Tracing Gould - oo3

Forever then, there is darkness.

 

Darkness, and Mystery:

Mystery moving over the face of the waters of the subconscious.

There is no Gould.  Then there Is, glimpsed, in moments, influence, inspiration, in non-submersible units, in all those artists I love.  I'll never be quite sure where I glimpsed him first.

It's occurred to me that since Gould passed through so many artistic Modes throughout the course of his Great Undertaking--  there is no other way to think of forty-six years of self-enforced productivity, than as a Great Work  --Gould embodies multiple artistic movements.  I do not know the scope of his art before the period beginning with Plainclothes Tracy, so it is possible that he encompasses more than the (conservative) three-to-four I believe Tracy exhibits, overall.

So too, then, with the artists he has influenced:  they contain multitudes.  Gould is perhaps most cleanly glimpsed in Gilbert Hernandez, Beto having boiled to reduction, re-invigorated, and sublimated further still, Dick Tracy back-to-front.  Charles Burns' psychosexually anxious heart is shaped like Dick Tracy's own strangely beaten face.  Art Spiegleman exemplifies, even as he is my least favourite of The Influenced.  But where else might Gould have gotten into the groundwater?

Because in all that you can see I'm talking about Style.  And alchemy: infusing one's style with new shapes, methods & ideas.  Who else really shines on that technical, formalistic, compositional, workaday "live-IN-the-trenches, motherfucker" level?

Keith Giffen.  I mean everyone sees Kirby and Starlin and Buscema and Jose Munoz and Ted McKeever and Simon Bisley and Kevin McGuire in Giffen.  Absolutely.  But they don't see the In The Trenches Motherfucker who rocked at one job after another, forever refining his thing.  They don't see the iterations of Gould mastering ditto machine and Giffen mastering xerox machine in parallel.  They don't see these artists learning, through brute repetition, the music in the dancing motes of stillness as they stamp their way across the sequence of pages.

There is no Gould there, you may say, then there is.  There is Gould (the gimmick, the sales technique, the brand.  witness the example of Capp's Fearless Fosdick, the meta-joke, when Fearless Fosdick usurped Li'l Abner in popularity & brand recognition--  Al Capp losing himself in competition with Gould, losing his satire in self-parody), then there is Gould (the enthusiastic autodidact alone with his pens, paper, and Spirit Duplicator (as the ditto machine was also known) repeating his gags and polishing his schtick).

Then there was Chester Gould, the illustrator and ad hack who pitched sixty-five failed gag strips over ten years at the Chicago Tribune before landing Plainclothes Tracy:  

"I'll change the name."

"That's all to the good.  I want two weeks of pages.  Your deadline's Monday.  I want 'em Sunday.  And lose the straw hat, fer chrissakes, he looks like a fag."

That's the true substrate of all these ruminations on Identity & Style:  Deadlines, and Pages.  No time to really plan.  Big plots only trip you up when the editor's got other ideas.    Pass the hat, take requests.  Stay fluid.  Fuck style, use a ruler.  Hack it out.  Keep it current.  Work the crowd.

Dance, dance, dance like the face of the waters of the subconscious.

I don't know that Giffen actually dug on Dick Tracy.  But we're talking about a guy who drew a double-page spread of every player in the Legion of Super-Heroes like it was a Sgt. Pepper's album cover and he worked fuckin' Garfield in there.  Everything was in Giffen, ergo everything that had been in Gould would be in Giffen, too.  That's kind of how this art & influence stuff occurs.

Gould, in the Great Darkness before I knew him?

Because I really latched onto Keith Giffen, before Los Bros Hernandez or Charles Burns or Jose Munoz--  because Aleck Sinner grew from a grafted cutting of Tracy, no mistake  --before any of the Hep Names I'd check for myself.  I'd scan the Sunday funnies when I was at paw-paw's, impatient to catch a ride with my aunt when she went to Get Her Hair Done so I could sneak off to someplace that Sold Comics.  Didn't matter if it was Big B's stuffed-to-choking with unsold comix spinny rack or K-Mart's magazine aisle or some dusty hobby shoppe.  My mission was always comix.

Maybe Gould was in Giffen.  Maybe he wasn't.  I'll never catch up with where-all Gould's influence was felt.  That's not what this is about.

What is strange to me is the near-religious Recognition I feel, now, examining this comic strip, and seeing its influence refracted throughout my pre-existing enthusiasms.

Where Gould was not, Gould always was.

"Kid, you gonna use those scissors?  Or just find your reflection in 'em?"

Tracing Gould - oo2

Sam Catchem casts his sardonic eye my way and says "Kid," around his perpetual cigarette.

Retinas gliding across the surface of his whites with ice-skate, stop-motion celerity.  Suppressing a shiver of the uncanny I force my focus in, down, onto the rustling newspulp.  Sam's rheumy gaze locked outwith the frame beneath me, making contact, he raises a hand to cock his plum-coloured trilby back.

"Kid," he says, "you're on the level."  The cigarette clicks from one side of his freckled mew to the other, almost audibly, as he turns, looking up.  "But what level?"

The waxen glow of the hardwood beneath me is gold as sunlight.  Redounding off the cut glass corners of the candy dish on the mirrored tabletop, misting butterscotches wrapped in their crisp whispering cello with particulate rays.  It's always afternoon in the front living room, by paw-paw's recliner.  I'm on my stomach on the floor, elbowpropped, and Dick Tracy's back at war with Big Boy.

"You remember that?" raps Sam.  "I mean, actually remember."

"I believe so," I answer, pulling legs beneath me,  "Like, I think I recall Paw-Paw telling me Big Boy was a Tracy villain from when he was a kid."

"Interesting," not sounding interested at all.  Testing the border of the panel he's speaking from, little exploratory taps with nicotine-stained knuckles.  "Think you can help me outta this rig?"  His cynical kewpie eyes sliding to the scissors beside my hand.

"I believe so," I answer, admiring the sheer glint of forever afternoon all around me.  The reflections off wood and glass and steel all caught and sponged up by the Sunday supplement.  The loops of the heavy scissors immense as trigger guards to my adolescent knuckles.  "I believe so."

Tracing Gould - oo1

In my psyche there is a direct association between my great-grandfather & Dick Tracy.  He used to collect them.  His daughter, my aunt, found them appalling & violent & disgusting, so as soon as he died she threw them away.

I did not know this detail until after my aunt's death.

Throughout my childhood, I spent Saturdays "up the drive" at my great-grandfather's house, the hearth of the Patty Family.  That place is very imprinted on my subconscious.  In my dreams I revisit it, though with significantly less frequency at this distance of decades.  My great-grandfather died in 1988, I believe.  He found the intensity with which I pored over the Sunday funnies, which they collected for me, amusing, and I know he watched me really grapple with the 80s incarnation of Dick Tracy.

I was fascinated by the faces.  Sam Catchem was particularly striking, to my child's eye.  But I didn't really know what I was ever looking at, what the stories were, who these characters were.  I had inherited the Max Collins / Kurt Lochner era of the thing, the attempted "modernization" of D.T., and it was completely impenetrable to me.  I understood Peanuts, and Garfield, and Calvin and Hobbes.  Dick Tracy was just thing full of talking about "cases" and "criminals" and I was just a kid who stared at teevee passively trying to understand what the fuck a Brady Bunch was and why it looked exactly like the Partridge family, and why did adult stuff seem so fucking stuck in the past?

But this was the 80s in Dogwater.  It was a bubble.  I didn't know who Chester Gould was.  I didn't see the effect he'd had on the culture I came to love because I didn't read the creators of my favourite comix lauding Gould, y'know?  I'm sure los Bros were talking about Dick Tracy but I didn't read those interviews.  I just didn't hear people talk about the effects, the influence.  I was a Bat-Fan like anyone who got secondhand toys and books and grew up with Adam West.  I didn't know how rooted in D.T. Batman was--  because DC made an editorial POINT of not talking about Gould, or the debt owed.  Crime fic writ large owes to the popularity of D.T., and the determination of Gould to bluff & hack his way through producing a daily strip for forty-six years.

I feel like I've spent my entire life tracking influence & interpreting the greater historical context of all this mishegas, catching up with the past, in an attempt to understand & accept the present that we've all been borne into.  Surely cooking my brain in the process.  Ah, the joys of being a human, walking to & fro, up & down this wired-ass world.

The point is, there's no one good reason I've discovered the Need to learn more about Gould and his work.  It's what I'm supposed to do.  It's an alternative to the deadspace that daily comix have become, in my attentions.  I grew up reading dailies.  In a way comix are an integral part of how I learned to read.  And probably why I was so credulous and literal-minded in my adolescence.  Not to diss on dailies.  But the stuff kids dig on?  Oof.  I'm not revisiting fucking Garfield, even ironically.

But then Sam Catchem casts his sardonic eye my way and says "Kid," around his perpetual cigarette...

sam kieth

Another reason for not being on the internet is all the dying.

In comix no-one truly dies.

In my memory Sam Kieth looms weirdly larger than his actual presence.  It was the inking, of course.  The full-on, all tactics accepted, rock'n'roll, performative way Sam Kieth inked.  There weren't many dudes making my hair stand up that way.  Sienkiewicz, for sure.  Mike Drinenberg, maybe?  But Mike's linked to Kieth, isn't he.

I know Sam Kieth first hit my life indirect.  I came to Kieth's name from scattershot sources:  The Comics Reporter, or the Amazing Heroes annuals, or The Comics Scene.  Those magazines were the only way I was able to learn about the greater wealth of talent operating within the field, because Kieth wasn't in all that many places.  Initially I associated Kieth with Willian Messner-Loeb & a strange-looking comic called 'Epicurus The Sage', which--  if I remember correctly, at this moment  --was published by DC's 'Piranha Press'.  I'd heard of that before I ever started reading 'Sandman', for certain.

'Sandman' I came into a little sideways, because it was THE book anybody in the industry had a take for.  You might not have given a single solitary fuck about Batman but if you were reading comix in the late 80s, early 90s, you were talking about DC's biggest gamble since they first yanked Moore's beard.  'Sandman' was a strange-looking book, especially those first, ungainly issues with Sam Kieth's art.

Have you ever read something where the artist looked like their work was the product of a greasy pizza?  Like, the product of miserable indigestion.  That's what Sam Kieth's work on the first few issues of 'Sandman' was like, to my eyes.  Like it's just uncomfortable.  The work feels like a misjudged assignment.  Like every page was Kieth trying to fight it out to the next page.  And then he's out, and the hot potato is in Mike Drinenberg's hands, and he's actually able to Hold It, Properly, before passing it on.

I don't know what Kieth's next assignment was, in that time period.  He hit me next with his arc on Dark Horse's 'Aliens', and man, did that book land with me.  It fit him.  He's maybe the only artist I feel like was able to capture Sigourney Weaver's likeness on the page?  He certainly got the gigeresque stuff right, like it's full on Biomechanical noodling everydamnwhere, which was definitely my vibe in high school.  I'd scribble biomech in the margins of lined notebook paper for hours.  I was starting to itch to be able to ink LIKE Sam Kieth, though this wasn't something I could properly articulate then:  I dug the granular, textural quality of how he laid india ink down on board.  He made ink his dominant FEEL.

And then, of course, there's Marvel Comics Presents, where Kieth rocked out for a bit.  Was he doing that stuff before or after the Dark Horse Aliens run?  Did he create Cyber?  Yes?  No?  Maybe it matters, maybe it didn't.  But the Wolverine stuff Kieth did--  that was a turning point.  I was all over the style, the absurd ribboning of fabric and the macho porcupine stubble and the vascular density of the triceps.  I was in love with The Maxx before The Maxx even happened.  Because you can see Kieth's Maxx all over where he was headed.

Like I know Arthur Suydam and Frank Frazetta were the big influences on Kieth.  Most people--  cis-het people  --see the Frazetta, because of how Kieth drew women, but what I saw everywhere, over everything, was Arthur Suydam...  But not gross?  Because Suydam's vibe is kind of squishy, and dank, and horny.  But there wasn't the hillbilly leering to how Kieth drew sexy stuff.  He had that "appreciation" for the human body you hear hifalutin' art dorx wax enthusiastic about:  he could draw hips like someone who wasn't trying.  As in, Kieth wasn't drawing with a pencil tied to his dick.

You know what I'm saying.  Some artists, you can tell where their mind is at.  Neal Adams couldn't draw sexy because he got too weirdly flustered when he tried.  Sam Kieth didn't seem to have that neurosis.  Does that sound like bullshit?  It maybe should.  Because there's a lot of working out hangups about sexiness on display, in The Maxx--  point of fact that seems to be the dark pulse compelling Kieth's work throughout that era at Image.  'Friends of Maxx' and 'Ojo' and everything else Kieth did, it always came back to feelings & feminism & fumbling through whether heterosexual men in america were fundamentally broken.

(Bad news for you, Kieth, where-ever you've gotten to...  Jury's out on that.  Like, at lunch in a greasy spoon, and probably not coming back unless it's with the shits.)

Anyhow, Kieth got all that stuff down, coherently or not--  I'm no judge, I'm only Your Average Fan  --Kieth got it all down on paper, without seeming like a creep or a cretin.  To me.  Kieth's art had an honest power to it.  He made drawing look fun.  He made me want to hold a brush.  He was there, early as any of the Big Names that hooked me, and he seemed like a weirdly humble dude.  And he made Image a better place?  Of all the names that jumped onboard during that second-to-third wave of 90s Image, Kieth was one who really CHANGED how the brand landed with my generation.

Because McFarlane, let's be honest, the only reason to read McFarlane is the kind of cartooning that came perfectly naturally to Kieth.  The excess, those noodling repetitions of heavy metal signifiers like shredded & wind-whipped fabric, etcetera, the tensed coiled clusters of muscle--  yeah, McFarlane sold himself to the world as horny for needless detail, but what he was celebrated for, his silly-ass "style"?  Sam Kieth was the original gangsta.

Tell me you wouldn't have read Sam Kieth's Spider-man.  Tell me you wouldn't have actually loved Spawn if he'd been a little less Al Simmons and a lot more Maxx.  God-damn.

Anyway.  Sam, my man.  You made it look righteous, and you seemed righteous, and does any more need to be said?  Selah.

boring is beautiful

I'm not typing here much right now because I'm working on making comix.

Also, usually anytime I type something, I'll glance at the datafeed on my menu bar and notice that we've bombed a series of cruise missile launching sites defending the strait of Hormuz or some such, and I'll feel like, Hey, kids! comix isn't exactly the energy I can bring to the internet in 2026, so why pretend?   This has never been a site poppin' with Hawt Content anyhoo.

Most of my spare mental energy that isn't dedicated to my husband, my job, or my art is dedicated to a late in life discovery of Chester Gould's cartooning prowess and the weird machine that he created.

Because Dick Tracy is an engine, my friends, that never stops running.  Dick Tracy is a perpetual comix machine, created & designed to last Gould's lifetime, and beyond.  I'm only interested in the bit Gould's hands were on, of course, but fuck, that's forty years of productivity.  Piss on Dave Sim's paltry 300 issues.  Dingus cheated with all those text pages anyhow.

It's been instructive to look at on any number of levels of craft, but foremost is its gridwork and its pacing, and how the strip adapted itself to the rigors of the publishing format it was alotted.  (Also how the strip was adapted, in its anthologized & reprinted incarnations, where the strips are cut-up and re-configured to more fully fit the dimensions of north american newsstand comix.  Which changes the rhythms of the story, seemingly, though how could it?  Spatial re-orientation of integers in a numerical chain doesn't change the value of the numerical chain if you're just linewrapping the digits, and this is all a comix reprinting of Tracy technically does; yet somehow re-orienting entire tracy arcs, as Blackthorne famously did with its weekly series, wholly changes the delivery mechanism of the strip format therefore the way it hits is just. different.)  Because webcomix have returned to my mind.  And I have a thing called 'The Hero of the Fever' that I'd liked to serialize here.  So reading Tracy is helping me think through how I'd like to approach webcomix.  Because I've been here before.  I've turfed out, too.  So Tracy is guiding me by example.  Gould didn't turf out.  Go on vacation or abandon it to his art assistants.  Gould stuck to it, and he was plotting on the balls of his feet most of the time.

So yeah.  This is what I'm thinking about, most of the time.  Staring at clouds that aren't there.  You know how I get.  It's pretty boring.  But it's boring like walking the beach and observing the quality of light beaming through fog transmuting into cloud is boring.  I do it every day and it doesn't lose its lustre.

I did a little of the beach thing already.  Stretches and yoga and studying the clouds and watching ducks nap.  Did some drawing.  So it's back to Tracy.  Volume Two of the complete dailies & sundays.  Let's see if Steve the Tramp gets what he richly deserves--  I mean motherfucker spent half the first volume earning it!  Like, Steve is the heeliest heel to've ever heeled.

"Wuxtry, Boy Commandos!" - March 2o26

Concrete, vols. 1-3 (1986-1994) - written & illustrated by Paul Chadwick

These left an imprint.

The cover copy for volume 1 of this 7-volume library, repackaged & published in the early 2000s, sez "Classics and little-seen stories from the legendary series".  Which is a little funny, because by the time these books were published, the Dark Horse imprint Legend was exactly one decade in the rearview.

Yesterday I found out Mike Richardson has been pushed entirely out of Dark Horse, and the publisher has been eaten by another of the ever-circling bigger fish.  Some leviathan or other will munch them all, eventually.  To me, it won't matter much, because the big money can't buy my love.  And I quite loved--  still quite love  --Concrete.

Last month the annotations were sweetly silent for ya'll, so if you'll pardon the digression, I'ma go down a rabbithole into the world below: memory.

Concrete was one of a holy trinity, no, quartet...  Maybe quintet?  of comic books that I cared enough about to discover for myself.  I was already a little hooked on Cerebus, in the late 80s, early 90s--  I was a high schooler, what d'you want? --and I was definitely addicted to Eastman & Laird's Turtles--  even though it was something of a chore to find the Real Turtles, and not the TV Turtles, on account of living in Dogwater Alabama, where all the commercial world could be found if only you ventured a county or so over to the nearest Wal-Mart, where Spawn & Youngblood were being packaged up in heat-sealed plastic bundles; god help your degenerate bones if you wanted an actual comic book SHOPPE --and some dumb how I'd even wound up addicted to Bob Burden's The Flaming Carrot-- of all the damn books --but the easiest "indie" comic in the world to find and stumble into, at that precise moment in my narrative, was Concrete.

What would the fifth wheel have been?  The Tick, prob'ly.

(Sometimes I call my narrative My Troubles With Comics, in homage to R. Crumb.)

((My Troubles With Comics was a sub-serial of autobio comix within a webcomic I used to do, titled 'Welcome To Crooked Corner'.  It chronicled the first and only time I was suspended from school, for "trafficking pornography", which meant I'd loaned the H.P. Lovecraft issue of Heavy Metal to a friend in art class and his mom found it and narc'd me out to the school.  The comic contained t&a, you see, to say nothing of Alberto Breccia and other adult horrors...  But none of this had happened yet.  And we are still figuring out how many b&w comic books I was hooked on in 199_, so selah.))

Concrete used to be one of the more popular, and marketable, black & white comics of my adolescence.  That sounds weird to say today, but back when advertising was more complex and difficult AND expensive to create, Concrete had risen to the top of a developing boom in publishing.  It was a black & white book created by one guy (give or take the letterer) and had survived the indie glut of the late 80s by dint of being pretty much the mascot of DH's premier anthology, Dark Horse Presents.  Which was reason #1 for Con's popularity, in a nutshell: its fungibility.

Concrete was a full-length comic, an ongoing series, but Concrete was also a VAST, seemingly bottomless well of short stories & whimsical riffs-- within Concrete's own series there was a sub-serial called 'A Sea of Heads' that showed up as much as the 'crete stuff  --and the character was iconic enough to be a toyetic mascot for its main publisher, acting as much as a pitchman for Dark Horse's stable of properties as for DHP.  And Concrete was everywhere.  You could find Paul Chadwick's bouncing baby at any major comics convention; Concrete was in Wizard, and The Comics Journal, and The Comics Reporter, and Comics Insider...

But why did I like it?  Pop prevalence notwithstanding.  It's all very well to be addicted to pop culture trash.  I grew up hooked on the Beatles, for chrissakes, listening to tales of record pyres; you can get hooked on a thing purely for its cultural cachet and not GET it, y'know.  Like, everyone was "into" the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles...  But how many people actually *read* the o.g. Turtles, and Grokked It?  Significantly less than you'd think.  Comix people read Thee Turtles, whereas TMNT were everywhere for the casuals.  The Turtles made a certain kind of pop sense because it emerged from a stew of influence whose top notes were martial arts and anthropomorphic funny animals.

Concrete, in contrast, was a book about...  a disembodied political speechwriter with an affinity for environmentalism.  A comic containing only one Fantastic element, an alien abduction, which never recurs.  Concrete was a book about figuring out how to be human, in a culture that didn't value humanity.  And it was--  to me, at least  --an art comic.  It was a comic you read for the art.

It was a comic I read for the art.  Concrete was an Art Comic.  The black and white was my life's blood.  There were a LOT of b&w books to be found, in my youth, veritable oceans of content left over from the boom & implosion of the marketplace in the wake of the Turtles finding a foothold.  But there weren't that many books that looked as Sharp, or as Pop-Influenced, in their black & white rigor.

I'm pouring out a 40 in pure verbiage here because you wouldn't think it to look around, now, but Paul Chadwick did a little to change the indie comix landscape in North America--  as much as Barry Windsor-Smith, or Dave Sim, or Los Bros Hernandez, or those terrible turtle boys.

Let's pause here for an admission.  A confession, truly:  I wanted so bad to rip it off.

I probably spent as much time trying to imitate Paul Chadwick's clarity of line & control of feathering as I did practicing my Frank Miller dropshadows.  Saturdays were spent at my aunt's house, poring over comics bellydown on the hardwood floor and tracing off my fucked-up pencils onto typing paper for inking.  It was Saturdays when I could convince my aunt to drive me to one of two comic shops, where doubtless satan was waiting to sell me magazines designed for single-handed enjoyment, and god smile on her bitter christian soul, she did, with little reluctance.  I guess if the options were godless rock'n'roll and heathen lit, well, at least the comix shops didn't have Perry Farrel's obscene poster of Ritual de lo Habitual hanging over the cash register.

If I had to pin down the exact moment I fell in Love with 'Crete enough to want to steal its main conceit, it was probably when my aunt was having her hair done.  There was a hobby shop at the entrance to the shopping plaza where her stylists worked, so whenever I got bored of leafing through Details magazine and trying to piece together the Wild Palms comic, I'd wander up.  The hobby shop had only a handful of comics, all trade paperback collections--  The One, by Rick Veitch (who?) and Snarfquest by Larry Elmore, and (maybe?) a Sandman like 'The Doll's House'.  But then there were these two issues of 'Concrete', singles, totally out of place amidst the lead figurines and Dragonlance novels.  'Concrete: Eclectica'.  I didn't know what they were, besides issues of my favourite book.

See, what they were?  Was colour.

Concrete, as I said, was a b&w book.  Black & white was why I lived & breathed.  I'd gotten 100% hooked on 'Crete the same way I got hooked on Cerebus--  I bought an issue in the middle of everything with no context for any of it.  My first Cerebus was a Flaming Carrot crossover, at the ass-end of Church & State book II.  My first Concrete was issue #9, the one where he grows horns.  It's a weird as fuck book, if you don't know the characters.  It spends almost the entire issue indoors, with the titular character bound to a chair, starving himself & tripping out.  If you're entering it context free, it's a bizarre In to a world of near-infinite potential, and reward.  So that's what hooked me.  It looked goddamned amazing, and it didn't do what comix had taught me to expect.  The story is very static, containing barely any action worth mentioning.  It's almost entirely an intellectual exercise, as a story.

The 'Eclectica' pieces?  I'm going to be honest, I don't remember them, today.  The essentials have evaporated.  All I remember is the shock of seeing Concrete in full colour for the first time--  if one disregards the cover art for everything Chadwick had drawn, or all the DH house ads, or the luxuriantly gardened painted posters of Concrete that had started to show up in shops.  It wasn't just 'Crete in colour, it was Concrete in computer colour, then still an innovation.  The stories were oddments, stuff Chadwick had dashed off for one project or another that didn't fit in, precisely chronologically, with the greater series which was--  then  --only beginning to be collected.

I do remember there was something luminous and uncanny about seeing 'Crete in colour, and that led me to scribbling my own ideas for a rip-off series.  Something I wouldn't attempt for years, and when I did attempt it, saw as only grotesque & misconceived.  But it got me started on Making, and not just Consuming, comix.  Chadwick, like Byrne, Sim, BWS, Moebius and all the others, got me started.

The aborted rip-off comic?  'A Lunar Body'.  Like, even the title is a bit of a stylistic lift from Chadwick--  he liked to title the individual issues subdued stuff like "A Remarkable Life" or "A Stone Among Stones".  My thing was going to be kind of a Carter of Mars riff where a dude goes to sleep and wakes up in a weird new body, in outer space, and has to re-orient himself in order to survive.  Not spectacularly well-conceieved, my concept guttered out after a few pages of TOO MANY narrative captions.  There was no-where to go with it because my core character was, of course, me.

Anyroad.  Concrete:  it's what my foundations were set in.

Dick Tracy: The Complete Dailies & Sundays 1945-47, vol. 10 - written & illustrated by Chester Gould

Dick Tracy: The Complete Dailies & Sundays 1947-48, vol. 11 - written & illustrated by Chester Gould

Concrete Colour Special (1989) - written & illustrated by Paul Chadwick, coloured by Elizabeth Chadwick

Concrete: Eclectica (1993) - written & illustrated by Paul Chadwick, coloured by Elizabeth Chadwick

Dark Horse Presents #16 & 18 (1986) - featuring 'A Sky of Heads' by Paul Chadwick

Dick Tracy: The Complete Dailies & Sundays 1933-1935, vol. 2 - written & illustrated by Chester Gould

the contrary girl strikes, & gutters

youtube is more fun than bowling sober

blogger doesn't like these posts, and who can blame them

OM (or OtM)

My childhood PTSD has led to me being largely unable to remember my very brief time involved in Olympics of the Mind.  It would have been 1982 or 1983, when I was attending Cedar Springs Elementary.  Why was I selected?  Dunno.  I had taken an IQ test, and then a scant month later the school funneled my neurodivergent ass into this program.  It made me miserable because none of my friends were there.

(Mm.  This isn't entirely true.  Jay Phillips was in that class.  Jay was a bright kid, and had extraordinary skill as an artist.  He could draw comics better than anybody my age.  I liked Jay-- but he was the only kid I knew, and he was more plugged into what was happening in that group than I would ever be; he Fit In and the other kids were really into him, whereas I was a weird-shaped peg.)

Anyway I phased myself out.  The organizers didn't ask too hard what was up.  They just shrugged and gave me a certificate.  Which still has Olympics of the Mind printed on it, so my participation must have been before OM had its legal squabble with the Olympics Committee...

I've always looked at this blip in my school history and asked myself what it was about.  But maybe it was simply that the school didn't know what to do with me.  I was pretty boggled and could barely function, some days.  And then I managed to get into some fights, and the school pushed my parents to move me to another district.  Anyhoo.  All that's really sure is I have a piece of paper, and memories of cinderblock rooms without windows, with no rows of desks, and not fitting in even amongst outsiders.

dream - o21626: escapes & avalanches, in no particular order

The dullgreen fluroescent throb of artificial light as I cross the transom.  Every upstairs is a further level.  A whisper of air kisses the arch of my bare foot and I bend to slip free slats of hardwood, revealing yet another stair.  This access narrower and even less lit than the last.  The passage littered with aged newsprint.  Headlines from forgotten papers fluttering like agitated birds in the subgreen.  I hear a rustle, a granular grating of stone against stone, and step backward from the secret passage.  A bricksize rhomboid clatters, redounding off shelving overhead like a pachinko pellet, setting off other avalanches, wrecking surfaces, wrenching brackets free, the whole storage system collapsing in fits of tumbling slats, dust rising and boobytraps raining all 'round.  Looking on the collapsed egress, I sigh.  Siegfried sighs.

"At least we aren't climbing down that."

dream - o2o626: mask off

Traveling with Siegfried through Japan.  Intimate rooms, golden light sprawling into partitioned shadow, across tatami, spilling through ricepaper all the colours of stained glass.  The other guests don't trust my face, and it's easy to see why:  streaming tears, eyes strained by rictus of repression, gasping for breath.  I feel my self-control slipping.  Begin slapping myself.  The blows don't land with any force-- because you can't combat yourself.  I can't, at any rate, the schizoid impulse to destroy my own reflection stutters, dims, all wind going out of the internal storm.  All that's left is sorrow at humiliating Sig, who has to account for my strange behavior in a stranger's home.  The scene recedes in my mind as I wake, shaken.

Walk to Montrose bird sanctuary, thinking the whole thing over.  When I get there, a finch is on a branch, peering at me.  I raise my hand and it flits to light on my fingertips.  Flies off.  Return home feeling better.