Welcome back! It’s Friday! I hope things are going well in your neck of the apocalypse.Time for another edition of this newsletter!

A reader recently suggested that I provide an upfront summary of each newsletter so they’d know what to look for. It’s not a bad suggestion. I hadn’t considered it before because the newsletters I’ve subscribed to don’t have that feature.

The biggest block to me doing this is that I’m always writing these against a deadline and around delivering mail, doing chores and new drawings. I don’t know how much I’ll get in before I hit my Friday morning deadline. So I’m flipping the order of things a bit. I’m putting the life news up front with the art in progress stuff following. If you just want to look at the pictures feel free to scroll past all the words.

These Days …

Last Friday Sarah and I were finally able to get our covid tests. We’d needed to wait until our new housemate’s covid cycle had theoretically run its course. Three weeks in quarantine. I know, I know, lots of folks have spent a lot longer periods quarantined. I did get a lot of artwork done. And we binged some distracting series. Things could have been worse.

We took the test in morning. We were told that we’d either get a call from a doctor (if the test was positive) or we’d get a notice in our mychart (if the test was negative).

We got our mychart notices in the late afternoon. Negative.

Saturday morning I went back to delivering mail. Saturday afternoon my arms hurt in ways they hadn’t in years. It seems that if you don’t do a certain repetitive action for three weeks your body forgets how to do that action and then complains when you start again. Thank heavens for Tiger Balm. I highly recommend it for muscle pain.

Sunday was a day off.

Monday was another day delivering. No repeat of Saturday’s pain. The body gets back into a rhythm pretty quickly.

Tuesday was a scheduled day off. It was also the day I’d scheduled my second covid vaccine. Other than feeling sore in the needled arm I didn’t think I was having any adverse reactions.

Those came Wednesday. I’d missed so many days of work (and I’ve worked while tired, sick or suffering from ennui in the past) that I felt compelled to go in. I started the day feeling a little woozy. I finished the day feeling exhausted, chilled and needing to go to bed early.

Thursday I felt great. Work was a breeze.

I still feel okay today. Not quite as perky but I suspect a lot of my good feeling yesterday were in contrast to how crappy I’d felt the day before.

I still expect to continue wearing masks in public for awhile. I haven’t gotten a cold in over a year and I credit that to masking and physical distancing. Humans are disease bags.

Dieux Sans Portefeuille

Open on:
The Skookworks studio. The Cartoonist sits at his drawing table. He is sketching. Next to him, at the computer desk, the Salesman is typing.

Salesman: This is what I’ve written for the copy for our Stardust and Fantomah design …

Cartoonist: Stardust the Superwizard.

Salesman: What?

Cartoonist: Stardust the Superwizard. Try doing a search for just “Stardust”. You’ll get a million Stardusts that aren’t Stardust the Superwizard. We have to make sure that we include a “Stardust the Superwizard” tag if we want people to find us.

Salesman: Do a lot of people search for “Stardust the Superwizard”?

Cartoonist: I do.

Salesman: You’re not helping. Can I read what I wrote?

Cartoonist: Sorry. Go ahead.

Salesman: “Stardust is a Super-Wizard, awesome in thought and power. Just ask him.
Fantomah is a nature goddess, slow to judge, furious to respond. Don’t mess with her. Fletcher Hanks thinks he created them. He was wrong. They allowed him to unleash them upon the world. The cat? I don’t know anything about the cat. ”

Cartoonist: That sounds fine to me. Were you wanting a critique? The copy is probably superfluous. People either like the design enough to purchase it or they don’t

Salesman: We must but try. The proper words can move mountains.

Cartoonist: Mountains don’t have ears. Words mean nothing to them.

Salesman: You can be annoyingly literal. You know what I mean.

Cartoonist: Yeah. Yeah. 

Salesman: So. Why?

Cartoonist: Why what?

Salesman: Why Stardust and Fantomah? Why these characters? What is their appeal for you? You’ve already expressed a lack of love for Fletcher Hanks’ art and storytelling.

The Cartoonist stares into space. The Black Cat wanders into the studio. It meows loudly. It wanders out again.

Cartoonist: They are a challenge. They aren’t the sort of characters I would have created on my own. The Heap, The Face, Octobriana – those folks are more familiar to me. When I invent superheroes they tend to me midrange sorts. Fantomah and Stardust are essentially gods.

Salesman: A lot of superheroes are. Superman is ridiculously powerful. And a few superheroes are gods from prechristian pantheons. Thor. Hercules.

Cartoonist: The comics industry has mined a lot of mythologies to create new characters. What I find interesting about these two is that they aren’t anyone’s gods or standard superheroes. They’re not from an existing mythology. They don’t fit the regular superhero template either. They aren’t regular people transformed into superbeings. They don’t have secret identities.They don’t have some tragedy in their past that is prompting them to right wrongs and seek justice now. Their powers are undefined.

Salesman: You’re seeing potential in them?

Cartoonist: I’m seeing a challenge. In order to do anything good with them I have to …

Salesman: Think outside the box? Color outside the lines? Do different?

Cartoonist: Think beyond catch phrases?

Salesman: If you want to get complicated.

Cartoonist: I do actually. I like complexity. I like considering new ideas and concepts. What would it be like to have godlike powers? What would you do with your time? Who would you hang out with?

Salesman: Who would your arch enemies be?

Cartoonist: Maybe. Maybe not. What if you didn’t have arch enemies?

Salesman: What about the cat?

Cartoonist: Don’t ask.

Salesman: Hey! Kind reader! Yes, you. The person reading this sentence. This design is intended to be featured on dark clothing. We’ve got a sample down below and there are many more examples in our Redbubble store. Check them out!

Out of the Aeons

A few years ago I got some flat files to better store my art. As I sorted art into different drawers I came across this unfinished illustration –

I’m not sure when I originally started it. It was likely in the mid nineties. The graffiti on the side of the shanty are symbols that I was using in the “Bonecage Graffiti” series in Glyph Magazine. The folks around the fire are Moe, Trouble Coyote, K.Z. O’Neil and Detritus from my Misspent Youths comic. I don’t know why I hadn’t finished the piece. If I don’t finish an illustration within a reasonable timeframe (say, within three months) I usually don’t finish it at all.

I thought this one had potential for completion. The main work was done. I just needed to complete the interior of the shanty and the brickwork up top. I set it aside with a few other unfinished pieces. I’m an optimist.

Years passed. The other unfinished illustrations got put into the flat files. This one kept getting moved into stacks of newer works in progress. Then I got quarantined. I worked my way through all the other illustrations in my stacks. Now or never.

I did the finishing in Photoshop. I was concerned about making mistakes on the original page so I worked digitally. It’s a lot easier to change direction or correct errors that way. I’m really happy with the results. It was a pleasure to hang out with some of the Misspent Youths gang again. The completed illustration is available on a variety of products in my Redbubble store.

That’s it for this week. Thank you for reading. I hope you’ve had a chance to finish an unfinished thing or two yourself. I hope you’ve been able to start a few projects as well. It’s great to have goals!

See you next Friday!