So, I’m doing contributions for a couple upcoming anthologies, and for the next few weeks I’m going to be taking a break from posting my ongoing story and posting pieces from what I’m doing for the anthologies instead, since the deadlines for those are looming and I have them mostly written but still have a lot of drawing to do.

I’ll still be posting… quite a lot, actually.  Just things from these other stories.

The above drawing is a portrait I did recently of my boyfriend, which I’m posting because one of the two upcoming stories has to do with him.  One of the anthologies I was invited to contribute to is a collection of short stories on the theme of Dads.  I was trying to think of something to write about my dad, and there were stories I could have done, but nothing was jumping out at me, and then I was talking to my boyfriend about it and he started telling me stories about his dad, and I immediately knew that was the story I should write.  I’m calling the story My Boyfriend’s Dad, hence the title of this post.

The other anthology I’m contributing to is the upcoming Northwest Press book of Robert Kirby’s anthology Three.  I’ve had this poetic thing I’ve wanted to do for a while, really taking certain comic conventions and also certain musical and poetic conventions, and mashing them up, and I thought maybe this anthology would be the place to do it.  What I’m doing is starting out with a bunch of drawings that I’m doing separately that have a link together, which I guess if you were talking in musical terms would kind of be the melody of the thing, and then I’m designing the story on a grid of six panels a page which, I suppose if you were again to use musical terms, would be the rhythm of the song.

It’s meant to be in some ways the visual equivalent of what Dylan was trying to do with the achronological arrangement of the incidents related in the Blood on the Tracks songs.  Of course, the way Dylan described what he was doing there was trying to create the lyrical equivalent of the way a story is told in a painting, because in a painting all the information is presented to you simultaneously and you can choose, to an extent, in what order you view the information, so time becomes less important and you can take in the totality of a story rather than one incident, and then the next, etc.  But comics, then, are different from paintings, because the arrangement of panels indicates to you in what order you should read the visual information, and in comics that are told well, space has a temporal element because a bigger panel should mean that you read it for a longer period than a smaller panel, and so in that way you can create pauses, or also create speed, when you’re telling a story in comics.  I’m talking about good comics, of course- in a lot of mainstream comics, the size of the panels is determined not by pacing but by what super cool pose somebody felt like drawing Spider-man in that day.  So what I became interested in investigating are ways in which you could be achronological, like a painting or a Blood on the Tracks song, but also have it read properly, like a comic, and have a rhythm to it, which is the thing that a good comic and a song have in common.

I want to edit the images together and find out what happens when they’re in different orders with different juxtapositions.  I’m writing the words separately as a poem, but I don’t want it to just be an illustrated poem, or a poem with pictures next to it, which has been done a lot in comics.  What I’d really like to do is not have the poem or the images be complete without each other, they should comment on one another, and the juxtaposition should hopefully make something that neither of them would make alone.

So I’ve drawn a lot of it and written a lot of it, but I won’t know quite what I made until I’m in Photoshop putting it all together.  I really wanted to do something at least a little bit avant-garde and interesting, and we’ll see if what comes out is something interesting, or if it falls flat on its face.

I’ve also written a kind of simple sex joke piece I could do if my brilliant poem comics hybrid thing goes unappreciated by the Philistines   We’ll see what happens.

Boy From Santa Cruz Part 34

Boy From Santa Cruz Part 33

Boy From Santa Cruz Part 32

So I saw this guy last week.  Drew this in a notebook while I was waiting in line.

I spent forever on this video for this song from Dylan’s new album, and it’s kind of awesome, so you should probably watch it!

So, this is a drawing I did of the young Jean Pierre Leaud from Truffaut’s 400 Blows.  The chapter title Children of Marx and Lady Gaga is a reference to the Godard film Masculin Feminin, which Leaud was also in.  There are a lot of things going on in the comics I’ve been doing and the comics that are coming up that tie in to 60’s French New Wave films, and 60’s culture in general.

As the comics coming up talk more about money and capitalism and the relationship between those things and art, it’s hard to not think about Occupy, and the obvious parallels between the dissatisfaction people have now and the protests going on, and things that were going on in the 60’s, and things like the student protests in France.  There’s more 60’s stuff in my comics going back a while now, with the references to Bob Dylan and R. Crumb, who became associated with that era even though he didn’t like it.  I think using some iconic things from 50 years ago to talk about what’s happening now appeals to me because it shows the circularity of these things, how they come around again, like the fly life cycle drawings in Morbid Obsession were meant to.

The best we can do is try to break out of the cycle if it’s destructive, and move forward.  Hopefully every generation is moving forward a little bit.  The world that young people in the 60’s were hoping for didn’t quite come to pass, but the world definitely became better than it was before then.  As the zeitgeist tries to have a forward momentum again, there’s always the reaction from the other side to pull us backwards, which is what the Republican party represents today.

I try not to talk about these things in magical terms, but I find it kind of fascinating the way these ideas float around in the collective unconscious.  That’s part of why I like to specifically call out in my work some of the influences that I’m thinking about at the time.  In Masculin Feminin, you see French young people in the 60’s talking about Bob Dylan, fascinated with the ideas that are going around across the ocean.  In turn, Bob Dylan is fascinated with the French poet Rimbaud, and kind of completing that circle is this picture of Leaud which has him in a pose and outfit looking very much like that famous portrait of Rimbaud that I drew in one of my comics a while back.

A couple weeks ago I was walking to a comics store in the Mission District of San Francisco, and I noticed some trailers parked along the street.  A little further along the street, I come across Woody Allen filming scenes for his new movie, and I stopped to watch him for a while.  I wondered what he would think knowing that a comics shop down the street was selling my book, in which I drew my rabbit making the joke Woody Allen made at the beginning of Annie Hall.  That joke, of course, was a Groucho Marx joke, which Woody mentions in the movie.  He’s talking about the wisdom you can find in jokes, and by deliberately mentioning a hero of his, he’s placing his work in the lineage of ideas that fascinate him.  Part of the reason I liked Marx and Lady Gaga as a title was that you could take “Marx” to be about Karl, or it could be about Groucho, who I had just mentioned in my book.  Some of the comics now are concerned with capitalism, but I didn’t want to seem like I was abandoning the themes about love and relationships and so on that I’ve been interested in, so it amused me that using that name could refer to either.

That’s what’s fascinating to be about art in general, you’re sending these ideas out into the universe, and you’re never quite sure exactly what ripples they’ll create.  Some people read my comics to have meaning extremely close to what I was thinking about when I wrote them, but other people with their own life experiences bring something to the comics that leads them to come up with interpretations I never would have thought of, which I love.  I think that’s amazing.

Woody Allen directed his first movie, Take the Money and Run, in San Francisco in 1969, and now he’s returned to film in San Francisco for the first time since then, and when I saw him it was actually a few blocks from a spot where he had filmed portions of his 1969 film.  When I was watching him, there was a lady standing next to us that I think had lived here that long, talking about how the neighborhood had changed since the last time Woody was filming it.  I somehow doubt it crossed his mind when he was starting his movie career in the 60’s that decades later when he came back, across the street from where he was filming there would be a comic shop selling some comics that have sex involving twinks and cartoon rabbits in them, and also jokes made in homage to films from Woody Allen’s career.

I made my own video for Bob Dylan’s new song, Duquesne Whistle!  It’s a one-second clip of Tom Daley shaking his butt put on a loop for the whole song.  You’re welcome.

So, let’s see, the story behind this drawing is obviously a long and strange one.  For those that follow my comics, this is the same boy as in the Boy From Santa Cruz storyline that I did a while back, the beginning of which can be found here.

As much drama as there was in the Boy From Santa Cruz storyline, that was actually the streamlined version of it.  Between originally meeting him in a club and then actually drawing him, there was something like 10 months where we talked over text a bit but pretty much drifted off, and then I saw him at a club again, and asked him if he remembered me, and then the six months or so that we dated and I did the drawings in that original series happened.  That Fourth of July strip, about one of our good, early nights together, is about a Fourth of July that’s now two years ago.

After we kind of broke it off that time, almost two years passed in which we didn’t talk much, several other guys came and went, and then, for whatever confluence of reasons, after this last breakup we started talking again and decided to do another drawing.  He said that after he dates somebody, he needs some time before being friends with them again.  Two years, really?  I think a big part of why I still talk to him is that I can never figure out exactly what’s going through his head.  He’s either stimulating or just obstinante, or maybe I’m stimulated by obstinance, I’m not sure.  For all my talk of tying boys up, I think in a real way I’m the masochist.

That’s actually why I like to do these tied up boy drawings, because of the fact that I’m doing them of people I know or have dated, the drawings, while ostensibly about sexual sadism or power play, are meant as my expression of affection toward them.  They’re interesting relationship metaphors for me, because the thing is, I tied them up, but they can be untied any time they want to.  The person who’s tied up always has all the control, it’s about the illusion of power.

One of the 10 billion great lines that Bob Dylan has written is in the song Abandoned Love: “I march in the parade of liberty/ But as long as I love you I’m not free/ How long must I suffer such abuse/  Won’t you let me see you smile one time before I turn you loose?”  Devotion to somebody else is always about masochism, because if you admit that you like them and don’t want to leave them, they’re the one with the choice to leave or not, and you’re the one who’s tied yourself up.

When I was dating the BFSC, I bought an Ipod, and when I first loaded songs onto it and put it on shuffle, the first song it ever played was Abandoned Love.  In that song, he’s the one who’s suffering “abuse” but he’s also the one who wants to turn her loose.  The two are the same thing.  After that, for me that song kind of became the theme song of my relationship with the BFSC, I would listen to it at least once a day when I was dating him.  He wasn’t ever aware of that, though, I don’t think I ever played the song for him or mentioned it to him.  As much as I wring my hands about him being inscrutable, when I can wrest myself out of my own narrow vision for a moment and see it from his side, I realize that I must have been equally inscrutable to him, if not more so.  My interior life doesn’t seem mysterious to me because I’m living it, but other people aren’t.  Although they have more of it than you would have with most people, they have all these comics.

I used Independence Day day as the strip that represented the happy part of our relationship, because it seemed to me like a good symbol for freedom for obvious reasons.  That moment when you think you can be interdependent with somebody else, and still be free.  I’ve managed to have those moments, and in some cases even sustain them for quite a while.  I haven’t found out yet whether they can actually last indefinitely, but I like to think they can.  The fact that I’m posting this new strip on Fourth of July is a serendipitous coincidence that I should probably take credit for planning even though I didn’t.

The chair I drew him in in this picture is actually the chair at my desk where I draw almost all of my comics.  That seemed fitting to me.  It’s a drawing of somebody tied up, and that somebody is in my chair, the chair from which I create art.  I like to push the question of who it is that’s actually tied up here.  I opened the whole Boy From Santa Cruz storyline with a drawing of him tied up, because it’s actually a story about him dumping me.  In that drawing, he’s tied up to a door, he can walk out it any time he likes.

Also from Abandoned Love:

“I can hear the turning of the key
I’ve been deceived by the clown inside of me
I thought that he was righteous but he’s vain
Oh, something’s a-telling me I wear the ball and chain”