988 - On the Five-Legged Space Rabbit

...who leapt down to Earth like a splash of luminous paint just beyond the Boardwalk Cafe on the promenade, and is preserved as a jpeg here.

The point being that His Five-Leggedness is starting to leap about in my head. I reckon there are a few adventures to be had. I reckon Whitley Bay has not heard the last of him. At the very least, he's wonderfully scrawlable.

There are one or two other characters hanging around the more imaginal corners of Whitley. Sloth Man hangs under the occasional Security Camera, waiting for crimes to occur beneath his shaggy bulk, whereupon he'll slip his grip and thwart, with the help of gravity, the muggings and Attempts at World Domination underneath.

And Wind Boy, a blast of innocence from a golden age, Ariel to Sloth Man's Caliban, with a touch of Fotherington-Thomas threatening to break through.

Maybe I'm being unkind to Wind Boy. I made up Wind Boy when I was seven or eight. At the foot of the track past our old allotment there was a tip, bound up with brambles, mattress frames, and bicycle wheels. The kind of place you can walk across without touching solid ground, and only minimal scratches. I climbed a tree there which swayed in the wind, and pretended I was Wind Boy. I suspect he has the kind of Teflon naivety that adult cruelty cannot touch.

If they've started to turn up now, and I suspect, in my sketchbook, they'll take some shape, perhaps Whitley's in for a Gotham City makeover.