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

writing an ending / writing ONE ending

The blog goes live.  The blog goes dark.  The blog goes live again.

It should surprise all one of you that I have mental problems.  Not least of which is feeling coherent, or explicable.  I do not feel like a Complicated person, or a particularly difficult mind, yet--  ego being what it is, a cockleburr (poisonous, clingy, and a staining agent)  --it pains me to feel misperceived.  Often I feel as though my manner of speech, or the ways in which I express myself, annoy others, despite their (seeming) annoyance being completely beside the point.  The "point" being, well, conversation.  With the ones who get annoyed.  And if they get annoyed, I just stop talking to them.  I do try to keep it simple.

Which is to say, it shouldn't matter how people respond to my existence, as I don't really try to press my points.  Being neurotic is my problem, nobody else's.  When I say "I'm not a writer" it's honestly felt-- I write as expression, not profession; from compulsion, not financial motive.  Writing is something of an agony, to be honest.  I don't feel particularly creative or innovative even at my best.  But it's a trellis, isn't it?  Hang the words in the correct order and a Scene emerges from a sentence; Dialogue unveils itself as a cadence of call-and-response establishes itself.  I have to write to know what I'm going to draw, you see.

TL:DR is something I've been hearing people say for decades.  It's like "wall of text", or a therapist who's asked for a sample of writing responding with "You wrote a lot."  It's leading with a preference.  The preference being brevity.  Commendable, certainly.  But it isn't as though reading takes all that much time or effort, and there's a distinct sneer to the majority opinion that A Lot is Always Too Much.

When reading my own work, I sneer rather constantly.

All that said, it's been a hard time in my skull this week.  Upshot is, after straining to complete the script for THE KILL HOUSE for months, the whole thing arrived in two easy parts, across two mornings.  It's only the final chapter, and it's only eight-ish pages, but it took some struggle.  Partly because the whole book isn't contiguous-- all the chapters kind of hang on their own.  There are no straight lines or clear joins between sections.  It's the first time I've really tried to work this way with a piece of fiction.

And as with all the sections, it wrote itself.  I don't say this sarcastically, or as a handwave toward Process.  It's fair to suggest I am the editor and the final authority on whether the writing Is What I Wish It To Be, but as to creation it's dodgy where some of the bits emerge from.  The Bill Moseley lines lifted from 'Psychoreal', off OhGr's 'Devil In My Details' were in my notebook for months, waiting for ideal placement-- but where did the Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas riff, or the Keith Giffen-esque / Dave Sim page-of-word-balloons interior monologue emerge from?  Why did those impulses emerge where they did?  Why was this, 56 page, 8 chapter script, the final incarnation of all the impulses & snits of "inspiration" that clutter my notekeeping?

And why was THIS version the superior?  Superior to its initial "skit" form, or its abbreviated middle draught?  Why did it expand itself into this?  And why--

Why this ending?  Why not (any of!) the other endings?

THE KILL HOUSE is built of endings.  Some chapters contain more than one.  The whole damned book is Ending things, themes, characters.  As to why it worked out this way, I cannot clearly say.  Each ending is its own tune.  All the tunes, whistled together, end-to-end, forms the libretto.

Why?  Why?  Why?  I keep asking.  The answer, insufficient as it seems, is sometimes it's the art that calls the shots.  Not the shootist.

writing by accident

Yesterday was one of those where I committed a scene without meaning to.  I was writing something else, hacking bits together--  in this compositional phase of a script I refer to this as "roadwork", where patches get steamed out & fitted into a sequence  --when a morbid thought hit me.  A morbid thought adacent to personal experience.  So that was given room to grow, and next thing, three extra pages.  Going to hack at that today.  THE KILL HOUSE is now at 56 pages, pre-formatting & editing.

Some of "writing by accident" is discipline.  Write a little every day, whether intended for posterity or greater purpose or just farting around.  Eventually bits happen, whether intended or not, or accrete material as a result of scale & gravity, and next thing one knows:  writing.

In the midst of the unplanned Bit, comedic instinct appears.  Gestates, as the lines are honed, then breaks the surface of the roadwork.  Now these bits have to be shaped.  Line edits happen.  Read, re-read for flow.  The Bit has become a Sequence.  Toward the end of the sequence, unbidden, a joke flowers.  A pun, sobconsciously conceived & thrown into the mix.  Too much?  Or just right?  Where did all these jokes come from, anyway.  Weren't we just writing something serious?

This is where it's most important for me to trust instinct.  There was no outline, but there's a rise & fall to the action & dialogue, one I can sense the shape of now.  The verisimilitude I'm after requires human response, and a vital impulse in this craft, I've found, is making room for jokes.  Leave room for response.  The jokes grow all on their own.  Some of it may be the Editor's Mind, taking shots at the Writer's Tendencies-- the editor, with his red pen, can cook like it's open mic at an improv club  --but then there's the Writer, who's just trying to break tension with the Three Stooges (my Script Idiots, known as Motive, Plot, and Post-hoc Justification (patches plot holes)).  The writer just wants to sit all his little freaks together in the front row and run through the lines.  He didn't set out to make a big production out of it.  He needs his creatures to co-habitate, profitably.  The quickest way is to get 'em giggling.

I keep writing horror, because I've experienced enough of my own to need an outlet.  Part of writing horror is needing breaks to vent tension, deflate things, break it down and build it back up.  So there's a lot of dumb comedy in my work, and it would (I'm confident) be considered surplus to considerations in terms of page count or runtime.  But it's my shop.  I'm the letterer, too.  So I get to do whatever I fucking want.  And mostly I don't want to run a by-the-numbers, Serious shop.  I want to keep it moving, keep it organic.  The only way to get there, in my experience, is by trusting Accidents.

[ redacted thoughts, redacted ]

Chicago had snow, then rain.  I had a case of the lows, now my brain's ringing.  No big talkies today.  Redacted thoughts are redacted.  Head's a wreck.  Christ, the ringing.  If it's not vertigo or being a goddamned mental patient it's tinnitus.  Gonna try to grind more tarot art tomorrow.  Think I have this composition down.  Honestly, why are you reading this?  Go read a paper book.  Something with real words by actual people.  The internet will only break your spirit & wither your glands.

my tarot - II - the oracle

 

ii - oracle

strictly a pencil upload this time.  this one's next on the block to ink, but that will wait until decent prints are made of the pencil stage.  turned out better than i'd hoped.  glad i took the time.  only last night fixed the reflections on the rim of the dish and corrected a kneecap--  i leave it to you to figure out which knee

cliff's notes:  the central figure is styled on Mariana Pineda's statue, The Oracle.  i fell in love with that statue the first time i saw it.  just a marvelous gestural figure.  so evocative.  i wanted to homage Pineda's work & pay tribute.  by using Pineda's oracle to replace the priestess i wound up triggering a series of changes in the composition...

first by the addition of the putto:  a cherubic figure meant, along with the oracle's robes, to evoke imagery associated with the lady of guadalupe-- the putto ordinarily would be supporting a crescent moon, in the original ikonography, whereas in my version would be presenting a choice:  the grasshook or the lamp?

the four suits are represented here for the first time:  the sigil (or pentacle, in rider-waite; the intersecting alchemical symbol in the dirt), the grasshook (standing in for swords & athames & all that), the lamp (for the clubs / fire symbol), and the bell (standing in for cups / chalices)...  which i realize on first glance plays hell with the standard elemental symbolism, but i'm not going to discuss that here because i don't feel like typing & revising for 5hrs to justify myself aloud for an exclusive audience of my own crazybrain

the drapery that hoods the oracle bears a pattern created by the artist known as Gerhard, who endured dave sim on cererbus for more than can be acknowledged in the length of this sentence.  the pattern was the background motif of the cover to cerebus 186, inverted here as a cheap counterspell against the diabolickal magicks dave sim indulged in throughout his most infamous work.  dave sim was a correspondent of mine for a time, but if he'd known i was gay he wouldn't have spit on me, let alone talked shop about brushes & composition.  my mother was a feminist.  so fuck dave sim.  gerhard's a real one for putting up with that crank

the underside of the drapery is patterned on pamela coleman-smith's original art for the high priestess: this pattern hung between the pillars, behind the priestess.  i believe pamela intended the fruit to be pomegranates

the pillars are engraved with the "crown" motif from the imp card--  as is the bell, if you look carefully.  the pillars will be explored more in full with other cards, such as 'the initiate' (the revised hanged man card), the lovers, and temperance.  these will be different perspectives on the floor of a larger temple.  this will be one of several instances of my trying to use the framing device of the cards to offer different perspectives on three-dimensional spaces or objects

i'm interested in the psychological effects this has when the cards are dealt & their meanings juxtaposed:  i want to see how they're read as pages in a book dealt out of order

have i mentioned that i am a crazy person?

i think that's all the important stuff.  wait, what else?  oh, yeah, i forgot to complete my thought earlier, about composition:

by adding the putto to the figure of the oracle you have a subtly queered helix ascending between the pillars.  that was my main fixation when building this.  composition drove almost all these cards for me.  symbolism & mystical interpretations were almost as an afterthought, if i'm honest.  it was like that with the imp card, it's been like that with all these.  i just follow my OCD and eventually i have art on the other end

 ...if i'm lucky

Next:  o - fool

(no, for serious this time)

THE AZURE PANTRY - thumbs 2: electric boogaloo

 

sing along now, you know the words

arrre they sitting on a plane / or are they sitting on an I-beam

(a popular little ditty ayy kay ayy "where does that buttock go?")

THE AZURE PANTRY - 1: thumbnails pps. 1-10 + 1st sketches

Decent progress today.  Finalized thumbnails for pages 1-10 of The Azure Pantry.

This all looks perfectly inscrutable to you, I'm sure.  Which is fine.

After all, these aren't the comix themselves.  Those will arrive before your eyes eventually.

Bottom row:  my very 1st two sketches for the project, for panels 1&2 of page 7.