny thing about school. And Ronald Searle was like, “oh, I don't want to do more school, people must think I'm obsessed with school.” But then he read the manuscript of the of the first book. He said, “this is really funny. I'm going to do it.” So the joke with Molesworth is it's all spelt badly, as if it's written typed by a… how old he is, probably nine or 10 or something, I don't know… public school boy. And it's all about sweets and oiks and stuff. And “as any fule kno” is his, sort of catchphrase, you know, and people who love it, love it. And there were there were enough of them that we managed to get the kickstarter.
DS: Yeah, I was quite surprised given that the original is from what? Like the 1950s or something like that. There's a lot of Molesworth fans out there.
CB: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I love it. I really enjoyed doing it. So I did. Basically, I did a couple of pages and posted them on social media and they got far more interest than I thought they would. And then it was James Brown, the former editor of Loaded, who just said “you should…” he messaged me directly and said, “you should do a whole book of this. Write it and draw it.” And I sort of replied, “oh, wow, do you think that I should do it?” No reply at all. Nothing. That was it. That was just his one little ping out of the blue. I thought “oh, he's probably right, isn't he?” So I spoke to you and then it happened. And… yeah
DS: Well, did you did you speak to me first? Or did you speak to Ian Hislop first?
CB: Oh, yeah. Yeah, sorry, Dan.
DS: Because you pitched it to Private Eye, didn't you?
CB: Actually, third, now, thinking about it, I sent it to Private Eye and I got a reply saying, “not for me, thanks”. I think he was literally sick of the site of Boris Johnson, I don't think it was anything to do with Molesworth. And then I sent it to the New European and they said, try Private Eye. So then I then I thought, well, it's obviously Dan then, isn't it?
DS: Publisher of last resort.
CB: No, but it's nice that it's a book, because that's what I wanted to make in the first place. It would have been lovely to serialize it in Private Eye. I've never had a cartoon in Private Eye, but it would be lovely to. But I could see his point. And, you know, I I don't want to hear any more from Boris Johnson, to be honest.
DS: Yeah, you do quite a lot of sort of political satire and satirical memes and stuff like that. Is there any point in that anymore, do you think?
CB: Nah! I'm gonna leave it. I'm going to pivot to annoying cats instead now.
DS: Excellent!
CB: I do… I do think there is still merit in the occasional meme, but it did get to the point back with Twitter… I had twenty five, twenty six thousand followers, you know, I felt I needed to service them towards the end. Towards the end of Twitter, when people were deserting it and I hadn't quite yet… I did feel like it was… it felt like another day job to a certain degree: “oh, something's happened, I'll think of a funny twist on it.” And I was getting quite good at thinking of what the funny twist on it was. But the sort of the exodus to BlueSky… I've got a grip on myself a little bit more now. And I only do something if I'm really, really annoyed by something, or really amused by something.
DS: And have you got anything, kind of, waiting in the wings or anything, any future Peakrill collaborations coming up?
CB: Give me a chance, mate!
DS: I'll find out… I'll find out about it at one a.m, when you go to the toilet. Won’t I: when an idea pops into your head. I have to say that's normally when I find out, when I go to the toilet at one a.m. and I check my phone and I’m like, “oh, oh, Chris has had an idea!”
CB: No, I do love it. I really do. Well, I was talking to Sam Sam Carhill about who I mentioned earlier, my Bernie Taupin, about collaborating with him on something because he thinks that… he thinks Dregs is a little bit too tame for him. His sense of humor is a little bit more twisted than mine. It's a bit darker. It goes there a lot quicker than mine does. I think mine… my sense of humor hints at the dark underbelly of society without sort of spelling it out, whereas he leaps straight there, and then tunnels a little bit deeper, and then burrows down at the bottom of that tunnel as well. We had a writing session the other weekend, because there's a bit in the middle of Dregs three where, for plot reasons, I have a couple of pages of interlude and I've done one page of it. And I said to Sam, what would you do here? And I had an idea that I wanted to do something a bit more overtly political on there. And I won't spoil it, but he took the idea that I'd had and made it work much better. And then we wrote it together, which was nice because it can be quite lonely doing a comic book because you're completely in control, which obviously I love because, you know, total control freak. But, you know, you can you write it, you draw it. And for me as a designer, I'm also laying out the pages and thinking how it's going to work as a structure of a publication as well. And what's going to go on the inside back cover and what… how am I going to do the page number folios and what have you? So you're in complete control. But it can be a bit… a bit lonely doing doing it all on your own because you can get to… It takes a takes a fucking long time to do a page as well. Takes ages to draw a page. It's… at the very least, it's a whole evening's work. It can be a lot more than that. And you get pangs of doubt throughout of it. “Is this… is this shit?” And it is [laughs]. You know, I do. I do get a lot of self doubt about it. So I'm just going to assume for the purposes of this podcast that it's great and everyone loves it and I'm talking about it as if everyone loves it. So I might write something with Sam. He was talking about he wanted to write a sitcom and I was like, I know that sitcoms are notoriously impossible to commission because they're really expensive and nobody wants them or whatever. So I said, why don't we think of it as a sitcom, but do it as a comic? So then if we did eventually want to pitch it as a sitcom, I could just hand over the comic and say, “here, adapt this”, you know, because people like.
DS: Yeah, yeah, they do.
CB: So something a little bit more, I would imagine a little bit more structured than Dregs, a little bit more plotted, and probably, inevitably, a little bit darker. This is a very dark man for a ginger.
DS: So who or what has been your biggest influences
CB: On the comic books?
DS: Well, just in life.
CB: Don't do that. I can't do that. I could do I could do my biggest comic book influences. I think I like, you know, I read the Beano voraciously as a child. If anyone had asked me what I wanted to do for a living, I wanted to be a Beano artist. Absolutely all of my school books would say “I want to be a Beano artist when I grow up”. I remember my mum saying, “you're never going to make any money drawing comics”. She was right.
DS: We're proving her right, yes.
CB: Yes. The point is, the point is, I think that you should do… I think you should do what you want to do. I wanted to draw Beano comics. Clearly, I haven't still haven't got it out my system 50 years later. No that makes me sound older. 40 years later. So just get… if your kids say, show an aptitude for doing something, just get them to do it. But yes, I grew out of the Beano into Mad Magazine, and then into Marvel Comics and then, you know, the Freak Brothers I think were a huge influence. Pete Loveday, I loved… I loved the fact that Pete Loveday – who did the Russell Comics and Big Trip Travel Agency – I loved the fact that he would draw a whole issue and then sell it at Glastonbury. He'd have a big stall at Glastonbury and he'd sell it at Glastonbury. And, you know, in my sort of when I was 17, 18 or whatever, going to the festivals, there'd be the bands. But I would go at the earliest opportunity to Pete Loveday's stall and pick up a comic.
DS: Fabulous.
CB: Well, you just it shows you that if you really want to do something, you can do it. You know, if you want to staple a few bits of A4 together and sell it for two quid in Gosh, then you can. And no one can stop you!
DS: Yeah. And what's the best piece of creative advice that you've ever received?
CB: I know what mine would be. But the best bit of creative advice, as a designer, I ever got was: “if you can't make it good, make it big. And if you can't make it big, make it red.” I absolutely love that. I use that all the time. But I think with creative projects, I enjoy the beginning bit. I enjoy coming up with the idea. And I enjoy when it's finished. Everything in between is an absolute nightmare. And I hate it, but I do enjoy the drawing side of it. But like I say, only when I'm really in the zone, you know, you have to enjoy what you're doing. If you're not, if you're not… sorry, I've totally said the opposite there. I'm like, I hate, I hate the fact that it takes ages to do it. But while I'm doing it, I think if you're not enjoying the process, then why should anyone enjoy looking at it? You know, if you're sort of, you know, bums on seats, you know, watching the clock, oh, God, finish this page, then it's going to show. So you have to enjoy what you do. That would be my advice. Enjoy it. Enjoy it. It takes ages, but enjoy it.
DS: It's later than you think.
CB: Yeah. It'll be over soon.
DS: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. Enjoy it. It'll be over soon.
DS: Oh, well, I enjoyed talking to you, Chris.
CB: Thanks. Thanks, Dan. I've enjoyed it. I've enjoyed talking at you.
DS: It'll be over soon.
CB: Thanks, Dan.
DS: Oh, that's great. And and the Kickstarter will be over quite soon as well. So, yeah…
CB: it'd be lovely if people did buy it, because, like I say, it might be the last one. Might be the last anything. Oh, my God…
DS: Yeah. Well, are we going to get to Sergeant Pepper 2025? Who knows?
CB: Might be the White Album this year. Keep it light, Dan!
DS: Thanks to Chris Barker for being our guest. You can find Chris on most social media as @christhebarker. You can find his books at peakrill.com and there's a link on there to the Kickstarter for Dregs in the 21st Century, starring Dregs of Rudetown. See you soon!