MelCroucher.net
Cartoon Heroines | Mercy Dash
"Robin and I have been in love with Mercedes Dash from the moment we fathered her. And that's despite her being a total cow, an utter pig, and a right bitch. She has featured in many publications, graced dubious calendars, made it onto posters, and appeared live and in the flesh at shows. It's got to be more than thirty years since we first met her, and she doesn't seem to have aged much even though she's got a grown-up daughter now. I haven't see her poor old Dad for a while though. Mercy has probably shipped him off to an old people's home and sold the flat. Anyway, she still makes regular appearances, particularly in our Great Moments In Computing strip.
If you want to know what the UK video games industry was really like in the Golden Age, look no further than these cartoon stories from a Newsfield magazine of the time called The Games Machine. We unashamedly featured ourselves and the magazine staff as much as we could, and all the people in it were games industry movers and shakers of the era, the good, the bad, and the downright ugly. And Mercy Dash was the mirror we held up to them all. Bless her."
Cartoon Heroines | Lydia Vineo
"LYDIA VINEO was a weird one. She started out as an overambitious graphic novel, based on a 1950s American housewife living in East Clintwood. The idea was to cram as many movie references as possible into each frame, and entertain the reader by making them work hard. The publishers and readers hated it in equal measure. So we changed her into a 4-panel strip cartoon, and Lydia became a vehicle to take the piss out of the then-booming video industry. There was only one joke really, which was that she would foul up in every strip and have to be rescued by her tech-savvy baby brother."
Cartoon Heroines | Disketten Johanna
"Sometimes our cartoon heroines would get ripped off and appear in overseas publications, and we'd be none the wiser for months. Sometimes we made a deal with a foreign magazine for a comic strip, and recycle the same old scripts and characters as much as we could. The Southern Europeans were lousy payers but the Hun always honoured a contract. This one's called Johanna Screws Up, which is miles better than their translation Disketten Johanna auf Abwegen."
