SKID AVENUE - THE BACK STORY...

ANTONELLA WRITES... It's never easy to stand in for another writer, especially when that writer is John Freeman. John and my partner Nick used to write and draw a strip called THE REALLY HEAVY GREATCOAT, about a young couple, John and Jo, and their daily dealings with a ex-hippie, permanently stoned, thinking talking greatcoat.

The strip ran for years and gained a cult following. John and Nick kept the strip running even as their careers developed, with John rising up the ladder of British comic publishing and Nick working as a successful freelance comic artist. John now runs the widely-followed DOWN THE TUBES comic news and resources blog and Nick is as busy as ever, with clients in five different countries.

As John and Nick grew older, so did the characters John and Jo, until finally the time came to pass on the Greatcoat to the next generation, in the form young layabout Kevin. The strip carried on with Kevin as the main character, and John and Jo bowed out, never to be seen again...

...OR SO EVERYBODY THOUGHT! Ten years later Nick had a nostalgic moment and came up with the idea of a spin-off strip, featuring a post-Greatcoat John and Jo, now older but unfortunately no wiser. Would I be interested, not to say brave enough to take up the baton from John Freeman and write a new version of the characters he developed? Since I lived in a different part of the world for most of the time the original strip was running and was blissfully unaware of what I was taking on, I agreed to give it a go.

So it was that Nick and I created the SKID AVENUE webcomic. Following the natural flow of life, John and Jo are older and are now part of the 'squeezed middle'. Jo's shop has gone out of business, and John's local government department is being downsized. Are they down? are they depressed? Well yes, a bit, but I'm confident they're more resourceful than they think...

...by the way, John and Jo now have a cat, name of Dennis, who's likely to become a star in his own right...