This segment of the story first appeared in an anthology for the (now defunct) UK Web & Minicomix Thing. When someone is going to print your stuff in colour you go to town, right?

I realise that the mentions of “Sexy Expanded Universe Fanfic”  and “Umber Hulks” will be utterly incomprehensible to most people but I really couldn’t resist them.

Luckily this stupid trend hasn’t abated, so it’s still relevant

At this point the publishing schedule of Hope for the Future had been completely derailed, partly by my own laziness, although also due to the fact that we had put the website together and were doing (fairly) regular updates. I had thought that I would be able to do unrelated strips as well as the main book in tandem, but unfortunately, I soon found out my brain just won’t work like that, so the story took a back seat to the strips.

This issue was the first that I knew I would be eventually putting on the website while I was doing it, so I tried to make most of the pages function as a regular webcomic  - so basically, you get a punchline at the end of each page. Well, kind of a punchline. At the end of most of the pages. I suppose I’m always more geared towards telling long rambling stories, rather than short and to the point webstrips, because, well, I tend to ramble. Like I’m doing here.

Who better to personify anthropomorphic Victoriana than a bunch of guys who had been in Deep Purple? The Butterfly’s Ball, and the Grasshopper’s Feast was a 19th Century poem, that was adapted into a children’s picture book by Alan Aldridge. My sister had this book when we were growing up and the gorgeously baroque and psychedelic (and not a little creepy) art was the sort of thing you could lose yourself in, much like the work of Kit Williams and Mike Wilks. However, I’ve only just discovered that there was an album based on the book,masterminded by Purple bassist Roger Glover, who roped in a bunch of fairly famous mates, including Ronnie James Dio, who appears as “Froggy” on the single Love Is All.

A live concert followed and Youtube evidence suggests that there were at least as many people on stage as there were in the audience and there are multiple shots of Twiggy being all ethereal and famous. Why don’t musicians go for this sort of large scale whimsy anymore? Where are the 21st century equivalents of The Pentateuch of the Cosmogony, Consequences, or that jazz rock version of Peter and The Wolf? It’s either the fault of punk, or Robert Fripp and his “small, mobile, intelligent units”. DAMN YOU FRIPP!