Joel White

Update

2011-07-23T07:15:00.000-07:00

Huh. I've let this blog slide quite a bit; when I was last working on it I was working nights, and it was easy to stop by the coffee shop and do some writing before going in; now, I'm on early, early days and my writing and creativity has slipped drastically.

However, I've made the decision to get up and running on a website, and have acquired Dreamweaver and some other creative software, and have been working on putting stuff up on the web, in the form of albums and possibly through a blog. So I am working, I'm just not posting so much stuff here.

Picasso, the dream and lie of franco

2010-02-03T17:12:00.000-08:00

The case of ‘THE DREAM AND LIE OF FRANCO, I & II, Picasso, 1937, is an excellent example of a confusion of purpose in analysis by art historians. Reading through Timothy Hilton’s PICASSO, one of the Thames and Hudson paperback art studies, the author argues the work isn’t a ‘comic strip’, stating with unnecessary (or maybe totally necessary) nastiness that it isn’t a comic strip format ‘as some Americans like to believe’. Well, fuck you too, limey.

That said, the issue for me is that the work is not so much confined in the narrow (and apparently provincially AMERICAN) format of the ‘comic strip’ as it is a member of the greater body of true narrative art. If we use the definition of narrative art, a sequence of pictures presented in such a way as to depict a series of events in a manner coherent to the reader/viewer, this Picasso qualifies. In case you haven’t seen it, here it is.

Oh; Hilton goes on to say that this piece isn't a 'comic strip', but a Spanish 'aleluyas', which he defines as, I quote, "cheap woodcuts with some narrational content". You know, art historians don't like to talk about a greater arc of narrative art because they are snobs and think 'comic strips' are lowbrow. It's as simple as that.

pad work

2010-01-24T13:24:00.001-08:00

experiment

2009-12-28T18:22:00.000-08:00

Da Book II

2009-12-13T16:53:00.000-08:00

I wonder what it is about ‘the book’ in Western thought that has created some mystery and aura of intellectualism about them. The unfortunate fact is that, throughout the history of the printed page the majority of what people have read has been the old standbys: romance, crime fiction, sensationalistic tales of adventures, sexual material, and joke books.
Thinking these days about the rapidly shifting changes in format concerning the printed page, I’m leaning towards an electronic format if for no other reason than relative expense, or rather lack thereof: a CD-ROM in pdf is way cheaper than a printed book. So much so, in analyzing only briefly the way books are created, selected, printed, distributed, and sold, I’m becoming convinced the publisher-bookstore-reader dynamic is hopelessly antiquated and inefficient, and kept alive mostly through a (now tottering) beaucoracy of publishers and authors, whose main aim in the creation of books is supporting their bloated corporations.
Let’s look at the big money maker in books, the Numero Uno seller in paperback fiction: the romance novel. Not only are these books sold in places where people actually buy them: grocery stores, chains, and small storefront bookstores, they have an extensive second life and always have: most communities have managed to support a ‘used bookstore’ in the past, due mainly to the practice of exchange plus money: you can either buy a used copy for cash, or bring in two copies of a similar book for trade, and then supply a nominal amount of cash to maintain a cash flow for the business. I remember the one place where I grew up, which would either sell a book for a dollar, or take 2-for-1 plus 50 cents. At least half the storefront was made up of romance paperbacks; much of the rest was science fiction, Westerns, mysteries, and cookbooks.
Actually, if you really want to know what wells in the real marketplace, visit NOT a new book seller, but a used book seller.

Originally, bound volumes were hideously expensive, so much so that only the wealthy could afford them: the majority of printed material, volume-wise, was sold in the form of uncovered magazines and so-called broadsheets. Most popular novels were sold by the chapter, piece, over a period of time, and only later bound in volumes and sold as ‘books’, much like comic books in the 20th Century being collected into bound volumes. Novels were also sold in installments by subscription, usually picked up by prior arrangement at either the publisher or bookseller (often one and the same). So the intellectual cachet of ‘the book’ is largely a late and illusory affectation of the rich.
For every high-minded, weighty tome printed, a thousand bodice-ripping, pistol-wielding, rope-spinning, brain-eating, spaceship blasting potboilers have been devoured by the unwashed masses.

This comes up because I get royally sick of listening to book people copping an attitude about books with pictures in them, i.e. the graphic novel. For the entire history of the printed book, the vast majority of content has been pop-culture CRAP. I am simply mystified where these people get off. The difference in content is minimal: comic books and comic strips have always stayed very closely to mainstream tastes of romance, adventure, science fiction, westerns, and horror. So what is the deal regarding a story told in pictures versus a story told in words?

I wonder if it doesn’t have something to do with ‘The Book’: otherwise known as ‘The Bible’. In Western thought it is the benchmark against which all other written works are (often unconsciously) compared. I wonder if the artificial importance attached to, and projected onto, that one ‘Book’ has a lot to do with Western thought and intellectual perception of books in general.
In Xtian thought, even now, the central point of all knowledge is the bible, and all other printed material is usually centered on the thoughts and ideas presented in that one book. Let’s also keep in mind that in original Xtian morality as contained in the 10 Commandments, ‘graven images’ were prohibited; and speaking from personal experience, that limiting idea still permeates much of Xtian ideology and therefore Western thought, at least in the USA.

It’s possible that the import of books in Western philosophy and perception has much to do with the mystical value of that one compendium of selective, subjective pseudo-history and tall tales known as ‘The Good Book’. I mean really: how many other religions are really based on an actual, physical BOOK? A lot of other religions and belief structures have written materials, but they are most often widely divergent teachings, usually interpreted by a select cabal of ‘learned elders’: the written materials themselves are incidental to their interpretation by so-called wise men. The average person is unlikely to even own a Torah or Vedic screed.
Tellingly, in the Islamic world, books are in ludicrously short supply: everything is focused on the Koran, which is very often owned and studied by everyone and anyone who can read; most other books are either political or practical volumes designed as dry information, not entertainment. International booksellers will confirm that a bestseller in the Islamic world is a few thousand copies, despite the millions of potential customers: they’re all reading the Koran. Let’s not even discuss the state of ‘graven images’.

Anyway; I wonder very much if the bizarre rarification attached to the plain old book-book in Western ideas isn’t due to (as usual) a combination of factors involving past religious constraints, prejudice against images, and comparative expense of bound volumes. Remember, when Abe Lincoln accidentally ruined a borrowed book, he did a shitload of work to pay for its replacement. Books were historically horribly expensive: if someone went to the cost of binding up their ideas, chances were good it was either for the Church, and therefore holy, or being presented to rich folk and therefore important.
I suspect, even relatively late in the life of Xtianity (18-1900s), books tended to be judged on a basis of how they stacked up against ‘The Big Book of Ideas and Law’ (the bible).

I guess the perception of my chosen art format is a matter of half-full, half-empty; I was reading a book on so-called ‘comics’ the other day, and fairly successful artist referred to the words-plus-pictures format as a ‘bastard’ format. This made me want to kick his ass. I view the format of the graphic novel as possessing the potential to encompass the BEST of both worlds, print and images; I strongly feel there is no reason for either form of communication to be slighted. I consider the format as possessing the advantages of both, and that using the two in conjunction doesn’t devalue either.

Tellingly, I’ve always viewed the images I use as informational, like a police sketch, or a diagram or blueprint: the pictures are designed to communicate information. They could inspire an emotional state, but that too is informational and communicating something to the ‘reader’.

In fact, when lately teaching myself to write, I’ve had in my mind the whole time the idea of ‘painting pictures in words’, a fairly nonsensical practice when I fully posses the ability to simply paint the picture in, well, a picture; it’s just that presenting my stories in a graphic format limits my audience in ways a printed book doesn’t.

Anyway. Frustrating.

Da Book

2009-12-13T16:46:00.000-08:00

Question of the day…

“What is the future of the printed book?”

I’m having to address this in detail at the moment. I’m faced with the fact that the printed book is on its way out, and the odds of continuing books as I’ve crafted them, the graphic novels, are unlikely to make any headway except with so-called ‘bibliophiles’ who have a visceral love for the printed page, a sensual attachment to the book itself. People like that will always be around; after all, there is still a market for newly-pressed needle-played records, and likely always will be.
But my question is how, exactly, to market the books I’ve already completed. The most common format of ‘comics’ and ‘comic strips’ these days is the web comic, published (?) online.
What should I do? Should I re-‘publish’ BRONZEVILLE in a web-based format, on a website? Should I do what I did with THE PIPER, transforming pieces into a pdf-based disc and sell that as an electronic book? Where is all that going?

Personally, I have no real attachment to ‘the book’. To me, it’s all just information, whatever the format or presentation. I like books because they are portable, cheap, and I can borrow them from libraries. Shit, if I had to PURCHASE the books I read, I couldn’t afford 1/100th of what I read: I read an average of 5 books a week, and it’s not paperback fiction, it’s volumes of history and typically hardcover nonfiction that never makes it into paperback at all.
If I could get an e-reader with a sort of downloadable subscription service, I would likely use the shit out of it, much like I get a pretty good value out of NETFLIX.

I’m leaning towards the pdf disc containing books and extra material, much like DVDs are packaged. I think it’s the way to go. But I’m badly thrown at the moment. Badly thrown.

Happy... well, you know.

2009-11-26T08:51:00.001-08:00

Profanity and its use in BRONZEVILLE

2009-11-23T05:36:00.000-08:00

The initial edit of JESUS HAS LEFT CHICAGO was significantly rougher than the end product, BRONZEVILLE. The language, both in use of profanity and racial slurs, was much cruder. I really thought about that, too, and had to consider how an 'artistically licensed' use of racial slurs, even in a work of historical fiction, would be perceived.
The use of constant profanity and racial invective was, at the time of the original writing, more a reflection of what I knew of how people in poor, urban environments talk. Part of the use of street language was to contrast George’s speech when he was ‘on the job’ with his speech and demeanor when at home, or with family friends. This is typical of cops and others who deal with street-level work: people have a way of speaking and communicating, and if you don’t speak ‘street’ they simply don’t understand you.
For example, when I worked as a utility disconnect technician in what I’ll politely call ‘low-income areas’, I had to modify my spiel depending on where I was and who I was talking to. A typical exchange might go like this:

(I knock. A voice shouts, “Who is it?” I indicate I am a utility worker, and not a cop. The door opens.)
“Wachoo want?”
“Good afternoon ma’am, my name is Joel, and I’m a field technician with X Utility. We have a disconnect work order for a resolution of your account. Do you think there is anything we can do about this issue today?”
“HUH?!”
(Deep breath)
“X Folks. I’m shuttin off your shit”.
“WHAT!!?? I TOLD THEM MOTHERFUCKERS-“

You get the idea.
I eventually elected to limit and minimize the use of swearing and racial slurs mostly in recognition of what the audience for the book probably would be, that is, people not really used to nonstop trash talk (like I am), and who would and could take it as deliberately provocative or assaultive, which was really not my intent. So I limited the use of racial slurs and profanity in the final edit.
Also, I’m hypersensitive to the possibility of crossing a line in the perception of a public in the USA who, at the time I started composing full book-length ‘graphic novels’, still viewed such things as ‘funny books’. I had a couple of encounters with people who perused the original edit and were obviously disturbed and outraged, as they viewed the format itself as suitable for and dedicated to work aimed at the under-10 crowd, and freaked out at finding adult content in a ‘funny book’. I had more than one person blow a gasket, assuming I was aiming my work at an impressionable audience of children, who acted as though I was selling drugs to little kids and luring schoolgirls into prostitution.
That’s a major, critical reason I have no interest in trying to ‘legitimize comics’. I strongly and unshakably feel the best bet for legitimizing printed narrative arts is to link them to narrative art further in the past, and skip over the introduction of the ‘funny papers’ as a divergent format of narrative art.
When people ask me about ‘comic books’, I won’t describe anything I do as ‘comics’. BRONZEVILLE is the only novel I’ve ever done that uses word balloons, even; and I did that as a sop to modern sensibility, which assumes their presence for comprehension purposes. If anyone asks me about the history of my work, I drag out reproductions of illuminated manuscripts, altarpieces, and the Bayeaux Tapestry; the Column of Trajan; Buddhist stupa railings; the frigging Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. ANYTHING but printed ‘funny papers’ or ‘funny books’.
But I’m still deeply paranoid about the public perception of a printed work of narrative art, which classifies such things as childish diversions, and attacks any subject material deviating or digressing from anything more challenging than MUTTS (Which is an amazing piece of, in a drawing sense, cartoon brilliance, and such a piece of, in a written sense, treacle I had trouble reading it my kid when she was 4).

Sketch

2009-11-18T11:37:00.001-08:00

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I've been working on a sort of 'recreation' of war artists from WWII. My charcoal work is getting slightly better.

Falling Down on the Job!

2009-11-13T04:19:00.000-08:00

I've got a few things I should post, but I'm getting really busy at my 'real job' (whatever that means) and haven't had the enrgy to really keep up with things. I'll get something up this weekend.

The Duellists

2009-11-10T03:16:00.001-08:00

I watched this movie on TCM the other day, and was suitably impressed. The costuming/period clothing was pretty close to spot-on, and the depiction of value systems and behavior of the time was effortlessly evoked. My only real, and it came close to wrecking the movie for me, was the sword duels, which were awful. The swordsmanship displayed is purely stage-Shakespeare, bears no relation whatever to any actual use of swords at all, and the fight choreographer should be ashamed of themselves and never stage a fight scene again in their lives.

For real examples of how people actually fought with swords, these people can give you an idea; the only problem is once you experience an actual sword fight, you are ruined for movie fighting for the rest of your life. Sorry.

But that was really my only problem. Well, that and the ending, which sucked. The ending of this film is dumb and makes no sense; but the road to the final showdown is amazing, thought-provoking, and a fascinating ride. Kietel is stone crazy in a very unassuming kind of way, and Keith Carradine, whom I'd last seen in THE LONG RIDERS, is surprisingly good as a sort of hapless soldier who just doesn't understand the implacable insanity of Kietel's character. I liked the lack of RenFair accents, too: the actors talk with their own voices, and this flick doesn't fall into the dreadful carelessness of 'if the movie is set in Europe in any time period anywhere, everyone talks like a high schooler playing Hamlet'. Both Kietel and Carradine talk more like cowboys than anything else, and the effect isn't at all jarring, but actually humanizes them a great deal.

Like I said, the ending sucks, falling into the cliche of good-guy and bad-guy face off in an extended showdown scene, which has been so overdone in other movies forever it's a waste of time; and secondly, the fate of Kietel's character doesn't come close to explaining or satisfying his personality. I found the final disposition of the duel lame and unconvincing.

Big props as well to possibly the coldest (temperature-wise) scene I've ever seen in a movie, ever. I had to drape a blanket over myself, it was so frigging cold-looking.

So, aside from a couple of quibbles, one being unconvincing sword work, the other being a somewhat unsatisfying ending, this movie is a keeper. I'll be watching it again. It's worth it.

KNEX gatling gun.

2009-11-08T11:43:00.000-08:00

We ended up going to the Rockford Discovery Center yesterday, so I didn't do any drawing. But while L made wands, deer, and other things, I crafted this 'gatling gun'. It doesn't actually shoot anything, but when you turn the crank the 'barrels' rotate.

Close enough.

Drawing Tablet

2009-11-07T09:29:00.001-08:00

Last Xmas I was given a drawing tablet for my computer; it's not a really expensive one, but with the reduction in costs of technology now it does anything I could ever want.
It's a 5x7 Genius Pad, and I use it for a lot of things. I highly recommend them.
For work I draw/paint/whatever the piece, and scan it in with a LiDE CanoScan 600F.
You know, I can't believe how cheap all this stuff is now. It's incredible. I'll post tomorrow about my first computer system! (and how much the setup cost!)

Ethnic Tensions...

2009-11-06T04:14:00.000-08:00

During the long, slow process of mulling over the book I’d created, for reasons I won’t go into, I traveled to the Balkan area in the early 1990s, specifically what was at the time called ‘The Former Republic of Yugoslavia’.
Now, over the years and as a result of living in questionable, sketchy, and just plain crime-ridden places, I felt myself pretty accustomed to environments of violence, ethnic tension, and cultural and racial conflict.
THAT place, though, took every demented fantasy of revenge, ethnic bigotry, and human hatred and took that corrosive, flammable cocktail, stuffed it in a bottle, made it into a bomb, lit it, and blew it up. After a while I came to the realization I was witnessing the very logical conclusion of every racial epithet, every ethnic slur, every vicious desire buried in the soul of human beings. It was the end result of human intolerance, prejudice, and inability to forgive or grow. It was every negative characteristic of the human condition, supercharged and let loose.
I’m a pretty tough person, and that’s no shit; but THOSE fucking people! Jesus. I simply couldn’t keep up with the sheer level of hate, and ultimately couldn’t cope with it as a social force.
When I got back to the USA I had utterly lost patience with racial and ethnic tension and conflict. I’d had enough.
In dealing with BRONZEVILLE, the aspect of the story that seemed to elicit the most interest was the aspect I liked the least, and after the FRY, I had absolutely no interest whatsoever in fomenting, encouraging, enabling or creating anybody’s ethnic hatreds and/or paranoid ideas.

We are at the edge of a clearing, looking out at buildings that look intact from here but I know are ruined. I light up a cigarette and hand another to the man next to me. He asks me, in heavily accented but pretty good English, “Where are you from?” I answer with the name of the nearest large city: “Chicago”.
He sputters: “Chicago!” and throws his head back. It’s an overcast day, and surprisingly warm for the season. The man grins at me and says, “Al Capone!” and then he raises his AK and waves it around, making ‘ack-ack-ack’ noises, like a boy playing war, except he is very much for real. He turns back to me and says, “So then you are used to this sort of thing!” and breaks into high-pitched chuckling.

Self-thinking

2009-11-05T04:16:00.000-08:00

During the time period I was thinking about the story, and trying to establish what it was I wanted out of it, and what I wanted it to say, a few things came into the mix. I was uncomfortable with the 'drug angle' of the story, and I did need to know exactly why that was so.
It’s arguable I was uncomfortable about describing a rumor that feeds into Black paranoia about White plots, being White; my hesitance to put my name on an explosive accusation could easily be seen as squeamishness about incriminating myself. So I thought about that. But really, the fact that I am White had little or nothing to do with my discomfort.
For starters, I’ve always lived in ‘minority neighborhoods’; as a child, as a teenager, as an adult. I’ve spent years as a racial minority myself in Black and Hispanic neighborhoods, and believe it or not, have significantly more experience with Black and Hispanic people than anybody else.

Actually, try being the ONLY White guy in a Black neighborhood. You become a lightning rod for everyone’s life frustrations, and in particular racial and ethnic rage. If I had a dollar for every time a Black person threatened, insulted, or assaulted me because of my race, I… well, I wouldn’t be rich, but I’d be driving a much nicer car.
I think my discomfort at fomenting an explosive rumor was made up of two parts: firstly, a desire to not add to racial suspicion and paranoia. I had (and still have) a fair level of sheer personal frustration at being perceived as a non-person by the people around me. A lot of urban Black people have little or no personal contact with White people, and truly believe Whites are a monolithic bloc of evil oppressors, and all some folks could see about me was that. I was not seen as an individual, with aspirations, struggles, problems of my own; I was iconic, a representative of something that, in reality, I had very little to do with.
So part of it had to do with my desire to express the statement, “Look, I get it! I understand you’ve been oppressed, continue to be oppressed, and will likely continue to be oppressed. I get it! I understand! Now stop shooting at my house and calling me ‘cumface”. In part the story was and is an expression of my feeling that there are certain human experiences and emotions that are universal, shared, and create a common ground. The subject material, of fear of failure, of financial, political, and spiritual struggle, is to me universal; and that part is a big part of me and, I strongly believe, transcends race or culture.

Inserting a divisive element into the story that created even the possibility for renewed animosity bothered me immensely, and didn't fit with what I wanted out of it.

Further thinking

2009-11-03T03:14:00.000-08:00

I also found myself deeply uncomfortable with the ending being the death of George Handman’s son, which represented the destruction of all his hopes, dreams, and efforts at the hands of uncaring, omnipotent, and flatly evil people. The crushing destruction at the end of the book was not only depressing but terribly nihilistic (and while I was debating how to handle that, something else came up to change the tenor of the story).
The original intent of having Geroge’s son killed was summed up in the final line of the original edit, in which, on VJ Day, a White cop tells George, “War’s over man, war’s over”, and George responds, “This one is… but there’s another one coming”.
The implication was, to me, historical: this was set in 1945, and I was trying to imply the future Civil Rights battles of the 1960s. However, I overestimated the historical knowledge of even well-educated Americans, and most people who read the piece didn’t pick up on the historical basis, and instead simply took it as an incendiary call-to-arms, mentally and emotionally transposing the story to the present day without taking it as historical fiction.
I didn’t care for that, and there is a reason why.

BRONZEVILLE story development

2009-11-02T02:52:00.000-08:00

The original draft was, like I said, entitled JESUS HAS LEFT CHICAGO.
I wrote and illustrated a story that concerned a heroin appearing in Chicago, and two cops looking for the source of the drug, one cop White, one Black. They move brutally through the low-level Black community, stopping at nothing to find the source of the heroin. The Black detective is tormented by his own role in brutalizing his own people over drugs, and the story ends with his son being killed in Europe during the Battle of the Bulge. While trying to cope with his loss, and being spiritually ravaged by his participation in oppressing his own race, he finds out the heroin they are finding is the product of the US Government, being brought into Chicago by Mexicans and sold to Blacks with the collusion of the Government.
The first draft of JESUS HAS LEFT CHICAGO ends with a savage and almost unreadable letter written by George to his dead son, expressing incoherent rage and begging his dead son for forgiveness.
I read this draft over several times, and handed it to people for perusal (this was in the early 1990s); and to an individual, everyone read it and, looking at me bug-eyed, asked, “Is this TRUE!?”
At first I didn’t fully understand, and explained the story is fictional, the family is fictional, etc. but finally figured out people latched onto the paranoid lore of the US growing drugs and selling it to Black people in order to enslave them.
This effect kind of alarmed me.
I have NO IDEA whether the US went into Mexico and set up drug-growing operations, any more than I’m at all convinced the CIA invented crack as a racist plot. I just don’t know. And the violent, embittered, explosive rant at the end of the book, I realized, which I had written up as a logical conclusion of the character, was a LOT more explosive than I had really thought. In other words, I just hadn’t thought about the ramifications of such an accusation, even in a work of nominal fiction.
The more I thought about it, the less I liked the sensationalistic aspects of ‘Government plot to enslave the Black race through drug distribution’, and got more and more uneasy with the divisive and potential for racial outrage embedded in the basic idea of the story. I had truly not considered the effect of changing the race of the main character, and what effect it would have on the perception of the drug angle.
I decided to sit on it for another while.

Happy Halloween!

2009-10-31T17:14:00.000-07:00

The Photographs, Part Four

2009-10-30T14:18:00.000-07:00

('George' and 'Marie' with Jesus prints)

The photographs made me think, and in trying to make some sense of how this entire family’s history got thrown away; their struggles and failures, their efforts and stories, the whole thing bothered me. And, over time, I merged this family with the story I’d been working on for all that time.
I changed one of the cops to a Black police detective, and from there huge amounts of fascinating material presented itself; I read accounts of the Black experience in the larger cities of the Midwest during the first half of the 20th Century, and over time the main character of George Handman came to life, became sympathetic and empathetic, and breathed and came alive.
I kept with the Chicago setting, for convenience and because it was far and away the source of the most information on the time period and historical setting; and Chicago was, in many ways, THE destination for Southern Blacks both before and during World War II.
In the course of describing the life and work of George Handman, the images of ‘Bob’ from the real family stuck with me, and I decided to use the mechanism of the main character’s son joining the Army as a symbol of the family’s aspirations and struggle for success. So in the rough drafts there is a parallel story, along with the ‘Mexican heroin’ angle, of George exchanging letters with his son, of encouragement, thoughts, and worries. I read through collections of letters from World War II and wrote up some of my own, with the father and son pouring out their feelings and thoughts to each other, continents away.
The letters, written as a humanizing device for the story, took on a life and meaning of their own, and in the letters the story changed and deepened.

The Photographs, Part Three

2009-10-30T14:14:00.000-07:00

I got to the pile before it rained, when all the photographs would have been ruined. I’ve always been grateful for that. I mean, look at this; it’s fairly simple to pick out recurring family members: there is the patriarch, matriarch, probably a grandfather, children. The color snapshots of the boy in the Army are from 1966, and one of them is signed on the reverse, ‘To mom, Love, Bob”.
I remember thinking at the time, and think still, “What happened?”
What happened? These people look prosperous, decent, reasonably well-off. They’re well-dressed, proud, successful. They fool around at parties, gather at events; they pose with cars and in nice suits in chairs for formal portraits. How did all this potential, all this history, end in a stinking pile of trash, gathered into plastic bags, most likely by hairy White guys who couldn’t care less, dumped in a muddy field in some bumblefuck place with nothing much to recommend it? To be found by a skinny, battered White kid out poaching for a rabbit.
I’ve saved these photographs for more than twenty years. I have no idea who they are, their names, where they are from, nothing. I pulled this anonymous family’s history out of a trash pile, out of garbage bags, saved it from the rain, because… why?
I think their history, no matter how fragmented or small, deserved preservation.

The Photographs, Part Two

2009-10-25T12:07:00.001-07:00

Some time after that, while working on other things, I was out hunting rabbits in a clear area a few miles from where I lived at the time, and ran across a pile of trash dumped illegally at the end of a dirt track.
To explain, at the time I lived in a grubby little failed industrial town in the Upper Midwest. To those who believe poverty, crime, filthiness, ignorance, and drug and alcohol abuse are somehow limited to ‘Big Cities’, allow me to inform you otherwise. The Midwest is dotted with villages, hamlets, towns, and small cities of anywhere from 10,000 inhabitants to upwards of 70,000 souls, all dependent in some degree on manufacturing and heavy industry, all of which to one degree or another have, since the 1970s, been hard hit by globalization and economic changes. I don’t know if anyone else call it this, but I call it ‘The Rustbelt Archipelago’.
These are rusting, decaying places, improving if at all in fits and starts, dependent on old people’s pensions, welfare payments, and government aid. Jobs are slim pickings, and tend to run either to relatively highly-paid blue-collar work or to miserable minimum-wage, short-hour jobs. They tend to be depressing places. I don’t care what anyone says to the contrary. Without earned income credits for the mobs of ill-raised kids and government grants and old people’s pensions, these places would collapse not tomorrow, but today. Period.
Anyway, that’s the kind of place I lived in.
These places are also quite commonly very segregated. White, Black, and Hispanic tend to cluster in clearly defined areas of the towns, and rarely intermix. It’s one of the features that make them so isolating: nobody interacts with anything but people exactly the same as themselves, and the result is a form of spiritual and cultural inbreeding that stifles thought and progression. But I digress.
So I was out hunting. Actually, I was technically poaching, but there were plenty of rabbits and not a lot of money for store food, so I decided to go get a rabbit, and the brush piles in this particular place were perfect hunting grounds. And there I ran across the trash pile.
It was obviously the product of an apartment cleanout. Someone had been evicted, or skipped out on rent, or something similar, and the cleanout crew or owner had stuffed the entire contents of the unit into heavy trash bags, salvaged boxes, and cheap tarps, trucked it out to a field to avoid disposal fees, and dumped it illegally. The majority of the stuff was the usual… shit. Broken particle board ‘entertainment center’ with contact paper over it, kitchen chairs with tape over the slashes in the cushions, filthy overstuffed furniture, melamine dishes, sticky children’s toys; the usual collection of papers and documents that poor, borderline literate people collect in grocery bags and never examine, organize, or regularly pay. I’ve done HUNDREDS of these cleanouts for apartment buildings, and it’s always depressing seeing the crappy stuff people carry around and value. And it all smells like cheap detergent, cigarette smoke, and roach spray. There is a specific smell that you can never forget. It’s everpresent, and always smells the same. I can catch a whiff off someone at WalMart and think, ‘I know exactly how you live”. It’s as distinctive as the smell of rotting human bodies, and to me has the same effect; one is physical death, the other is spiritual.
In the piles of stuff, which I of course examined to see if anyone inadvertently tossed alcohol or perhaps a baggie of dope or maybe a Band-Aid box with money in it (it’s happened), I found the family photographs. These were mostly bad, red-eyed snapshots of family members, of a Black family. Most of the photos displayed what I expected to see: dirty kids in diapers, badly dressed cousins, aunties, undetermined relatives, all taken in cheap apartments and the pounded-out yards of subsidized apartment complexes. Welfare people. However, buried in the photos were the following treasures.

The Photographs, Part One

2009-10-25T12:00:00.000-07:00

The original story was kicked off by a mention in ‘Papa’ Thorsen’s paperback thriller/memoir/fantasy narrative, THE HUNTER. In this book there is a bit of Southern California folklore stating that some of the morphine the military used during World War II was made from poppies the US Government planted and cultivated in Mexico, and that the appearance of cheap ‘Mexican Brown’ heroin after WWII was made possible by the introduction of poppy fields into Mexico by the USA.
Now, this is literally an unknown; I have no idea if it’s true or not. It smacks very much of the ‘CIA inventing crack’, which is also a SoCal nugget of folklore. For all I know both stories are true. It’s entirely possible. And equally probable both stories are paranoid delusions. Who knows?
At any rate, the idea made for an interesting departure pint for a Noir-type story set during WWII, which I turned around for a while, with a premise of diverted ‘Mexican morphine’ being sold during WWII, when the supply of real heroin stopped more or less completely (a documented fact confirmed both by the ever-unreliable and self-contradictory Bill Burroughs and, more credibly, Joe Valachi of THE VALACHI PAPERS). That story had to do with a couple of AWOL vets trying to sell stolen morphine in Chicago, running afoul of everyone, and… I never did come up with an ending. It’s an interesting idea that never really went anywhere.
However, I continued turning it around and around over a period of time, and in maneuvering the characters around the central core of the story, I mulled over the idea of changing the emphasis from the veterans to the police finding opium products in Chicago during WWII, when the drug had been nonexistent, and trying to find out where it came from, both for the police and for the mobsters they’re beholden to. So the story rotated around a central premise of ‘Hop appearing in Chicago during WWII’, but changing from more of a noir to a police procedural in the vein of THE NAKED CITY.
At that point I had a totally unformed and unspecified tale of a cop hunting for war veterans with an extremely valuable item, trying to get to them before other cops and the mob. At that point the story was entitled JESUS HAS LEFT CHICAGO. At the time I just kind of liked the title, and believe it or not, didn’t realize the title was a subliminal recollection of the ZZ TOP lyric:

“Jesus just left Chicago,
with his suitcase in his hand”.

The Basis for George Handman

2009-10-25T11:48:00.001-07:00

More Photographs

2009-10-25T11:47:00.001-07:00

The Photographs

2009-10-25T11:46:00.001-07:00

cop.

2009-10-23T17:25:00.001-07:00

Experiment with frontspiece.

2009-10-23T17:24:00.000-07:00

William Johnson influence

2009-10-23T17:22:00.000-07:00

I worked on several pieces concerning Johnson's technique and style, trying to see if it ws appropriate to the material. I decided it wasn't, but there is another aspect of looking the stuff up that led to another thing.

Bronzeville, preliminary

2009-10-23T17:21:00.001-07:00

I guess it's worthwhile pointing out the original title was JESUS HAS LEFT CHICAGO.

Last one.

2009-10-23T17:01:00.000-07:00

Another kid, German soldier. This is the kind of portrait artists would do to communicate, nearing the end, how young a lot of the soldiers were.

World War II Days 2009, weasel.

2009-10-23T17:00:00.000-07:00

WEASEL!

World War II Days, US soldier

2009-10-23T16:58:00.000-07:00

I liked this one a lot. The guy looks quintessentially 'American', and it's exactly the kind of spot portrait US war artists would dash off to depict American 'types'.

You get the idea.

2009-10-23T16:57:00.000-07:00

This guy was outside a radio and communications center set up in a house. Technical Sergeant.

Midway Village World War II Days, 3

2009-10-23T16:56:00.001-07:00

This knowledgeable and delightful gentleman was portraying an Italian mountain trooper. They had a wide variety of odd, unseen, and rare items. Very interesting.

Midway Village World War II Days, 2

2009-10-23T16:54:00.000-07:00

This is actually from someone else's photostream online, flickr, I believe, before I went, to practice. This kid was a German soldier.

World War II Days, 2009

2009-10-23T16:50:00.000-07:00

At the reenactment at Rockford's Midway Village, I decided to take my sketchbook along and do some 'combat' sketches, in the same vein as the LIFE artists during the time period. This is an interesting aspect of being 42 years old, with a beard: it's hard to pass for a 'soldier'. The above is a spot sketch of one of the 82nd Airborne emplacements.

St Knud Altarpiece

2009-10-19T17:14:00.001-07:00

Pictorial theories of BRONZEVILLE

2009-10-16T04:00:00.000-07:00

The original idea for the book was to create all the backgrounds as photographic reference and hae the characters airbrushed into the pictures.

It turned out to not be practical at the time of composition. It's important to note BRONZEVILLE, in its original incarnation, was completed in... 1990. My avenues of visual composition were limited, and my access to easily copied and reduced/enlarged photographs or photocopies of setttings was not anywhere up to the task; so I decided to mostly airbrush the entire thing with a few exceptions. There are a few much-modified photographs in the book, and I made sure to change them in some significant way so as not to simply reproduce them.

Divergence and film

2009-10-15T04:58:00.000-07:00

I've often wondered where, exactly, or in what time period, the use of visual narrative separated into 'print' (which is now considered 'comics' by definition in the Western world) and 'film', which constitutes the simple addition of simulated motion within scenes structured into a narrative. I mean really, a 'film' is a collection of set pieces, arranged into a story, with simulated motion and movement within the sequences. That's it. Film is a light-projected version of narrative art, and that's all.

Actually, it seems 'magic lantern' slides, projected on screens for assembled audiences and accompanied by narration and sometimes sound effects, were common and popular prior to the introduction of motion film. So, at base, 'film' is a format (of narrative art) rather than a unique medium (of art in general). Film is a subspecies.

It's interesting to see that in the early days of film, people didn't really know what to even call it, and seemed unclear on what to use it for. Most histories emphasize the aspect of 'picture stock' and the use of film itself, which is simply a technical innovation, and then ignore the critical aspect of its function as narrative art and where it fits within the medium of narrative art.

(Another) Pet Peeve: This, or This.

2009-10-14T03:18:00.000-07:00

The modern equation of narrative arts with cartooning. I hate that pairing with an almighty passion. I do not accept it and never will. It drives me nuts. On attending the Wisconsin Book Festival this last weekend, I perused the material on 'comics' etc. and there it was again, the old bugaboo: talking about narrative, graphic art in the same breath as 'comics', the extended version of the 'cartoon'.

Why, oh why is the action of placing a series in images in sequence to describe a story arc so vulnerable to the accusation of 'comics'? and why, oh why, are the composers of such work so accepting of the (to me perjorative) term of 'comics'?

I strongly believe the drawings/visuals of the narrative art form can be cartoons, but by no means exclusively; in fact for most of the time period of use of the hand-drawn or -created narrative artwork, the visuals were quite deliberately NOT cartoonish or in any way intended to be so.

The visuals, in antiquity, were very much iconic and in many ways symbolic, but that in no way makes them 'cartoons' and the visuals should never, ever be interpreted as such. There is a big difference between the use of exaggerated physiognomy to create an amusing or easily-absorbed image, and the use of a set and revered mathematical or artistic pattern to create an iconic narrative.

Time

2009-10-13T03:14:00.000-07:00

Something I really like about the graphic novel, and an an intrinsic aspect of the form that's kind of rarely used in most commercial aspects of the format, is the ability to extend time. Using a spread page, for instance, replicates the 'fixed image' use of a single painting (I coined for myself the term 'static art' for single-image art, and I use 'narrative art' to describe any other use of representative images in sequence). On a single page, multiple images with minimal use of printed words tends to speed up the consumption of information, and lead to faster storytelling speed; in the case of a large, single image, it tends to 'slow down' the pace of the story, and in effect slow down time.

So time is a critical use of the format, a use and potential that I think justifies its use for certain things above and beyond the formats of film or the printed word.

For influences in film, the later movies of Sergio Leone, specifically ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST, were a huge influence on slowing down pacing in ways most directors or composers are afraid to do; another influence was Tarkovsky's STALKER. Interestingly, both films deliberately use natural and artifical noises (in both cases electronic tones) to accent and define scenes, characters, and impending events. I strongly think printed sound effects and dialogue can have the same function in the graphic novel, and the use of print styles, and inventive layouts of letters and words, can not only accompany the work but be an integral part of it.

I love the way time can be slowed and then simply stopped in the graphic novel. Admittedly, it's a little harder to 'speed up' the pacing.

Bronzeville, example

2009-10-12T09:59:00.000-07:00

The idea behind BRONZEVILLE's 'look' was the concept that there should be a discernable, clear, and justifiable reason for a book or novel to take the graphic form, as opposed to a prose approach or a filmic approach.

A couple of things convinced me BRONZEVILLE could be served well through the approach of a graphic novel.

First was the intense focus, during the 1940s, on The Photograph; that is, during World War II, the overwhelming emphasis, much more so than during The Great War or any significant previous historical event, was on the Black and White Photograph. I think the 'social record' aspect of the photograph began during the WPA projects of the 1930s; prior to that, snapshot-type cameras had been very common, and photographs in magazines and newspapers were almost required to boost distribution and 'readership', but the scale of photography during World War II was something new. If doing a book set during the 1940s, presenting the story as depicted in a sort of 'photo essay' style made sense.

Secondly, the use of TIME in graphic novels is extremely critical; the content of a printed page doesn't require the framing of as much physically elapsed time by the viewer/reader. Since BRONZEVILLE is basically 'built' around a series of exchanged letters, the ability to compress the time required by the spoken word (as in a movie voice-over) in the form of a single printed page, is critical for certain things, not least of which is, say, a written letter. With the graphic novel format of visual narrative, the two impulses can be blended together: the visuals can speed up time, the printed words can slow it down.

So the two dominating principles leading to BRONZEVILLE being completed in the graphic novel format were 1) artistic style appropriate to the time period (photography) and 2) the ability to hybridize the paper page to contain both visuals and print (the letters).

Newly Back up...

2009-09-23T03:26:00.001-07:00

I'm back up with graphic works after getting exhausted about the whole process last year.