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That was the second Dirk Venice strip from 2003. I had his arms folded on purpose to have very closed body language even when talking to a therapist. These strips do feel like the work of a much younger man, crude, but I do still quite like them and the character. Coincidentally I found an old sketchbook with some of my original Dirk Venice drawings in them that go a long way to making up these first two strips just yesterday, and here they are:

I dropped the Popeye-style anchor tatoo, but I quite like it again now

This one focus’ on the two women from the first two Dirk Venice strips. I wanted the the first girl to look similar to the central female character from a comic around the time called Three Days in Europe, or rather the way the wonderful J. Bone drew the said woman from the covers of that long forgotten series (below). Incidentally it was a pretty apalling comic (with nice artwork). In one issue the central couple go to a recording of a Jools Holland style show, and the host is called Jules Amsterdam. It’s that level people.

The second woman is supposed to be based on Dr. Melfi from The Sopranos, as played by Lorraine Bracco if you can tell that from the dodgy artwork. It’s embarrassing to see how little these characters have to do apart from feed Venice lines. I think I tried to address that later in a different strip. They aren’t even given names although the second woman was going to be called Dr. Felmi for obvious reasons and I was planning to write her into another strip that didn’t get off the ground.

Blimey. Well I hope that was interesting for someone. It was a bit like everything you never wanted to know about Dirk Venice and couldn’t be bothered to ask. Apologies.