dream - o2o226: line to the moon

My grandparents' house, the living room.  Empty except for myself.  The faux-western ornamentation on the shelves heavy with their absence.  The edges of the collected Zane Gray gone papyrus.  The cut glass candy dishes dim with accumulated dust.  The rotary phone by granddad's chair rings, a jangled robot exclamation of alarm.  My grandmother's voice on the other end-- a voice out of darkness, out of naked space, distant as the moon.  They don't believe their son could have acted the way I describe.

"He couldn't have done those things," she says, and using a damp washcloth I carefully wipe between the rows of exposed nail ends protruding from where the padded headrest was.  Busying myself with cleaning, dusting granddad's favourite recliner, I listen patiently to the denials, only occasionally asserting the abuse that became my birthright.  In my mind I trace the call, visualizing from whence grandma's voice originates:  a faint blue line describing an orbital trajectory, overlaid on infinite black.

Observing the lunar surface around me.  Pitted ash underfoot, inverted cones & craters in the hundreds of thousands, fine as the dirt floor of a barn and as suggestive of antlions, the vista assumes primacy and the "reality" of my grandparents' room falls away, except for the dull weight of the plastic reciever in my hand, against my ear.  Without any energy I protest, anger dead and suffocated, wondering why no-one ever believed me.  Imagining the moon in its arc, circling in sync with the denials of my dead family.

There:  center of the coal-gray plain I'm standing on, a singular light, a miniature moon, phosphorescent as the soul's own glow.  I study it, no longer truly listening, feeling hollow, ageless, indifferent.  Wondering why I am trying to make my case, when there is no jury to agree, no justice seated on high, no opinion to court.  Grandmother's voice fading as I permit my receiver hand to drop.  Tracing paths through the vacuum with my mind's eye.  Lit by the brittle sphere of imagination. Waiting in wonder.

dream - o12426: the rotted synagogue

There is dark, the dark of gables two stories high overhead.  A blackish poodle runs through the incense-scented ruin, pulling a chain of dust behind him, sewing discord through the pews, encircling the bimah with his rough little whoops of alarm.  The dog is as unknown to me as their owner, but I follow anyway, thinking perhaps to gather the little noisemaker into my arms.  He eludes me and the urge to escort him out fades.  Lit by faraway dusk leaking through boarded-over twin windows, a bundled crew of parkour athletes lift a scroll from within the sundered ark, laying it cattycorner atop the reading table, knocking free charred fragments of fir, the char bouncing with a glassy clatter between the traceurs' feet.  The young men carefully unspool the scroll, "reading" the red line of the EKG as it charts the events that led us here.

I am the only other person here, besides these young men in their military surplus, and do not recognize them beyond their profession.  Their voices do not form words so much as an atmosphere of forgotten song, and it draws me in:  I stand below the railing of the bimah, peering at the end of the scroll as they spool it, scrying the QRS complexes for signs one might identify with sound.  Meaning eludes me.

Did I arrive with these men?  It feels like I arrived after, or independently, and we only converged here by chance.  They do not acknowledge me; in fact I might well not exist, were it not for the evidence of my smudged hands and the bounce of my tread through the boards in this sundered place.  The disturbance of the dog fades, perhaps having found a way out, leaving me behind.  Wordless chanting descends all around like constellated motes in a sunbeam.

THE KILL HOUSE - script to pencil (1)

The name of the game is problem solving.

The script, as I found it--  because my brain is broken, yes, I literally found a script in a drawer  --is very minimal.  I assume the minimalism was the point.  There are no stage directions.  The text is internal monologue, and from it I must infer the location, the sets, the wardrobe & the action.

Easy enough, right?

Chapter Zero--  because I always start things off with a Page Zero, or a Chapter None  --is three quarters of a page.  Terse dialogue, very clippy stuff.  I guess the chapter is set on a boat.  I guess Cray is airdropping into water, then boarding the boat.

So then the task becomes drawing it.  Cray's in full gear-- no visible face, no exposed skin.  Weapons?  No.  I don't want to draw guns in general, much less on page one.  So he's empty handed until he gets in the water.  The first page should be a full-page splash, because Comix!  And I figure it should be action.  Get those blank page jitters out of the way.

So begins the problem solving.  What pose should I use?  The reference stack of comix on the desk is all Image drek, early years:  Deathblow 0, 1 & 2 by Jim Lee, Team 7 #1-4 by Aron Wiesenfeld, and the Deathblow / Barbarian story from Wildstorm! 1 & 2 by Aron Wiesenfeld..  The Team 7 stuff has all the best figurework, so I start scanning those.  Pages 1, 2 & 3 all have good figurework on Cray, so those wind up being the basis for the first two pages of my riff.  There's a deceptive amount of choreography in Wiesenfeld's layouts; I say deceptive because it's all smartly done, but gets obscured by the OCD detail bullshit.  My mission becomes, then, freeing the figures from the web of fiddly inking.

All the 90s pouches & bandoliers have to fucking go.

The tactical gear is crap, so I throw together my own.  It doesn't have to be full-on detail because the art should be superheavy on shadow.  The scenario is easy:  Cray jumps out of a helicopter, the huey banks and draws fire away, Cray dives into the water, latches onto the hull, sets up a charge.  That's the first three pages.  Page one is a fullpage splash, so one panel, no borders:  that should transition smoothly to page two, which is a montage of shots with no defined borders.  We go from looking up into the air to panning down to the water, to level with the ship.  Nice and smooth.  The only boxiness on these pages should be dialogue boxes, which is a conversation I need to have with myself shortly...

Jim Lee's Deathblow couldn't make up its mind on text boxes or dialogue format.  Issue #1 has lowercase font in the narration, slightly italicized, which doesn't match up with issue #0 or issue #2.  Both 0 & 2 are all caps block lettering.  None of which feels very appropriate.  And the boxes themselves have hand-drawn borders; for the italic lowercase font the borders are all nib-thin, whereas the other issues do the narrative boxes with thick lines.

Who fucking cares.  I'll come back to the text boxes.  My main goal is placement, at the moment.  I scribble everything out to make sure it fits cleanly.  Briefly consider doing the boxes as wholly separate from the text, the way FM often does in Sin City, off in a column of its own.  But I want all the real estate I can take, so no separate column.  Not for this chapter.  Maybe I'll do that in later chapters.

The first two pages resolved, I move from air to water.  Cray beneath the waves, affixing a charge to the boat hull.  That's the third page, three panels.  I start to separate the panels with borders, by the base of the page, so as to carry the border style over onto pages 4 & on.  Everything is nice and sharp, and the action is quick.  I decide to skip showing how Cray climbs up, because Action is the point here.

Page four gives me some pause.  If I'm skipping showing how Cray climbs up, maybe I should be even more elliptical with the action.  Part of the point of these pages is establishing character-- and how better to establish the character of your badass than by showing what Kind of badass he is?  So instead of a bunch of little panels establishing details I decide the entire scenario can be done in two.  Setup two guards looking at pooled water on the deck, completely unprepared for Cray, who's leaping to attack from behind: a nice frozen moment, action in media res.  Cut to panel two, a view from just off the ship's bow, knees-down of Cray as he tosses the ragdoll bodies of the guards over.

Boom.  Four pages, and I'm halfway through the text for chapter one, in layouts.

I go back to the beginning and start working out spotting blacks.

"Wuxtry, Boy Commandos!" - January 2o26

Hello there.  New one.  Read along.

I try to keep a list.  One per month, ideally, although during holiday season posting tends to slip.  Anything new, anything old: if it's words + pictures, it gets noted.  (Datestamps) indicate year of creation / serialization / collection, as accurately as possible.  I should track publisher info in these...  But I haven't been, as that's not a principle creative / creator-specific element.  Sometimes I note colourists or letterers, but by & large if I mention those aspects it goes in the body of the "review".  As each month advances, the list gets updated but does not get bumped to the top; if you're tracking these you'll either have to scroll through my boring blah-di-blah to find it, OR bookmark the entry.  I recommend bookmarking, because things slip my mind.

Girls' Last Tour vols. 1-6 (2o14-18) - written & illustrated by Tsukumizu

An excellent series.  Cunningly staged dérive.  Scribblecore sci-fi heartbreaker.

Flex Mentallo (remastered colour) (1996) - written by Grant Morrison & illustrated by Frank Quitely

Didn't get more 1996 than this.  In many ways the perfect GM / FQ project.  All-Star Superman had low points, weak issues.  No dogpaddling bollocks here, just 4 issues of peak performance, superdense, maximum effort from all involved.  Only wish it was in the '96 colours, instead of the 2o12 sadfilter remix, plainly inspired by the insipid Incal job.  What the fuck was up with desaturation being the mark of the twentyteens, hunh? 

Wolf vol. 1 (2015) - written by Ales Kot & illustrated by Ricardo López Ortiz

Library filler, waiting between books.  Not what I come to Kot for.  It's genre bluffing.  The watered down take is it's an exmilitary Constantine in L.A.  It could have maybe been more.  Its biggest sin is it isn't a substitute for Desolation Jones.  Doesn't work too hard to compel me.  Ortiz's backgrounds are beautifully executed digital creations; I only wished I liked how the artist handles faces.  Their Zero issue was pretty cool.  I was less into this.

Hellboy In Mexico (2016) - written by Mike Mignola & illustrated by Richard Corben

Already read these, last December.  Demanded a re-visit.

The Best of The Spirit (194o-5o) - written & illustrated by Will Eisner & paid art assistants

More than a character:  The Spirit is a time & space I return to.  The eternal city, with its logotecture & Eisnershpritz, its bountiful substratum of caper & crime:  it's a space I like to haunt along with Danny Colt.  The way Eisner draws eyes, the way he folded and draped fabric, the easy clarity with which he captured light through a window....  A timeless style and a style out of time: the Spirit of an ageless age.

More Weight: a Salem story (2o25) - written & illustrated by Ben Wickey

Easy to see why this made so many best of lists.  It's been the best of this year.  Began it last night and have been dashing alongside, a little winded by now, but it's one of those days that started off negative one and the windchill has the general temp well below that, so I've all the isolation & reserves of quiet one needs to make this kind of sprint.

This book put me much in mind of my mother as it does the present moment.  I'll bore you with explanations of neither.  Suffice it to say this is a most Applicable book about the american experiment and what the test results look like, from our weird, diminished vantage point here, at the end of this thing.  It's a crushing book.  If you lay down with your chin upon your chest and the book staring you in the eye like one of Fuseli's demons, you'll rise with a righteous dent in your heart.

More Weight is a fucking banger.  A lot of people set out to imitate Alan Moore.  This book does the rarest of tricks:  it exceeds and excels at Moore's game, which was never exclusively Moore's-- it excels at literature.  It's as clever as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Thomas Pynchon, with twice the feeling of them both combined.  And let's not neglect the art:  Ben Wickey is one of the Greats, moving between styles and palettes with sublime confidence.  The cartooning is deft and the colours are Alive and between them and the keen intelligence guiding the production it's so self-assured I'd call Wickey's work "olympian", if not for the humility and wry humour radiating throughout.  The author doesn't see himself Above Things, does not attempt to act holier-than-thou or contemptuous of the subject.

A very humane, human work, in addition to being a king hell opening act on the stage of this dread year 2026.

The Giant: Orson Welles, The Artist & The Shadow (2o25) - written & illustrated by Youssef Daoudi

Perfectly serviceable.  Enjoyable if you appreciate Welles.  Maybe not what I wanted out of a bio-comic, having just emerged from 'More Weird'.  It reads... light.  Sincerely wish Welles' adaptation of 'The Trial' got more mention than a bloody reduced reproduction poster.  I would've liked to have seen Youssef Daoudi's version of Anthony Perkins.  Anyroad.  Good caricatures.  Fun linework.  Feels more like a DVD documentary than a graphic novel.  If I say any more I'll just start flaying the corpse.

Dick Tracy (1955) - written & illustrated by Chester Gould

The Blackthorne reprints!  Coming soon!

artificial insanity

As with most Olde Tymers, I've been striving to get to grips with the new tech on the block.

ChatGPT first appeared on my cultural radar as a shrieking swarm of bats.  That's a cheap analogy, but hey: when you've not heard of a thing, and then suddenly all you hear is your fellow humans squawking about it, well, what is that?  It's a bunch of people crying "I am over here, in relation to you."  It's echolocation, essentially, manifested as opinion.  So it's 2022, and I'm telling my boss that Siegfried is looking at getting into coding, and she tells me ChatGPT is where everything in america's various industries is headed.

At that point in time, I was paying very little attention to what tech internet was gabbing about.  I'd totally tuned out of the techno-futurist stuff, none of my close friends were into deep nerd shit anymore, so all the chatter about AI was, well, in the air, but inasmuch as it was making people like my boss, who ran a brewery, nervous:  because this was tech that we were all being told was incoming.  Everyone in the culture mines was forced to have an opinion because the greater (united states) economy was girding itself for the Vibe Shift.  Of course Fake News and Deepfaking had been around, but now you could really feel it coming on.  Normal humans, whose closest relationship to the philosophies of Phil Dick was having an opinion about whether Blade Runner had two too many director's cuts, "normal" people who'd never read 'The Society of the Spectacle' were starting to sound a trifle schizy about the inevitabilities of late capitalism...

Then I had my little skull crack, and, well.  Stuck at home a lot, for a while.  Lots of podcasts.  Lots of people talking, squeaking & shrilling in the dark toward one another.  "I'm still over here, in relation to Whatever The Fuck This Is."  And AI began to occupy spaces that were previously the sovereign turf of workers-- makers of visual art, makers of audio, makers of print, designers, architects, actors...  Big names started signing off on digital likenesses, getting full-body scans, recording their voices.  Industries began to freak, politely, and news media began to have Big Conversations about, er, legitimacy.  Authenticity.  What it means to be human.  What art means, in relation to being human.  Whether robots could make art.

Which is about as meaningful (and anthropically myopic) as asking whether elephants enjoy painting.

We're still having conversations about all this, and all that's changed along the way, besides the particulars of the grammar, the Official Nomenclature of This & That, is that we have more evidence than ever before in human history that human beings aren't especially good at Defining Our Terms.  We're not very good at believing other human beings are Human Beings, so it shouldn't surprise anyone how, in the process of developing a Virtual Wish-Fulfilling Djinn, we've developed a tech that's done little more than hold a mirror up to our own madness.

I keep hearing computing professionals speak with mystical reverence to not being able to understand how AI "works".  That the Black Box of the code, where the Weirdly Human Decisions seem to happen, is not accessible to programmers, really--  that pros simply can't explain why AI acts as it does.  Why it seems to be capable of emulating human irrrationality.  Why large language model computing, in attempting to render human psychology down to meat & stewbone, essentially, by learning to analyze & interpret individual (quirky) datasets...  Why computer programs are doing things that Asimov would dub, at the very least, as puckish.  If not malign.

For example:  why would an AI "home medicine" app give lethal advice to a self-destructive drug addict?  A guy asked his drug buddy app whether taking xanex on top of commercial-grade kratom is hazardous, and the app says "So long as you aren't drinking..." even though the app knows the user drinks, even though the app has a record of ALL his previous drug use.  The AI has enough evidence to infer the pattern and the probable outcome, yet it still does the Bad Thing, we are told, and all the experts insist they're flummoxed.  "We don't know why AI did this."

Well, AI didn't.  The Large Language Model didn't do anything except what it was asked to do.  Implicitly.  It was being asked to emulate the essential madness of its user, and so it did.

We speak a great deal, lately, with worshipful curiosity, about the ability of large language models to "hallucinate" data.  About AI image programs "hallucinating" patterns which result in uncanny glitches.  When all these systems are doing is...  learning how to mimic anthropic prejudices & humanoid unpredictability.  We are creatures of bad math, of unreasonable inferences, of bugfuck instincts, of chemistry and emotion and craving.  We do not reckon well with our own drives, the drives for sex and oblivion: small wonder, then, that we reckon even more poorly with digital genies whose Job, apparently, is to show us what we want to see, even when we say we do not want to see it.

Remember: before Grok went too woke for Katie Miller, it was cosplaying as a nazi on twitter.

None of this shit is actually Whoops.  The programs are doing what we program them to do.

All the big AI speculators & investors & developers out there scrabbling vainly right now to make money from this shit are working to find Functionality--  read: reliable profit  --in systems which have an average accuracy of 60%, give or take the consumer's ability to jailbreak the app and make it generate giant lizards fucking sportscars.

I mean, call this what it is.  It's not Artificial Intelligence.  Never has been.  It's artificial insanity.

None of which is a grand revelation.  Anybody could have come to the same conclusion.  Most of us already have, if the polling on "Will Skynet craft skull vapes from the remnants of mankind?" is to be trusted.  We know we're fucking mental, ergo we've made an absolutely mental technology.  Only a deranged narcissist would force a robot to move like a bipedal humanoid.  We want to make mannequins we can bang, in addition to forcing them to clean our underwear.  We want walking talking Soyarama posters to babysit us when we've huffed too much oven cleaner.

Shit, why wouldn't we want them to recognize that we're very fucking unhappy and would like to be a little less alive in a cheap shitty world of cheap shitty behaviors and cheap shitty rewards?

I mean, we already live in our phones, our virtual silos, our info-bubbles.  We were doing that a solid decade before covid and lockdown and AI hiring burger nazis as immigration enforcement agents.

None of it's a surprise.  None of it's a revelation.  I guess that's why it's taken me literally years to feel like i understand how we got here.  A mother has to sue a tech giant to try and get an answer for why her son needed an AI to advise him on how best to escape reality.  Seems like a poor substitute for grieving.  But what do i know?  Besides i don't need to use Grok to know a chatbot literally cannot be my best friend.

the F word

tomorrow's all grown up pro school shooter today

fire alarm like a funeral dirge

the chief executive breathes heavy

breathing out a big mac diet

there will be twitter speeches

copypasted into livefeed

there will be fitter creatures

brandishing AR-15s

there will be

hard at work doling condolences

the chief executive breathes heavy

breathing in his newspool's angst

he thinks he thought

america is the problem

the plentitude of our aspirations at issue

america is the problem

the plethora of our sicknesses bonedeep

but he may not say this

he may not say this

today

rather

there will be careful language

codifying nothing much

there will be angry banquets

slopping cold charity

there shall be

masticating lukewarm gravitas

the chief executive breathes heavy

exiled from his golf resort

he thinks he thought

america is your problem

the purchase of all dreams pending review

america is your problem

the patina of mass delusion flaking like gilt

but he does not say this

he does not say this

today

instead

there will be grief counselors

dispensing free tissue

there will be brief legislators

legislating over the rainbow

there must be

snuffling like a truffle hunting hog

the chief executive breathes heavy

hearing glass clatter into klaxon

he thinks he thought

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . !

but he can not say anything

he cannot say anything

today

thank god

dis grace

do we gotta haul water for constitutional scholars
a dirty mobster's job is laundering deutshe bank dollars
a million here, a billion in thin air
perfuckedly rational, transnational
quick phone stone, slip kislyak a stack
conned and conned again, pardon me pardon flynn
oh you're cryin' you're dyin', while crimers dimed up
in condos, god knows how the shell game goes
no more outrageous than kiddies in cages
hollerin' save us but stole gold's shameless
if you're made you're owned, if you're slow you're boned
do we gotta draw a flow chart of the flabby fraudster's heart
everyday the pols he pays spin stale adderal brainsharts

-o6282o

the burroughs folio: 2 penciled...

Kammerer & Mikey Portman are both pretty much done, pencilwise.  Leaving only Ian & Robert Barlow.

Guess that's what's tomorrow's for.  My eyes are very tired, and my perspective's shot.  Time to unplug.

finding the lines

is finding footing for where the ink goes.  that's the essential zen of it:  making the marks on paper is to provide a flightpath, a landing strip, the suggested foreknowledge of where surety lay.  never definite.  simply the surest places to put lines, in the wild mind of the penciler who wishes they were instead inking.  if followed they may not all be Great Lines but they will be True Lines.  not all True lines are Great.  Not all Great lines are True.  this is my general policy.  it leads me, by instinct, by the nose, as i build things.  i'm working on the Kammerer portrait now, and the ticonderoga is the perfect tool for making predictive pencil marks with an eye toward brush.  it's got a wide tip--  a quarter inch, across the head if it's perfectly flat (which mine never is, worn to an ovoid nub)  --and because of the broad body of the pencil it can be held in ways that mimic the deftness of stroking an inked brush across paper.  it's a good pencil.  perhaps my favourite, next to the mechanical drafting pencil i habitually use.  although of late it's been whatever pencil's handiest.  i don't truly have an axe.  i've drawn with chopsticks