Wr/Dr

Twice a week, very Tuesday and Thursday, I drop the tyke off at daycare and head for the third floor corner seat of the McGill library to pore over the Blue Book, which is my business strategy and enhanced lifestyle notebook, and to pound out an average of ten pages of minimalist comics, today I did twelve.

The Blue Book is where I've been detailing plans and thoughts for my business, Monastiraki, and my art and career in general. In blue ballpoint pen, I write down schedules, attainable goals, ambitions. All in a fairly clear and organized way, cross referencing entries and everything. I do this to warm up. I get into it. Sometimes I find some book on branding and read a page or two to bring the experience up a notch. This is new for me. My notebooks of yore have been havens for scribbles, stoner notes and doodles, all words hardly revisited let alone legible.

When that's done, I crack out a couple of mechanical pencils and my clipboard full of fresh 8.5 x 11 white sheets and start drawing minimal little heads, six per page, each with a few words, telling a simple story. I started this comic project last year and mostly spun my wheels, creating a frustrating stream of consciousness comic about the false starts of the creative process, all in real time.

Since the new year, since I've turned the corner, as they say, the comics are considerably less about humming and hawing and more about the thoughts and experiences I've been having rediscovering my path as a magician who is intent on authoring his life proactively. It's been liberating to say the least. I draw simple lines and write simple words in a way that feels like journaling and comic making. I thought today that if I were to make a zine of this stuff, which I will (for TCAF 2016), I may write as part of my bio on the back cover that the author has shown he can draw elsewhere, this is about something else.

I've often derided what I call 'Head-Coffee-Head' comics, comics that simply show the characters head in some panels, and a coffee cup or other mundane feature in other panels. Well folks, I've come a long way and I'm done for the time being busting my back on ornate guitar solos. I've searched for a way to write and draw quick stream of consciousness work and I've found it. It's one floating head and a few words in an open panel six times per page. I've got a nice stack of the stuff now and I like where it's going. Some of the pages, even when they are part of a sequence, seem to stand up on their own, like a serial, so I'm thinking hard of uploading them as a webcomic. I'll also make a series of 12 or so page zines, each with a simple cover design that repeats, kinda like King Cat.

I'm truly excited about all this stuff, Wr for writing and Dr for drawing, whether it's journal and notebook focus or simple comics. Stay tuned. I'm going to share this stuff.

Turned Corners

Shall I go out on a limb ? Sure, why not.

I've recently rediscovered that authorial authority is within my domain, ie: I'm writing my life.
I've known this for a while but a bout of mundanity, lasting maybe ten plus years has recently been sloughed off. What was revealed was how to continue scripting.
You see, since childhood I made up stories about who and what I was. This continued well into adolescence and adulthood. Somewhere along the way the narrative fell off, the story was dropped and consequently I was at sea. I knew I was somewhat lost but couldn't put my finger on it.
Late last year I started addressing my dilemma. Dissatisfaction with my job and my art led me to realize that I had to find a way to continue telling the story of my life in a way that I wanted it to be told and lived.
I had the past down. I knew what had happened. And I knew there was this vague interval where mythologizing myself was replaced with a pity party, bitterness, frustration, anger and all that.

Since December 2015 many factors have converged allowing me to see that I can resume storytelling, rebuild meaning and continue on my way towards a happy ending or even a to-be-continued.

I am religious. My religion, I remembered, was mine. What religion are you ? Mine. Period. It's my religion. I built it and I build it. My art once paid attention to it and now i'm learning to siphon my art back through my religiosity. Sure, I'm spiritual too if that makes anyone feel better.

I now openly admit to gnostic revelatory experience. I have on occasion been graced with understanding in the form of geometric models that speak volumes to my personal mythology. These models look a lot like the kind you get via the study of esoteric subjects in general. They are hard to word and often are benefitted by diagrams and drawn symbols. They are devices to know and to learn from.

They come at me and they come clearly and better when my head isn't in my ass lamenting my lost sense of meaning. Meaning has returned and it is imperative that momentum is sustained. Momentum will be sustained via regular somatic/spiritual work as well as regular writing and drawing.

Henceforth, and until the next revelatory moment, I will be working on the vertical as it seems I have the horizontal down pat. The voice told me this clear as day. The voice that was so much like my own voice but as if it knew something I didn't. I've been puzzled by how the horizontal becomes the vertical since forever. I've been looking for that crux left and right. I found it in the cresting nexus point of the now. That place where mystery becomes known and collects behind you in an ever widening cloak. It's slippery to write about but it's also head rattling, exhilarating and liberating.

I'll continue this ramble in future posts.