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I know this is creepy, but I've been keeping Tom Artis's last voicemail to me alive.
He called me from the godawful welfare motel they'd been staying, where I'd been helping them out with the rent, just a few days before he had the stroke from which he never recovered. When i got back from Springfield after that dreadful day, I realized that it was probably the last time I'd ever hear his voice. So every time the robotic lady says "The following message will be deleted from your mailbox..." I press 9 and it's mine for another 30 days.

The thing that makes me despair the most is that Tom never got the hookup to produce the brain-frying mind-dazzling magnum opus he was capable of--and that's reflected in his ceiling-high stacks of notebooks. I had hopes that my Transfiniteers online strip would be that for him--and I had the arrogant fantasy that the two of us riffing in tandem would become the next Claremont & Byrne, Siegel & Shuster, Lee & Kirby: two talented but off-kilter guys supplementing each other's madnesses and becoming greater than the sum of our parts. And, IMHO, our collaborations sparked with strange fire that gave promise of just that.

Tailgunner Jo remains our longest collaboration--and would have been longer (12 issues) in our original scheme. But I'd like to point out two weird little gems that are better indications of just how weird we could get: the first is a Munden's Bar story (GrimJack #31) that featured my misbegotten group Blaze Barlow and the Eternity Command. It involved a drinking contest between Blaze and Blaze's alt-universe rival Breeze LaBrowe and her Damn Metro-City Ten. (Hint: there are anagrams involved.) Create eleven new characters for an eight-page backup? Tom was just getting warmed up.

Even better was a Starfox story that appeared in Avengers Spotlight #21. (Yep, we were everywhere: Marvel, DC, First...) Starfox, insouciant and dashing, goes to the rescue of winsome Heater Delight, who is enslaved on the planet of the Rescorlans, a race with such a complicated reproductive process that everything is taboo to them, except for commerce. Oh yes, and violence. An entire sf swashbuckler in 11 pages, and Tom realized the Rescorlans as something like erect warthogs in cloaks, complete with non-standard joint articulation, and the hero and heroine are just plain irresistible as Tom drew them. After doing this one 11 pager, I was gripped with the irresistible feeling that I would be completely happy doing Starfox stories with Tom for the rest of my career.

But Tom was also my friend--in some ways my best friend.

We were bound together by our out-of-control minds. Nothing--not gematria, not quantum entanglement, not how good the old Doom Patrol was--avoided our jaw-wearying conversations. He hid a voracious mind behind an easy drawl and a disarming affection for whatever his interlocutor was interested in. He could trade dumb jokes all night and enjoy it mightily. There was a Buddhist patience down deep at the core of him, even in the worst of his anger, frustration, and despair.
Some of that was because it all came out through his hands. He thought with them, sang with them, danced with them. His drawings were as full of his mental activity as of his skill. It was like jazz on paper. And that's in part why, wonderful though his comics work was, why his true glory was his piles of sketchbooks. I think we both tamed each other and set each other free when we did comics--but watching him solo was like watching Art Tatum or Lester Young or Miles. And if you think I'm getting extreme, that's because you didn't see it.
And now never will.

Tom was my friend in all the stupid ways that matter, too. It was only he who could have convinced me to drive thru a White Castle for the first time in fifteen years--and for which I roundly cursed him for years thereafter. It was he who watched respectfully as I set out to ruin my life with what would have been a marriage made in the Dark Dimension--and sat with me as I drove around aimlessly night after night after it crumbled in time. We got ourselves into some incredibly dangerous and moronic situations--the kind of which bad buddy movies are made. I listened to him moan, he listened to me, and we both steadfastly ignored the other's advice. And in those last years, when we were slogging away at my dream--Transfiniteers, and the vast online comics empire that would inevitably follow--I saw him, bound with all the traps of earth--poverty, racism, age, isolation--and yet freed with a stroke of his pencil--and I saw that secret fire that I too was a servant of.

If there was one thing that drove me crazy about Tom, it was his pervasive pessimism. He never believed that his prodigious talent would ever bring him anything but envy, indifference and/or hostility from the powers that be. Growing up black in Springfield Illinois can do that to you--and he was probably righter about all that than I was. It tears me apart that that pessimism finally won out: it's the worst feeling in the world that it shouldn't have been this way.

In the end, all we leave behind is circumstantial evidence: a loving wife and two terrific children; a bunch of funny books; a pile of drawings; and a torn net of friends and admirers through which the Big Dark Current pours. There are vast numbers of people who will read these words and think that I'm getting carried away with my grief, and think that he really couldn't have been that good. And no doubt, when I die, they'll say the same thing about my work. Don't know what the fuss is about.

Tom ended his last voicemail to me by getting the date wrong. Kim corrected him, and in his last words to me, he said, laughing, "I'm losing it..."
About whatever you may have now gained, my friend, I know nothing. But I do know this: your message will be saved for as long as I have something to say about it.

Posted: Wednesday - May 02, 2007 at 02:58 PM        

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