Volpane

More Companion Pieces Preview

2011-12-06T08:30:00.000-08:00

Here are a few more images that will end up, sans grey shading, in an essay comic about my youth. I hope to post it soon, but I thought I'd share these as I'm pretty happy with the results. These two images and two from my previous post's all came from thumbnails that were less than an inch square and I think they look as good in a larger format, which shows how simple works well for comics.

Companion Pieces Preview

2011-11-23T15:21:00.001-08:00

In my previous post about my "Dirty Comics" submission, I mentioned I'd written it originally as part of a letter to a friend, but there were other related pages; so I thought I'd clean them up and post them here. But as happens this time of year I've been busy cooking, cleaning and doing things around the house that need to be done. Not that I need an excuse nor do I want to seem too fastidious, but I've also spent a lot of time using Tumblr, Facebook and Google Reader. Wasting time really, as I have better things to do than scroll through porn, assault my friends "walls" with aimless comments and catch up on blogs that I like to follow.

As always, I justify everything I do recreation-ally as "doing research". Anyway, these images will end showing up smaller and with less detail in the final, because they will be accompanying words, but I wanted them to have more punch. At some point I'll get back to posting sketchbook pages.

Art show entry about my childhood

2011-10-07T18:00:00.000-07:00

Jon Macy asked me to submit comic book art for his show Dirty Comics at the Center for Sex and Culture in San Francisco. This is an autobiographical piece I did many years ago in a letter to a friend, explaining my childhood with my father. I need to point out I still have a good relationship with my father, which is more than I can say of my siblings. He will be Eighty-years-old this year and I am grateful that I am his son.

Both my parents came from broken and abusive families, which they visited upon their children in different ways than they experienced from their parents. This is not to say they did not love us or that the abuse was intentional. In many ways, their view of the world conflicted with reality and they were doing what they thought was best for them. Still, I learned to forgive early in life.

This is what I believe saved me, because I learned pretty quickly to refuse my father's advances and forgive my mother for not confronting what happened, especially when we children came to her for support. Their experiences with their own parents are what shaped how they treated us. Even today I have to be mindful of their common failure to meet me as an adult and accept me as I am and my own failures to forgive what happened.

Eventually I got over the limitations of my relations with my parents and learned to be myself. I entered college, came out as a gay man, survived my parents divorce and my father's own subsequent coming out as a gay man. I sought what I could not find in my family at college, then failing that, dropped out, moved to the city (my father soon followed me) and decided to live for myself instead of living for the approval of others.

It hasn't been easy. I've learned a lot about myself. I haven't always liked what I've encountered, but I've learned to be a better person and to be honest with myself and everyone I encounter. It is easier now, doing what is best for me.

The Mad Violinist part 5—promotional designs

2011-10-04T08:14:00.000-07:00

Having posted this spring about my planned animation project, I was inspired to clean up two of the sketches and offer them as promotional items at Zazzle.com. Here is Erich Zann as the crazed musician the protagonist encounters in the garret on the top floor above his apartment. I will use all proceeds from the sale of these images toward producing my animated short, so please be generous and buy a tee shirt or mug. You can find more items in the widget in the side bar.

Self portrait?

2011-09-27T08:14:00.000-07:00

I wanted to illustrate the phrase "Read my lips" with this stylized self-portrait. Unfortunately I wasn't too flattered by my attempt to illustrate my personal "look". I imagine I had the exaggerated and smooth lines of the Rolling Stones' logo in mind.

Wikipedia tells me that was the work of designer John Pasche, who has done extensive work designing album and single covers for the music industry, notably several Art of Noise covers that I remember from working at KUOI, the college radio station in Moscow, Idaho, back in the late Eighties. All the same there is much to recommend this sketch, perhaps I'll re-do-it.

Dirty Comics: an Art show

2011-09-21T13:08:00.000-07:00

Jon Macy has put together an art show of comic book "erotica" for the Center for Sex and Culture in San Francisco, California. He's calling it Dirty Comics and I've submitted a single page autobiographical piece for the show. I'm not sure what the etiquette for posting things that are submitted to a show is, but once the show is done I may share it here.

Artist Signatures: Jon Macy

2011-09-11T08:52:00.000-07:00

Jon Macy almost needs no introduction as his work is all I've been talking about for the past five years or so, well, when I'm not talking about my own stuff. He's published his adaptation Teleny and Camille and won a coveted Lambda Literary award this spring for Erotica with it. He's now working on his four part series Fearful Hunter, a fantasy featuring Druids and Werewolves. He drew the above portrait of his two protagonists Oisin and Byron for me at the Emerald City Comicon this spring. Below is the Wolf Master, who I've been pestering Jon to depict for me for some time. Hunky, isn't he!

Artist Signatures: Sean Z

2011-09-06T08:18:00.000-07:00

I'd heard of the Myth comic books on several of the Internet forums I regularly read and I'd visited Rated-Z Studios before. But I was very pleased to meet Sean Z, the creator of these comic books at the Emerald City ComicCon this spring. He asked me first, "elf or human? I think elf." Then he proceeded to produce this "portrait". Who knows, this character could show up in one of his stories...

Artist Signatures: Christopher Lange

2011-09-01T08:32:00.000-07:00

Jon Macy pointed out to me Chris Lange's artwork last year. I met Chris at the Prism Comics Booth at the 2011 Emerald City Comicon. He's been posting his web comic at Capitol Hillbillies since 2007 and had a small chapbook of his strips published by Northwest Press. His eclectic and graphic style stands out for its ability to engage the reader and yet the topics of his strips are definitely not work safe. Chris's humor is adult, sarcastic and definitely campy, referencing pop music stars, porn stars and Internet sites. What you get is a contemporary pro-safe-sex observation of "twenty-something" gay culture. In the sketch above the comic strips character's names, as best I can tell, beginning in the upper right corner with Stu pointing his finger, then John in the lower right corner, William to the lower left and finally Clark in the upper left with the cross hanging from his neck...Hey Chris, let me know if I got their names wrong!

Artist Signatures: Jeff Krell

2011-08-30T08:28:00.000-07:00

As promised here follows a series of posts about artist signatures and better yet, original art that I collected at the 2011 Emerald City Comicon last March. I'm starting with Jeff Krell, who's work I've read ever since I came out. I first discovered his funny Jayson comic stories in Gay Comix, back in the mid-Eighties. He continued publishing in the Meatmen anthologies in the Nineties. Later Jeff collected the stories together and re-published them through Ignite! Entertainment the publishing company he started to publish his translations of German cartoonist Ralf König's works. He has continued to write new Jayson stories and publish them in their own publications.

When creating my comicbook, Loren and Sylvia, I took a lot of inspiration from Jeff's simple line work. He manages to present just enough information to allow the eye to skim over the page without too much interruption, which makes for a fun and easy read. He also is inventive with his backgrounds which are often similar for whole sequences, but manage to maintain the continuity between panels.

Here we can see Arena, Jayson and Robin, the three main characters of Jayson, enjoying an evening of television watching. Hot in Cleveland is a new property offered on the TV Land cable network, which usually features reruns of classic television comedies. It stars Betty White, Valerie Bertinelli, Jane Levees, and Wendie Malick and Jeff is a big fan of these actresses and the show.

Artist Signatures: Roberta Gregory

2011-07-12T08:30:00.000-07:00

I've been a fan of Roberta Gregory's since I encountered her groundbreaking, Dynamite Damsels. Roberta has written a little about the creation of her first comic book at PrismComics.org and she includes a link to the Queer Zine Archive Project where you can currently download and read yourself. This book set the tone of all my comic book reading since I entered collage, which is to say I was reading primarily underground and independent authors and works relating to sexual politic and Gay/Lesbian lives. Which is not to say there was a lot to read, but thankfully by the mid-Nineteen Eighties we did have the Gay Comix anthology which lead to other things being published by progressive and innovative independent publishers.

I met Roberta in the early Ninties in Seattle at an art show featuring cartoonists held by The Center on Contemporary Art Seattle when it was down on First Avenue. She drew this sheep in my sketchbook and signed it right after the cartoonist's panel where the Bros. Hernandez and other artists discussed their works. Later I got a job in the Fantagraphics circulation department for a couple of years when she was working in their art department. She was publishing her Naughty Bits comic through Fantagraphics which I collected and thoroughly enjoyed.

This post is something of a departure from posting my own artwork, but I've recently acquired several more pages of original artwork with artist's signatures at the 2011 Emerald City Comicon, so I will continue with those for the next few posts.

Heads

2011-06-07T08:28:00.000-07:00

I often sketch in coffeehouses, at least I did when I frequented them often. The denizens of the coffeehouses then often become the subject of what I draw. I'm rarely a quick enough draw to capture them accurately. I don't know what was different on this day, but I had a ballpoint and the urge to capture haircuts and headgear. Then I began to doodle inspired by a face I saw in a magazine made up of letters. I didn't have a clear idea of what word I was drawing, so I guess it is just shapes inspired by facial features. You sometimes come up with the most amazing ideas when in coffeehouses.

Butch Man and Nelly Girl

2011-05-17T08:10:00.000-07:00

Returning to my sketchbook posts, here is a quick sketch of contrasts: a man and woman with exaggerated physiques. Gender issues have always played into my own identity, so naturally in my sketchbook, I've played with how our society tends to point-up certain aspects of gender while downplaying others. This first sketch plays off the differences between men and women.

I've suggested the passivity of how women have been depicted in the past century by drawing the female relaxing at the man's feet, but she is also proudly displaying less characteristic feminine traits like chest hair and hairy armpits. The man, in contrast is depicted with a swollen head, like a Mardi Gras costume, and yet his sexual traits are minimized. I named these two "Butch Man and Nelly Girl", then later played around with the idea that those names made them seem to be superheros. But what would their super powers be?

This next image is a cartoon I did much later depicting what those superheros would be like. They start by observing how stereotyped their schtick is; but rather than breaking them, only confirm it more by their actions. Is this an effective way society teaches us about gender? Probably not.

The Mad Violinist (an unfinished project), part Four: Style

2011-05-10T08:34:00.000-07:00

In working on this project, at one point I began to experiment with ink and white gouache to see if I could conceive the artwork as depicting a silent black-and-white film. The following images I derived from my morgue that I'd assembled to help decide and fix the style of the film. I did several paintings in this style focusing mostly on people. I included a lot of images of women although they don't really figure in the story, but I did want to use them in the dream sequence.

This is based on a portrait of Nijinsky, the Russian ballet dancer. I thought the protagonist in the film would look something like this.

This image reproduces a poster of drag performer Joey Arias. I often salvaged posters for collage material from the street. I really liked the mood of this image and how dramatically it crops the face.

This portrait based on a promotion still of silent screen actress, Theda Bara, I liked the contrast and the expression.

A publicity still for Louise Brooks in "The Canary Murder Case" provided the inspiration for this image.

This is a fashion photo from the Nineteen fifties. The stance of the model seems suggestive of a visual story.

I've always been inspired by the Russian designer Erte', so I have often referred to his work.

Another Erte' design, I love the Grecian sleeve and tunic form, used here for great effect.

How does play enhance our world through humanitarian focused games?

2011-04-21T14:39:00.000-07:00

Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Happy and How They Can Change the World by Jane McGonigal

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Jane McGonigal wants to change the world by getting us all to play games more. She has already established a reputation for generating play around basic ideas and putting them to work with the support of many multi-national corporations and non-profit organizations. I think she has very admirable goals and she certainly has the enthusiasm to promote them, but will this book really solve the most pressing problems in the world?

"Reality is Broken" is a manifesto. McGonigal is convinced that by playing games mankind can attack the most troubling of social issues, from poverty to hunger, and solve them through play. She lists the ways that we can do this and often sounds like a self-help guru; "do more satisfying work", "participate wholeheartedly wherever, whenever we can", and "have more fun with strangers".

I like her ideas and she been actively putting them to work in her career as a game designer and social engineer. Designing games that can encourage and teach people is a noble idea and McGonigal has worked on many projects that seem to have accomplished this. But where are the results? Unfortunately, McGonigal has only saw fit to list Internet sites where she's implemented these games. Where is the statistical data that shows the real effects of these games? Where are the first person stories of how playing these games really changed people's lives? Only online apparently because they are not in this book.

Modern humans are already playing games more and yet global problems still persist. I think the failing of this manifesto is that the gaming community is not unified in the same humanitarian values McGonigal clearly espouses. Also, while McGonigal acknowledges criticism that games can be used to escape reality, her rebuttal focuses only on the positive aspects of games and sidesteps any negatives of gaming addiction. It would make sense to design games to minimize these potentials, but that is outside the scope of this book.

I do want to watch her career for the next decade and see if she manages to attach herself to any project that applies itself to real world problems and manages to solve some of these dilemmas. It would indeed be a coup for the modern commercial world for a game designer to win a Nobel prize as she asserts is a personal goal. Unfortunately, this book has not changed my gaming habits and fails to convince me that we are really entering a new era of gaming. I'd like to be proven wrong.

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The Mad Violinist (an unfinished project), part Three: Planning

2011-04-19T11:11:00.000-07:00

This is the third posting about this unfinished animation project I started back in the early Nineties. Here I'll share with you some of the sequences of the film that I began to plan out.

This is a sketch of an image I planned to use to first introduce the violist. The idea is the protagonist hears music and is clearly annoyed. He looks out his window and sees the shadow of the violist cast on the building opposite.

Here are notes and thumbnails I jotted down to begin thinking through the process of the story. In them the protagonist attempts to sleep and begins to dream. The camera pulls away from an overhead shot of the man sleeping. As the sleeping man recedes architectural columns and other features like stairways appear, getting more elaborate. On the right I began to jot down ideas for a narrative, although I really had no intention of including any voice overs:

"It is past midnight and I dread the music. I hate my neighbor with a passion that haunts me when I wake and torments me so I cannot sleep. I am not a vengeful man, yet the evil music insinuates itself into my life so that I am desperate to free myself from it. Every night like clockwork it pierces my dreams and wakes me mercilessly. Twisted and jarring music, haunting and compelling are the only way to describe the horrific effect it has on me, perverting my dreams with its own reality. I cannot sleep. He robs me of my rest. I must fight him for my sanity. I must destroy his vile instrument. The music of Ehric Zahnn must be no more."

Here are a few more notes indicating a transition during the dream sequence when a clock face becomes superimposed by the sleeper's face. At another point I wanted the camera to zoom backwards through a door-less hallway of columns, each set from a different era and design. Eventually they would devolve into a Dali-esque open field dotted with columns and ruins at odd angles.

This is a sketch for the final scene where the protagonist bursts into the garret of the violist and discovers the man playing to a broken window behind which is a swirling maelstrom. To the left is a metronome which I wanted to be the size of a wardrobe, perhaps indicated by super-imposed images. I was also inspired by Van Gogh's painting of his room in Arles to develop this scene.

The Mad Violinist (an unfinished project), part Two: Characters

2011-04-12T08:30:00.000-07:00

There are primarily two characters in Lovecraft's story, the protagonist and the violist. At one point he does describe a conversation with the building owner, but only as a reference point, so I never really considered it a part in my story. But I didn't want my story to be only about the protagonist and the mad violist, I wanted there to be something more that would point to the early surrealists. One of my favorites was the photographer Man Ray, who often created arresting imagery with simple visual juxtapositions that illustrated how we recreate our worlds with words and phrases that do not translate logically to visual mediums.

For example, I was always taken by the idea of the relationship between a musician and their instrument as a love affair. Man Ray illustrated this in a famous portrait of a nude woman viewed from the back. He'd pasted two "f-holes" in black paper on her back to play with the connection between the human form and how stringed instruments are shaped. F-holes are not what you are thinking, but are sound amplifiers which are very recognizable on the front of most stringed instruments. I played with this notion in relation to the violist by drawing him as seducing a woman who was interposed with the instrument.

In this last image, I was playing with the idea that the protagonist might see the violist as an idealized figure, more cartoony and sinister. I have to admit I was inspired by Tim Burton's Beetlejuice, as it was interpreted as a cartoon show. There is a skeleton character that I believe had spirally eyes, which I modeled this character on.

The Mad Violinist (an unfinished project), part One: Cityscape

2011-04-03T14:29:00.000-07:00

This was an animation project that I've thought about off-and-on-again over the past many years. What I'm presenting here are mostly sketches and ideas, notes I've taken and the general mood that I hoped to create with my story. I was originally inspired in 1990 when I first read H.P. Lovecraft's short story, "The Music of Erich Zann" and most of these sketches are from that early time.

I had a definite visual story that I wrote out as an outline and then created images to match the story. My story deviated from the original story, including a dream sequence suggested by the weird music the protagonist hears playing above him in the garret apartment.

I was greatly influenced by Lotte Eisner's book "The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt" which focused on Germany's silent screen history. The only films I had viewed from that period were "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" and "Metropolis", which I believe is reflected in the imagery. Also, having recently moved to Seattle, I intended to include an iconic tower. I vacillated between wanting to include the Eiffel Tower which would place the story in Paris, France or including the Space Needle which would place it in Seattle.

I ♥ H. P. Lovecraft

2011-03-22T12:42:00.000-07:00

I knew about H.P. Lovecraft by the time I started working for Collectors Bookstore in the Pike Place Market during the early Nineties. Collectors was a small store down just one of the ramps to the lower floors and across the hall from a Chinese cafe that served dim sum. It was run by the same couple that own Golden Age Collectables, the comic book store that has been an anchor store in the Market for many decades. On Collectors's shelves held a wide range of books including many regional titles, cookbooks and a children's section, but they specialized in hardbacks and special editions of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror books.

This is where I learned how popular H.P. Lovecraft's stories are. We barely could keep hardback editions, from the notorious publisher, Arkham House, in stock, they were so popular. Of course, nowadays, years after role-play gaming has brought much of our American fantasy literature alive for younger generations, as well as, film and other popular media, Lovecraft is mined by such popular properties like South Park.

I mention my stint at Collectors because it was at that time that I decided to read some of his stories, which I'd avoided partly because I didn't want to believe what every fanboy (and quite a few fangirls, too) I'd talked to said, "he is one of the best, most influential horror writers of the twentieth century. And his monsters 'kick ass'!" A friend offered to lend me his cherished paperback, collecting short stories by the author. And so, I read.

Lovecraft is not a terribly good writer, his style is similar to many writers who've taken a page from Edgar A. Poe or the lesser known Sheridan Le Fanu; but Lovecraft manages to ease you into his ideas so that by the end of the story you are truly startled by what happens and he does it often without being explicit about what does happen. In other words, he enlists your own imagination against you, so you fill in all the details he leaves out. For example, my favorite story in the collection I read (I don't remember the collection's title now) is "The Music of Erich Zann" which involves little more than the interactions between a lodger and his upstairs neighbor, who happens to play the most strange music at night, keeping the protagonist awake.

You can imagine there will be an intense final encounter with the mysterious musician, but I won't elaborate more, because the story really stuck with me and it is certainly worth tracking down and reading. Anyway, I soon outlined a sequence that I still think would make a wonderful animated film. In researching this post, I stumbled upon a few attempts by people recently who do just that. Nothing notable enough to link, but if you're still interested, a search on YouTube.com will get them. Anyway, as I come across my drawings for the sequence I will make mention of them.

Now for the above illustration, which unfortunately is something of a spoiler if you haven't read the story it's from. I don't remember the story name, so perhaps you will be surprised anyway. I barely remember the story, but I think it was about an old abandoned cathedral on the top of a hill. A man sees lights in one of the cathedral towers and later decides to investigate. The protagonist climbs to the top tower where he encounters recent evidence of someone performing an occult ritual, burnt candle wax and charcoal markings on the floor. One of the tower windows is boarded up and the cracks filled with fabric. Upon breaking back some of the boards the protagonist encounters a creature that carries his likeness, but is naked, has wings growing out of his back, his hair is frizzed out and his feet are blackened, as if he was hit by a bolt of lightening.

My attempt to research this story didn't elaborate further, but short of rereading all of Lovecraft's writings, which I think I would enjoy, I still do not know if the seraphim-type creature is unique to this story or occurs again. I was so taken by Lovecraft's description of it, that I had to draw my version of the moment before the protagonist opened the shut window. I had a distinct impression that the wings were not typical or traditional, i.e. bat-style or bird-style, but more like fans or fins. After reading these stories I began creating my own impressions of his creatures, based on dreams I had featuring them. I will have to dig around to find them before I can post them here.

Another lost idea

2011-03-15T17:45:00.000-07:00

My sketchbook often becomes the resting place for all the ideas that roll around my head. For example, this image depicts a story that I originally thought of as a response to the AIDS crisis that was prevalent through the Nineteen Eighties and Nineties. I know for one, working at a gay bookstore through the early Ninties, gay men were not really looking for stories about living with AIDS; too many men were already living with it and preferred to come to the bookstore as a way to escape. Not surprisingly we sold more porno than literature. By the late-Nineties mainstream publishers were beginning to recognize there was a gap in gay literature that was vaguely "AIDS-shaped" and began publishing books like Micheal Cunningham's A Home at the End of the World.

Anyway, my story was going to be about a young drag queen who, before he dies, gives his trunk of dresses and scrapbooks to the candy striper who befriends him in the hospice where he's attempting to recover. She is naive and is emerging herself as a whole person into a world where the consequences of your actions determine what happens to you. In the process of the story she would meet an older man who she has sex with and then has to become a single mother because she does not want to marry. Year's later her son who she has raised without help from anyone other than her mother, discovers the trunk in the attic and asks her about it. She then discovers her own son has an affinity for cross-dressing.

I have to admit, I didn't take the scenario very seriously. It is overly dramatic without anything really tying the relationships together save the trunk of memories. For me, I was more interested in the drag queen who dies than the young candy striper who wanted to take over the story. I knew it wouldn't go anywhere, but it is still here as an image in my sketchbook, just in case I change my mind and attempt to turn it into something more than just an idea.

Emerald City Comicon 2011

2011-03-08T13:05:00.000-08:00

Mark Brill (in hat and earphones), Chris Lange, Jon Macy
and Jeff Krell man the PRISM Booth on Saturday.

I skipped a week of posting, but I have a good excuse for myself. This weekend I attended the 2011 Emerald City Comicon at the Washington State Convention Center in Seattle, Washington. I mainly volunteered for the PRISM Comics booth, which is a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting LBGT (Lesbian, Bisexual, Gay and Transgender) comicbooks and creators. Jon Macy also was in town, with several other creators I'm pleased to have met.

Zan Christensen (standing) organized the booth and I have to thank him for allowing me to volunteer. Thanks, Zan! I had a great time, I met many different people and even hooked up with my friend Maxxwell Mcguire.

Here are some more highlights of the event that I photographed:

Me and Jon Macy model my T-shirt design.

Maxxwell shows his fandom spirit.

Chris Lange poses with some X-men.

More Muscle, a Monkey and mistakes

2011-02-22T08:33:00.000-08:00

I learned how to draw figures in high school partly assisted by following a series of books on the human form by Burne Hogarth. The system he used was more detailed than systems I'd read about in other books, which were focusing more on abstracted forms rather than how those forms connected and transformed through movement and viewpoint. Hogarth showed quite easily how limbs and muscles were connected to each other and what proportions remained consistent while others transformed by movement and perspective. I found I was better able to draw figures in action and foreshortened by following his work. Unfortunately it seemed to backfire for me in college as I tended to idealize the human form after Hogarth's style and I was regularly criticized by professors examining my work who I guess too easily recognized where I was borrowing my style.

By the time I was drawing the above image I didn't really care what anyone thought of my work. Several thoughts were going through my mind in creating this. I was attempting to show someone eating a sandwich, thus the right arm position, but I wasn't drawing from life, so it didn't really come out as I hoped. Later in talking the drawing over with someone I mentioned how the proportions of monkeys and apes are different than humans, thus the quick sketch of a monkey swinging from a perch.

Sometimes mistakes lead to lucky insights, but this wasn't one of them. The figure's torso is leaning back and while appearing somewhat relaxed, the left leg doesn't seem to be angled properly for the rest of the body. Not surprisingly I've not really done anything else with this sketch.

Aurora Borealis

2011-02-15T08:57:00.000-08:00

One thing I'm not including in this blog is all the text that I've written in my sketchbooks, although I may share some of them with you as they come up. I have several reasons for not including them; most of them are fragments, or simply odd notes. This is one that is pertinent because I turned it into an essay, Childhood Phenomenon that is displayed at my web page, Volpane In Love.

Here is the image I created to illustrate the essay.

Collage: First Love

2011-02-08T08:24:00.000-08:00

Here is one of several collages I did in collaboration with my upstairs neighbor at the Huntington Arms in Seattle. We became friends partly because we shared an interest in collage. This collage consists primarily of images she choose. I think the only image I added to her selection was the postcard portrait of a young Truman Capote.

Many of my collages from this time contain religious imagery combined with sexuality. This is perhaps the tamest of the images I've done in this project, although my intention was not to be specifically profane. My only wish was that the text which informs the images was a lot larger. So I've recreated the image with some resized text.

Collage as an art form began in the late nineteen hundreds when print media first began to become plentiful. At that point photography had not translated to print media, so most imagery was based on engravings and woodblock printing. Since the early part of the twentieth century it became a medium that influenced many famous artists including Picasso and Max Ernst.

Before college I really only considered it a craft activity like scrap-booking. In college I really had no clue how to use it effectively as art, but I am surprised at the specific images I created. Now I use it as a way to explore relationships between images and and words, although copyright law makes it near impossible to market anything I create.

Note: These images may be protected under copyright law. If you are a legal owner of any images used here and do not wish them to be used in this way please contact me directly.

China Teapot

2011-02-01T08:47:00.000-08:00

Again, here is a random sketch done more to capture the shape of this vessel than to create something artistic. My upstairs neighbor had brought this over to serve tea, and I was so taken with the unique shape, decorations in Delft-blue decals, that I asked to keep it for a while to sketch it. She agreed and allowed me to keep it in my apartment for a few days. Later we challenged each other with collage projects, by compiling clippings together in several envelops and including a theme or title. I may post them later.

Review: Joys and Fears of Childhood

2011-01-28T08:53:00.000-08:00

Rainy Day Recess: The Complete Steven’s Comics by David Kelly

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Long time acquaintance and cartoonist David Kelly collects his self-published works in a new publication by Northwest Press. Steven's Comics, serialized in several gay newspapers during the nineties was written for all-ages in mind. Kelly explores the trials of growing up gay in a single-parent divorced family. Seeking strong role models within Wonder Woman comics and discovering the joys and fears of a childhood crush, David mines similar childhood emotional territory explored by his friend and fellow comics creator Lynda Barry, while remaining true to the unique story he has to tell. I am pleased to see this collection. But that is not all as he will include new material, and if that is not enough Dan Savage provides a forward. If you don't buy it for yourself, then give it as a gift to your favorite baby-gay. They will thank you for years to come.

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Jimmy Dean

2011-01-25T08:20:00.000-08:00

There is another look outside of the leather jacket that I've noticed gay men sometimes adopt. Penny loafers, pegged jeans, wind breaker and white t-shirt was a look that James Dean popularized after his appearance in Rebel without a Cause. Perhaps the most celebrated person to adopt this look is the former Michael Jackson, although he added his own effected touches.

The clothes evoke the nineteen fifties, but since then seem timeless. Add something unique like Mr. Jackson did and you are evoking a subsequent era. It is a post-war, pret-a'-porter masculine look that can transform even the most willowy lesbian into a dyke.

I prefer it on men and wore it like a uniform for years. I always wanted to be Dean in Rebel without a Cause if only because Sal Mineo looked up to him and set him on a pedestal. I didn't care for the story though and always imagined that Sal Mineo inherits a ton of money, rebuilds the burned out mansion they play house in and lives with Dean, while Natalie Wood goes on to New York and becomes famous. She could come back and try to mess up the relationship, but Dean would set her straight and she'd have to leave for Paris. Hmm, I wonder...

Shoes

2011-01-18T08:15:00.000-08:00

I'm always amazed when an artist confesses to being afraid of drawing feet or hands. It seems that because we use these appendages so unconsciously that drawing them, for some people, is nearly impossible. I never had that problem, but I was never very interested either.

Feet often fall outside the frame. HR advisors often suggest that you consider the condition of someone's shoes before hiring them. Shoes do take on a variety of shapes from different angles, so depicting them accurately can be a challenge. Thankfully I don't have a lot of shoe practice pages in my sketchbooks.

Leather Coat

2011-01-11T08:30:00.000-08:00

One item of clothing you will see gay men wearing above all else, it seems, is a leather jacket. It doesn't matter what else they are wearing, a leather jacket has moved far beyond The Wild One and now inhabits a place in modern iconography that says something more than I own a motorcycle. Of course, to complete the image you'd need those other accoutrement: boots, jeans, a white t-shirt, mirrored sunglasses, a high-and-tight haircut, a helmet (preferably black with no striping) and a hawg or some other appropriate motor-cycle.

When the jacket is removed from this environment it says something completely different, but it often screams, "I am a victim of fashion!" I remember a friend being so proud of his new leather jacket that he wore it constantly, until he developed a rash and sore on the second day from the edge of the coat rubbing against his torso. As with all things, moderation is key.

I held off owning a leather motorcycle jacket for years until one day, upon walking to the Vogue nightclub in Seattle, a friend and I met a man who was selling his jacket on the street. He was on a cross-country trip, having driven from the east coast on a motorcycle, and now was heading into the mountains to hike. Not wanting to carry such a heavy piece of clothing he was willing to part with it for a reasonable sum. I adored that jacket, not only because it fit me well, but because it had many stories to tell.

Danger Dog, Muscle Men and Procrastination

2011-01-04T08:25:00.000-08:00

I was clearly thinking about superheros when I did the above doodles. "Danger Dog" is a riff on a British cartoon series Nickeldon ran back in the Nineteen-eighties, about a secret agent superhero, called "Danger Mouse". That is a musclebound superman in the middle. The man on the left seems quite full of himself or perhaps he's seeing a bird or plane, over there.

When I started keeping sketchbooks, I discovered these doodle pages appearing between the intentional pages. I often told myself I was just bored and reflecting that frustration by jotting down the noise that filled my mind, but I was also capturing elusive ideas that were barely formed in my mind. Although I didn't know what I was doing at the time, I now have something to show for it anyway.

Blogger has a great feature that allows you to post ahead of yourself, which is a tool I used back in early November in anticipation of the holidays. Unfortunately I lost some of my posting momentum because I allowed myself to wait out the time I gave myself instead of using it to stay ahead. I continually remind myself that I am more conscious about stumbling blocks like procrastination. I know working on my various projects and setting goals for myself is a continual process, even when I'm working on other things, otherwise I loose my momentum.

I do want to thank everyone who has taken the time this past year to read this blog and visit my website. I really appreciate the feedback here and on FaceBook. Thank you all.

Review: Comic Artists on the Web

2010-12-31T08:30:00.000-08:00

I mentioned Matt Feazell in my last post, but encounter artists all the time on the internet. Some have posted a huge body of work, while others, like me, seem to be just starting out. Here is a short list of some artists I've encountered recently and enjoyed.

Introspective Comics by Ryan Dow

Hark! A Vagrant. Comics by Kate Beaton

Stop Paying Attention by Lucy Knisley

So Super Duper by Brian Andersen

Bang a Left by J. Tana Ford

Urban Buzz by Ned Hugar

Perhaps the most amazing thing about these artists is that they share their stories as they make them with little expectation that you might benefit. I wish I could support them all, only I am in a similar boat, creating without any guarantee of financial support outside of the products that I offer on my website. Go read and then if you can, help out by buying their stuff. It is worth it just to help us all keep the faith.

Another Loren and Sylvia redux

2010-12-28T08:01:00.000-08:00

Back when the black-and-white comics boom happened in the early Nineties, due to the cheaper pricing of computers and printing technology, somewhere in the Mid-West Matt Feazell started a mini comicbook called "The Amazing Cynicalman". Although minimalist cartoons have a long tradition, including a topper in Chester Gould's Dick Tracy where nothing more than word balloons and little piles of sawdust appeared, Cynicalman embodies a light humor and engaging social outlook that is both immediate and easy to embrace.

I have dabbled with the idea of minimalism in comicbook humor before. Somewhere I have a twelve panel comic called "Deep Thought Breakfast", which features a piece of manufactured cereal that has longings. But once Kathy Sprague introduced me to Matt Feazell's work, I had to dash off a tribute to his rare genius. The cow references a descriptive Kathy attributes to the rural nature of our home state, Idaho, but is little more than a doodle...really.

Eon Lives

2010-12-21T08:45:00.000-08:00

After reading Frederik L. Schodt's 1986 book Manga! Manga!: The World of Japanese Comics sometime in the early Nineties, I joined the ranks of many frustrated American fans of Japanese Comicbooks who could not find the titles they were wanting to read. Animation, especially made for television animation, was imported to the states for years, but Manga, especially the stories featuring gay men in relationships, often called yaoi, were not yet available in translation the United States in the early Nineties. Speed Racer may be one of the better known anime shows that aired on American TVs in the early seventies from Japan, but there have been many others.

Discovering a backlog of comicbook archives had not yet been imported to the US was maddening on a certain level, but in the intervening decades that has begun to be remedied. Fans began translating both movies and magazines, which eventually lead to commercial entities being formed and official publications. In the meantime I was seeking untranslated magazines for a time in the Nineties, mostly to examine the art style. The above picture is one of my first deliberate attempts to copy a Manga style.

At some point while hanging out on Capitol Hill in Seattle, a young Japanese-speaking woman accosted me because she saw me carrying my sketchbook and asked to see my artwork. She liked this portrait of a young man in a coat and asked if she could have it. I was still quite attached to it, but I did give her another figure this was based on. Later when considering characters for my forthcoming novel, I remembered this picture and decided this young man with the big eyes would be my protagonist. Thusly, I've named him Eon.

Review: Breaking the Glass-Ceiling of Syndication

2010-12-17T16:04:00.000-08:00

Curbside Boys: The New York Years by Robert Kirby

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

With Gary Trudeau publishing his forty year retrospective this year it is hard not to be impressed by syndicated cartooning. Charles Schultz is the only other syndicated cartoonist that comes to mind who has a more impressive collection of work, but there are many who have benefited from syndication, becoming national bestselling cartoonists, despite breaking conventions in the system. All the same, writing for mainstream newspaper media seems a breeze compared to the challenges faced by Gay and Lesbian cartoonists who also want to tell their stories.

I learned about Robert Kirby's "Curbside" back in the mid-ninties, years after I'd begun collecting gay comicbooks. I was immediately impressed, because his formula of telling simple stories about relationships between gay men was something I'd attempted to do at the same time, but never found my voice or stride. Robert had something I didn't have, which is a real drive to be published in as many newspapers as he could manage.

The Gay press media landscape has changed over the years, but there has never been a syndicate, that I know of, that have helped the careers of gay cartoonists in the same way that Trudeau, Schultz and other mainstream cartoonist careers have. Kirby and others who want to see their work in print have to hit the pavement and talk to editors first hand, convincing them to make room in their papers to publish their comics. And I know first hand that newspaper editors will make room for paying advertising long before they will print cartoon strips.

Ultimately it depends on the artist and his own discipline to regularly produce quality work and send it out. So the real heros in the cartooning world are people like Kirby, who syndicate their own strips to unsympathetic editors, often for no immediate compensation. Nowadays, newspapers are finding it difficult to maintain their readership. Here in Seattle, we no longer have dedicated gay and lesbian owned bookstores where you know you can find the major gay newspapers. Instead you have to rely on adult bookstores and bars where these things are left on faith that they will get into the hands of the people who need them.

But because Robert Kirby did all this work in the early nineties, he eventually found publishers like Cleis Press who were willing and interested in collecting his strips into published books. "Curbside Boys:The New York Years" is the second such collection. The first collection is incidentally selling for about seventy dollars at Amazon.com, although I would like to point out Mister Kirby is not getting any money from these used copies.

This second collection is a complete story, where the protagonist and his roommate meet, fall in love and then move on. It stands on its own more than anything Trudeau or Schultz ever wrote. Having read the original "Curbside" many years ago it is difficult to compare, but this feels more mature and studied than his earlier strips.

I really enjoyed seeing young men struggling to connect with each other in these stories. Nathan and Drew, the main characters seem fickle twenty-somethings and yet like all young men, vulnerable to the opinions and reactions of others. Their relationship counterpoints the supporting characters lives, Kevin and Rain who break even more stereotypes about black men than I've seen before or since in a gay comic strip. All the same, the drama is difficult to sustain within the context of six to eight panel stories.

Kirby returns to the story-telling techniques that worked for him in earlier strips, bringing back his own "greek chorus" character modeled after himself. He keeps the same squared nose on this character from earlier strips, which helps clue the reader into the fact that this character can directly editorialize for the cartoonist. All the same, he returns to telling the story rather than spending a lot of time with back-story, allowing the characters to tell their own stories.

"Curbside Boys:The New York Years" is a must read in the lexicon of gay comic books. The themes are adult and there is a lot of male sex, but the images are clean and appealing. Anyone who happened to pick them up might keep reading because the emotions and situations are universal.

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Sylvia in Wonderland

2010-11-30T08:00:00.000-08:00

My all time favorite books are the two Alice books by Lewis Carroll aka the Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, so it was only with time that I'd think of injecting it into Loren & Sylvia. Afterall, another of Carroll's novels was called Sylvie and Bruno, but the truth of the matter is this:

I originally attempted drawing the Disney version of Alice for the 1951 animated film. Kathy had come across it in my sketchbook and made the astute observation that it looked like Sylvia from our comicbook. That naturally lead me to attempt more adaptations of characters from our story.

This is a foiled attempt at drawing Wayo as the hookah-smoking caterpillar. Only he came out more like a preying mantis. I didn't like this version so I did another following a more traditional interpretation of the character.

Somehow this one is even less satisfying, but it does follow the Disney version somewhat. The Persian shoes with turned up toes seem to have migrated his way. And I think those claw like things on his chest are supposed to be multiple arms the caterpillar would have along his trunk.

Of course that lead to more characters: Genise as the white rabbit, Erie as the mad hatter and perhaps a lesser known character, the mock turtle, portrayed by Spencer. I guess Todd would be the griffen, perhaps Jared would be the Red Queen and I'd want Loren to be the cheshire cat. I so thought Sterling Holloway did a wonderfully fey version of the cat. And Sylvia of course is Alice, but that says something about her character, what with all the temptations of bottles that say, "Drink Me".

Egyptian Priestess

2010-11-23T08:41:00.000-08:00

For some reason, I don't remember where this came from outside of what it appears to be. I've always been interested in ancient Egyptian religion and so I suspect this could be an extrapolation from a conversation of what an Egyptian priestess might look like. It is a decidedly campier version than I would do now as I know much more about ancient Egypt society than I did twenty years ago. For example, I think that headdress was pretty much reserved for royalty.

Anyway, she certainly has an elongated face and looks more like one of my drag portraits than a woman. I might use this for a character design somewhere, so she may morph into something different. That collar and sholder wings are quite unique. Hmm, that beltclip looks like clue. Could this be a missing character from Paula and the Purple Rayz? I wonder?

"Paper Doll" and the Manhattan Transfer

2010-11-16T08:30:00.000-08:00

In high school a favorite vocal jazz group was The Manhattan Transfer (TMT). They had two albums that I remember were popular and iconic of the early Eighties, Extensions which was released in 1979 and Mecca for Moderns which was released in 1981. I sang along with these until it became part of the running soundtrack of my life. These album covers defined for me the "nouveau deco" style that appeared at that time.

Although I sketched this "paper doll" almost ten years later, I was thinking of the figures that appear on the "Extensions" album. If you check it out under their discography you will see how the feet are rendered as simple cones, which always made me think of pen nibs. This is why her feet are seemingly joined like a fountain pen, although I'd think she'd be difficult to grasp with those fins on the lower part of her dress.

Gee, I wonder if TMT ever recorded the song that the Mills Brothers made famous?

More Theo Silliness at Cafe Press!

2010-11-12T15:40:00.000-08:00

I was thinking this portrait of Theo would come out more conservative, but once I saw it in this hot pink all the memories of hot pink sweaters from the late Eighties came rushing back to me. Hideous, really, although somehow Theo seems to pull it off with aplomb. She manages to express a unique combination of sophistication, world-weariness and relaxed irritation. I'm glad that she does not haunt me anymore. I've even put away my high heels and no longer have any desire to dress up and express myself this way. But I have my memories and these pictures, although they are only sketches, which I can share with you.

Naga

2010-11-09T08:28:00.000-08:00

A Naga is a legendary creature from India usually a feminine form emerging from a snake body. I was thinking in terms of a Halloween costume, so I wanted a male version and figured less than the Medusa-like creatures that are often depicted, this one would be more sophisticated and cultured. I gave him an "Astroboy" hair-cut and low-cut waistcoat. I suppose I was also trying to figure out a way to make a pun about a "naga-hide".

Recolored Theo design at Cafe Press!

2010-11-05T11:47:00.000-07:00

It's another colored Theo portrait available as a tee shirt from CafePress.com. My designs are eclectic, campy, unique and printed on a tee shirt makes the best holiday gift. Inspire others to be true to themselves or encourage your own party spirit.

Gremlin on the Bus 11.24.90

2010-11-02T07:52:00.000-07:00

I don't often date pages. But I do remember riding a bus south of Seattle and finding this child charming enough to attempt a quick sketch. You can see how I used the jostling of the bus to suggest brush lines.

Loren and Sylvia do Don Giovanni

2010-10-29T20:39:00.000-07:00

Kathy Sprague and I are both fans of opera. We both developed our tastes because of our mother's backgrounds. Kathy's mother once worked as an opera singer and my mother had the opportunity during her childhood in San Diego to appear on stage of a production of Aida, which has formed a life long interest in music and singing.

Still, this title isn't quite accurate because I've never done a sketch of Sylvia dressed as Don Giovanni and I'm not sure I'd cast her in the role because it would be odd to have Loren as Dona Elvira. These sketches happened because I was watching a production of Don Giovanni on television (I think it was the Metropolitan Opera in New York) and really liked the detail of the women's costumes. If you are unfamiliar with the storyline, Don Giovanni is quite the ladies man, but has been around the block a few too many times. Eventually he encounters a ghost which calls on him to repent or face the fires of Hell.

This other sketch of Dona Anna features Jared from Loren and Sylvia. After doing these I realized it could be a sequence for the comicbook, perhaps as a dream. I so love the drama of opera.

Self portrait based on Tom of Finland

2010-10-26T08:06:00.000-07:00

Perhaps the ultimate conceit for a gay man is to imagine himself as one of those models in a Tom of Finland drawing. Not that it is wrong, far from it, but Tom of Finland's men are so "other-worldly" it is rare to encounter anyone who resembles the idiom. Still, I often dream of entering this world and after all these years of searching, I still get a charge out of looking at Touko Laaksonen's art.

Naturally it becomes something to emulate. As Jon Macy commented on an earlier post, Tom of Finland's models are happy, which I think is ultimately the appeal. As oppressed sexual minorities, we all dream of happiness, a happiness that is acceptable and accessible to everyone.

So this is a self portrait filtered through the Über-masculine. Looking back at a photo taken around the same time, it is perhaps not so fantastic, although I drew my hat much smaller than it really was. In fact, I have a big head and finding a used straw hat that actually fit was quite unusual. Okay, I really did cheat on the nose and the glasses.

Review: Romance, Heart and Soul

2010-10-22T20:33:00.000-07:00

Teleny and Camille by Jon Macy
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I'm not a fan of gay romance novels, but I've always loved gay romance comics. From sitting on my friend's bed back in college reading the Gay Comix anthologies and the few other works available at the time, to recognizing my personal desires displayed on the movie screen when I watched Kiss of the Spiderwoman, even prior to coming out as a gay man; graphical stories of fighting against repression have always resonated with me. Meeting my friend Jon Macy, back in the early Nineties when I managed a gay bookstore was the pinnacle of my gay life, but my joy has only seemed to rise from there.

Jon has put his heart and soul into Teleny and Camille (T&C) and I still love looking over the pages and finding all the little tidbits he put there. The cherry blossoms, the gypsy on horseback, the gardens at Kew, the morgue and the page of absinthe are all favorites. This enjoyment carries over to his new series Fearful Hunter (recipient of a PRISM comics grant) where coincidentally my own brush with madness mirrored his realization to honor his past with a personal story of love and redemption. I really can't say anything against his wonderful stories, and why would I? I envy his skill and dedication to his craft, but I also love that he shares it with the rest of us. I think by doing so he asks us all to consider striving for better lives, despite opposition we may encounter.

Having watched this project begin with baby-steps back in the mid-nineties to Macy's full realization now, I cannot be happier to recommend T&C to all curious readers. (Check out previews at northwestpress.com, jonmacy.com and oscholars.com) This is the real thing: explicit tales of sex, sumptuous graphics, torrid romance, Victorian virtues upheld, and then overturned. Bringing this material to the modern reader through personal storytelling and displaying the challenges he encountered, Macy "pulls-no-punches" resurrecting an underground world Oscar Wilde likely encountered sheltering a hidden nineteenth-century sexuality.

Praise must also be raised for his publisher, Northwest Press, not only taking on a controversial work, but placing it in such a handsome package. The design is understated and enhances what is inside. Everyone will be proud to display this modern novel of gay romance on their bookshelves. The interiors may shock and reveal the lurid nature of repression, but this is with good cause. Without questioning the social structures that allow prejudice to persist, how can we create a more peaceful world for all humanity? I think this is the purpose of retelling our personal stories, no matter how horrific.

This publication sets the standard for erotic storytelling very high. I want to see more stories like this in the future, be they from the pen of Macy (did I mention he is publishing a new fantasy series?) or others working in the same market. Northwest Press already handles several quality titles and is set to become a leader in presenting new works of gay literature today. I am looking forward to more excellent work from Charles "Zan" Christensen at Northwest Press.

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Review: Filtering Childhood Memories

2010-10-20T15:03:00.000-07:00

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I am amazed that after all these years, I still identify so strongly with Alison Bechdel. I always enjoyed her characters from "Dykes to Watch Out For" and found them quite appealing. Of course, I am a gay man and "Dykes" was written from a lesbian point-of-view, but I could still relate to the human drama of people struggling to live their lives with integrity. And besides, I have always aspired to create art and work in bookstores. I managed to even do that in my twenties, which has been very satisfying.

So I was very happy to hear about Bechdel publishing a personal and true story about her coming out as a sexual adult in "Fun Home" (FH) several years ago. It has taken me quite a long time to get to reading this book, but allow me to feign excuses based on my gender and sexual identity. What I did not expect was to find an even closer relationship with a fellow artist and storyteller.

In FH, Bechdel focuses almost exclusively on her relationship with her father, almost to the detriment of telling her own story. But I've always found her to be a fairly truthful and modest public personality. She does include herself in her stories but often presents her stand-in as self-effacing. Her "Dykes" author-character, exhibits the most neurotic and personal emotions that any artist might express in a confessional comicbook, even while fictionalizing her own life stories. Reminds me of Woody Allen, a bit. But Bechdel also understands enough about narrative to step away and allow the stories to develop without editorializing.

FH is a sober book, though, so you expect to find wistful reminisces about the high points of a personal life. You do get those reminisces but filtered through a very adult sexual sensibility that only comes from sifting very finely through old photographs, diaries and memories. I love that her main objective is to present herself and her family as baldly human as possible. Still, we see her adult self wrestle with the adolescent exhibition of an effected mental illness.

While a little madness throughout life effects us all, the truth Bechdel uncovers is not only disturbing but lies just under the surface of the facts. She neither recoils from them or waves them about like some emblem of sanity. At one point she even coolly describes her Fruedian childhood fear at encountering a snake in a pool of water. All the same, what she reveals is a very normal if still unique family portrait, which is all too common and from my own perspective, strangely familiar. I cannot help but identify with and ponder the various items on display.

My father was a closeted gay man, too and in FH, Bechdel shows her father as a divinely flawed human being, limited by his inability to grasp his desires and yet totally successful at sublimating them. I also remember the same emotional distance from my own father growing up that Bechdel states as such a particular element of her relationship with her own father. When it becomes clear towards the end of the book that he eventually drops his pretense, we can see how sometimes there are details even his own daughter can't scrape up from the clues he left behind.

Still, my father didn't exhibit the quintessential fussiness that Bechdel's father used to manipulate his children to his stereotypical will, and yet my father did manipulate us in his own way. We didn't need clues to know he was closeted; there always seemed to be plenty of information, but my mother and the other adults in our lives generally ignored it. Acknowledging a truth like this is always painful enough that you avoid using it, like a wounded limb.

And in the end, a short time after Bechdel comes out to her parents as a lesbian, her father is killed by a truck while crossing a road. Rather than make the whole book about this one incident, she mentions it again and again, almost in-passing, piling up the details, like a "macguffin" which allows her to reveal her personal memories of growing up. The difference for me is that my father is still alive and came out as a gay man soon after I came out to my parents in college.

The parallels between our two different lives are uncanny and yet speak to a larger truth about the combined narrowness and width of our generation, sometimes called the "lost" generation. There are several years between us, but at the same time our lives are both uniquely American and of a time between the Sixties and Seventies. I think this book is going to haunt me for a very long time. And if I ever meet Alison in person, I'm not sure I will know what to say. I might just give her a big hug and say simply, "thank you."

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Tattoo designs III

2010-10-19T08:22:00.000-07:00

I began to consider more Tod's background in costume. Here you can see more ideas which play with the idea of costume in mind. The feminine figure in the upper right hand corner got Tod's approval enough that I came up with the larger central figure in response.

Tod really liked this design because it both captured the idea of a thistle and a figure. It is the design he took to his tattoo artist, Vyvyn Lazonga, who's been doing tattoos in Seattle for almost four decades. She had to alter it slightly, but in the following photos you can see it is basically the same design.

This last picture needs some explanation. It was taken while Tod was attending Evergreen state college. Tod held a "pink dress" party which was lots of fun. The dress is of his own design and the wheel behind him is a roulette, which he was using to give gifts to the guests. I'm not sure about the man to left baring his chest. It was a pretty wild party.

Tattoo designs II

2010-10-15T08:15:00.000-07:00

Here is my second page of design ideas for Tod Streater's "dancing thistle" tattoo. I was thinking more decoration than figure, so here were more interpretations that use symmetry and natural sources. There is even a sense of the "Pineapple" character from "Paula and the Purple Rayz". I've often thought these would be great designs for tee shirts.

Tattoo designs I

2010-10-14T08:35:00.000-07:00

When I first moved to Seattle I shared an artist's loft with a young man named Tod Streater. He was a costume designer and a very good person with big ideas. He admired my own design skills and asked me to design a tattoo for him. I wrote a fictional account of our lives which appeared in my zine, Gaeraj and I've posted at my web page.

I'd never designed a tattoo before, so it was a great challenge for me, but also an opportunity to test myself and my design skills. Tod and I had discussed it after seeing Disney's "Fantasia". His favorite sequence was the dance between thistles and orchids, set to Tchaikovsky's "Trepak" music from the Nutcracker Suite. He asked me to design a "dancing" thistle.

You can see above left a literal interpretation from the Disney film, and below right a stylized design that I think was based on art nouveau era wallpaper. Some how a dandelion came into the picture, perhaps because they are similar.

Tee Shirts available at CafePress.com!

2010-10-10T12:55:00.000-07:00

All the more reason to remind the world that life can be better! The wonder of the Internet allows me to offer your favorite designs printed on tee shirts. See the selection of images at my web page: Tee Shirt Designs.

Starting a new sketchbook, October 13, 1990

2010-10-08T08:31:00.000-07:00

So this begins my post college years. Before this I'd almost always used a spiral bound notebook. Since my previous college sketchbook was a small bound 5 1/4 x 8 1/2 book with a blue paper slip cover and I liked the idea of a permanent record I couldn't alter without leaving some indication I'd removed a page, this time I went for a larger black leather-cloth 8 1/2 x 11 book by Strathmore available at most art supply.

I was very productive during this period, sketching and jotting down thoughts and ideas in pencil, inking them in later, inventing some new comic strips that never went anywhere. There are some erotic images that I will post at Y!Gallery when I get to them. Notably I have ideas for a tattoo I designed for my friend Tod Streater, but there are a few Loren and Sylvia riffs too. I also have cameo appearances from friends, as I almost always carried my sketchbook when I was out and about.

Just one more note about the above image. That straw hat I purchased off the street from someone doing a sidewalk garage sale. At the same sale, I also bought a cheaply made blue enamelware pin in the form of a shield that I married to the hat ribbon. It became iconic for me and I wore it around for most of that year.

The Theo Portraits III

2010-10-05T08:13:00.000-07:00

"Really Albert, you're so weird!"

-Theo

This portrait of Theo is definitely in a modern mode. We had a catalog of women's sweaters kicking around the house and a model in one photograph had such an imperious look that I needed to capture it. It took me longer to come up with the caption, but it seems appropriate for the image.

The Theo Portraits II

2010-10-01T08:30:00.000-07:00

"Really darling, the guests will run away

if you don't come out and greet them."

-Theo

I am posting these portraits in fairly quick succession because I want to get to posting pages from my next sketchbook which begins in 1990. I'm including these under the sketchbook labels (below) because these images started out in sketchbooks and then took on a life of their own. I hope to post t-shirt versions of them, although I have no idea if anyone will wear these images.

This Theo portrait is directly from my imagination. I created it more consciously and the caption is something I said because of a real situation rather than just springing from my subconscious. But it received such a reception that I thought it deserved a Theo portrait.

At the time I drew it, Auntie Mame was a newly discovered "favorite" movie, so there is likely quite a bit of inspiration from that, although I have to admit my notions about the artificiality of the nineteen fifties and the odd costumes of Orry-Kelly for the movie inspired me less. The costume for this drawing was based on the unlikely pairing of satin and fur which is something that could have been used in the nineteen fifties. I liked that the wide edging of the coat works both at concealing and revealing the body underneath.

The Theo Portraits I

2010-09-28T08:48:00.000-07:00

"Really Albert, you can't go through
your whole life being a toad!"

- Theo

After coming out as a gay man, I began to believe I was possessed by the spirit of a woman from the nineteen twenties. I didn't take it very seriously and it mostly came on when I was inebriated with marijuana and beer. But it persisted enough that I attempted to capture the notion in pictures and stories. In a way, it was a psychosis brought on by a desire for attention and related directly to finding my identity as an adult gay man.

My friend Kathy would laugh and make a big fuss about it when I'd say things out of the blue, like the above statement. She also encouraged me to dress up in drag, which I'd always skirted with my interest in theater but eschewed in my childhood because my mother always vetoed it as being "stereotypically effeminate". But in my mind as a newly out gay man, it was less about being a woman or transgressing my gender than it was a combination of finding myself suddenly freed from invisible shackles of sexual, emotional and social repression that I'd grown up wearing in my childhood.

Imagining myself possessed was my way of healing and reconciling the memories from the past of pains I developed socially when my gender and sexuality was questioned at school by other boys. Possession was also a reflection of stories coming out of Hollywood, but it also gave me permission to be silly and effeminate in front of friends who encouraged me for the first time in my life; when growing up I'd always felt an outsider, even when I was praised for unique abilities. Because dressing up and playing at being sissified was an easy way to entertain, I could indulge again in the sort of play that previously I had controlled and commodified out of fear, a fear that I had no concrete idea what the consequences were outside of my own ongoing experience of isolation, separation and loneliness.

Both my parents had interests in theater and growing up I became involved and shared their interest. One of the first times I saw a public performance, my mother took me away from a cub scouting event to see a performance at a local theater of "The Fantasticks!". I was already familiar with the music, my mother loves to sing and taught me all sorts of tunes. But it was the very idea that this adult storytelling could take precedent over an otherwise boring social event, that I soon realized my desire for acceptance didn't need to come at the price of my own identity. Somehow I continue to persist, no matter how anyone else perceives me.

The above image (which I named "Theo" after my grandmother) directly references a photo-portrait of a rich New York heiress. I copied it from a magazine, perhaps Smithsonian magazine, but I really don't remember now. I loved her odd turban-like hat and the imperious manner of her stance. I can't remember if the cigarette holder was in the photograph, but it became a signifier of Theo's character in a picture. Like many gay men, I have always been attracted to strong, powerful women, some of them lesbian, almost always distinctly feminine; but most often they are self-possessed and in control of their situation and life. It is something I see in my own mother although I should point out she has always been heterosexually oriented.

The reference to "being a toad", I think, is related to the famous character in Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, but here it is clearly directed at a male counterpart. In my mind, Albert is her brother, but I never did imagine what he looked like. Perhaps he looks something like a toad.

THREE, edited by Robert Kirby

2010-09-25T17:45:00.000-07:00

THREE #1 by Robert Kirby
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Existentialist realism, that is, the examination of the self in relationship to the environment we create for ourselves is entirely the realm of the self-confessional comic story. I think since the nineteen nineties when the self-confessional comic book boom really hit its stride, the genre has matured. I love this type of comic book because it often breaks traditions and challenges readers expectations. We have come a long way from the talking-head confessionals of the nineties and yet in any story that deals with human emotions, especially isolation, the talking head, where the author and artist both address the reader directly, persists as a dynamic feature of the genre. So it is always wonderful when a comic book creator works especially hard to avoid the simplicity of talking heads.

Robert Kirby has brought together in THREE, the first issue of his new anthology series, two other storytellers with very differing skills from his own. Eric Orner is only less familiar than his comic strip character "Ethan Green". In "Weekends Abroad" he speaks with a personal voice rather than that of his popular "nebbisher" character. We encounter personal stories that you might hear if you met him casually at a cocktail party. But they are not simply stories to fill the uncomfortable silences between sips of your drink. Instead he decorates them with scenes and environments that really bring them alive and outside the flat page. I am pleased to see his art has moved beyond the static and ironic talking heads of his early strips. In every location his story goes, from the Hebrew school of his childhood to the outskirts of Tel Aviv, you get the very clear sense that he's been there and he's bringing you along with him.

Joey Alison Sayers's, "Number One" takes a different tact and focuses less on place and time, instead opting for relationships. I have to admit I am less familiar with her previous work, but I did find it quickly online and am pleased I took the trouble to find it. She has a wonderful sense of humor and she uses that quirkily in her portion of THREE. The effect is unsettling within seemingly static panels filled more with space and emptiness than detail. This unsettled feeling counterpoints the easy reading of her brightly colored and breezy storytelling. My feeling after reading is that I just overheard a series of conversations over the fence between a next door neighbor and her hired workers. Sometimes the most compelling stories are things you'd rather not know about first hand.

Perhaps the most confrontational story in this anthology is editor Kirby's own offering, "Freedom Flight". His approach to storytelling for me has always been a little self-conscious and here he is elaborating a story he has hinted at before in other strips. But he does what he can to help you follow the twisty thoughts of his main character with little formal motif-like arrows that repeat like punctuation throughout the telling. These curvy and staccato, swirling lines echo the same lines that make up the legs, arms and clothing of all the characters. These are pointers to the dissolving nature of the character's relationships. That dissolution is both isolating and freeing, so much so that some conscious direction is seemingly needed to connect them on the page.

I like his artwork because even in the tiny panels he gives himself to carve out a story, there is a cohesive design that pulls it together on the page. He also has a keen eye for arresting images. Molecular patterns that swirl around his main character and then dissolve into shadows and shading on the remaining page, a street map that illustrates an urban neighborhood and then becomes the pavement where his character walks onto the next page, and a handicapped dog missing a front leg that seems to fade away into silhouette and then disjointed pieces, even as his owner enters the panel with even more curvy lines to retrieve him. I would like to see more visual real estate given to these small visual moments, because they help to frame and arrange the themes of Kirby's stories.

It is challenging to create a satisfying and whole reading experience in only thirty-one pages of a comic book, which is why most superhero comics serialize a much larger story. It keeps the readers coming back. When you share that space with other artists it can be distracting and I have to admit the variations between the artists and stories kept me from jumping into reading this volume several times. But once I did, I discovered this anthology offers far more heart and soul for your money than any superhero comic can. Ultimately, I think it is well worth the investment and I will be looking out for the next issue with great anticipation.

View all my reviews

Some Early Portraits

2010-09-24T08:47:00.000-07:00

I'm not ashamed to admit that I played a lot of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons in high school. In fact, I am glad my parents encouraged me to read about and explore fantasy worlds, despite being fairly starched Mormon christians at the time. In the late nineteen-seventies I responded to a newspaper ad for someone looking for others to role-play this game with. I'd noted similar advertisements posted at the local library, so I assumed it must be the same person and responded to the ad. This is how I met Clayton and his wife, Terry. Clayton was originally from Pennsylvania and had played D&D in college. He had developed a whole world campaign that we played in over the next few years. The original group of players was a mix of teenagers and adults that grew and expanded.

I met a lot of great people I doubt I would have met otherwise. One of the librarians at the local public library, Mary, and her brother joined the group and I became fairly good friends with them both. At one point I made several trips to Cour d' Alene, to visit with them when they moved out of the Sandpoint area. Mary and her brother were always quite resourceful and developed a dungeon campaign system on 4x6 cards so that any time someone didn't have a campaign prepared she could game master one easily by randomly selecting cards from her file.

Another friend was Darin who fostered some of my interest in comic books and horror fantasy. He began a campaign based on a gaming system called Chill, where he managed to mix a Lovecraftian inter-dimensional story with the Sanctuary fantasy series with the added feature that each player gained a new skill when in the fantasy part of the scenario. He also began a comic book store he ran from his apartment by taking subscriptions from friends, which is when I began my comic book collecting.

This is a portrait I drew in 1985 of my D&D character, Aurora, who was a priestess of the Egyptian Goddess Isis. The drawing is based on the image of Isis in the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Gods and Goddesses Manual. Unfortunately I don't remember the original artist otherwise I'd credit them here as inspiring me. Aurora wasn't my first female D&D character and I did have a few other personae. There was Naylor, who was my first character and was an elven multi-class character that I hoped to make a ranger. Only he was killed off by an unfortunate encounter with hellhounds.

Another character I liked playing was my cleric, Balden, who is depicted in the next image with his elven friend, Trevor. He started off being named Baldwin until I learned that was the real last name of another player, who was really cool about it. But I wanted him to be unique and I have to admit I named him after the piano manufacturer, so I came up with something different. I originally wanted him to worship Baldar, the Norse god of beauty, but Clayton had pretty strict rules about which gods and goddesses showed up in his campaigns, so I choose the Greek god Apollo instead. Unfortunately his new character name brought quite a bit of ridicule from other male players, because they assumed I was referring to lacking hair on his head, which as you can see, isn't how I saw him.

Unfortunately I lost touch with many of these friends when I attended college and then came out as a gay man. I felt differently about myself, but I didn't stop playing Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. My friend Kathy had played some campaigns in high school and we played a few times together. I mainly played my character, Balden, and she played her elven magician character, Trevor. I guess it was freeing to allow my D&D character to come out of the closet as I had done the same, but for some reason my gaming interest was already waning. I was reaching adulthood and because I felt even more an outsider, as I'd not maintained any of my previous friendships, I soon lost interest in pursuing fantasy role-playing, preferring the real role-playing we do as adults.

Carmen Miranda

2010-09-12T16:45:00.000-07:00

This is closing up my pre-nineties sketchbook. An image that I had to draw after all those versions of Pineapple from Paula and the Purple Rays. It's just another silly doodle.

Why Loren and Sylvia didn't become a four-panel strip

2010-09-07T08:30:00.000-07:00

These Loren and Sylvia images are just odds and ends I put together while attempting to consider it as a four-panel strip cartoon.

As you can see here, I never got to the fourth panel. I don't consider myself a very good "gag" writer.

One of the primary concepts for the comic was that Sylvia was angry, but she is angry because everyone around her is unreasonable, while Loren is pretty much the opposite, entirely unaware that the world around him is unreasonable.

I figured Loren would be very introspective, always questioning his inner motives and those of the people around him, as I was when I came out as a gay man. Sometimes Sylvia was seemingly irrational, saying and doing whatever occurred to her at the time, other times she'd just end up in odd situations because people would be afraid to tell her the whole truth.

In many cases we intended Loren to be a sounding board and foil for Sylvia's outbursts.

The simplicity of the artwork leant itself to becoming a four-panel strip cartoon, but Loren and Sylvia didn't really succeed that way in my mind because the stories we wanted to tell were more complex than would fit in that minimal medium.

Paula and the Purple Rayz

2010-09-03T16:46:00.000-07:00

I promised a post about Paula and the Purple Rayz, another of the projects Kathy Sprague and I developed. We originally devised this storyline as a comicbook, but after doing Loren & Sylvia I realized it would take me more time than I was willing to commit to develop the layouts. So I suggested to Kathy that we turn the script she'd written into a radio play. It was a small success at the student run radio station on campus at the Uof I, in Moscow, Idaho. We invited all our friends to contribute voices for the various characters, deliberately playing against gender to hilarious effect.

I was assigned the voice of Pricilla Syben, the band's manager. During our first recording I had a mild cold and began to loose my voice, which was perfect for her "Hollywood" character. Subsequent recordings I did my best to give Prisilla the same husky quality to her voice, which wasn't easy. Over the seven episodes Kathy wrote and produced, we developed a loyal following of listeners, both on campus and within the larger community.

The storyline was pure word play and invention as all the characters had names beginning with the letter "P" (save Cinder Lou), frequenting cities from Prague to Puyallup. At one of the celebratory parties after an early recording session we asked everyone to bring a food that began with the letter "P". So there was a plethera of potluck potatoes, pineapples and peanuts. The basic idea was a mix of Wonder Woman's origin story and Jem and the Holograms, one of Hasbro's attempts to work with Marvel, which also produced the animated GI Joe and Transformers, only rather than the cheesy pop-music you encountered in Jem, we decided the band was a punk garage band.

Here is Paula's mother, Pollytah, Queen of Paradise Island saying two of her most popular lines. Kathy and our friends would often repeat these catchphrases as if we were the Queen-mother, arm raised and voice modulated in a faux British accent. These two drawings are not my original designs. Instead our friend Ari Burns had attempted to copy my style and came up with the Grecian dress and pointy headdress. She was intentionally aping the Statue of Liberty. After seeing Ari's version I drew up these two images, based on her design.

It took me quite a bit of drawing to come up with suitable characters. I filled my sketchbook with page after page of just character head-shots. Here is the villain character, Pineapple in a series of quick sketches, playing with how Kathy described him, a cross between the Cheshire Cat and The Joker from the Batman comic books.

Here are some quick sketches I did for the members of the band, who were all women. Up in the left corner was a sketch that brought a strong reaction from Kathy, so I labeled it so that I wouldn't use it by mistake. One of the running gags in the storyline is that anyone listening to the band is transformed, playing off the hysteria in the Sixties that Rock and Roll music was changing the youth of America into sexually liberated fiends. Here is a quick sketch of Sylvia as if she were a member of the audience.

More Loren & Sylvia pages 16-17

2010-08-25T17:28:00.000-07:00

So, here Erma's girlfriends, Roxy and Tabo, interact. Blatant homophobia from people who thought they were tolerant of gay people is a theme both Kathy and I have experienced in our lives. I can still encounter it from my family members sometimes, which is quite unfortunate. All the same, I am happier that I feel I can live my life more openly now than when I first came out as a gay man.

One other point about the characters, in the final panel Uncle Chuckie comes in the front door. He is Sylvia's landlord. I don't remember if Tia Marge and Uncle Chuckie were related, but I think we had decided they came from opposite ends of the family. I suspect that they don't really like each other, but I suppose that will have to be revealed later.

I'm sorry to leave this on a cliffhanger. Unfortunately Kathy and I didn't write more script after this point and this is all the artwork I created. There is more story to be told, but you will have to wait until I get to the point of creating more pages. Part of why it has taken me this long to post these two final pages is the last page, seventeen, was unfinished. I feel like I rushed it to get it to post, so the lettering is perhaps not my best work.

After all, it has been nearly seventeen years since I've visited this and my lettering hasn't improved in all this time. I may have to figure out a font that will go well with the artwork and re-letter the whole thing. Some of what I want to add is a prologue, introducing more facets of the characters involved. At one point, I jotted down some ideas for a dream sequence where Jared appears as the Sphinx of Egypt and my idea at this point is this dream will include some of the other characters that Kathy and I first experimented with.

I'm going to go back to posting pages directly from my early sketchbooks. There is quite a bit of development of characters for a story line called, "Paula and the Purple Rayz", which was our riff between early Wonder Woman comics of the thirties and forties and the late eighties "Jem and the Holograms" animated television series. Kathy and I talked about developing it into a comic, but before we got too far with that Kathy was inspired to write a radio play, which she produced through the student radio station at the University of Idaho. We enlisted all our friends to play the different voices and it was a lot of fun to record.

More Loren and Sylvia pages 13-15

2010-08-14T17:13:00.000-07:00

I just completed a web remodel for Jon Macy, which is why there's been no activity here...and not because I'm making any excuses for finding my time filled. I do admit it allows me to plug his new edition of Teleny and Camille, although I am likely to do an actual post about it once I've posted everything I have for Loren and Sylvia. Anyway...

Here we meet Erma's new beau, Randy and get to see Eiri and her sister go at it. Both Kathy and I have younger sisters, so you can imagine how we've fared in these situations. Eiri, of course, thinks she's protecting her sister, when in fact she's exhibiting her sublimated homophobia (irrational fear of homosexuals for any of you unfamiliar with the term).

Also Genise and Sylvia make up for the moment. I think this all speaks for itself. Poignant but ironic relationships are the most difficult. We also get a better look at Erma's friends, Tabo and Roxy. We will see more of them next time.

More Loren and Sylvia pages 10-12

2010-07-30T13:09:00.000-07:00

I took a week off posting more Loren and Sylvia for the Comic-Con in San Diego. No, I didn't attend...I hear it was quite the event as it always is, but I was actually busy camping in the mountains and since there has been little commentary or interaction here (thanks for your comment, Carolyn!), I figured I was safe while many of the comicbook geeks are out of town. I doubt many of them are reading here...:P

There's not much to say other than the introducing of even more characters. I think this was a problem with Loren and Sylvia, the list of characters began exploding exponentially as the party scenes kept getting wilder. We get to see Adam, Tia Marge's beau hitting on Wayo, Sylvia's co-worker. Remember from the "crab" chart, they've already done "the nasty". There's another musical reference, and I really can't remember if we named all the kids that show up at this party.

Eiri's sister, Erma is here with a new boyfriend Randy and two girlfriends. Randy brought along a couple of friends, including the mo-hawked punk. It may be a problem to name them all correctly as I didn't keep copies of the scripts and I haven't spoken to Kathy in many years, assuming she kept them. I think in the long run it doesn't matter as what was written is soon to run out. I don't have immediate plans to add anything new, although I've begun to assemble notes I've made over the years and I do hope to have something more complete as a premium eventually.

More Loren and Sylvia pages 7-9

2010-07-17T11:02:00.000-07:00

Other influences include the master of the panel comic, Charles Schultz and the editorial strip, Garry Trudeau. Here we are introduced to a role call of "Loren and Sylvia" characters. Besides Uncle Chuckie, who is mentioned but doesn't appear until later in the story, there is Adam, who is Tia Marge's beaux. He is primarily a background character, but we wanted to show that even Tia Marge, who is clearly much older than most of the other people in Loren and Sylvia's lives, has a sexual life and the good sense to be knowledgeable of her partner's sexual behavior.

Perhaps the biggest enigma presented here is Sylvia's liaison with Genise. You can assume they were highschool sweethearts of a sort, but there is still plenty of emotion between them. But I don't want to spoil what happens next with too much information, so I'll stop here.

Just one more comment about background material, though. I've peppered these scenes with references of music we were listening to at the time. Can you guess what they were? The first person to post all of them correctly in a comment will be eligible for a complimentary copy of the premium comicbook, when it is done.

More Loren and Sylvia pages 4-6

2010-07-09T11:23:00.000-07:00

Sylvia is a complex character and not simply because she emphasizes her recycled bonmots by brandishing her beer bottle. She sees the world through her own uniquely-colored lavender spectacles. She wears her pink flamingo sweatshirt not only because it is a practical piece of clothing, concealing more than revealing, but because it declares her affinity with things absurd and otherwise termed "gay" (it would be teal with puffy pink ink if this were in color). Eiri, too is a lesson in contradictions. She personifies that rare creature: the semi-butch, leather-coat-wearing straight woman. In a more innocent age she would have been openly bi-sexual, without really experiencing anything more than trading kisses with girlfriends at slumber parties, you know, the ones Sylvia never got invited too. We get to see her in action reprimanding her sister later.

Jared is on the other hand a deliberate stereotype, the misogynist self-aggrandizing queen. If it isn't about her, she hates it. I perhaps needn't italicize those pronouns, but how else would you identify an adult man who behaves like a fearful self-loathing child, verbally sparring with anyone who cares to cross her and speaking archly in case anyone is overhearing. Loren exhibits some of these characteristics (smoking in bed, indeed!) but his focus is just on daily living and getting laid, a bit like most of us. Being college age, he still hasn't given up the trappings of childhood: a poster of a dead hero, a favorite blanket with whimsical animals, airplanes on his curtains (were they there when he moved in?) and Mickey Mouse alarm clock; symbols of the adolescent emerging into adult life.

The juxtaposition of all these personalities I think come together well on the page, but there are consequences to all actions; what develops here will de-evolve in the next few pages. I was always referring to other gay comic books when I was drawing this, Jerry Mill's "Poppers", Howard Cruse's "Wendel" and Jeff Krell's "Jayson", so naturally the stories that I personally experienced are repeated here in Loren and Sylvia. You may see the similarities too.

More Loren & Sylvia pages 1-3

2010-07-03T17:12:00.000-07:00

Here are some of the elusive pages that have never before been published. I will post as much as I drew back in 1990, when I was last working on this. I'm not making any promises, but I have some notes which expands the story to include some "adventure" characters that Kathy and I developed. Because they don't really fit with Loren and Sylvia, they will likely appear in a dream. I also have sketches of versions of the Loren and Sylvia characters that were intended for potential dream sequences, so this is not so much out of the ordinary.

In these pages we are introduced to Jared, Sylvia's awol roommate; Erie, their straight friend who has a sister living with her; Genise, Sylvia's on-again-off-again girlfriend and notorious neighborhood bi-sexual; among many more characters. The story has a lot going on behind the scenes, but I think it is an accurate portrayal of the lives of college age students learning about sexuality. Of course, Sylvia is old-hat at it, but later she does find her desires acknowledged. Oh, wait! I can't give away secrets too early!

I packed a lot of little bits of information into these drawings and some artistic bits. You can find collage clippings scattered in the background as artwork and posters, reflecting the modern environment Loren and Sylvia inhabit. These are pretty subtle reminders that these characters have lives beyond the panel.

Loren and Sylvia Pages 5-9

2010-05-19T16:46:00.000-07:00

Lorraine is based on various women friends both I and Kathy roomed with at different times. We never did get along well with these women as there always seemed a big gap between our values and theirs. I suspect they didn't get that we were gay and what that meant, but that's perhaps my own prejudice.

Here we meet Sylvia's friends, Spencer and Tod, which were based on a gay couple we both knew. We also see to what extent pot smoking was common place in our lives. We intentionally never brought attention to the bong and what they were doing with it.

There is a lot of psychology in Sylvia's move to the door when Loren arrives. Also too much story telling. I really did come out after seeing "Kiss of the Spiderwoman".

I really wanted to show more of Loren's relationship with Vince, but for the sake of story telling we cut to the drama. I think some day I will have to write in the romance section.

The last panel is a story that Kathy told several times before we decided to include it in the comic. It is a good closing joke. Middle America is so naive and ironic.

Loren and Sylvia Pages 1-4

2010-05-09T13:30:00.000-07:00

First four pages of Loren & Sylvia. Written by my friend Kathy Sprague and drawn by me, Nathan Kibler. The characters Sylvia and Loren are drawn directly on ourselves and the supporting characters are all based on composites of our friends, but the stories are mostly reactions to the culture of the time in a small college town in Idaho. This is autobiography with tongue firmly planted in cheek.

Kathy and I were friends, but we thought the idea of "kissing cousins" was too perfect to pass up. I still wonder why we never did any back story for Loren and Sylvia's childhoods.

Wayo is a composite of several friends. He's mostly a supporting character, but he shows up at a party later in the unpublished section I will post at some later date.

I lived with Kathy for a time and rented the basement bedroom from her and her brother, who also lived with us. It was a good sized room and I enjoyed living with Kathy. It was also an official fallout shelter, thus the sign on the wall...

Loren and Sylvia together again

2010-04-15T16:10:00.000-07:00

I met my friend Kathy Sprague back in the late eighties when I attended college. She was an open lesbian living in the college town where she grew up. We became fast friends after meeting at the local Science Fiction Association which held a small fan convention once a year and met monthly on campus. We immediately started bouncing ideas off of each other for science fiction characters, and then eventually wrote a comic book together we based on our own lives, called "Loren and Sylvia".

I created the first nine pages of the comic book in a whirlwind week of drawing between finals and the holidays. These pages Kathy later published with two other comic stories by other people in a one shot called, "Feedback". I added several more pages to the original nine, but never got around to publishing them together again. I hope to offer them again here as a premium, but I'm not making promises.

Here's a short synopsis: Loren and Sylvia are cousins. Loren is a virgin and has moved to town, but is looking for a new roommate. Sylvia is looking for a roommate also, so suggests he move in with her. Then Loren expresses his desire for his cousin, who scoffs and points out that she is gay. Later Loren decides he's gay also and has a quick fling with one of Sylvia's friends who've dropped by to get high. Hilarity and broken hearts ensue.

Maverick DeGable--in the style of "Loren and Sylvia"

2010-04-08T12:47:00.000-07:00

This is one of my first original characters, although he is a sort of gay James Bond and I was inspired by an R. Crumb comic. I drew this back when I was in college and had come out a few years before and was still exploring my gay identity. I was thinking about the sorts of characters I wanted to read about and Maverick came up as a government spy who would infiltrate the more conservative factions and subvert the status quo. This was long before "DADT" caused many military people to do similar things. Unfortunately this is the extent of the character in my mind, so I never invented any adventures he would star in, but there is always a chance I could be inspired now.

Because I was drawing a lot of "Loren and Sylvia" stylized characters at the time it seemed reasonable to draw Mr. DeGable in a similar manner. I will be posting more "Loren and Sylvia" sketches next and as I have now uncovered my archive of the comic, eventually I will be posting it here as a premium.

Underwear Model

2010-03-10T16:55:00.000-08:00

Occasionally you get a hankering to depict something appealing, then as you put pencil to paper it takes on qualities of its own. For some reason, this torso looks elongated and unrealistically wide, but I did get the pouch and butt right. I often find myself stopped when things begin to go wrong. I always suspected I'd return to these images and finish them and I may still.

Self Portrait circa 1987

2010-03-04T15:32:00.000-08:00

One thing about considering oneself an artist, the mirror is always a ready model for observation and I have always been interested in how others see me. This sketch is based on a photograph taken by a boyfriend, after sex; notice my slightly unfocused expression of self-satisfaction. It is not easy for me to display this as it reveals more than it hides. I kept this sketchbook private for many years simply because some of the material will never be appropriate for public display; but perhaps this is part of my own healing as a gay man that I can post these images here without worrying about the consequences.

Tom of Finland

2010-02-26T13:02:00.000-08:00

From 1987-89

Nearly every gay man I know has encountered the images of Touko Laaksonen, sometimes early in their life, and had a physical reaction. I knew of his images long before I came out as a gay man and combined with Richard Corbin's "Den" stories in Heavy Metal magazine, I can say encountering them was an awakening for me...and I don't just mean physically. Mine is a sketch of a famous Tom of Finland tableau I found in an art history book in the college library. I think I wanted to see how well I could copy the tonal qualities of the original, because I am not usually drawn to leathermen bikers as a rule. Alas, I have very little patience when I am drawing, so this remains a hint of the original.

"Teleny and Camille" by Jon Macy

2010-02-16T11:48:00.000-08:00

A year ago last December, you may remember my posting about the anonymously published gay erotic novel attributed to Oscar Wilde. You may obtain a copy from Northwest Press. Despite its very pornographic, and very-frankly-handled-subject-matter, I can well recommend it to anyone who is not squeamish for such erotic matters.

Shirtless doodle in the style of "Loren and Sylvia"

2010-02-15T16:25:00.000-08:00

From 1987-89

Back when I was in college I had a close friend named Kathy Sprague. Kathy was also gay and helped me find my way out-of-the-closet. I will always admire and appreciate what she did for me and despite our lives diverging along sexual lines, I will always consider her a dear friend.

We also collaborated on a comic book, based somewhat on our own lives. Our alter-egos were named "Loren", which is my middle name and "Sylvia" which is a name Kathy always liked. There is also a well known syndicated comic with the title "Sylvia", but we felt safe using the name because we were telling deeply personal stories, which had nothing to do with that syndicated newspaper strip. Someday I may share here the one issue of "Loren and Sylvia" that Kathy managed to print with her own money.

Anyway, I drew "Loren and Sylvia" with a distinctive stylized shorthand for creating characters like I'd seen done with other popular comic strips, namely "Peanuts" and "Doonsbury". This doodle of a shirtless male is an early attempt to draw a character in this style without clothes. It looks a little like "Loren", but even at this late date I doubt that is who it really is.

Male Crotch

2010-02-14T10:48:00.000-08:00

From 1987-89

This next series of images feature men. I tend to think about men a lot and how they appear to me. This includes how I appear to myself. My purpose is not to be crass or rude, but to depict the truth I see, which is perhaps the only way I can do this. I can only hope that you enjoy what I put down on paper.

Thistle design

2010-02-10T15:03:00.000-08:00

From 1987-89

I have always been inspired by art nouveau design. This design is an early inspiration which lead to my friend Tod requesting I design a tattoo for him. The sketches that I did subsequently are in another sketchbook and I will link them when I post them. I only have one photograph of Tod right after he got his tattoo, but I can say this sketch was the first inspiration.

New Order Clown - Euclidian Solids

2010-02-05T14:21:00.000-08:00

Back in the late eighties, I remember the English musical group New Order did a video for their song "True Faith" featuring costumes modeled after designs by a surrealist artist. Unfortunately I never paid much attention to who the artist was, but the costumes made the wearers seem to be clownish because they obstructed movement. It didn't make much sense, but the images persisted in my brain until I had to jot them down.

Paul Poiret - 1910

2010-02-03T17:46:00.000-08:00

Ah, yes...a coat by Paul Poiret. This sketch of a fashion photograph looks like it is from the height of Poiret's oriental-ism. I've always been a great fan of fashion design from the beginning of the previous century, especially the nineteen-twenties and nineteen-thirties. In college I collected Tom Tierney's books of paper dolls published by Dover for reference. Unfortunately his copies of the Erte collections are no longer available, nor are Dover's reprints of fashion catalogs containing Erte's designs. But Dover has continued to publish other designer's works and Poiret is a favorite.

The shape of the coat which is emphasized by the stylized pose of the mannequin is similar to how a robe or kimono might drape, only Poiret has used fairly modern western forms to achieve this with a wide embroidered lapels and a frog clasp. I suspect the fabric is silk velvet in either brown or avacado green. The sleeves seem to be gathered, as well as the back which seems to gather below the knees, just above the lower edge, creating a unique form that you only see in coats from this time period.

I did a short series of sketches featuring fashion models and clothing back in my college days, although I mostly shared them with close friends. I named the model in each sketch Theo, after my grandmother and sometimes gave them captions as if they were speaking to someone off page. In this sketch I was thinking of my boss at Waldenbooks at the time, so she looks somewhat different to the original model, who I think had a triangular face. Clearly I didn't want to lose the effect of her pose so I redrew the part that went off the page above her right arm. Her hat looks as if she's wearing a cleaning woman's scarf, but I assure you the original was worth my recording it here. Too bad pencil smudges.

Raphael's Sitting Cherub

2010-01-30T16:38:00.000-08:00

From 1987-89

This sketch is one of those sitting sculptures of a putti or winged cherub that were popular in the late eighties. I think I sketched this in the home of one of my art professors. It's kitsch.

Sketchbooks Project

2010-01-30T16:30:00.000-08:00

1987-89

I have over a dozen sketch books that I've filled over the past two decades, which I intend to share some of the material here. Some of the stuff is interesting, some banal and much is pornographic. The pornographic stuff I'm posting gradually at Y!gallery under my "volpane" moniker, if you are interested enough to sign in there. I don't have a lot posted there yet, but if you want me to post more I do expect encouragement. The click-able gallery above is the tame material although because I am an adult gay man, you may find the frank depiction of crotches, etc. not to your liking. My plan is to give each image a unique post here with some description as to why it ended up in my sketchbook, so you will eventually see everything here that is posted there. I encourage you to comment and engage me in some dialogue. I like that kind of thing.