SAM AUGUST

Aaargh! That bloody "Inspector Gadget" theme is rattling around inside my head again. Occasionally, it does have a nasty habit of lodging itself inside my mind for no very good reason that I can think of other than to taunt me about my past failures.

I think that it really does try to taunt me from time-to-time, because I created a comic strip character not unlike the Inspector myself when I was a teenager and then never did anything about it or had any success with it, only to find that something very similar popped up on my TV screen during the children's programmes that were on during the late afternoon when I was still at college training to become the kind of person who might have made a living drawing such things if I'd only got up off my fat backside and actually done something about it.

As with most things, timing is everything.

That's why I was so filled with dismay when "Inspector Gadget" appeared on our screens because, if I did then do anything with it, they would probably say that I was ripping them off, despite me having done mine first…

After all, how could I have proved that…? By calling up a former acquaintance (and future airline pilot) who used to read out these adventures during our Sunday evening Youth Club gatherings but who'd probably forgotten all about them once he'd impressed his latest crush with his performing skills…?

Hardly, as they say, conclusive evidence, m'lud…

And so Sam August, P.I. and his sidekick Sunny Jim were destined never to have their adventures played out in front of the entire world, whilst I could quietly seethe as "Inspector Gadget" became a worldwide teatime phenomenon and future unsuccessful movie franchise.

"Hah!" I thought "That'll teach them!"

But of course it didn't...

Sam August looked quite similar in many ways to the Inspector, in that he wore the ubiquitous trench coat and hat of the classic "Private Eyes…" although my creation also sported the kind of toothbrush moustache much favoured by early twentieth century dictators, a facet of him which might have counted against him if he'd ever made a breakthrough.

He used a lot of ridiculous and surprising gadgets in that "James Bond" way which so impressed the teenage version of me at about the time that the films first started to be shown on ITV during the mid-1970s, although, it's fair to say that none of Sam's gadgets were "built-in" like the Inspector's were...

There were four twelve-page adventures in all which I "completed" to a barely competent level before finally getting fed up of drawing the same thing over and over again and my pals moved on to having far more interesting things to pay attention to. Four probably either massively plagiarised or spoof homages (depending upon your point of view and which side of that particular fence you choose to fall) on both the "James Bond" and "Pink Panther" movie franchises, which probably shows you where my interests were headed at that point of my life.

It's actually quite interesting to me that I could still churn out page after page drawing the same character back then because, when I made my laughable attempts at becoming a commercial illustrator, the one thing that bored me to tears was having to repeat myself and draw something more than once. I do sometimes wonder whether I could have carried on drawing the same thing for year after year if it had been "my" thing rather than someone else's? After all, a renowned cartoonist like Charles M Schulz  was able to draw and write for his "Peanuts" characters for decades once he found that people enjoyed what he did, and that was most definitely "his" thing…

Interestingly, though, he came up with a style which could bear relatively simple repetition, and most of the best cartoon characters have had a simple shape and silhouette. This is probably the key to it. If it's not a chore to keep on drawing your creations, you can have more fun in creating new situations for them to appear in.

I don't know if I could ever have the patience to draw those highly detailed comic book panels which are sometimes barely glanced at, and I've always struggled when the ideas brewing in my mind are ten steps ahead of the thing I'm currently working on.

I have the same problem with the blog. Sometimes the post after next is the one I'd much rather be writing than this old nonsense, and this might also explain why I've never been able to sit down and concentrate on one idea for long enough to compose one of the several great plays and novels which once lurked inside my head.

And so we return to the lost tales of Sam August, a man who had to be called Sam because, after I'd first drawn story one, page one of "Dan August", I noticed the listing in the "TV Times" for the series of the same name starring Robert Urich.

All-in-all, it was not a promising start for the uniqueness of my fledgling detective character, but, well,  I was young, and I was still learning about how to draw and how to tell stories, and so I created my rather badly-executed and childish comic strip mostly for myself which, because it reflected the type of telly I used to watch, was about the adventures of a Private Investigator whose name was, thanks to the intervention of a bottle of "Liquid Paper" now indeed “Sam August”.

Yes, my own comic strip and, because it did get read alound to the members of my youth club to a general lack of hilarity, and consequently gave me a certain amount of what we might now call "kudos", I persisted with it for a few months. After all, don't all awkward teenagers crave just a little bit of attention from their peers from time-to-time…?

So, there he was, a gadget-laden detective created years before Inspector Gadget, showing exposed roots which were probably pretty obvious and were pretty much based on my youthful interests in Film Noir and Bond movies and the fact that the cruise ship “Titan 1 C” crops up at one point is also probably fairly significant, too, given the kind of volumes which still fill my bookshelves to this day.

I can't quite put my hand on the four dozen or so sheets of A4 paper which tell the story of Sam at the moment, but I do remember some strangely contemporary moments which made their way into the stories. There was a character called Fatima wearing a burqa, and a spherical floating computer whose name I've now forgotten, and I even recall an early example of metatextuality which occurs when the character “Sunny Jim” was shot at the cliffhanger of one episode only to have the bullets miss when the next episode began because that storyline, I decided, would be "too sad”.

That's such a cheat! Even though I was obviously channelling my disappointment with some of the "get outs" from the "Flash Gordon" serials...

There were four adventures completed, although I vaguely remember starting a fifth, and these were called “The Case of the Plastered Prawn” (which turned into a kind of “Moonraker” movie pastiche), “The Case of the Crimson Cobra”, “Sam August vs Goldstealer” (I think its roots were very clear) and “The Case of the Blue Baked Bean” and, if you're really unlucky and I manage to track them down, they may yet turn up in these pages one day…

Although I doubt it.

After all, aren't everyone else's teenage scribblings just far too embarrassing for words…?

As indeed these postings will be one day, too…