Putting Mitchell's Pictures and Words Together - Shamed Squaddie Bound

One of the unexpected things that happened when I started publishing my pictures on the internet was the extension into story telling. I had started out by publishing groups of 2-3 pictures on other people's groups which were related by some theme e.g. dungeons, bondage furniture. I quickly found that members of the groups enjoyed discussing what the picture showed and weaving fantasies about them. Often I was able to share the ideas which had surrounded the pictures as I had drawn them. "The Squaddies Shame" was an example of this - see illustration

Mitchell @mitchmen - The Squaddies Shame (3)

When I launched 'mitchmen' I realised that I needed a regular supply of material to maintain interest and so I started to assemble larger groups of pictures. It seemed natural to try and link them with a bit of narrative. Neighbourhood Police was the first set to get this treatment and I found that, as soon as I started setting the story down, it grew and developed naturally - shaped partly by the pictures I had selected for it.

For Manley RFC, which followed, the story simply provided a setting for the various pictures which depicted individual incidents rather than the main thread of the narrative. This story grew in quite a Byzantine fashion with numerous cross-references and semi-hidden 'clues' weaving the different incidents together.

By the time I got to the Press Gang and Cactus Kid - both of which already existed as small sets of artwork - the story was demanding additional pictures which I drew to fill missing parts of the story line. The Kid was my first effort at a narrative where the same characters appear throughout. The challenge of replicating the same character in different situations in a recognisable form is quite daunting!

It is only recently that I remembered that these are not my first stories. I had previously produced an illustrated story based on the adventures of a World War II fighter pilot - at the ripe old age of eleven. So it seems like this interest has lain dormant within me waiting to be revived.

I had never considered the technical problem of how to publish text and words alongside each other. It was easy enough to publish messages with text and picture attachments but archiving them together was a different thing altogether.

Fortunately one of the 'mitchmen' group members - 'Carabalda' - came up with a solution - PDF document format. Carabalda has already produced PDF files for 'The Press Gang' and 'Cactus Kid' stories. Now he has very kindly done the same for some of the older stories. I will be posting them at 'mitchmen' on Yahoo! over the next few days. The first one will be the small story of the Squaddies Shame and a sample illustration is attached.