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.

THE AZURE PANTRY - all thumbs (pps. 1-12)

 

Things are coming along nicely.

It's a little stunning to me how the information parcels out, on a page-to-page & panel-to-panel basis:  there's no 1 = 1 where a written page equals a drawn page, not really.

Like ch.1: which (although caption box heavy) equals maybe a quarter of a page in type, takes six full-bleed pages.  That was a difficult choice on my part.  I resisted it for a while, accustomed as I am to the constraints of page count.  But this is My Book, right?  So why not have the whole thing breathe and be about atmosphere.  I relaxed and indulged the impulse to make the opening chapter a series of full-page splashes.  And once I did, it felt ideal.  It made sense; it opened up the format for me as though I were unfolding an origami, permitting me to understand where the folds went & how discrete points related to one another.

You get to ch.2, and look at that page on the left: there's one caption box, one spoken line of dialogue, and that's it for two & a half pages.  Everything is just shot wild, a nice silent sequence of Emerson walking through a dark apartment.  Then there's a tumbling barrage of dialogue captions representing SMS texts, which goes for basically a single page, spread all the way across the middle bleed of 9-10.  So one full typed page of script = 3 pages of comix.

There's one more page of dialogue to ch. 2, and that goes for 11-12 & 13.  So two pages full script = 6 pages total.  But it's all extremely elastic, and I suspect the expansion & contraction will only get wilder & weirder as the story progresses.

This implementation of the 6 panel grid really pleases me.  It allows for total use of each two-page spread and makes everything, well, Whole.  I don't feel like the pages are forcibly separated from one another by the straight razor of the industrial printing process.  This implementation of the 6-panel grid is a 12-panel grid, really: it lets me think about each set of two pages as one essential unit.

That's not how I was taught to think by The Industry, with all the arbitrary changes in story sequence advertising & magazine formatting choose to impose.  Makes me feel like I'm in control of my own book, for a change.  And that's a fuckin' excellent feeling.