Steve Whitaker is dead, and none of you know who I’m talking about.  Which is a shame.  Steve was an immensely talented artist, and a genuinely lovely man.  I came across him at the London Cartoon Centre in the late 1980s, his lanky frame and mop of hair a good example of the theory that comic artists tend to look as if they’ve drawn themselves. 

Steve was clearly very intelligent, at least in the Stephen Fry sense of that word: someone who has drunk widely from every source that culture has to offer, from knowledge of Greek myth to obscure jazz musicians.  And in other senses his intelligence was limited: a harsh way to put things, but I don’t know how else to account for his inability to translate his undeniable gifts into a reliable way of supporting himself.  But I’m very much a pragmatist, or at any rate have something of an entrepreneurial streak, and Steve danced to the beat of more elfin drums, like those you can imagine his beautifully depicted characters playing.  Steve’s characters came complete with a sense of art history being paraded in front of you effortlessly, a touch of Art Deco here, of classical painters I don’t even know the names of there, and it’s that evident quality that made his work both distinctive and ill-suited to the demands of a market that primarily traffics in cheesecake illustration.

Just 52 when he died unexpectedly the other day, Steve’s death is the second from the world of the Cartoon Centre.  The other was cartoonist and musician Andy Roberts, who died maybe a couple of years ago.  Andy was someone else who looked like one of his own drawings, and opened my eyes to words, pictures and sounds that made my life that bit richer.  Andy was the punk to Steve’s beatnik, and it was a pleasure to spend time in the company of either – and even better when both were in full swing, swapping stories and dreaming out loud. 

I was less sure of myself at this point, and a bit embarrassed about my tastes in comparison to theirs, but they both had time for me.  And that led to me editing and publishing an anthology comic, Discordia, one review of which captured what I and the Cartoon Centre were about when it said words to the effect that the comic was proof of the Centre succeeding in a way that nobody could have anticipated.  Looking back, that remark makes a lot of sense to me: Discordia was a comic that favoured narrative over style, and had no special regard for genre, and that describes the evolution of my writing subsequent to the Cartoon Centre pretty well.

Discordia was named after the Roman Goddess of Chaos, known to the Greeks as Eris, and Steve and Andy’s deaths are further confirmation that death is part of her beat as much as anything else.  She continues to crop up for me in one form or another, and I’ll end this piece with something that started in one place – about NLP trainer Michael Breen and performance poet Murray Lachlan Young’s excellent Captivating Communication course, created using the methods we learned that weekend – and becomes something like a prayer.  At any rate, the kind of prayer that even Andy and Steve would be happy to be said in their names.

DIVINING WITH M&M

We flirted with muses and courted attention
Abandoned excuses and even intention
Found ways of speaking that aided retention
All in pursuit of verbal invention

Make an impact — learn to rupture
Liven up the surface structure
Alpha-bet your life it’s fun
Making meanings of the pun
That punctures, from above
Why punctu-hate when you can punctu-love?

Abandon the planned and
Glad-hand the random
Conscious, unconscious, steering in tandem

The day-to-deity here is Eris
Goddess of Chaos, succulent mistress
Benevolent minx, Hex in the City
Whoop-de-doo wyrdplay, pearls from the gritty