JaMiE BaKeR: fallout

In celebration of all the glory that is the San Diego COMIC CON, here are some sketches of Con denizens that I drew a few years back…

On this very day, July 15th, 1986 (which ALSO fell on a Tuesday) I left Australia for what I thought would be a six month trip through Asia. I had saved for the trip for years but a fall in the Australian dollar while I was trying to amass travel funds meant that I didn’t have much spending power. In fact, it would have been better had I left a year earlier with less dollars but at a higher value. In frustration, I sold all my stuff and gave up my flat in Sydney just to be able to afford to go at all.

But because of a series of adventures, happy accidents and connections made along the way, and the fact that I hadn’t left any entanglements back in Sydney to draw me back, I wound up getting work in various countries, which enabled me to extend my trip, and here I am, 22 years later, still abroad, meaning that I have now lived exactly half of my life away from my native land.

Funnily enough, I have yet to do a few of the things I had planned when I left home all those years ago. My original plan was to visit Japan and then go to China and ride the Trans-Siberian express into Europe, find some work in London (as most Australians do in their youth) and then head home. But although I got as far as Japan and China, I never rode the Trans-Siberian.

Along the way my plans changed, and I ended up staying in Asia for 3 straight years, using the money made from working in various animation studios throughout Asia to finance wanderings around the region. After that, I came to the USA to visit friends who I had met in Asia, and then I travelled around both North and South America.

I worked in France for a year and did some travelling in Europe, but by that stage my wandering feet were getting tired and I wanted to stay in one place for a while. Thankfully I was given a job-offer to move to San Francisco and I have been living in this great city pretty much ever since.

Now I am feeling somewhat restless again… For sometime now I have been thinking that it might be time for some kind of a change, although I don’t know what it should be. Maybe I should actually complete my original travel plan by riding the Trans-Siberian express from Europe into Asia and then back home to Australia…

This sketch of my buddy Dave Gordon, was done around 10 years ago when He, I and mutual friend Tony Stacchi all visited Paris. I just found some photos and sketches from that trip when I was sorting through some boxes of old stuff.

I have been on a scanning and archiving kick lately, organising old photos and drawings. The recent round of activity was inspired when I received some boxes I had sent myself when I was in Australia last Christmas.

I had helped my father move into a new house and along the way I was obliged to sort through several boxes of my old junk that I had left at his house all these many years that I have lived abroad. I threw a lot of it away but mailed the rest to myself here in San Francisco. It was sent SEA MAIL so it took quite a while to arrive.

The box contains some stuff sent home to Australia during my travelling years plus some of my childhood drawings and other things that I may post here later.

Here is another picture from my spare time project about a dog from outer space. This image is from one of the later books, where he returns in a fancy spaceship to visit the friends he made on Earth in his first adventure when he crash landed. You can see him here cloaking his space ship, which is parked above the rooftop of an apartment building that has a view very much like the view from the roof of the building where I live right now.