Friday 21 February 2020

GW Artifacts, (An occasional series): Some unpublished artwork.

So, this is something I'm pretty certain no one has seen for thirty years. I recently found them whilst going through some old paperwork and thought you guys might be interested in seeing them.

When I started at GW I was in Mail Order up on Chewton Street in Eastwood, and at some point in my tenure it was decided that all of the Mail Order Trolls would get individual packing slips. As part of that, we were all shipped off to the studio to be drawn by one of the studio artists, and these are the results:

Top Row L-R:  Dan, Jon, ?. Bottom Row: ?, Mike?, Conrad, Dave?

I'm guessing by the style that they were drawn by Carl Critchlow, but it was that long ago I'm afraid my memory is rather fuzzy in that regard. Also, rather more unfortunately, my caricature was done later, and I can't for the life of me find the paperwork with mine on, so it may have been consigned to the dustbin of history long ago. These were my Mail order compatriots at the time, but also due to my imperfect memory I can no longer remember half of the names.

more info after the cut...





Weirdly, I don't think they were ever actually implemented, we just carried on using packing slips of our own devising, as you'll see later. I do remember that Conrad absolutely hated his, he was a bit of a glam rock fan and it made him look scruffy and unkempt. Not that he wasn't, he just didn't like it showing!

Anyway, here's a few close ups of them:




Dan

Jon

??

??

Mike, possibly...

Conrad

Dave. I think. 

I lost touch with most of them, but Dan (Who I went to school with) and Jon (who I got on with immediately) both went on to be long term very close friends. If anyone can fill in the blank names, let me know.

Rather poignantly Dan passed away in 2018 before I found these to show him and laugh about them with him, but I recently showed them to his partner Emma and his parents, and they seemed to like them.

And, although I didn't find mine, I did find two of the packing slips I used before the caricatures were done:

My packing slips! 

As I was a punk at the time, I used the stylised Anarchy symbol featured in Dark Future and a squig with a mohawk to match my own!

Did anyone actually receive one of these in their orders? If so I apologise for the missing bits, but in my defence I was either hungover or still drunk at the time. I blame Jon.

Cheers all, enjoy!


2 comments:

  1. So awesome when one finds artifacts like this from their past. Thanks for sharing.

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  2. Evo that is quite a cool bit of history there. I for one would have really enjoyed getting those packing slips.

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