Coffeehouse Aesthetic: I have saved examples of my earliest work for the last two pages because they were judged to be incongruous within my presentation. The ideas germinated in these early writing opportunities continue to evolve to the present day. The symbology has perhaps gained a layer of encryption.
Friend and former student Jeanne Marie Head took this photograph of me outside The Runcible Spoon, my local haunt, in 1990.
Two decades separate my first cartoons in the mid-60s from my next transformation as a cartoonist in the late 80s.
Post-Graduate School: In 1988, I drew in ballpoint pen on non-archival paper. These comics were compiled in a single volume called The Monologues, which was later destroyed. I did not consider myself to be doing much more than doodling and whiling away an idle hour at the coffeehouse. At this time I was preparing for a one-man show of paintings in Chicago, which explains my casual commitment to cartooning since I still thought of myself as a painter. When a fellow-cartoonist gave me a proper drawing pen one day, my method of working was reconsidered.
I first switched to a cotton fiber typing paper, which was archival, but it was not the best surface for fine-line detail. Strathmore’s 500 Series plate-finish drawing board was a better fit.
As for pens, disposable markers were first used. Black-tipped disposable pens, at this time, were often alcohol based—and bled: By which I mean the carrier of the pigment leached out into the surrounding paper and left a yellowish residue. These markers were chiefly employed to draw fat borders and do area fills, and it was some time before the extent of the bleeding problem was realized. Rapidiograph pens were already doing most of my careful work, so I eventually eliminated alcohol markers from my toolkit.
The point of pursuing an advanced degree in painting at Indiana University was to acquire a college-level teaching position. This was not going to happen anytime soon, if at all. Moreover, I tend to reinvent myself every ten years; comics marked this next stage of reinvention. By 1992, everything was in place to start my Epic Dermis comics. Considerable ink had been supplied to my recreational undertaking by then.
Original cover
Dreams of Bad Milk: Dreams of Bad Milk became Bible Welts over time. As seen in the two comic spreads linked below, the cartooning style for Bad Milk fits its format, and the overall look holds together, despite the unfortunate typewriter boldface script font chosen for the text. The typerwriter provided consistency for the text, since I did not trust my ability to hand-letter.
Blueprint for Storytelling: My early story ideas were built around a simple premise: The protagonist faces a peculiar difficulty. In Malady of Love (below), this difficulty is a leg tumor that resembles (and acts like) a standard poodle. Our little boy wishes only to be a normal little boy, but his misadventure hints at vague perversion. There are lots of gags and verbal plays-on-words along the way.
Every story I wrote over the next several years followed this formula more or less. Conventional storytelling would have made for more storyboards than I cared to create, so I hit the ground running with each title page. I got in as many funny ideas as possible, and then wrapped things up an ironic ending. It was not until my first novel was started that I learned how to tell an involved story.
Text pages from Dreams of Bad Milk are here reproduced to show the look of the book. (The point of this is not for you to read these impossible pages!)
I came to be unhappy with my unpublished collection. There were also issues concerning the unresolved drawing style: How much energy did I want to invest in it? When compared to the splash pages, the drawings for the stories, though stylistically similar, were underwhelming. Moreover, in wanting to turn every character into a monster of some sort, because this was a preoccuption in my complex drawings and paintings at the time, I ended up creating more distraction for already constipated storyboards.
Splash drawing from Dreams of Bad Milk
Early Transitions: Once Dreams of Bad Milk was completed, I continued to make comics without a clear end-use in mind. The drawings for these transitional comics were both scaled up and cleaned up: There was less pointillism and more cross-hatching. Line weights were also bolder. I also began to hand-letter.
The below examples were incorporated into Bible Welts.
A Mother’s Obsession with Hairnets. This story was expanded from its earlier version in Dreams of Bad Milk.
Building A Better Mommy.
Malady of Love. These frames were added to the reformat of this comic for Bible Welts.
Bible Welts: Change in priorities led me to cut up (butcher) the storyboards for Dreams of Bad Milk in order to pad them with improvements. In retrospect, these measures were not needed, and though I ended up creating a few memorable drawings and gags along the way, my evolving drawing style no longer reflected Bad Milk’s original sensibility. The new storyboards, being exceedingly spacious in places, diluted the earlier product.
Little can be redeemed from these reworked pages. I grimace at much of what was committed to paper. Every other page contains graphic sexual images and irreligious references. My imagination grappled to understand aspects peculiar to my intellectual development as a sexually repressed child of Southern Baptists. It is difficult for an older man to view his youthful angst objectively or favorably. Moreover, incredible energy was expended in trying to retrofit later development onto earlier development. This is never a winning strategy, except when it comes to music mixing and novel writing. (The computer allows the creator to pave over eariler edits seamlessly.)
The Purge: As of June 2021, I undertook the task of archiving my works on paper, which included all my comics. My dissatisfaction with Bible Welts led to the destruction of most of its reformatted storyboards. By extension, this included much of the artwork original to Bad Milk. All the centerpiece drawings (splash drawings) were saved. The best drawings from each storyboard were also saved. A few stories survive intact, but I am not sure how I arrived at my determination about which comics to spare, apart from nostalgic attachment. As I age, I find purging artwork less difficult than what I imagined it to be when I was younger. One reason why this subtractive process does not trouble me is that, where I can bear to read my earliest work, I find much of it was reworked to better effect in later projects.
Factually, all these destroyed storyboards survive as tif images on computer hard drive. Photocopies also exit, so decommissioned is perhaps a better way to describe the ontological state of these stories.
Transition to Epic Dermis: By 1993, I was crafting works of greater polish for Epic Dermis, even as I continued to edit older comics. In the leadup to this, there were a few outliers:
I attended a lecture given by Art Speigelman sometime around 1992, where I presented samples of my comics to him in hopes of being included in the pages of RAW Magazine (defunct by this time). The Prince of Wands was created in this window, and was the last work to enter Dreams of Bad Milk. It foreshadows the drawing style that became Epic Dermis.
Smoker’s Plaque came at the tailend of this transitional period. Unlike The Prince of Wands, it did not go into Bible Welts but bounced around until it found a home in Epic Dermis.
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