David Chelsea's Blog, page 39

EARTH ALERT!

From my pals at INX:

“Please join us on Monday, July 16, for the opening reception of

“EARTH ALERT - INX Artists and the Environment” Curated by Andrea Arroyo.

Meet the Artists reception: Monday, July 16th, 6-8pm . Exhibit on view through  August 31, 2012.

The Grady Alexis Gallery, El Taller Latino Americano, 2710 Broadway, 3rd fl., New York, NY 10025.

Gallery Hrs: Mon-Thurs 10am-6pm, Sat 10am-1pm. Free and open to the public.

Contact: Andrea Arroyo, Curator and Gallery Director, The Grady Alexis Gallery, NYC (arroyo212@yahoo.com)

David Chelsea is listening to:

How the Dog Became the Dog: From Wolves to Our Best Friends

by Mark Derr

“Earth Alert - INX Artists and the Environment” features the work of twenty-one artists from INX, an artist-run syndicate for political illustration founded in 1980 by award-winning editorial artists from the U.S. and abroad. The group has produced a weekly package of powerful images in print and online that has been distributed to hundreds of news sources over the past thirty-two years (The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Chicago Tribune, Newsday and The Washington Post among others.)

Participating artists: Michelle Barnes, David Chelsea, Paul Corio, Susann Ferris-Jones, Vivienne Flesher, Felipe Galindo, David Gothard, Ryan Inzana, Randy Jones, Janusz Kapusta, Thomas Kerr, David Klein, Igor Kopelnitsky, Martin Kozlowski, Peter Kuper, Laird Ogden, Sara Schwartz, Jill Karla Schwarz, Rob Shepperson, Brad Teare and Robert Zimmerman.”

I had no advance notice of this show, and don’t know which piece of mine they’ll be showing, but the INX stable are all worthy illustrators, and readers in the New York area should definitely check it out. And definitely check out the recent collection INX Battle Lines: Three Decades of Political Illustration.

The Girl With The Keyhole Eyes: See You In September

This just in: the first chapter of my three part comics story The Girl With The Keyhole Eyes has been scheduled for an upcoming issue of the anthology Dark Horse Presents. Here’s a profile of that issue, though it doesn’t go into any detail beyond listing my name with the other contributors (John Layman, Carla Speed McNeil, Tony Puryear, Bo Hampton, Phil Stanford, Nate Cosby, Jimmy Palmiotti, Justin Gray, Richard Corben, Robert Tinnell, Sam Kieth, Patric Reynolds, Evan Shaner and Tony Akins). No matter, I previewed that story on my blog plenty last year when I was working on it.

David Chelsea is listening to:

Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend

by Susan Orlean

The Girl With The Keyhole Eyes preview from last year

Another one.

Dark Horse Presents #16 goes on sale at a comics shop near you on September 19, 2012.

Format: Full Color, 80 Pages

Price:$7.99

RIP, LeRoy Neiman

Caricature from The New York Observer, 2007

Back To The Return To The Chronic Rift

The old interviews are the best. Here’s one recorded in 1992, from the public access cable program The Chronic Rift. The interviewers are Andrea Lipinski and Keith R. A. DeCandido. The talk is mostly about my then-current comics series David Chelsea In Love, but it also touches on the optics of night vision, my preference for Embosso eggshell paper over coquille board, and my embarrassing East Village performance artist phase. I even work in a prophetic and utterly gratuitous mention of perspective.

David Chelsea is reading:

Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City

by Guy Delisle

If you watch the program from the beginning, you will also see an interview with the late Star Trek novelist Janet Kagan and Keith’s review of a new Li’l Abner collection from Kitchen Sink Press. If you’re only interested in my interview, it begins at the 17 minute mark.

Many thanks to John S. Drew for making the program available.

Nineteen years later I returned to the new online podcast incarnation of The Chronic Rift to be interviewed by Andrea, mostly about my latest book Extreme Perspective! That interview appeared last year, and you can listen to it here.

Blog post about previous Chronic Rift interview

The Survey Extended!

Yesterday, June 4, was supposed to be the last day to take The Survey, my online poll for determining the most commercially appealing style and genre possible for my next comics project based on your responses (as well as another comic guaranteed to be unpopular because it will have all the features you say you least like), but I have decided to extend the deadline another two months, partly because many of you may only be learning about it now, partly because I am deep in the throes of another comics project that I can’t talk about (yet), and partly because August 4 is my sister Anny’s birthday.

David Chelsea is listening to:

Gently Weeps

by Jake Shimabukuro

Taken The Survey yet? Click here, and don’t be shy about leaving your contact information in the space provided!

Perspective Police!: The Album

A reader writes in, apropos of my recent Perspective Police! post revising Alison Bechdel:

“I just wanted to say, it was nice to see the perspective post but I also wanted to suggest perhaps you provide a link to a side-by-side comparison of the original and your revision.

I dragged the thumbnails and opened each up side-by-side in different windows using an image viewer. But, if there were just a link to a side-by-side on the blog, that would give people a great option to see what you did.”

David Chelsea is reading:

The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business

by Charles Duhigg





Always happy to oblige. I have just put up a picture album of all Perspective Police! posts so far with side-by-side images of the originals and my revisions at Comics Lifestyle. View here.

Here are links to my original posts:

Perspective Police! post revising Alison Bechdel

Perspective Police! post revising Ivan Brunetti

Perspective Police! post revising David Celsi

Perspective Police! post revising Joost Swarte

Got an example of iffy perspective to show? Be a whistleblower! Send an e-mail to me at davidchelsea(at)comcast(dot)net and include Perspective Police! in the subject line.

Juvenilia: Tricentennial

Illustration for Tricentennial: 2076 by John Shirley for The Portland Scribe, 1976.

No fair criticizing the perspective- or lack of it- in this drawing done for The Portland Scribe in the Bicentennial year of 1976 (when I was seventeen); my big breakthrough on that front didn’t happen for another seven years. It illustrates a short story predicting a very grim and dystopian Tricentennial in 2076, written by future novelist, rock musician, Bram Stoker Award winner and comics writer John Shirley. (By the way, Shirley and I had no contact at all on this collaboration; we didn’t actually meet until I went to hear his band years later in New York.)

David Chelsea is listening to:

Thinking, Fast and Slow

by Daniel Kahneman

You can view the illustration big at Comics Lifestyle.

How’s this for futuristic? Below is the original story, scanned from a 36-year-old newspaper and converted to digital text with optical character recognition software (hence the line breaks- OCR preserves the original column widths). Many thanks to John Shirley for allowing me to post this:

TRICENTENNIAL: 2076

© 1976 by John Shirley

“PRECISELY WHAT do you sug-

gest I do about it?” asked Ollie.

“You’re hedging. You know what

has to be done. You got to go get

one,” said his sister Lem coldly.

“Look—we can make one for him

out of cardboard—”

“No. He wouldn’t fall for it, he

has to have the real thing. Cloth.

With the official Tricentennial medal-

lion on the stick. He’s not that far

gone. And if we don’t do it Pops

won’t sign the release and he’ll die

without turning over the cubicle to

us and then we’ll be out in the

street. And you are the oldest,

Ollie-boy. So you are elected.”

“I don’t know if I want to stay

in this grimy cubicle. I could be in

the Angels. I got a Hell’s Angels

Officer’s School commission and I

see no reason why I shouldn’t—”

“Because it would be worse, that’s

why. You don’t believe all that stuff they

tell you at the Angels recruiting office

about the Cycle Corps, do you? They have

it just as bad as the Army, except they’ve

got the Rape Decree to back up anything

they do. But big deal. You get your rocks

off but do you get a decent place to

sleep?”

“Okay. Okay, then. But- I ain’t goin’

alone. No way. If we’re gonna get it for

him, you are goin’ with me, back-up. Be-

cause there’s no way to go two big ones on

53rd alone without getting it in the back…

Look, are you sure we can’t get one in

Building Three?”

“I’m sure. I’ve called around. All the

dispensaries are out of them except

Eleven.”

“Maybe we can roll the old man on the

hundredth floor who’s got one—”

“He’s got microwave barriers. We’d fry.”

Ollie sighed. “Then let’s go. And when

we bring it back I hope to God the old

sonuvabitch is happy with it. Because if

he’s not, Father or no Father—”

“Okay, don’t get smogged up. Let’s

go.”

II

At first, the metal streets seemed almost

deserted. The frags and the joy-boy gangs and

the hustlers and sliders were there, just out of

sight, but maybe Security was keeping them off

the street for the Tricentennial Procession. Ollie’d

heard it might traverse the 53rd Level but he’d

assumed it would move through some less dilapi-

dated end of the street. But probably it all

looked this way.

Crusted with grey-white scum from exhala-

tions of methane-engines and human pores, the

kelp-fiber walls of the five storeys visible on the

53rd Level bulged slightly outward with the

weight of excess population—each cubicle held

at least five people more than regulations pre-

scribed as safe. Ollie cradled the Smith & Wesson

.44 magnum he’d received on his Weaponing Day,

at 14 years old. He held it now, five years later,

as a man of an earlier era might have clasped a

crucifix, and he whispered to it piously, while

his eyes swept the rust-pitted streets, sorting

through the heaps of litter waiting for the dumper,

the piles of garbage, the half-dozen corpses that

were as much a part of any street as the fire-

hydrants. The streetlights extending from warped

and peeling faces of the buildings were all func-

tioning and the vents near the ceiling within

the plasteel girder underpinnings of the 54th

Level were all inhaling, judging from the thinness

of the smogs wreathing the dark doorwells. There

were only about 25 pedestrians on the street and

no cars—nearly desolation, compared to any

other time. Apparently the Procession was near.

Ollie and Lem, crouching just inside the door-

way to their home-building rechecked their wea-

pons and scanned the sidewalk for booby-traps.

“I don’t see anything we can’t handle,” Lem said.

“You’re naive. We can’t see into the alleys or

doorways or that subway entrance. And—” Ollie

was interrupted by the blast of a siren. A few

ragged silhouettes shuffling the street scurried

for doorways at the wailing from the cornice-

speakers. Others hardly looked up. “Looks like

all that’s left are dope-heads who don’t know

from shit. Christ, they so far gone they don’t

know the clear-streets-siren when they hear it.”

As the siren wound down Lem asked, “How

long since you been on the street?”

“This first time in three years. Looks pretty

much the same. Only more dope-heads.”

“Always more dope-heads. They don’t get

gutted much because they don’t have any money.”

“Well. Let’s go, maybe we can dash the

whole two blocks. I mean, since the streets are

almost empty—”

“Look who’s being naive. You haven’t been

on the streets in three years. You don’t know—”

Lem began. •

“Don’t sound so smug,” Ollie interrupted.

“You’re an ass for venturing onto the streets

when you don’t need to. We’ve got everything

we need on our floor, all the dispensaries and

spas are there, and it’s the same everywhere any-

way and since you can’t leave the Zone without

a permit or unless you go with the troops, why

bother?”

“We’ve got a half hour to get to Building

Eleven. Let’s do it.”

Both of them were dressed in scum-grey

clothing, camouflage, their faces ensanguined by

ashes so their pallor would blend, as much as

possible, into the walls.

Lem, tall and thin, the fire in her curly red

hair extinguished with ashes, stood and checked

her brace of throwing knives; inspected the

Thompson sub-machine gun she’d got two years

before on her Weaponing Day, and the cans of

acid-bombs affixed to the two khaki belts criss-

crossing her chest

Ollie examined his own equipment, certified

that the extra pistol he kept in his shoulder-holster

was loaded and ready, the knives on springs lashed

to his forearms primed. His .44 loaded and cocked.

Lem behind, walking backwards to cover the

rear, they set off, looking like some odd two-

headed predatory creature. The lineaments of

the dour metal streets converged in a mesh of

street-lamps, girders, stairways, and furtive

figures, made tenebrously unreal by the smudged

air and dim mucous-yellow lighting. The vista,

shackled by metal ceiling and street merged in

the distance, had all the elegance of a car crum-

pled into a cube by a hydraulic-press compactor.

Ollie adjusted his infrared visors to see into the

darker lairs. A frag, there to the right. The frag

was a woman, left breast burned off to make

room for a rifle-strap, a patch over her right eye.

She waited, leaning back against the wall, her

lower half hidden by a multiplex heap of refuse.

Ollie hadn’t been on the street in years, but the

indications were ever the same: the suspect

looked casual, relaxed—and that was bad. If she

wasn’t planning to attack them, she’d look tensed,

in defense. So she was preparing to jump.

She was 20 feet off, on the low right, standing

in the well of a barred basement doorway.

They carried $40 for their Old Man’s Fourth-

of-July toy. Frags could smell money. Even

penniless, they’d be jumped for their clothes,

guns, and on General Principle.

The frag made as if to tie her boot-lace. A

signal. “Down!” Oilie cried.

Lem and Ollie went to a crouch as the woman

who had seen her accomplice’s signal leapt from

the doorway immediately to her right, and only

her M-16’s jamming saved them. Lem stepped in

and with an underhand cut gutted her and with-

drew the stilletto before the frag could reach for

another weapon. By this time the other frag was

swinging her rifle round to take aim. Oilie had

already leveled the .44.

He squeezed the trigger, the gun barked, the

jolt from the recoil hurt his wrist. The one-eyed

woman caught it in the gut, was thrown back,

rebounded from the wall, and pitched forward

to fall onto her face. Blood marked a Rorschach

visage leering in red on the wall behind her.

He heard Lem firing at the other frags attracted

by the gun-shots. A young man fell, pistol clat-

tering into the gutter. The others found cover.

“C’mon!” They sprinted, running low to the

ground, gaining another forty feet, three-quarters

of the first block behind diem. Another block-

and-a-quarter, Oilie thought. Something lobbed

in wallowing tinny arc struck the sticky plasteel

sidewalk and clattered past Ollie’s right leg, he

turned and grabbed Lem by the forearm, drag-

ging her into the shelter of a doorway. The gre-

nade exploded on the other side of the wall,

fragments of the flimsy wall-fiber flew, laughter

erupted from nearby frag-niches to echo from

the distant ceiling, laughter as uncaring as the

shrapnel that took put two dope-heads across

the street. The blue smoke cleared.

A bullet struck the wall by Ollie’s head, flying

splinters stung his scalp. Swallowing fear—it had

been three years—he crouched, panning his gun-

sight back and forth over the grey-black-engraved

prospect. Sniper? From where? He looked up—

that window, fourth ‘floor. Glint off a barrel. He

snatched free an acid cartridge and clipped it

hastily on the launch-spring welded to the under-

side of his pistol’s barrel. He cocked, squinted,

and fired. The sniper’s rifle went off at the same

moment, another shot too high. Then the acid-

bomb exploded in the sniper’s apartment. A

scream that began as a rumble, went higher and

higher in pitch, finishing as a bubbling whine

that merged perfectly with the returning off-

streets-siren, a growing, piercing ululation. The

sniper, slapping at his boiling skin, threw himself

whimpering out the window and fell, writhing,

three storeys, striking the ground head first. Strip-

ping die corpses of the sniper, joy-boys and the

two dead women, the frags were momentarily

distracted. So Ollie and Lem sprinted, zig-zagging

to make poor targets.

Bolting across the intersection, they drew fire.

Four strident cracks, two pings—two misses.

They achieved the opposite comer. Crouched

behind a conical heap of excrement and plastic

cans, their left side protected by the extruding

metal side-walls of a stairway. “Three-quarters

of a block left,” said Lem.

But frags were closing in from the right, at

least a dozen piebald figures creeping hastily

from shadow to shadow like scuttling cock-

roaches.

One of the frags caught another unawares and

slipped him a blade. There was a bubbling cough

and that was all.

“One less,” said Lem. “But they’ll cooperate

to kill us before they turn on each other again.”

A scratchy recorded fanfare announced the

Tricentennial Procession.

The street was 20 yards from gutter to gutter.

The Procession filled the street for half a block;

two long, six-wheeled armored red-white-and-blue

sedans surrounded by twelve Security Cycles.

A recorded voice from the fanged chrome grill

of the front sedan announced over and over:

REJOICE INDEPENDENCE DAY REJOICE

INDEPENDENCE DAY REJOICE INDEPEN-

DENCE DAY MAYOR WELCOMES ALL CITI-

ZENS TO SEYMOR COLISEUM FOUR PM FOR

PUBLIC BURNINGS AND SACRIFICES RE-

JOICE INDEPENDENCE DAY REJOICE RE-

JOICE

Dimly, through the green-tinted window of

the low, steel-plated limo Ollie could make out

the faces of the High Priest of the International

Church of Sun Moon sitting beside the man he’d

appointed as Mayor, whose name Ollie could not

recall. A few token bullets bounced from the

limo’s windshield. The silhouettes within waved

at the faces crowding the windows. A handful

of excrement splattered the roof, cleaned away

instants later by tiny concealed hoses in the

windshield frame. One of the Security Cycles

shot a microwave-shell into the apartment from

which the excrement had been thrown, there

was a white flash and a scream, a thin wisp of

smoke from the shattered window.

The Security Cycles were three-wheeled motor-

bikes, propelled, like the limousines, by methane-

engines fueled by gases extracted from human

excrement. Issuing blue flatulence, they rolled

slowly abreast Oilie and Lem. The cops inside,

figures of shiny black leather, heads completely

encased in black-opaqued helmets, were protected

by bells of transparent plasteel from which their

various weapons projected cobra-snouts. The cop

nearest Ollie methodically snuffed dope-heads

and careless frags with casual flares of his

handle-bar-mounted microwave rifle. “Hey,”

Ollie breathed, “maybe they’ll help us. If you

call them they don’t come but since they’re right

here, if we ask them for help getting to the cor-

ner they can’t refuse, seeing as we’re right in

front of them and all. Hell, with the High Priest

watching…”

“Ollie don’t be an ass—”

But Ollie was already out in the street, waving

his arms, shouting, “We need an escort, just a

little farther, we are citizens, we have to go to

Building Eleven to buy a—”

He threw himself flat and rolled, wincing as

the invisible microwave beam singed his back.

The cop fired again but Lem had thrown a

smoke-bomb, and Ollie took advantage of the

thick yellow billowing to return to cover.

“Wish I could afford one of those microwave

rifles,” Lem remarked wistfully.

“Hey, Lem, maybe if we keep just back of

the procession we can use it for cover and get

the rest of the way.”

Lem nodded and they were off.

Most of the frags were flattened to avoid the

microwave beams; the cops ignored their shielded

rear, so Ollie and Lem had little to fear from

them. They sprinted, and Building Eleven loomed

ahead. Ollie grinned. There! The stairs!

They were scrambling the two flights up the

stairs when the doors to building eleven swung

open and a pack of joy-boys, none of them over

twelve years old, stampeded directly into Lem

and Ollie’s reflexive gunfire. But there were too

many of them to spray dead at short range. Five

went down, another ten were upon them—naked

but for belts bristling with makeshift knives.

Their gap-toothed mouths squalling, drooling like

demented elves, they chattered and snarled glee-

fully. Their sallow, grimy faces—seen as blurs

personifying aggression, now—were pock-marked,

the eyes dope-wild. Swinging the gun-butt in his

right hand, knife sanpped on spring to his left,

Oilie slashed and battered at the small faces,

faces like rotted jack-o-lantems, and time slowed:

fragments of skull and teeth flew, black-nailed

hands clawed at his face, his own blood clouded

his visors.

Ollie ploughed forward, kicking, elbowing,

feeling a twisted shard of metal bite deep into

his thigh, another below his left shoulder-blade,

another in his right pectorals. He was two feet

from the door. He left his knife in someone’s ribs.

He glanced at Lem, three of them were on her

back, clinging like chimp-children, clawing re-

lentlessly at her head, gnawing her ears with

ragged yellow teeth. He dragged them off of her

with his left hand, wrenching viciously to keep

them off his own back, and brained another who

flailed wildly at his eyes—and then they were

through the door.

It was cool and quiet inside.

A young man, a custodian chewing synthabetel

and squinting at them, leaning on his mop, said,

“You got some holes in you.”

“Where—” Ollie had to catch his breath. He

felt weak. Blood soaking his right leg—have to

bind that before heading back, he thought, try

again, ask: “Where we buy. . . flags?”

“Fifty-fourth level if he’s got any left.”

III.

Luck was with them. They made it back with

only two more wounds. A .22 slug in Lem’s right

arm, a zip-gun pellet in Ollie’s left calf.

Lem slumped outside the door to bind her

wounds and rest. Ollie took the flag from her

and staggered into their two-room apartment,

stepped carefully over the children sleeping on

the crowded floor, tried not to stagger. He was

dizzy, nauseous. The tiny cubicle seemed to

constrict and whirl, the stained yellow-white

curtains over the alcove where his father lay

dying on an army cot became malignant leprous

arms reaching for him. He cursed, his right hand

gripping the small, rolled-up flag. He felt he could

not walk another step.

Ollie sank to a chink of clear floor-space. He

shoved wearily at one of the sleeping children.

Eight-year-old Sandra. She woke, a pale, hollow-

eyed child, nearly bald, a few strands of wispy

flaxen hair. “You take this to Pops.” He told

her. “The flag. Tell him to sign the goddamn

release.”

Seeing the flag, the little girl’s eyes flared.

She snatched the bright banner away and ran out

into the hall, ignoring Ollie’s shouts.

She got three bucks for the flag from a

man on the Hundredth Level.

A penny a year.

Perspective Police!: Bechdel

I owe Alison Bechdel big time. The cartoonist responsible for the comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For and the graphic novels Fun Home and Are You My Mother? may be best known for The Bechdel Test, which she formulated to determine whether a movie is sexist or not. For a story to pass the test:

1.    It has to have at least two women in it,

2.    Who talk to each other,

3.    About something other than a man.

Some people amend the rules to require that both women have names.

David Chelsea is reading:

Manara Erotica Volume 1

by Milo Manara

Not Passing The Bechdel Test: Panel from The Girl With The Keyhole Eyes.

Even though Bechdel devised this test for movies (some notable ones that fail it: The Godfather, The Graduate, Citizen Kane and the original Star Wars Trilogy) there is no reason it can’t apply to comics; a story is a story. When I first heard about the test I mentally applied it to my own work and was embarrassed to discover that only two stories passed: my first graphic novel David Chelsea In Love, thanks to a single sequence taking up part of two pages (41 and 42 in the Reed Press edition), and the 24 Hour Comic ID, which you can read in its entirety here. I was therefore inspired to create Sandy & Mandy, a story I’m working on for Dark Horse Presents which features two named female friends who talk about everything under the sun as well as the occasional man (I couldn’t resist having a bit of fun with such a P.C. restriction- notice the convoluted way Sandy & Mandy manage to bring up men’s names without actually talking about a man).

Passing The Bechdel Test: Rough sketch for Sandy & Mandy

So hats off to you, Alison Bechdel, for opening my eyes to my own unconscious sexism. Now let me return the favor by showing you how to improve your perspective.

Alison Bechdel illustration for The New Yorker

Here is a recent New Yorker illustration in which Bechdel depicts herself multiply at work in her basement studio. It appears to be a simple one-point perspective view of the basement as seen from overhead, (a view we could only get if the upper floors were removed) but it is actually more complicated than that. It was obvious to me at first glance that the receding lines do not all meet at a single point, which in itself is not terribly surprising- cartoonists often take a loose approach to perspective- but once I began diagramming them out I noticed that the lines do roughly meet at four separate vanishing points- a different one for each side wall.

Bechdel diagammed

The method of perspective Bechdel is using is known as vanishing axis or vanishing trace perspective, and it has a long history. Lawrence Wright in his 1983 book Perspective In Perspective gives a good description:

Diagram of Vanishing Axis Perspective

“If the artist wants to show more of both side walls, he can ‘open them out’ slightly without noticeably falsifying the proportions of the room. Each side wall now has its own separate vanishing point, both being on a common horizon. This discrepancy may not be noticeable, but a further problem arises if the orthogonals (receding parallels) of the floor, if they are to meet correctly, now need a third vanishing point, and those of the ceiling a fourth one. These last two fall on a common, vertical ‘vanishing axis’ or ‘vanishing trace’. Vanishing axis perspective often occurs in medieval drawings. It is a quite acceptable formula—if that word can be applied to an arbitrary device for which few rules can be laid down—when used with discretion. It has survived as an occasional remedy for the drawbacks of normal systems of construction.”

Bechdel revised

Whether Bechdel knew about vanishing axis perspective or reinvented the method on her own, it’s a clever solution to the visual problems set by her subject. Setting up the drawing the conventional way with one vanishing point at the center of the picture would mean that the walls to the right and left would be far more foreshortened than those at the top and bottom, an effect that would be even more exaggerated if the vanishing point were placed anywhere else. Using a different vanishing point for each wall enables Bechdel to foreshorten all of them equally (It does mean that the rectangle representing the floor is a different shape than the framing rectangle representing the ceiling, but I’m sure hardly anyone notices that).

While it is pointless to criticize any drawing in vanishing axis perspective for not having all its lines meeting at a central point, that does not mean there is no room for improvement. The method requires that objects and furniture attached to each wall should share the vanishing point of that wall, and Bechdel has not done this consistently. My revision brings wayward objects into line with their particular vanishing point, and I have in a few cases tilted or redrawn the human figures to better align them with the perspective of their particular part of the room. I believe my version improves on Bechdel’s inconsistent construction without destroying the the charm of the original.

Thanks to Wilhelm Schroeder for bringing this piece to my attention.

Got an example of iffy perspective to show? Be a whistleblower! Send an e-mail to me at davidchelsea(at)comcast(dot)net and include Perspective Police! in the subject line.

Young Mitt:

Can’t Stop the Sharing: Still More Pictures From Facebook

IF WRITING ALL-CAPS IS SO RUDE IN AN E-MAIL, WHY IS IT THE NORM IN COMICS?

David Chelsea is reading:

My Friend Dahmer

by Derf Backderf

Vintage ink bottle:

Warhol painted soup cans, but Goya put his name on them:

Great minds think alike:

Ben’s Tessellation:

Whose successor? That’s right:

Deep Throat+Strep Throat= Streep Throat:

David Chelsea likes the look of reflections on vintage cars in black and white:

Osamu Tezuka based the design of Astro Boy on Betty Boop. I like that Betty’s DNA lives on in the animation style that eventually displaced Disney- call it Fleischer’s Revenge.