School days - in person - 47
School days - Zoom - 57
Total school days = 104
Socks gigs - in person - 15
Socks gigs - on Zoom - 58
Total Socks gigs = 73
Flights 1
Socks videos - 55
(inc 7 x hour-long shows Social Club 1 & 2, Superheroes, Murder Mystery, Talking Of Changing The Subject, Minging Detectives, Eurovision)
Podcast videos - 16
It was the most diverse range of Socks gigs ever, I think. In past years we'd mostly be doing the same hour-long show, doing it 26 times at Edinburgh and a dozen times in previews, and as many times on tour, with a peppering of comedy club sets. The Zoom gigs were mostly comedy club sets, but they also included six brand new shows in the form of Burns Night (Jan), Interactive Murder Mystery (Feb), Talking Of Changing The Subject (Mar), two Social Clubs (Mar & April), and Eurovision (May). We certainly wrote a lot of new stuff in the first half of the year. Live gigs included Shakespeare, Superheroes, and Talking Of...
Details I meant to include in the strip were the kid in my Zoom class saying "Claudia Winkleman? She's my mum", some namedropping of guests in Comic Cuts The Panel Show, and maybe some more quotes of songs from the new Socks shows. But they're all somewhere in my past year's blog entries if you search for them. I usually also include the above stats as part of the cartoon, but to be honest I hadn't totted them all up till the next day. Whatever, they're recorded for posterity. Lucky old posterity. How do these stats compare with previous years?
73 Socks gigs is the most since 2013's 76 (our record is 110 in 2012)
104 days of classes is the most since 2015's 117 (103 in 2018, the record is 120 in 2014)
55 Socks videos is beaten by 2020's 86, but never mind the quantity, have a look at the length. 7 hours worth of full length shows, that's going some. Damn, I miss being able to guarantee an audience for Zoom gigs!
Things that didn't make the comic strip, and haven't been in this blog all year, are the big domestic things that mostly revolve around the house. The house we live in which was, until the summer, troubled by the family upstairs who made life a lot harder throughout lockdown because they have two young kids who would jump up and down on, effectively, our ceiling at all hours of the day, right above where Hev was trying to work. They left in July, lifting a great weight off us. The other big story is the house we don't live in.
At my birthday party in October, the first social event we've had since the end of 2019, because lockdown, we ended up telling everyone about the new house we've bought. I say new house, it's actually a very old house. And we thought we'd be living in it by now (the first draft of our Xmas card was going to feature it). But, of course, since we jinxed it by telling everyone, things haven't gone smoothly, thanks to our buyer's buyer and the 'chain'. So, as of Dec 31st, we still don't know where we stand and, this time next year, quite where we'll be living. I'll finally write all about it when there's something I can write without jinxing anything more!
Happy New Year everyone
Buy the books:
Pop Star Colouring Annual with 50 images from 70s to now
Kev F Sutherland, as well as writing and drawing for The Beano, Marvel, Doctor Who, and graphic novels adapted from Shakespeare, runs Comic Art Masterclasses in schools, libraries and art centres - email for details, and follow him on Facebook and Twitter. He is the host of the podcast Comic Cuts The Panel Show.
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