Friday, March 28, 2008

Hmmmmmm....how Odd!



One of my many favourite characters has always been Professor Odd, we both have a certain thing for Victorian inventors and the whole beginning of the industrial age, all those valves and steam pistons, visually, a great period in time. There's something about that age, maybe it was the whole Empire, spirit of adventure and almost stupid heroics of the upper classes that makes it an easy period for a vast array of stories to be told....I don't know...but it just works!


We wanted some sort of slightly mad inventor, maybe on the lines of Doc Brown from the Back to the Future trilogy or even a Dr Frankenstein type character, somewhere along the lines we decided on our Victorian hero Odd. He didn't appear in many of the original strips but he featured in some of my favourite story lines (20,000 leagues under the paddling pool and when they travelled to a future Farm still crack me up!)


Well, imbetween my daily chores of freelancing what seems like an endless task of greetings cards, I was working on a character for a 'Grandpa' birthday card. I was a little concerned about the original design of Odd (created many years ago for a black and white newspaper strip) and whilst designing my 'granpa' geezer it suddenly dawned on me that I was infact subconsciously drawing an updated Odd! The Grandpa card was eventually changed to an image of a map so I've officially rescued Odd from the cluthes of the Evil Greetings Card Empire!


So, dear readers, here he is, in all his new found glory....I really like him as he appears a bit more pompous than before, what do you all think?