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!

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

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

the burroughs folio - the secret dreamer (3) [nobody recording b/c nobody sees]

what recording?  what tapes?

the burroughs folio - the secret dreamer (2)

the burroughs folio - the secret dreamer (1)

 

pencil rough for the final portrait in the burroughs folio series:  'the secret dreamer'

Azure Pantry / the Burroughs Folio - Kiki (3)

chalk is the quick'n'dirty route & i love it.  such a dirty, dirty shortcut.  but it's meditative, working the chalkdust into the weave of the paper.  paper is such a sexy medium.  why do people fuck around with digital when they can learn something tactile?  because it's no-muss, i guess.  less time spent on prep & cleanup.  less inclination to plan with caution?  whatever.  who am i to shit on a shortcut?  i'm using chalk because it doesn't take thirty minutes of fucking around with layers & levels & erase & smudge & burn tools when i can just rub a piece of paper with a piece of chalk, wipe it down with a paper towel, and boom: sky.  i love this shade.  it's going to look fab in Azure Pantry.  i'm not going to lay too much blue on Denizen, though.  this is just for the facing chapter pages

(text for the chapter)

The Lazarus ink--  that's what we're calling it, now; this bottle has been resurrected regularly for a decade  --is too watery for a nice drydown, so dry brush is off the table until this stuff bakes for a bit.  this wasn't how i wanted to ink this piece, but so fucking what.  it's a test piece.  every piece is a test piece until the comix actually happen,  i'll fuck around with the sea in the b/g today, prob'ly...

calling it.  that's as much fuckaround as i feel like today

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

DENIZEN - postscript.

 

This tasty extract from the [revised, 2nd edition of] 'The Soft Machine' occurs midway through the book.  When I was re-reading & researching for DENIZEN, this paragraph (which was not a paragraph unto itself, originally, as it was merely one runon in a greater blobwall / passage) struck me as a total encapsulation of my intent with the project.  For months I had been wrestling with an explanation-- if not justification --for why I had returned, like some self-incriminating idiot, to my teenage fixation with the furtive, seedy, wife-killing Beat ikon, William S. Burroughs.  And the explanation was this:

I am not a writer.

I like to say that.  Set aside whether or not it's true.  I'm not a writer.  I'm a bad forensic scientist.

DENIZEN began with this choice:  I chose the Carr-Kammerer homicide as a junction where all of modern gay life changed forever.  The Carr-Kammerer case was used by the legal system of New York City as the foundation for what became known as the "Gay Panic" defense.  Burroughs was complicit in the lies told in that courtroom, as was Allen Ginsberg, as was Jack Kerouac.  The whole Beat movement began with a pair of flailing, failed writers trying to carve a book out of their best friends' senseless homicide.  Ginsberg initially dedicated his most celebrated poem to Lucien Carr.  Everyone in the circumstance had opportunity to save their friends from the murderous impasse in the relationship of Lucien Carr & David Kammerer-- and no-one tried any harder to prevent it than anyone tried to avenge it.  Everyone in the situation was complicit.  Everyone in New York.

Much has, quite rightly, been made of William Burroughs' killing of Joan Vollmer.  In my view, most if not all the same parties are culpable:  Allen Ginsberg & Jack Kerouac pressured Burroughs to stop "being queer" and become romantically entangled with Joan.  Nobody made the correct choices there, either.  In every instance, everyone resisted the sensible, honest course of action:  Be Yourselves.

No-one assumed any responsibility.  They simply constructed the circumstances permitting the experiment's disastrous result.  "It just happened," as we like to say.

It can be argued that the reason why Lucien Carr's lawyer was able to successfully sell Self-Defense in court in 1945 is because no-one wanted to hear the facts of the case.  Nobody in New York in 1945 wanted to understand why homosexuality was criminalized, or why the participants ultimately came to behave in such a callous, stupid and inexpertly criminal fashion.  Nobody wanted to hear why Lucien Carr rehearsed his excuses for murder with both his "best friends", nor would anyone want to hear why Lucien Carr-- a male prostitute with a family history of mental illness --attempted to cajole Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs into helping him dispose of evidence.

No-one in New York in 1945 wanted the responsibility.  Everyone just wanted it to go away.

In picking apart why I couldn't portray the events of August 1945 completely factually, I had to use the "facts" of August 1945 to explain how fucked everyone and everything was.  So the facts wound up with my fingerprints all over them.  A Real Writer might have the discipline & integrity to depict all the facts of the case faithfully, with absolute clarity-- but the facts, as they arrived on my desk, were murky as sin.

Lucien Carr's motives were as murky as his attempted disposal of David Kammerer's still-breathing corpse, and the facts were as bent as the police manning The Tombs.  Lucien tried to stab Dave with a cheap knife that could barely break skin, then he tied his friend hand & foot and put bricks in his pockets and threw him in the water.  Taking time to empty Dave's pockets of money and cigarettes.  The same Lucky Strikes Lucien offered Bill to smoke, when Burroughs answered the door and discovered Lucien in a less-than-fresh hell of his own invention.

In some versions of the story, Burroughs helped Carr dispose of the cigarette pack and knife.  He did not.  In other versions, Carr presented Burroughs with Dave's bloodied glasses as he said, "I finally had to off the old man."  The exact same phrase Lucien would use to greet Kerouac.

Burroughs' own version, in 'And The Hippos Were Boiled In Their Tanks', has Lucien killing Kammerer with a hatchet and throwing the body off a roof.  Because one gets the sense that Bill had had enough of Facts.  Facts couldn't account for Carr's stupid, brutal, delusional act of finality in a set of circumstances which never required stupidity, brutality, or delusion.

In Kerouac's version, Lucien and he spent the day at the movies, juiced as fruits on cheap vino, trying to decide when, not If, to tell the cops.  In every version, it was Lucien Carr's own mother-- who'd had a traumatic enough life already --who was left to convince her idiot son to turn himself in to the police.  In the public version, Carr was forced to defend his honour from a scary elder queer with the only means he had.

Etcetera.

I couldn't tell any version of that.  I had to tell every version of that.  In order to tell it, I had to get away from everybody but one solitary witness, William S. Burroughs, a.k.a. Will Dennison of St. Louis, worldweary young traveler, failed medical student, self-mutilator and recent denizen of wartime New York, with his admittedly auto-impaired perspective.  So.  Those are the facts.

I am not a writer.  "I used abstract reports of the experiments to evolve the formulæ of pain & pleasure association that control the planet."  Mea culpa, my friends.

DENIZEN: word falling / photo falling

 Marshaling photoref & getting the act together.

DENIZEN: style test / logo process / cover concept

Nothing some of you haven't seen before.

 

Noting my process here, since a traumatic brain injury has made my long-term memory semi-furtive & sneaky.  We moved to Chicago twenty-five days ago and I've forgotten what the front of the building I live in looks like three times.  Which isn't that bad, I s'pose, new environment & all, but I worry... when I can't remember whether it's a brown brick building with white stripes or a white brick building with brown stripes?  Honestly.  Two years ago I stopped & left my bike in the middle of the bridge a full block from my house--   absolutely no clue why  --and didn't realize I'd done so until I reached the front door & panicked because I was missing... something.

 

There have been other moments, probably not aided by marijuana, or a pre-existing diagnosis of dissociative PTSD.  This is me, admitting the actual reason to keep a fuckin' blog in the year 2024.

 

It is 2024, right?

 

The art itself was done in a quarter-century old sketchbook bought at a yard sale, because I compulsively collect ancient paper.  Media involved:  4H graphite, felt-tip pen, sharpie, calligraphy brush & india ink, watercolour, white acrylic.

 

The test fonts came from the preloaded typefaces in my word processor of choice, Libreoffice, which is open source, free, and superior to any other program in my (admittedly backward) experience.  I recommend it to anyone similarly bound for the Great Glue Factory.

The final logo was kerned & tweaked using Microsoft Paint-- because I am a trilobite --then pasted in as a transparency using GIMP-- because I am a highly evolved trilobite.  Dual thumbs & everything!