#15 - the trip to kansas part iv. (03-97) 



the last of the trip to kansas episodes, and it concluded them without ever resolving any of the issues it set out to study--namely, nips' relationship to his luche libre team, why the mexican armadillos were there in the first place, or what happened to them next. let that be a lesson to you all: indy comics require actual thought: you can't just charge off in a direction being all emo and scrawly and expect to arrive somewhere by accident.

this comic was written shortly before the heaven's gate suicides, and owes nothing to them, despite the presence of the crow. up to that, comet hale-bopp was merely an interesting astronomical phenomenon. one clear evening, i trooped up pennsylvania street to some friends' house with a telescope under my arm and showed them the comet.

it looked a lot like this, but not as bright or as large. wihtout a telescope it was merely a smudge of light; only with magnification could you clearly see the head. but i confess i missed halley's; i was damned if i was going to miss this one. everyone was suitably impressed, and i was happy to use the images to ffill in this meandering little story and get on witth my life. the crow, and the implication that it was flying out of colorado, was a symbol that christopher's emotional death and physical end--and at that point i still planned his suicide, so this all wraps around heaven's gate all accidentally and unintentionally--was coming upon him out of the west. the same had happened to me, and in those days i still regarded colorado with some distaste, as a source of trouble and monsters. the theme survived in my life for several years.

i had never handled speech bubbles over dark space before; indeed, you will notice that i do not use speech bubbles at all. this is an old choice, and i can only partially explain it by saying that i did not like how speech bubbles looked around my text: i drew them poorly, so i chose not to draw them at all. this has been a huge challenge ever since--a good speech bubble (or set of them) can indicate order in a conversation, the relationship of sound to the environment, and any number of other things. at this point for me to begin using them would be somewhat pointless, and i do have some advantags by refraining. for one thing, outside the context of a speech bubble, the 'font' size, if you will, can be expanded and contracted at will, and kerned together or farther apart; the lettering, which i of course do by hand, is no longer under the same constraints of regularity. for another, a lot of dead space is consumed unnecessarily by speech bubbles that otherwise would be taken up by background images, which are very important to me. finally, like so many other half-assed decisions i've made, it's compelled me to reinvent my own art and learn how to do it better, to compensate for my own choices.

note that the method of displaying text on black is not entirely satisfactory, and at the time only reinforced my decision. the edges are unnaturally sharp, sticking out like any number of sore thumbs, especailly on the second page, where i ruined the bubbles through clumsiness and had to paste cut out pieces of paper on the surface. very obvious! but i had no time to redraw them. i had deadlines.

last note: christopher is saying, 'i have an unpleasant feeling of déja vu,' if you can't read that line.






 

Posted: Sun - April 11, 2004 at 07:12 AM             |

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