Below is a PechaKucha talk I gave at StattLab, Berlin, on 22 June 2023.
I’m Richard Cowdry, a cartoonist from England now living in Berlin. This is an advert I made recently for an issue of Kuti magazine, a comics magazine from Finland.
This is my first comic from 2004. Kartoon Cuts. It was a collection of all the short strips I’d done up to that point. A friend saw it recently in a library in Seattle. I don’t know how it ended up there.
After Kartoon Cuts I did 3 issues of The Bedsit Journal. It was another anthology, this time with guest artists who fitted the vibe. It was mainly autobiographical and humour comics.
Then I organised and edited 6 issues of a comics newspaper called The Comix Reader. There were hardly any comics publishers in the UK in those days so this was a way of getting our work out. Everyone paid towards the printing and we shared out the comics, with everyone getting a few hundred copies to distribute as they liked.
I was also working for another newspaper at this time - a music paper in London called the Stool Pigeon. I was doing strips for them like these here.
Then I moved to Albania for 4 years. These are typical Albanian scenes. Stray dogs, half constructed yet abandoned buildings, telephone wires. I felt kind of in limbo as far as my comics career went so.....
… to stay in touch with friends on the comics scene I started doing illustrated newsletters and emailing them out. It was mainly diary comics.
While doing these newsletters, as a kind of bonus strip I started adding short stories about the history of palaeontology and fossil hunting - this one is about how people thought fossils of sharks teeth and shells had magical properties.
This one is about how these two German scholars searched for dragon bones in the caves of Transylvania.
This is the first complete Ichthyosaur skull ever recorded. Joseph Anning was 15 years old when he found it in 1811.
As I worked on these history strips I got more into it, and started seeing the potential for a longer work. A kind of scientific mystery story about how people went from using the bible to explain everything to realising the Earth was older than previously thought and that there were these earlier lost worlds buried in the distant past.
I also got interested in the characters involved, like Mary Anning here. She discovered the first complete Plesiosaur and made many other amazing discoveries. She was a self-taught expert.
She was out every day looking for new fossils. Everyone wanted her fossils and advice and opinions, but 200 years ago women weren’t supposed to be scientists and so she was excluded from academic life. She must have been incredibly tough to survive in that world.
Another outsider was Gideon Mantell. He was excluded from the geological scene because he wasn’t university educated, had to work for a living, and wasn’t a member of the Church of England. But he was one of a very small handful of people who discovered the existence of dinosaurs.
Another one of this small group was this guy, William Conybeare. Here he’s waiting for Mary Anning’s fossil Plesiosaur skeleton to arrive in London. He’s worried that it might be stolen by a rival scientist.
This is a page from a comics adaption of a science lecture given in 1824 by William Buckland, which was the first attempt to describe a dinosaur (although that word hadn’t been invented yet).
Here I’m illustrating what people might imagine this elephant-sized cross between a monitor lizard and a crocodile would look like. Btw these pages are work in progress the colouring is unfinished.
While working on this book I always had other projects on the go. This was for the Comics Invasion Berlin competition in 2020 which won first prize (it’s the first of two pages).
These are pages from a nonfiction story for Blab! issue 2, an American comics anthology coming out in 2024.
Finally this is something I’m working on right now… rough pages for a story about Native American cave paintings and creation myths. I’m doing this while finishing the fossil book.