the burroughs folio - mikey

 Michael Portman is completed.  Onto Kammerer & Ian & Barlow.

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

chalk & light

Chalk.  I'm quite fond of it.  It's up there with charcoal, for soft media.  Soft media captures the diffuse, particulate, impish nature of light.  Hard media, like inks & paint, lock & block light out.  The big hassle is getting all the chalk dust off the paper, once you've worked a sufficient amount into the fibre of the piece.  I'm attempting something tricky right now; the hope is thoroughly embedding the blue chalk in the paper and then dusting it over with drafting charcoal and working THAT in.  If all goes well then there will be a blue "glow" beneath the gray shading.  If all goes awry, then it will be a massive setback.  Just gonna be patient and work it step by step...

out of a variety of nowheres

That's where the writing gets done, largely.  The writing and the thinking.

Your Warren Ellises of the world will talk up their gear and their precious rituals for genius and the albums they were given as gifts and the live shows they saw and the meals they ate and the booze they saturated them with and the gardening they struggle over.  They will blog.  They have blogged.  They are blog.

Yet I am blog, and you can too.  Because you do not need the frills & the fripperies of a content hound to triangulate the origins of inspiration.  You can pick up those signals... anywhere, everywhere, and in my case, most readily, in a wide variety of nowheres.

Of late I refer to them as Woods Offices.  I have two Woods Offices--  the first so designated is nice in spring but utterly inaccessible by summer.  It consists of a log thrown across some other fallen logs, by a fence, right next to the Evanston channel trail.  Woods Office number two is technically a River Office, as it's beneath an overpass, but the woods are also right there.  These are places I habitually hang out in the hour(s) before my actual job begins.  I'm a compulsive tidier, so when I head out it's with plastic bags & vinyl gloves at hand, the better to clean the world with.  Usually I average one to two commercial grade trashbags.  This past couple weeks I've pulled gallon cans of paint outta the woods, found a cop's lost maglite, cleaned a burnt-down homeless encampment, et cetera.

I may often be found at the beach, picking up.  You would wrinkle your nose at the things I've picked up.  Just rest assured I do so with a great many precautions & barriers between myself and worldly filth.  The upshot of this compulsive behavior, while distracting, is that it calms me and leads me to Notice all kinds of oddments.  The cleaning has rewards built in, as well.  My new Leatherman multi-tool, for instance, came from a beach clean, as did my new collection of novelty cocaine spoons.

The point I am making here, painfully slowly, is that one may find inspiration in the world, in a wide variety of nowheres.  The cocaine spoons are useless to me, practically & personally, but it's a lovely character note to append somewhere within A HERO OF THE FEVER.  Because...  the sort of personality that would collect coke spoons?  That's something I couldn't have brainstormed.

It takes being in the world.

Warren Ellis might have been able to conjure the cokespoon collector.  Because himself is a poseur and a degenerate who quite enjoyed cocaine.  I also imagine that, though he was once as scrawny and gutter-oriented as myself, he only hung out in curious out-of-the-way overlaps of urbanism & opportunistic nature as a hipster flex in his twenties.  Carousing, like.  Doing his weekend warrior bit with the lads, getting into shit, desperate to pull some bird.  

Whereas I've always been the guy who needs to avoid humans.  And if you need to avoid humans, you explore.  Now I know how to access the Metra rail corridor.  Like, there's a great deal of mapmaking that gets done, just walking around.  Because people take walking for granted.  North American urbanoids rely on their cars for virtually every sojourn and consequently never get to grips with how their city is constructed.  It's very, very useful to know every square inch of the places you live & work.

Anyway, recon:  It's how creation gets done, as much as any of the Art or Craft shit I usually drone on about.  I've written four going on five books by being absolutely nowhere, writing at fucking dumb hours, in conditions of relative-to-absolute dark, cold, and rain-- by being persistent, prepared, and pathological.

Try it.

writing around death

As with every time a script hits the Finished pile, the ritual resets.

Mornings begin with the commute.  I'm on day four of a twelve-day stretch at work, so an essential element in the morning ritual is recharging.  Find a space to Be In, a place to walk, pace, think, sit, stretch, do yoga, listen and focus.  Focus is precious.  There's not much else one can do at my job BUT focus on the immediate.  So I need a recharge space.  There are several--  what I refer to as --'woods offices' along the way to my gig.  The current preferred favourite is beneath a major bridge, where cliff swallows nest.

Yesterday, sheltering there from the rain, as I observed heron and river otters and, yes, beaver, I went through the scripts, from most recent (THE KILL HOUSE) to secondmost recently completed (AZURE PANTRY / DENIZEN) and that put me in mind of the first to be completed in the pile (PAINLESS).  Looking for...  not similarities, so much as resonances?  Because I wanted to reassure myself that they aren't all The Same Book.

And they aren't.  But they aren't unrelated, either.  It's occurred to me that four of the seven major projects on my desk are about Dying.  At least in part.  It never occurred to me before that I'd turn into the kind of writer who writes the same book, essentially, time after time.  First off, I'm Not A Writer.  Secondly, I didn't think not-dying had been that big of a knock.  But, faced with the facts?  It's obvious that I'm trying to work through something.

Because all these books are about one's relation to mortality.  One's proximity, if nothing else.

A couple years ago, one morning in a burst of basic arithmetic, I tallied up the number of times death buzzed my ass.  It came to three, officially.  Surviving the murder attempt.  Surviving the suicide attempt.  And surviving the accident.  I'm sure there were other close calls, or at the very least WAKE UP calls, but of the times death was close enough for hugs:  three.

I have not done therapy for that.  Unless one counts four scripts.  Do these count as therapy?  Clearly I wrote them for that purpose.  Technically they were written because the OCD demanded their invention.  I don't write because I want to, I write because crazybrain commands.  Anyway, they're all plainly of a piece.  They're very different (or at least arguably different) approaches to the High Seriousness of that practical jester, mortality.

Maybe that's why the next book is just about sex.

cue the endless edits & amendments & revisions

This phase of things shouldn't be too bad.  Usually, after completely scripting a book (Painless, Denizen, Azure Pantry), I'll go into reread & edit line by line; testing the rhythms of dialogue, the pace of exchange, and fix all the Real Obvious Fuckups.  Chop.  Fill in.  Until the thing has defined itself satisfactorily, when I really Hear the words spoken, without reading them aloud.  The persistent problem with this stage, I've found, is the abundance of really obvious mistakes spellcheck doesn't get-- where there's an automatic linefill, some kind of substitution situation where you didn't mangle the word, you just mistyped so the processor can't hang any red lace on it...  A completely nonsensical sentence will sit there for weeks of revision with a Bad Error which I can't see because my brain's glazed over with all the other work that must be attended to.  It's embarrassing and a real argument for having an independent editorial voice, a reader who isn't the author, but at this phase in my professional personality as an Artist I'm no longer interested in sharing unfinished work with others, and I certainly don't want to hear "I'm going to read it, I swear" used as an excuse by ANYone, let along a friend, so why put people through it?  I'm not using fucking AI to read my scripts, so it's down to me and my OCD to find all the goofs and fine-tune the troofs I wrote while wearing my SmArt Faggot hat.  I don't think this one's gonna be too much of a problem because if I fuck up continuity between chapters it's only going to enhance the final effect THE KILL HOUSE is going for.  Art house is where it's at, and aggressive unconcern with a reader's comfort only becomes more attractive to me as I grow ever further estranged from John & Karen Q. Public.  I like Refn movies with no dialogue, and 800-plus page books about imaginary cities written with the structural conceit of a geometrical puzzle, whose primary Plot is fucking and who does who where.  So this book shouldn't be any surprise to anyone familiar with my psyche.  It's more cluttered & up its own ass with theory than this blog.

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.

the burroughs folio: kammerer (1) dots & lines

Back to the OCD.

Line placement is key.  So too balance.  The first rendering of David Kammerer did not go well.  I got impatient with my own process.  This time has turned out significantly closer to the mark.

Brushwork next, INKluding fills, then lay on the tones.  This is the fifth of the eight portraits.  First in the actual series, as it will be printed.  I'm pretty close to satisfied.  I'm hoping the bubbles look right...

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)

THE KILL HOUSE - script to pencil (1)

The name of the game is problem solving.

The script, as I found it--  because my brain is broken, yes, I literally found a script in a drawer  --is very minimal.  I assume the minimalism was the point.  There are no stage directions.  The text is internal monologue, and from it I must infer the location, the sets, the wardrobe & the action.

Easy enough, right?

Chapter Zero--  because I always start things off with a Page Zero, or a Chapter None  --is three quarters of a page.  Terse dialogue, very clippy stuff.  I guess the chapter is set on a boat.  I guess Cray is airdropping into water, then boarding the boat.

So then the task becomes drawing it.  Cray's in full gear-- no visible face, no exposed skin.  Weapons?  No.  I don't want to draw guns in general, much less on page one.  So he's empty handed until he gets in the water.  The first page should be a full-page splash, because Comix!  And I figure it should be action.  Get those blank page jitters out of the way.

So begins the problem solving.  What pose should I use?  The reference stack of comix on the desk is all Image drek, early years:  Deathblow 0, 1 & 2 by Jim Lee, Team 7 #1-4 by Aron Wiesenfeld, and the Deathblow / Barbarian story from Wildstorm! 1 & 2 by Aron Wiesenfeld..  The Team 7 stuff has all the best figurework, so I start scanning those.  Pages 1, 2 & 3 all have good figurework on Cray, so those wind up being the basis for the first two pages of my riff.  There's a deceptive amount of choreography in Wiesenfeld's layouts; I say deceptive because it's all smartly done, but gets obscured by the OCD detail bullshit.  My mission becomes, then, freeing the figures from the web of fiddly inking.

All the 90s pouches & bandoliers have to fucking go.

The tactical gear is crap, so I throw together my own.  It doesn't have to be full-on detail because the art should be superheavy on shadow.  The scenario is easy:  Cray jumps out of a helicopter, the huey banks and draws fire away, Cray dives into the water, latches onto the hull, sets up a charge.  That's the first three pages.  Page one is a fullpage splash, so one panel, no borders:  that should transition smoothly to page two, which is a montage of shots with no defined borders.  We go from looking up into the air to panning down to the water, to level with the ship.  Nice and smooth.  The only boxiness on these pages should be dialogue boxes, which is a conversation I need to have with myself shortly...

Jim Lee's Deathblow couldn't make up its mind on text boxes or dialogue format.  Issue #1 has lowercase font in the narration, slightly italicized, which doesn't match up with issue #0 or issue #2.  Both 0 & 2 are all caps block lettering.  None of which feels very appropriate.  And the boxes themselves have hand-drawn borders; for the italic lowercase font the borders are all nib-thin, whereas the other issues do the narrative boxes with thick lines.

Who fucking cares.  I'll come back to the text boxes.  My main goal is placement, at the moment.  I scribble everything out to make sure it fits cleanly.  Briefly consider doing the boxes as wholly separate from the text, the way FM often does in Sin City, off in a column of its own.  But I want all the real estate I can take, so no separate column.  Not for this chapter.  Maybe I'll do that in later chapters.

The first two pages resolved, I move from air to water.  Cray beneath the waves, affixing a charge to the boat hull.  That's the third page, three panels.  I start to separate the panels with borders, by the base of the page, so as to carry the border style over onto pages 4 & on.  Everything is nice and sharp, and the action is quick.  I decide to skip showing how Cray climbs up, because Action is the point here.

Page four gives me some pause.  If I'm skipping showing how Cray climbs up, maybe I should be even more elliptical with the action.  Part of the point of these pages is establishing character-- and how better to establish the character of your badass than by showing what Kind of badass he is?  So instead of a bunch of little panels establishing details I decide the entire scenario can be done in two.  Setup two guards looking at pooled water on the deck, completely unprepared for Cray, who's leaping to attack from behind: a nice frozen moment, action in media res.  Cut to panel two, a view from just off the ship's bow, knees-down of Cray as he tosses the ragdoll bodies of the guards over.

Boom.  Four pages, and I'm halfway through the text for chapter one, in layouts.

I go back to the beginning and start working out spotting blacks.

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) [secret 13th apt tapes]

basically finished except for minor noodling & fretting, which always happens

 but fidgets aside i feel like i've got my method with this paper down

 three pieces of paper left.  three portraits done.  three to go

executive decisions for artfags in poverty (part of an otological regress into finitude)

You could record.  You could.  You could record, and playback, the process of hacking out the art.  The layout process.  The correcting and re-positioning of elements on the page.  You could.  You could record.

Often I do.   Yesterday I did not.  Nor the day before.  I did not record those days because there is a crudity and artlessness to the uncertainty in the initial stages of sketching, a goofyfootedness.  Often I don't.

Recording is something I do when not altogether there.  There's the OCD, y'see.  If the obsessive-compulsive mark-maker is In, in the driver's seat, in the director's chair, then "I" am less in evidence.

Then I'm more liable to record.  But if it's the layout guy, the composition hack, that's less Inspired.  That's mechanic brain; that's function and form guy.  That guy doesn't do much that's inspired.  No sense to 'im.

No sense recording that.  But the camera's charged.  Battery pack plugged in.  Tripod extended to full height.  So maybe next session.  Maybe tonight.  Or tomorrow.  When the brush is in hand.  Maybe then.

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

THE KILL HOUSE - vapour to vapour

A backburner, or side-burner, is this DeathBro script I've been hacking at.

 

A long while back-- maybe two years ago, now? --my interest in certain lapsed properties at Image Comics began to bubble anew.  It's probably, at least in part, the fault of the Xtinction Agenda podcast.  Like, does anybody remember when Image started revitalizing their store of old Rob Liefeld projects?  Prophet went to Brandon Graham & his friend circle, Glory went to Joe Keatinge + Sophie Campbell, and Supreme was shopped to Warren Ellis & Tula Lotay.

While obviously a market-driven thing--  like, Image owned those properties because Liefeld didn't, any longer, and what good's an I.P. when it's left in the bottom of the toychest?  --it made me super nostalgic for all the other shit Image used to have and didn't do all that much with.  Like, Prophet, Glory & Supreme were all capeshit.  Then there's a whole other tier, purely military-adjacent; all those Jim Lee / Brandon Choi / Whilce Portacio / Chuck Dixon riffs:  Deathblow!  Wetworks!  Team 07!

I am not saying my favourite decade for trash entertainment was the 90s.  But when it comes to quality, smoothbrained idiocy, you could do worse than Wetworks.  It's a Delta Force level military unit that gets dipped in T-1000 sauce and recruited into a blood feud between vampires & werewolves.  Sometimes you don't need smart comix:  you only need visually exciting stuff.  Which is why I read them.  Deathblow, at the outset, was Jim Lee flexing his skills & amusing himself.  Nothing more, nothing less.  It's a project he abandoned because Frank Miller threatened to sue, for biting Sin City's style.  And Team 07-- that book introduced me to Aaron Wiesenfeld, a strange & exciting talent for excess.  God bless excess.

Of course none of it's aged well.  DC apparently owns it all, now, because Jim Lee gave it to 'em as a kind of wedding dowry.  The company hasn't figured out what to do with any of it, effectively.  DC doesn't need any of it, so it's all just kind of packed into the hinges of the casement, where Black Label World is ported onto earth-52 or what the hell ever.  It's accessible whenever Kwyzz bounces off the orbit of Wonderworld and caroms against earth-34 and the bumper lights spell out TILT.

Highly technical trick, doesn't happen all that often, but ever since I was a young kid I've played the silver ball.  Anyhow:

The Xtinction Agenda had a contest, two-and-a-half years ago, and somehow I entered it.  Also somehow, I won.  Probably had to do with the paucity of contestants.  But the prize:  the prize was 'The Wild Storm', a big dumb comic that doesn't need much explaining.  It was I.P. maintenance, farmed out to Warren Ellis, meant to re-engineer all those leftovers & re-invigorate them.  Then Warren Ellis was exposed for having his dick out online and the whole thing got shelved.

What that meant, what that SIGNIFIED, was that people who loved 90s excess were still craving it.  The project wouldn't have gotten greenlit any other way.  Everybody in comix knows that American Audiences are Trash Humpers and always will be.

So I went on a quest, and started re-reading.  Now, let's be clear:  Team 07 is as dumb as any offbrand rip-off of any movie you like.  Nothing is as good as the original Predator.  But there's some interesting stuff, deep in the mix, and it takes a brain less brutalized by physics than mine to point out the useful conceits.  Doc James over at the X-A did some heavy (unpaid!) lifting on Deathblow, and what scuttled from underneath those corpses were some weird-ass phages, fer shure.  Like, Chuck Dixon & Brandon Choi & Jim Lee & Warren Ellis all together were grafting Ancient Aliens, Genetics & Spiritual Warfare onto Toxic Masculinity, and the results did not rock any stadiums or collect any stage panties.

But they COULD have.  They could have.  So that's where I'm at, today.  Figuring out how to arrange all these leftovers into something cogent & compelling without losing the weird inchoate broken-ness which continues to charm my ass.  Because I do not want an internally consistent, logical comic book about alien angels using Delta Force rejects to save makind.  That shit is why I remember these comix:  these comix were never planned to be consistent, these stories were never built to be Whole.  It's all vapour.

I've been very fixated on the concept of Vaporwave, because as a critique [of capitalist detritus], vaporwave makes aesthetic concerns the organizing principle behind the re-configuration of found materials.  I'm a huuuuuge fan of found materials.  All my favourite art--  art I've made  --has emerged out of found materials.  Please, let's put this business of Originality to bed.  All I want is to make lines on paper.  It's the pleasing arrangement of things that charms me.  I build little sculptures & scenes out of scrap, all the time.  It's what my mind does, generating & configuring component parts into patterns.  I'm good at pattern recognition; I'm good at sorting & filing.  Everything is Systems, I like to tell myself.  It makes living with OCD bearable.  In fact it puts my OCD to work, making art.

And the conclusion I've come to is, Deathblow should have been gay.  Or at least queer for Jackson Dane.  Because Delta Force is packed with toxic males, some of whom find it funny to perform night raids in drag.  All that Seal Team 6 worship that came out of Jim Lee & Brandon Choi, all those Special Operations military-industrial handjobs Chuck Dixon loved to script, that stuff would have hit different if Michael Cray were knocking boots with Jackson Dane.

Further down that road-to-nowhere-good: if Team o7's goodoleboys were woke enough to recognize that they just wanted to fuck each other, why, they might decide fragging the chain of command would be a laugh.  And, well, there's no way that story ends anywhere satisfying anybody.  How can it?

It's all vapour.  It's ALL vapour.

So that's what THE KILL HOUSE is.  Me, playing with toys that aren't mine to play with, putting Barbie dresses on my GI Joes and generally Making Shit Up, with no intent to tie it off or put a fancy Alan Moore-style, purple, flowery bow on it.  It's that scene where Dutch's Green Berets are all emptying their mags at absolutely nothing, chopping green hell into bagged salad, and at the end all you can hear is the high plaintive whine of Blain's overheated m134 minigun, spinning down.  That's what the whole of THE KILL HOUSE is:  confusion, heartbreak, and doom, peppered with Shane Black style quippery.  That's the intent.

I'm finishing off the last of my Research, ironing out a final chapter, now, and will start drawing it sometime.  There's more pressing material on deck right now.  But the fun thing is, this book IS vapour.

Because I haven't mentioned maybe the best bit:

I literally do not remember writing 9/10s of it.  I found almost an entire script for this thing, filed away, that must have happened sometime in the last year.  I must have begun writing it before moving to Chicago!  But when...?

Not remembering things, as any reader of this blog will know, worries me.  But in this case it's perfectly suited to the project.  Where did it come from?  Out of my brain fog.  Where is it going?  nowhere, fast!  If THE KILL HOUSE ain't Vapour Comix, then I dunno what could be.

the burroughs folio - the secret dreamer (2)

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

Azure Pantry / the Burroughs Folio - Kiki (1)

in progress.  one of a series of six portraits to be used as chapter stops in the Azure Pantry.  each portrait will precede one of six dreams; the dream sequences from Azure Pantry will have a limited print run, separate from Azure Pantry & Denizen, bound together as the Burroughs Folio

that's the plan, at any rate.  this is the third portrait.  i've already got ian sommerville.  thought i'd posted him already.  guess that goes up tomorrow.  still moving toward finished pencils on this one.  next up is inks & colour.  probably cop out and just colour the background...  that's what i've done with the others

"finished" pencils, a little later...

i no longer am certain whether he looks like the historical Kiki, whose name is not recorded.  i only have one photo to work from.  but he'll do for "my" kiki

(actual final pencils)

i know, i know, the hands look like shit.  i'll figure out how to fix it in the brushwork.  that's how these things always go:  i find the final line in The Doing, wielding pen or brush or whatever the final medium is.  the backgrounds will probably be chalk and graphite with some brush whereas the sky should be a chalk blue with pure cloud, so those regions of paper should go wholly untouched

this india ink is a quarter century old