Original Art Sundays No. 220: Speedy Recovery, pp. 16 and 17

Back on schedule and posting two pages for one week, as a way of thanking readers for tolerating my erratic postings.
When we left, our villain had just laid out and begun the final steps of his mad plot.Speedy and the girls are chained to a dungeon wall, forced to listen as Toby Continued rips open the sonic dimension.
No read on...

Some things that I like here: the overlapping and larger notes, implying escalating volume. The strangely shaped notes on page 17. Speedy's "sour note" is fun!
Also, the lines "Sing along", "But we're dying!" and "you need the practice" are classic deadpan.
Speedy's shirt collar just barely creeping over the panel border at the bottom of page 17 is a fun touch.
The art works well here from a narrative standpoint, though I think Speedy's hands got a bit too big in the last panel.
Drawing sound is an interesting challenge. Devices like musical notes and symbols are fairly common, and I like playing with them. One of the most interesting approaches was used by Bernie Wrightson in his Marvel adaptation of the King Kull story "The Skull of Silence". Wrightson's original intent was to bleed out the color panel by panel as silence took over, but Marvel's colorists and printers blew it. Still, an intriguing idea.
Next: more Speedy!

Original Art Sundays No. 186: Dead Dog Comics Tryout page

Posting on time this week (actually starting a few minutes before midnight, so technically early!). Worked a 51 hour week, so no time to complete either of the current Surrealist Cowgirls projects, but progress has been made on both.
Meanwhile, one more from the vaults.
This was also a colorist tryout page, like last week's, but this time I got the job! It didn't pay, but I got the job.
While completing my BFA, I found an internship with a new publisher out of Hopkins, MN. They were called Dead Dog Comics, and run by the very optimistic and friendly Chazz deMoss. As part of the tryout package, I was asked to color a page from a forthcoming monster book (all of the line was horror books at first). This was the result.

Ooh, scary! Sort of.

This was done in late 1999 or early 2000, so I'm guessing Photoshop 6 or 7. In retrospect, it would have worked just as well as a hand painted piece, but they wanted digital.
I tried to keep it vibrant but not overbearing (though the image doesn't demand subtlety, anyone who know the work of Bernie Wrightson knows it's possible to do sublime horror illustration). The piece doesn't show it, but it is more than 50% gray values.  The light sources are a bit inconsistent (the only visible light sources in the scene are the candle and the window, but much is brightly front lit). In my defense, my first priority was to be consistent with the cast shadows placed by the inker. Not sure if this ever saw print. I also did some spot inking and digital lettering for them.  

The best of the job: genuinely nice people, very enthusiastic about their work.

The worst: the day I showed up early and the place smelled odd. I opened the microwave and was swarmed by fruit flies. Someone had left a dirty plate, food still on it, in the microwave over a long weekend. Once I was able to hold down my cookies, I cleaned it up and got out of there- no more work for me that day! Yikes!

The only real problem I had with the horror books was that one of them was blatantly misogynistic- a slutty woman being chained in a dungeon by the monster, who "eyed with bad intent" as the song goes. This was in one of the stories I lettered for them, and I did very little work for them after that.

Dead Dog continued for a few years. Last time I saw their stuff at MNCBA's Spring Con, they were branching into cop books, and the line looked more polished. I've not heard anything about them for several years, but I do wish them well.

next: Cowgirls!

Original Art Sundays No. 146: TNT news

Back after a week off for no reason other than the holidays!
Here are some older editorial pieces.
But first, a brief explanation.
In the early 1990s, there were two magazines on transgender politics that took a slightly more "street level" approach than the academic journal Chrysalis.
One was Davina Anne Gabriel's TransSisters, which we've discussed briefly in the past. Ran ten issues from September 1993 to Summer 1995.
The other was Gail Sondegaard's TNT NEWS. This ran from 1994 to 1997, running eight issues.
If memory serves, that is. I don't have all my files copies of the latter at hand.
At any rate, I did editorial cartoons for both.
One of the TNT cartoons, Pinkette and LaBrainne, has been published here before. I'd like to offer a couple others this week. These are two of my favorites. The art is serviceable, the writing is sharp and on point, if a bit dated for at least one of them, and they come together fairly well.
These will be included in The Complete Tranny Towers, if and when it's done. The first one uses a Tranny Towers character!

Actually these stand up better than I thought they would.
I do have to note that there are a couple others with alarmingly bad art. I will not post those, but will include them in the aforementioned book, with a healthy dash of mea culpa.
The "change for a dollar" gag is adapted/stolen from a Bernie Wrightson poster. See the end of this post.
And the Mr. Haney vibrator line is a classic among us devotees of Green Acres!
The issue of stealth remains significant, but has lost some of its explosively divisive properties over the years.
Still.... a story comes to mind.
My last girlfriend suddenly moved to Texas to care for her mom about a month after her final surgery.
A little odd, but then we all have choices to make and I respected her for caring for her mother, even though we were getting rather close and her handling of the matter hurt me a great deal.
We talked a year or so later, and she was dating a guy. She was quite happy.
Well, good. We all get to be happy.
But he didn't know about her past, and she wasn't going to tell him, and isn't that wonderful?
Well.... no, it's not.
I mean, yeah, it's wonderful that you succeed in the world so well that you have that option. But there's more to it than that.
Deciding when and where you're out about your gender history is a complex issue. It touches on matters of integrity, mental health and physical safety, not to mention just plain wanting to be accepted on your own terms. And every decision around it has to be weighed VERY carefully.
This stuff can drive you up a tree. I used to worry obsessively about who knew, who could tell by looking, who was and wasn't laughing, on and on and on.
That will put a real crimp in your day.
Then after the end of my abusive relationship, about which I've kvetched in the past, I started assuming everyone knew and stopped worrying about it.
The paradox was that many less people knew after I took that tack!
However, in the midst of all that, it must be said that there are some people who have a right to know if you respect them. Close friends, family and partners/lovers/spouses fall into this category. It's their business if you value them in your life. If they can't handle it, that's on them, but those are the people you should trust.
Tuesday is January 1, 2013. and I'll begin my Best Comics of 2012 countdown then.
New art resumes January 6.
Now, here's that Wrightson piece!

See you all next year!

A memory and a reflection: Jeffrey Catherine Jones, 1944- 2011

The comics world is full of people who call themselves artists, for better or for worse.
The larger art world has a similar circumstance.
Few cross the arbitrary boundaries of the two worlds.
Jeffrey Catherine Jones was one of those few.

 

Beginning her comics career with some one-off stories for Charlton and some work in the undergrounds, notably on her stunning solo book Spasm!,  Jeffrey's work first gleaned national recognition through the pages of the National Lampoon. 

Her strip IDYL, stunning in its clarity, was a series of sardonic and melancholy short moral tales, often strangely out of place among the strip's peers, but always welcome and eagerly devoured by the readers. During this time, Jones also took up with Bernie Wrightson, Micheal Kaluta and Barry Windsor-Smith in the short-lived adventure known as The Studio. Wrightson spoke to me concerning The Studio at San Diego a couple years ago. To paraphrase from my spotty memory, "It was this huge, rat-infested space with great light. We only worked there together a short time (he specified the time frame, but I don't recall specifics- it may have been less than two months) until the whole thing caved in. But we produced some incredible work." Shortly thereafter, Jones shared an upstate New York home with Vaughn Bode', a colleague from the undergrounds, another collaborator with Wrightson (on the Purple Pictography strips for Swank), and another artist with transgender leanings. Bode' and Jones were fast friends by all accounts, and some of their adventures living together are documented in the Comics Journal special issue on sex. The article is reprinted at this link, on the website of Vaughn's son Mark Bode'. 

Vaughn's strip Jones Goes to Bones is a loving jab at Jeffrey's perspective that her art would make her immortal. I'll add the strip to this post as soon as I can get a decent scan of it.

I have no direct knowledge of the problems Jeffrey faced in the subesquent years. She finally had her sex-reassignment surgery fairly late in life. 

She had personal problems following her surgery, but based on secondhand reports from mutual friends in the comics community, these were problems she had experienced prior to surgery as well. Her bouts with mental illness have been documented, by her, on her website. She appeared to be in recovery in the final years of her life.

I wrote her in the early 1990s as part of my research for my book on GLBT comics.We struck up a brief correspondence thereafter, truncated by her aforementioned illness. 

Her reply to my specific query about her sexual identity, which I promised to use verbatim:

"That I am a transsexual is a matter of public record. But I am a woman first and an artist second and wish to be seen on those terms. I find no others acceptable."

I reconnected with her via Facebook, as did so many others. I suspect she was surprised to find out just how large a following her work had. 

L to R: Wrightson, Jones, Kaluta, Smith: The Studio

A Jones Tarzan painting

Ms. Jones in recent years

In the spate of obituaries I've seen today, there is a bit of well-intentioned stumbling over pronouns. My response is direct. She chose the terms of her life. Respect them in her death.

Finally, here's a video obituary that includes the trailer for a recently funded documentary on the life of Jeffrey Catherine Jones. Like Roy Orbison, she was lucky enough to live to see a renewed interest in her work.

Goodbye, Ms. Jones. I would have liked to have known you better, but I feel honored to have known you at all. Your work made all our lives a bit richer.

da bode' strikes again!

I grabbed this great photo from Golden Age Comic Book Stories, one of the intriguing blogs I follow. You can find the link in my list as well.
This time around, they're posting the stunning Purple Pictography run, which concluded with episodes written by Vaughn and drawn by the so powerful Bernie Wrightson.
I believe the Purple Pictography stuff has been reprinted a couple times. It's in Wrightson's book A Look Back, at least the Wrightson/Bode' collorations, it's in one of the Fantagraphics trades (I think- my Bode' stuff is upstairs), and Fantagraphics did a stand-alone color comic of it in the 90s. But it's still a treat to see it here. Besides, I think these are scans from original printed pages in Swank.
However, the remark at the end of the Golden Age post comments can be inferred as Bernie being unhappy with his work with da bode'.
Well, I chatted Wrightson up on this very issue last year at San Diego, and he had nothing but kind words for Vaughn. Said it was a delight to work with him.
But then, Bernie seemed to have kind words for most folks!