#12 - the trip to kansas part i. (02-97) 



having ensconced these four friends in kansas city, i now sent them haring off into the wilds of kansas. (my friend martha told me that she wanted them to come back to the city, and was worried that they would stay out there.) i don't know why, for certain, i chose to do this: i think i wanted to draw nips with a car, and then of course had to send them driving somewhere for a while . . . kansas seemed likely, because it was flat and lonely and empty, which appeals to me. so i gave them the unlikely excuse that nips' mexican wrestling team was staying at his grandmother's house, and sent them on their way.

the car drawn here is nothing in particular . . . just a generic 1940s/50s chunk of steel--in my head i heard a distant, long-dead ad-man say, here's your brand new 1954 car! as if it were a name brand, but that's neither here nor there. nips car has been recently redefined as a tucker in my contribution to the 2003 SPX anthology. a tucker is pretty close to this anonymous car, but has obvious differences. but i felt that the tucker was interesting enough, and this episode was remote enough in time, that no one would really care about continuity problems like that. it's interesting to compare how this story played out versus how the SPX submission looked. i shake my head at how different the drawing is now; and then i shake my head again at some of the similarities.

again, there are plenty of panelling problems here on the front page; 'the trip to kansas' title is difficult to read and i would certainly do it differently today. the panel of christopher and chirp going down the stairs together, and the three tiny panels at the top of the page are jyst difficult to place in the context of the huge panel amorphously hovering beneath them. the second page, although not terribly well drawn, at least resolves some of the issues with the comic's panels. the main panel on the first page, however, i like so far as the perspective and the snow goes; echoes of it have cropped up elsewhere.

and lo! speaking of things that crop up elsewhere, a scrap of lyrics from 'i know it's over' from the smith's 1985 album, the queen is dead, crops up here. i have just noticed this for the first time, and am more than a little fascinated, because that song forms the whole underlying theme of a much, much later comic, 'vauxhall and i.' i am completely certain that i did not remember i had used that lyric here four years earlier.

other remarks: the wash was a little sloppy. i think that the drawing and inking took su much time that i was in a big hurry to get it done, and skimped on control and qualtiy at the end. the bumper stickers are difficult to read, but say, chester a. arthur was right, (i have no idea,) we are not alone, and hate my driving? call 1-800-go2hell. there's a kind of x-files theme going on under the surface; i believe that the name ellens for the town where the grandmother lives is from an airbase made up for an x-files episode.








 

Posted: Thu - April 8, 2004 at 08:27 AM             |

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