Monthly Archives: March 2021

Skook WIP #13

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Thirteen weeks into 2021. Sixth day of the week. Pictures to look at! Words to read! Yay!

Greeting Card Conversions

In which I present a scan of an original hand drawn, hand colored image and then the digitally cleaned up and edited version of the image that is available as a print on demand greeting card in my Zazzle shop.

Better Than Impossible

“When pigs fly” is an expression to indicate an event that will never occur. Silly cynical people. We live in the future now. Flying pigs and talking cats and vacations on Venus are right around the corner!


Once pigs get off the ground, other gravity challenged species will demand equal time. All sorts of critters will fill the skies. Birds will complain. Strict demarcations will be made in our airspaces to prevent collisions. This is not an anarchist future. It’s a future with rules!

Or maybe it’s just a fun greeting card design.

The Fast and the Really Slow

Sloths spend so much time hanging upside down that their fur grows in downward pattern from their bellies. They spend so much time being still that there are species of algae that have evolved to grow in their fur. Sloths are not speedy creatures. Not in modern times.

In the past there were giant sloths that lumbered on the ground and tore up termite mounds without seeking permission from the builders. There were sloths that lived in the ocean. Sloths can adapt. Sloths can dream of speed.

“When sloths caballerial” may describe an impossible event today but tomorrow? The possible lives in tomorrow.

Spring is Sprung

The seasons have changed. There’s less cold. More sun. More color. More bunnies. All you have to do is look.

You will need to be very patient if you want to see them in their spring fashions. They don’t get dressed up for just anyone.

Squeezebox in the Night

What is that music? It’s 2 am. I want to sleep not dance. I don’t need infectious rhythms pulling me to feet inspiring me to boogie. Go to bed you annoying noturnal critter!

In the future the raccoons will wander through our ruins and give thanks to the ancients who left them such fascinating trash. Then they will dance and sing and give thanks for their clever thumbs that have allowed them to rule the world.


Designing Fantomah

I thought that coming up with “my” version of Fantomah would be easy. She’s a blue nature goddess with a skull face. It’s pretty simple design. I’ve drawn her a few time before and had fun. I assumed the main challenge would be adapting Fletcher Hanks’ original design into a version that was comfortable for me to draw on a regular basis.


Her skull face is fun to draw. As with all his characters Hanks gave her a limited set of expressions. I like sketching a range of emotions. Her hair in the original comics is long with a series of tight curls. She does have awesome magic powers so maybe she uses them to style her hair. I tried doing curls the first times I drew her. This time I tried drawing her hair as if it were always floating, constantly twisting and turning.


I ran into problems when I started thinking about her dress. She’s wears a black cocktail dress. Why does she wear a black cocktail dress? Why does she, a jungle goddess, wear a black cocktail dress in the frickin’ jungle?

I know, I know, a blonde, caucasian jungle goddess is already a problematic figure, why do I care about her outfit? I’ll get back to that blonde, caucasian part in a minute.

I like the main design in the above sketch but it’s a very different look for Fantomah. It’s more goth superhero. I think that if I’m going to take an existing character I should at least start with a version that’s close to the original. It also looks … warm. Aren’t jungles hot?

The two smaller sketches are inspired by ancient Egyptian fashion. I wasn’t satisfied with them either. Egypt is located in Africa but it’s more desert than jungle and I don’t know enough about ancient Egyptian culture to appropriate it for an imaginary vengence goddess.


I settled on a black dress with simple straps. Is it still a cocktail dress?  Probably. It somehow seems different to me than the original version but I can’t tell you why.

The unskulled faces are possible versions of Fantomah’s human alter ego. I working from the idea that the version in the original comics is a sop to its white American readership, that Fantomah is herself African. As yet I don’t have an origin story for her. It will come. My brain seems to think up ideas without me having to work at it much. They aren’t always good ideas of course. And ideas by themselves are just seeds. There are great stories and fun characters who were born from bad ideas.


These Days …


I did not wake up at 1:30 am this morning with a cat pawing at my face to tell me that it was time to feed him.

There is currently no cat at my feet staring up at me in order to get me to check that the food dish has fresh food in it.

For the last seven years we’ve shared our apartment with two cats, Chemo and Sabe. Sarah picked them up at an animal shelter in 2014. Chemo was a kitten. Sabe was a full grown cat that, supposedly, had lived with an elderly woman who had passed away. Supposedly he was not a friendly cat. Sarah put the kitten in the same room with him. He didn’t exactly play with the kitten but he wasn’t upset either. Sarah thought he just seemed tired and needed a home.

Chemo and Sabe got along fine.

Chemo grew into a big cat, bigger than Sabe, but Sabe was always his boss.

We shared our place with a housemate and her cat, Toulouse, for a few years. The cats all got along. As you can see.

Sabe died on Wednesday. We’d taken him to the emergency vet on Tuesday night. He’d had a massive seizure. They had kept him overnight in hopes that they could get help him. I called in the morning to check on him and they reported that he was doing well, considering. I went to work. We’ve been short carriers a lot recently and I didn’t want to stick anyone with carrying my route if I didn’t need to. I’m an optimist. I thought Sabe would hang on and I’d be able to bring him home in the evening.

No.

He had a heart attack about mid day.

We knew his time was short. He had kidney problems. We’d treated him with subcutaneous fluids for a few months but he got tired of the process and refused to participate. He got thinner. He seemed to have a harder time getting comfortable.

He was a good cat. He spent a lot of time in the window watching the world. I was the one he expected to fill the food dish. Sarah was the provider of laps for his naps. We had to be careful not to leave the front door open because he’d try to get out. When he did he never went far. He just seemed like he wanted to feel the world that he saw from the window.

There’s a ravine behind our house. It’s full of all sorts of wild things. I tucked his body in a sheltered spot a short distance down the incline. Nature will claim it.

His spirit goes where it wishes now. We miss him. I’m glad for the time we had.

Skook WIP #12

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Is it Friday again? Time flies! And occasionally stumbles. I’m still adjusting to, and complaining about, the time change. I do like that my phone and my desktop don’t require me to update their clocks. It would be handy if the rest of my timepieces adjusted themselves on their own but I really don’t need more objects connected to the web.

Thank you for joining me again. I hope you are well and happy.

Greeting Card Conversions

We start, as usual, with the before (scans of the original hand drawn art) and after (digitally corrected and edited for print) versions of the greeting card designs I’m posting in my Zazzle store.

Hil(arity)raiser

You’ve solved the puzzle and summoned the tormenter. Your giggles will be legendary even in Heck.

Keep your shoes on! Wear a heavy sweater! Stomp your feet and protest. He can only tickle you if you let him. Bunny cenobites require consent to torture you. They’re polite that way.

Out for a Stroll

Spring is on its way. So I’m told. It’s a mix of rain and sun and warm and cold here in Seattle. Dressing for the weather means taking a gamble at being too hot or too cold, often on the same day. But, heck, you might as well dress to show off and take your chances. You’ll look good for a few minutes at least.

Every season has its moments. Enjoy them as they come.

Fancy a Game of Catch?

After spring comes summer and with summer comes baseball! Teamwork! Batting! Throwing! Catching! Running! Yelling at the umpire! Nothing more American than yelling at some guy for having the wrong opinion.

Make sure to pick that frog kid for your team. He’ll never let a fly get past him.


A Dragon Indeed

This critter doesn’t hoard gold or diamonds. His favorite treasure is cookies. He doesn’t eat them. He takes them back to his cave and stacks them in neat piles. Then he sighs with satisfaction.

Chocolate chips. Oatmeal raisin. Peanut butter. Coconut maroons. He loves them all. They may get stale but they stay free of ants. When they show up the dragon eats them. He likes their spiciness.


The Panel Jumper Does Octobriana and the Heap

I got an email on Sunday from Cole Hornaday reminding me about his Panel Jumper series of videos. The main videos are neat little documentaries about various aspects of comic book history. In particular he has episodes focusing on two of the weird heroes I’ve appropriated for … whatever …
Click these links for histories of:
Muck Men (including the Heap)
Octobriana

After you’ve checked out those videos spend some time listening to the Perfect Bound podcast. It’s an entertaining and informative way to spend your quarantine!

Face the Face

The Face had a simple premise: radio announcer Tony Trent puts on a scary mask to fight crime. I like the basicness of the concept. Trent had no supernatural powers and his adversaries were primarily just ordinary crooks. The Face was featured in the anthology Big Shot Comics, appearing in 62 stories. In issue 63 Tony Trent stopped wearing the mask and went on to have another 40 adventures until the Big Shot was cancelled with issue 104.

This is the third time I’ve spent time (re)designing the Face. I did one version here and a second here.

I started with the idea that I was going to just update that second version but it wasn’t clicking. It didn’t look scary. So I went back to the original Big Shot design – short hair, no eyebrows – and played around with different variations..

I do like the horrifying version with all the exposed teeth but I ultimately decided on a look that wouldn’t require a lot of prosthetics (or magic) to pull off.

The original Face fought crime while wearing a blue tuxedo. It’s not a bad style. I went with a brown suit that, I think, more emphasizes the weird green and red mask. In the 1940s wearing a tuxedo made the Face stand out. Suits were the standard uniform of even the lower classes. These days suits are less common so fighting crime in one would be unusual. And, to me, more comfortable than the spandex and leather that most superheroes put on. I also think that, these days, a plain brown suit makes the Face look more like a middle class crime fighter. I get that the “hero with a secret identity” originated with rich guys (The Scarlet Pimpernel, Zorro, Batman) but I’m not a rich guy and, the older I get, the less sympathy I have for rich guys.

I honestly don’t know what, if anything, I’ll do with the Face but now I have a standard version to use.

News from the Night Forest

A couple of updates on the Mighty Nizz project –
Sarah wrote a vignette and it’s live on the site.
Unless something goes wrong, Nizz will be the star of my 2022 calendar. Zazzle has a calendar template that I should be able to make work for my preferences. I’m hoping I can customize the template to include people’s birthdays but I haven’t really looked at that yet. I will update you as I figure it out.

These Days …

Last week I forgot to do an “Influences” section. This week I’m sort of putting that section and this one together. After I’d written about Bill Peet I thought about other chlidren’s book authors I might want to feature and, of course, Dr. Suess came up. His books were ubiquitous for kids who grew up when I did. Obviously his work had some influence on me.

Right?

At first my answer was, “Kinda. Sorta.”

I don’t remember wanting to draw like Suess. I couldn’t remember any specific Suess story that had an impact on me. I remember How the Grinch Stole Christmas and Horton Hears a Who from the cartoon specials rather than the books from which they were adapted. I’m sure the absurdity in his stories and art had an impact but I couldn’t come up with anything specific.

And then it was announced that some Dr. Suess books are no longer going to be printed. My first thought was, “Which books?” because the first few memes I saw didn’t say. Being a someone who prefers to know what he’s getting upset about I did some research and found the list –
1. And to Think that I Saw it on Mulberry Street
Marco watches the sight and sounds of people and vehicles traveling along Mulberry Street and dreams up an elaborate story to tell to his father at the end of his walk.
2. If I Ran the Zoo
Gerald McGrew visits a zoo and finds that the animals are “not good enough” and describes how he would run the zoo. He would let all of the current animals free and find new, more bizarre and exotic ones.
3. McElligot’s Pool
A boy named Marco is ridiculed for fishing in a small, polluted pool, and tries to justify himself by imagining the fish he might catch
4. On Beyond Zebra
The young narrator, not content with the confines of the ordinary alphabet, invents additional letters beyond Z, with a fantastic creature corresponding to each new letter.
5. Scrambled Eggs Super
A young boy named Peter T. Hooper spins a tale of an incredible meal he created by harvesting the eggs of fantastically exotic birds.
6. The Cat’s Quizzer
The Cat in the Hat asks many, sometimes ridiculous, questions of the reader.

Of the six on the list I remember having read the first four. I don’t remember much about them. The summaries I’ve included came from the Suess Bibliograpy wikipeda page. I don’t remember racist imagery in the illustrations but when I was a kid I wouldn’t have noticed much. There was enough racist imagery all around me that such illustrations probably seemed normal. I was a white kid growing up in a mostly white community. I didn’t see a lot of examples of other races and cultures. The human beings in the good doctor’s illustrations were all pretty cartoonish. I didn’t have the awareness to know the difference between generally cartoonish and offensively cartoonish.

I did feel disappointment in hearing that some of the Suess catalog would go out of print. I especially felt a twinge over the loss of Mulberry Street. That was Suess’ first published kids book and had been rejected by multiple publishers before it debuted in 1937. It had been an example for me of success through determinated effort. I’m also attached to the idea that a book I liked once would be available for me to read again someday. But books go out of print all the time. Most of the books on my shelves right now are out of print. Before print on demand, most books got one, maybe two print runs and that was it. Mulberry Street was in print for EIGHTY-FOUR years. The Cat’s Quizzer, the most recent of the books, first saw print in 1976. I’ve had plenty of opportunities to buy a copy of it or any of those other Suess books.

Theodore Guiesel aka Dr. Suess passed away in 1991. His widow, Audrey Guiesel, passed away in 2018. His books and the licensing of his characters is now managed by Dr. Suess Enterprises. It’s a nonprofit company but it exists in a capitalist world. It’s a property management company. They could have had the books edited to change or remove offensive content. Suess himself did it slightly once with Mulberry Street. I’m sure there would have been outrage at that. But the money to made with Suess’ work isn’t in publishing books. It’s in licensing. Licensing for toys, film and television adaptations, games. It’s in recognizable characters like the Cat in the Hat, Horton the Elephant, the Lorax and other non-human creations. Those characters can be sold to any parent of any race and ethnic background. Those characters can be marketed internationally.

It’s been over a week since the announcement and the internet has moved on to other outrages. I have a lot of time to think while I deliver mail and I’ve devoted more time to thinking about Suess in the last couple of weeks than I have in the last twenty years. I realized that, yes, I did have some favorite Suess stories. The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins. Bartholomew and the Oobleck. Green Eggs and Ham. The Pants with Nobody in Them. Horror stories for children. 

Most folks probably wouldn’t consider them such. They all have happy endings. I don’t remember if any of those stories gave me nightmares but they are fuel for such. Pants, in particular, has haunted me through the years. I’d forgotten about Bartholomews adventures until I read the Suess bibliography. Pants was a story that I’d use as an example of a really creepy children’s story. I was disappointed to discover that it’s not actually titled The Pants with Nobody in Them. The proper title is What Was I Scared Of? That telegraphs the pleasant resolution. I did remember that the pants and the narrator became friends. But I remember more the disturbing idea of being stalked by a piece of empty clothing.

I don’t need to own those books. I need to let go of a lot of the books I own now. I love having a big library but eventually we’ll have to move and it will be a lot easier to do that with a lot less books. Those Suess books that are no longer being published will, sooner or later, enter the public domain. Mulberry Street will do so in twelve years, in 2033. At that time anyone will be able to publish the story. They can publish the original version. Or they can redo it to fit their own taste. It will be interesting to see the variations we get.

In the meantime, I hope you own the books you love and you have time to read them. See you next week!

Skook WIP #11

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Today is March the 12th, 2021. Friday the 12th. One day away from being a Friday the 13th. Supposedly the 13th is a day for bad luck. I’ve only experienced one bad luck Friday the Thirteenth. That was back when I was 16 on a bicycle tour of Europe. I got lost. I got into an accident that required replacing my back wheel. I was grumpy and frustrated. I was also in Europe with friends so, in retrospect, it wasn’t that bad a day. Perspective is everything.

Today is also the fifth day of my Long Week. Because of rotating days off mail carriers have a six day work week once every five weeks. That week is bookended by a three day weekend at the beginning of the week and a two day weekend at the end. After seven years at USPS I’ve gotten used to it. Of course I complain about it. I am human. Humans complain. It’s in the handbook.

Tomorrow is Saturday the 13th. Since it’s the last day of my Long Week it seems like a lucky day to me.

Shall we get started?

Greeting Card Conversions

Once again – before (scans of the original hand drawn and colored illustrations) and after (digitally cleaned up, edited and ready to print) versions of greeting card designs. The after versions are available in my Zazzle shop.

Let it Snow!

I love the idea of snow. Here in Seattle it only takes a little snow to shut the city down. But I still have to go work. So I don’t love the reality of snow.

That’s okay. This mouse isn’t me. He’s enjoying himself!

Forget the cold. Forget the wet. Enjoy the miracle of fluffy frozen water drifting down from the sky!

A Master of the Feather Duster

Armed with a feather duster, Jeeves attacked the disorder and entropy of the house. Armed with dry wit and keen observation Jeeves deflated the egos of his “masters”.

Jeeves is unflappable. Mess not with the Jeeves.

A Room with a View

Available soon: one room, great views, very cozy, perfect for writer or monk or other single hermit. Current occupant is a working mother who is looking forward to stretching her wings and getting away from it all.

The mother will be taking her children with her. Some redecorating may be necessary.

Eight Arms to Hug You 

Love is whatever you make with whoever will make it with you. Love can happen at the beach or the bottom of the sea. Love is a word. A gesture. A look. Love is vast and may have suckers.

Love is where you look for it. Love is where it looks back. Love is love is love.

Bigfoot Boogie

Sasquatch are generally solitary creatures. Mostly quiet. Mostly keeping to themselves. Once in a while they feel a need to be social and loud. You won’t hear them. They know how to be loud a long way from human ears.

Most human ears anyway. They consider the Mighty Nizz to be, if not exactly a Sasquatch, different from those critters that only see a forest for the number of trees they can slaughter.

The above is a process gif of one my Mighty Nizz illustrations. The final illustration is available on all kinds of stuff in my Redbubble store. Plug. Plug.

Defining Octobriana 

Octobriana is 50 years old this year. I first met her as supporting character in The Adventures of Luther Arkwright back in the early Nineties. Her first published appearance was in 1971 in Octobriana and the Russian Underground. Her original adventures can be read here. Supposedly she was the creation of a group of Soviet artists and writers in the 1960s. She wasn’t. That’s a hoax. But it’s a story that gives the character an attractive background and it inspired quite a few comic book artists to use her in new stories in the following decades.

I’ve drawn her in my sketchbooks a few times over the years. I included a couple of illustrations of her in my 2019 daily drawing project. One of those is now gracing a coffee mug in my Zazzle store. She seems like she’d be fun to use for other merchandise so I set about doing development sketches.


My version of Octobriana is more conservatively dressed than most other depictions. I’m a fan of dressing comfortably. That boob bandana she is usually shown wearing just doesn’t seem practical, especially in a fight. Octobriana has magic powers and deadly combat skills. Maybe she also has superior sartorial sorcery?

That’s a question I didn’t try to address in these sketches.


Part of the fun of drawing Octobriana is that she’s angry almost all the time. Well, maybe not angry, maybe passionate is a better term. She’s a revolutionary. Revolutionaries have got to have strong emotions to keep going. Octobriana stares into the abyss and laughs.


What will I be doing with Octobriana?

Eh. I don’t know. Part of my creative process is to (re)invent a character first and then find a place for them. In the process of trying to write this part of the newsletter I came up with a new backstory for Octobriana that ties into a few of my other imaginary mythologies. Once she was Nurri Kala, child of the caverns, daughter of Surrilana, Blessed of the Blue Flame, priest of Shub Niggurath, citizen of Carcosa, Devil Woman of the Endless Revolution. All that is a bit too complicated to fit on a coffee mug.

These Days …

The house is quiet. It’s been quiet for a week. Thing One and Thing Two have moved on to better places.

No, they aren’t dead! They’ve literally moved somewhere else.

Names have been changed to protect the innocent and to laugh at search engines. The Thing One and Thing Two designations come from Dr. Suess’s The Cat in the Hat. I’m sure you know the story.

Thing One came to us a year and a half ago. “Came to us” sounds effortless. It wasn’t. Thing One is one of Sarah’s young cousins – 22 at the time of acquistion. Sarah had been in contact with some of her cousins in Texas. A group of them was homeless and she had been trying to help them out, not an easy thing to do given the distance and our minimal resources. He and Sarah had struck up a friendship via text and messenger. He was living in and around Spring, Texas. He was friendly and had spent some time caring for elderly relatives when he was younger. Sarah has medical issues that have made her eligible for in home caregiving. The agencies in charge of supporting caregivers advocate making family members caregivers whenever possible. Sarah had had one caregiver that she’d really liked and a number that hadn’t been good fits. Her favorite caregiver was needing to return to her home country for a while so Sarah got approval and offered the job to Thing One.

That was the easy part. One had lost his ID. He had no bank account. He had a cellphone for communication and not much else. You can’t get on a plane without an ID. You can’t get an ID without a mailing address. It took months of wrangling to get him an ID and onto a plane. It was his first plane ride. He’d never been out of Texas before. He arrived in Seattle in September, 2019.

He spent the first year sleeping on a couch in our library/studio. He got certified as a caregiver in Washington and got a regular salary. He cleaned and cooked and helped Sarah with physical therapy.

In August, 2020 our housemate moved out and we rearranged things so One got his own room. Less than a month later we acquired Thing Two.

Thing Two came to us from Spokane in Eastern Washington. She was 20 years old and she says she’d never been out of Spokane. She was part of group of friends that Thing One had bonded with online. One of her parents had just been arrested for assaulting her and Thing One thought she needed rescue. He convinced a neighbor friend to give him a ride to Spokane and bring her back. Yeah, we agreed to it. We believe in helping people when we can. She and Thing One shared his room.

There was drama. Drama with exes. Drama within their online groups. We didn’t see most of it. It happened online and over the phone with people in other states. They mostly kept to their room. Eventually things got heated enough that the Things needed to go. Thing Two went to Pennsylvania to live with friends on February 25th. Thing One went to live with loved ones in Texas on March 5th.

I had hoped that, in living with us, they would have the chances to build up their resources (mental and economic) so that when they moved on they would be better off than when they arrived. And they were better off. They went to places that are a better fit for them. We’re told to live by the Golden Rule: “Do to others what you would have them do to you”. That’s a good start, but one that doesn’t take the other into account. A more compassionate rule is: “Do to others how they would want done to them”. That one is harder because it requires communication and observation. It requires that I am able have honest, revealing conversations with the other person and that I am able to observe their actions and way of being in the world enough to be able antipicate their needs and wants. It requires time and patience. It requires communication skills that I’m still trying to develop.

The world that existed for me in my twenties doesn’t exist for the Things. Their home lives were very different  from mine. They have a neurodivergencies that I hadn’t really heard of at their age. It’s common to complain that “kids these days” spend too much time on their phones but cell phones didn’t exist when I was their age. Neither did the internet. I’d keep thinking about what I would be doing at their age in their situation and I’d have to keep reminding myself that my experiences couldn’t be used to fit their situation. Economics were different. I didn’t live through a pandemic.

So we gave them a place to stay and regroup. We made sure they got fed. We tried to pass on the knowledge and wisdom that we thought would help. The Things are intelligent. They are generally kind and honest. Thing One is creating a family with people his own age. Thing Two is living with people who were expecting her. I’ve lived long enough to guess the problems that they will face. I wanted them to be better prepared for the world before they left. But they are not me and they have their own experiences and mistakes to learn from. I wish them well.

I wish y’all well as well. I hope that your loved ones treat you as you wish to be treated and you can talk about it when they don’t. I hope you are able to do the reverse with them. See you next week!

Skook WIP #10

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Well hello! It’s a delight to see you again! The constant insanity of the modern civilization doesn’t seem to be infecting you at all!

Me? I’m okay. There are been some bumps in the road but whether those bumps are problems or high points is something I’m still figuring out. I’ll talk about those next week when they are more sorted out. This week, let’s just talk about some art. We’ll start, as usual, with some greeting card conversions, before (scans of ink, colored pencil and marker drawings) and after (digitally cleaned up and edited) versions. (The final designs are available in my Zazzle shop.)

Carving Your Face

In America, Halloween is the season for giving faces to oversized, hollowed out squashes. This is, apparently, an evolution of an old European traditon of carving faces into hollowed out turnips. A long series of films to the contrary, it is not a season for killing teenagers. Killing teenagers is frowned upon by all right thinking people. If you’ve been thinking about killing teenagers, please consider carving pumpkins instead.

Admittedly, killing teenagers will give you more cardiovascular exercise. However, most teenagers are actually more entertaining when they are alive than otherwise. Pumpkins are much more entertaining as objects to carve than teenagers. Plus, you can roast the seeds for a tasty snack!

There are No Weak Kittens

One day Sarah, my fabulous wife, described herself as feeling “weak as a kitten”. That comment inspired this card design. She has the original.

That original was done on a sheet of 8.5×11 folded in thirds. For the version that’s in my shop I had a lot of fun moving and reorienting the elements to fit a standard 5×7 greeting card design. Climb those curtains baby!

A Bit of a Breeze

There you are, walking with your umbrella, staring at your feet, thinking out what you’re going to have for lunch, trying to keep dry and suddenly …

The wind gives you a new perspective!

The world is suddenly a much bigger place. So many colors! So many birds! So much moss on people’s roofs!

Love Is …

Time is short. Spend as much of it on the things that bring you joy in the company of those you love.

A little peace and some cuddling makes the chaos of the rest of the day so much more bearable.

Hail to the King!

Photoshop is a massive program and my knowledge of it is actually pretty minimal. I know how to do a few things fairly well but the program can do so much more than I use it for. Lately I’ve been practicing making gifs of my illustration processes. I save my work in layers so making gifs is fairly easy. This process gif is of one of my King in Yellow portraits.

Influences – Chuck Jones

Chuck Jones is the one of the first film directors I remember identifying. I didn’t really know what he did, I just knew I liked his cartoons more than most of the other cartoons I saw on television. The short cartoons were funny. The smart characters outwitted the buffoons. The drawings were attractive.
As an adult I can identify why I liked Jones’ work more than other cartoon short directors. His character designs are a mix of angles and long curves. His heroes were the smart guys. They succeeded by being more clever than their adversaries. When the clever ones crashed it was usually from failing to think out the ramifications of their latest plan. (Hello Wile E. Coyote!)

I saw most of his work on television. There was the regular Bugs Bunny show on Saturday morning and during the week there were blocks of cartoons that played on a local station in the afternoons. There was The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. Horton Hears a Who. Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. He drew a comic strip that ran in our local paper for awhile. I loved the art but it didn’t really stand out from the other strips. Jones was a master at motion and timing in film. His strip looked good but didn’t have the space to play to his strengths.


My Moe and Detritus/Misspent Youths comics owe a lot to Jones. The heroes (mostly) succeeded by being smarter than the bad guys, by being (mostly) calm in the face of chaos. Hell, I owe a lot of my personality to Jones. I got bullied and picked on as a kid. He gave me examples of characters who faced bullies and survived (and thrived) by being more rational and much weirder than their foes.

Model Sheeting the Super-Wizard

Last week I posted concept sketches and a model sheet process gif of the Heap. This week I’m posting concept sketches and a process gif of Stardust the Super-Wizard. (Superwizard? Super Wizard?)

The first thing I realized as I started sketching Stardust is that, in the original comics, his expressions were pretty much the same from panel to panel. They ran the gamut from stern to slightly more stern. I spent all of two seconds considering making my version of Stardust just as stoic and blank faced as the original before deciding, “Nah. That’s no fun!”


The original Stardust seems to be a giant – taller than regular humans. I made him about ten feet tall, lanky and stretched out. He’s a space wizard. Maybe he grew up in zero gravity. Maybe he grew up on a planet with lighter gravity than Earth. Maybe his practice of superscience has transformed his body. I’ll figure it out later.

Expressions!

I updated Stardust’s outfit slightly, more for the fun of it than because there was anything wrong with the original. I don’t question the fashion choices of technosorcerors.

That guy in brown standing behind Stardust? His name is Bill. He’ll be in most of the model sheets for size comparison. He claims he’s 5’10” but, you know guys, he may be exaggerating somewhat. He is on the taller side of average. The average height for men in the USA is 5’9″. Since I’m an American that’s the height I’m conditioned to think of when I have to think “taller than” or “shorter than” average when designing characters.

What do I plan to do with Stardust? When I know I’ll tell you!

These Days …

“Bad art is forever.”

I have a friend who likes to quote that when talking about why he noodles on all his projects and has abandoned many altogether. I get that. I want to be proud of the work I produce. I want it to be the best it can be. I’m also plagued with more ideas and images and thoughts than I will ever get down on paper. I plan the work. I do the work. I fix glaring mistakes. I resist noodling. I put it out in the world and leave it to the world to judge whether it is good or bad.

I will always see the faults in my work. Most creative folks can tell you everything that sucks about their work before they can point out what’s good. But art, good and bad, exists in interaction between the work and the audience. Once I put art into the world it’s no longer completely mine. I retain the copyright and the trademark but the interpretation? The judgment of goodness, badness, coolness, greatness? That belongs to the audience. And that’s great! Not because the creator is a bad judge of their own work (although they often are, both rightly and wrongly) but because humans are social animals and art is part of the conversation we have with each other.

I got an email recently about Misspent Youths, a comic book series I created back in 1991.

Hi, there! I just wanted to let you know that I’ve been a fan of Misspent Youths for a while now–since they came out, actually, when I was a disgruntled and disaffected teenager working in a comic shop. The shop I worked at brought them in and I snatched them off the shelf eagerly whenever they arrived, but for whatever reason (it might have involved the store eventually going under; it’s kind of hard to remember) I never got to read Issue #5. Flash forward three decades and my original copies have long since vanished into the aether and I’m in lockdown halfway across the continent from my hometown. Regardless, I got a hankering to read Misspent Youths again and found a set on eBay for a reasonable amount, so I ponied up my money and waited. Well, they arrived today and I couldn’t be more pleased. I’ve read the first issue again so far and it’s just as great as I’d remembered it (and captured much of the flavour from my hometown’s punk scene in the ’90s (minus the Pile and the cop homicide (though we sometimes wished it were otherwise)). Interesting characters, fun dialogue, compelling story–just great  all around. In any case, I just wanted to shoot you a quick line to let you know that those comics you put out all that time ago imprinted on and have stuck with someone since they came out, and I’m thrilled to finally be able to read the entire series through for the first time. Thank you very much for the quality read.

I thanked the author, Chris Eng, for writing, saying –

Your email made my day. I’m delighted that, thirty years later, someone would track down issues of Misspent Youths. I hope issue five was a good read!

He replied:
Issue five was, weirdly, really touching. I mean, it did bring back the shitty kitchen job I had in my teens (where I put up with the first of many exploitative managers but thankfully not a hostage situation), but the issue in general was a nice coda on the (too) brief tales of Detritus and Moe (and all of the other assorted and endearing members of the cast of characters). The series in general summed up my time in my hometown’s punk scene: all of us living as best as we could and looking out for each other while scraping bottom. Good times all round. (Also, can I just say that I would have loved to have seen Detritus and Moe in Bugtown? That would have been a hell of a story. I’m imagining the bizarre and intense meeting between Detritus and Hiroshima. Or the Pile jamming with the Bulldaggers.)

His letter did more than make my day, it made my week. I loved doing Misspent Youths. I loved the characters. Doing that book was fun and exhausting and satisfying and … unprofitable. The publisher didn’t make any money. I certainly didn’t make any money. I did draw 160 pages of comics in about a year while working a part-time job. Brave New Words (the publishing company – they also put out the first four issues of Oz Squad) put out more issues of Misspent Youths than any other series they printed. Cancelling the series was a mutual decision – the guy behind Brave New Words was reassessing his business plan and I wanted a break to improve my art skills. I’d planned to pick the series up again, to publish it myself.

Other things happened instead. My drawing skills did improve. I drew the Misspent Youths characters in some calendars that got printed at Kinkos and sold to friends. I got married. I moved from Santa Rosa, California to Seattle, Washington. My wife and I tried running a publishing company and put out few anthology magazines. I worked in a couple bookstores and as an office manager and now as mail carrier. In the thirty years since Misspent Youths I’ve illustrated/collaborated on a lot of projects (comics, RPGs, novels) that haven’t gotten finished. I’ve enjoyed that work. I got paid for most of it. I’ve improved my skills in the process. But I’ll never get any fan letters complimenting or complaining to me about that work. It sits, unfinished, in my files.

Bad art in the world is more fun than great art in a drawer. I’m not saying that Misspent Youths was bad. Not at all. I put my heart and soul into it. It was the best work I could do at the time. And it’s out in the world. Copies can be found on ebay and on comics specialty sites. If the internet crashed all the art on my websites would be unavailable but someone could still read an issue of Misspent Youths.

I’m a different person than I was when I did that book. The characters still keep me company but they’re older and wiser and (mostly) more settled. They wave to me from the back of my imagination. I love the idea of drawing comics but, so far, working as a mail carrier doesn’t leave me the time and mental energy necessary to do an ongoing series. Drawing is relatively easy. Writing takes more concentration than it used to.

So what’s my point?

Number One –
A big thank you to Chris Eng for writing! Chris has finished some projects of his own. He has a couple of novels available through Amazon: Molotov Hearts and ZeroWave. He didn’t ask me to include those links.

Number Two –
That project you’re working on? Finish it. Put it out into the world. Art is ephemeral. Do the best you can and let it go. What was brilliant once is often considered terrible by a new audience. What was obscure and forgotten originally can find new fans. But it needs to be available.

Yes, I’m talking to myself as much as to y’all.

Back to work. See you next week!