Chris Gavaler's Blog, page 5

Tarot Comics!

Anachronistic “Comics”

“Anachronistic rhetoric,” argues comics philosopher Aaron Meskin, “is unnecessary.”

For example: “Nothing could have counted as jazz in the seventeenth century, and any theory that implied that there was an instance of jazz 350 years ago or more would be anachronistic.”

More importantly for comics scholarship: “spatially juxtaposed pictorial narratives existed well before the birth of comics in the nineteenth century and any definition that characterizes these as comics is guilty of artistic anachronism.”

I disagree. Or, more precisely, I agree but think artistic anachronism is a common convention and possibly a defining trait of terminology generally.

Caravaggio, the exemplar of chiaroscuro painting, died in 1610, over seven decades before the term “chiaroscuro” was coined in 1686. “Science fiction” was coined in 1929, making H. G. Wells’ 1897 The War of the Worlds not science fiction. Far more significantly, “genocide” was termed in 1944, making the 1915 Armenian genocide, in which the Turkish government killed a million Armenian civilians, not a genocide. Terms are coined in response to something that necessarily pre-exists the term, making them all anachronistic and retroactively applicable.

The term “comics” is typically understood to originate in the 1890s, making any pre-1890 use anachronistic. I have no problem with that. When I find artworks that are sequenced images (AKA, what I consider the comics form) but also include multiple conventions common to the later comics medium, calling them anything other than “comics” seems false.

Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper is filled with them. Last summer, I explored weekly issues from 1891 (and blogged enthusiastically about them here, here, here, here, and here), all of which fall roughly within the term’s historical timeframe, but I’m now two decades earlier and so fully in the anachronistic zone.

Unless I’m not.

The “Platinum Age” was coined to group comics or proto-comics published before the mid-1930s, but I’ve not seen a start year earlier than 1882. I’ve also seen the “Victorian Age” refer to works published from 1840 to 1897, due mostly to the existence of Rodolphe Töpffer and Punch magazine. Accepting that terminology, I’m just exploring “Victorian Age comics.”

Whatever you prefer to call them, here’s one of my favorites from 1872:

It’s titled, “The Grand Duke Alexis on the Plains — The Buffalo as it Really Was.”

I was especially taken by how the (unnamed) artist draws the panels overlapping, a technique I thought emerged decades later (for example, by George Herriman in the late 1910s and early 20s). If you’re a fan of Neil Cohn’s Visual Narrative Grammer (which isn’t a kind of grammar, but that’s a whole other argument), you’ll notice that all but the penultimate image tell a clear visual story without the need for words. The few captioned words that are included fall within the norms of a standard third-person narrator. The page sequence is even “comic” in the humor sense, the origin of the U.S. misnomer (it’s a shame “comic strips” wasn’t abbreviated “strips” instead).

Here’s another from the same year.

Though this page also features overlapping panels arranged in a sequenced narrative, the text is more essential for understanding the events because each panel is a stand-alone segment of “The Adventures of the Japanese Ambassador in Utah.” Unlike later works in the comics medium, the text is placed in footnotes at the bottom of the page, but, like later works, each panel is numbered. Also, the style of drawing is cartoon (simplified and exaggerated), another later norm, and the intent is comic (and probably racist, though I’m not sure if the features of the Utah characters are more exaggerated than the Japanese ones).

Again, not calling this a “comic” seems false.

To be clear though, these are exceptions. Of the 52 issues published in 1872, each usually 16 pages, these are the only two individual pages that closely resemble later 20th-century Sunday comics: a visually unified one-page narrative.

Of course “narrative” is a tricky term too. Some sequences achieve a different kind of diegetic coherence.

Here’s an example from 1870:

The black line across the center is from the newspaper spine; this is a two-page spread held sideways. It’s titled: “The Promise of the Declaration of Independence Fulfilled: An Allegorical Picture Commemorative of the Passage of the Fifteenth Amendment of the Federal Constitution.” The amendment, establishing the right to vote for Black men, was ratified the month before. Rather than a time sequence, the six images occur simultaneously, with any combination producing what Scott McCloud would term an aspect-to-aspect transition. It’s also an unusual example of a layout drawn with multiple overlap and framebreak effects, as well as two circular insets, all techniques I thought originated over seventy years later.

Here’s another stand-out from 1871:

The work is atypical, because it was not drawn for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper but included instead because the paper considered the German artist, Paul Konewka, noteworthy:

Unlike Konewka’s Midsummer Night’s Dream illustrations (which include one image per page), “The Prussian Soldier” is a one-page multi-image narrative.

I’m especially intrigued by this description: “A scroll-work of thorns and thistles supports, decorates and apportions the subdivisions of this touching story.” That’s an excellent definition of a comics gutter.

It also prefigures Theirry Groensteen’s 1999 analysis of a comics panel:

“There are six important functions of the frame, which I call the function of closure, the separative function, the rhythmic function, the structural function, the expressive function, and the readerly function. All of these functions exert their effects on the contents of the panel (a voluntarily general expression, by which I mean the totality of the figurative elements within the frame) and, especially, on the perceptive and cognitive processes of the reader. Most of the functions also open up a range of formal possibilities, allowing the frame to fully participate in the specific rhetoric of each author.”

While Frank Leslie’s “comics” are rare in the four-year 1868-1872 period I searched, I found one more self-contained one-page coherent humorous narrative in 1868:

Like “The Adventures of the Japanese Ambassador in Utah” published four years later, “A Fight for the Championship” is drawn in a cartoon style (humorous exaggerations), this time caricaturing members of President Grant’s cabinet. Like “The Grand Duke Alexis on the Plains,” the eight unframed panels are not numbered, because each instead includes its own caption. Oddly, the page also includes segments of newspaper text between two of the rows — which have nothing to do with the images but are the continuation of the previous page’s article; perhaps more oddly, the words flow as columns rather than rows, producing two unrelated and contradictory reading paths.

Finally, Frank Leslie’s also includes what could be described as a “comics page,” in the sense later used to name the pages in a newspaper that includes humorous comics, AKA “the funnies page.” In Leslie’s the page typically has only one one-panel comic (or “cartoon” as the term is sometimes used) on a back page of mostly ads.

Here are four from 1872. They all include captions typed below the image, though this first one also includes what would later be termed a speech balloon (emanating from the birdcage) and handwritten text:

The next includes two speech balloons (though I understand from better-researched comics historians that the device did not convey an impression of sound as it would after 1900) and four distinct images combined into one undivided panel (what I call embedded juxtaposition):

Here’s another speech balloon (or speech label) and also a clearly divided panel inset:

Finally, a three-panel sequence with vertical gutters:

I refer to all of these drawings by the appropriately anachronistic term “comics.”

Born in the Bronze Age?

I was born in 1966. The first comic book I remember reading was published in 1974. Somewhere during that eight-year span, U.S. comic books outgrew the Silver Age and matured into the Bronze. A sharper edge for that transition and what it might have caused it are less clear.

There is little critical agreement about the so-called Ages of comics. Richard A. Lupoff is most often credited for coining “Golden Age” in his article “Re-Birth” in fanzine Comics Art #1 (Spring 1961). Though the perspective of a later period is necessary to define any former Golden Age, “Silver Age” was probably not coined until a fan letter printed in Justice League of America in 1966 (Casey 2009: 79). When Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide was first published in 1970, it distinguished between only Golden and Silver Ages.

My 2001 edition includes Top 10 lists for four: Golden, Silver, Bronze, and Platinum—a then new term for comics published before Action Comics #1 (June 1938). Terry O’Neil explained in the Bronze Age section of his market report: “As these books are now in the 20-30 year old range, I myself as well as other dealers of my age group must acknowledge that they are truly established as collectibles” (57). Tony Starks, who identified the Bronze Age as his “specialty” and declared it “HOT!,” used the term synonymously with “the 70s” (63), but many fans and scholars place its endpoint in the mid-80s, when I graduated high school. I bought the original monthly issues of the maxi-series Watchmen as a college sophomore.

So why “Bronze”? The sequence of metallurgical periods in world pre-history begins with the Stone Age and is followed by Bronze and then Iron.  Placing Silver after Gold instead evokes the Olympics, which established the third-place Bronze medal in 1904. When I ran track in early high school, I finished every race in fourth, so categorizing the period of my childhood as third-place is a comparative win.

The ambiguous Silver-Bronze shift corresponds with a range of events within the U.S. comics industry.

Steve Ditko left Marvel in 1966. The artist had co-created Spider-Man with Stan Lee for Amazing Fantasy #15 (August 1962) and continued penciling, inking, and—in the typically uncredited Lee-dubbed “Marvel Method” sense—co-writing every issue of Amazing Spider-Man that followed. Ditko’s last issue was #38, cover-dated July 1966, and so probably on stands during my June birthday. John Romita drew #39. Ditko worked briefly at DC afterwards, but kept mainly to Charlton where page rates were lower but artistic freedom apparently higher.

Jack Kirby left Marvel in 1970. The industry veteran had worked at Marvel in its earlier incarnations, Timely in the 40s and Atlas in the 50s, and his and Stan Lee’s collaboration on Fantastic Four #1 (November 1961) launched the renamed company. Kirby’s final issue as penciler, #102 (September 1970), ended the longest continuous writer-artist collaboration on a single title in comics history. John Romita drew #103. Kirby signed a three-year renewable contract with DC where he had last freelanced in the late 50s.

Kirby had come to define the Marvel house style, which new artists learned and imitated as inkers of his pencils. After co-penciling and inking two issues with Kirby, Joe Steranko took over Strange Tales #154 (March 1967), penciling, inking, and writing Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.E.I.L.D., which soon received its own title. Kirby built Marvel’s layout norms on a 3×2 grid and punctuated it with an occasional 2×2. Steranko introduced a radical irregularity with no base pattern, which would in turn become the layout norm of 70s comics generally. Artist Neil Adams, who debuted at DC in Our Army At War (July 1967), proved even more influential, innovating his own layouts while also adding a level of comparative realism that defined the next decade.

Though Stan Lee didn’t leave Marvel, he left the role of editor-in-chief to become publisher in 1972, simultaneously ending his career as a writer. His final writing credit was Fantastic Four #125 (August 1972). He wrote one of his last stories for Spider-Man about the dangers of drug abuse at the request of the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare. Because it depicts criminal drug use, the three-issue story arc of Amazing Spider-Man #96-98 (May-July 1971) are the first mainstream comic books published in the U.S. without Comics Code Authority approval since the self-censoring industry organization was established in 1954. When CCA revised its guidelines in response, it was the second revision within one year.

In Superhero Comics, I suggested a different era system established by the Comics Code: the pre-Code era ends in 1954 with the creation of the CCA, marking the start of the Code era which spans to 2011, when the last publishers discontinued its use, marking the start of the post-Code era. Because the Code was revised multiple times, each major revision marks an additional Code era. The second Code era begins in January 1971. The primary change was the acceptance of horror-themed comics, producing an influx of new titles and deadlier characters, including Swamp Thing (1971), Man-Thing (1971), Werewolf (1972) Blade (1973), Deathlok (1974), Punisher (1974), and the spike-fisted Wolverine (1974).

Under the leadership of new editor-in-chief Roy Thomas, Marvel decided the best way to relieve Spider-Man from the plot confines of a happy relationship was to kill his girlfriend. Amazing Spider-Man #122 (July 1973) featured not only Gwen Stacy’s death, but his failure to save her after she’s pushed from a bridge. Gill Kane penciled a “SNAP!” next to her neck when Spider-Man’s webs halt her descent too abruptly, a simultaneous shift in the laws of physics and narrative morality for comics.

The creation of Black superheroes increased exponentially during the transition period too: Black Panther (1966), Falcon (1969), the Butterfly (1971), Blade (1971), John Stewart Green Lantern (1971), Luke Cage (1972), Brother Voodoo (1973).

Denny O’Neil’s and Neil Adam’s first issue together on Green Lantern Co-Staring Green Arrow #76 (April 1970) brought race explicitly into focus when a Black man criticizes Green Lantern for protecting an abusive White landlord: “I been readin’ about you … how you work for the Blue skins … and how on a planet someplace you helped out the Orange skins … and you done considerable for the Orange skins! Only there’s skins you never bothered with–! …the Black skins! I want to know … how come?!”

More female superhero characters and titles premiered in the early 70s too: Black Widow (1970), Valkyrie (1972), The Cat (1972), Shanna (1972), Satana (1973), Tigra (1974).

The shifts were responses to a range of real-world events: the Black Power movement, blaxploitation films, the Women’s Liberation movement, Vietnam War protests, the Mai Lai massacre, Watergate. Scripter Steve Englehart’s Secret Empire run in Captain America and the Falcon culminated in #175 (July 1974) and the revelation that the secret supervillain was the President of the United States. In the next issue, cover-dated the month Nixon resigned, Steve Rogers renounces his Captain America identity.

I want to say that the shift in comics parallels a similar if coincidental shift in rock music: the 1969 supergroups of Led Zeppelin and Crosby, Stills and Nash forming from the breakup of the Yardbirds, the Byrds, the Hollies, and Buffalo Springfield; the death of Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones in 1969; the Beatles and Simon & Garfunkle break-ups in 1970; the deaths of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin in 1970; and the death of the Doors’ vocalist Jim Morrison in 1971. On the flip-side: the first albums of the 70s-defining bands Black Sabbath and Emerson, Lake and Palmer in 1970; ZZ Top in 1971; Eagles in 1972; Aerosmith, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Queen, and Journey in 1973; and Kiss, Rush, and Bad Company in 1974.

I recognize though that most eight-year spans could net a similar Bermuda Triangle of idiosyncratic significance.

Oh, and my parents divorced in 1973.

Comics for me start mid-70s, well into superheroes’ gratuitously titled third act.

All-New All-Different Medusa?

Dear Marvel Comics,

Please develop a new title featuring a Black woman as a new superhero named Medusa.

Here’s why.

First, some history. Medusa means guardian or female protector. The mythological character was raped by Neptune in Athena’s temple, and then Athena punished her by transforming her hair into snakes and her gaze with the power to turn men into stone. After giving Perseus a mirrored shield so he could kill her, Athena mounted Medusa’s head on her own shield.

French literary critic Hélène Cixous transformed the character into a feminist icon in her 1975 essay “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Here’s an excerpt: “Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Write your self. Your body must be heard.”

As far as Marvel mythology, Lee and Kirby introduced their Medusa in 1965. They later retconned Inhuman royalty to fill-in the amnesia induced by the Wizard, but initially she was a supervillain, one of the Frightful Four in Fantastic Four #36.

Maybe it was a product of her villainy, but her powers — her impossibly long, animate, and super-strong hair — distinguished her from Lee and Kirby’s typical women. Look at her first cover appearance:

The male villains extend their bodies, the Sandman most obviously, but the Trapster projects a force field, and the Wizard’s helmet is elongated, which Kirby further foreshortens by placing him in the foreground. Medusa’s hair, which extends beyond to top page, expands her physicality too.

Lee and Kirby tended to shrink women — literally with the Wasp, the lone female member of the original 1963 Avengers. Invisible Girl vanishes, allowing backgrounds to appear within the dotted outline of her body. Marvel Girl sometimes projected thin emanata lines, but usually from a background position. Look at their first covers:

Like the members of the Frightful Four, the male members of the Fantastic Four expand their bodies: the Thing is a living block, Mr. Fantastic stretches, and the Human Torch is a column of fire extending off the page like Medusa’s hair. The male X-Men are the same: Angel’s wings, Cyclops’ eye projection, Iceman’s ice projectiles, and the Beast’s body extends from some sort of swing, while each of his foreshortened feet is larger than other characters’ heads.

Invisible Girl, already taking up less page space than her teammates, literally fades in half, and Marvel Girl, despite the empty negative space around her arms, takes up half the space of each of her teammates.

Compare them to Medusa:

The page area of Medusa’s body roughly triples theirs. Or, as Cixous put it: “I, too, overflow.”

But, like Marvel Girl, Invisible Girl, and Wasp, the original red-haired Medusa is white.

The first Black female superhero, the Butterfly, appeared briefly in 1970 from Skywald Publications. Her wings, which project Dazzler-like light, extend her body too:

Marvel wouldn’t introduce a Black woman as a superhero until 1975. Storm’s cape expanded her body too:

The notion of a Black Medusa (meaning a Black character named Medusa) seems obvious given how real-world hair extensions expand bodies:

Like Medusa’s hair, they also come in red:

I can even recommend a writer.

I paired Nnedi Okorafor’s Shuri: The Search for Black Panther with her 2015 novella Binti in my first-year writing seminar.

Though Shuri’s braids look animate on the cover, Binti’s hair is actually animate at the end of the novel when she transforms into part-Meduse. That’s the name of a jellyfish-like alien species with “long tentacles spilling down to the floor.” Binti was already Medusa-like at the start of the novel, the way she would palm her “plaits smooth like the bodies of snakes.” After her transformation, she realizes, “My hair was no longer hair.” The braids were becoming tentacles: “a soft transparent blue with darker blue dots at their tips. They grew out of my head as if they’d been doing that all my life, so natural looking that I couldn’t say they were ugly. They were just a little longer than my hair had been, hanging just past my backside, and they were thick as sizeable snakes. … I pinched one and felt the pressure.”

But if Okorafor is booked with other projects, Eve L. Ewing is an equally excellent choice.

I pair Ironheart: Those With Courage and her 2017 poetry collection Electric Arches in the same writing seminar. Riri Williams has shorter hair than Shuri:

But hair is central throughout Electric Arches, including in “at the salon,” the poem that gives the collection its title: “I am in the universe and it is my hair, / each strand arched electric …”.

And “why you cannot touch my hair” sounds like it’s straight out of Binti: “my hair is a technology from the future and will singe your fingertips, be careful.”

(Hey, what if Riri’s next Ironheart suit design featured mechanical hair extensions?)

While “Shea Butter Manifesto” and “Ode to Luster’s Pink Oil” extend the theme even further, those poems make me think of another equally excellent choice of author.

I’ve taught Ebony Flowers’ 2019 Hot Comb in my comics course. Unlike Okorafor and Ewing, Flowers is also an artist. Her Lynda Barry-influenced style is nothing like Marvel, but imagine how fun her drawings would be as childhood flashback scenes.

But if all three are busy, I have yet one more equally excellent suggestion.

That’s the final full-page panel from C. Spike Trotman’s Yes, Roya. Though a Black Wonder Woman is wonderful (DC introduced Nubia in 1973), Trotman would have to reign in the sexual explicitness and return BDSM to the subtext — though Medusa’s rope-like hair seems ideal either way.

Trotman, AKA Iron Spike, also has a brilliant social media essay on Black hair:

Would the new Medusa’s braids be born-that-way tentacles? Mechanical extensions riveted to her skull? Something supernatural?

I’d leave those details to Okorafor, Ewing, Flowers, Trotman, and anyone else ready to join Team Medusa.

Of course, Marvel doesn’t own the name “Medusa” or the concept of a hair-themed superhero, especially a Black woman with braids, so if you pass, I’m guessing other comics companies might be happy to step up.

PS. I’ve since had a conversation with a fellow comics scholar who, in addition to kindly giving me time and attention, critiqued relating Black women’s hair to a snake-haired monster — regardless of how Cixous, Binti, or Marvel comics have evolved the mythological allusion. It’s an important critique, and so if someone were to pursue the above suggestions, a new name could be key.

Drawing Tarot Cards

Lesley Wheeler’s “Rhapsodomancy” appears in her forthcoming poetry collection Mycocosmic. The title is an invented word that riffs on bibliomancy, randomly opening a book and stabbing a passage with your finger to tell the future. The 22-line poem (published online at the ASP Bulletin) also riffs on the tarot deck, one line for each card of the Major Arcana. But for me, the poem is a comics script. I’ve been searching for a project to apply my “hazardous cut-outs” technique, an oddball Word Paint hack that pops out some random results. That’s right, a divinatory deck that exploits the randomness of card order drawn in a style that exploits the randomness of computer-produced black-and-white shapes. Form, meet function.

The 22-page “Rhapsodomantic” (we’re changing the title a smidge) is still a work-in-progress, but I’ve sketched most of the cast.

Death:

The Devil:

Strength:

The Sun:

The Hanged Man:

The Magician:

The Emperor:

The Hermit:

The Lovers:

The High Priestess:

The Star:

Justice:

The Fool:

Judgement:

The Empress:

Wheel of Fortune:

The Chariot:

But I don’t need a tarot deck to tell this future: Mycocosmic is on shelves March 1, 2025. Pre-orders start now.

How I Make Non-Crappy Art in MS Word Paint

I made this drawing in Paint. I’m guessing it took about four hours spread over three days. If I were a more experienced artist I assume it would take less time, but maybe not radically less? I’m also auditing my Creating Comics co-author Leigh Ann Beaver’s Drawing 1 class every Monday and Wednesday morning this semester, which has noticeably upped my game.

Let’s call that Step One: Practice drawing.

Don’t think of a computer as a shortcut around drawing. Think of it as just a drawing tool not fundamentally different from pencil and paper. I use Word Paint because I’m too lazy to learn anything more sophisticated. I also really really like the lack of sophistication because the more I explore it the more weirdness I discover. Better still, it’s infinitely forgiving. If only there were a back-arrow key for the other parts of my day.

I use seven other keys too.

Step Two: Find the keys.

“Color 1” determines the color of the digital pencils, inks, fills, and brushes. Ignore all of that.

All you need is “Color 2,” which determines the color conceptually “underneath” the surface of the screen. I toggle between black and white.

Under the “Home” tab, find the “Select” button, and from the pull-down menu find “free-form selection” and “Transparent selection.” Keep both as default settings.

Most importantly, find “Cut” on the “Home” tab. The little scissors icon next to it is helpful because that’s all you’re doing: cutting out shapes.

That means making a “line” requires drawing two lines: an initial line and a second line loosely retracing it in the opposite direction. Then you click “Cut.” I’ve started using a small Wacom pad and stylus, but I made this pattern (and gobs of other drawings) using the touchpad on my PC:

I start with “Color 1” on the black square, but the white square will be essential later.

Step Three: Choose a picture.

If you want to draw a realistic image, you’ll need a real-world source, and photographs are easier than live models because they don’t move and they’re already flat.

For the above image, I clicked through Facebook photos of myself (because getting someone else’s face wrong feels wronger to me than getting my own face wrong), until I found one with good lighting contrasts. I also ended up going back a decade and picking one that didn’t make me cringe (downside of self-portraits: your self-idealization button is on constant display).

Step Four: Cut-out a sketch.

I described my “hazardous cut-outs” process in a previous post.

This time I started with a “pencil” sketch in Color 1 red (adding the one-time use of two additional buttons to my above instructions, but this step is optional). I copied, pasted, expanded, and cropped my head, then sketched a very very loose contour drawing beside it.

I switched to “free-form selection” and Color 2 black, made another two-minute sketch, and hit “Cut,” which produces semi-random black and white shapes.

To get rid of the red lines still visible in the white areas, select the entire image, delete it, check “Transparent selection,” switch Color 2 to red, and hit paste:

To be clear, it PAINS me how badly I drew the mouth. But that’s the point: it doesn’t matter because these shapes will be part of the final image.

Step Five: Start scribbling.

I mean hatching. I started with the face. If an area was black, I scissored out white marks; if the area was white, I scissored out black marks. I did that multiple times in each area, before reversing the process: scissoring out white marks into areas that were now predominately black, and black marks into areas predominately white.

Step Five: Hatch a background.

Free-floating heads are less interesting than heads in some kind of context. The context I created was completely fictional: it has nothing to do with the source photo. I also scissored out the black areas of hair, cutting a particularly tight pattern of white shapes all at once.

Step Six: Start refining.

It’s the same white-cuts-on-black or black-cuts-on-white hatching as above, but now my areas of attention tightened. So did my hatching. I also discovered a paradox of the digital approach: a unit of small tight hatches cuts out less than a unit of large loose hatches. Less is literally more. And, more importantly at this stage, more is less.

Oh, and one macro change: I have a tendency to draw overly long noses (can’t imagine why) which produces equally elongated cheeks. To correct that, I turned off “Transparent selection,” switched to “Rectangular selection,” selected the top half of the entire image starting mid-nose, and then dragged the whole thing down incrementally, until the nose and cheeks appeared more proportional.

Step Seven: Keep refining.

This is also the final step, but how long you go at it is up to you. I kept the original photo next to my drawing so I was constantly comparing. As Leigh Ann tells her class again and again: CLOSE ONE EYE AND SQUINT. It blurs everything and so clarifies the shading relationships, which is what you’re drawing. The image is not a set of distinct lines but a set of many many lighter and darker hatching areas.

Step Seven: Keep refining.

Like I said, there’s no definite endpoint. But the longer I worked, isolating one increasingly smaller area at a time, the more I actually SAW both the original photograph and the drawing. I also noticed that my mental concepts of “face” and “eye” and “mouth” were interfering with my ability to see and reproduce actual facial qualities. It took me the longest to overcome what I apparently think lips look like.

Also when I showed it to Leigh Ann, she told me to clean out the highlights more. So I did.

Because I like the stylistic contrast, I never fiddled with the hair or ear. I could keep at the rest (so many flaws are jumping out at me right now), but I felt I hit a pausing point. Maybe I’ll go back and refine further. Maybe the pausing point will become a stopping point. Either way, this is the most realistic drawing I’ve ever made, and I did it in a software program that’s almost as old as I am (I’m 58, though a mere 48 in the snapshot).

Hazardous Cut-Outs

I’m auditing a drawing class by Leigh Ann Beavers (who co-authored Creating Comics with me), which has been influencing my digital work, adding speed and perhaps a slight improvement in observational accuracy (alas, the above image is technically a self-portrait). But where I used to labor hours over pixels, most of these contour drawings took maybe three minutes. I went back in and fiddled a little with some, but they are mostly single lines too. Or, because my idiosyncratic approach to Word Paint is all about the scissors tool, they’re single cuts.

The term “cut-out” evokes Matisse, but I’m going to cite Robert Fripp instead: “The album to a degree works on the notion of hazard. It’s hazardous events where chance rules, yet there’s significance [or meaningful risk] involved.” Fripp means his music, how he programs unpredictability into his soundscape software to complicate his live compositions. Word Paint does the same for me because I have no idea what my winding scissors line will render as black on the white background or as white within larger black cutout areas. If the beginning point and the ending point are distant, the program will also create a new and perfectly straight edge line to connect them.

For me, the thrilling moment is when I finish the sketch, lift the stylus for the first time, and everything I’ve drawn vanishes — before I click “cut” and the complete composition pops into existence.

It’s easier to show than describe, so here’s a thirty-second doodle:

I say “doodle” because, unlike the images below, I didn’t draw from a photograph, but otherwise the process is identical.

Here’s a stack of recent hazardous cut-outs:

I just submitted my new book manuscript, The Color of Paper: Representing Race in the Comics Medium, for external review, so I am also thinking about how commonly white represents all skin colors and how rarely black represents any skin colors — except for Black skin in the virulently racist blackface minstrel traditions that dominated comics till the mid-twentieth century.

Leigh Ann’s drawing class is giving the non-analytical areas of my brain a needed workout, so I’ll just say I’ve been enjoying hitting the hazard button:

Last Chapter of My Election Memes

I’ve averaged about a meme a day since July. After chapters one, two, three, and four, this is the fifth, last, and longest, from the first week of October to Election Day (which is tomorrow as I post this). If nothing else, Donald Trump provides an extraordinary amount of material.

What were Republicans saying a couple months ago about requiring presidential candidates to take cognitive tests?

Is this dementia? Is he actually this out of touch? Does he just say random statements that pass through his head without caring whether they’re true or false? Does he understand the difference?

Now only $59.99!

2024 is on track to be yet another worst-year-ever for hurricanes. If only there had been some way to predict and prepare for this trend.

The Trump-inspired Project 2025 will cut FEMA disaster aid and end FEMA flood insurance. It will commercialize the National Weather Service, leaving hurricane forecasts to private companies. It will defund the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration because it considers climate research “harmful to future US prosperity.”

I know that supporting Trump doesn’t mean you have to be an idiot or lunatic. But it does mean you’re okay with this kind of idiocy and lunacy. This is the America MAGA has made.

Remember this endorsement? Supporting Trump doesn’t mean you must be a white Christian nationalist, but it does mean you’re okay with white Christian nationalism.

When Hilter ran for president in 1932 Germany, did he tell voters what he actually intended to do?

What do military leaders who worked closely with Trump think of him?

What does Trump’s former cabinet think of him?

The depth and audacity of his lies continue to shock me. Or more precisely, I’m again newly shocked that his supporters support him despite, or even because of, the depth and audacity of his lies.

Musk has donated $75 million to elect Trump.

Last week Trump was asked by a ten-year-old, “What was your favorite president when you were little?” Trump answered, “Ronald Reagan.” Trump was 34 the year Reagan was elected. Also, his “favorite president” supported citizenship for undocumented immigrants.

Anyone supporting Trump because of “the economy” is getting scammed.

It’s a sales tax, stupid.

Even the Wall Street Journal knows Harris has the better economic plan.

Remember when Republicans still pretended to be fiscal conservatives?

General Kelly began in Trump’s cabinet as Secretary of Homeland Security before becoming Trump’s longest-serving Chief of Staff. No one in the Trump Administration had a better inside view of President Trump.

What do people who worked closely with Trump during his first term think of him now?

To be fair, Scaramucci is an idiot fired after ten days because he forgot to say “off the record” before mouthing off to a reporter. He supported Trump after he was fired, until Trump tweeted that Rep. Omar, a Somali refugee, and other women of color should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came,” which devolved into the rally chant “SEND! HER! BACK!” Even Scaramucci called that “racist and unacceptable.”

Walz said it best: “Who is that jackwad?” Answer: Trump’s favorite comedian. He picked him to open his Madison Square Garden rally. Hinchcliffe’s response to the backlash: “These people have no sense of humor.” Vance’s response: “Let’s have a sense of humor and let’s have a little fun.” Trump’s response: Not a word.

Double standard.

His immortal words.

Obama says it best.

The final Trump-Vance campaign poster.

The Supreme Court will decide whether states can ban birth control. Thomas already declared his intent to end that right when he ended the right to abortion. The next president will either expand or reduce Thomas’s conservative majority.

You know the theory that our world is a simulation being run in another universe? I’m pretty sure that universe is Netflix.

Okay, last time, all together now: wah … wah ….

So how’s everybody else feeling?

Why don’t I like Donald Trump?

I wrote this five years ago and first posted it in June 2019. Rereading it now, I find there’s little I would change. The statement that I “don’t know if he ever committed sexual assault” is no longer true since he was convicted of defaming E. Jean Carrol and ordered to pay her $83.3 million in damages. There’s obviously nothing about his inciting Jan. 3 and then claiming it was a government-staged riot to cover up the certification of a fraudulent election. I’d consider deleting much of the prevaricating last paragraph; if there ever was room for the benefit of the doubt, he extinguished it. I’ve also long abandoned the “Civil Discourse” page I founded. But my 2019 understanding of Trump is essentially the same as my 2024 understanding. So, unedited, here’s what I said five years ago:

Why don’t I like Donald Trump?

This is a sincere question asked recently by a fellow member of the Rockbridge Civil Discourse Society. Usually I’m surrounded by family and friends who take the answer for granted, but RCDS is a group of Democrats and Republicans trying to build understanding across the partisan divide. Which means I have to give the question more serious thought than I would normally. That’s a good thing. Having to explain myself to someone who doesn’t already agree with me is an even better thing. So this is my sincere attempt at a thoughtful response.

I didn’t like Trump before I didn’t like Trump.

Before he was a politician, I knew Donald Trump only as one of those self-fulfilling celebrities famous for being famous. I never watched an episode of The Apprentice, but everyone knew the one-man promotional brand playing himself on TV. I categorized him in my head with Hulk Hogan. Saying I didn’t like him is misleading. He was no more real or relevant to me than Paris Hilton or a Kardashian. Except his caricature was even less savory. A serial adulterer marrying absurdly younger trophy wives while flaunting his comic wealth. None of this has anything to do with politics.  It never occurred to me to wonder what political party he might belong to because political parties involve groups of people banding together to pursue common goals. The goal of Trump was exclusively Trump. This was before 2014—before I knew he was running for office. At first I didn’t believe it, not really. It had to be another gimmick product, Trump Wine, Trump University, Trump for President, one more way to expand his business brand, pump up his ratings with more outrageous showmanship. It didn’t occur to me that he could win a primary let alone a nomination. It didn’t occur to me that someone, anyone, could view him as anything but a pop cultural personification of ostentatious greed, because I sincerely understood him to be that and only that.

Trump says things that aren’t true.

Some people call that lying. Others say he’s only using exaggerations—or just savvy business practice. Whatever you call it, Donald Trump knowingly and wantonly makes statements that are not true. He also knowingly and wantonly makes statements that are true. The accuracy of his statements is irrelevant. He says whatever is most useful to him. His 1987 memoir ghost-writer called it “truthful hyperbole,” a way of playing “to people’s fantasies,” “a very effective form of promotion.” Admittedly, an indifference to truth sounds useful in a cutthroat business environment, and as long as Trump remained in that environment, his exaggerations, lies, and hyperboles were no concern to me. Then he became a politician, a profession known for its own brand of mistruths. But Trump is different. Look at all the presidential nominees of my adult life: Mondale, Reagan, Dukakis, Bush, Clinton, Dole, Gore, Bush, Kerry, Obama, McCain, Romney, Clinton—all of them were constrained within a similar range of allowable spin. I’m not arguing any are better, more honest people. If they could have gotten away with Trump’s level of mistruth, they probably would have. But his go unpunished. Maybe it’s his business savvy, his ability to sell anything, but its application to U.S. politics deeply disturbs me. Again, this has nothing to do with political parties. If Donald Trump had run as a Democrat, he would be the same democracy-gaming salesman appealing to a slightly different set of voters with a slightly different set of self-promotional hyperboles.

Trump says things that offend me.

I’m not going to say Donald Trump is a racist. Conservatives tend to define that term as a necessarily conscious belief, that only a white person who actively believes he is superior to non-whites can commit racist acts. I don’t know if that describes Trump or not. I suspect when he refers to Central Americans as rapists, murders, etc., he is not expressing deeply held personal convictions but politically useful hyperboles of the kind discussed above. That doesn’t make it any less offensive to me. I also don’t know if he ever committed sexual assault, but I know he bragged that he did. Some defended his words as “locker room talk,” that it’s normal and therefore okay for men in the privacy of other men while unaware of being recorded to brag about assaulting women. I never have, and I have never heard any male friend or acquaintance of mine brag about assault either. Maybe I’m the wrong kind of man. Maybe Trump is no different from all our other white male presidents, saying out loud what the rest privately thought and privately committed. If so, then they all offend me equally. Again, this has nothing to do with political parties. No one who brags about sexual assault and expresses offensive stereotypes about ethnic groups should be electable, and I’m offended that Donald Trump got elected anyway.

Trump thrives on the political divide.

It never even occurred to me that he would keep using Twitter after the election. It never occurred to me that he would continue to attack and mock his political opponents at literally a daily rate. Maybe I’m just old. I remember when George Bush’s campaign rhetoric went into panic mode a week before the 1992 election. He said, “My dog Millie knows more about foreign policy than these two bozos.” He nicknamed Gore “Ozone Man” because “we’ll be up to our neck in owls and outta work for every American.” Those sound like presidential tweets now, and during a Trump presidency, it’s always a week before the election. I’m not suggesting Trump created the political divide. Exactly the opposite. He got elected because the divide was already so extreme, and he is the perfect salesman to thrive in that political marketplace. And even this isn’t about political parties. I want a president—preferably a progressive one—who tries to bridge differences, not focus exclusively on his base by stoking their outrage in an endless get-out-the-vote campaign.

I don’t like his politics.

Now, finally, this is about political parties. I’m a Democrat. Democratic candidates more often reflect a larger number of my political preferences than Republican candidates. That’s an absurd understatement. I have never seen a Republican candidate that came even close—though McCain during the 2000 primaries did make me sit down and really look at his plank-by-plank platform. I long for that.  Still, if Romney had been elected in 2012, or McCain in 2008, or Dole in 1996, I wouldn’t have responded to their presidencies in any way like I’ve responded to Donald Trump’s. When Bush was reelected in 2004 and elected in 2000, and when his father was elected in 1988, and Reagan in 1984, I had voted against them but accepted the outcomes with disappointment and only disappointment. November 2016 was nothing like that. I felt personally betrayed. I felt that the norms of decency had either been overturned or revealed to have never existed. Even when Clinton’s polls dropped three points after the release of the Comey letter in the last days of October, it still never seriously occurred to me that Donald Trump—a man who to me represented misogyny, bigotry, narcissism, and greed—could be elected. Clearly, I was wrong. But I maintain that it is not possible for anyone to have voted for Donald Trump if they understand Donald Trump to be the person I understand him to be.

And maybe I’m wrong about that too.  Maybe my impressions of him from the 80s and 90s and early 2000s unfairly biased and blinded me to his real character on the campaign trail. Maybe I have an idealized, antiquated notion of proper politics and my disappointment isn’t against Trump’s divisive style but the political arena that makes it effective. Maybe most or all white men who rise to power are at least latently prejudiced and abusive, and Trump has merely revealed that fact. Maybe it’s okay to use mistruths when it’s for a cause you and your followers deeply believe in. It’s also possible that my dislike for Donald Trump is really motivated by political preference, and that if a Democrat with the same traits had risen to power I would have accepted his shortcomings and supported his agenda. I hope not. But I fear it is possible. It’s also one of the things I most dislike about Donald Trump. He’s motivated a lot of good people to embrace a lot of very bad things.

Revising Donald Trump

I recently read the New York Times headline: “Trump Tries to Rewrite History of Jan. 6 in Campaign’s Final Stretch.”

The phrase “Rewrite History” jumped out at me because Nat Goldberg and I published a book last summer that analyzes exactly that phrase in a range of nonfictional contexts. Googling “trump” and “rewrite history” produces a dozen more example headlines:

Nat and I recently gave an author talk at our school that included a similar slide about the book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity and how two different reviewers used the word “history” in two different ways:

The first “human history” can be rewritten, but the second “human history” can’t. Why?

Next slide please:

I think most readers experience the distinction intuitively, but it’s helpful to make it explicit — especially given the proliferation of Trump-related history rewriting.

Trump rewrites stories about the past, and his supporters believe the stories to be true. But whether true or not, the written stories and the actual past are never the same thing. An accurate story about the past still isn’t that past itself, because the past is fixed and all stories are permanently open to different kinds of revision.

Drawing from pop culture, Nat and I identify four:

Three of those kinds apply fully to nonfiction: sequels, retcons, and rejects. Reboots (or remakes, we use the terms interchangeably) apply only to fiction. That’s because sequels, retcons, and (most) rejects involve a single world (whether fictional or nonfictional), and reboots require two worlds: the reboot produces a new world that’s distinct from the previous world that it remakes. That’s easy to do in fiction and impossible in nonfiction because in nonfiction there’s only one world, the actual world.

And yet, we conclude that the Trump historical rewrites are closest to reboots, which, like the other kinds of revision, do have a nonfiction application.

Reboots in fiction are obvious. Pick your favorite franchise and count how many times it’s been restarted:

Every Batman is a new Batman unaware of all previous Batmans (until the franchise later connects the separate universes by revealing they’re all part of the same multiverse, which is a retcon — but let’s not go there right now).

While you can’t restart the actual world, you can pretend you have. Paul Revere is our go-to example:

When he died in 1818, Revere’s legendary midnight ride wasn’t mentioned in his obituaries. That’s because it didn’t happen until 1861, when Henry Wadsworth Longfellow published “Paul Revere’s Ride,” the poem that created the larger-than-life American hero.

The poem includes invented details (Revere did not, for example, shout, “The British are coming!”) so it is not “history” in the unrevisable metafictional sense. Epistemically though, the poem effectively replaced earlier and far more accurate accounts. It started as fiction and then was accepted as nonfiction.

Other fiction-taken-as-fact revisions are more disturbing:

Remember the pizza shop in DC where Hilary Clinton and other prominent Democrats kept kidnapped children in the basement to drink their blood during Satanic rituals?

The restaurant didn’t even have a basement, but the gunman who tried to free the children believed the fiction to be nonfiction.

The most common term for that kind of story is “hoax.” Nat and I call it a “reboot” because, when believed, it produces an impression of the world that’s different from the actual world.

Which gets us back to Donald Trump.

The kind of revision he and his running mate write are fictional reboots that they present as nonfictional accounts of the real world. If our analysis stopped with the authors, the reboots would merely be works of fiction. Authors of fiction know they’re writing fiction. Liars also know that their lies are lies — otherwise their statements would be mistakes. Historians (meaning anyone saying anything about the past) get things wrong all the time, but an inaccurate report about the actual world is still a report about the actual world. Accuracy doesn’t define nonfiction.

But the intent and result of Trump’s fictions being accepted as accurate reports on the actual world turns his reboots into a kind of malicious nonfiction.

Nat and I discuss Trump multiple times in Revising Reality, including his rewrites of the 2020 election, the invention of the phrase “alternative facts,” his golden age reboot encapsulated in his MAGA campaign slogan, and the revision of our country’s founding document into religious scripture. Depending on how actual history turns out next month, we will either have a new four-year multiverse of reality-distorting reboots to analyze, or Mr. Trump will retire to Paul Revere’s basement.

I’ve already voted for the basement.