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.

promiseland: stuntcasting

Embracing the nature of the thing I am compelled to write, have built a complete cast list for PROMISELAND, which now includes Vincent Price, among others.

 

Vincent is a good example of how the cast list is being built, as a sort of structural guide to my intentions:  Vinnie's part is listed as "distinguished patron of the arts", which he certainly was, in real life.  I don't have a scene for him yet, but when I get there it's plain to me what purpose he'll serve.  Most of the supporting / auxiliary cast have titles like that, with very few proper names; Donald Cammell is listed as "a hedonist", where Val Lewton is a "blind shopkeeper", and Curtis Harrington is a "peepshow regular".  These will all be fun rôles, I can tell.

Of the few actual names for these historical persons, Leslie Van Houten surprised me by being the 2nd Mansonoid to make my mental casting call:  she's won the part of "creepy Sally Streetmeat".  I thought Bobby Beausoleil would be the only Mansonoid, with hir marquee role as the enchanting & difficult "Bobbi Beautiful Soul".  Leslie's secondary cast, though, so she won't be stepping on Bobbi's feminine energies.

That starfucker Manson's insisted on horning in, but I've relegated him to the absolute end of my cast, subheaded as "introducing", and made sure he keeps his shit in check by crediting him as "a recidivist".

Can't let these freaks take over my show.