Los Troppo Drongos

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This is the first comic I ever did, for an anthology made by the staff of the animation department of Colossal Pictures way back in 1992. Originally, my contribution was printed as a 4 page story and the end pages were added later. (I have split the pages in half here to make an 8 page story, plus intro and outro pages, that reads more easily on a computer screen.)

I can’t remember who had the idea for doing a collaborative comic, but once that scheme was hatched, Bob Pauley was the brains behind actually getting it made. He found an offset printing company, designed the book, organised the art and did the paste up (yes, old school 1990s style; with glue!) and he had a neat comics story in the book himself to boot. Bob also came up with a nifty idea for the covers, which was a clever use of offset printers printers’ ‘waste sheets’ and some stickers. We titled the anthology “48X21” (because it was 48 pages made by 21 artists) and we all split the costs of print production between us, and we each got a share of the print run, in time to sell or give away as Christmas presents that year.

This bit of visual nonsense was my first time doing a comic, and it was a lot of fun to do. Whenever you see a texture, I just cut or xeroxed those out of magazines. Some of the miscellaneous objects in the background were likewise xeroxed out of books. It makes no sense at all, but hopefully has an internal logic all of its own. I called this trio Los Troppo Drongos and its members were named Nob, Wuz and Dag, and I had some other equally pointless adventures for them thumbnailed out which, sadly, I never got around to completing. A few years later, when I self published my first solo 32 page Rocket Rabbit comic, I reprinted this story (with the first and last page you see here) as a support feature.

21 thoughts on “Los Troppo Drongos”

    • Some very fine work of yours Mr. Baker!
      I have maybe three or five copies around somewhere…maybe a few pages of the paste up art as well…..be fun to do something like that again……..

    • Bob! For me, this project was the first ever time that an idea for a fun spare time diversion ACTUALLY happened. It was probably the reason that I actually got into self-publishing pretty soon after. Thanks so much for getting the ball rolling!

  1. I remember taking great pride in having a couple of pages in the company of such an eclectic band of pirates. Sadly I think my copy has drifted into the land of dry cleaning receipts and mis matched socks, but the pride remains.

    Reply
  2. Great work Jamie! Was that the night we sat in that print shop cutting and stapling stuff till the wee hours? Or was it on a Saturday afternoon? I can’t for the life of me remember if I contributed or not…

    Reply
    • I don’t remember any stapling (I thought the printer handled that) but I know a group of us spent a day gluing the labels on the covers, I think one Saturday afternoon at (C)P.

  3. James! so GRAND to see these guys again, I remember seeing them when you’d freshly drawn them (I think) maybe even as a work in progress. This was for the (Colossal) Comic, was it not?

    Reply

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