Random Calculations

(Click on the above image to view it in all its exquisite detail.)

I've always been an habitual doodler. I enjoy the mild form of psychic automatism it allows one to access in the course of everyday life. One doodles without thinking, planning or intending anything. You set your pen to wandering and see what emerges. It's a useful palliative to dull meetings, long waits on phone-ladders, and other obligatory forms of potential boredom.

Most of my doodles end up being faces, figures, vaguely biomorphic shapes, or queer blob-like architectural constructs. Sometimes they resemble elaborate ornamentation--William Morris on acid--expressed in lines of sloppy chicken-scratch. When note-taking, my bullet points nearly always have hairy, tentacular extrusions radiating from them. I have no idea why this should be.

There's probably some psychological insight to be gleaned from the study of such unintentional artworks, but I don't know what that might be. In my own case, I don't think I want to know.

From the TSI Vaults: The Haberdasher's Glug

Above is the cover of my 1988 lo-fi release, The Haberdasher's Glug!, a musical comedy. It features that Halloween party favorite, "Bloody Pumpkins", along with a host of more obscure and irritating tracks, all sort of spliced together in a frenzy of ping-pong recording sessions, abetted by an ambient tunnel of tape hiss. The highlights, as far as I can remember are "Al Corpuscle/Only Kind of Water", "Weight Farm", "Medical Crime" and the instrumental "Catfish".

Below is the complete track listing, credits, etc.:

From the TSI Vaults: A Bell for Wild Birds

Above is the cover for the 1994 Les Amis D'Irving album A Bell for Wild Birds (Une Cloche pour L'Oiseaux Sauvage). I don't think this can be the final version of the cover, as it omits song credits ("I Wanna Be Like You" was written by Robert & Richard Sherman, "1970" was written by the Stooges, and "Jean Genie" was written by David Bowie) and other indicia.

This is actually the second version of the cover; the first, featuring a drawing of a of rabid, saucer-eyed, bat-like creature, remains somewhere at large in the vastness of the TSI/Powerpop Comics library.

Rip Van Winkle

Sweet Potato Brownie Recipe

This recipe appeared in the Summer, 2008 issue of American Vegan (all rights reserved, I'm sure--I hope they don't mind me posting it here; it's an excellent recipe, and should entice anyone to subscribe to their fine periodical or perhaps even join their excellent organization). 

Double Chocolate Brownies

Makes one 9x13" pan of brownies

1 large sweet potato

(1 cup water to cook sweet potato, not to go in brownies)

1 cup soy milk

1/4 cup oil

1 1/2 cups brown sugar

1 1/2 cups cocoa powder

2/3 cup whole wheat pastry flour

1/4 tsp. baking soda

3/4 cup chocolate chips

Sweet potato should be cooked with water in a pan on the stove until tender. Allow to cool

Meanwhile, mix soy milk with oil.

Mix Dry ingredients (except chips) in a separate bowl, then combine the two mixes.

Skin and mash sweet potato, and mix it in. Add chocolate chips last, and mix.

Lightly oil one 9 x 13" casserole pan, and spread evenly. Bake at 350 degrees F for 35 minutes or until done. A toothpick pocked one inch from the edge should come out clean. 

Allow brownies to cool before serving. Especially good served with vanilla soy ice cream, and berries. 

******

Enjoy!

--Hobby

Here are some pages I created for an early prototype for Weird Thrills #1. This was during a phase when I was between artists and seriously contemplated doing the art for the book myself. It's in a style that I suppose might be best described as "inked fumetti". That is, I took photos of myself in various poses, printed them out, inked them, scanned them, then imported them into a Quark Xpress document and--voila! Instant comics!

I realize this is cheating a bit (but just a little bit, and I did employ the time-honored craft of hand-inking every image), but I kind of like the results, and may consider doing a future project using this technique.

Anyway, I thought these might be of interest to anyone who's curious about the arcana of my production methods.

Young Goodman Brown Page 10

Here and below is a four-page sequence from my adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown." The art is by Khanh Ong. 

Click on the images to enlarge.

Young Goodman Brown Page 11

Young Goodman Brown Page 12

Young Goodman Brown Page 13

Spooky Weird Thrills #2 Page

Here's another great page by Neal Obermeyer from the forthcoming Weird Thrills #2. 

Neal has just completed the artwork for this issue, and his work is stellar throughout. 

I'm really excited about WT#2, because it's the best old-fashioned adventure-comic writing I've done yet, and Neal has totally exceeded my (already high) expectations with his phenomenal artwork. 

This issue is both weirder and more thrilling than the first, and there's lots more where that came from. 

I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.

More Sleepy Hollow

Here's another page of Tim Durning's from "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow."

Tim's handling of light is, again, wonderful. I love the way he captures the subtle gradations of light on the chalk-board.

The picture of Ichabod Crane reading the letter is great as well. What a charming, expressive drawing: the slight incline of his head; the glasses resting on the tip of his nose; the little smile that plays at the corner of his lips; that enormous ear sprouting above a thatch of muttonchop. 

Good stuff.

Sensation Comics #1

In 1974 Lyle Stuart, Inc. of Secaucus, New Jersey published a tabloid-sized hardcover reprint of Sensation Comics #1.

I found a copy in a gift shop at Sea World in Orlando Florida in 1976 and bought it for $5.00. 

I must have read this book a hundred times. I carried it with me everywhere I went that summer. For years afterward I'd dig it out and re-read it. 

Sensation Comics #1 was originally published in January, 1942 by J.R. Publishing Company, Lafayette Street, New York, NY (the company had not yet consolidated itself under the name of DC Comics). 

The book is 64 pages long, with six stories between 4 to 13 pages, each featuring different adventure-oriented characters. 

The most famous and enduring of these characters is Wonder Woman. The others are mostly second-string superheroes, with a couple period-drama swashbucklers thrown in for a bit of dash.

It's a charming book, full of crude but invigorating art and story. Maybe someday I'll re-read it and see if I can still find the magic in it.

Because it is about magic. Comics are just one of its talismanic props.

A Day at the Races

Here's a preliminary sketch of a page by Tim Durning from the upcoming Powerpop Comics Classics adaptation of Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow."

Tim's an amazing artist. I love the way he handles the lighting effects. I also love how he draws horses.

We are nearing the climactic chase scene, and I can't wait to see it.

When you think about it, comics and horse-chases just go together.

Comics excel at depicting the movement of physical bodies in space. That's why superheroes and slapstick both work so well in the form.

Horses are these beautiful, athletic, well-muscled creatures with enormous physical grace and power--nature's superheroes, if you will.

If I accomplish nothing else with Powerpop Comics, at least I managed to bring back the classical horse-chase scene. Comics needs more horse-chases!

Here are some after pictures of my newly rearranged comics library. Not only am I able to access the books, I can now shelve them vertically, rather than horizontally. 

It's a small thing, but it really makes a big difference. 

I have a pretty diverse collection of books: classic newspaper strips, cartoon collections, golden age reprints, contemporary comics, and lots of books about the form and its practitioners. 

My plan over the coming weeks is to read (or in many cases re-read) these things and use them as fodder for this blog. 

Stay tuned.

 

Spring Cleaning

I decided to rearrange the comics section of my office/library. What follows is a photographic record of this fun-filled project. 

Here are a few "before" pictures.

Unfortunately, I didn't get the idea of documenting this process until after I had unpacked the bookcase on the left, so I took a photo of the books piled on the floor, just to give an idea of the sheer mass of the things. 

This is the corner of my library wherein my comics collection resides. As you can see, it's a bit cramped. There are two bookcases--one prefab and one I built myself--housing my graphic novels, cartoon collections, and comics-related prose. Unfortunately, the long boxes in front of them render half the collection inaccessible. 

My plan is to move the shelves perpendicular to the door and the long boxes behind them, hopefully making the room more functional and less cluttered. 

I'll keep you posted of my progress.

In Dreams Begin Responsibilities

Borges once said, "Books are incantations uttered in the dreams."

He said this to me, in a dream; so take it with a grain of salt. Still, even as a figment of my own sleeping mind, when an artist of Borges' stature makes such a pronouncement, I take it seriously.

Dreams are certainly powerful and inscrutable psychic mechanisms of some sort. Think of how "Across the Universe" came to Lennon and "Scrambled Eggs"* to McCartney in dreams. Or the visionary fragment of "Kubla Khan" that Coleridge was able to snatch from a dream. I'm sure the night-mind has spawned countless works of art over the ages.

I've written a lot--entire books, actually-- in the midst of hypnagogic reveries. A vastly different version of Weird Thrills actually came to me in its entirety, pages speeding past my attention like a flip book, while I half-dozed in the grip of a fever. This has been an area of particular interest to me, thoughout my writing "career." Powerpop Comics was, in fact, originally called Hypnogogix.

I think of comics as being uniquely close to the the sub- and/or unconscious mind. I dunno if it's something to do with the right/left brain engagement required, or what. For some reason, the cognitive geography where comics are located seems very close to the region of dreams.

I think the content of comics has always reflected this. You have this improvised gallery of gods and demiurges, tricksters, monsters and grotesqueries of all kinds, seeming sprung fully formed from the collective unconscious. I mean--Superman! What could be more mythic and elemental than that?

I find this landscape peculiarly congenial to my tastes and preoccupations. This is where I stake my own ground, I suppose: in the wild, unmapped landscaped of the human mind as it dissolves itself in mythic reveries.

*I insist upon using the original title for the tune to honor the composer's unconscious intentions. Besides, I think if you really analyze the song, it is about scrambled eggs after all.

A Batch of Links

Douglas Wolk reviews an interesting batch of superhero comics in the New York Times.

I'm a sucker for the really early superhero comics. They're like primitive folk art. There's a wonderful, manic incoherence to some of them that I find fascinating. It's like depression-era urban art brut.

Here's a marvelously lurid cover by Jack Cole featuring the Claw, one of the golden age's most diabolical villains.

Origin of Azbezel

Here's a page from the second issue of Weird Thrills, an origin sequence involving the demon lord Azbezel.

I think Neal has outdone himself on this one. I love that foreshortened hand in the last panel.

And check out the skeleton fountain! I want one of those!

This is just one of the delights to be found in the forthcoming Weird Thrills #2.

Click on it to make it big.

The Black Cat

Here are some pages from my adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Black Cat.



I'm taking advance orders for this title at my website. Just click on the menu and choose "Powerpop Comics Classics #1" to order single copies. Subscriptions are also available.



The art is by S. M. Vidaurri. He did an phenomonal job.



The book should be ready by mid-March.

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

Here's a page from Powerpop's forthcoming adaptation of Washington Irving's classic "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow."

The art is by Tim Durning. His work is amazing. Check out this crowd scene!

"The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" will appear in Powerpop Comics Classics #2. It should be out sometime in May.

Weird Thrills #2

Neal Obermeyer is hard at work on Weird Thrills #2. Here's a weirdly thrilling page from that jolly exciting issue (due out in April).



The book is coming along great. Each page Neal sends me is better than the last.


I'm really (not weirdly) thrilled that Neal has also agreed to do a brief biographical comic about Edgar Allan Poe, to appear in the forthcoming Powerpop Comics #1.

Young Goodman Brown

I'm finally starting to get back the fully-balooned (the book has been lettered for months, but not in proper baloons) pages of my adaptation of Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown."

The art is by Khan Ong.

Conan the Barbarian #10

When we were kids my cousin and I both had big stacks of comics. We used to trade some of them back and forth.

I remember borrowing Conan the Barbarian #10 from him, but having to return it because the pictures in the book terrified me. I was afraid to keep the book in my room at night. It was way too much for a four year old to process.

In retrospect, it's a great story. It contains all sorts of memorable images: there's a giant, anthropomorphic bull-god that somehow manifests out of a pillar of naked human bodies, a public hanging of one of the story's heroes, a shot of a sweaty fat man being squashed to death by the bull-god's red thumb, and a kind of lovely and surreal sequence in which the bull-god's naked (human) torso breaks through a domed roof and stretches his arms to the stars.

The whole thing is brilliantly done, and today it's one of my favorite memories of the comics of my youth. This was part of a great run by the creative team of Roy Thomas and Barry Smith. It's one of the high-points of the Conan comic series for me.

Smith's work at this time was not quite fully formed, but it contained the energetic enthusiasms of a young artist on a path of genuine exploration and growth. In a year or so his work would be amazingly lush and gorgeous, but at this point he was just coming into his own as a graphic storyteller.

(The hanging sequence is particulary memorable: it is presented as a series of wordless panels tracking Conan's reactions as his friend's legs kick and dangle from the scaffold above him. It's a pretty powerful sequence, for a sword and sorcery comic.)

A few years later I came across this story again, in a mass market collection of Conan stories. By then I was no longer frightented by the stories macabre or violent elements--indeed, I was entering that phase of male adolescence that finds romance in the violent and macabre.

Today I just admire the vividness of Smith's images, and the flair of his visual storytelling.

Why Comics?

1. For some reason, colorful picture-stories powerfully imprint on impressionable young minds. I caught comics like chicken pox at a very young age, and the virus never left my neurological system.

2. Although they are often vulgar and trashy, there's a powerful energy behind trashy impulses. The products of such have a vigorous, natural vitality.

3. There's something satisfying about the act of viewing marks on paper. There's a lot of great art made in that manner.

4. The repetition of static images in a linear viewing sequence forms a unique non-verbal grammer that has yet to be fully explicated, but it creates an effect that is totally cool.

5. Narrative can gain in both complextiy and velocity with the addition of a visual dimension.

6. Comics require a rigorous formal control that is similar to the discipline of poetry.

That's enough for now. And abstract enough, too. It's getting late.

Sublime Fun

"Captain Marvel Battles the Plot Against the Universe," from Captain Marvel Adventures #100 (1949), is one of my all-time favorite comics stories. It is goofy, sublime fun of a very high order.

Dr. Sivana is "the world's maddest scientist," and "the greatest enemy of civilization ever known." He is a child-sized, perpetually grinning, bespectacled bald man in a lab coat who vows to wear the crown of "rightful ruler of the universe! " (He actually keeps the crown under a cobweb-festooned glass display, awaiting future use.)

His multifarious schemes for world domination are inevitably foiled by Captain Marvel (whom Sivana likes to call "The Big Red Cheese").

The story involves an attempt to retroactively prevent the origin of Captain Marvel, the kidnap of a talking tiger, a "spider gun" that shoots ropes of liquid plastic, a palace at the top of "The Rock of Eternity," and an army of Sivana clones, who are so obnoxious that the hero gleefully bludgeons and stomps one of them to bits.

This is one of the most pleasantly daft, fun comics I've ever read. It has the simplicity of a folk tale and the logic of a dream.

"Captain Marvel Battles the Plot Against the Universe" has been reprinted several times. I first read it in Shazam! *from the Forties to the Seventies collection that Crown published in 1977. I think it was also published in one of DC's 100 page giants in the mid-seventies, or maybe in one of their tabloid-sized books; I don't recall exactly which.

It's worth tracking down.

*"Shazam," for those not aquainted with Captain Marvel lore, is the secret word that newsboy Billy Batson would utter to change into Captain Marvel, "the World's Mightiest Mortal." The word is an angagram of the first letters of the names of six heroes of classical antiquity, each representing a specific virtue. They are: Solomon (wisdom), Hercules (strenght), Atlas (stamina), Zeus (power), Achilles (courage) and Mercury (speed).

An American Master

I've been re-reading Charles Schulz's Peanuts strips lately.

Schulz was a genius. His strips have the compression and formal mastery of great poetry.

For almost fifty years the strip appeared in the same format: four panels a day, six days a week (with eight to ten panels on Sunday). Under this severe formal constraint Schulz delivered a series of meditative "gags" that possess acute psychological insight and humane wisdom. And they're funny!

The strips are astonishing in the simplicity of their forms, their narrative inventiveness, their staging, and the sheer elan of their cartooning. Shulz is one of those artists whose visual grammer is so clear you can read it at a glance. It's really exemplary stuff.

Taken as a whole, Peanuts strikes me as a major work of 20th century literary art.