7.) The Years of Great Progress
Just don’t call it steampunk! Click to read more.
Chapter seven of Kim Stanley Robinson’s alternate history novel The Years of Rice and Salt chronicles the rise of Travancore (modern-day Thiruvananthapuram in southern India) as a world power. This is chiefly because they invent steam power. Their charismatic leader, the Kerala, ousted the Mughals (who, with the British empire never having arisen, continued to dominate India unchallenged well into what we would call the 19th century.) After that, the Kerala embarked on semi-peaceful Asoka-style conquest of the Muslim world, even conquering Konstantiniyye on the Bosphorus. The Kerala always brings the intellectuals of a new territory back to his capitol where, with a host of scholars and scientists from Africa, the New World, and especially the enormous Japanese diaspora, their scientific investigations are fully funded.
“The Years of Great Progress” contains one of my favorite passages in all of Robinson, recited by the Kerala as they float above the city and its orchards in the scene depicted:
“We will go out into the world and plant gardens and orchards to the horizons, we will build roads through the mountains and across the deserts, and terrace the mountains and irrigate the deserts until there will be garden everywhere, and plenty for all, and there will be no more empires or kingdoms, no more caliphs, sultans, emirs, khans, or zamindars, no more kings or queens or princes, no more quadis or mullahs or ulema, no more slavery and no more usury, no more property and no more taxes, no more rich and no more poor, no killing or maiming or torture or execution, no more jailers and no more prisoners, no more generals, soldiers, armies or navies, no more patriarchy, no more caste, no more hunger, no more suffering than what life brings us for being born and having to die, and then we will see for the first time what kind of creatures we really are.”
I have a complicated view of KSR’s specific brand of utopianism, which I will elaborate upon in a later post. But while I think a lot of his positions need to be problematized, there’s nevertheless something about his egalitarian vision that stirs me pretty deeply. Unlike (sadly) many sci-fi writers, KSR is actually capable of beautiful writing, and passages like these set my leftist heart a-reeling.
He forgot to say “no more Qaddafis!”
Briefly, regarding the art: I had an obscene amount of fun being obsessive and anal over all the details in this picture. Though overzealous detail is something I try to avoid, I fear that I more often sway too far the other way, being sketchy and sloppy and leaving my characters against stark, uninteresting backgrounds. (I’m particuarly guilty of this in SNitLoE, which, to be fair, takes place mostly in the desert and in completely dark rooms.)
I’ve also been more careful with the “camera angles” of my art lately. I’m trying to use “upshots” more often for dramatic effect, but I don’t wanna become somebody who uses them all the time because they are easier than elaborate downshots. This picture would have taken half the time if we were looking up from the city at the hot air balloon, but would it have been better? I doubt it. Before composing the downshot in this image I studied some of the absolutely gorgeous urban downshots of Dustin Weaver (whose fantastic Shield series is kind of an alternate history itself).
I wanna be absolutely clear that in displaying Dustin’s work here and linking to his blog I am not comparing myself to him or anything like that. As an artist, he is to me what, as a writer, Kim Stanley Robinson is to… also me. An inspiration!
Read More6.) Widow Kang
I’ve set myself a February goal of illustrating every chapter of Kim Stanley Robinson’s alternate-history novel, The Years of Rice and Salt, and so far it’s been really exciting! I feel as though I learn three or four new things with each drawing, and each is (to me) better than the previous. The only downside is that it’s making me slack off on my main project, Savage Nobles in the Land of Enchantment. For some reason I do not put as much effort into my comics pages as I do into these illustrations – maybe it’s because of the demanding 2 1/2-page-a-week schedule of SNitLoE, or because I’ve been drawing those same characters off and on for two whole years. Don’t get me wrong, I definitely plan to finish the story. But my “side projects” are opening new and fascinating possibilities for my future!
So even though this illustration is pretty exciting, “Widow Kang” is definitely the book’s most boring chapter. Most of it is about the feisty titular widow and her second marriage to a Chinese Muslim scholar, Ibrahim Ibn Hasan. Ibrahim is a sort of alternate-history Hegel who undertakes the possibly impossible task of synthesizing Islam and Confucianism, but stumbles upon some clever ideas along the way. He sees the philosophical synthesis as indispensable, for huge populations of Muslims continue to move into western China’s Gansu corridor, where this chapter takes place, and skirmishes and rebellions are frequent.
Since most of the chapter is about two middle aged people sitting on their porch and debating ideas, it makes for interesting reading, but not much worth drawing. Until there is a huge flood! Poor Kang has to evacuate her house and try to save her writings in a state of advanced pregnancy and with legs crippled long ago by footbinding. (And in the story, her husband was not there to help her – I just added him to the illustration for the heck of it.) I did some google searches for images of footbinding… just, ew.
Read MoreHopi Hairstyles
Hopi women have such awesome hairstyles! Last winter in New Orleans I picked up a used coffee table book about the contemporary Hopi reservations in northeastern Arizona to use as visual reference. In addition to architectural, fashion and phenotypic information, I was particularly concerned with finding a “look” for Theo’s friend Manaka. I wasn’t even to the table of contents of Hopi by Susanne and Jake Page when I met this beauty staring right back at me:
She’s too young for Manaka’s character, but the look is there, if I could only capture it. I had seen similar, and even more elaborate, hairstyles in historical photographs of Hopi women:
As cool as these swirly braids look, I have a hell of a time trying to draw them from different angles. Expect a considerable amount of “Mickey Mouse ear syndrome” as Manaka’s hair migrates over the surface of her head.
5.) Warp and Weft
Here’s my illustration from chapter five of Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt, an alternate history novel that imagines how history might have developed if the plague had wiped out 99% of the European population instead of 30-60%.
Chapter five, “Warp and Weft” (a basket-weaving term), is told from the point of view of Hodenosaunee Indians in what we would call the Hudson River valley, in what we would call the early 18th century. The story centers around a mysterious stranger “Fromwest.” Fromwest is actually a ronin (masterless samurai) who fled to the New World from Japan, which has been completely conquered by the Chinese. Determined to preserve the “unspoilt” natives from a similar fate, at the hands of China or the European Muslims (who are simultaneously colonizing the New World from the east), Fromwest tries to convince the Hodenosaunee 0f the importance of industrialization and firearms manufacture to their survival. However, he urges that, while industrializing, the tribe must not abandon their complex but functional system of consensus-based, psuedo-matriarchal government, which is the best form of government he has ever seen. Through such a system, a massive alliance of all New World tribes against the colonizers is an actual possibility.
Robinson is not so naively PC as to suggest that the “American” natives were always fully capable of defending themselves, but neither is he so condescending as to intimate that they could only be defended by an altruistic outsider (what we might call the “Avatar” approach.) Instead, he invents a properly radical-historical narrative, where the “best” of the oppressive outsider (in this case, industry and empirical science) is adopted by the colonized and turned against them. KSR’s dialectical ideas really start to emerge in this chapter, and are further solidified in the next chapter, “Widow Kang.” I think he’s right to point out that often the most productive areas of society are not the central monoliths, but the interces, the points where two cultures intersect on the periphery of either.
I’m still trying to get a handle on this ink-wash thing, trying to keep in mind the principles of atmospheric perspective, with pretty limited success. I feel that if I can learn how to craft pleasing compositions in grays, my black and white illustrations will improve and I might even learn something about color.
Up until the very last minute, I had planned to show Fromwest and the Indian practicing katana stances from a medium close-up point of view, and I’d even done some fairly detailed figure studies based on actual katana positions. But I’m trying to keep myself from falling into a comfortable 2/5 rut, where all my compositions are based on dividing the page into fifths and placing the center of attention two fifths from the left or from the right. That approach is like the minor pentatonic scale – just because it always sounds good, that’s no excuse not to try something else. I woke up yesterday and decided to go for the wide shot, to show tiny figures against the expanse of the American wilderness. My hero James Gurney would be so aghast to see how inconsiderately I’ve treated the Hudson River valley, the site and subject of so much incredible plein air painting.
Read More4.) The Alchemist
Click to read my explanation of what’s happening here.
Here’s my illustration for chapter four of The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson. “The Alchemist” tells the tale of Khalid, a Samarqandi armorer whose right hand is chopped off by the Khan when his demonstration of transmuting lead into gold is discovered to be fraudulent. He is rescued from spiraling depression by his son-in-law, the Sufi-minded Bahram (center), and Iwang(right), a mathematically-minded polyglot. They gradually launch an Islamic Renaissance in Samarqand (in the Muslim 1050’s, our 1640s), eschewing the conjectures of the Ancients and constructing a method of empiricism that quickly leads to many discoveries in diverse fields, theoretical and practical. (Of course the Khan is only interested in weapons).
In the scene I’ve depicted, the three of them are walking home one night after a vailiant but failed attempt to measure the speed of light, slightly drunk. When Bahram asserts that the purpose of life is to “make more love,” Khalid (whose scribbly notebooks designate him as a sort of alternate-history Leonardo Da Vinci, with a touch of the martyred Galileo) concedes but adds that it is our duty to Allah to understand His world, in order to love it. Iwang, meanwhile, envisions a mathematics that would measure “the speed-of-the-speed.”
It’s a great chapter, where KSR’s strength for writing that is intellectually stimulating, and not just a relentless emotional roller-coaster, really shines. Sure, there are some beautiful moments of character development, but the most engaging passages are where we witness an old discovery or invention (vacuum pumps, barometers, the telescope, calculus, even nasty things like mustard gas) being made again in a novel way. It reminds me of middle school, when science was in my hands, not in the hands of distant, corporate-funded lab technicians; when science was fun. It’s a chapter I think my scientific-atheist friends could really appreciate, despite the heavy Muslim/Buddhist overtones.
Kuleshov Komics
The Kuleshov Effect is a phenomenon in cinema whereby audiences perceive facial expressions differently depending on context. In the 1910’s and 20’s, Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov designed an experiment that involved a sort of movie collage: A shot of a bowl of soup, followed by the impassive face of handsome actor Ivan Mozzhukin reacting to it; then a shot of a little child in a coffin, followed by Mozzhukin’s face again; finally a shot of a beautiful and seductively dressed woman, and Mozzhukin’s reaction. Audiences praised Mozzhukin’s brilliantly subtle acting, his nuanced expression of hunger, restrained grief, and boiling lust. But as you probably have predicted already, each reaction shot was exactly the same – the same footage every time.
Alfred Hitchcock explains the same phenomenon in this video:
HOW DOES THIS APPLY TO COMICS?
On the one hand, comics artists, and cartoonists in particular, have an obsession with, almost a fetishization of, facial expressions. From the simplest distillation of an emotion into a few carefully-chosen lines, to an elaborately rendered portrait of a distinct countenance, we all seem to strive for the most evocative faces possible. Some people have actually insisted this is the single most important storytelling mechanism for a comics artist, more important even than body language. The ridiculously great facial-expression guide by Lackadaisy artist and comics samurai Tracy Butler has been making the rounds on the internet, and deservedly so. She’s got the art of drawing facial expressions down to a science (or maybe the science down to an art – I’m not sure.)
But on the other hand, comics are not single images like a painting, but an arranged series, like a movie. Because we tell our stories through sequential juxtaposition, *ahem, puts on green plaid shirt and opaque full-moon glasses*, why exactly do we need the perfect, nuanced facial expression every time, when, at least according to the theory of the Kuleshov effect, a perfectly neutral face will do? An incredible amount of emotion can be imparted into a blank face given the context that comics can provide. Sarah Oleksyk took this to its sublime extreme in one of my favorite single comics panels of all time, from book five of her series Ivy:
Here, perhaps the biggest emotional turning point of the entire series is represented a 3/4-rear shot. What is Ivy thinking? Oleksyk doesn’t say. She only asks what YOU think she’s thinking.
Two years ago, when I started this comic you’re reading now, I had not heard the term “Kuleshov Effect,” but I knew I was interested in the comics possibilities of blank, ambiguous facial expressions, and I used them a lot. This was particularly useful since I was still learning how to draw.
I’ve come a long way in my artistic abilities since then, and I like to think I’m capable of much more convincing, expressive faces that are interesting in themselves. But sometimes I worry that I’ve thrown out baby Kuleshov with the bathwater. I try to remember that sometimes, rather than telegraphing emotion so obviously, the right thing to do is to let the reader fill in their own subtext.
3.) Ocean Continents
Here’s my illustration for chapter three of The Years of Rice and Salt, in which the Chinese discover the New World. An expedition in the Christian 1620s to conquer a small Japanese port goes astray and is dragged by a current all the way across the Pacific. The survivors eventually dock in what we would call the San Francisco Bay. The relationship between Admiral Kheim and his crew, and Butterfly, a small Miwok girl they adopt to use as a translator, is in my opinion the most touching in the book. Oh, and though Kheim and the Chinese marvel at the unspoiled simplicity of the Miwok, suffice it to say a journey much further south convinces them that not all savages are noble.
Great quote for those of you who’ve read it (context-sensitive, spoiler alert):
Kheim said to [the emperor], “That far country is lost in time, its streets paved with gold, its palaces roofed with gold. You could conquer it in a month, and rule over all its immensity, and bring back all the treasure that it has, endless forest and furs, turquoise and gold, more gold than there is yet now in the world; and yet still the greatest treasure in that land is already lost.”
Read More2.) The Haj in the Heart
Here’s my illustration for chapter two of Kim Stanley Robinson’s alternate history novel The Years of Rice and Salt, entitled “The Haj in the Heart.” Most of this chapter is set in the 970’s (the Christian 1590’s) and follows Bistami, a Sufi Muslim from Gujarat, India who is saved from marauding thugs by a friendly tiger and later becomes a personal religious adviser to the Mughal Emperor Akbar (another real historical figure). After he falls out of favor with the emperor and his bureaucracy, he is sent on the Haj to Mecca, and proceeds from thence west (chapter two is basically a geographical mirror image of the east-bound chapter one) across northern Africa. Eventually he crosses the straight of Gibraltar to Spain, where an intrepid group of Muslim pioneers have been gradually recolonizing the abandoned European continent and attempting to recreate the golden age of al-Andalus. It is here that Bistami sits in an orange grove with Ibn Ezra, a sort of proto-proto-scientist, in the scene I have chosen to depict.
A debate arises over why the plague happened. An orchard-keeper proposes the common explanation, that Allah killed the Christians because of their wicked and polytheistic ways. Ibn Ezra differs, noting that many Christians in Ethiopia and elsewhere survived, and moreover that the plague killed many Muslims in the Balkans and southern Spain. Instead, he offers a biological explanation. Since he lacks the language of genetics or evolution, Ibn Ezra uses the human-bred oranges (and the naturally occurring fungus that attacks them) as examples to explain how a new, stronger version of plague might arise through cross-breeding. He argues for a less interventionist God, while still remaining within the realm of orthodoxy.
Shortly after this, the Sultana Katima arrives, a sort of proto-proto-feminist character who gets down from her camel unaided. She leads Bistami and a troop of outcasts further north into “Firanja,” where they found a new city (on the ruins of an old city) and construct a progressive, feminist-egalitarian Islamic theology which discards much of the established Hadith.
I was very excited to read today’s entry in my favorite blog of all time, GURNEY JOURNEY, by Dinotopia-creator James Gurney. If you are reading this now, you should definitely go read that next! It’s about models and photo-reference, and how to use them sparingly, and only in the final stages of a piece, so that the imagination isn’t too stifled by an overzealous adherence to observation. Like many of my friends in the comics world, James Gurney is a big advocate of the 1950’s Famous Artist courses and their mannequin-based approach to constructive anatomy. I was pretty late to this party, but I’m proud that I was able to construct all three of these figures from geometric shapes, only sitting on the floor once or twice to figure out where Bistami’s feet should go.
Read More1.) Awake to Emptiness
I’m hoping to do a series of illustrations based around the chapters of one of my favorite novels of all time, The Years of Rice and Salt, by Kim Stanley Robinson, which I am rereading this month. This project is partly to give me a little bit of a break from SNitLoE, which for some reason has been bogging me down a little bit, and partly to introduce myself to new art techniques, like the ink-wash used here. I also want to practice the “illustration-a-day” ethos of Benjamin Dewey, where the point is not for an illustration to be be perfect in every way, but for it to be completely finished in a day. This drawing took me about three or three and a half hours.
The Years of Rice and Salt is an alternate history novel which speculates how the world would have developed without the influence of European Christendom. Some time in the 14th century, a mutant strain of the plague kills 99% of Europeans (instead of the historical 30-60%), effectively eliminating them from history, and leaving China and Islam the dominant powers on earth. The novel traces humanity’s progress over the next seven centuries, all the way up to the Islamic year 1423 (which would be 2002 on the Christian calendar).
But Kim Stanley Robinson, very characteristically, never spells this all out. (Amazingly, KSR is often accused by other sci-fi writers of being prone to “infodumps,” but I think this charge is ridiculous.) Instead, he tells the new history through the eyes of his characters, ordinary and extraordinary people who are only barely figuring it out themselves. The central character of chapter one, “Awake to Emptiness,” is Bold, a Mongolian raider under the conquering Temur Khan in what would be the very early 15th Christian century. Bold takes a wrong turn and heads out into the Magyar plain (present-day Hungary), where he finds villages and entire cities completely depopulated by the plague, their buildings and cathedrals still ghostily in tact.
(Fearing that he has been exposed to plague, the Khan orders Bold’s execution, but Bold flees. He works his way through deserted eastern Europe alone, down through Greece, where, on the brink of starvation, he is captured by Arab slave traders. He journeys with them down the east coast of Africa, where he forms a deep bond with another enslaved person, an African boy named Kyu. They are taken on the magnificent trading fleet of Admiral Zheng He (a real historical figure) to Hangzhou, where they are employed in a restaurant, until Kyu gets the idea… well, I won’t spoil it.)
By the way, I haven’t forgotten about the “alternate history” that’s happening RIGHT NOW. Here’s my 3-minute warm-up sketch of a man whose power-grubbing would give ol’ Genghis a run for his money, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak:
Art For the Egypt Protests
I spend most of my time drawing imaginary people fighting imaginary oppression, but tonight I really felt I should draw something to honor the real heroes out there this week on the streets of Cairo, enduring truncheons, rubber bullets and firehoses in the hopes of a freer Egypt. Of course none of them will ever see my stupid drawing, even if Mubarak hadn’t shut down the internet, but I guess it’s my way adding my voice to the throng.
I kinda like the black and white version, though I wish I could think of cleverer ways to create gray. The b&w original is for sale on etsy.
“Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees, to deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people, making widows their prey and robbing the fatherless. What will you do on the day of reckoning, when disaster comes from afar? To whom will you run for help? Where will you leave your riches?” – Isaiah 10:1-3
GOOD LUCK EGYPT! And remember, the real fight will begin the morning after Mubarak steps down.
Read MoreMy Next Project
Guys, great news! I’ve decided what my next graphic novel will be:
“The Li’lest Nobles,” a heartwarming children’s adventure about the Savage Nobles as BABIES. When their wagon becomes mired in the sandbox, their only hope of getting home in time for dinner is THE POWER OF IMAGINATION!
But shouldn’t Theo be like a teenager already?
Okay, seriously, this was a lot of fun to draw (especially since I pencilled most of it while on the clock at my barista job). I’m totally indebted to Aaron McConnell for the idea. Aaron drew a hilarious image of Marvel’s team of reformed supervillains, the Thunderbolts, as teeny tiny adowable widdle kids.
For MLK Day
I know that saying “King has really meant something to me” is a bit like saying you like the music of the Beatles or that you enjoyed the first Matrix movie, but I can only assert that in my case it’s really, actually true. But sometimes MLK Day bums me out; I feel the popular image of King the civil rights pioneer – the guy who led the Montgomery bus boycott, the guy who gave the “I Have a Dream” speech – often obscures the legacy of King the theologian, the political philosopher. I think he is at least as important as a thinker as he was as a public speaker, which is why I drew him with his mouth closed.
Any remembrance of the civil rights activities of the 60’s can easily turn into a self-congratulatory massage circle, where the implicit message is “thank goodness we’ve got it right nowadays.” Even the more modest pundits who add that “there is still so much work to do” often seem to buy into the general end-of-history onanism. I’m afraid that this spectacle has become more obscene since Obama’s election, and the MLK Day ceremonies he’s presided over have filled me with a disgust that borders on despair. (By the way, I blame the ceremony organizers, not the President, who I’m pretty sure just shows up.) While Obama’s election was definitely a symbolic triumph of huge proportions, and I can’t begin to imagine what it meant to people who were alive in the 60’s, especially blacks, I always try to remember King’s own aversion to specific examples of individually successful black people. In his writings and speeches, he didn’t count the existence of a narrow black middle class as a victory, and if he did cite the accomplishments of individuals like James Meredith or Marian Anderson, it always accompanied a parallel citation of the nameless masses.
I think anyone with eyes can see there are still serious racial inequalities in the U.S. today, and I even think most of the above-mentioned memorializers know this very well, even if they continue to play an ideological game. Moreover, I think, with King, that a fundamental class division underlies most racial divides, and that racial strife, if not exactly a subset of class strife, is certainly inseparable from it. It’s a big taboo to suggest (especially if you’re a white guy like me!) that King’s ideas extend beyond issues of racial injustice, but I think this is exactly what needs to be said if his legacy is to be rescued from those who are turning him into a historical relic of a social fait accompli. A stone monument, for goodness’ sake!
I used to refer to this socialist-minded King as the “post-63 King.” My happy discovery of 2010 was just how inept this description was. For instance, in this mushy 1952 letter to his then-girlfriend Coretta Scott, (90% of which ends up being about the book she lent him, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, which I have also read) King claims that “capitalism has outlived its usefulness.” In 1952! It was so refreshing to see that the socialist attitudes that characterize King in the final years of his life had been there all along.
For many years, starting in college, I’ve struggled to reconcile my own leftist (I’d even like to say “communist,” at the risk of being misunderstood) political convictions with my Christianity, and King has probably helped me through more moments of crisis than any one else. When I despondently Googled “can a christian be a communist?” one night, I found this transcription of a 1962 King sermon of the same title. I really encourage you all to read it, and the other archived speeches and writings at Stanford’s MLK Research and Education Institute online, but if you don’t have time, I’ll summarize: Can a Christian be a Communist? King’s answer is a big “no,” followed by an even bigger “BUT…”
My favorite quote: “Indeed, it may be that communism is a necessary corrective for a Christianity that has been all too passive and a democracy that has been all too inert.”
As contradictory as they now seem, I do think Marxist ideas must somehow be incorporated into Christian theology, perhaps in a similar way to how Aristotelian thought was adapted in the later middle ages (a proposal that at the time would have seemed equally untenable!) If this mammoth intellectual project of synthesis ever happens, I think King will be remembered as one who laid the groundwork.
Oh, and one last thing! Let’s please, please, PLEASE start just calling him “King” instead of saying “the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.” or something like that every single time. We don’t feel the need to say “Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi” every time, do we?! Maybe at one time it was a big deal to point out that a black person had a PhD, fine. But when a somebody has attained the level of world-historical individual, we generally recognize this by dropping all but their last name. Heck, if the words “Derridean,” “Clintonite” and “Reaganomics” have entered the common parlance since ’68, isn’t it about time we promoted the poor old doctor to a monosyllable?
Read MoreThe Misadventures of Herschel Pachman
That’s right, the ghosts are Klansmen! How’s that for dark?
I pencilled these pages in a burst of New-Yearsy determination two weekends ago during a visit from Vancouver cartoonists Wei Li and Vanessa Kelly, two people who don’t mind if you look down while you talk to them (my kinda people!). I let the comic languish uninked until today, when I was home from work with a seriously nasty cold.
I’ll be submitting “The Misadventures of Herschel Pachman” to the video-game-themed February issue of Stumptown Underground.
I have a few friends and acquaintances who draw lots of video game characters or vg-related art, and I’m pretty much in awe of what they do. Drawing only these four pages has convinced me that I probably do not have what it takes to do justice to the intricate designs of these types of characters. I really phoned it in on Sonic the Hedgehog, and only got away with the guy from “Dig Dug” (in the breadline behind Zelda’s Link) because that character is so pixellated already that nobody seems to know or care what he actually looks like – I certainly don’t. But otherwise, I’m actually quite pleased with how this comic turned out!
Read MoreComix Not Ded
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the broad appeal that “punk” characters seem to have in comics. I already knew that, on the face of it, my writing a story about a garage band full of pissy youngsters was not unique. But I’ve only just become aware of how extremely non-unique it is. Just to take two examples from comics by cartoonists I have met since living in Portland in March:
Patrick Devine, who works down at the IPRC, gave me a copy of his zine “Calico Jack,” which mixes punk ethics/aesthetics with dilapidated spaceships in a way that calls to mind the subject matter of Jaime Hernandez’s “Love & Rockets” series, except that in my case I read “Calico Jack” first.
Steve Fuson, a regular contributor, with me, to Stumptown Underground, has a little series called “the Nihilist Club” whose assaholic skateboarding “protagonist” really takes the “hero” out of “anti-hero.” Reading it gave me a little shock, both because Steve is himself a very genteel person, and because his auto-bio webcomic, “Me&Ering,” is about as tame as that genre can be.
So why do so many comics artists feel drawn to this material? Is it because, as lonely losers who spend the best years of our lives hunched over a desk drawing imaginary picture stories, we idealize the opposite lifestyle of undisciplined mayhem and direct political engagement? Because we are boring milquetoasts who rebel vicariously through kick-ass rock stars and impossibly cute manic pixie dreamgirls? Because, impotent onanists that we are, we can only soothe our whimpering civic consciences by dressing up our flat solipsism in virtuous black leather and valiant mohawks?
Don’t answer that!
Obviously, there’s a very strong “indy” comics heritage informing most of us, one that has traditionally focused on marginal social groups (though usually not too marginal). What better suits the “warts and all” approach of these comics than the ugly truths of the underground music scene? There’s a lot of philosophical overlap between comics and rock, and you could write a whole book on the parallels between, and interconnectedness of, the two worlds.
But the mere fact that spiked collars and electric guitars are a comics cliche (and they definitely are) doesn’t negate their artistic potential. Heck, we’ve been churning out hundreds of comics a year about superheros for the past seven decades! And I’m not even going to dwell on the similarly hallowed legacies of TV shows about cops and lawyers, novels about writers who can’t write and painters who can’t paint, or songs about how, like, totally in love I am. These things are popular for a reason!
I think rebellion movements are interesting, not just entertaining, and I can’t overstate that the righteous anger of youth is very important, as well as, on occasion, pathetically hilarious. It’s pretty apparent by now that something in us needs to read about the hero punching out the villain. I think it’s equally true that we need to read about the teenager screaming at the cop.
Nude with cap – still nude?
Just so you don’t think this is turning into some kind of boy’s club after yesterday’s cartoon, here’s a little Russian beefcake courtesy of this morning’s figure drawing session. This model brought a hat, a prop gun and A LIGHT SABER! (not pictured) (haha)
