Tracing Gould - o15

Cut to title card:

Behind the wheel, the weary detective in his trenchcoat races to the scene, police beacon signaling like a defective halo.  Inconstant light barely touching his eyes.

The further the D.T. influence spreads, the less identifiable Tracy becomes, the more diluted.  Gould's influence circuclates like the very air.  Coolly alive, in the flow & pulse of water.  In the spark & flicker of fire, as secret and plainly exposed as the very devil.  The influence, mutable, immutable, evanescent yet beyond transmutation, inveigling everything like a plague or conspiracy of ghosts.

He arrives.  The villain from nowhere.

"All the things that used to be inside me, now they're outside.  So I can see all the things inside you....  But the inside of me is empty."

The curious, plodding, sleepy-looking young man with wiry hair walks seemingly in place, growing ever-larger in the mind & eyes of his captive audience.  He emerges as if from the horizon itself, a swelling born from the collision of earth, sea and sky.   A point against all geometric reason encompassing, absorbing, linearity.  The enigmatic villain seems to only speak in questions, his somnolent, placid voice ever on the verge of collapse into ellipsis.

"The detective, or the husband?  Which is the real you?  Neither one is the real you.  There is no 'real you'.  Your wife knows that, too."

His only identifying trait, the name sewn into the lining of his coat.  Mamiya.

The detective knows who the Killer is:  but the detective finds it impossible to Know the man.  The killer is a missionary from an occulted past.  His methods are inferential, at best; insidious.  Involuted.  The killer may not be pursued beyond the boundaries of his crimes.  Secure in the hollow he's carved inside himself, the killer looks out on the detective with contempt bordering on transcendence.

The killer within looking down on the killer without.

Triggered by the word fate, the detective fires three times.

"Remember now?"

Kiyoshi Kurosawa pivots, abrupt as the final day torn from a calender, from gangster flicks to weird serial murder tinged with hypnotic menace.  It's 1998, and the filmmaker is bored by the philosophical quandaries of V-cinema with its inbuilt limitations of commerce and pop genre fiction.

"People like to think crime has meaning.  But most of them don't."

Nemesis frees the detective to free the killer.  The killer, freed, returns to his origins; origins he can only recognize through inference.  The killer does not know who he is, only where he is: in the world, walking up and down, to and fro.  Waiting to be found in the hearts of the men whose lives he touched with fingers stainless as unwritten law.  Waiting for deliverance.

The gun fires five final exclamation marks.  One for each finger on his healing hand.

Eight bullets, total, to kill a man beyond life.  Snuffed by an abundance of fortunate death, the dying arc of the murderer's bloody finger paints a ceremony in the expectant air.  Evokes something where there is nothing.  Falls, use extinguished.

The detective looks around the space of the shrine, mute, his curiosity at its end.

Inner peace restored, the detective takes his dinner.  Opting against his trademark trenchcoat, for a change.  Retired to the dry cleaners, to exorcise Mamiya's splatter.  Leaning away from his table the detective looks spiritually sated.  Coffee the perfect companion to a postprandial smoke, he orders from a nearby marionette.  The waitress stiff and formal as her uniform.  She does not walk so much as obey an invisible mechanism, faultless, guiding her toward the cutlery.

Plate clean, appetite restored, the detective extracts a cigarette and lights it, drawing the smoke into his lungs.  Ember tip flaring like a caution signal over the industrial heart of Tokyo.

Wipe to credits.

Tracing Gould - o14

These dreams are shared.  Dreams of stark primary colour and furtive perversion: dreams of weakness manifested in impotent rage: dreams stolen from little boys, given to those starvelings not yet men.

"You must be curious to know. But, I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you not only not to tell anybody about your find, but also not to ask more about the case. One day when it's all sewed up, I'll let you know all the details. Right now, though, I can't."

"I understand. I'm just real curious, like you said."

"I was the same way myself when I was your age. I guess, that's what got me into this business."

"Must be great."

"It's horrible, too."

David Lynch's 'Blue Velvet' surely shares in Gouldspace.  Influence is manifest everywhere, in unwise love of mystery and tears for fathers stricken; in little agonies, femme fatales & mutilated victims.

The pattern is Crime, and Lawful Wrath, and the Kid inbetween.

The man in yellow teeters, a bullet to the head.  One false alarm and the reflex is murder.  And where is the villain of our piece?  Why, he's queer as a well-dressed man with a gasmask apparatus on his belt.

The kid crouches in the closet and remembers a dream he had, of wanting to break into a stranger's room and watch them unrobe.  The kid holds his breath, wondering why there is so much trouble in this world.

The prowling, growling, gray murderer huffs, ridiculous in his fake mustache.  "I shoot when I see the whites of the eyes."

It is 1986.  The scene is a staged multiple homicide, and the boy who sees it believes he is a man when he is able to say, to himself, with confidence: "I'm going to let them find you on their own."

The kid is not Dick Tracy Junior.  The kid is not me.  The kid holds his breath, wondering.

Tracing Gould - oo6

Traveling, bouncing faster than can be perceived, echoing ahead of itself and backward again, the reflections finding purchase in the present.

The essayist sets his dogeared paperback aside.  The bookmark at the halfway point.  Page 127, the witness under cross-examination discusses printing leaflets with a mimeograph.  "We had a duplicating machine and produced a little news-sheet for distribution to members."  A spirit duplicator...

1968: Per Wahloo publishes 'The Steel Spring', chronicling an unnamed nation in the grips of a self-inflicted crisis, made possible by prohibition.  "Inspector Jensen gave a shake of his head.  He had always thought the plainclothes patrol slipshod & imprecise in its actions."   Was Dick Tracy being syndicated abroad, in Scandanavia, in 1968?  During the space period, was Dick Tracy translated into Swedish?  Why not.  The 1940s strips were being translated into Hungarian in the 90s...

Any influence is possible.  Passible.  Communicable.  If Dick Tracy (1933) contains Batman (1939), and Batman contains James Bond (1953), then Dick Tracy (o.g. G-man) contains James Bond (oo7).  Everything flowing from wartime, crosstime, informing points in a constellation which may only be read from without.  Every influence equal to pastiche.

Now.  Cut to then.

"But Kid," says Sam, frame slipping free from the Sunday page, freckles scintillating around his wry smile.  He pulls himself bodily from the two-dee space by the narrow black bar of ink, hauling up and out, into memory's atmosphere, thin as the moon, and stands there hands on knees, panting, cartoon cig clinging to the corner of his winded grin:  "You can't just draw any old constellation, if ya can't project what the myth is meant to encompass.  The story has to map true."

"True," The child echoes.  Setting his scissors aside.  Studying the fifty year old face he finds reflected in them.  "The story has to encompass the imaginary shape; the myth isn't cut to fit the story."

The essayist in his fourth-dimensional window winks, a glint off steel shears.  "Sure.  But what do you imagine the shape to be?  Forty years of dailies.  Forty years of work.  What kind of silhouette does that provide?  Is it flat?  Flat, hell: is it even opaque?  Can it shade, block, obfuscate?  Or is it only an outline, a profile, a précis?"   Eyeballing the diminutive Sam as he cocks his derby back with a derisive sniff.

"What's the topography of our myth," says Sam, giving the tip of the scissors a light kick, setting them spinning.  "Izzat what you're asking?  An implausible ask for an impossible question."

The scissors spin, spin, spin on their axis.  Images old and new flashing.  Forgotten to the child, immemorial to his quinquagenarian self.  Olden anew.

Tracing Gould - oo5

The reflections are something else.

There's the obvious:  Dick Tracy & his orphan partner in crimestopping, Dick Tracy Jr: 1933.  Bruce Wayne & Dick Grayson I940.  Easy parallels.  Deathtraps.  Shared (stolen) villains.  The fetish for grotesquery.  The influence shines clear.  But change the angle of the shears in your hand...

There's a weirder, narrower resemblance:  Dick Tracy & Joe Dredd.  Lawmen who've survived countless deadend hells.  Witnessed the devil's worst, climbed over corpses wracked with torment, had the soles of his feet flayed, been starved, blinded, shot in the head and abandoned down cravasses in desert wastes.  Dick & Joe, refusing promotion in favour of staying On The Prowl, On The Streets, forever in syndication, applying the law to scum.

These likenesses neither begin nor end at the chins.  There's an unholy implacability to these characters, a momentum of moral force, that marks them, now.  It was never there in the beginning.  But fifty years on, the characters carry themselves differently.  They are marked by their villains.  They have shaped themselves against their stone & steel & forgotten future metropoli and become celebrated, for better or for worse, as reflecting Us.  We're the cutouts.  We're paper dolls, dressing ourselves to match... 

I'm trying my city on for size.  D.T. contains Chicago, as Wayne contains Gotham, as Dredd contains Meg-1.  Each its own ironic tweak on the times they inhabited.  Tracy, emerging from the ruins of the white city, through the flames of prohibition into the electric light of our present/future police state--  his own creator a kid raised without indoor plumbing.  Of the three the most winking invention is probably Batman, that mob-busting vigilante-cum-rich kid, whose multi-billion dollar likeness was owned & printed by a mob front publishing outfit, looking to launder money--  here's looking at you, Johnny DC  --with Bob Kane's vainglorious signature stenciled atop art he never saw let alone touched:  I'd say Gotham is New York and Manhattan Island and New Jersey in the bargain.  And then there's Joe's sweet Mega-City One, America's terminal Sprawl, a nubbled & mushrooming coastline, as imagined from the Firth of Tay...

The scissors close.  Reflections fall away.

Tracing Gould - oo4

Three of the four corners of the strip clipped at clean right angles, I rotated the sunday supplement and spread the scissors anew.  Paused.  Listening.  Sam's wry eyes a little uncertain.

"Kid, I'm not one to gild lilies.  Further you clip into this thing, the woolier reasoning is liable to get."

From deep in the metal throat and lungs of the house, faint chuckles, repeating.  Heat register flaps chiming, gently resonant.  The subliminal music of the family hearth.  Imp giggles.  Then:  "Neki Hokey!"

"What?"

Elbows on the freed bottom frame of the panel in my hand, Sam sighed a cartoon balloon of smoke.  Hanging his head, rubbing his neck. "Just what we needed.  Comic relief."

"Neki Hokey!"  Shrill with glee.  Bouncing through the ventilation.

"What is that, Sam?"

"Fertheluvvamike...."  Heaving a sigh like a sack of dry cement.  "I thought we left those brats in the 50s!"

The haytangle haired twins tumble, a human wheel free down the sundappled hall adjacent to the kitchen, the pirate map tattooed across their soles flashing.  "Neki Hokey!"  The cackling tumblers reel across the checkered kitchen floor and through the breakfast nook, their wheel breaking on the threshold.  The pair spill against the faux-edwardian walnut chairs and come to a bruised stop.  

Massaging reddened shoulders, the comic relief critically eyeballing the leafy, dark, nubbled motifs of paw-paw's prize furniture.  "Ugly!"  "Dang!"  "Smarts!"  "Neki Hokey!"

"What the hell are they saying?"

In a snit of agitation Sam lunges, groping impotently from his pane for the blunt outer rim of the scissors.  "Just finish, wouldja!?"  The cigarette in his mouth switching corners with an audible click, sounding like nothing less than an automated turn signal in a 60s model Ford.

Hesitant scissor hand dropping.  "Do I recognize these kids?"

"You shouldn't.  But don't let me stop you..."

Tracing Gould - oo3

Forever then, there is darkness.

 

Forever, for how does one measure the duration of immaturity.  Darkness, for ignorance is as vast as the vacuum between stars.  Therefore the original constellation, the original binary out of which "i" arose, in a cloud of unknowing, an Initiate-- and in what a state, o my kin!  A state of 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?"

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)