Restful scenes to colour? Nope.
Tranquil images to soothe the soul as you shade? Not so much.
Cynical scenes to crayon? Now we’re talking!
And so is Ivor Tymchak aka The Reckless Pen, creator of the legendary and subversive 80’s Life And How To Live It cartoon strip talks about the journey from 80’s Sounds magazine to relaunching the strip online for today’s equally screwed up world.
You know those moments when you’re sitting outside the pub on a warm, lazy afternoon with your best mates and you gleefully start riffing around an unlikely concept when someone comes up with such a crazy idea that everyone bursts out laughing at the absurdity of it, and then when you’ve all stopped laughing and reach for a sip of your favourite beverage to celebrate the wonderful joke, one of you idly pushes the idea to another level and suddenly pauses mid-sip and pronounces in a slow and portentous voice, ‘wait a minute…’
Well, for the creation of this book, none of that happened.
Instead, the publisher commissioned some grey-souled geeks to meticulously research and data-mine the book market. The publisher then got them to apply a super-sophisticated algorithm to the mountain of data to discover what people in consumer-land really, really wanted and the answer it eventually came up with was…Colouring Books.
Nah, that didn’t happen either.
So here you have it – the Life and How to Live it Colouring Book with some of our old favourites from the ‘80s when they first appeared in Sounds music paper. We have to admit they do look better with a splash of colour so get out the felt-tip pens and crayons (or paint bucket if you’re digitally inclined)* and start filling in those white spaces.
*Colouring implements not included.
I worked on Sounds mag throughout the 80’s. Where is Edwin Pouncy