Comics Portfolio 1

Origins: Prior to starting Blender Kitty, I generated many pages of comics between 1988 and 1999. Works presented in these pages are personal favorites. I do not dwell extensively (and hardly at all) on my earliest development, but a few examples are presented on the last page. The page before this summarizes efforts preceding Epic Dermis.

I attended art school for painting and not comics, so these portfolio pages dedicated to comics are less organized. However, as the last of these pages supply some autobiographical background post-art school, they may be seen as corresponding to a chronology. (A missive on my “comics career” may be read on my Blog pages).

This photograph of me was taken of at The Runcible Spoon Cafe. I am seen with my usual beverage at my usual table. Given the daylight outside, this is likely a weekend day. Otherwise I would be drawing at night. Going by the shoes, this must be around 1992 or earlier. This routine was kept at this establishment from 1988 until the early mid-90s.

Epic Dermis n1: Thanks to the Xeric Foundation, I was awarded a grant in 1999 that enabled me to self-publish my first collection of Epic Dermis pieces. The remainder of this page exhibits selections from that work.

Click to enlarge images.

Overview: These storyboards do not translate well to digital devices at small scales. Truthfully, they did not even fit that well in a cramped comicbook format. Here they are presented in their raw (original) format without cleaning up.

My sensibility has always been that of a fine arts artist, and my comic work, like my stand-alone drawings, look at their best full scale hanging on a well-lit gallery wall.

Comics from this period are of an exoteric nature; and as my mind was exploding with ideas, I crammed a great many of them into every page. Few comics were made in this horizontal format after Epic Dermis n1 was published.

The Bed Wetter: Like Blood Nap (below), The Bed Wetter chronicles a urination dream. The power line motif may be viewed as desynchronous brain activity. This white noise prevents dreams from becoming fully conscious to the sleeper.

The depiction of a detached male member likely limited the number of comic book stores willing to carry my book, although there was other questionable material included in Epic Dermis n1. It is funny how obvious all this is in hindsight. At the time, being an alternative comicbook artist was considered a dangerous job.

(Storyboards appear in linked pages.)

Blood Nap: These splash pages portray a restless night’s sleep filled with nightmares. The last page is an attempt to capture an accelerated sense of time, or decompression, at the moment the alarm clock goes off in the morning.

Abnegation: I am compelled to repudiate certain expressions of my youthful creativity, even as late my mid-to-late thirties. Beginning with Bible Welts, I discovered a rich vein to mine by combining my love of the language in The King James Bible with my love of puns and nonsensical wordplay.* I did not, in any of these pages, intend sacrilege, malice, or mockery, as I was simply creating out of my upbringing in the Southern Baptist Church and having fun at its expense. And yet, where these indulgences are conflated with other elements, chiefly salacious material intended to shock, irreligious inferences will be made, which I regret.

Epic Dermis No. 1, my only published comic book, falls within this period of my counter-culture evolution. Perhaps owing to autism, my sources for artistic inspiration are far and varied, and indicate predilections peculiar to myself. Few bridges can be built between these early ideas; and there is no philosophy behind them, despite my youthful vanity at the time insisting otherwise. No—this is absudist bricolage; and to approach these assemblages with literal-mindedness in what they appear, superficially, to communicate on a given page is to assume more than was meant. I usually leave it to the reader to interpret my comics how they see fit, but I have at least one example of this book possibly encouraging a reader in his atheism. He may have been surprised to discover, after contacting me, that I was not an atheist. It is for this reason that I set the record straight on this one issue.

I do not seek to destroy or disown my comic explorations because they are instructive, just as similar journeys made by other artists and thinkers are instructive to me, whether these creators’ initial rejections of an existing order were made with strident arguments or out of unreflective frivolity. It is, as T. S, Eliot characterized the journey, returning to a place and knowing it for the first time. In short, creation is the business of inverting values to learn their value; but this is not so odd an occurrence since prodigals regularly return to the fold after a time of rebellion, such as the example of decadent Alice Cooper becoming (or returning to) Christianity. His journey is my own.

It is reasonable to suppose, where one makes artful or clever sport of a faith, that when such a sinner repents, he is all the more convincing because he once typified the superior reasoning behind the opposition, and yet came to reject it. This is my feeble justification in sparing my early life too much censure. I am still coming to terms with what being a Christian means to me. Autistics have a history of peculiar and self-contradicting views in religious matters, which are sometimes interpreted as veiled disbelief—but this is too simplistic a view of the subject. These schisms perhaps bear on an inability of the autistic to integrate executive brain function (the seat of intellect) with sensory and emotive function—but at least the dilemma is acknowledged.

(*) I am not alone in this tradition. Baron Edward Plunkett Dunsany, noted author of fairy lore, was influenced by the prose style of the King James Bible.

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