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.

progress / glacial vs. epochal: fight!

Not much headway these last few days, no.

Mornings are quiet.  Dripfeed of podcast content straight into my ears aside.  Once I'm off the train in Evanston, I'll walk up and down the North Shore Channel, either by way of the hiking trail (which goes beneath the bridges) or over the grounds of the golf course.  Usually there's one if not two to three rabbits out.  If I'm lucky-- like this morning --something larger will happen along, say a deer or--  like this morning --coyote.  This is my second coyote, the first of this year.  It was last january I saw my first one.

Today I managed to forget my scripts so I couldn't re-read & line edit, as is my habit.  Reading and re-reading stuff is how anything gets done.  Falling back into the world(s) I've been building.  It's strange re-reading these text pieces alongside portraits of the characters.  I didn't honestly know how they looked when this project began; like, I knew what Ian Sommerville looked like, generally enough, from the photos I've seen, but I'm as familiar with Kiki, which is to say I've only seen a handful of shots.  Now I know what my versions of these people look like, which is far the fuck along from where things were a year ago, when the word order was still cooling.  I have a much different idea of how Robert Barlow looks (in contrast to my own sense of his self-image), and am surprised to find myself charmed by the portrait I've built.  It's not often I find likenesses in my own work "attractive" or "handsome" much less Sexy, so things are going well.  David Kammerer's portrait is the one I'm teething to start inks on, but I'm not doing that until I've gotten Michael Portman's seance drawn.  Ian's portrait is fab, it's the background that's proving a nightmare because there's geometry and projected light, so, yeah.  Fuck my bright ideas.

Have I mentioned having no great confidence in my penciling, recently?

At any rate.  It's strange looking at all this writing.  As I insist, I'm not a writer.  And generally the world backs me up by not reading my work.  There has been one fresh (read: trustworthy) source of flattery for my prose, who's steadfastly refused to engage with my illustration work, so I'm not going to get a big head about either.  These are private glaciers, to be scaled and mapped and studied and sampled as my stamina permits.  It used to bother me that it takes so long to find satisfaction and completion.  Now I'm not very fussed about time.  I've survived dying three times.  It'll get done when it gets done.  Just because it takes a long time for it to get done doesn't make it any greater or lesser than any other work of art in my studio.  They all get equal weight: none is epochal, no particular work is more meaningful, more weighted than any other.

I feel like it's the sanest way to approach this stuff.  One day at a time.  It's how life gets lived.

Gives time for rabbits, coyotes and long walks by the water.

honesty

have not been putting up progress pix of my current work because i'm not feeling confident about my pencils or bothering to document my work process either but anyhow still hackin at stuff.  it'll get posted sometime

executive healthcare for artfags below the poverty line, oh god o'clock edition

Today's menu:  SHOTS!  SHOTS!  SHOTS!

Renewing covid jab this morning, downtown, at a free clinic.  Since getting a shot at CVS-- where it had been free for individuals w/o insurance up until three months ago  --now sets a body back a min of $200.

After that, we'll see if my arm functions well enough for a complete re-type of the working draft of PROMISELAND.  Probably at Loaves + Witches, because I need to work in a cozy atmo that isn't home.

It's how I usually do these things:  write a draft, review, re-type, revising as I go.  This would be the third draft.  I normally only do two to three drafts.  This fucker might go to four; PAINLESS ran four drafts.  AZURE PANTRY only went three drafts.  DENIZEN was two.  That was easier because I knew the Big Beats, since it was a historical crime thing.  KILL HOUSE is on its third draft.  PROMISELAND, I'm off the res, because it's massively ahistorical & has consistently been surprising me.

I have to insert a bus scene and some characters--  Robert de Grimston (of the Process church), David Berg plus other creeps.  de Grimston's working as a sideshow geek & pole sitter at the local boardwalk, where beachcomber David Berg and his wife(?) are heckling the simp.  Dennis Hopper is walking home after a particularly disastrous pass at Bobby Beausoleil.  There's gonna be a surprise waiting for Dennis on the bus.  A surprise fresh out of jail.

For my travels I hope there are no surprises on the train to, or from, the clinic.  Chi transit surprises sometimes have a predilection for setting hair on fire.

the burroughs folio: the secret dreamer (4) [process: media: charcoal]

memory fumes / the memorious (a post-it yawp)

A yawp rather than a nope, today.

 

Had a Big Talk with Sig.  It's probably the first time we've ever formally discussed the probability that he'll outlive me.  It didn't sting as much as feared.  He's a sensible fella.  I know he means every word he says.  I've never really been able to say that before, about any guy in my life.

He's determined.  And he's right.  It's better to work on living memory than to live with the dread, probable, uncertainty.  So I'll keep journaling & take notes of the gaps, sift the evidence, and see what's likely & what works.

Updated everyone at work & asked, as humbly as possible, for them to help keep me on track.

Next step:  finding brain mechanics w/out greasy streaks on their overalls.

Meantime I'm gonna finish watching 'Weapons' (2025), and wait for a bushel of vintage comix from the forgotten canadian past to shore up on my stoop.  I ordered 'night life' by Derek McColloch & Simon Tristam.  A lot of my comix picks these past three years have been nostalgia fodder, I guess; but unlike a lotta gobblers of glory days fare, these things are assistants to memory.  I don't have anybody in my life from that era of my existence, and revisiting these things sweeps the leaves from old pathways.  It's an aid to memory, like re-reading, like repetition of tasks.  And it's a pleasure, honestly, seeing the fire in these old b&w books that have been remaindered by the Annunaki of pop culture.

"The future proves the past," as a certain sect of twits like to say.  It's not the stupidest sentence ever written.  Not that I'm studying conspiracy-adjacent twaddle for any of the projects on my desk.  I would never drop some 17th-letter wisdom into the mouth of an Image comix character; I would certainly not have any character from the Wildstorm stable saying such things.  It's fun, collaging this vapour comic together.  Is it profitable?  No.  But neither are my obsessions with William S. Burroughs or Larry Hama's Wolverine comix.  The past is a waste: wasted on those present: and it's fair to say this future I seem to be stuck in is proving it.

So why obsess over my memory flailing for scraps to cling to?  I'm still here.  Until I ain't.  What's certain is my essence: which may be remembered, for recalling that which the rest of ya'll forgot.

no jump on gripes, today (a s'update)

--simply noting that the clouds i inked yesterday have a soothing flow

i should draw clouds more.  it's a good exercise, contemplating the shape of wind.  zen shit!

i am housebound for at least a week (a post-it nope)

but on the positive i have a pimp cane for my pimp limp

anyway just (a post-it nope) to let ya'll know i do draw things now & again and to expect more of that

because i am locked in my fucking studio with a chain on my ankle.  don't kinkshame