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AAC August issue, vignette 3

July 11, 2016
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The story so far in Vignette 3: That despicable canine cad, Archie Wawa, has used cuffs as coercion to shanghai June Monsoon into a milkshake date at the 5 & Diner. Archie appears, and is, unpleased at the arrival of June’s friend and champion, Speed Cameron.

NOTE: The 5 & Diner is a popular 50s-style soda-fountain-type diner, variously located in the Valley of the Sun. Pictures of James Dean, Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, the Life Magazine cover showing a movie audience wearing 3D glasses, and loads of other memorabilia festoon their 16th Street/Colter location. My daughter Kate and I have been known to pop over there for cherry Cokes and burgers in the middle of the night, though it’s been a long time. I wish I were there right now.

ANOTHER NOTE: These images of vignette panels I’ve been posting were not scanned, but badly photographed for expedience’s sake on the day I sent Russ my cover design. I know Russ and his superstar colorist brother Kyle have a challenge ahead of them, finishing and colorizing my design, but they will be working from the scanned originals and not these unholy photoimages, thank Goodness.

AAC August Issue, vignette 1

July 9, 2016
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My Karaoke Fanboy friend, Russ Kazmierczak, Jr., asked me months ago to be his featured artist for the cover of the August issue of AMAZING ARIZONA COMICS. The plan solidified when he did a 24-hour drawing stint in a storefront window in downtown Glendale (my home town!), and used those 24 hours to draw the August issue. I asked him what the deadline was, and he said two weeks would be fine. Twelve days later I met my self-imposed Thursday-Midnight deadline, giving Russ two days of wiggle room.

The story is of four vignettes, so my design of the August cover includes four panels, each relevant to a vignette. Without further ado, and with Russ’s kind permission to post before release (“It’s not NASA secrets, after all,” he said with a karaoke sidelong grin), here is a panel from Vignette 1. Santa Claus has unmasked a Hobgoblinesque troublemaker, only to find a normal, befuddled guy under the mask, who had been possessed by the hot and dire villain Heatstroke. I was fairly faithful to the source, adding an incoming, dashing Speed Cameron.

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My thanks again to Russ for recruiting my involvement in his Magnum Opus. It is a privilege and an honor!

lonely for a woman

July 8, 2016
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NOTE: This poem originally appeared in my Notes in Facebook, under the title “lonely for.” I changed the title because it was bet-hedging and wishy-washy.

lonely for a woman

lonely for a woman

lately the phrase “lonely for a woman” flits around
there in my uncaring-of-correctness skull
but like a hummingbird this morning it is hovering

demanding to be seen and acknowledged

well ok “lonely for a woman” i see you i acknowledge you

and it is embarrassing to acknowledge your taunting truth

sure you are true but you are not enough
there are a thousand flavors of loneliness and you imply lust alone
you say nothing for loneliness of moments
loneliness for those firsts that amp the mundane into the spectacular
first look not just into a pair of eyes but into the beyond of them
first deeper-meaning laughter first high-voltage touch

and yes first intimacy first joining

and here comes another hummingbird thought
side by side with “lonely for a woman”
this one is “unlucky in love again and again”

the beat of its hovering wings makes an irritating noise

now there’s a whole flock of them
“desperate, aren’t we?” “you’re not getting any younger” “what did you expect?”

and there is the background hissy rasp of many more

i dismiss the birds i cast them out
i have known love and i will know it again
and though it is instructive to be in the desert of ‘lonely for . . .’

it is dangerous to seek relief instead of rightness

i create a hummingbird

this one says “any day now”

that’s all i need on any given day

tone in tone

July 7, 2016
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2016-07-07 09.15.46

Last night I finished the design of the cover of the August issue of AMAZING ARIZONA COMICS, meeting my self-imposed deadline of midnight by 20 minutes. Now I can go back to this stuff. [smiles]

This edition of this stuff is in a way a blast from the past. It finishes a drawing I’d begun while still the front desk clerk at Sedona Winds, a year and a half and a lifetime ago. The acrostic poem was created today.

tone in tone

tenacity is sometimes silent
oboes, faint but not pianissimo
nudge silence aside for satisfaction
entreating the listener to drowse

Note that there is the mildest violation of my arbitrary Acrostic rules: the last line does not go through the n of In, the middle acrostic word. The last n of Entreating would have fit perfectly, but the text would have been too squeezed.

On this page I wish my brother Harold a happy 64th birthday. This is a first. “To err is human; to forgive, divine.”

WIP II (pronounced “Whippeee”)

July 2, 2016
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Here as promised is the new, improved Work In Progress. I feel I have fulfilled the promise that it be better, in two ways. One, it’s in color and has a fuller range of light-to-dark. Two, the acrostics are done.

But there’s a tradeoff, and it’s been disimproved due to my yet-clumsiness with the oil pastel medium. WIP III will be created as a new image based on this one, with care taken and proper media selected–and an order of magnitude of additional time spent–to present this image/concept as it deserves.

wip ii 020716

planets twinkle

peaish green as i of newt
liquid as ye droppe of dew
angsty as a java’d gui [graphic user interface]
newton law’d and al [albert einstein] sed pfui; in
each ecliptic falls some silk
the mother’s milk of wit and will
sustaining cecil b de mille

stars shine

some hum some hiss
trill yon year ish
age brings satori
rituals overween
stasis, sis, is crystalline

I can promise without reservation, WIP III is NOT coming tomorrow, nor the next day. I have a comic book cover to draw, and a drop-dead deadline of but a few days from now. But WIP III will include image, annotation, and valedictory. Please stay tuned!

abs ORB ent (allotrope burden sailboat)

June 30, 2016
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It is the last day of the month. It is my personal superstition that to do things on the last day of the month is to increase the probability of their occurrence on other days. (This also applies to the first day of the month.) So I have cooked and cleaned a little, and, though my heart wasn’t in it, having received two reminders of things over and done with, I’ve created this minimalist acrostic/image card. Abs is for abdominal muscles; Orb is for that “cold-hearted orb that rules the night;” Ent is for that singular creature of J.R.R. Tolkien’s invention, a humanoid partaking of a tree.

An allotrope is one of at least two arrangements of the same atoms in differing array. A burden is represented here as a pack mule loaded down with another’s possessions. A sailboat is often delightful.

Watson and Crick were the scientists who found that DNA, the stuff of life, was double-helical in form. Even Linus Pauling, supernally brilliant as he was, didn’t deduce that.

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I have a feeling of deja vu. Have I done this acrostic before?

 

Figures!

June 29, 2016
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In these parts, if you say “Figures!” it means “Obviously, that was going to happen!” But in Artland, Figures are human forms represented by some sort of expressive medium as pencil or paint.

I love to do sketches of the human from in various attitudes. It figures that on my day off, I would relax by doing this.

20160629_163108

?

spoilsport

June 29, 2016
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spoilsport 062916

I hope I haven’t spoiled the sport of the man who’s holding the fish. I would be hypocritical to denounce fishing. I’ve enjoyed fishing myself, though it’s been years. But thoughts occur, and with them seeds for more, such as the many ways Spoilsport might be interpreted. Spoils sport: To the victor go the spoils. Spoil sport: a mutant fish’s putrefaction. I the Spoilsport, tainting a happy moment by taking sides with the fish. The fish the spoilsport, not going along with Survival of the Fittest. The fisherman the spoilsport, ending a creature’s life on a whim. Th’ gods the spoilsports, creating such somebody’s-gotta-lose-here situations.

spoilsport

snag yourself a smallmouth Bass
place its fate within your grasp
oleo a pan with goo
in the cove with boat at moor
LIKE & tweet bon appetit

YUM factor

June 27, 2016
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2016-06-27 11.31.38

YUM factor

You have eaten ambrosia, naif
You have tasted buffets at Vee Quiva

U have been in the dark in a new story arc
U five-star near & far till u like to infarct

Mastication verbatim–will U take ye bait? O
Mayhap a tomato au gratin won’t scar

I work for a restaurant. We provide made-from-scratch meals as part of a dining experience intended to relieve, fortify, and empower the bedraggled traveler. We charge airport prices. Overwhelmingly our diners think it’s well worth it, judging from the repeat business (“Laura on Thursday,” for instance) and wonderful comments our diners make on their way from our place to their flights.

Today I ate a breakfast brioche prepared by Bertha’s Cafe. The grill marks on the bread somehow made the sandwich taste that much more exquisite. Cooking is an art, not a science.