Tag Archives: Art

Rational Lampoon’s Vacation

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From October 25 through November 2, I was on a mandatory vacation. In September, I had run the vacation calculator, and I found out I had about sixty hours of use-or-lose vacation, so at the end of last month, I went to Colorado to see my friend Emilie. She was kind enough to show me some cool art galleries.

There were also some inspirational diners and cafes.

None captured my imagination quite like Corvus. So many colorful people came into that establishment for caffeinated refreshment.

For a couple of days, my sister and I hung out, including our hajj to Mile High Comics, one of the largest comic book stores in the country, possibly the world (not counting those perverts in Japan). It’s in a warehouse. A warehouse. The distance between me and bulbs overhead could be measured in light years. Most of the warehouse was actually a warehouse, storing and shipping comics all over the planet at marked up prices.

            They had rows upon rows of older comics, including a separate series of bins for variant covers. They had comic book toys, in their packaging, going back to the toys I collected in high school. Do any Xers remember The Power of the Force? The pre-prequel action figure line with really buff biceps? They had those. They had a bit of everything, including long out-of-print trade paperbacks.

I spent *cough, cough* dollars and started conversations with two strangers, the latter of which is a huge deal for me.

Emily and I spent Halloween together, and the first person we saw outside of each other was a waitress in bunny ears. It bode well for us, and we spent the morning in the mall, goofing off like teenagers whose joints weren’t cooperating anymore.

There were plenty of costumes on the retail workers as we went into an enormous bookstore, a comic store, game and toy stores, the Lego store, the knife store, jewelry stores, and Spencer’s gifts, the latter of which always gives me a giggle.

After retreating to our corners for naps, Emily had dressed up in a sexy medieval (sexy, not skanky) dress, and we wandered the neighborhood, looking for the coolest Halloween decorations, and we were sorely disappointed. Some people went all out, but most either ignored the holiday altogether, or just slapped a couple of pumpkins and a fake spider web and call it done. Some people had eight- or twelve-foot skeletons and expected their game would be judged based entirely on that. Oh, trust me, Alan: we’re judging you.

Emilie and I didn’t spend every waking moment together, even if I had inadvertently booked an Airbnb a block from her house. And honestly, that was for the best. She’s got her way of doing things, I have my way of doing things. She has errands, I have a muse.

When I had dinner without her, I had it shipped to me. However, since guests and hosts prefer to keep as far apart as possible, I had to intercept the drivers before they could ring the doorbell. This is despite that I specifically asked them to go out back. On one occasion, I ordered the food then went on a brief constitutional, taking a wrong turn that led me so far from home base that I had to sprint to catch the driver only moments before she reached the front door.

For our last day together, we went to Golden, the former home of my sister, which has a beautiful downtown. Unfortunately, for the second day in a row, we were disappointed. Golden has a whole lot of restaurants and cafes, but very few quaint shops to roam around in while discussing things of no real importance to anyone but us. We went to a coffee shop instead.

But Saturday, I had to go through that hellhole of airports to return home and to my life, and my Oscar, who is currently punishing me for not being Nicole.

Subedit

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My novel was accepted by the publisher almost two years ago. I read the contract very carefully, looking for tricks and traps, but it was straightforward and very generous. The cover looks great, and they were very responsive to my concerns about fonts. Because the title is a Navajo word, they were able to accommodate the unique accenting of the language. The layouts went well. Everyone has been extraordinarily professional. But that’s not why this is taking so long.

I received the first edits fifteen months ago, and they were really bad. When I realized the editor had caused a lot of problems, I asked Production to fix it. They rejected all the changes and brought in a new team. They were just as bad. So was the third edit. The fourth edit was a vast improvement, though it wasn’t until a later round that they stopped changing “Oxen’s Razor,” which was the term used by a teenager trying to sound smart, to “Occam’s Razor,” not getting the joke.

I’ve been going back and forth with them for fifteen months, during which I’ve reread my novel nine times. I’m getting kind of sick of it.

(To be clear, I’m really proud of this book, and I think it’s some of my best writing.)

Now that they’re only sending me the final proofs, I have to edit my own book. Because of my attention span, I can’t catch all of the errors on a pass, so I have to go through it again and again, stripping out the errors. On the ninth pass, I saw that I had misspelled Jennifer once, and I didn’t notice the other eight times I read it. Also, I’m catching some continuity mistakes, like who gave the main character his pickup. These things should have been spotted by an editor.

To be clear, I’ve liked working with them so far. I just can’t figure out how this one department can be so unskilled and unprofessional. And I can’t figure out why the publisher isn’t taking this more seriously. When I self-published three years ago, my novels went up covered in typos. I reread them at least three times, and I still missed a lot. And that’s embarrassing. How am I able to hold up a book proudly and brag about it if it looks self-published? This looks bad for the publisher too. So I just returned the latest round of proofs. I will spend another fifteen months doing this if it’s what it takes to make this perfect. I painted this picture of Aaron and Jen, the main characters of the novel, Hanììbààz Rising because it was on my mind again.

Frisky Business

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As you may know, I’m ace, or asexual. Some may find this hard to believe because I’ve had my fair share of sex in my life, but there is a pattern. I tend to be more randy when I’m manic, and when I’m baseline or depressed, I’m not interested. I’m still drawn to sexiness, but I don’t want to have sex. Asexuality is a scale, and I fit on it somewhere.

Anyway, that’s my way of saying that I’m apparently going through a manic period. This means delusions of grandeur, snap decision-making, irresponsible spending, a really short, hot temper, and I start remembering sex fondly again. As a result, I started getting a little frisky with some of my drawings. I’m still seeing all the errors, but I’m happy with most of these.

Art to Art

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I’ve been feeling really self-conscious about my art lately`. I’m continuing to draw, almost compulsively, and paint or color, because I like the act of doing it. Unfortunately, I am not that crazy with the results.

I obsessively catalog and curate my art, going back almost as far as I’ve been drawing, which was 1998. I started out sketching in lined notebooks or whatever I could get my hands on, and I was so proud. I was drawing stick figures and bodies with no faces, and to me, they were as classic as a John Singer Sargent. Unfortunately, those notebooks are all lost to history. The first sketchbook where I started drawing faces was given away as a wedding gift to someone who would appreciate the symbolism of it. That’s the first six months of me making art.

The earliest drawings I have digitized are from 1999. They’re of Sean, Lisa, and Eugene, characters from a short story I wrote in college and the sequel I was working while I was figuring this out. I still write and illustrate these characters constantly.

Twenty-five years later, I continue to feel pride in these sketches. I can’t always say the same.

Recently, I skimmed through thousands of digitized drawings and picked only the ones that sparked joy, which turned out to be about six hundred. As I was paging through, I saw countless bad drawings that are making me ask myself who I’m fooling.

I’ve drawn pictures as recently as last week I would be mortified by if someone else saw it. Even as I’m getting better with basics like hands and anatomy (I’m still trying to get the hang of hips), I draw mostly stinkers. There are dozens of pictures of Lisa crosshatched with red, blue, green, and black pens, and only four of them are worth looking at. (Almost) everything I drew between 2015 and 2020 was so bad, I quit drawing altogether.

I didn’t start drawing again until the end of 2022, when my coworker saw a self-portrait I did in 2020 (one of the few good ones I did) and would not let me say no to her request for a portrait of her own. This time, I bought a cheap sketchbook and a mechanical pencil and started from scratch.

Look, I have no idea what the hell I’m doing. I have no training. I have two anatomy books that are useless to me because that is not how I learn. I read How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way. Every breakthrough I’ve made is met with a backslide, and I can’t seem to stop that from happening. I’m self-taught, and it shows.

I look at the comic book artists I take inspiration from, and they don’t make mistakes. The penciller doesn’t make one hand bigger than the other. The inker doesn’t lean too hard on their brush and make one line really thick. The exception to this is my idol, Matt Wagner. In his 1983 series, Mage, you can witness his evolution, issue by issue, as he gets better by doing it.

This inspired me to start drawing comics in 2002. I figured out how to do it by doing it. It’s how I learned to draw in the first place, and it’s the most satisfying way for me.  

I’m not going to share as much art as before. A lot of what I’ve already shared is a huge mess, and I’m really embarrassed about it. I’m also not getting as much engagement over social media, so I’m seeing that as a less and less productive way to spend my time. If there’s one that really knocks me out, I’ll share it. Otherwise, I’ll turn the page and try again.

Noir Favorite Things

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A while ago, I started listening to podcasts, and I soon learned that some really talented people were doing old-timey radio shows. I quickly zeroed in on writer and voice actor, Gregg Taylor and his baby, Decoder Ring Theatre, home of the superhero adventures of Toronto’s Greatest Champion, the Red Panda and my favorite, Black Jack Justice. Set in the fifties, the show is about a Private Detective and coffee snob, Jack Justice, and his partner, Trixie Dixon, two-fisted Girl Detective.

Taylor is an enormously talented writer. The styles of Red Panda Adventures and Black Jack Justice, as well as the anthology plays he does are wildly different. The tone between episodes of a single show will veer out of control. Black Jack Justice has had episodes that leave me laughing aloud on the train or episodes that break my heart with the injustice of it all. His dialogue is spot on, and I wish I could pull out a few quotes to share.

I picked up a couple of his novels when I was a reader, and his conversational style in the shows translates perfectly to paper. He’s been a big inspiration to me, as a writer and as an artist, so I did this little piece a while ago.

Meet Gretchen

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Gretchen West is a former intern at a sleazy New York City tabloid who graduated to fotog. She’s a bombshell, she doesn’t have an insincere bone in her body, and she’s actually a really good photographer. She balances out her good points by being really obnoxious. She is a gum-chewer, a belcher, and a knuckle-cracker. She can unleash a silent-but-violent at will. And her laugh. Oh, God, her laugh.

Parenting in the 70s

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I would like to start working on comics again, but it’s been so long, between Newcastle’s final days in February and Oscar moving in in April, that I’m concerned I won’t be able to restart. I’ve been spending my weekends at the coffee shop, drawing little lots of little fully rendered sketches, hanging out with Oscar, etc., that I can’t bring myself to return to my half-penciled page.

So I did a one-page short, set in 1977, starring my parents and their kid, who only likes to play with toys if they can kill him.

I Ink, I Can

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Last week was a terrible week at work (this one’s not looking much better). I was just basically buried in work, but I fell sick for half of Tuesday and all of Wednesday, and no matter how efficient I was, no matter how much Adderall I took, I could not catch up.

Some of this momentum must have carried over to the weekend because I chose to work on a project I needed to finish by this morning at the latest, but I also wanted to finish some art I’d worked on during my busy week.

In addition, I was thinking about ink-washes and the fact that I had several bottles of ink left over from when I was writing my books by hand. I rushed through these drawings, so they are not great drawings. I’m not sure I really enjoyed them very much, but I’m also not sure I did them right.

Gods Save the Queen

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This is Regina de Costa. She was conceived by Kate to be a badass witch named Gina, and her creator asked me to write a novel about her character. I did so, and I added some details of my own.

Regina’s mother is Helena Torres-de Costa, the chief executive officer of a corporation so large and powerful, it has no name. It manipulates politics, sports, pop culture, and finances in order to maximize profit. The corporation is not a democracy, so Regina is heir to the executive office, by virtue of birth, as well as a lifetime of training.

Regina ran away from home twice, once when she was a restless young woman, and once when she was a crusader for justice. She’s clever, she’s ruthless, she’s imaginative, she’s fashionable, she is utterly insane, and she’s a heartbeat away from being the single most powerful person in the United States.