from friedkin to delany (with love)

In the space of a single morning.  Discussed 'Crusing'-- the book and the film adaptation --with my husband, as well as the Situationist concept of the dérive, and what Samuel R. Delany meant by "contact" in 'Times Square Red, Times Square Blue'.

We also covered how transvestigators have this dorky overlap with racist schmucks, and how often sexually paranoid individuals arrive at conclusions like "the Rothschilds secretly funded a satanic plot to make Emmanual Macron fuck his own brother".  Which seems like a lot of work for a satanic inversion of values, if you ask me.  Surely there's a cheaper way?

Ultimately with this biz Sig & I are like, One Yarn Board Looks Very Like Another, and maybe it would be less mockworthy and personally isolating if these dinguses would revert to blaming Satan, imps and goblins for giving them failboners.

Chuchy shouty type who claims the devil incited their toe fungus looks remarkably less foolish than the average Content Generator who has to create a seven-part Youtube essay to unpack their "investigation".  

The average churchy shouter is also less likely to be sued by the president of France.

But what the eff do we know.

Tracing Gould - o1o

“That’s the sex that passes the censor, squeezes thru between the bureaus, because there is always a space between, in popular songs and Grade B movies, giving away the basic American rottenness, spurting out like breaking boils, throwing out gobs of that un-D.T.* to fall anywhere and grow into some degenerate cancerous life-form, reproducing a hideous random image.”

* [un-differentiated tissue]

 

Exit the kid's stuff.  Enter Jenn Pennfield:  who, with her toontown leer, could be first cousin to Betty Boop.  There hasn't been much spiciness since year one, with the gratuitous Tess Trueheart bubble bath--  I'm sure Gould blushed at the Tijuana bible going around, preoccupied as he seemed to be by rearing Dick Tracy Jr.  --.but there's a hellzapoppin amount of of lingerie & boudoir stuff going on in this kid's adventure strip now.  And catfights.  Keep it classy, Dick!

You nasty mans.

No wonder Dick Tracy Junior ran off with Starfire and started the New Teen Titans.

"Think Clean Thoughts, Chum."  Batman smirks over his shoulder at the confounded Jason Todd--  in german, tod means "death"; in morguetalk, T.O.D. is an acronym for time of death  --as young Robin gawps at demigod Diana sauntering in her star-spangled bikini toward Superman's Fortress of Solitude.

Sex, that world behind the world:  The Fortress of Solitude--  stolen wholesale from Doc Savage, and used, like Savage, as a weapons cache, a cabinet of curiosities, a lair for speculation  --hidden at a northern, arctic remove--  north being in many traditions, the land of the dead  --only accessible through interlacing an immense lock & key.  Only Superman can open that door.  Or Alfred Jarry's Supermale.

And what rough beast, its keyholder shredding contract to nofap

edges towards Tijuanabible.org to be horned?

Although I've got to say, it's rare I see Tracy bricked up for anything other than machine-gunning racketeers.  Sex is that side of things you don't really see represented in Tracy's psyche.  He cares about puzzles and protecting orphans and solving murders, and maybe he gets off on the death traps-- we're all grown-ups here, if it takes being tied by the neck to a burning log to get you off, hey, we don't kinkshame.  So long as it's consenting!  Dick Tracy doesn't seem to have one of those nonconsensual consent kinda minds.  Unlike Tess.

 

The Jazz age indeed.

I'm not just posting this in celebration of the o1o that tops the page:  I'm posting this because it's entirely possible that THIS IS GOULD.  There are a lot of Tijuana Bibles featuring Dick Tracy, but this is the only one that has all the earmarks of the style & general linework.  It's the cartooning of Gould, and the lettering, and the word bubble format & placement...  The storytelling, the "action", etc.  I've not seen any Dick Tracy tijuana bible that could pass for the man, except for this.  I'm really given to wonder.

If it wasn't him, then maybe an art assistant?  Did Gould have art assistants before 1950, and Dick Lochner?

Anyway.  What were we talking about?

 

 

Oh yeah, "action".

Well, let's stop calling this entirely an essay.  There's obviously some journaling in the mix.  The Gould Thing that you've been listening to, for nine episodes-- or not, and no-one could blame you, least of all the poor bastard who has to inhabit this skull --is also Research into how to reverse-engineer a webcomic out of my obsessions with science fiction, and sex, and william s. burroughs, and clive barker, and michael moorcock, etc. --and the mechanics of how to machine a slow strange sprawling fucker like that out, especially now, in this era where any content goes.  God help who-ever reads it, but I want to write & draw a cautionary queertopia, and I'd like to use the daily strip format to explore it.  Sex should be part of the exploration, I firmly believe.  But drawing sex, lighting sex, framing sex, staging sex...  That's difficult business.  Not for the faint of hard.

It intrigues me to speculate, today, that Chester Gould authored one of his own tijuana bibles.  He's the only one who credibly could, I think.  So yeah.  Filing this here:

Eddie Campbell made porn, Carla Speed McNeil made porn, Alan Moore reinvented himself as a pornographer, and my husband makes the cutest smut, too.

It's only lines on paper, folks!

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.

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.

on frank miller (a.k.a. the greatest punk song ever cut to vinyl is the final 85 seconds of "by you" by fugazi)

been thinking about frank miller a lot lately

there was a very punk thing manifesting through that dumb kid

a very punk, reactionary, inherently conservative thing that couldn't understand anyone who wasn't a white man angry at the near-certainty of dying in cities made terrible by mutant hands

i mean why did i like repo man.  why am i a nearly-fifty gay punk who got the ethos behind the jokes in a movie that is 99% joke*, but didn't understand why the jokes were funny.  why was i so dissociated & damaged by violence in the home that i didn't get why the "real" punks in the movie are so fucking funny.  you have to be a punk in this fucking world, because how can you be comfortable in the skin you were born in, in america?  the only way you can be comfortable being defined by this oppressively dumb, barely sentient lumbering Thing calling itself society is through complacency & sedation

* the remaining 1% is a sincerity pure & intense as boomslang venom spat in your eye.  that is why i liked repo man, by the bye.  because it Believes the shit it talks, to your face, as it smiles like harry dean stanton fingering a straight razor

(listen i never promised your a primrose path of seagues.  just keep reading & pretend i'm not here)

i've never read anything that said frank miller saw repo man but i mean christ, look at frank when he's firing on all cylinders as a satirist.  'give me liberty' is as punk & anarchic as any alex cox movie.  the Whole of a frank miller project is never as great as its opening chapter.  i think we can all agree on that:  the martha washington book miller & gibbons death-marched to conclusion does not interest me as a work of fiction because frank really wanted to write a dave sim length essay on (of all people) ayn randian theories and YAWN, man

but that opening salvo, 'give me liberty', was as fucking punk as it gets, and it's magnificent comix, and it's miller giving alan moore the business, and it's the stadium rock equivalent of listening to fugazi live in the snow on their fourth encore and the people who were there were fucking living the music, believe

[lest you fail to identify my synesthesiac tendencies i consider elektra: assassin one of the finest cyberpunk novels i've ever gobbled.  so maybe i feel art more strongly & specifically than most ordinary people who weren't deeply traumatized.  i experience music.  there's no other way to say it.  every time i hear one of  my favorite songs i am forever hearing some part of it anew because the experience is new and i'm still playing that track, motherfucker]

anyway.  i'm never going to assemble all these notes in one place & edit them into a cogent slab because who cares, on the internet.  i'd rather make art & think about art & blither about it where & when-ever i feel like it, because i've survived death three times & once it was nearly at the hands of my dad.  i've earned the right to not give a fig about brevity.  and i think frank the tank is a guy i need to thank, cringe as his name goddamned be.  he's just as fuckin' bad as dave sim and has just as many weird sins to answer for, and i say this counting alan moore's name also in the lot, because they're all popular artists, and i hold my favorite creators' feet to the fire all the time no matter the medium.  i've kept a list of who was naughty & who was nice & who can be considered an architect of the present moment because these sumbitches have been shaping popular imagination for decades, baby.  and frank's a fuckup, first & foremost, so his work has produced a fuckoff bevvy of idiots who in time came to shape conservative tendencies in young white men

insert existential drawn-out heaving sigh here

but frank's a great artist, no matter whether i think his linework has irreparably deteriorated or not, because he's made some Great Art, and chapter one of the dark knight returns is an excellent 48-page graphic novella that's < the dark knight returns as a whole, which is a very clumsy book.  ronin is a fucking excellent graphic novel from start to finish; there's no up-and-down to the tone that fucks up what miller's doing.  it's mathematically perfect in its pacing.  it's assured, it's practiced, it's stadium rock...  yet i'd rather read the first chapter of the dark knight returns, any given day, because it is a perfect batman story that shoulda been an annual or one of those "elseworlds" prestige format things DC started squatting out

and what the fuck is punk about batman, anyway?  what in the name of balls has happened to this meander of sentences since i first typed the words "there is a very punk thing" about young frank miller.  i dunno.  but there's something there, because miller had batman become King Of The Punks in his weird dumb superhero comic about an aging son of old money dressing up in armor to bruise superman's jaw, and frank miller identified with the blank angry irony of sid vicious's swastika fetish, and frank miller was a dumb white kid who got the crap scared out of him when early 80s new york beat him up & took his money.  he very nearly wound up being a victim in a mike hammer book, chewed up and covered in filth--  or at least he clearly felt that way, and as a lifelong violence survivor i can totally empathize what's it's like, living in terror, so no surprise when the guy who barely held it together after getting robbed saw the twin towers fly apart, no surprise That Guy turned into a really embarrassing coked-out uncle and started drawing supercrude bat-fantasies about killing saddam with his hands & his love (of america)

but still: there's that punk Thing.  because the dark knight strikes again is as tonally weird as tdkr, and it's goddamned beautifully abused by lynn varley, at the other end of a creative partnership that i'll never quite comprehend because creeping jesus, imagine having sex with the dude who considered himself the physical inspiration behind 'that yellow bastard'?  the confidence to draw himself as the main monster in his best "hard-boiled" book, that's fuckin' Punk

and the way frank miller drew Ben Grimm, recently? 

punk as fuck

and anyway when i say i've been thinking about frank miller a lot lately usually it's for the pacing & all that "writing" jazz--  and what the fuck is writing when it's done by re-arranging a literal wall of post-it notes?  don't answer that  --but in this instance it's i've been thinking about frank miller a lot because i really used to admire his artwork even though it's ugly & there's never been anything sensual about his line, his lines had this Energy.  and i know that energy wasn't all caffeine and booze and coke

the energy was punk.  it's for-sure there.  it's a guy who was making some of the best comix of his young life and survived getting robbed by new york at the same time as a pandemic is destroying the city and reagan's in office & that fer shure meant we were all gonna eat a nuke.  so fuck it, fam, clamber in my chevy malibu & let's bang.  the line of a repo man is always intense

lettering

warning:  contains honest depictions of states of mental health some might consider distressing

lettering

i abhor lettering.  i say this both as a comix artist & an ocd person.  i hate hand lettering.  i view it as absolutely essential to a certain type of comic book work, however, and i hand letter all my own comix.  i just hate lettering because it's time-consuming & it involves rehearsals & warmups & practice.  i know i sound like a whiny teenager but sometimes my fine motor control sucks since the accident & it makes me impatient with myself

i hate lettering because it's a Job, in comix, and not always the most stimulating one.  sometimes you only need one type of lettering for a given project.  it gets monotonous pretty fast, writing everything all out by hand.  i can.  i keep journals.  but yeah.  lettering

all my coworkers at every restaurant job i've ever worked has asked me to hand letter the goddamned signs.  not to draw things for them on the chalkboards.  just write out all 77 craft beers.   "sure.  don't give me anything creative to do.  let me write today's shitface special" i would mutter, rifling through the shot glass full of chalk

lettering

after i ran away from home at 18-- a sentence you may hear altogether too often from me, sorry --i dedicated innumerable months of my life to reprogramming certain tendencies i was taught in infancy, specifically my handwriting.  every night after work i would sit down with a legal pad and rehearse.  i re-conditioned myself to write upper & lowercase As, Gs, Qs, Ks, Ts etc entirely differently.  

because i am ocd.  i didn't know it at the time.  but i should have

when i am very stressed i have dreams about practicing lettering

my first recurring dream occured three nights in a row, and it was just a running scroll passing across my completely paralyzed field of vision.  (i have sleep paralysis sometimes.)  on all three nights, the scroll would inscribe itself:  arcane, unknown characters would imprint themselves as the scroll rolled mercilessly.  i went to school completely exhausted every day.  i was terrified of whatever was happening to me and began to dread sleeping.  but then it stopped.  make of that what you will.  i was 17

and, this is not even a joke.  there was the very first time i dropped acid, at 18.  i saw, crawling over every surface-- exactly how your ordinary, un-concussed* wannabe raver & skater rat might simply hallucinate pretty colours  --lettering!  everywhere, sliding over & simultaneously somehow beneath every surface, on skin and countertop and clothing, the entire environs: lettering

* because of course at 12 i'd had a concussion.  dropped headfirst onto a rock from the very top of a jungle gym on the playground.  when i woke i didn't remember arriving at school so they send me home

the last time i had a nervous breakdown, when i had been several weeks homeless & chose to sacrifice money for a hotel room for just one night--  because life in the graveyard had become intolerable, what with the hysterical barks of humorless laughter from the adjoining woods --i sat clutching edge of the bed, both hands hammerlocked to the seams of the mattress, trying to keep myself from looking at the ceiling, where just seconds ago i had seen the whorling & swarming of letters

lettering, man

i do not enjoy it.  but i practice it habitually.  it's just one of those things.  i don't take pleasure in it the way i do drawing.  it is just a thing i made myself learn how to do.  everyone tells me i have nice handwriting.  i dunno

but LOGOS

i LOVE them

because i get to fuck with lettering.  i get to spindle & reimagine & mutilate & break lettering

my favourite mag of the early 90s was RAYGUN because half the articles were purposefully impossible to read.  i love fucking with language on that level.  stretching the possibilities of what a design may imply and the limits of typography.  shit is key.  logos are all about brevity & BAM and out.  impression & individuality.  that's such a relief

with logos i don't feel crazy the same way hand-lettering a comic does

anyway.  these are the thoughts of a man with OCD & an autodidact, and this essay does not have a particular point beyond putting all my dumb maundering thoughts on a subject in one particular place, since art is therapy as much as anything

art saved my life

so i must grudgingly admit lettering has, too

...which's tantamount to admitting to myself that being crazy has been beneficial

which i guess is the point of the blog?  i should stop typ

my tarot - XV - the imp

xv - imp

Short for Impetus.  I do not believe in the devil.  Full stop.

Let's start with the devil.

I had an unconventional upbringing: consequently I possess a peculiarly personal conception of magic that needn't concern you in depth, suffice to say I do not believe in magick, Crowley or all the freaky racist gibberish baked into western occult traditions.  I don't believe in Ghod or the judeo-christian schema ruling every moment of our shitty little American microcosm like some weird judgmental micromanaging cuck, perched in the corner of everybody's lives, scornfully disapproving, dick in hand.

And I don't believe in the devil, either.

But I do believe in the material existence of spiritual evil.  Just not the way the rest of this frankly insane country does.  And I do believe in magic-- &, weirdly --I DO believe in god: as the organizational principle that keeps our atoms dancing to ever more complex arrangements of weird tunes.  So when I undertook re-creating & re-interpreting the Rider-Waite deck, I wanted to preserve the Spirit and overall composition of Pamela Coleman-Smith's work, with her intricately theatrical staging & all the little narrative suggestions which make tarot so compellingly suggestive, as a storytelling vehicle, constantly hinting, like panels in a comic strip cut up & re-ordered.

I saw a number of ways to address all these concern, here, in the Imp card.  

Because the Impetus is not the devil.  But he is.  I don't believe in Sssatan, but satanism, if treated like surrealism, or communism, any sticky -ism you can name, satanism illuminates some specific issues--  let's say, classical themes  --which even a novice tarot reader might find germane.  (Today, of all days!)

There are a few details to finish in the art, here.  The gradiants in the far background and the final touches of flame.  But otherwise, personally?  I think it's the devil to the tee.  The Imp looks nothing like Pamela-Smith's devil card, and is one of the only ones to have been so thoroughly & completely  retooled.  But I think it's honest to her intentions, and I like to believe she would have approved of my efforts.

This guy was designed the year before covid hit.  I borrowed from the loteria deck for the wardrobe on the gender archetypes, as well as the left-side devil face, hoof & chicken leg--  el catrin, la dama, & el diablito, respectively.  The right-facing mask of Lucifer (if that's how you choose to read that solar figure) is represented by the capering 'Angel of Hearth & Home' by Max Ernst.  The tails, the Fruit & the Flame are repurposed from Pamela Coleman-Smith's original Devil card, and re-contextualized; the imagery of the Fruit & Flame owes as much to Coleman-Smith as it does to Waite's instructions.

It took a while to figure out how to put these elements together, and if I'm entirely honest it was not an entirely conscious process, as I was principally concerned with Queering Symmetry, a recurring fixation throughout this series.  (You'll see what I mean soon enough.)

I did all the real groundwork on inking & tones during the covid shutdown.

I think that's all the stuff that matters.

On to the other cards.

Next:  o - fool

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?")