In May of 2020, a naturist on Twitter after seeing one of the characters in my original comic ‘Bratstreet’, asked me why I wasn’t doing a naturist comic. The truth was that, at the time, I was extremely wary about drawing a comic introducing nude children and wondered if the world was ready for it. Still, the person was quite persuasive and shortly thereafter I decided to begin a comic strip that took a particular character from Bratstreet, moved her to a naturist community on a remote island and start her adventures there. That comic I called ‘Charli on the Beach’ named after that eponymous child.
Charli was a headstrong toddler in Bratstreet that was consistently and constantly removing her clothing, much to the chagrin of the staff and other children. As time went on, the children stopped caring as much and the owner and operator of the daycare, after discussing with the Charli’s parents (who were full blown naturists), came to the conclusion that she wasn’t harming anyone and her hijinks became more regular and accepted.
So it wasn’t much of a stretch to take this character and move her and her family to a full-time naturist community, where she would meet new friends, and terrorize a whole new cast of characters.
The strip in this original form ran from May 2020 to February 2021. As it went on, I realized that I was beginning to lose a little focus on it. The characters were beginning to grow, not only in age, but in style, and the writing started getting way too political, preachy and involved. I began to lose touch with what I had originally wanted for this comic strip, and to be truly honest, outside of a following in the naturist community, the larger world ABSOLUTELY wasn’t ready for this kind of thing. The few times I ventured to push it into a slightly more mainstream viewership, it didn’t go well at all.
Still, there’s something to be said for fringe groups having books and movies and comics and entertainment of their own, and the following I had in that naturist community was, while not huge, quite devoted. So once I realized that I was kind of losing my way with this original Charli on the Beach, I took a bit of a hiatus to figure out what direction to take it.
The new iteration of ‘Charli on the Beach’ was renamed to ‘The New Adventures of Charli on the Beach’, because huge titles are always fun to say. The new version began shortly after I got a 22″ Huion Kamvas Plus digital tablet as an early birthday present in June of 2021, and ran in fits and starts until December of that year. I aged all the children considerably (as to make them less dependent on the adults in their lives), and spent some time significantly updating their looks and styles while maintaining their core personalities and body types.
Sadly, even with all the changes, I just found myself falling into the same old trap of simply writing too much, about too much, and forgetting to really make the comic FUN. There were fun moments, but t was still preachy. I was still a person that cared too deeply about what I saw as a collapsing nudist movement, especially in North America, and I couldn’t stop trying to make the comic an allegory for that. The New Adventures never really took off. I had far less engagement on it than the original, and I got so focused on trying to find body reference to draw from that I simply forgot to just let myself create.
So, by December 2021, a mere 5 months after doing all the changes and updates, The New Adventures petered out and I took quite a long hiatus from drawing altogether. It didn’t help that at the time my computer was giving me all kinds of problems and I just kind of gave up on all of it. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I had continued on with it. If my mind set hadn’t changed, I would have absolutely burnt out even worse I think. I was constantly writing myself into corners, trying to too pushy, and just not having fun with it. A naturist comic strip, I believe, should be a thing that people can look at and go “that’s fun”, and not try to read a wall of text constantly pushing why you should be naked as well.
Still, I do miss it. Family Naturism doesn’t get seen in our society anywhere near enough, and even though there are one or two comics out there that show it, and a few podcasts and things that TALK about it, the reality of the power and positivity of family naturism remains mostly hidden. I attempt to get it back out there with my minimalist realist line art, but something like another comic strip I could attach to some publications or something would be nice to see as well…
But do I have it in me? Perhaps. I did a little fooling around with the concept again today, for the first time in almost 3 years.
The bodies are still a little too on the nose for realism. I can’t help but put those fun real lines in there. I like real bodies and how they play more than the cartoony thick and thins or crazy oversized or undersized arms and legs and hands and feet and all those little things. One of these days I mean to stumble upon the perfect marriage of styles… and if that day happens, perhaps we really will get a new Charli on the Beach. Just…. with a different name. A TRUE fresh start.
It could happen.