“Recreational drugs, 2000AD and art colleges have much to answer for. Not because any of them are intrinsically bad, but because they encourage the production of tired, self-indulgent, cliché-ridden comics like Blags.” Vic Pratt, Zum! #10
Blags is a comic universe that came into being during my time as a student at Watford College of Art in the 1980s. It is a joint enterprise with writer, artist, animator Chris Mendham. Over the past 40 years we have returned to the BLAGS world and the adventures of the BLAGS, ‘Elbows’ and ‘Blud’ in variety of projects from small press comics, short animations to feature film and TV scripts.
Most recently we have compiled a 40th anniversary ‘Big, Bumper, Book of Bollocks’ that predictably failed to reach its funding goal but we have published some anyway and it can be bought from this website…
To describe BLAGS is tricky but imagine a during-apocalypse version of Withnail & I, but with more concrete and you might be starting to get it.
Excitingly, or depressingly, Chris has started writing more BLAGS stories and I am attempting to do justice to them… They feel darker and weirder than some of our earlier work so watch this space!
A Selection of some BLAGS pages and a link to the movie to follow:
richard starzecki 