102° in the shade

& Chicago is aswarm with biting flies.  Husband is on his way to visit fam.  Storms on the horizon.

Welcome to the freshly dead dog days.  Bleargh!

Time to count how many comix I've read this year.  And fix some fucked-up anatomy on the Michael Portman portait.  The Burroughs Folio is halfway there.  Maybe I'll tackle the architecture & lighting on the Ian Sommerville portrait next.

Or maybe I'll have the courage to tackle A HERO OF THE FEVER...?

Musing on materials a lot.  Part of why I like chalk so much is it embeds atmosphere in the paper: it works into the weave and powderizes as it works its way ever downward into the paper until its remotest particles hit a ledge and ultimate compression.  Blue chalk worked into paper is as pure as the sky itself, and contains that sense of vapour (and / or humidity).  Chalk is as elemental as charcoal in this respect.

Ink, of course, is Carbon, and is therefore both capable of embodying our bones and blood and representing them, applied scientifically.  And then there's just the blank of any page, which is air and Being itself.  I'll likely never move past physical media because the physical is the medium, to me.  Comics are Real Things, and must be made (by me) with True Elements, not a bunch of post-hoc squiggly "correction" & filtrations with Apps.

Not to preach.  Digital comix are just as truly Comix as anything and I'm not saying anything against them for anyone but MYSELF and perhaps having a long-lived physical record on one's existence as a Creator as opposed to the befuddled flaming moth known as the Consumer.  I'm just an old bitch with opinions.

"Physical media is physical."  I'm the Forrest Gump of comix is what I am.  Lord.

Do you know how long it's taken me to fix this fucking hand in this picture?  I only have two of them to look at, it's not as if I'm lacking for models, yet somehow I couldn't get my head around the configuration of the bones so I could DRAW the fucking thing...  and it's taken half a year of irritibly erasing & re-sketching to get it right.  When I bitch about my skull fracture screwing up my ability to think this is the sort of thing I mean.

I *am* the Forrest Gump of comix.  With more mood swings and memory gaps.

"Wuxtry, Boy Commandos!" - September 2o26

 [freshly-plagued by biting flies edition.  welcome to the heat dome...]

StormWatch #44 (1996) - written by Warren Ellis & illustrated by Tom Raney

Fell #1-9 (2005-08) - written by Warren Ellis & illustrated by Ben Templesmith

A Body Beneath: collecting issues 2-5 of the Comic Book Series, 'Lose' (2009-'13) - written & illustrated by Michael DeForge

Correspondence from the End of the Universe vol. 3 (2020) - written & illustrated by Menota 

The Ticking (2005) - written & penciled by Renee French

Anti-Gone (2017) - written & illustrated by Connor Willumsen

from the shores of lake canada

It's no longer lake Michigan.  Because I say.  If google can be so broken it wears a gimp mask in public & apple can be so rich they'll disavow sensible design elements like headphone jacks, why can't I decide for my own damned self that Michigan is a rubbish name for a rubbish peninsular state, and they don't bloody deserve a lake.  Now it's lake Canada, and I'm pretty pleased with how easy the process was.  I didn't have to poll anybody, didn't have to fill out any forms or schedule a Youtube Instant Premiere 'signing ceremony'--  even though my favourite kind of televised ceremony does happen to be watching a senescent diapermonger pretend to write his name with a sharpie, there are only so many hours in a day --nope, just wrote "HELLO, MY NAME IS: LAKE CANADA" on a post-it and appended it to the No Lifeguards On Duty sign.  Voilà!  New, better lake.  It was that easy.

Why doesn't everyone do this?

i have flashbacks (part the second)

...and three days later I tell him about them.

He doesn't judge me.

You knew he wouldn't.  So did I.  But admitting to being even a little crazy is a tuff gnarl.  Takes a lot of rolling words around in your mouth with sincere deliberation to get them in sensible order.

But I did it.

broadcasting resumes

mental health is improving even if mental weather remains subject to cosmic winds

and, you know, living in a deadend capitalist hellscape wondering where all my sugar daddies at

never had them bitches before and now i'm fifty.  a motherfucker is due some lucre if not celebrity

youtoooobz you failed me

chalk & light

Chalk.  I'm quite fond of it.  It's up there with charcoal, for soft media.  Soft media captures the diffuse, particulate, impish nature of light.  Hard media, like inks & paint, lock & block light out.  The big hassle is getting all the chalk dust off the paper, once you've worked a sufficient amount into the fibre of the piece.  I'm attempting something tricky right now; the hope is thoroughly embedding the blue chalk in the paper and then dusting it over with drafting charcoal and working THAT in.  If all goes well then there will be a blue "glow" beneath the gray shading.  If all goes awry, then it will be a massive setback.  Just gonna be patient and work it step by step...

Tracing Gould - o18

In the dark of the bridge the sonofabitch nance rogue deputy cop Charlie Rakes takes three bullets and a knife deep in his viscera and that almost begins to make up for the carnage what he brought.

Lawless (2012) is Nick Cave channeling Dick Tracy energy & John Hillcoat catching it in the shadows that connect us to a time & place wrought from bloodfeud and bottled lightning.

Fire in the blood indeed.

i have flashbacks

Sometimes I'll just be cooking soup on the stove and I'm back in the aftermath of the accident, waking up in the hospital.  I'll just be doing something mundane & efficiently and I'm right back in the middle of being sewn up and then left in a dark hallway listening to the sounds of a hospital on a bad night with the network down and wondering what happened and where I am and if my husband knows where I am.

It's a little discombobulating in that it's just memory.  Very clear, very clean memory.  Memory wired to pain and confusion.  That doesn't get dull.  It's the stuff that isn't keyed to the Big Notes that tends to get slippery, now.

Anyway.  I'm okay.  Yesterday I was just experiencing flashes of pain.  Today I'm involuntarily reliving their point of origin.  As I prepare potato and corn chowder.  I just got done with all the prep.

"Hello," says Siegfried as he returns from work.

"Wuxtry, Boy Commandos!" - July / August 2o26

Started the bottom.  Now we here.

Re-reading heavy lately.  Could be because the present's so shitty the future looks like '72.  I may've missed some stuff.  You could maybe give-a-damn?  If my ass believed in patreon.  But, shit.  Started from the bottom, now the old teen's here.  Started from the bottom now we here:

Listings are in reverse chronological order, freshest-to-oldest.  Read the top five Just Today b/c have I mentioned quitting smoking has my голова crenellated like one of CF's typographical fugues of revelation...?

Distant Ruptures: A Selection of Comics (2000-'10) - written & illustrated by Christopher Forgues

Stormwatch #47 - 'Assembly' (1993) - written by Warren Ellis & illustrated by Jim Lee + Richard Bennett

Dark Knight Universe Presents:  The Atom #1s (2016) - written by Frank Miller & Brian Azzarello, illustrated by Frank Miller & Klaus Janson, and coloured by Alex Sinclair

Silicon Horizon #1-3 (1992) - written by Mario Bergeron & illustrated by Richard Forgues

Billy Budd, KGB, a.k.a. Bouche du Diable / The Devil's Mouth (1989-'90) - written by Jerome Charyn & illustrated by François Boucq

Secret Agent X-9 (1934) - written by Dashiell Hammet & illustrated by Alex Raymond

X-9: Secret Agent Corrigan (Nov. 1970) - written by Archie Goodwin & illustrated by Al Williamson

Blood Lines a.k.a. The Fury #1-7 (1987-'88) - written & illustrated by Rob Walton

night life #1-8 (1986-'91) - written by Derek McColloch & illustrated by Simon Tristam

Ring of Roses #1-4 (1992) - written by Das Petrou & illustrated by John Watkiss

Grendel #16-17 (1988) - written & illustrated by Matt Wagner, and coloured by Tom Vincent

'The Aerialist' chs 1-3, from Dark Horse Presents #40, 45, & the DHP 5th Anniversary Special (1990-'91) - written & illustrated by Matt Wagner

Stormwatch: Team Achilles #2-5 (2002) - written by Micah Ian Wright & illustrated by Whilce Portacio, w/ colours by Alex Sinclair, Jeromy Cox, Guy Major, & Whilce Portacio

Post-Mortem starring Savage Henry & Those Annoying Post Bros. (1977-'90) - written & illustrated by Matt Howarth

Introducing Postmodernism (2004-'05) - written by Richard Appignanesi, Ziauddin Sardar, & Patrick Curry, and illustrated by Chris Garratt

Beneath The Trees Where Nobody Sees (2024) - written & illustrated by Patrick Horvath

The Ephemerata:  Shaping the Exquisite Nature of Grief (2026) - written & illustrated by Carol Tyler

Wolverine: Revenge (2024-'25) - written by Jonathan Hickman & illustrated by Greg Capullo

healthy inhumane services

Gov't websites with RFKjrwtf's sundried dessicated potato face on 'em should be a crime.