Nov 11 2007

Old Skool: Stately Thunderchild Manor

Way back, lo many years ago, before I was a starving artist, I pursued even less-green pastures and was a starving musician. I, along with two of the other three members of the band I was in, Come on Thunderchild, purchased a circa-1910s house in Cornelius, NC (known among us locals as “Corntown”), which we used both to live in and as a practice and recording studio.

I recently heard from a friend and Davidson classmate from those heady days who’d dug up some old pictures of various goings-on from back in the day, some of them at the house/studio, known at the time as Stately Thunderchild Manor. She’s posted a bunch of them to her Flickr account. Mostly they’re just a bunch of liquored up folks doing liquored up stuff, but I thought this pic was pretty cool:

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This is the interior of our practice studio. It was originally a bedroom but (If I remember correctly) the walls, and windows beneath, were covered in several layers of sheetrock, then over that, several layers of carpet obtained from a “contact” at a local carpet warehouse who would let us know when large scraps became available in the dumpster behind the store. The exterior-facing walls also had some added noise insulation courtesy of a bank of food-service size egg palates (on the left) that the guitarist collected via his day job at Davidson’s Soda Shop.

The Manor was the (in)famous site of the Thunderchild Halloween party, which drew several hundred folks from the surrounding area, as far away as Charlotte, and was mentioned disparagingly at least once in the sermon of the church across the street. We eventually got tired of taking the minor decorations up and down each year, and as you can see our shiny pumpkin and crepe paper are still in evidence here. The guillotine and mock electric chair and other large items had to be stowed or returned, however.

The Manor is currently occupied, and beautifully restored, by the onetime guitarist of the band and his wife. I believe it’s now on some sort of local register of historical places. Had there been such a thing when I lived there though, I’m certain The Manor would have been on a local–if not national–register of disreputable places.

Nov 02 2007

Spx Finds – pt 2

(If you don’t know what the heck “SPX Finds” is all about, see the original post…)

Urban Legend – Bradley Day

Mini-comic series, 8 1/2″ x 5 1/2″, ~36 pages each, B&W interiors, color covers

Autobio comics, particularly autobio minis, are often the subject of a fair bit of scorn. What I find interesting about these sorts of criticisms, though, is what it reveals about the popular stereotype of the autobio comic. As Johnny Ryan’s hilarious send-up strip of autobio comics, “Every Auto-Bio Comic Ever Written,” (which I can’t seem to find a scan of anywhere online) exemplifies, when folks think of autobio comics–good or bad–the stereotype brought to mind is usually that of the the bitter, confessional, warts-and-all, semi-whiny/semi-ironic autobio book–let’s call it “the Joe Matt model.”

Often exempted or overlooked for whatever reason–maybe just because it’s not as easy a target–is a whole other school of autobio comics that’s had just as much influence on the genre as the Joe Matt model: the James Kochalka model. Bradley Day’s Urban Legend falls squarely in this latter camp and is a pretty good example of this sort of mode, the “daily comic” or “sketchbook diary.”

In addition to a few overt references to Kochalka, Urban Legend shares with Kochalka’s dairy comic, American Elf, a number of features that to varying extents are the key hallmarks of this comics-making mode, most notably its strip-a-day requirement as well as Day’s drawing himself non-literally, as a “bigfoot,” as similarly Kochalka draws himself as an elf-like creature. Interestingly, though, unlike Kochalka, Day draws only himself this way–the rest of the characters are drawn as regular humans.

Each issue has a nicely done, and often clever, wrap-around cover. Here’s one I thought was particularly nice–both in its color choices and in overall composition. Based on the strips inside, I’m assuming this is Fripp Island, South Carolina:

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Even the drawing here is a bit Kochalka-esque, although Bradley Day’s color artwork appears to be done with actual paint, rather than being done in black ink and then colored in Photoshop.

I generally enjoy reading diary comics day to day online; for me, they function better as a short, regular, revelatory trip into someone’s life than as a continuing narrative that one reads cover-to-cover, and that would be my preferred mode of reading Urban Legend as well, I think. That being said, Day’s cartooning is nicely done throughout. He plays with panel arrangements quite a bit, with some days as single panels and others as multi-panel strips. All are done with black pen and ink wash. The tone throughout is usually either matter-of-fact, or overtly funny, but relaxed and not self-conscious–and neither cutesy or twee as can sometimes be the case with these things.

As with most diary comics, I found that with Urban Legend the whole is more than the sum of its parts. While some strips are insightful, or poignant, or funny, they’re not all going to be. The point, though, is what the completed “diary” represents in terms of the ritual, discipline and challenge involved. And, if you’re lucky, you’ll get a few really good strips out of the whole deal, which Urban Legend does. Here’s one example I really liked:

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No website was listed, but Bradley can be contacted at bradleysasquatch [at] gmail [dot] com.

Nov 02 2007

Sketchbook 11/02

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Nov 01 2007

(Almost) 100 Demons in H.P. Lovecraft Mag

Here’s some cool news: the current Spring/Summer issue of H.P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror has begun running selected illustrations from my (Almost) One Hundred Demons drawing exercise. The feature starts as a page of “Nine Little Demons” and continues with further batches of nine demon illustrations printed between articles through this issue, with the next few batches set to appear in the next issue.

I’ve purchased and enjoyed several issues of this magazine before I managed to get some art printed in it. It’s the sort of magazine that is unfortunately becoming more and more scarce in the age of things like Maxim and FHM. It’s a publication than comprises largely prose short stories and poetry, along with the occasional interview. Not many pictures. No advice about whether to buy this product or that product. The prose stories and poetry are (no surprise) usually horror stories influenced by Lovecraft, and the interviews are generally with horror writers, although not necessarily overtly Lovecraft-influenced ones. This issue, for example, features an interesting interview with Anita Blake writer Laurell K. Hamilton.

I know too well the fate that will befall you if you don’t purchase this issue, but it is far to foul and mind-boggling to describe. Words simply do not exist to describe such a thing. Were I to do so, it would most assuredly drive you mad!

Nov 01 2007

SPX Finds – pt 1

Well, not really finds, I guess. Here’s the deal: If you’ve ever been an exhibitor at SPX, you know that people will often just walk up to you and give you stuff. Some of this turns out to be good, some of it terrible, and a lot of it somewhere in the middle. Anyway, since most people reporting back from SPX (and, yes I know that SPX was like a month ago, but gimme a break–I’ve been working on a book) have been highlighting the stuff they bought, I thought I’d try to post a few quick write-ups over the next week or two of some of the more interesting stuff that wound up in my hands at this past show.

(First, though, a disclaimer: I received a number of things from people that I read while I was at SPX and then passed on to other people, and some stuff just gets lost in the shuffle… so if you gave me something at the show and it doesn’t wind up in my roundup, please don’t be personally offended.)

Nomad Station by Sara Rosenbaum

Mini-comic, 7 1/2″ x 5 1/2″, 28 pgs., B&W interior, Block (or maybe potato?) print cover

Nomad Station is apparently a fictional story adopted to comics form from the book The Gebusi: Lives Transformed in a Rainforest World. The story, told in the first person, centers on two young men who, I assume, are residents of the rainforests of Papua New Guinea. The two are traveling to a dance held at Nomad Station, which seems to be maybe some sort of camp or small town, and they decide to stop on the way and visit a professor, a white westerner, living there, thinking that he might be able to supply them with an elixir/aphrodisiac that they call “Ada-men-ee.” The professor misunderstands what they’re after, which leads to a discussion about anthropological matters that the two young men would likely have just as soon been kept in the dark about–youth initiations, ritualized homosexuality, etc– particularly as they’re on their way to a try to make some time with the local women. It’s an interesting story, the thematic gist of which centers on things like the conflict between non-native perceptions (and mis-perceptions) of native peoples, and the conflicting pulls of modernity and tradition on those people.

Sara’s cartooning is quite graceful and fairly accomplished for someone wandering around giving out her books for free. She uses a lot of large areas of black and reminds me a bit of David B. in both this respect, as well as in her occasional incorporation of non-literal/diagramatic drawing, as here:

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Her storytelling is clear and confident and even pulls off some interesting formal maneuvers, as in the flashback transition at the end of this page where the young “flashback version” of the professor seamlessly continues a line of dialog spoken in the previous panel by his present day counterpart:

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Nomad Station is definitely work tracking down, and I’m surprised I haven’t seen more of her work around in anthologies and the like. From the looks of her website, she’s been doing comics for a while, and a Google search turned up a project she did with David Lasky. Anyway, Nomad Station is definitely worth tracking down.

Here website is: http://si.arrr.net