Ch Ch Ch Ch Ch Changes
I just have David Bowie on the mind for some reason
My thoughts just fragment sometimes. You know how you just know things? You can recall pockets of information that you know but not exactly sure when you learned it or socked it away in one of your brain wrinkles for a later date and then BOOM it’s right there for you to use in your conversation. Just in time, it almost seems like you just inherently knew this factoid and had it waiting for the right time.
The funny thing that happened, to me anyway, is the information that I just recalled was the idea that atoms are 99.9% empty. Which means if you only piled up the solid parts of atoms that make up the entire Earth in one place, it would be about the size of a basketball. I don’t remember where I got this information. All those atoms are just individual elements, by themselves they are not “life”. But I think I’m alive and I think I see other life forms on the planet. Or do I? Can I trust what the atoms that make up my eyes tell me? I don’t know, how do I test this?… it goes on and on. I think I have about the same ratio of interesting things I say. My knowledge is surrounded by 99.9% vacuum!
What motivates my brain pouch that holds my information to give it to me when I need it? Is it me? Whatever “me” is. Atoms don’t really need each other do they? Is that electrical bonding mean they care? Is it the structural arrangement that creates the sense of self? These are always the questions you run in to in first year philosophy, or some such course. I wouldn’t know, I went to art school. I’m shocked I get away with saying I’m a “college graduate”.
I had a moment in Philosophy 101 that talked about defining a chair. Like, what is a chair? What form is the universal idea of a chair? I don’t think I heard the rest of that class. It was one of those mind games the philosophy teacher introduces to a bunch of sleep deprived art students. Every answer is correct but wrong. I remember just listening to everyone jumping in with their “Mic drop” solution. A chair is something you sit on. Who sits on it? Describe it. It has legs and a flat part for your butt to rest on. What’s it made out of? Let’s go with pickles held together with cheese-wiz. I don’t know, it gets complicated quickly.
I kind of look at a comic book page in a new light. They are broken up into panels that depict different moments in a (usually) linear sequence. I like to look at the spaces in between panels as that negative vacuum that is 99.9 percent of an atom. Most of my story is empty! I do a lot of damn drawing just to hit that .1 percent solid. I always want to play with that space that we usually leave untouched on the page. But I’m not sure the best way to do it. If I just start a panel with no gap, I’m just doing the story. There is no new information that is enhancing the narrative. Sergio Aragonés would do these brilliant little gags in between panels in Mad Magazine through the years. I always felt like he was desecrating some unwritten rule that in between panels should be pristine empty paper. How does he keep getting away with it? Why isn’t he in jail?!! An aside: I was deeply honored that a few years back, Ahoy had him do an alternate cover based on my Snelson (issue #2b) character. He totally nailed the character!
I’m very happy with Snelson. I loved Paul Constant’s take on it. I was also always pushing for more grit and obnoxiousness. He asked me where he should set the character and I of course said NYC. I could take so much reference for the clubs and the different parts of the city. I had already become, and still am, a comedy junky. I knew which clubs I would use for all the scenes, I was going to have cameos of some of the NYC comics I kind of knew… and then Covid hit before I was finished with the books! I couldn’t get it in the hands of my friends, there was no comedy for at least 4 months. By summer there was a thing happening under the big tree in one of the meadows in Central Park. I saw my friend Wil Sylvince at one of them. He spotted me and gave me a shout out. I think he thought he was bombing, the outdoors with a shit sound system doesn’t work with people’s ability to hear their words and then any laughter or clapping gets lost to the wind so he probably thought he was bombing. I couldn’t tell, but I wouldn’t blame him.
I consider the untold stories that make what we distill into the main plot of a story, subplots. Maybe those are the hints and winks I can put in the gutters between panels? I like putting weird or odd things in the back grounds as a way of entertaining readers who might be reading it a 2nd or 3rd time. My favorite thing about painting or doing comics is that person that comes up to me years after a project has been out and says they only recently noticed some of those things in the bg after multiple readings. Like if you weren’t looking for alien or monster faces in the opening painting I posted you might have only stopped looking after seeing the green chair since I was talking about chairs earlier.
