beachcleaning / markmaking

Yesterday was an OCD day.  But the basic model kind.  First I took my OCD out on the beach, digging in the dunegrass for cans, scouring the land of all its impacted water bottle caps, and being generally observable by the lazyass patrons as "That guy is cleaning every corner."  Knocked out two full sized garbage bags of rubbish.  Then I took a break to write a while, beginning the Grand Re-Type (as this phase of the process is known) of PROMISELAND, doing five pages.  No major edits, yet.  Then I went back do it, knocking out another bag and taking on a broader swath of greenspace.  After THAT, I went home and started inking.

Inking when I have OCD is one of those things.  Ink is sacred.  Especially when doing brush stuff.  Fucking up is hard on my psyche.  So I try to get the condition "tamed" before doing anything artistic.  Clearly I succeeded, because the brushes behaved and there weren't any hiccoughs of Intent.  As long as the Intent behind the mark-making is pure, the work is true.  But if there's anything hinky going on in my brain things go sideways.  I was cautious, to be sure; mostly the inking was stark bucketfill, with some minor dry brush; I saved the major detail focus for the very end, placing drop shadows and adding weight to elements of the face.

The only lines which may be placed on a Prepared Drawing--  a drawing that's been through all the stages of development, multiple sketches & careful composition  --are lines that Belong.  Lines which "belong" are lines that either emphasize or complete an element of an image.  An eye, for example, may be almost entirely drawn, but if it needs weight or shading along the edges of the eye's orbit (the folds of the lid, say, or defining the planes of the nose & brow) then those should be placed as they are Noticed.  If you see something absent, affix a light stroke in the absence's vicinity.  Affix it where the light source(s) would place it, quickly and by instinct, as light itself does.

This may sound very casual, but it's true:  action's truth is in its invention.  An absence may not be Seen or Noticed until the other ink is placed and cementing itself in the paper.  Absence must be created, as much as anything...  But be cautious: the aim is not to make work, but make work whole.

Casual, shit, this stuff probably sounds Mystical to anyone who doesn't have wrong with their brain what I do, with mine.  Not every drawing winds up like this.  Only the ones my mind deems important.  Sketches, I could give a toss.  Improvisation isn't alien to me.  But some art, it achieves a higher rank in my mind, and must be executed in a certain way.  That's when the rules of behavior start to creep in.  That's when I know the OCDemon is upon me.  The "rules" I have bolded here are not things I consciously think; they are conclusions extracted from an unconscious, semi-conscious, state of null.  The nullity is one of feeling as much as mind.  I do not sit to ink, when under the influence of obsessive-compulsive disorder, unless I am empty of desire.

Which may or may not be 100% true, sometimes.  Because nobody starts working on something serious or "important" without desire of result.  The archer does not notch or loose an arrow without the truth of intent within them.  But are Truth of Intent and Desire of Result mutually exclusive?  I shouldn't think so.  Nothing is mutually exclusive except in chemistry or higher math.  But then, this is not science. this is OCD.  And OCD is groping in the dark with gloves on and a dulled grasp.  I only know what is right, and I am not always right about what is...

Selah.

the burroughs folio: mikey portman

finished the linework.  have to do the brush and fill in blacks but all the fiddly details are done.  and there were a surprising amount of fiddly details.  i gave myself the assignment but i really didn't know what it would entail until the memo landed on my desk, as it were.  i wrote it but i gave myself a WIDE BERTH on how to interpret & depict things.  sometimes that's a bad thing because i wrestled with this illustration an unreasonably long time considering how essentially simple the composition is.  the proportions of the page are awkward, perhaps...  i grow tired of doing the portraits all on this size paper, but i'm nearly through with this damned thing, so i can go on whether i can't go on or not.  it will be liberating to work on other illustrations of different (greater) proportions again.  i never thought of myself as an artist who Works Big but i've grown to truly enjoy having a fuckin' enormous canvas.  everything feels constraining now

the mytho-literary calculus of considering cruising ÷ the dérive = a night journey, or, i am why you hate blogs

(sundry notes regarding queertopian artfaggotry)

panel to panel transitions have been less on my mind as i work increasingly ONLY in single panel images, no longer concerned with greater page or presentation, those variables having been ruthlessly determined to be fixed & beyond my artistic control, so no more really fucking cute games involving page layout or movement of bodies (or directed flow of dialogue) at diagonals intersecting with the Focal Points of BLAH FUCKING BLAH.  the panel is the Non Submersible Unit, just as the sentence is the emotional core of the paragraph, to entirely misquote gertrude stein, bless her dead ass.  you work on each panel equally; no panel takes priority.  every panel is another part of the story.  the only one that was a Big Deal was figuring out the very first image.  once i had that, the rest was flow.  the script is very interesting to me right now as i build it; there's a renewed sense of surprise & invention in the moment-to-moment of my experience as i write.  when the characters surprise me, or do something other than i originally intended, it's always a treat.  when it occurs in an erotic context it's especially intriguing to me, as i generally don't consider myself that inventive or horned-up enough to write Pornography.  sex is a very Literary thing to me, as it's an internal-- or perhaps most aptly --interior state, a state of Being: "outside" of (the bog standard linear perception of) time.  sex is also an artistic thing, a preoccupation bordering on obsession, in how to present it in my art without looking like more of a weirdo than i already am.  i feel judged enough on all number of things:  actually putting my sense of sexuality out there & cojoining it to my artistic impulses, that requires raw courage of the average joe.  i'm not average, or normative, in a great many senses; not because i have outre tastes or behave like a weeaboo-- like that even matters anymore, living as i do in both a culture, and sub-culture, that's too far gone in jerking it publicly to judge nothing ol' me for my dull hangups  --but because i haven't had the experiences (or built up the bank of experience) that the majority of gay men have.  mostly i haven't had the opportunity, or the physical, sexual courage, to celebrate my body or my desires the way most queers my age have.  i have limits, and my hangups are to do with my face.  i want to be exhibitionistic.  i want to be proud of my body, and to show off, and to feel Present and Real in my physical being-- to be myself.  but i can't, because i have the Wrong Face.  i'd like to have pictures taken of myself, to be in videos, to be a cute little freak like all the other cute little freaks up and down my beach, to hang out with my equally fucked up friends and be vain and do the selfie thing and talk endless drama about how hard it is to have a good time and still earn a living selling underwear and whatever...  but i'm not that, and i think that's all well & good but also my brain never shuts off unless i'm fucking or making art or lost IN art or bicycling or maybe exercise, yoga, if i'm lucky, so i can't check out and pretend people give a shit how i look or particularly want to fuck me anyway because i have the Wrong Face.  so i spend a lot of time window shopping, daydreaming, and writing little erotic "skits" that ultimately get refined into parts of stories.  i think they're smutty but i also believe they're good writing for the kind of story i want to tell (ultimately, a positive one), and honest interpretations of human experience.  so yeah, i dunno....  judgy old queen writes litporn instead of giving in to a lifelong urge to behave like a hedonistic ho.  newsflash, or something

point being, thinking about time, pacing, presentation.  the beats of the story.  the music of the experience.  because sex & musicality aren't--  though dancefloor culture would have you believe otherwise  --exclusively driven by beats, and time is queer.  time is queer, in sex, and in how time expresses itself through art; time is a suspension, in comix:  each unit, each panel, considered as a "whole" moment, an integer of time, is a Monad, the nucleus of the atomic circumference of the greater story:  so too is the Self whole, in the heightened awareness of sex that comes from being both embodied and outside concern with restraint or convention or table manners.  not to get all wittgenstein but the world is all that is the case, and if you're in the world, and in the moment, it's all about balance, ultimately.  set, and setting.  i know i overthink shit and i yammer and nobody cares but this is what is always happening, and it's why i make art, and comix, and it's why i blog.  because otherwise these would be the substacks NOBODY WOULD READ, because who needs to read my pseudophilosophical daisy chains anyway.  *i* don't.   (i just keep compulsive notes)

somethings i write in notebooks like this, and brother, the typos would make samuel delany wince because at least he had dyslexia as an excuse

anyway.  where was i.  oh yeah.  the panel.  i spent a long time thinking about dick tracy, this past winter, and it all comes down to the panel.  that box is a microcosmic unit of perfect potential.  i get why the modernists were obsessed with its structural utility.  i've spent most of my life thinking about little boxes, what to put in them, and what order to put them in.  i've gone through a lot of notebooks.  and i'm never gonna be done with filling 'em.  i have been haunted by sequences of squares my whole life, almost as much as i've been haunted by lettering.  i have a pattern seeking mind.  and the panel:  the panel IS the most powerful thing there is.  it can be a page, or multiple pages at once, even as it may only ever be but a sliver of story.  there is an awesome malleability to what may be done with it.  i don't know if i recognized that before my recent meditations on chester gould's art, and comic strip art writ large.  i believe i knew it, that it was in the fundamentals of my toolkit, but i don't believe the fundamental Facts of the art had explained themselves to me, before indulging my OCD and studying the shit out of dick tracy for like four, five months

incidental to that insight, i've always had a fixation on the comix page as being analagous to the architecture of the physical space in a story.  of it being an architectural cutaway of a building, or the dimensions of the panel conforming to the space of a stairwell.  it's a Will Eisner stagecraft thing.  my favourite frank miller comix make use of the conceit.  everybody lauded the hawkguy comic for doing it, everybody loves it when frank quitely does it...  it's a real boss move, taking the little boxes and using them to capture the feeling of bodies moving through a Lived Space.  you see where i'm going with all this stuff, right?

the erotic potential of cities, capturing life in little boxes, putting it all on array like windows in a building and building the story pane by pane, glimpse by glimpse.  lighting the windows the right way, so you can find your way back to them, to stare in again, and marvel at life & how it is lived, in all its curious detail

i'm nearly done re-reading dhalgren, and it's been extraordinarily useful to me, on the heels of rereading 'the screwball asses', in re: the whole queertopia thing.  our experience of society, and of social spaces, and natural spaces, and shared spaces...  all very much on my mind.  plus i have this whole Very Gay beach right next door to me, and the lights tend to be off in the park a lot.  the city has a lot to say about the human condition beyond being horny, of course.  but it's nice to recognize the positive, in life as much as in art & one's experience of it, and i have not spent nearly as much of my fifty years on this planet as i would have liked, being happy about being a gay man, and liking men.  men have not done much to make this world pleasant, these past fifty years.  i find i empathize perhaps too well with the amoral Kid at the center of dhalgren.  i get where delany was at when he wrote it.  he was very conflicted about the world that produced him.  i do not feel dissimilar.  but i do find joy in this life: an extraordinary amount: and i believe i have found the means & the medium by which to express it.  which is also where i think delany was, when he wrote dhalgren (and the book(s) that dhalgren contains-- beause, as a container, it refers to notes towards a modular calculus, which is a structural conceit within delany's corpus which contains all of neveryon + trouble on triton).  

boxes within boxes within boxes

(it just ends there)

Tracing Gould - o1o

“That’s the sex that passes the censor, squeezes thru between the bureaus, because there is always a space between, in popular songs and Grade B movies, giving away the basic American rottenness, spurting out like breaking boils, throwing out gobs of that un-D.T.* to fall anywhere and grow into some degenerate cancerous life-form, reproducing a hideous random image.”

* [un-differentiated tissue]

 

Exit the kid's stuff.  Enter Jenn Pennfield:  who, with her toontown leer, could be first cousin to Betty Boop.  There hasn't been much spiciness since year one, with the gratuitous Tess Trueheart bubble bath--  I'm sure Gould blushed at the Tijuana bible going around, preoccupied as he seemed to be by rearing Dick Tracy Jr.  --.but there's a hellzapoppin amount of of lingerie & boudoir stuff going on in this kid's adventure strip now.  And catfights.  Keep it classy, Dick!

You nasty mans.

No wonder Dick Tracy Junior ran off with Starfire and started the New Teen Titans.

"Think Clean Thoughts, Chum."  Batman smirks over his shoulder at the confounded Jason Todd--  in german, tod means "death"; in morguetalk, T.O.D. is an acronym for time of death  --as young Robin gawps at demigod Diana sauntering in her star-spangled bikini toward Superman's Fortress of Solitude.

Sex, that world behind the world:  The Fortress of Solitude--  stolen wholesale from Doc Savage, and used, like Savage, as a weapons cache, a cabinet of curiosities, a lair for speculation  --hidden at a northern, arctic remove--  north being in many traditions, the land of the dead  --only accessible through interlacing an immense lock & key.  Only Superman can open that door.  Or Alfred Jarry's Supermale.

And what rough beast, its keyholder shredding contract to nofap

edges towards Tijuanabible.org to be horned?

Although I've got to say, it's rare I see Tracy bricked up for anything other than machine-gunning racketeers.  Sex is that side of things you don't really see represented in Tracy's psyche.  He cares about puzzles and protecting orphans and solving murders, and maybe he gets off on the death traps-- we're all grown-ups here, if it takes being tied by the neck to a burning log to get you off, hey, we don't kinkshame.  So long as it's consenting!  Dick Tracy doesn't seem to have one of those nonconsensual consent kinda minds.  Unlike Tess.

 

The Jazz age indeed.

I'm not just posting this in celebration of the o1o that tops the page:  I'm posting this because it's entirely possible that THIS IS GOULD.  There are a lot of Tijuana Bibles featuring Dick Tracy, but this is the only one that has all the earmarks of the style & general linework.  It's the cartooning of Gould, and the lettering, and the word bubble format & placement...  The storytelling, the "action", etc.  I've not seen any Dick Tracy tijuana bible that could pass for the man, except for this.  I'm really given to wonder.

If it wasn't him, then maybe an art assistant?  Did Gould have art assistants before 1950, and Dick Lochner?

Anyway.  What were we talking about?

 

 

Oh yeah, "action".

Well, let's stop calling this entirely an essay.  There's obviously some journaling in the mix.  The Gould Thing that you've been listening to, for nine episodes-- or not, and no-one could blame you, least of all the poor bastard who has to inhabit this skull --is also Research into how to reverse-engineer a webcomic out of my obsessions with science fiction, and sex, and william s. burroughs, and clive barker, and michael moorcock, etc. --and the mechanics of how to machine a slow strange sprawling fucker like that out, especially now, in this era where any content goes.  God help who-ever reads it, but I want to write & draw a cautionary queertopia, and I'd like to use the daily strip format to explore it.  Sex should be part of the exploration, I firmly believe.  But drawing sex, lighting sex, framing sex, staging sex...  That's difficult business.  Not for the faint of hard.

It intrigues me to speculate, today, that Chester Gould authored one of his own tijuana bibles.  He's the only one who credibly could, I think.  So yeah.  Filing this here:

Eddie Campbell made porn, Carla Speed McNeil made porn, Alan Moore reinvented himself as a pornographer, and my husband makes the cutest smut, too.

It's only lines on paper, folks!

mirroring the internet

As usual I'm awake at 4am.

Can't sleep, so over to the comix shelf--  even though the main research book checked out is due in 3 days.  I can't do research first thing in my day.  I pluck 'Mirror Mirror' vol. 1; mainly to browse the Connor Willumsen strips toward the end of the volume.  They're really fascinating works of comix.  Maybe the best works of comix to incorporate / contemplate the internet-in-relation-to-self I can think of, next to '2oo1'.  The internet's not a thing I want in my comix, generally.  I'd be happy if the 'net weren't in film, but fat fucking chance of separating the two at this juncture.  I'm not a fan of the internet.  I had my own contretemps with separating my sense of self from blogging, a decade ago.  I don't want fame, and I don't want the majority of people to have access to me.  So these strips by Willumsen, 11 in all, speak to what I feel like the-space-that-isn't is about.

Because that's what the internet it, what cyberspace is:  it's a space that defines itself, in (absent) relation to the sphere of the individual.  The 11 strips by Willumsen cover all the probable permutations of self Connor could conceive of; where the Self touches the Screen, and where it evades & elides contact.

At least that's how I define these strips.  They're very spare, meditative pieces, drawn as iconographically as possible; there aren't even any full-on Faces in the strip, strictly ikons representing eye & ear & mouth.  Each page in the series bears a central window, a digital notepad file, printed onto tracing paper & superimposed atop the 9-panel comic window Willumsen uses to explore / manifest the written / poetic content.  The strips begin with a meditation on The Body (point of origin & departure for The Self) and run through a series of explorations of where 'net & self contact one another, concluding with a meditation on Time, as in time spent, the current of time, the currency of time-as-capital, the Waste of time.

Inasmuch as any of it's Waste(d).  It's only waste if it's not capitalized on, right?  Material conditions and all that.  If the material conditions of the Self are the body, what is the body, when you're talking about the internet?  You're talking representation.  Connor represents the Self as rituals of self-embodiment, self-improvement, self-care, self-awareness.  His self is rendered into abstractions, filtered thru comix, using technical tricks to express emotion & intellect.

These comix aren't just meditations by the artist:  they're for audiences to meditate ON, and so they're superbly suited to the format of Mirror Mirror, which (for Connor's contributions, particularly) mimics-or-mirrors gallery space.  Gallery space is one of those wild theoretical states of being that belongs up there with Hilbert Space.  Fuck, gallery space might as well BE Hilbert Space.  Mirror Mirror #1 is a theoretical interior space for the appreciation of where comix & art collide, collaborate, cohabitate.  Connor's strips are presented one at a time, on the right, faced by a blank-- the comix face out, facing us, when the book is open, and are closed against Nothing, blanks where (perhaps) biographical data relating to the art / artist might be placed, spaces where information could be placed, blanks for the studious to annotate within, gaps for vandals to scrawl across.

Connor doesn't come to any "solid" conclusions in these 11 strips.  The artist contemplates their body, then the Space they've chosen to put their mind into, the Screens we filter thru, the Representational Reality we are ruled by / against (photographs, for instance), the representational geometrical abstractions produced by the coding & overcoding of Self & Internet-image, the conceptual Fog it all emerges out of & recedes into, et al.  The materials Willumsen uses to express it all waver between representational (a Scan of a Transparency of a Printout of a Window) and manifest (the tracing paper wavers, is wrinkled, becomes occluded by excess of imagery, overlaid) and the resulting Waveform never collapses into Fact or Fallacy, in spite of, perhaps in triumph over, the artist's misgivings about the medium.

Blah, blah, blah.  These 11 strips--  the only Connor Willumsen in my comix library, point of fact  --are another one of those works of Art that keeps pulling me back in.  Like '2oo1', it's a comic about the internet, kinda:  it's about how comix end up on the internet, and WHY they end up tatted across that vast numinous & honestly kinda gross bathroom wall we all stare for minutes? hours? every day.

I try not to insert the internet in my comix.  Only one of the five books I've been working on even admit the existence of this-thing-you-are-using-to-read-now.  I've resisted the internet most of my life.  It started with Bulletin Board Systems back in the dial-up days of '93; since then I've crashed out and committed e-suicide several times: nuked one blog after another, yanked my art from the server racks of friends, bailed on lifetime accounts with Flickr & Librarything, and essayed virtual leagues outta my general way to avoid social media tar-pits like Myspace, Facebook & Xitter.  I've only had the internet in my pocket for, like, maybe seven years total, and only ever on a flip-phone because fuck the illusion of Access, man.  My current flip-phone doesn't even have a functional browser.  It's bliss!

I still pay my phone bill in person.

Anyway, here we are, at 6:38am--  did it really take all that time to pile all those thoughts there, like a bunch of mismatched socks?  --having learned very little about Connor Willumsen or Connor's art, much less me, because by some perverse twist you (of all people!) are reading a text-heavy blog, authored by an oldfag with organic brain damage & cognitive issues.  Mirror Mirror #1 sits on the kitchen table, to my left, shut, Connor's comix closed on themselves.  To my right, a stack of sketchbooks & pencils & erasers, topped with some pithy post-its about projects forthcoming & in process.  Nothing legible.

It looks a little like this:

It looks very little like life.

xtinction agenda - final stretch

final graytones.  going to plug this fucker in gimp & see if i can turn it into colour, now

that'll do, pig, that'll do...

Azure Pantry / the Burroughs Folio - Kiki (2)

firehose of thoughts commences:

inking now, foundational fine linework.  taking it slow.  i like this face.  as before, i don't know that this is a good likeness of the historical kiki.  but i think he's my version of the character.  he's got the chin.  he's got the hair, the posture.  i think i can see how he carries himself.  been re-reading the kiki chapter and it's going to be a pleasure to draw.  quite pleased w/ how the whole Folio reads, as a unified piece.  i've built three discrete Books that talk to each other but may be read in any order; there is no determining chronology to the way the Burroughs Folio / Azure Pantry / Denizen may be read.  and that's a hell of a thing i hadn't thought of before:  between this & my Tarot, i'm building two comic books that may be read out of order, in any order.  (i've mentioned my crackpot theory about the tarot & comix, right?  that the tarot is just a bunch of comix panels with no chronological order other than that which the Reader imposes?)  anyway, that's what life is like when you're an artfag.  sometimes you don't know that you're doing something new.  i guess it's on to eyes next, then hands, then background

pee ess:  i hate having a fucked up foot.  i am going stir crazy

 

(some lines later)

 

this is a grayscale, so you can't see that the cloudlines are in blue, but anyhoo.  the eyes furned out okay.  the right hand is fine.  i still have to figure out how to make the left work; that's been the problem for days now.  if all goes well, maybe i'll get some inking in today (thursday, now) and that'll firm this whole thing up so i can stop neurotic-ing over things people do not, cannot, perceive

eddie campbell (or, "the mission and the meaning of the mission (is comix)")

Has always been an influence on me, before I even knew who he was.  I knew Bacchus, first, as a teenage reader of Dark Horse Presents, and only cottoned onto the artist behind that mad saga much, much later, on the far side of a chasm where my teen years are housed, half-recalled & water damaged...  and even further, realize that I had seen Eddie's LINE in cognito, in collaboration, endlessly, with other artists hither & yon, from when he was doing the 80s indy scene.  I still pick up scraps from those years today.  I'm probably the only Eddie Campbell reader in Chicago with a copy of the Ace Rock'N'Roll Club.

Chi's a pretty cool town.  A few months ago my husband, who's only read what Eddie Campbell I've shown him*

* Single page strips that endlessly amuse me from his Alec archive of self-reflection, mainly to do with home life, anecdotes & Real Life stuff, which is about as far from Bacchus as it gets.  I was into Eddie first for his fantasy, but in the long view the only Bacchus I have these days is the colour special he did with Teddy Kristensen painting the whole thing, and it's SIGNED by Eddie, which wasn't even a thing I sought; I got it by accident, off an ebay purchase 10 years ago that I only permitted myself--

(the control on my addiction to comix, y'see, was only letting myself buy comix i found In The Wild, in stores or in random nooks in bookshops, little free libraries, library book sales, yard sales, etc--  NO INTERNET PURCHASES, was the hard line up until covid came knocking.  now i control my addiction with an ingrained sense of poverty & the fragility of life & the Transience of All Things, since i have rebuilt my entire comix collection Three Separate Times in my life and have had three near-death experiences.  this, the third collection, is the last one.  the final cut, if you like, the hard edit on what i think the best & most influential comix of my life.  this is the library that survived, and i will pass on, as an inheritance, to someone whom i hope shall not squander the precious knowledge entombed therein.  if you can grok these books you have everything you will ever need to put lines to paper for yourself, guaranteed)

--an ebay purchase which I only permitted myself because my last copy of the Bacchus Colour Special, aka 'The Bottle' got lost, somehow, in my move to the 405 4th studio, where I undertook teaching myself how to make comix all over again as I sweated it out night after night in a dirt bar that also happened to have the best damn pool tables in Atlanta.

We could have a conversation about Eddie Campbell, and comix, and how Eddie's comix have guided me as a person about as much as Grant Morrison influenced my pop cultural adoration of metafiction & the intellectual, literary gameplay comix could result in, etc, insert endless name-dropping cocklobbering daisy chain of hero worship here [goatse.cx]

Short version is, Eddie influenced me as an Ahhhrtist as much as on the human, literary, level as any scots bastard ever.  Eddie is a player in the comix marketplace on the level of the heavies, has been his whole life (even when he thinks / thought otherwise) and his sense of line & his bravery as a scribbler are second to bloody none.  I love him for his abstraction, his carefully chaotic swings at using two values to represent kalaidoscopes of colour; for being a Colour Artist & fine painter who learned how to do every bit of that in Black & White, in minute abstracted & rigorously swiftly & beautifully resolved experiments in what an artist can do with tiny boxes, lines on paper, & the interaction of word / image.  

He's the real goddamned goods, and better at Talkin' Art than Scott bloody McCloud & Eisner & who else is there, really, when you're talking heavies, because Eddie Campbell is also old as fuck and I express this as someone freshly old as fuck, and at least as experienced with the ups & downs of bar life, hanging with total poolroom genius wasters...  Minus, perhaps, the extra 30,000 miles of wear on SOMEbody's liver.  Who were we talking about again?

We could have a conversation about Eddie Campbell.  But then I'd have to apologize for biting his style, above.  And I do like that picture, despite all the terribly critical biting things I might could venture--  the fact that I can't mimic Eddie's lettering b/c it's mostly done w/ crowquill nib & i am not lettering with anything other than a felt tip, fuck ya'll very much, i DID my time cleaning nibs & lettering with them and eff all that fine motor control, son, because i possess it no longer  --I do think it's a good likeness, Eddie Campbell to the life, and I was barely trying.

The zip-a-tone really makes it.  Letraset, little black sticky dotty things, whatever you gotta call it.  My favoured brand was Letraset.  They went outta business in the states; I think they merged with a Japanese backer & in some form persist there today, largely kept afloat by the manga industry.  But enough anecdotal, shoppy meanders.  The zip-a-tone is what makes it. 

 

The zip-a-tone is mainly why I thought to post this, today.  This zip-a-tone was given to me by my mother, and may date to her stock from pasting up newspaper adverts for the [Dogwater] Star, her hometown newspaper.

This stuff aged like finest vinegar, as you can see-- it's brittle & doesn't want to stay adhesed to anything other than other acetate; it's gotten that lovely yellow you get from decayed spirit gum that's had exposure to a surface easily affected by humidity (such as xerox paper).  It's fascinating stuff.  You can get lovely moire patterns from it by layering, as demonstrated here.  You can scratchboard it with an exacto to create nifty photorealist gradiants...  Zip-a-tone is the BOMB.  Eddie was, to me, the expert with this shit; at a certain point in an artist's life you collect these obscure scraps & they become precious.  I think Eddie ran out a few years ago; like, within the last administration.  He had that much!

I gave my collection of my mother's letratone... 

--gathered over the decades & only slightly supplied by me, as when I first ran away from home I bought up all the stock there was to be had in Auburn, and their people didn't even know they HAD it:  tucked away on shelves only accessibly by footstool.  I recognized the logo and had to ask someone to get it down.  They sold me the entire batch for two twenties.

Girl at the counter didn't even know what it was.  She asked why I would spend so much money.

Most of that letratone got used by me & my art partner, Josiah, over the late 90s & early 2000s as we both tried & flailed to get noticed / published / do it ourselves, a la Sim, in fucking Auburn, Alabama, then Richmond, Virginia.  We probably picked the wrong time to do any of this, because clearly we caused 9/11.

Anyway, after all the carcinogens died down and nobody knew who or what we were bombing or who we were putting bags over the heads of, the art partnership came to a mutually conciliatory divorce and I was on my own, in Atlanta, and after 4am I would finish cleaning up the daily spills and leave my coworkers to the afterparty, go home & practice making comix.

"...instead of bitching" (#41) was a simple exercise in grinding out a windowpane.  I figured, three panels, three art styles as near as can be imitated, using only felt-tip & ink & a blunt / rough brush.  No laming out with markers on the shading like I had been, where the graytones had almost become a crutch & my linework was suffering.  I think that was the motivation, as near as I can recall.  Eddie's not the panel I'm most proud of-- that would be the Brandon Graham pastiche, where I got his line DOWN; the Carla Speed McNeil imitation is half-rate & too busy, and I don't care for my bald spot in panel 1 at all; it's a terrible composition & unless you knew from previous strips you'd have no idea that there was a bare lightbulb on a weird articulated arm of entwined plastic lei flowers on my desk, nor that that was what that was meant to be.  

Anyway, yeah:  for a while my desk just had a fucking light bulb directly over my head.  Which would be ironic because during this phase of my life I was not particularly creative nor bright.  I knew why I & Josiah had failed, and it wasn't because of Jo.  It was probably because of the unresolved homosexual attraction, unrecognized on my part, happily, because if I'd known I'd had a thing for him we wouldn't have partnered up to make comix in the first place.  We weren't very good at it, generally, we were enthusiastic amateurs.

I mean, my enthusiasm had to be pretty boundless, in those days, because I ran away from home to Make Comix, the way some idiots run away from home to become Rock Stars, or Join Circuses, or Go L.A.-- I mean, there's me, Al Columbia & Brandon Graham, there's gotta be other malformed idiots who started this way.  There I was--  holy shit, there I still am, in my memory palace: the comic shop I used to brazenly steal from back in 97, the one that got burned out for the insurance money; there I am, idly nudging the char from a roof support with my duct-taped jump boot  --rifling through quarter bins back when there .25 bins were a thing, bruh, and there was Eddie Campbell, this fuckin' internationally recognized comix artist whose rep I mainly knew anecdotally, through copies of Amazing Heroes or 'From Hell' hitting Taboo, or... 

Wait, this Campbell cat, didn't he do Bacchus, in Dark Horse Presents?  Did I already say that?

Hey, I think I forgot to finish a sentence, back there.  I gave my mother's collection of letratone, to which I'd also contributed, to my husband.  Kind-of not-really as an engagement present.  It's an heirloom.  Y'know.

Since this endlessly nested reverie has (at last!) reached the weed-fogged borders of Old Beardy's Ideaspace, I suppose it's appropriate to re-visit this cameo by Moore, whom I dreamt dropped into my first "apartment".  (really just a single room, converted motor hotel space that flooded annually; an apartment I inherited from the only other terminal nerd I knew in Auburn, a total loser named Shakin' Blake who creeped on teen girls & eventually got kicked out for not being able to pay rent on that shithole because he'd lost his job at KFC, so him & his Billy Idol cds and his reeking mildewed collection of longboxes--  Shakin' Blake, James, in case you're still reading, is who I blame for my knowledge of 90s GL  --got chucked into the street, so I inherited: a fridge that did a cool imitation of a block of ice; an air conditioner which drooled, loudly; a disgusting sink; and an oven that never worked)  First "apartment" i ever paid rent on, the first lease to ever bear my name.  Bulldozed immediately after I moved out, December 31st of 1999.

That was the first studio I made comix in, and that's where Josiah made his first comix.  You can see it in the first panel:

Not terribly well-drawn, but the compositions work.  It's early in the Greetings from Crooked Corner run of autobio comix that I shan't bore you further with, as they are crap.  But yeah.  Eddie fuckin' Cambell figured heavily in my appreciation of the form, as much as this beardy ol' fucker with his lugubrious Northampton drawl.  I first experienced their work together in that apartment.  It's in some annex of the memory palace, maybe a hallway over from the Big Wreck that rattled my chronology.  Pretty sure I must have been listening to Moore's spoken word performances around the time I had this dream.  The Birth Caul is my favourite thing either Campbell or Moore have done, collaboratively, after From Hell.  It's a magnificent bit of work, especially as a Single Issue of Comix, which is most definitely not what it began as.

Eddie MADE that thing, two-handedly wrestling Moore's marijuana free-associative flight into such robost, sculptural shape.  It's a massive bit of comix-as-art and it's philosophically chewy in a way I find only Eddie Campbell really delivers, for me, at the end of the day.  He gets how people think, and talk, and how it all sort-of ties together.  "Memory is a big ol' plate of soup," as Campbell once endearingly put it.

I'm starting to get what he means.

So it was a pretty wild thing when my husband--  hey, did you remember where originally I left off?  half of fuckin' Anna Karenina ago?  blitherin' in my infuriatingly dissociated way about showing Siegfried some of Campbell's Alec comix?  --my husband attended CAKE, two months ago (the altcomix expo here in Chi, apologies for all the stumbly parantheticals, it's just my style, which is why I don't make autobio comix, it's the sorta thing only works in standup or blogging) because he's scouting for next year & our table there.  Did I mention we're doing that?  We're doing that.  And who does he stumble into?

Siegfried comes home & asks, "Eddie Campbell makes comics."  And I'm like "That's not a question."

Sig says, "Yeah.  He was just walking around, chilling."  And I'm like "Apropos of being fucking cool."

Anyway.  Eddie.  Man.  Don't get me started.

We could have a conversation.

this india ink is a quarter century old

 

workdesk: a s'update

It's my blog, and I'll walltext if I want to.

Today I don't want to.  Finished the inks & tones on Merrick, the elephant man portrait, and am quite happy with it.  Putting it in the pile to make prints from.  Have my buddha / owl piece out, and did some touchup on tones today.  It's ready to go, too.  Nearly done with 'Chirality', a piece that's been some eight years in development, one terrible sketch & rendition after another.  But I got it right, this time.  I'm proud of it.  Not a thing I say often, if at all.

It's a time for completing work & clearing the desk.  I'm taking time off work to build the art pile.  Took a shot in the teeth with a cutting board today, so that's yet another injury at this gig.  So far I've had my scalp split open, the back of my drawing hand seared, and my bottom lip split & bruised.  I associate this job almost entirely with physical endurance & weariness leading to accidents.  The raise I'm due in May better be significant.  The hospital's already handed me off to the bill collectors: before sending me a bill.

Otherwise, re-reading scripts.  Doing thumbnails.  Thinking about Promiseland.  Working slowly on tarot.

Reading the christ outta comic books.  My reading list for March has turned into a motherfucker.  In lieu of new posts I just revise & add to the 'Wuxtry' list.  Keeps things simpler, and makes me feel less like a blogosaurus wanx.  Though after a while I'm not sure what to say, or who I'm talking to.  The eternal wangst of the internet addict...

today, in ink: merrick

 

on lynch

Twin Peaks meant the world to me when I was trapped out in the woods halfway up a hill in a geodesic dome with stone floors and a handmade spiral staircase and my mother was kinda spooky, like Sarah Palmer, and I was a closeted gay kid getting outed in high school and I was afraid for my life because my father was my abuser, and we had a doppleganger thing going with our resemblance.  So, y'know.  I felt the whole Laura Palmer thing.  I felt it hard.  I felt all the dumb highschool strung-out highjinx where you're out at night trying to cope with the first real deaths & tragedies you are going to come to know in a long line of them.  I felt like Twin Peaks described my small backwater where daughters were being molested by their fathers right next door, and everybody at church knew about it, and the cops let the daughter leave town with a suitcase after the family turned up shotgunned in the early morning.  I watched Twin Peaks religiously, like the rest of america, and I felt like it was talking about the forces that pulled a trigger and woke me in the absolute dark to gawp out the window at the little sallow house on the corner, listening to a wild agonized shriek fading fast.  I looked at Leland Palmer and I didn't see a man even remotely like my father, and knew the violence between us was wholly dissimilar from what happened to Laura, but I identified nonetheless because teenage kids everywhere live in terror of violence in the home.  I saw Lynch talking about america with a little a.

 

I bought the Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, of course, and when I finally ran away from home, it was snug in my backpack, right alongside Dale Cooper: My Life, My Tapes, and my microcassette recorder.

David Lynch is not the kindest or most elegant artist to attempt to describe the emotional violence of such circumstances.  His productions are not always what you would desire in terms of representation or sensitivity, and the male gaze is inescapable.  But he understood how deeply awful and weird and inexplicable human beings are.  His contributions to pop culture television trash & the metaphysics of soap opera existence aside, he's meant a whole hell of a lot to me creatively.  He understood music and sound in a way that spoke profoundly to me.  He made beautiful and terrifying melodrama with the soul of a painter.  He made the artistic life & the artistic process seem accessible & even desirable, as a form of self-expression, healing & therapy.  And he made some funny comix, too.  I liked his drawings especially, his use of black and white, his minimalist fixations in design.  He was a pleasure to watch creating art, or furniture, or sculptural paintings for installation; a delight to spy on, on set, in creative on-the-fly modifications to a shoot.  He inspired me throughout my life, and some of my forever favourite film experiences came from sticking with him:  Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, INLAND EMPIRE, Wild At Heart.  I love that he got to perfect some of his favourite shots & compositions & concepts from Dune and he snuck 'em into season 3 episode 8.  Even at the end he was hail mary-ing ways to express his vision with fine-tuned control & zero compromise.  He pulled off every stunt.

The man had a particular vision, and did his damnedest every time.  I will miss you, man I never met.

typical

 

dangit, paper!

 

you might be asking yourself why in the name of horus am i using a ticonderoga, a lumber pencil, to refine my sketchy-ass linework & demented anatomy.  because it's a broad, dense lead that you can carve into a useful shape, and the lead works well with bristol board.  same essential reason as why i use felt-tips, and brushes: the necessity of a tool with a variable line width.  you can turn a standard pencil lead on its side and maybe achieve the ticonderoga's line-thickness: but i don't have to alter my grip or turn the pencil sideways to achieve the effect.  all i have to do is rotate the pencil and the line widens.  it's a very easy and intuitive thing that allows you to modulate your line width, you just shift forefinger and thumb and boom, wide.  so that's why the ticonderoga, which i'll be the first to admit, is a clumsy-feeling implement to hold.  it's like trying to pencil with a ruler, at first.  the hand is accustomed to cylindrical implements so the rectangular pencil is a li'l weird.  but it's well worth it.  i call it a "lumber pencil" because that's how i was introduced to them.  my dad used them all the time, and i'm pretty sure he drew up the schematics for building the geodesic dome we lived in using a ticonderoga.  it's just what you have handy.  and they're hard as hell to break.  that's another bonus.  traveling with them there's less chance the lead will have snapped because you threw your bookbag too hard or something.  the body of a ticonderoga takes temper tantrum exhibitions of strength to break

on frank miller (a.k.a. the greatest punk song ever cut to vinyl is the final 85 seconds of "by you" by fugazi)

been thinking about frank miller a lot lately

there was a very punk thing manifesting through that dumb kid

a very punk, reactionary, inherently conservative thing that couldn't understand anyone who wasn't a white man angry at the near-certainty of dying in cities made terrible by mutant hands

i mean why did i like repo man.  why am i a nearly-fifty gay punk who got the ethos behind the jokes in a movie that is 99% joke*, but didn't understand why the jokes were funny.  why was i so dissociated & damaged by violence in the home that i didn't get why the "real" punks in the movie are so fucking funny.  you have to be a punk in this fucking world, because how can you be comfortable in the skin you were born in, in america?  the only way you can be comfortable being defined by this oppressively dumb, barely sentient lumbering Thing calling itself society is through complacency & sedation

* the remaining 1% is a sincerity pure & intense as boomslang venom spat in your eye.  that is why i liked repo man, by the bye.  because it Believes the shit it talks, to your face, as it smiles like harry dean stanton fingering a straight razor

(listen i never promised your a primrose path of seagues.  just keep reading & pretend i'm not here)

i've never read anything that said frank miller saw repo man but i mean christ, look at frank when he's firing on all cylinders as a satirist.  'give me liberty' is as punk & anarchic as any alex cox movie.  the Whole of a frank miller project is never as great as its opening chapter.  i think we can all agree on that:  the martha washington book miller & gibbons death-marched to conclusion does not interest me as a work of fiction because frank really wanted to write a dave sim length essay on (of all people) ayn randian theories and YAWN, man

but that opening salvo, 'give me liberty', was as fucking punk as it gets, and it's magnificent comix, and it's miller giving alan moore the business, and it's the stadium rock equivalent of listening to fugazi live in the snow on their fourth encore and the people who were there were fucking living the music, believe

[lest you fail to identify my synesthesiac tendencies i consider elektra: assassin one of the finest cyberpunk novels i've ever gobbled.  so maybe i feel art more strongly & specifically than most ordinary people who weren't deeply traumatized.  i experience music.  there's no other way to say it.  every time i hear one of  my favorite songs i am forever hearing some part of it anew because the experience is new and i'm still playing that track, motherfucker]

anyway.  i'm never going to assemble all these notes in one place & edit them into a cogent slab because who cares, on the internet.  i'd rather make art & think about art & blither about it where & when-ever i feel like it, because i've survived death three times & once it was nearly at the hands of my dad.  i've earned the right to not give a fig about brevity.  and i think frank the tank is a guy i need to thank, cringe as his name goddamned be.  he's just as fuckin' bad as dave sim and has just as many weird sins to answer for, and i say this counting alan moore's name also in the lot, because they're all popular artists, and i hold my favorite creators' feet to the fire all the time no matter the medium.  i've kept a list of who was naughty & who was nice & who can be considered an architect of the present moment because these sumbitches have been shaping popular imagination for decades, baby.  and frank's a fuckup, first & foremost, so his work has produced a fuckoff bevvy of idiots who in time came to shape conservative tendencies in young white men

insert existential drawn-out heaving sigh here

but frank's a great artist, no matter whether i think his linework has irreparably deteriorated or not, because he's made some Great Art, and chapter one of the dark knight returns is an excellent 48-page graphic novella that's < the dark knight returns as a whole, which is a very clumsy book.  ronin is a fucking excellent graphic novel from start to finish; there's no up-and-down to the tone that fucks up what miller's doing.  it's mathematically perfect in its pacing.  it's assured, it's practiced, it's stadium rock...  yet i'd rather read the first chapter of the dark knight returns, any given day, because it is a perfect batman story that shoulda been an annual or one of those "elseworlds" prestige format things DC started squatting out

and what the fuck is punk about batman, anyway?  what in the name of balls has happened to this meander of sentences since i first typed the words "there is a very punk thing" about young frank miller.  i dunno.  but there's something there, because miller had batman become King Of The Punks in his weird dumb superhero comic about an aging son of old money dressing up in armor to bruise superman's jaw, and frank miller identified with the blank angry irony of sid vicious's swastika fetish, and frank miller was a dumb white kid who got the crap scared out of him when early 80s new york beat him up & took his money.  he very nearly wound up being a victim in a mike hammer book, chewed up and covered in filth--  or at least he clearly felt that way, and as a lifelong violence survivor i can totally empathize what's it's like, living in terror, so no surprise when the guy who barely held it together after getting robbed saw the twin towers fly apart, no surprise That Guy turned into a really embarrassing coked-out uncle and started drawing supercrude bat-fantasies about killing saddam with his hands & his love (of america)

but still: there's that punk Thing.  because the dark knight strikes again is as tonally weird as tdkr, and it's goddamned beautifully abused by lynn varley, at the other end of a creative partnership that i'll never quite comprehend because creeping jesus, imagine having sex with the dude who considered himself the physical inspiration behind 'that yellow bastard'?  the confidence to draw himself as the main monster in his best "hard-boiled" book, that's fuckin' Punk

and the way frank miller drew Ben Grimm, recently? 

punk as fuck

and anyway when i say i've been thinking about frank miller a lot lately usually it's for the pacing & all that "writing" jazz--  and what the fuck is writing when it's done by re-arranging a literal wall of post-it notes?  don't answer that  --but in this instance it's i've been thinking about frank miller a lot because i really used to admire his artwork even though it's ugly & there's never been anything sensual about his line, his lines had this Energy.  and i know that energy wasn't all caffeine and booze and coke

the energy was punk.  it's for-sure there.  it's a guy who was making some of the best comix of his young life and survived getting robbed by new york at the same time as a pandemic is destroying the city and reagan's in office & that fer shure meant we were all gonna eat a nuke.  so fuck it, fam, clamber in my chevy malibu & let's bang.  the line of a repo man is always intense

what does OCD mean (to me)

a variety of things, but let's concentrate on the making of lines on paper tonight:

 

basically i have to create marks implying patterns. the markmaking itself is the compulsive process expressing itself, and everything you see being drawn isn't "planned"-- there are sketch versions of the regions i'm drawing in this illustration, but there's no visual referents or guidelines for the foliage / moss / tree bark i'm penciling. the faking of the texture itself is the compulsion: i have to, i don't know... put the lines where they are meant to go. which you can only know by expressing the mark? which is some zen bullshit and this is why i try not to talk

sorry i ain't no ///max///headroom/// [ . . . memory, brain trauma, near death experience & other mysteries of the creative process . . . ]

i hate needing to explain who i am in order to explain what i am which is a total headcase

i can't just say "artist" because i taught myself to do this stuff so i could hold myself together

but i want to be part of this world, so i blog as best & as bravely as i am able because holy shit

this world is not nice & is extra hard on everyone & especially brains

today's blogisode:  sorry i ain't no ///max///headroom///

my tarot - XV - the imp

xv - imp

Short for Impetus.  I do not believe in the devil.  Full stop.

Let's start with the devil.

I had an unconventional upbringing: consequently I possess a peculiarly personal conception of magic that needn't concern you in depth, suffice to say I do not believe in magick, Crowley or all the freaky racist gibberish baked into western occult traditions.  I don't believe in Ghod or the judeo-christian schema ruling every moment of our shitty little American microcosm like some weird judgmental micromanaging cuck, perched in the corner of everybody's lives, scornfully disapproving, dick in hand.

And I don't believe in the devil, either.

But I do believe in the material existence of spiritual evil.  Just not the way the rest of this frankly insane country does.  And I do believe in magic-- &, weirdly --I DO believe in god: as the organizational principle that keeps our atoms dancing to ever more complex arrangements of weird tunes.  So when I undertook re-creating & re-interpreting the Rider-Waite deck, I wanted to preserve the Spirit and overall composition of Pamela Coleman-Smith's work, with her intricately theatrical staging & all the little narrative suggestions which make tarot so compellingly suggestive, as a storytelling vehicle, constantly hinting, like panels in a comic strip cut up & re-ordered.

I saw a number of ways to address all these concern, here, in the Imp card.  

Because the Impetus is not the devil.  But he is.  I don't believe in Sssatan, but satanism, if treated like surrealism, or communism, any sticky -ism you can name, satanism illuminates some specific issues--  let's say, classical themes  --which even a novice tarot reader might find germane.  (Today, of all days!)

There are a few details to finish in the art, here.  The gradiants in the far background and the final touches of flame.  But otherwise, personally?  I think it's the devil to the tee.  The Imp looks nothing like Pamela-Smith's devil card, and is one of the only ones to have been so thoroughly & completely  retooled.  But I think it's honest to her intentions, and I like to believe she would have approved of my efforts.

This guy was designed the year before covid hit.  I borrowed from the loteria deck for the wardrobe on the gender archetypes, as well as the left-side devil face, hoof & chicken leg--  el catrin, la dama, & el diablito, respectively.  The right-facing mask of Lucifer (if that's how you choose to read that solar figure) is represented by the capering 'Angel of Hearth & Home' by Max Ernst.  The tails, the Fruit & the Flame are repurposed from Pamela Coleman-Smith's original Devil card, and re-contextualized; the imagery of the Fruit & Flame owes as much to Coleman-Smith as it does to Waite's instructions.

It took a while to figure out how to put these elements together, and if I'm entirely honest it was not an entirely conscious process, as I was principally concerned with Queering Symmetry, a recurring fixation throughout this series.  (You'll see what I mean soon enough.)

I did all the real groundwork on inking & tones during the covid shutdown.

I think that's all the stuff that matters.

On to the other cards.

Next:  o - fool

inking xtinction - 4 (((the sound of uncertainty)))

(((inside my head, every day)))

 

there are times where i am trying to do something and i don't know what

 

with apocalypse: it's trying to work out what i liked so. much. about walt simonson

because i'm not a simonson superfan, i'm not reading all that thor shit.  but

i thought simonson on x-factor was actually pretty righteous.  i dug on all

the dashed-off weird reflections w/ chrome filigree he would add to everything,

almost compulsively.  he had a real punk energy to his art at that time, i dunno,

and i felt him kind of flexing at mignola, too, like oh a contender.  his art was more fun,

competetive.  after leaving x-factor he became kind of a famously fastidious & consistent

workman, but for a minute it felt like he was in the dojo just throwing down, like wildstylin

i didn't CARE about or like anything apocalypse brought to the table of the summers saga

i kind of dug apocalypse whenever mignola got to draw him.  but otherwise idgaf.  he looks doofy

so ultimately this is all just me rehearsing textures & working out ocd kinks

 

it's not entirely a simonson tribute.  i find myself trying to do something

but it's not silvestri, like on the left, with sinister.  that's me aping silvestri

apocalypse just winds up being something else.  i dunno.  i hope james (tiberius) likes it

 

i'll be glad to start inking the rest soon

inking xtinction - 3

  not happy with ANYTHING i have done today but oh well

 

The Wild Bois - series I