"NO! THIS IS ENOUGH! I DON'T WANT ANY MORE OF THIS, NO! NO! STOP!"
Good. I look less surprising at the age of forty-eight than Little Nemo here, but that's still no excuse for not getting on with things – not that I haven't been entirely okay with not getting on with things this past year, and not that I'm not entirely supportive of the absence of resolutions for the coming year. But while 2022 saw me comfortably protected from most of the year's crises by jobs and a nice big bedroom, I've no guarantee 2023 will do the same, so some kind of "project" might be an idea, as fortune at least favours a moving target.
The Med, from which I'm now back.
That project probably won't be this blog though. It's
not just the holiday that's caused my contributions to thin. I thought
about doing a big New Year's Dump of my favourite unposted
photographs from 2022, but could never get beyond trying to caption the photo from January below, simply because I couldn't think of anything to say about it.
It's only now that I realise that's probably exactly what I had to say about it: that this photo represented a cycle of me going outside,
into Kensington, and coming back with absolutely nothing to say, and realisations like that are what this blog is great for – coming up with ideas as I'm writing. But putting the time into a post which an idea might deserve is ungaugeable when you've decided to turn out one a day. And it's the not coming up with ideas that takes up so much, well, everything.
Also, I've finally worked out how to download Word onto this old laptop. So if I like something now I'll just share it on twitter (as long as that's around,) and if I have some pictures I have nothing to add to I'll share them on instagram (oh, if my new, even worse phone's memory lets me, I've just remembered.) Otherwise I'll take notes a bit more privately in 2023, and try to find some other blank pages to stare at. And maybe this is just the January talking. But it's January's turn. Let's hear it out.
"Recently my secretary came to work one morning, and she said that her
little boy had come home from school the previous afternoon, had removed
his jacket, had thrown it down on the living room couch, and had said -
Mom, I feel like Charlie Brown... And all of a sudden it occurred to me,
after all these years: this is the purpose of Charlie Brown."
Back to the dawing board: here's more treasure from the BBC Archive, to honour what would have been Charles Monroe Schulz's hundredth birthday today. Buying old Peanuts paperbacks as a child, I felt let into an
unusally adult kind of comedy, at least as funny as, but more emotionally astute than the
anarchic, boggle-eyed output of British kid's comics, and the fact that this comedy's
protagonists were people my age was, in hindsight, incredibly important. It meant you didn't have to be adult to be human. Your
feelings were valid regardless, and not just something to be marked right or
wrong.
I actually miss the tone of these pre-junket-era interviews: "I think the one overwhelming reason why your work is so popular here in
England, where very largely we think of ourselves as being a
Post-Christian Society, is that here's a man who really knows how
terrible life is. Are you happy to be looked at in that way?" asks Peter
France of the author of Happiness Is A Warm Puppy.
The Art Department called these "Visual Notebooks" when they gave them out, as if a thirteen-year-old me was going to fill it with sketches of passers-by or bark rather than a page and a half of an unfinished Watchmen spoof. But here is all that remains of all that was started of something I seem to remember I called "The X-Ceptions". Also an obvious influence on these few frames is The Dark Knight Returns, and possibly The Killing Joke, which is why I'm dating this 1988 (and I appear to have thought that giving the Joker an upturned nose instead of a pointy one counts as pastiche). Having lovingly referenced these three core works however – note the wobbly lines around Pscychoe's speech bubble* – I seem to have immediately run out of ideas, so who knows what role in this dark epic "The Lilac Librarian", "Incy-Wincy-Splat" or whatever that Swamp-Thing-looking thing on the left were meant to have played? ("Doc God" I like.)
* Sure, I noticed that. But not the fact John Higgin's colours weren't totally boring. I think this must be why I got a B.
Pictures from a burnt book taken with a broken phone, to honour an artist who, more than any other, helped me realise my place was among monsters. The book is the 1988 2000AD annual – published in 1987 – and the pictures are from a feature asking its creative team of "droids" to choose their favourite covers from previous year. Of the eighteen images chosen, six are by Kevin O'Neill. Hyperbole is the comic book's stock-in-trade, but "thrill power" was a real thing, and O'Neill drew covers you just really wanted to show people, like something inexplicable found under a hedge or a world opening up in your satchel. Sorry for these poor reproductions but maybe new-comers shouldn't see these too clearly...
chosen by Glenn Fabry
chosen by Brendan McCarthy
chosen by Pat Mills
chosen by Cam Kennedy
chosen by Bryan Talbot
And Kevin O'Neill operated on my brain. Thanks, Kevin, and I'm deeply sorry you left today.
I'd not noticed the Medusa outside Tate Britain before. Henry C. Fehr's The Rescue of Andromeda isn't the only depiction I've seen in which Perseus and the woman's head he brandishes look identical – I don't know the reason for that (and I haven't bought Natalie Haynes' new book yet, so it might get explained there) – but it's the only depiction I've seen in which Medusa's hair is bound. I suppose that's a sensible precaution, although it's possible Fehr just couldn't be bothered with all the snakes. It's odd that Perseus is also holding a sword though: he's about to turn a sea monster into stone, what was the plan?
Similarly bound and held at arm's length, I realised, is the head in the centre of Francis Bacon's Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. Not "the Crucifixion" I now note. According to Bacon they're Furies: raging demons from Greek Tragedy broken into the Christian Iconography of a triptych. The artist decided in 1944 that pity was no longer enough I guess. Every time I walk into that room of the Tate I'm fifteen again, seeing those girning horrors in that orange boom for the very first time, and recognising the one in the middle from Swamp Thing's first trip to Hell. "Flutch" Alan Moore called him in that. Pencils by Stephen R. Bisette. Inks by John Totleben. Outside of comics I suppose it's odd for a drawing to have two artists, but I looked at those drawings a lot.
Another triptych was playing in the dark round the corner: John Akomfrah's gorgeous The Unfinished Conversation, a study of the immigrant intellectual life of the Stuart Hall who didn't present It's A Knockout. And thread through the whole building, Hew Locke's mighty Procession. Two new highlights. I can't remember when I last spent as long there – I went Monday; it might be where I picked up the bug – I really recommend going.
Not every power would be relevant to every challenge. Reed understood this even if Sue didn't. Still, he was glad he'd brought the ropes along. It was nice to have something to do...
A classic Jack Kirby cover – which my friend Alex Fitch got Stan Lee to sign for my birthday! – and which, decades earlier, I ripped off, from memory – (I hadn't noticed the other eye) – for the front of a Conan spoof I then never got round to drawing.
As with yesterday's untitled Jaws parody, I start out with a straight steal, this time from Mad's "Superduperman!" (viewable here, although our paperback version at home was in black and white, making Lois Pain – far right - far more prominent in the opening splash)...
... and then I wander off. It's possible nevertheless I was at the height of my creative powers here. I would have had to come up with my own solutions to depicting stuff before I was proficient enough to start copying styles, and both the grizzly robot/monster hybrid and the balding, pot-bellied editor are surprisingly elegant, I think, considering – like the ripples yesterday. I'm also reminded of these fish I drew...
I'm not sure I could design anything so simple and effective now.
The Tarzan's just background, I think. I still don't really understand muscles. Sorry there was so little poop.
Or maybe seven. That's my excuse for the "you're"/"your" confusion. The first page is missing, as you can see, so I don't know now what pun on Jaws I used as a title. The layout's based on paperback reprints of EC's "Mad" which we had around the house, as are some of the panels:
Characters in Mad parodies would occasionally break character to ask "How's your mom, Ed?" I didn't know why*, but it hopefully explains some of what follows. I hadn't seen Jaws, obviously, but I assumed the film followed the plot of King Kong, which Mad had also parodied, (source):
I didn't follow the plot of King Kong either though, because I was six. Clearly I stuff every frame with as much extraneous detail as my felt tips would let me, in the Mad style, but the way I depict things emerging from the water is actually quite minimalist and, I'd even go so far as to say, elegant. I'm pleased. Minimalism and elegance were big in 1980, as were were sharks. I remember, I had a big book that taught me how to draw "sea monsters" in four steps. A shark was a cone with two eyes and gills. It's all coming back now.
This is too long an introduction for what follows though. Sorry.
... are even more horrifying than Cornelis Saftleven's. Having said last Thursday how rare it was to see seventeenth-century Dutch artists tackle medieval demons and animal allegories, I notice this week that "Monster Brains" has put up another one, so maybe it's not. Egbert van Heemskerck's style – or styles in fact, because there were two painters called Egbert van Heemskerck around at the time, apparently unrelated, maybe even three according to wikipedia, and noone knows who painted what – anyway, his/their style is far less photo-realistic than Saftleven's, and I don't just mean worse – maybe cruder, but that's part of its terrifying power, and I'm pretty sure the pictures are meant to terrify. One picture is anyway. Not the sketch above, that's just a bit of fun (apparently satirising the British Navy). The harder stuff I've decided to spare you, unless you're absolutely sure you want to see a painting called "The Monkey Surgeon".
Let me describe "The Monkey Surgeon". It looks like it could have been painted in a single night, or maybe even a minute: It shows a darkened operating room lit by a
single, smoking brazier, crowded with braying, misshapen animals, eys and teeth glinting in the murk. A pig's head and other offal fill two buckets on the floor, while a split
ox's carcass and other, less identifiable animal shreds hang from the ceiling. In the centre, its muzzle hidden beneath a blood-stained turban, something pulls the entrails from a kitten.
Today was spent finally catching up with Sarah Airress' engrossing account, over more than a year's worth of blogging, of her trip to Antarctica, to research a graphic adaptation of Apsley Cherry-Garrard's memoir of Scott's 1911 Terra Nova expedition, The Worst Journey In The World. I hope Sarah doesn't mind if I share some of it here.
From The One Show, April, 2020
Emotional, educational, and beautifully documented with her own
photographs, the trip to McMurdo took place two Novembers ago,
months before Covid saw the rest of us having to rethink our living
arrangements, and Airress was there for a month. But her account, begun in September of 2019, has continued to run on until at least last Saturday, which is what I powered through today, transported by every paragraph.
One of the interesting things I learnt: In dry air, minus 10ºC can still feel "very mild".
Most recently, she wrote about her visit to the remains of an already misshapen stone igloo that "Cherry" built in 1911, during the disastrous journey to find Emperor Penguin eggs that gave his memoir its title, and she quoted his return to the base hut:
Bread and jam, and cocoa; showers of questions; "You know this is the
hardest journey ever made," from Scott; a broken record of George Robey
on the gramophone which started us laughing until in our weak state we
found it difficult to stop. ... Then into my warm blanket bag, and I
managed to keep awake just long enough to think that Paradise must be
something like this.
We slept ten thousand years ... [301]
I looked out the George Robey, and could only find something from 1913. Still, I thought it might give me a taste, and tried to imagine men who only twenty-four hour hours earlier had been so uncomfortable that they willingly risked death, laughing themselves silly to this:
It was alright, I suppose. Not as ticklish as I'd hoped, I thought, but tastes had clearly changed. Then I re-read what Cherry wrote: "a broken record of George Robey on the gramophone"... A broken record! And immediately I could hear them, high as kites, their past no more distant than my own.
From Sarah's record of the 28-sleeping Cape Evans hut (source).
About her return towards the end of 2019, Airress writes of the "thin places" – an apparently Celtic term, and possible improvement upon the word "liminality" which I've been trying to find a replacement for for years now. You can see, and indeed buy, more of Sarah's work here. And her brilliant visualisations of John Finnemore's Cabin Pressure, which is how I first knew about her, are viewable here.
As soon as it gets cold and dark the lights can go up. I'm fine with that.
Continuing to wind up the review of my favourite or at least more conspicuous posts from the last twelve months, November saw a lot of these going up late – over a week late sometimes – but I made up for it in the end, and the delay actually made it easier to work out what I was going to write, so there are a lot of posts I like from November but this one made me smile the most. It provides a nice coda to September's complaint of feeling like I hadn't really "recovered the knack of experiencing", and as a return to Forbidden Planet also ties in nicely with July. I'd pretty much forgotten I'd written it – I'm thinking a lot about schools, aren't I? – but the argument I stumble across for at least one way in which comics are superior to books still seems sound. It's nominally from Thursday, November the 5th...
Can you see a white arrow in the centre? I think you can press that.
The
following four posts will all begin with me confessing that I'm posting
them on the evening of Saturday the seventh. Now I've cleared the air,
here is a video of Forbidden Planet that I took on Monday before the
second lockdown. It's a bookmark more than a record: I was feeling
something, and thought if I took a video of the place where I felt it,
it might help me to remember it – as good a use for my new phone as any I suppose.
I tried to describe this feeling later to Joel Morris and Will Maclean
whom I happily bumped into at the queue for the cashier upstairs. Will had just had a book published.
It was now in the shops. We had coffee, our shopping at our feet, and
were happy. Men of our age had not been the majority in the shop
however; it was full of girls now – not women, girls – doing what we'd
done as boys: looking for worlds built on messages. The toys were
upstairs on the ground floor but here in the basement were the warnings,
the comics that let you know the future might be cruel and that coping
might mean fighting in bright colours. It felt peaceful because comics
make no noise, even when they're full of fighting. That's what I was
feeling, and although I hadn't read any recently and I'm always in
Forbidden Planet and was never into super-heroes, for a spot of time
just before I took out my camera, I felt
like I was looking round an old school again, a school I had been
allowed to
choose for myself. The covers on the shelves facing outwards felt like
allies, a
feeling I don't get in bookshops. Covers of books without pictures have
scenery on their cover, or handwriting, and rarely look at you with the
faces of young people ready to fight your corner.
Pithy punchline from C.G.P.O. there. I wouldn't be aware of "Quee-er" as a gay slur until I saw Five Go Mad In Dorset a few years later. And I remember being shamefully aware of how little Pham Shmoelo looked like Harrison Ford, but also quite excited to have accidentally captured the likeness of Jack Lord from Hawaii 5-O. I am pretty merciless in my depiction of Mark Hamill's new nose...
"Fab on" indeed! Frame seven of this page contains the first evidence of me knowing that rude body parts and functions are, in theory a staple of comedy, without actually knowing what any of them are called. I would later learn that an appendix is not rude. Barbara Woodhouse was of course a celebrity dog trainer at the time – television's always been turning out reality stars – but I might have spelt her name wrong. However there seems very little guesswork in the design of either the snow steed, the snow beast or the AT-AT, so I was probably using my own toys as models. I also notice. Nice foreground/background stuff in the frame with the spy droid by the way. Nice gag too. I'm also particularly proud of this next visual gag...
Another cracking panel seven, politics of course also being a staple of comedy. Dusty Bin's there too, great. Giant nostrils, yep. Puke is in his vest and pants when he gets kicked off the ship because he
was definitely wearing a vest on Dagobah in the photobook so I assumed he was doing PE. Which he sort of was. And I've clearly abandoned any hope of making Pham Shmoelo look like Harrison Ford now and am just doubling down on the Jack Lord thing. Panel two of the next page features another botched bodily function joke: Is Puke farting, sneezing, burping, shitting? No idea...
"You nerdy jerk!" "Baboons' pants"! What filth was I reading? And why is "a matron" asking for money for seats. Do I mean "usher"? I know jobs have names, again I'm just not quite sure what any of them are. "Your Tallness" is a valid honorific though, and knowing how unpublishable my drawings of Short Round from the The Temple of Doom were, I'm hugely relieved to see how handsome I've made Landoff...
