Strongman 2.0

Well, I think it's time to announce that I'm today getting down to work on the next exciting installment of the adventures of Tigre. We're gonna be putting together another Strongman original graphic novel over the next year, and I'll be sure to post interesting production stuff as it comes up. And here is my first sketch of Tigre 2.0 to get things off to a good start. Keep checking in, there's more to see!

Cars! Strongman! YOW!

I'm thrilled to announce that I've gotten one of the coolest gigs ever! That's right, I've been drawing and coloring covers for the Pixar Cars comics that are coming from Boom! Studios! I have had to keep mum on this until the first issue was solicited in Previews. Well, they've been solicited and the cat's out of the bag! So here is a little preview of my covers. And if you keep coming back, I'll post my subsequent covers as they are announced. Ka Chow!



And then, those of you who have been following this blog know that I've been working on what I have affectionately called "the 'Rasslin' comic." STRONGMAN! Well, that book, all 120 pages of it is currently being solicited in Previews. It's being published by Amazing Ink/Slave labor Comics, and it's slated to hit in early March!

So March is shaping up to be my best month in comics ever, and there's more on the way! Hang on to your hat's, my friends!

An open letter to Josh Dysart

Josh Dysart and Alberto Ponticelli's UNKNOWN SOLDIER was released by Vertigo this week. It is a stunning piece of work; relevant, angry, frightening, and (dare I say?) important. Shades of Michael Golden's THE NAM, but with the fury of mid-eighties Frank Miller and the moral ambiguity of Garth Ennis's or Grant Morrison's best work. It reimagines the Unknown Soldier in a complete new context, that of the civil war of Uganda, and the empathy and terror it brings to bear on this almost completely unknown (int he USA, at least) conflict is nothing short of breathtaking. I think the world NEEDS books like this. It's fast, it's scary, it's intelligent, and, damnit, it's exciting.

At the end of the book, when the last page has been turned, after catching my breath, I read the coda that Josh Dysart wrote to explain himself. In it, Josh expresses, repeatedly, the nervousness he feels that he may be doing a disservice to this subject. As if the problems of the world are too big, the limitations of pulp comics are too small, and he is just too damn white and Western to be able to do this right. That inspired me to write a quick note to Josh, and I think it's perfectly alright to share my thoughts and philosophy with the world.

Josh

I understand that you have an ambivalent relationship with your creative endeavor. You worry that you cheapen, debase, make kitch, misrepresent. The moral ambiguity you feel must be terrifying, I get the impression that this conflict nearly inspires you to abandon the task set before you- to write a comic book that matters.

But somewhere deep in this conflict and doubt are the seeds that promise to raise your efforts to the pedestal of high art. It prevents your work from becoming over-ardent, strident, heavy-handed and preachy. See, making art, the good kind anyway, is about testing limits. And the limits your temperament sets for yourself are the most difficult kind to probe. Cross those lines, lines as fuzzy as a Rothco color field to perceive yet as sharp as a cat’s claw to violate, and your work becomes the steaming pile of cultural misappropriation pulp that you most fear, to be taken no more seriously than Madonna dancing on a bed in bondage gear while photos of Darfur atrocities are projected on 50-foot TV screens. This is the dance of death of art. If you can dance that dance and stay on the right side of that cat’s claw, then you stand a chance of achieving the highest aspirations of art- to communicate, illuminate and educate.

Sure, plenty of artists WANT to do this, and more often that we would care to witness, this earnest desire to be relevant overwhelms the subject they wish to communicate. The form, the audience experience, is sublimated to the message and both are lost to the steaming pile of cultural bullshit that white-walled art galleries, black-box theater troupes, independent book shop poetry slammers and nekkid cock-and-balls interpretive dance companies inflict on the hoi-poloi.

But, and I cannot stress this enough, you do not debase your subject by acknowledging the limitations of your art form, as you appear to fear. Quite the opposite! I am a modernist in this sense, that art must acknowledge the limitations of its form. Painting did not truly mature into an expressive, poetic art until painters acknowledged that a painting is what it is- paint on a canvas- and the art of it begins and ends right there- as paint on a canvas- and the art is really somewhere between that beginning and ending. A painting that tries to derive its relevance from anywhere else, from densely written artists’ statements or staid institutionally-imposed contextualizations, will ultimately fail the test, and will fall and be forgotten. The meaning of art begins and ends with WHAT IT IS, and while that may seem somewhat belittling and empty to the idealist, if you fail to acknowledge the formal limitations of your art, then you are likely to have your message spill across the borders. This is NOT a good thing! If you’re going to say something with art, you have to say it with art alone.

But here is also where the danger of stridency and heavy-handedness rears its ugly head. For if you have something to say, why not simply say it? To that I say that acknowledging the limitations of art does NOT simply mean that you cower from that cat’s claw edge I spoke of earlier. The dangerous challenge of art is to explore the limitations of form and content right up to the point where you draw blood. Get that claw into the flesh, make them feel it, then withdraw and do it again, do not tear them to shreds, do not beat them over the head, just give them something to think about, death by 1000 cuts. At the end of a day spent with art, they should be damp, dark and exhausted, and unaware that the blood they are covered with, damp and dark, is their own. Stridency and heavy-handedness is a two-by four with a nail driven through it, they call undue attention to their intentions. Art must be a subtle knife, well-concealed until a split-second flash of silver delivers the fatal strike.

You, Josh, know that you are working in a debased art form, seemingly better suited to funny animals and adolescent power fantasies, and it terrifies you that something you really care about may sink to the level of those pamphlets that surround it on the spinner rack. But the problem with those stories is not that they acknowledge their limitations, it’s that they REVEL in them. Remember, art is about acknowledging limitations and TESTING them. It’s about taking your ideas as far as they can go without stepping over the line into the land of the awkward and obvious. Most comic books do not dance the dance of death. They are quite content, happy to simply be what they are. God knows why.

But you, Josh, have something on your mind, and you fear that comics may not be a big enough vessel to contain it. Will the limits of comics, culture, upbringing, and whatever other bugaboos you fear conspire to lay your good intentions low? Nine times out of ten, the answer to that question is a resounding, heartbreaking yes. This is the hardest part of being an artist, the failure. But once in a while, it all comes together and it works. An artist must endure all the times he fucks it up before he can ever enjoy the euphoria of getting perfect-right. That is not to say that I think you’ve ever “fucked it up.” I’ve always enjoyed your work. But I also know that YOU have, in your way, ENDURED your work. This is why I root for you! If anybody can make it work, it is you. You endure!

And I think UNKNOWN SOLDIER has the potential of becoming just that kind of work. It’s a big idea that is dancing the dance of death, on the cat’s claw edge, it’s all right there between the first page and the last, and I see the flash of silver of its very subtle knife. It is your BEST work yet.

Allen




Again, UNKNOWN SOLDIER rocks. Josh is my hero. Go buy this book!

Look who dropped by!

Last month I went to the Emerald City Comic Con. Had a good time, good thigns may come of it. But by far the coolest thing to happen, as far as I am concerned, was that Mike Dodd happened by the booth. Mike was one of my best friends in high school, and I hadn't seen him in over 15 years! I mean, there I was, at my table, drawing cartoons 'n shit, and I hear "Omigod! Allen! Is that you?" And I look up and you betcha, there's Mike Dodd. Looks the same ashe did 15 years ago. I was really happy to see him (as this photo can attest!) We gabbed for a few, exchanged emails, and off he went. Now we come to the part where I reveal why I am posting this on my blog so prominently (as I am sure that you all are absilutely riveted by my Gabriel Garcia Marquez trip.) Well, the email Mike gave me didn't work for whatever reason. SO I'm posting this in the hope that Mike will see this and be inspired to contact ME! Mike, if you're out there, get back!

Okay, next time, more Marquez.

100 Years of Solitude - Chapter 2

Well, I checked, and I am currently at page 180 or so. But I am also re-reading the early chapters as I advance through the later ones so as to make my chapter summaries. it's also helping me to identify the cycles and patterns that develop in the later chapters to see how they were introduced in the earlier ones. This book seems to me to be all about how history repeats itself in this place, and I'm picking up on very interesting details that went by me in the mad rush of ideas that is the style of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

So, apparently, Jose Arcadio Buendia and Ursula did not consummate their marriage for a year because they (well, Ursula, mostly) feared that their children would be born with pig tails, or worse! Both of their families had lived in Riohacha for generations, and this sort of thing had happened before. So Ursula would wear a chastity belt to bed and they would just wrestle. Jose Arcadio Buendia’s patience with this arrangement wore out when the whispers of the townspeople got to him. A man, Prudencio Agular, said something impugning Jose Arcadio Buendia’s manhood, and he killed Prudencio for it. Then he went home and had his wild way with Ursula saying, “if you bear iguanas, we’ll raise iguanas.” But the ghost of Prudencio haunted Jose Arcadio Buendia, and this is what inspired him to pack his things and begin the two-year trek that led to the founding of Macondo. Along the way, Jose Arcadio was born, thankfully normal and not an iguana.

He did, however, possess a very large penis. This detail passed me right by when I first read it. Gabriel Garcia Marquez is not so coarse a writer that we would come right out and say that young Jose Arcadio had a big dick. (and I suppose that I am!) What he did say was that “he was so well-equipped for life that he seemed almost abnormal” and “she (Ursula) thought that his disproportionate size was something as unnatural as her cousin’s tail of a pig.” It was at about this point in the novel that we are introduced to Pilar Ternera, who reassured Ursula that Jose Arcadio was actually pretty lucky to be so “equipped for life.” (I’ll say!) “Lordy!” she said when she saw it. Then we are treated to a few pages depicting the hot, cloudy confusion and drive of adolescent lust as experienced by Jose Arcadio, who wanted nothing more than to hear her say “Lordy” again and took to sneaking into her room at night to be heaved about like a sack of potatoes and to be thrown from one side to the other in a bottomless darkness… Well, that Pilar Ternera is some woman.

While Jose Arcadio was engaged with this, his father and brother were busy trying to separate Ursula’s gold from crust of gnar at the bottom of the kettle. When they succeeded , everybody was happy about it, except for Jose Arcadio, who didn’t really give a care, so wrapped up in Pilar Ternera was he. Around this time, the Gypsies came to town. Not the Gypsies of Melquiades’ tribe, with their heralds of technological progress, but another band who mere purveyors of amusement. And they offered the villagers rides on a flying carpet. Well, the town was thrown into a state of collective disorder that Jose Arcadio and Pilar Ternera used as cover to spend even more time together. Well, at least until Pilar Ternera revealed that she was pregnant. That freaked out Jose Arcadio, and he first hid in his father’s alchemy lab. Then he went and started fooling around with a little Gypsy girl. A Gypsy woman entered (with a companion of her own), took a look at Jose Arcadio there with the Gypsy girl and… well… “lordy” is as good a way to put it.

"On the first contact the bones of the girl seemed to become disjointed with a disorderly crunch like the sound of a box of dominoes, and her skin broke out into a pale sweat and her eyes filled with tears as her whole body exhaled a lugubrious lament and a vague smell of mud… Jose Arcadio felt himself lifted up into the air toward a state of seraphic inspiration, where his heart burst forth with an outpouring of tender obscenities that entered the girl through her ears and came out her mouth translated into her language. It was Thursday."

On Sunday, Jose Arcadio left with the Gypsies.

Ursula, distraught at the very thought that her son would become a Gypsy set out in pursuit of them into the swamp and was gone for 5 months. While she was gone, Jose Arcadio Buendia missed her terribly. And then, suddenly, she returned, having succeeded not in finding her wayward son with the large penis, but instead in finding a road that would lead to another town on the other side of the swamp, a mere two days travel away. Remember that Jose Arcadio Buendia had tried to do this, had failed and come to the conclusion that they were absolutely isolated on a peninsula surrounded by the sea. Well, no, they weren’t as isolated as that.

Heady, saucy stuff, is it not? We'll see Jose Arcadio again later, very much a changed man. He'll still have that big wiener, though.

One Hundred Years of Solitude: chapter 1

Thanks so much for being open to fielding my letters about One Hundred Years of Solitude. It really is a beautiful book, and as I go along, it gets a little easier to keep track of things, but you know I still need to have a notebook handy to jot things down in. There are so many Arcadios and Aurelios and Remedios that knowing if we’re talking about the Grandfather or the Grandson or Nephew or Aunt can be a real brain twister. So writing this will I hope help keep this issue clear and also perhaps draw out some of the patterns that I see emerging as I read the book. This letter will be only about the first chapter, but I am already about half way through the book, and things that seemed merely colorful and amusing at the beginning appear to be recurring themes. Themes include the loss of memory, the different ways that the characters embrace or endure their solitude, incest. Yes, incest! That seems to be an issue, although nobody has actually perpetrated that taboo. Yet. But we’ll leave that for later as these themes become more apparent in the later chapters.

Chapter 1.
There is a town in Central America called Macondo that is so remote as to be virtually cut off from all the world. It was an Eden, really, from when “The world was so recent that many things lacked names.” It is often remarked that Macondo is a town that has not known death. It was founded by several families, led by Jose Arcadio Buendia, after 26 months spent wandering the mountains. Shortly after founding Macondo, Jose Arcadio Buendia’s imaginative and somewhat flighty character began to emerge. Once a year, in March, a band of Gypsies would arrive, guided to the town by the captive birds that towns people kept in their houses, and amongst them was an honest Gypsy named Melquaides who would bring strange objects and devices that never failed to spark Jose Arcadio Buendia’s imagination. The problem was that Jose Arcadio Buendia never really understood the inventions and would spend a year in futile experimentation. When Melquaides and the Gypsies would return with another fantastic alchemic device, Jose Arcadio Buendia would trade the previous object for the new one, always with Melquaides’ warning that he was misunderstanding what the device could do. The first was a magnet, which Jose Arcadio Buendia thought could be used to collect gold from the riverbeds, then it was a telescope, that he thought could be used as a military weapon, then it was a set of navigation instruments, that he used to figure out that the world is round “like and orange.” Although this last deduction was correct, his wife and the villagers were convinced that he was mad. When Melquaides and the Gypsies returned again the following year, he gave Jose Arcadio Buendia an alchemy laboratory. Jose Arcadio Buendia spent long hours in his laboratory trying, through alchemical processes, to double the quantity of his wife, Ursula’s, gold. Ursula was quite the opposite of her husband, possessed of a firm, iron will and a anchoring resolve to preserve her family and homestead. Jose Arcadio Buendia succeeded only in turning her gold into a worthless charred crust on the bottom of his cook pot, which pissed her off quite a bit. When again the Gypsies returned, Melquaides had with him a new set of dentures that gave him the appearance of renewed youth. Finally, the wonders the Gypsies brought to Macondo became too much for Jose Arcadio Buendia to bear, he felt like the world was passing him by, and he resolved to blaze a trail to the outside world so that he could gain access to these marvelous inventions. He led a ban of villagers into the jungle. For ten days they did not see the sun. Here is one of my favourite passages in this chapter,
“The men on the expedition felt overwhelmed by their most ancient memories in that paradise of dampness and silence, going back to before original sin, as their boots sank into pools of steaming oil and their machetes destroyed bloody lilies and golden salamanders. For a week, almost without speaking, they went ahead like sleepwalkers through a universe of grief, lighted only by the tenuous reflection of luminous insects, and their lungs were overwhelmed by a suffocating smell of blood.”
The long trek through a vast swamp lead only to the sea, and thus he concluded that Macondo must lay on a peninsula, surrounded by swamps and the sea on three sides, and a mountain range on the fourth. Only thing on the other side of the mountains as far as Jose Arcadio Buendia knew was a town called Riohacha that he had left, in part, to escape the ghost of a man whom he had killed with a spear for insulting his virility. But this sense of isolation was terrible to bear and Jose Arcadio Buendia resolved to move his family back over the mountains. Ursula and the rest of the townspeople would have none of it, and she admonished Jose Arcadio Buendia to pay attention to his children. They had two at this time. The older was Jose Arcadio (2) who was born before the founding of Macondo while the settlers had been wandering the mountains. The younger was Aureliano, who was the first child born in the town. Jose Arcadio (2) was big and strong, like his father, but possessed none of his father’s imagination. Aureliano was said to have wept in his mother’s womb and had been born with his eyes open. He was silent and withdrawn and possibly telekinetic. So Jose Arcadio Buendia did focus his attention on his children, teaching them to read and write and do math, and he told them stories, tall tales really, of the fantastic, wonderous outside world. When the Gypsies again returned, it turned out they were not the same band as in previous years. Jose Arcadio Buendia asked around for his friend, Melquiades, and learned that he had died in Singapore and his body had been cast into the sea. This band of Gypsies had a wonder like none other seen by Jose Arcadio Buendia before, a block of ice, which impressed him a great deal,
“He forgot at that moment about the frustration of his delirious undertakings and Melquaides’ body, abandoned to the appetite of the squids… he exclaimed: ‘This is the great invention of our time.’”

That is chapter one. Oh, how it pains me to think of all that I left out, but I claim success in making sense of what happened and I think I have a line on who is doing what so far. I can see here some things that will be followed up on in later chapters, the growing madness of Jose Arcadio Buendia’s imagination, the stoic character of Ursula, and especially the peculiar character of their son, Aureliano. Melquiades will return as well, but changed by his experience of death. Of all the characters so far, I have the least insight into the elder son, Jose Arcadio (2). I have placed a number after his name to help keep his identity as son straight, otherwise I get him confused with his father, and later his son, grandson and great-grandson. Yeesh! I can only suppose that using such similar names must be deliberate and must mean something. I don’t think Gabriel Garcia Marquez would do such a thing for no reason. But what that is, exactly, I haven’t figured out yet. Finally, I see that he has set up Macondo as this virtual Eden, and that part of the story must be how Macondo itself changes through the years. Characters comment on it in later chapters, and so I think Macondo is a sort of character in and of itself. For not, everything is fresh and green and filled with the songs of birds. We’ll see what happens.

On to hte next big thing!

Now that Strongman!, the 'rasslin' comic I've been working on for the past 2 years is in the can (COming fromk Slave Labour Graphics in early 2009!) it's time to get to work on my next big thing. While I'm not really at liberty to reveal the name of my next project, I think it's cool to share an image or two of what I'm working on. Sneak peek! You are among the first to know!