I'm just putting the finishing touches on this. Been too long in the making but the first issue of my personal anthology book RevolveЯ is just about ready to go to print. For the moment I'm doing a basic small run zine edition for some up coming cons and to show to a few publishers to see if they're interested, and to submit for grants. It will have a two colour cover and B&W interiors, and comes in at about 48+ pages. I'll post a complete index of the contents and some samples but for now here's the cover art.



If your interested in ordering a copy leave a comment with your email address and a note of how many bellow.

Sort of continuing with the sentiment of my recent post about The Italian Machine, a short Cronenberg made for TV film that features a fictionalised version of my father in one of the central roles - here is some more of Lionel online.

From the mid 60’s to the mid 70’s Lionel was a central player in the experiment in anarchist education called Rochdale. It was many things to many people, and in the 90’s as i mentioned in the last post, Ron Mann made a short documentary called Dream Tower about the place. A very large portion of that film appears inter-cut with an interview with a Rochdale survivor here on POT TV’s web site [a real player file].

A very young Lionel has a brief appearance in the Doc [time index reads about 9:27:00 on pot tv’s video]. This was filmed back then for a log documentary about the project that was never finished, but in the end provided a greater deal of raw footage for Ron’s film. Lionel was at the time of the interview, helping to coordinate the newly instituted building security along with several of his biker friends, in an effort to stem the tide of Yorkville junkies that invaded the place after the cops cleared out Yorkville [paving the way for a major gentrification of that neighbourhood, its now a luxury condo and shopping district for the very very rich]

When Dream Tower was made, I had not seen any footage of Lionel or heard his voice for 10 or so years. Ron gave me a dub of the film when it was done, I recall rewinding and watching this very short bit of footage of my father several times over that night.

Wow, I just found this link, very cool!

channel4.com is hosting streaming video of an early David Cronenberg short film titled The Italian Machine.

You can watch it there, unfortunately it's not downloadable, I want a copy. There's a DVD collection of early Cronenberg shorts that includes it, i'll have to get my hand on a copy of that i guess. I found a bit of background on the production from this site, The Italian Machine was actually meant to be a 60 minute long TV film for CBC before the head of CBC Drama removed Cronenberg from the editing of the final cut to create her own 30 minute long version, or so the story goes.

It's central charicter is based loosly on real 'legendary acid and pot dealer', general trouble maker, writer and photographer, Lionel Douglas [played in the film by Gary McKeehan], who was killed in a freak motorcycle accident in 1979. It features an array characters all to familiar to me, and displays Cronenberg's classic off beat approach to his subjects.

”When motorbike fanatic Lionel learns that a rare and prized Ducati has been bought by a rich art collector purely for the purpose of display, he enlists the help of his friends to liberate the motorbike.“

Now while I am a Cronenberg fan, my reasons for being hyped about tracking this down are a tad more personal. The real Lionel was my father. This version is an exaggerated caricature, but I recognise the source material.

I'm told that the premise may have been influenced by a true story about a bike being displayed as art and Lionel's reaction to the idea "how can they not want to make it go!!". The other guys in the film with him are loosely based on people who shared a garage with my father in behind his house. I remember bikes in parts, being worked on all the time, made to go a bit faster and bit smother, tuning till they hummed like instruments. Always lots of talk and laughter. And the smells of metal, oil, cleaners and gas. That garage, and him talking with other people around the kitchen table about all sorts of crap, astrology to philosophy, these are probably the most common icons in my memory of my father.

He and Cronenberg were close friends I'm told, they went to university together and rode bikes out at mosport speedway a bit one summer. My grandmother says there was a time when the two were inseparable. This film was meant as a little tribute to him. Lionel was a larger than life kind a guy; he left his mark on a lot of people. Every once in a while someone comes along whom knew him, and when they find out that I'm his son their behaviour towards me tends to change, suddenly I get these wired reverent looks. When Ron Mann made his short documentary about Rochdale College called Dream Tower (1994) he contacted us about looking through my fathers photos for stills to use [a number of which ended up in the film]. In researching the film he told us, every one he talked to told him look up Lionel Douglas, he's the guy you should talk to, until he found someone who told him Lionel had died. So then he tracked us down to get permission to use his photos.

He had watched some film of my dad giving speeches at the collage found with the reels of old film he dug up on Rochdale, and he showed up in some early CityTV footage apparently. And even with that, not having met him in person, Ron talked to me about him with the same kind of mythic aw as everyone else did. I've never seem much of that footage Ron told us about, except a short bit that appeared in the film [He explains for the camera how they conducted security checks at the door of the building after Yorkville imploded].

For a long time this was all very strange and odd for me. Sadly I hardly remember the living Lionel now. I was 8 when he died and it knocked me for a loop but good. When I came out of that emotional coma 10 years later I barely remembered him any more. I have his photos, a trunk full I'm planning to make a book from some day, and there is a small chap book sampling his poetry, text and photos his friends put together after he died.

My two copies are both raged and dogged. One, that I've had since I was a kid, is marked with tabs so that I can flip right to my favourite poems. Over the years I've tried to tease more of him out of my head by digging up more of him out there, so I'm always happy to find another bit of him floating around.

I'll have to post some more on Lionel, he's hardly got a inch of web to his name, that's just not right. Gona have to put up a site or something.

The other day I went by the D&Q headquarters to pick up my check for some pre-press work I recently did for them, I had called to see when I could cus' it was a few days past due, not any sort of crisis but I probably whimpered about being broke at the time and needing the money as way of explaining my pestering him. I brought him a hand full of the last few Jam Zines for the office to show my appreciation for the work, and he or Peggy said "oh, we want to give you something too", and proceeded into the stock room. I was being dense at the moment and didn't realise they meant books, or something like that, and was surprised when I rounded the corner to see the wall of beautiful comics that they were looking at trying to decide what to offer up. I think Peggy or Chris asked me "what would you like?" I was too dumfounded to reply though coherently, where to start? So many good books….

At which point there about Chris leans down and says "Ok, how about this…" handing me a copy of the Acme Date Book. A hefty hard cover that goes for enough in the shop that I have been longing for it from afar for some time now.

I'm thinking "I bring them a hand full of zines and they hand me this… ohhh, I've been trumped but good"

I think I grinned a lot, I should have said thanks more than I'm usually prone to. I do know that I held the book close to my breast the rest of the time I was there…

So Many Many Many thanks Chris & Peggy, for the money that has eased my mind and the book that has delighted it. Bernie has noted to me in that past Chris's generosity, I can see why.

I just finished reading it through, and will undoubtedly browse it intently for weeks to come. It certainly helped motivate me in my own work towards an approaching benchmark, the first act being completed in about half a page from where I am now. That took way too bloody long to get to! Helping to spur me on in part was the many many instances in the book that I deeply related to in regards to being a comic artists, the angst and anxieties that go with taking on these projects that quickly become monsters on our desks, plaguing us with so many doubts about our competence and ability to do the things we started out to with any kind of respectable level of craft. Just even to get it half right would be a wonderful thing.

Frequently in the book [for those of you not in the know, a 207 page hard bound colour reproduction of selected highlights from Chris Ware's sketchbooks dating from 1986 to 1995] Chris depicts himself wracked with all manner of self doubt and self recrimination. He flogs himself in more ways than one.

I think that anyone who is shocked by all this is probably not being honest with themselves. You may not experience this level of self-doubt or anxiety but I don't think there is anyone in the world that truly experiences none. The rest is just a question of degrees.

For my own part, if what we are audience to in the Date book is to be believed I feel fortunate to not be one who is prone to this degree of negative self-doubt. But I most certainly can relate on all counts, to some degree or another, particularly as a comic artist in regards to his continuing internal conflict about the work.

There was a time when it was all fun and light for me. When I was a kid, up till shortly after I started my professional career. Nothing would make me happier than to be at my desk drawing.

I did so for hours on end, forgetting food, bodily functions, daily life and all it's cares. Being a working artists changes this, first because I made the mistake of working on the wrong things, burning my joy of creation with the indifference of crass commercialism. This knocked me for a real loop and after I spent three years flailing in that torture chamber I got out. I though I may never draw again and didn't for nearly a year. But I recovered and began rediscovering a path that would lead me I hoped to somewhere idyllic.

The reality I have discovered is not quite so. In the beginning what I enjoyed so blissfully was pure artistic creating, drawing for hours with the story only half thought about. As I've matured as a comic artist I've come to recognise that this is a literary form, whether the practitioner treats it as one or not. To put it pointedly it's a form of writing, and there are few writers for whom the act is so carefree.

A.J. was recently reading a large number of books on the subject of writing, and would share with me some of the more interesting bits. One thing she noted is that few authors of note claimed to enjoy the process. It was wracked with anxiety and doubts, a fight at every step for clarity. Nothing about it, it seems, is fun- Except perhaps the having finished.

I suspect that one way or anther I would have found myself at this point, often dreading the desk, the feeling that I have to get SOMETHING done, to move the bolder a bit further forward. Sooner or latter I would have lost my peach fuz and have to face the reality that my chosen craft brings with it a big ball and chain.

But it helps immensely to see that I'm not alone in this. Reading Chris Ware's notes makes me feel much lighter. Not because he is, like the rest of us, and more so in some respects, wracked with the same self doubts as I am. But that despite all that, he has finished how many great peaces of work? Like him or not, few can debate the level of craft and accomplishment in any given Chris Ware book or story, and to have completed even just one of them involved overcoming or at least living with and working through all that self doubt.

Shit, if he can do all that with all that going on in his head, I sure as hell can face down my demons to get a few of my modest goals accomplished.

If you haven't' already, find your self a copy of The Acme Novelty Date Book and gape in aw of what Mr Ware call his ‘un-studied' sketches…good god man, cut your self some slack! Them is some fine doodles.

Ah, well i know i said no more colour pages but this came out nice, sooo.....


1. Now in the heat I imagined their facades yielding a bit. Wwaying, billowing out and back like sails, as if only a temporary backdrop, a theatrical illusion or a curtain that now lifted'.
2. I tried to hold this thought and closed my eyes.
3. I sensed them fading and dissolving until step by step, increment by increment, the scene of original Chicago returned.
4. A fertile basin flourishing naturaly off the foot of Lake Michigan, say, five hundred years ago - this took over my imagination.
5.The lush wet prairie with marsh grasses edging off the beach- gulls picking their way through the beach washed seaweed
6. The Hickory, oak, walnut and wild cherry trees.
7. The sky itself filled with migrating blue herons, orioles and black crows- all brilliantly etched across that sky-
8. The roar of the crashing majestic surf of the pounding lake front filing the air with a glorious dynamic coming and going sound.

Working on some scenes with Elmo tonight I was listening to the soundtrack and looking at my reference stack.

I was reminded of a bit of good mojo that I had when I got off the plane in Chicago last summer for my week of research.

AS I came down the escalators from the arrivals lounge heading towards the EL platform, I heard what sounded like live trumpet music wafting through the space...-->> Full text on rise-fall.com

I'm not going to upload any more finished art [color with text] from this project for a while, don't want to give away the farm. But here's some more B&W stuff.

Un prepared, overwhelmed and under orders to soften them up. Surprise surprise that shit happens like the stuff we’ve seen on the tube all week. You cannot be an all powerful fear inducing world power with a small carrier military core supplemented by weekend warriors who you don’t deem worth training for their jobs. And you cannot be a free country with a draft. What to do eh? How about stop thinking that war is even the beginning of a solution to anything.

And it seems I’m not the only one that noticed that the pictures that are getting the most coverage seem a bit skewed in favour of one subject. Lynndie England is being branded the anti-Jessica Lynch in more ways than one.

What a freaking mess. Hey you guys south of the 49. Look, this is what happens when you elect morons and religious zealots. Please PLEASE get something more than 30% of your buts off of your collective soft sofas and vote his ass out of office.

All done, shipped out and pending approval. Whew.

Ug, fighting a gastro bug a.j. brought back home from school or work, one of them places where she interacts with humans.

Messy humans. Ug.

Was supposed to have this Illo for On magazine done yesterday, but I passed out after a bike ride to the dvd shop, all of about 10 blocks. Ug.

N-man!

I’ve been experimenting with different commenting systems and I think I’m going to settle with the one provided by HaloScan.com. So just to point them out, down there, at the bottom of each post. Be more than pleased to hear your thoughts on what you read or see here. Yes, I really am that needy. I dare you to find an artist who doesn’t enjoy a bit of feed back.

Been a while since i posted on the Rise and Fall of it All, but things have progressed, all be it intermittently. Had to stop for a few days to do some contract work and beaurocratic house cleaning. Back at it now though. Want to get the first act, about 20 pages, done for RevolveR 1.

Working on a project of this scale is a steady string of unanticipated problems and revisions. Right now I'm trying to resolve what sort of imagery I should use for a segment about the transformation of Eliot's environment...

1. Today I watched the buildings reflect the late morning light. Smoked glass, deep blue and burnt orange steel structures, powerful, mute invincible.
2. They seemed to grow more and more everyday.
3. A new one could be completed before you even knew it had been started.
4. They just appeared out of nowhere was as if someone were feeding the rest of the city to them gulp by gulp.

I had roughs done, this would be the thumbnail marked as #12, but I’m dissatisfied with them now. Something about the tone/feel of them is too static, predictable. Too much like what comes just before. But so far I’m drawing a blank. To give myself a brake from that I went back a few pages and completed #10. At the last minute I realised it was the wrong resolution, I've raised it to the correct res but I'll have to see how it looks in a test print, might have to re build it from the scans. Grrrrr.

Getting into a more traditional daytime routine for a bit, I started today off with a soup, coffee and brain food.

Saw some interesting clips on the boob tube and flowed them up online – Some really interesting stuff about body language here, walking patters at the BioMotionLab, and The NONVERBAL DICTIONARY of GESTURES, SIGNS & BODY LANGUAGE CUES. Both interesting and invaluable for better understanding how to make my players play their rolls well.

Then I watched this clip about the Hubble Deep Field image recently captured by the doomed observatory, showing some of the galaxies that may have formed less that one billion years after the Big Bang. I’ve been rekindling my interest in astronomy recently, downloaded a great little program [HNSKY] to allow me to identify the few bright lights visible in my night sky. But the program also lets you zoom around the cosmos and identify each object, great stuff.

And now I’m poking around the projekt30 virtual gallery. Mixed bag but some nice stuff up, check it out.

Late night at the desk, trying to conceive of an illustration, bit stuck on the POV & geometry of the moment [at what point in the narrative in my head do I want to freeze it? Before, while, or after?] hmmm…

scribble scribble schiibblles

Nope, not working.

Well at least I got a lot done on the book today, so I don’t feel like it was a waste.

Today was the first, oddly hot day of the year. Wonderful but also sad. I went for a quick walk to run and errand and was choked off the main road by exhaust fumes and dust. Wish I lived somewhere warm and clean all year, instead of the cesspool of pollution and wildly swinging whether that is Montreal these days. A.J and I keep joking about moving to Australia, but it’s less of a joke than a hart felt desire to escape.

Read an interesting story about fellow 70’s kid Jonathan Lethem’s relationship to the Marvel universe, Kirby’s work in particular. It’s amazing how much we project onto our childhood reading material.

Some stuff can support it - the mining of metaphorical minutia - but really those old Marvel books, much of the DC ones too from the day – I find that they can only by virtue of being so very empty, superficial containers, described with such broad archtypical strokes that yes, you can infer quite a lot….but if you scratch you find often that what you are seeing is more reflection that subtext. Makes them ironically the perfect fodder for nostalgia launch pads.

In the reflections of those old comics I’ve certainly found a looking glass that has taught me a lot about my own efforts. Quite a lot of that golden age work, in Ditko & Kirby’s art in particular, always made me sad. It was all so playful, free in form. But underserved by the scripts.

With Kirby especially, it felt detached from the content. The images and ideas were fantastic, but the execution so pedestrian. Something about it struck me, even back in the late 70’s, as done to please the draftsman in the moment and meet the deadline. It seldom seemed to mesh with the story for me. Eye candy for the escapist.

It seemed to me that in working in the mines to earn his rep working and buffing up other peoples ideas, he tragically never found the room to properly explore at depth a personal aspect, to tell his own stories until he was so stereotyped by the publishers & readers, and in the end limited by his own apparently rather stringent ideas about what could be done and how. He was the classic good hack, proud of his craftsmanship to the detriment of his craft. And like many who embrace the tradesman’s philosophy with the dedication of a monk, he let that be his boundary.

In this story it’s concluded that he never was a good writer, but really we don’t know if he could have ever been a good writer, the opportunity for him to have any kind of healthy and untainted exploration of that possibility was eliminated right from that start, when he decided to become a comic book artist as a capitol J job and accepted the roll as a member of an assembly line.

By the time that his first, understandably amateurish personal story came along [I dare you to find someone who’s first real writing efforts are all that deep, slick or impressive] he was so strictly defined as a creator by everyone, including himself, that no one, accepted it, including most importantly Kirby.

He never seemed to give himself the chance to learn in the end. The readers certainly didn’t. But of course, it’s not like he was some kid just starting out, he was a pro, right? In truth creatively he had more in common at that moment in time with a fan today writing their first hand full of fanfic tales than any seasoned pro, experienced at carrying a book on their own. It was clearly evident in his art that his imagination was fantastic, more than up to the job. But at best as a writer he timidly followed the formulas he’d been indoctrinated into for so long, and never gave himself the room to learn how to do what he was trying to do with any depth, with a personal voice, or any true confidence. Whatever stories he may have had in him seemed so overwhelmed by systematic genre driven ideas and expectations drummed in to him over the years that they never got a chance to evolve or develop into something.

His limited attempts and decision to walk away from that in the end belays a childish expectation that the work perform without the learning curve that all but the most gifted must endure. The appearances of years of experience seemed to become a prison, blinders. Having drawn and co-written for so long he thought, expected, that he new how to do it. And was, it seems, disheartened when it became apparent he wasn’t there yet. Like most he was probably at a loss to understand what was wrong or how to do it any other way. I’m by no means certain but I’ve often thought, that in the interviews I’ve read and heard with him, that a self-recriminating note can be heard in his opinions of his later efforts. Something Jonathan highlights in his article with this old TCJ quote from Kirby
Interviewer: 'It always seemed like your last stint at Marvel was a little half-hearted.'
Kirby: 'Yeah.'
That’s the way I think of it anyway. I think that in truth it wasn’t halfhearted so much as lost in a writer’s wilderness, the dark wood of truly grand, but hopelessly vague ideas with little or no depth behind them.

When I was starting to think seriously about the realities of a career in the comics biz again a few years back - having been shocked out of my own childish misconceptions of what that meant by my first handful of professional jobs - His and his pears life stories largely defined for me a path to be avoided. I had to confront my own hubris and ego, and remind myself that while I’ve drawn comics for over 10 years now, and know how do that, the visual side of story telling, with some degree of competence – I’ve only been trying to write my own stories for 5 years in earnest, I’m still a babe in the woods in that. There were a few notable efforts back before I began my pro career but they were so uninformed and underdeveloped, I look at them now as only potential raw material to plunder. I didn’t get the chance to learn much back then from the efforts, though I’ve learned a lot in hindsight contemplating were and how they each went awry.

With this perspective in mind, frustration with my own limitations has to be put aside in favour of a focused effort to learn this new aspect of story telling I thought at one point I understood. I’ve learned than I have a lot to learn, and always will. That there is no point at which you achieve competence, a point of view propagated a lot in the 80’s to the young wanabe cartoonist. It’s a long journey that only ends with the eventual death of the creator. If you learn a valuable thing or two the lesson in the form of example and wisdom passed on can help nudge the next generation of creators along a bit farther. But none will ever reach some mythical endpoint of final knowledge. The goal for me is not to become but to be.

Like I said, it’s pretty amazing, the things we can superimpose on an old comic book form the 10-cent bin.