So why Girl Guides?
It began innocently enough. In September 1989, I was looking through my sister's Girl Guide
Handbook (!) when I found a selection of very silly and simplistic cartoons. Each picture showed
Girl Guides in various situations, remembering or forgetting the Guide laws.
For each of the pictures, you had to put a tick in a box if the Guide was remembering the laws,
or a cross if she wasn't. So for example, in one picture a bad girl is about to beat a snake
with a stick. A Guide runs in shouting "Don't kill it! It hasn't done you any harm."
The girl running onto the scene has remembered that a Guide is always kind to animals, so you
put a tick in the box.
This led to the work you are about to view. I wanted to capture the blind innocence and naivety
of these Girl Guides, so I re-drew the original pictures in exactly the same style, and then
drew second pictures to suggest what happened next. The result was 'The Guide Handbook' (1989)
and 'Revenge of the Guide Handbook' (1991). Those pictures are featured here.
For 1992 I wove some of the original cartoons into a story of over 240 pictures about a
disastrous camping trip, called 'Danger In The Woods'.
Eight years later the Guides returned for 'The Guide Handbook 2000'.
Enjoy!
REVENGE OF THE GUIDE HANDBOOK (1991)
Excerpt from DANGER IN THE WOODS (1992)
THE GUIDE HANDBOOK 2000
