#14 - the trip to kansas part iii. (02-97) 



having got everyone to kansas, the whole experiment was visibly petering out. i was growing bored. they weren't in their proper element, nothing felt like it was happening, and i didn't feel that i could write convincingly about the armadillos. so i babbled on about militiamen--a fading phenomena even then--and UFOs--in which i had a lot of interest in at the time. (i have since concluded to my satisfaction that they do not exist.) by now i was hastening to draw it to a close and get back to kansas city, where i (hopefully) had other ideas of how to proceed.

but i still had to get through this, and i maximized the panel sizes to cover as much ground as possible as quickly as possible. the most interesting about this comic is the view from inside the mailbox; this view is presaged from old sketchbook drawings of the old truck-eating bridge at 43rd and broadway.

i liked the truck-eating bridge. an old overpass for the (defunct) kansas city trolley system, wire barricades closed it at both ends. the arches were unnaturally low, and despite signs posted to prevent truck traffic from proceeding up broadway, every so someone driving vegetables or furniture would drive full-tilt into it, sometimes peeling the front quarter of the roof back like a sardine can. i suppose the bridge was adjudged a nuisance eventually, despite its architechtural beauty. they ripped it out, and it's gone now. a great pity.

another striking feature were the pedestrian archways on either side. they were tall, narrow slots with arched tops--rather like the view from inside the mailbox--with recessed lighting fixtures that had probably been broken since the sixties. walking to the broadway café and back again on a dark winter's night, with ice and snow on the ground, and crows filling the trees cawing at each other . . . they looked like grim gates into despair, and god knows i felt like that in those days. the image recurs every now and again, as here.

poor paneling at the bottom of the second page: nips is pretty much lobotomized by the edge of the circular center panel (again marked with an inverted coffee cup.) the drawing of christopher being manhandled by armadillos is excerable.

the john dupont reference is extremely dated now.







 

Posted: Sat - April 10, 2004 at 09:27 AM             |

©