#032 A puncture repair kit of yesteryear

Family cycling resources / Veg rack controversy rumbles on

Hello, and welcome to Diagram Club, Issue #032.

This week: What’s in your saddle bag? What actually is a veg rack? If I needed some images to promote a family cycling event where would I find them? All these questions are answered, and more, in sensibly-divided paragraphs.

But before we begin

This newsletter is made possible by Diagram Club Paid members. Benefits of joining Diagram Club Paid include: permission to reuse my work, ability to post newsletter comment, and view the extra content below the Orange Line at the end of newsletters. Also: misc uncategorizable benefits like (to give this week’s example) use of the cycling images that I’m about to post later in this newsletter.

You can join Diagram Club Paid, monthly or annually, via the huge orange buttons.

Cycling cartoon of the week

This week: The saddle bag - what’s inside? It’s a guide to the things found inside a saddle bag, essentially.

Taken from The Cycling Cartoonist, published by Bloomsbury Sport [All books].

Vegetable rack: Reader feedback

Back to the subject of the veg rack, which featured (too) heavily in episode #031. Diagram Club reader Sonic Scribbles writes:

“Surely level 1 has to be at the bottom, not the top?”

Yes, I take this as being a fair and valid point. And so I have redesignated the vegetable rack levels, thus:

It has also come to my attention that not 100% of you know what a veg rack actually is. Essentially:

Back in the day, in the early days of vegetables [Check for accuracy - Editor], it became apparent that in general four high wasn’t the worst way to store your perishable foodstuffs, and once you’d stored them you’d often find that you needed them a short distance away, across (say) a smooth and flat surface. A four-high easy-to-wheel vegetable-storage device on castors would solve a lot of problems. And so the veg rack was born.

Family cycling images

I’ve made some family cycling graphics (using figures in one of my cartoons) following a request. The idea is that they could be used by local cycling groups for posters, banners, leaflets, etc. I ask that you become a member of Diagram Club Paid if you use them in any real-life situation. You can join for a month, though a year would be lovely - I’ll leave it to you to decide based on the benefit you’ll get from the work. You’ll find the hi-res transparent images here on the website: Family cycling images

Thank you to all supporters

Exciting news, for me, at least. For a very brief moment on Thursday this newsletter reached the giddy heights of no 2 in the Substack ‘Rising in Comics’ chart.

I attribute this unprecedented level of success to the following factors:

1. The fact that I’ve chosen ‘Comics’ as my primary category. Comics is a fairly unpopular category - there’s a lot more newsletters in, say, ‘Art and illustration’.

2. The support from my wonderful Diagram Club Paid subscribers, a number of whom subscribed or resubscribed during the week, for which I am incredibly grateful.

Admittedly the chart placing is now, 36 hours later, rather less spectacular, to say the least, but we can choose to bask in past glories.

Thank you everyone!

It’s freepost weekend in the shop

Yes, it’s true. From now until the end of Sunday (30th March) there’s free UK postage in my shop. Here’s some photos of one of the best-sellers, the cycling heart t-shirt, as modelled by models and, to a lesser extent, me.

There are also bags and greetings cards and stickers and mugs, on both cycling and Household Problem themes. You can take a look via this button:

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Colour of the week (filler) and closing remarks

Titanium White. You can get tubes of it for art and things like that. I don’t know how it differs from other shades of white.

Well, that’s about it. Thank you for reading. Content for Diagram Club Paid members continues below The Orange Line.

The plan is to be back in approximately one week with issue #033. Speak to you then.

Dave
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