Mint Sauce

ARE WE THERE YET?

Finish a Mint Sauce strip, think of the next one, get it done, immediately consult the book of jotted-down ideas so something half useful is percolating in my head until

nearly deadline. The woolly albatross is always there, pecking in the background, all the time. Tear off another sheet of A3 paper, line out the scaled-up page size, 4mm for the song lyrics along the top, start drawing. Again.

If you’d have told me, that day in my very early twenties, about lunchtime, when I first scribbled a sheep on a bicycle, that I’d still be doing the same thing all these years later, I might’ve laughed. It’s no way to make a living, although the alternatives are, on reflection, a lot worse. I suspect deep down there was a little twinkle of hope that this doodle might end up going on an adventure; if you don’t have that faint light of desire inside, you’d never start anything, walk over and say hello to anyone, pump up the tyres on your bike or look out of the window for summer.

It’s been a long, circuitous ride, and without delving too deeply into the day-to-day tedium of drawing a cartoon as a job, there are times when it’s been hard, boring, a pain in the arse, just a job and a depressingly futile exercise. Like any bike ride, Mint could’ve decided to stop at any time, had enough, sighed, turned left and headed for home. There have also been a couple of awkward moments when his ride companions said they were tired and didn’t want to go on any more, but he managed to argue the persuasive case for just one more hill, one last bit of singletrack, one more cartoon.

I’ve always said that as soon as I stopped coming up with good ideas I’d give it up, but every month there’s always been a joke/ musing/big-sky-worth-colouring-in (your opinion on this may vary). That empty page

No we’re not.

Not yet.

There’s always one more cartoon.

If you’d have told me, that day in my very early twenties, about lunchtime, when I first scribbled a sheep on a bicycle, that I’d still be doing the same thing all these years later, I might’ve laughed

is like the path that winds up the last hill – just this to get over and then we can stop and go home. But despite the grunty bit in the middle where I absolutely hate it, at the end it’s usually OK and once I’ve got my breath back I’ll actually want to keep going.

This compendium is just the briefest of scampers through the back-catalogue of Mint Sauce. The cartoon’s been going for over 30 years and scrap-of-paper calculations make that out to be getting on for 400 monthly strips to choose from – and that’s not counting all the other random ovine ephemera that’s materialised over that time. It exists as a body of paper, paint and ink sitting in a large mess of folders, Jiffy bags and envelopes in the cupboard. And it’s an impossible task to try and squeeze all that into a wafer-thin booklet, without even enough room to pick one cartoon a year to form an ordered-ifslender retrospective. So the cartoons included here – along with one new doublepage strip – are the ones that best represent the way Mint Sauce has evolved over its lifetime. A lifetime that’s around three times as long as a normal sheep’s. Don’t I know it…

Mint has changed a lot. Nothing discernible from month to month, but a slow, steady development that’s apparent if you pick two random cartoons from different dates. Hopefully there’s been an improvement. There are the early black-and-white years when it was badly drawn and finding its feet; the youthful, overly-detailed and colourful period (the years people fondly remember); the maturing, life-getting-messy bit; and finally, the ongoing ‘thinking about things and being a little retrospective’ era. It’s not always been about mountain bikes, because there are only so many cycling jokes you can stretch across that amount of time, so bikes and the landscape of the South Downs have become a conduit for the whole spectrum of human emotion. There’s been love, death, longing, rain, some shockingly bad poetry and not nearly enough fun being poked at downhillers.

There might be room somewhere, at some point in the future, to include a whole lot more Mint cartoons, compiled into another collectable supplement… maybe. But until then, thank you for being there and for coming along for the ride. I hope you enjoy this tiny morsel. We’re not there yet. Just one more hill, one more cartoon.