Bill Sienkiewicz and Barry Windsor-Smith at UKCAC ’86.

(cont from last page)

Even so that job-lot bid would not have been the first three-figure wager I had placed. Once I put an even higher amount of cash backing the table-topping evens-money favourites in a football match hosted by the basement boys. The league leaders could manage only a draw but that meant I lost. I never did anything like that again, as for a week or so after losing I felt very unwell, in all kinds of ways. That was in stark contrast to how I felt when I received the above drawing, part of the job-lot, in the post. I thought I have gotten to the age when I don’t really get so excited about things like I did when I was young, however being in possession of the above resulted in me for the first few days at least walking around in a deliriously light-headed air of exhilaration. If I was not looking at it then I was thinking about it. It was like being in unrequited love; unrequited because it was never going to reciprocate as it was not a living breathing thing; although paradoxically it did seem to sing and dance and have a life of its own.

Prior to receiving the drawing I was concerned that it might be just a handcoloured print/photocopy but all my experience of having to operate a state of the art, A3-format, leased photocopier tells me that this is a genuine drawing. The waterproof ink sits proud on the paper like spot varnish on a book cover, and, in spite of what an expert might say, the ink is applied homogeneously – uniform in its thickness, which I assume is the result of decades of rigorous and disciplined practice.

I admit that the drawing has a number of issues. It is unsigned, but BWS fans know that he did not even sign all his published New Mutants covers. It is on thin 80gsm copier paper which means that the applied watercolour has wrinkled the paper. There is a 2-3 cm tear in the middle at the top. There is a note to production written directly onto the artwork in the top right. However, this note gives a number of clues as to the identity of the artist. Aside from the very British good manners – using “please” – it has the UK spelling of “colour” and “colouring”. In a brief YouTube video of BWS which is not all that old you can hear him speaking with a perfect English accent even though he has been a US resident for close to half a century, so why shouldn’t he still spell like a Brit? There aren’t many examples of BWS’s lowercase writing on the internet but there is one excerpt on his Storyteller website where he is giving feedback on the Archer and Armstrong logo design and the writing there (especially the lowercase “d”) is not a million miles away from the writing on the drawing. But none of these are “smoking guns”. I cannot see anything in any of the nine issues of Storyteller or the two Opus books which look similar so I would like to ask CAF members if they have any strong opinions about the drawing, or, even better, evidence to prove or disprove it is by BWS. There are some dedicated BWS fans on CAF – BWS inspires devotion in a way that is paralleled by only Frazetta – and there is also a knowledgeable art curator who has some previous with unattributed/misattributed works, not to mention a resident expert who passed on his insight on the questionable authenticity of my Nick Park drawing. I realise asking for help in this way may result in me finding on my face an industrial quantity of egg (or a cheaper food substitute) if the drawing is not by BWS, which may mean me having to take it down; or perhaps I could get special dispensation from Bill to allow me to keep it up as a towering monument to my overarching hubris.

You might be thinking why I don’t go directly to the source: BWS has a facebook page and also a website (although I do not know if either is maintained). It is going to take a matter of life or death before I reawaken my dormant facebook account, and in any case I hear that BWS had a serious health issue in recent years and I am not going to disturb him to just satisfy my idle curiousity. This seems like an opportune time to quote Richard Feynman. I wish I could say that Feynman is my preferred reading matter and that comics are my way of only “cleansing my palate” between my usual literary diet of Rovelli, Hawking and Feynman, but the truth is I am quoting, appropriately enough, Jeff Jones quoting Feynman in one of his I’m Age strips: “I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong”.

As at the start of this description I am going to presumptuously claim to speak for many BWS fans when I say that I would be delighted to see new work from him, but if we don’t and instead he has a long and healthy retirement then we would be every bit as happy. His contribution to the artform we love has been immense, and his legacy is assured. We would all like to wish him a very happy birthday and hope that he has very many more of them.