The book proposal drawing is done! All that’s left is the words, which I’ll spin in my head while packing for this move to Chicago.
Something about it still doesn’t quite satisfy me - I think it’s because the “painted” style doesn’t appear and I kind of rushed the “tendrils” that appear over everything, but it’s only a proposal, so the final version will have a much more polished style. In any case, I’ll spend the next few days sitting in a coffee shop, putting tracing paper over printouts of these pages, trying to come up with good narrative and good composition.
OMG spoilerrrrrrs! That weird cylinder thing in the previous pages is the human character’s “descendant” from millions of years in the future. He (It?) is trying to protect him from harm, and the “eye” thing is his assistant whom the cylinder-being created to help him in this case, but since Mr. Eyes won’t come into being if the human man isn’t harmed, the eye dude secretly wants to kill him. Anyway, I was thinking that the whole “prose” section would be from the point of view of these two post-human beings, with the dialog of the two humans being completely parenthetical to that, and the third-person explanation of their behavior being the whole conciet from which I’d write this. I thought it would be a good device to tie the two styles together, and also a good way to add some real “narrative” that isn’t often seen in graphic novels. They’re a visual medium, to be sure, but it’s very, very difficult to comment on specific behaviors or mentalities with nothing but tiny squares full of drawings. Check “Bus” in the comics section for an attempt, but I’m going for something a little more complex this time. Anyway, feedback is appreciated.
First, a little publicity:
If you’re in or around Madison, be sure to check out some of my drawings at the State Street Gallery show.
Here’s an interview with the editor emeritus of Nature, who passed away recently. Fascinating ideas about probing into the human brain using notions of fear, as well as all the other questions science has been probing lately.
Finally, speaking of fear and bizzare ideas, yesterday I read a horror comic called “Uzumaki” (”Spiral”) by Junji Ito. It’s wormed its way into my mind and laid eggs, so I’m going to talk them out of my brain and get on with my business. It’s a story about a town that is cursed by, well, spiral shapes, which act like a kind of contagion, slowly destroying the town and its inhabitants. On the surface this sounds irredeemably silly, but Ito has a knack for atmospherics that makes you believe these shapes have the supernatural power to make people go mad, or mutate into grotesque monsters, or kill each other and themselves in a variety of creatively gruesome ways. The story follows a high school couple, and we see the events through their eyes as people are warped or killed by a kind of invisible, Lovecraftian personification of “spiral-ness” itself - as the story goes on, the pattern loses all its ordinary connotations and becomes a kind of character as well, which appears in and corrupts everything it can. Even the blades of grass begin to curl. I’m not normally that interested in horror, but this has a kind of surreal, apocalyptic feel that propels it above the normal gore and scares. Ito draws beautifully, too, if sometimes a little clumsily, in a subtle, noir-ish way that augments the strangeness of the story. In the end, not to give too much away, the town is obliterated, but it seems like the fate of the villagers isn’t too terrible considering the events up to that point; they at least seem to end up in a kind of off-brand Nirvana, which is rendered exquisitely across a two-page spread. Nothing about the curse or its origin is explained, beyond a basic “spirals exist to mesmerize, and so want desperately to be looked at.” - For mere humans, in this case, there is no answer. Definitely recommended.
Now that I’ve had a chance to sleep on it, I’ve realized the preceding post had far too many puns in it; someone may get the mistaken impression that I am a math teacher, or your bachelor uncle you only see once a year. This sketch should get the taste out of your mouth:
The reason this little guy is incredulous is because this site finally has its regular domain name again - Now I can actually go about advertising it. Awesome. And major thanks to Kris Truitt of Kookies and Kreme for the amazing web design.
…..
I know it’s half a decade old, but “Ten” by cLOUDDEAD is possibly the best album I have heard in years.
Just got an email saying that while I was a finalist for the Gershwin Hotel Artist-in-Residence Program, they decided to go with someone else. Poo. I’ll have to shop around my idea some more to see if I can get a grant to build it. And I’ll try again in October; I’m not exactly low on gallery-style ideas right now.
In the meme-time, here are three puns about bees:
BumbleBeam
MoBee
Limit Bee, the bee who occupies all available space:
Ballpoint pen sketch I did a little while ago in an airport waiting area - Added the plane just for the fun of it.
Am I the only one who thinks this would be awesome?:
China’s proposal is to activate the IMF’s power to issue Special Drawing Rights (SDRs). The IMF would be groomed as de facto central bank for the planet. The SDRs would gradually become an “accepted means of payment”. Call it the ‘globo’.
It would be an error dismiss this idea as a pipe-dream. Cynics once ridiculed Maastricht plans to launch the euro. John Major famously said chatter about a European currency had “all the quaintness of a rain-dance and about the same potency”. Yet once officialdom began assembling the machinery for monetary union, EMU acquired a life of its own.
I always took for granted the idea that the World State is the future, and it’s cool to see a concrete step toward it, no matter how tiny. I can’t wait to start paying for stuff in “credits,” like household robots and designer babies.
Added some links to the main page, if you look over on the right, there. No, that’s too far. Back a lit- Yeah, right there.
Someone online was describing a nightmare he had when he was little, where Superman was waiting in the bushes to attack him. I thought it was such a goofy idea I had to sketch it:
The Simpsons used to be so awesome:
I think it can be a problem when anything gets too polished: Notice the strange lavender sky and Homer’s weird motions and angle during his soliloquy - I think it makes the whole thing a lot funnier and more “intimate,” contrasted with how the animators have figured out a way to do everything consistently now, taking the surprise out of it. Maybe it’s just nostalgia, but when the show was dealing with the ’80s and early ’90s it seemed so much “realer,” whereas now they make self-conscious references to things like cell phones and Facebook in a bid for relevance. Any comedy that isn’t completely absurdist needs to engage with the society that created it somehow, granted, but by deliberately drawing attention to the “furniture,” I think it actually diminishes its ability to comment on and point out all the silly things we take for granted. …Or you could just say “Show, don’t tell.” Whatever works for you.
Oh it is on. There is so content on this blog now.
Last month I applied for an artist-in-residence opening at the Gershwin Hotel in New York City. I’m waiting to hear back on the application, but one of the requirements was an essay about how a stay in NYC would enhance your art career. I thought I’d go the extra mile and do mine in the form below:
I have such a backlog of stuff I can’t wait to get uploaded.
Been doing some more drawing lately, to fill this site out a little as its propeller begins to spin and it takes to the sky on its untested wings of HTML and Javascript. That last sentence betrayed an embarrassing lack of knowledge of both web design and aeronautical engineering, but hopefully this will distract you while I escape:
Follow Me!