Jo Burt, creator of mountain biking's best-loved cartoon character, Mint Sauce, is typically self-effacing as he describes the tome he spent nearly a year working on. But this isn’t just any old book.
Lost Summers and Half-Forgotten Afternoons – A Mint Sauce Collection is the work that fans of the off-roading ovine and beloved star of MBUK magazine have been clamouring for, for more than three decades.
It's a veritable treasury of illustrations and annotations, documenting the adventures of the world’s favourite mountain-biking sheep and his myriad companions, from old favourites Coleman, Chipko and Oonagh, to the near-omnipresent Death and heart-breakingly seldom-glimpsed Summer.
Why has it taken so long to put together, when there’s so much Sauce – sorry, source – material to draw upon? “This is a lifetime of work, so we weren’t going to cut any corners,” explains Burt.
“Max, from Isola Press, and Jimmer [former MBUK art editor James Blackwell], who’s doing the design, I can’t stress how hard they’ve worked. Everyone’s going to be surprised by how colourful and detailed it is, and on proper paper, too. It should be sumptuous!”
Flock printing
Putting together the book has been a painstaking process, requiring Burt to trawl through the archives, and put pen to paper to create plenty of new illustrations.
“We couldn’t fit everything in, because there’s over 400 Mint Sauce strips and it’d make for a very, very long book,” he says.
“I went through, picked a few from each year and edited it down from there.
“It’s a combination of stuff people might remember, stuff I really liked, and stuff I’d forgotten about and thought, ‘Oh yes, put that in!’.
“If I haven’t included your favourite, I’m really sorry – maybe that’ll appear in book two. We picked a few standout strips, which I’ve done a little commentary on.
“There’s a new strip at the start, and as much other new material as we can fit in, in little sort of ‘breather’ gaps between the strips. I began work at the start of the year and haven’t left the house for nearly a month getting the last bit finished.
“It’s been a lot of work – I always find it funny when people say, ‘Oh, you should just do a book’.”
Lambing season
When Burt began drawing Mint back in 1988, did he ever imagine he’d still be at it nearly 40 years later?
“Oh, God no! I was young and full of dreams. I thought it’d be amazing to get a job drawing cartoons and doing mountain-bike stuff, because I’d just started riding and was really enjoying it.
“I had no idea it would lead to Mint, a career as an illustrator and all kinds of other stuff in the bike industry. I couldn’t have dreamt it.”
How did it all start? “The Mountain Bike Club [founded in 1986, a key part of the early UK MTB scene] had a photocopied newsletter and I was studying art at college, so I sent them some cartoons for it,” Burt explains.
“I was trying to figure out a character to put on a bike. One day, I tried a sheep, and it was like, ‘There he is'. I remember it clearly – it was just before lunch, I think it was a Tuesday. Somewhere along the line, I lost that bit of paper, which was a real shame.
“Bicycle Action magazine saw it and got in touch, and Mint appeared there for a year-and-half. But I had to fight to get paid – £15 per strip, enough to buy a house in those days! – so I swapped to MBUK. The original editor, Tym Manley, was really supportive in the early years. I can’t thank him enough.
“I first realised it was a big thing at the Malverns [Classic], when word got out that I was on the MBUK stand doing little Mint Sauce drawings and I was absolutely mobbed.
“I remember looking up and just seeing a sea of faces, and thinking, ‘F**ing hell, people actually like this!’. Until then, I was just sitting in my back room (I still am) drawing cartoons and hoping people liked them.”
Regrets, I’ve had a few
Jo admits his favourite strips tend to be from the ‘golden era’ when he was young, and recognises that it’s probably the same for most readers.
As for the cartoons he likes least, he says: “There are a few from when I was having a really bad time, life hadn’t been kind to me – sometimes through my own fault – and I got a bit self-indulgent and a bit dark. It’s good to have that outlet [for negative thoughts]. Whether it’s good to force it on other people is debatable!”
It’s rare that Burt is 100 per cent satisfied with his work, though. “Looking through the book, some of the stuff I haven’t seen for 20 years, I’ll think, ‘That wasn’t very good!’.
“Every strip, I’ll look at and say, ‘I could have done that better, done that differently’. But that’s just being an artist. It’s all been an interesting path.”
The latest stop on that path is the new book. And Burt admits he has no idea how it’s going to be received.
“People say, ‘You should do a book’. But is it just those 10 people who want one, or do their mates, too?”
If his sales of sheep-related prints, stickers and calendars on his Etsy page are anything to go by, there’s still a market for Mint merch.
“That was a real help to shove the book forward,” he admits. “Thank you everybody who bought the bits!”
Ovine inspiration
“It’s always been absolutely lovely that people love Mint Sauce, and some have properly taken it to their heart,” says Burt.
“As an artist, that’s the best thing anyone could ask for.”
But how does he come up with new ideas, after all these years?
“I get them from everywhere. Stuff that happened on the trail, something a friend said, a lot of misheard song lyrics… They often come to me while riding my bike, brushing my teeth, washing up or lying on my bed staring at ceiling.
“There’s something about an everyday activity that requires no thought. When I let my brain go for a walk, stuff lurking in the background comes to the front. That’s one of the things that keeps me going – the joy of coming up with a new idea, after all these years, is lovely.”
Original Sauce material: Jo Burt's favourite Mint moments
June 1993: R.I.P. Mint
“Well, this caused a stir! This was back in the day before emails, of landline telephones and time-related charges, when everyone called after 2pm because it was a bit cheaper, and your mum rang you after 6pm when it was even cheaper still.
“When this strip arrived in the MBUK office, my phone rang just after 9am, so it must have been quite serious.
“There was a lot of swearing from the editor – you know that bit in cartoons where the telephone handset is vibrating and has ‘!?*#@?!’ coming out of it? It was like that. It was very serious.
“At the time, the magazine was doing its best to milk the popularity of the fatted lamb, and it was all too much for me and I really didn’t like it.
“When someone suggested ‘Mint Sauce juggling balls’ in a merchandising meeting, that was the final straw, so in an immature passive-aggressive move, trying to regain some kind of control, I killed him. Sorry.
“The resolution to this story was an absolutely terrible mess [it turned out to have been Mint’s stunt double] and I apologise for that, too, because it still makes me wince – although the magazine did get some merchandising money out of it by selling a death-panel T-shirt. Always good for sales, is a death.”
July 1995: Summer daze
“Whenever I’m asked which is my favourite Mint Sauce strip, I tend to gravitate towards this one, and I’m not exactly sure why.
“I think maybe because it sums up a perfect summer’s day riding on the South Downs and the ‘idiot slalom’ of riding home along Brighton seafront, with maybe a pint on the beach, which I did a lot back then as I lived right in the middle of town.
“Looking back, this does seem to represent a rather purple patch of mountain biking for me, so there’s a lot of dusty nostalgia in there, too. I like the layout of the panels, as well – it’s one of the strips that marked a change in style and, dare I say it, maturity of artwork.
“There’s Summer channelling ‘Ophelia’ by Sir John Everett Millais there, for all you Pre-Raphaelite art fans.”
October 2002: Thanks, dad
“When I was 18, my dad gave me £500 as a present, to do with as I wished. A month later, after much absorbing of the not-much-of-everything there was in the few cycling magazines available, I trotted down to the local bike shop after school and slapped down most of the money on a gunmetal Saracen Conquest.
“That was when my life started its wobble down a path I didn’t even know existed.
“I got the suspicion that my dad wasn’t too impressed with this frivolous use of the money and would have preferred that I invested it or something – he was a very sensible and logical man, was my dad.
“It probably didn’t help that it was an extortionate amount to spend on a bicycle at the time.
“Fast forward a good few years, and dad told me in passing that he’d been in a newsagent’s, picked up Mountain Biking UK and seen my cartoon in there, which was as close to acceptance as it got.
“Not that I was after parental approval, but it was nice to hear as, while this wasn’t necessarily the career path he might have envisioned for me, he saw that it made me happy.
“He hasn’t been around to see some of my greatest cycling exploits, which I’d have loved to have shown him, and he can’t see this book, but thanks for the bike, dad.”
