Weatherby found!
A few months ago, I mentioned having a strange and puzzling memory surface in my brain. It was of a newspaper comic about a town called Weatherby, where it was always raining on one side of the street and sunny on the other, and the strange adventures of a boy and girl who lived there. I remembered especially the last issue, in which the town was destroyed by a terrible disaster and the couple disappeared into a void, and my parents telling me it was because the artist was dying of cancer and wracked with existential pain. All my online searches turned up nothing but references to Mr Weatherbee in the Archie comics.
Well, I found it.
While working in the NSW state library, I couldn't stand it any longer, and went and wasted a couple of hours in the microfilm section. I started in the Sydney Morning Herald reels for 1980 and worked my way back. Finally I caught it around 1976.
The comic was called Max and Min the Weather People, by one Max Foley. I immediately did a web search with this info, and amazingly found a reference in a blog from only a couple of weeks ago. There isn't much info about the artist either, this entry here is about it. He seems to be still alive, and under 70! I wonder if I can contact him and see about getting the series scanned and put online?
Rereading the comic again after all these years, it's just as good as I remember. It had a very sweet and dreamy vibe, and seems to hark back to the surreal dreamlike comics of the early 20s like Little Nemo, although much more modern, with a lot of self-referential humour.
The final destruction sequence was roughly as I remembered it, although it went on for several weeks. No wonder it stuck in my mind, I must have been appalled by the way this entire fictional world was being undone week by week, with dozens of familiar characters meeting their end in various ways.
Well, I found it.
While working in the NSW state library, I couldn't stand it any longer, and went and wasted a couple of hours in the microfilm section. I started in the Sydney Morning Herald reels for 1980 and worked my way back. Finally I caught it around 1976.
The comic was called Max and Min the Weather People, by one Max Foley. I immediately did a web search with this info, and amazingly found a reference in a blog from only a couple of weeks ago. There isn't much info about the artist either, this entry here is about it. He seems to be still alive, and under 70! I wonder if I can contact him and see about getting the series scanned and put online?
Rereading the comic again after all these years, it's just as good as I remember. It had a very sweet and dreamy vibe, and seems to hark back to the surreal dreamlike comics of the early 20s like Little Nemo, although much more modern, with a lot of self-referential humour.
The final destruction sequence was roughly as I remembered it, although it went on for several weeks. No wonder it stuck in my mind, I must have been appalled by the way this entire fictional world was being undone week by week, with dozens of familiar characters meeting their end in various ways.