3 September

"May We See the Cannons?"

Monday, my wife and I went off on one of our semi-regular painting safaris, heading up the Hudson to sit and find interesting things to look at and record.  The cannons at West Point was the first idea, but - as you can see - that didn't pan out.  After we left West Point (we opted not to take the buses), we left to find another place to draw/paint, and settled on Fort Montgomery, a Revolutionary War era fort just north of and with an insanely beautiful view of the Bear Mountain Bridge.  We settled under the footbridge, and in between bouts of skipping stones,* I carved this page out.

The first conversation is real - the second half came when I realized about halfway through the strip that the anecdote really didn't have a point, at least in the context of the Vomit Comic parameters.  From a drawing perspective, you can tell that I started the page thinking it would be a quick, anecdotal doodle.  So I started hatching the background in the bottom panel intensely, hoping that something would occur to me.  

Ooh.  We have to take the bus.

Uh...

Eventually, it occurred to me that nothing was going to pay off of that set-up, so there's your 'punchline.'

Still, at least I unloaded some vintage Dave architectural rendering, which is worth a lot more than any joke or comment I could come up with on the topic of the cannons at West Point no longer being accessible to those who wish to stroll about the grounds.  In fact, the other day I was strolling around the Village with Walrus' fine editor (Hermit), and something he asked me about crosshatching made me think of my early artistic development.  'Early' in this case refers to the ages of 12-14, since before that, I'd displayed no visual acumen whatsoever.  Anyhow, the tool and technique that I first stumbled on to was doing obsessive architectural  drawings with my trusty Koh-i-Noor Rapidograph .30 - the yellow one, for those of you who have them color coded.  The pen was a Bar Mitzvah gift, and even if the ceremony did nothing to make me a man, the pen made my eye grow up fast, and for that, I'm grateful.

So, when the strip started to tailspin after the first two panels, I reflected on that conversation and thought, 'well I wonder if I can still do that on demand?' The answer is: not as well as I could when I was 14.  But still - for starting an engine that's lain dormant for twenty-plus years to see how it functions, the drawing of the West Point Museum and grounds has to rank up there with the VW sequence from 'Sleeper.'  One thing that gets left out of the Vomit Comic idea is actual drawing, and when I'm in more of a visual than verbal mode, it's good to know that I can lean on it. 

It may be boring, but it can sure be purty.

Speaking of purty: Yesenia actually wore pigtails, short-shorts and a tight t-shirt on our Labor Day excursion.  If anything, I've de-sexualized this drawing of her - so, those among you who think I'm falling into the sexist trap of the va-voom cartoon girl, sorry.  That's no bombshell, that's my wife.

D.

*I'm not kidding about the skipping stones part:

 

 

12 August

 

23 July

Climber

That's probably not the real title of this one.  Frankly, I have no idea what's going on with it.  I just realized that it was Tuesday night, and no Vomit had yet materialized for the week, so I took a little time before band practice and puked this one out on the page while Karl watched (and narrated) the Tour de France.  When I was done with the drawing, I realized I'd only thought it out as a pin-up, and really had no idea what this dude was saying or doing or looking so intent on.  So I asked Karl, and his response became the caption.

Really, he's probably reaching for some proton-sized singularity, throwing off sheets of blinding white light as it threatens to convulsively expand and consume our entire reality.

"Johnny!  Ben!  On my mark, activate the Dynamic Forge!  We must act in seconds to depolarize it before it can enter stage two!  I'll have to manually contain it so that the targeting vectors can la la la boom!"

If you grow up reading enough superhero comics (and still keep reading them as an adult), you internalize the flair for the dramatic that the early Marvel powerhouses like Kirby, Ditko, Everett and others brought to the medium.  Some black here, a strong light source, splayed limbs and digits and a look of intense concentration on the face and voila!  Pulse pounding, senses shattering, etc.  If comics are a language all their own, I'd have to admit that I tend to speak it with a strong Marvel accent, albeit one that somehow got pidginized by a trip through the bigfoot school.

But I like Karl's take on it better.  After all, if you didn't stew your brain in those comics, an image like this can have different meanings.  It's a bit like a Rorschach blot in that way.  Which has been happening to me a lot, lately; speaking of the band, our new singer Christine was discussing her interpretations of all the song lyrics.  Where I'm a morose and dyspeptic sort, she's atomically cheerful - so a lyric that I wrote about the inability to save an addicted friend from self-destructing became, in her mind, a love song about a really great first date.  Admittedly, Christine is getting married in a few months, so that type of thing is on her brain.  But, still - it really threw into sharp relief for me that one of the great things about art is how much the viewer brings to it.  And that's something we forget, sometimes.

So.  Is he climbing, crawling, saving us from a baby universe, or going to close the shades because the light from the bar across the street is keeping him awake?  You tell me - it's your context.

 

 

14 July

Wellington's Bluff

This week's entry is one from the archives - June 29th of last year, to be exact - and is probably the first true Vomit Comic to make an appearance her on Walrus Comix.  The Vomit Comics were first developed as exercises for a Comics class that I teach at the local arts center, and all it really was intended to be was a way to get the class started, both for the students and for myself.  Fifteen minutes at the top of each class: break out your drawing tool of choice (although I proselytized for the Sharpie, of course) and finish a complete page within the time limit.

I won't say it was the most successful exercise for everybody - many adults and kids alike just threw their hands up and said 'I can't think of anything to draw!'  But I still think the exercise has validity, and I recommend all cartoonists and non-cartoonists out there try it a few times.

As far as the content of this week's entry, when I first wrote about it on my blog (the Subway Rambler) last year, here's all I had to say: 

"The first Vomit Comic from the third round of classes.  More boats. I'm thinking this is me telling me I really need a vacation.  Also, this reads like the worst Tony Millionaire comic ever. Sorry, Tony."

Which seems pretty cryptic to even me, now.  Broken down, that's a reference to the fact that this was the third time the class had run - and this strip was the first one done in the first of the the new 12-week session.  Sailboats had made an appearance in a previous strip, and the vintage nautical theme and even the general tone of the strip reminded me of the great Tony Millionaire's Maakies strip (http://www.maakies.com/), which somehow magically combines British Naval tradition, fine pen and ink rendering, self-loathing and toilet humor all in one brilliant package.  Easily my favorite of all of the alt-weekly strips.  As is the case with the fifteen-minute variety Vomits, most of the references and ideas happen below the level of true consciousness, and I can only piece together what went into it after i can step back and look at just what the hell it is that I've done.  That's when the obvious Maakies influence became apparent.

None of which is of particular interest, except when I originally posted the strip over at the Rambler last July, someone claiming to be Millionaire posted in the comments section on it - to wit, "not so bad, nice drawing."  A comment that was so straightforward and brief that I eventually came to the conclusion that it probably really WAS Tony Millionare, which, for me, is pretty much the equivalent of posting one of my songs on my blog, mentioning that it had a nice Ben Folds vibe, and then finding a post from Folds about it.  Mentally, I get that Millionaire probably has a Google News or Blog alert on his name, but, still.  Nice of him, I thought.

A few months later, I purchased some original art from him for a friend of mine, and exchanged a couple of emails with him, and you know, I preferred not to know the truth.  So I never asked.

The reason you're getting this archive strip is partly because I intend to work through the archives eventually anyhow, but mostly because Yesenia (my much, much better half) and I went out to a County park on the Hudson north of us in Haverstraw, and spent a couple of hours making watercolors of the river.  I had originally thought I'd try to make a comic out of mine, but nothing came ("I can't think of anything to write!'), so I ended up just doing a pure riverscape.  It bears mentioning that I'm a huge, slavering, gay-for fan of the entire Hudson River School, from Cole to Church to Bierstadt to you name it, and I hold them up as the pinnacle of landscape painting, a skill which I never even remotely tried to learn, never mind master.  So I consider a Hudson River nautical painting to be kind of a holy object.  Not mine, mind you.  

Anyhow, the nautical feel of the painting jogged my memory of this strip, even though they're miles apart, visually.  

Here's the painting as supplemental Vomit material for you.  A larger version can be found at http://www.copper-man.net/images/Haverstraw-Dave-RTLg-713.jpg, and Yesenia's (far superior) version of the river scene can also be found at today's Rambler entry (http://copper-man.net/2008/07/day-by-river.html).  Witness me and my hundred-thousand dollar art school education get demolished in head-to-head competition with my wife.  I've never had such a conflicting sense of pride and shame in my life.

D.

 

 

8 July

Shipyard

Drove north this weekend, to visit my friend Putnam at his new log cabin off in the Maine woods, and to back him at a show in Portland on the 5th.  A somewhat abbreviated account of the entire weekend can be found over at my blog, the Subway Rambler (http://copper-man.net/2008/07/remote-feed.html), but that was written after the fact.  This comic was drawn right after I arrived, after having spent the night at a Comfort Inn in Vernon, CT - roughly 1/3 of the distance between my house and Putnam's.  The rest of the narrative is pretty self-explanatory, I think, except to say that Putnam is a singer/songwriter in the folk vein, who comes from an old-time music background.  Lord knows how a Fender Rhodes fits in sonically with a banjo.  I guess you had to be there.  To hear what his music sounds like without the Rhodes, I recommend you visit his site at www.putnamsmith.com.

About the drawing: I seem to be switching back to using finer points after a few years of sketching almost exclusively with the Sharpie regular.  This is ego at work, really: even though the purpose of a sketchbook is to, you know, sketch, I realized that I also want it to have something of an archival purpose, and looking back through several sketchbooks of nothing but sloppy marker drawings is dispiriting, to say the least, particularly when said sketchbooks represent nearly the entirety of my artistic output, these days.  It's really a toss-up, though - I can certainly render more fully and with a greater range of tones with the extra-fine point than with the regular - in fact, I used to sketch exclusively with blue ball point, which gives an incredible tonal range, better than pencil - but my figure drawing is much more lively and spontaneous with the medium point, and that's the thing I really need to sketch.  I've always been able to render - being exposed to David Macauley and Gerhad at a young age took care of that - but drawing believable figures from all different angles is more problematic.  It used to really mess up my comics, because I'd give up on the figures if I got something down on the page that looked okay, even if I had to sacrifice storytelling clarity to do so.  Now if I hit a snag, it's sketch/scan/trace and everything looks much, much better as a result.

The Vomit Comics, being sketchbook comics, benefit from none of this.

My sketchbook of choice is the Strathmore 400, 14" x 17" (Recycled if I can find it), so these originals are pretty big.  That's another concern with switching back to the fine point - I like a lot of dark on a page to balance a drawing, and it's a hell of a lot easier to fill up that space with the regular point than to diddle for hours with the fine point.  The larger page is also in response to my youthful tendancy to sit and render a very small area, only to discover that the rest of the drawing was total crap.  Now I work in large and sweeping motions.  The sketchbook is a bitch to carry around, though - any larger and I'd get carried off by it on breezy days.  But 9" x 12" doesn't give me the space I need - last week's strip was done in my 9" x 12", and I think that may be a reason for its constipated quality.  And anything smaller than that is, I'm sorry, just a little girly sketchbook.  If feel like those should be filled exclusively with drawings of unicorns, and I should put a little heart next to my signature.  If I can fit it in my pocket, it's not a sketchbook.

We were the middle act on Saturday, and before and after we played our set, I sketched the opening and closing acts.  It's not an exaggeration to say that my sketchbook was larger than the café's dinky tables, so maybe there is something to be said for the smaller books.  I'll probably be posting those sketches over at the Rambler some time this week.

Two specific comments:
a) The hand and bottle ware drawn from direct observation, and I'm overly pleased with how the glass on the beer bottle looks - and it was the fastest thing on the page, laid in with the medium point in about 30 seconds.  I'd planned to feather it out, but I realized that would just fuck it up.  I'm good at fucking things up.  I'm such a fiddler.
b) The logo on the Rhodes.  That is NOT a Rhodes logo, and I should know better, since I've only been playing the fucking thing for almost twenty years, now.  That was not drawn from direct observation.

Someone suggested I should send this to Shipyard Brewery, but I think it might actually show their IPA in a negative light.  It's not intended - and indeed, not true at all - but the strip makes it look like the reason for the slowdown in my songwriting was that I'd been partaking of too much of their fine product.

Lastly: no, there's nothing wrong with your monitors or with the file.  Those little splotches of red are the remains of a mosquito that was pestering me while I drew.  I did say that Putnam lived in a cabin in the Maine woods, right?  I decided to leave the viscera in for the sake of verisimilitude.

D.

 

 

 

30 June

Substrata

So this is what blood from a stone looks like.

Seriously, seriously dry, this week - but I'd hate to start eating into my archive of completed strips on only the second week of these things.

Frequently, when I'm completely bereft of ideas, I just pick the first vaguely resonant word that comes to mind and plant it at the top of the page. Even though the final strips have little if no obvious connection to the title, there's obviously some kind of feedback at play in the backrooms of my brain that wakes up, groggy, and proceeds to dictate a few further words and pictures to go along with it.  Whatever engram the title is part of ends up getting spilled on the page whole (encoded, of course), and sometimes it makes sense, and sometimes it doesn't.  It's the ones that don't make sense that worry me, because like most people, I'm driven to find meaning in my own work.  Absence of meaning could mean either just that - it's just pure nonsense - or it could be that I'm revealing something so deep about myself that I should be embarrassed.

This week's entry probably(!) betrays an ennui that's been running through my life for the last few days, and finally caught up to me, today.  To a degree, I like the challenge of trying to create something when every fiber of your being would rather be doing something else - or nothing else, to be more exact.  It's the closest we can ever come to mind over matter, forcing your inaction into action.  But the one thing you can't force is an idea, so these stoneblood strips will lean to the emotional weather report end of the spectrum.  Yes, I'm feeling a little scattered and distracted, and under what Matt Groening so succinctly termed the 'nameless floating dread.'

The title and content do at least go together.  So there is that.

Crumb's great BoBo Bolinski single-page strips were running through my head while I did this, although nothing of that actually comes out on the page.  But if you'd ever seen them, you'd know what I'm talking about.

 

23 June

Euracist

The editors of Walrus Comix have persuaded me (largely against my better judgement) to post a new weekly feature wherein I present my sketchbook comics for you, their discerning readers. And how did they persuade me? By stroking my ego. This will be a real tightrope walk for said ego, since I can be all-too-easily convinced that anything I put my hand to is a work of stone genius, and can just as suddenly conclude that the aesthetic center of my brain is largely filled with gravel. But, still - thanks to Ansley and Bran for running these, and I do hope you enjoy them.

You'll note that each entry comes with an accompanying apologia. It's a feature I like on Tim Kreider's excellent The Pain - When Will it End (http://www.thepaincomics.com/), and I see no reason why I can't rip it off, here. Still, the editors believe that the strips function better on their own, but I'm of the philosophy that humor works best when you not only explain the joke, but kill it, slab in on a metal table and perform a complete humor autopsy. I know it's an aggravating fact about me, but these strips are oftentimes so pointless and abstract that I feel an explanatory essay is the only way I can justify having wasted your time for reading them. And therefore waste more of your time by making you read the essay.

But, come on - if your time were so fucking valuable, you wouldn't be reading this in the first place. This is the internet, after all: killing time until you die is what we're all about.

The real definition of the Vomit Comic is that it was drawn directly in ink, with no forethought, no self-editing, and (usually) in fifteen minutes* or less. I do allow myself the use of a white-out pen as part of the process. Neatness counts, even in Vomit. The finished results are usually pretty banal as far as comics go, but I'd guess their function as a window into my subconscious makes them valuable to connoisseurs of fine train wrecks, everywhere. That's another purpose for the essays: trying to convince you that the horrible, creepy thing that you've just figured out about me isn't at all remotely true. Not in the slightest.

I hope that more people try to produce Vomit Comics for this feature, since I think the idea of it is too sublimely stupid to hog all for myself.

This week's entry (titled "Euracist") is pretty self-explanatory. As soon as I drew that face, I knew he was lecturing me about the superiority of Soccer, and let's face it - every hardcore soccer fan is deep down, a real asshole. Whenever World Cup Fever grips Little Ethnic Town, it combines all of the best elements of of macho pride in someone else's accomplishment that all sports fans display, and jingoistic fervor that causes the fan to forget for half an hour that the homeland he's getting in your face about is the place he couldn't wait to leave.

And anyone who ever sees art in a game where a bunch of adult men swat, kick, or chase after any kind of spherical object is seriously deluding themselves. George Will, I'm looking at you. And while I'm at it: fuck boxing, too. George Plimpton, Norman Mailer and Ernest Hemmingway have a lot to answer to as well, for introducing the phrase 'the pugilist's art' into the lexicon.

Living here at the end of the Bush administration, there are few things I like less than obnoxious sports fans, racists and nationalistic pride. But I do agree with this soccer fan on one fundamental level: football does suck.

See you next week.

*About 90% were done in under the time limit .  I'd like to think this gives me a leg up on Scott McCloud's 24-Hour Comic exercise, since the Vomit Comic guidelines will produce a 96-page graphic novel in a single day.