Frank Bottom: Adventures in Procrastination!

Illustration showing a group of cartoon characters. From left to right are: a drag queen in revealing leathers, a dinosaur in a lab coat, a naked man with two angry-looking monkeys holding onto his leashes, a rugged woman in a ball cap, a very tall insect-like alien, a happy muscular leather daddy, and a small cube-shaped robot. The backdrop is teal-coloured sky with a few stars.

I posted this Frank Bottom sketch on my Cara account a year ago. ONE FUCKING YEAR AGO. I've been so wrapped up in how fucked up the world is getting, and being unemployed for 18 months, that I just ended up putting this aside for a while and never came back.

It's been very difficult for me to work on personal stuff since the pandemic peaked and then just… never went away. We've seen that public health has been decimated everywhere, a further symptom of letting far-right ideologies creep their way into governments and take over, abolishing science, fuelling racism and transphobia, normalizing the live-streaming of a genocide, and generally just dumbing down the population who just can't afford to live or eat anymore. How low can we go?

The story of these characters has been unfolding in my mind however, and I really need to get back to doing it. In many ways, what's been going on is influencing its world-building. I'm thinking of doing it as a simple 8-fold zine comic, and just dropping them around town.

What will this turn into a year from now though? Will I act?