Preventing the Rape

This is a collage piece from around 1995. I wanted to see what would happen if I replaced as many elements as possible from an old masterpiece with analogous images from magazines and comics - more or less along the lines of Plutarch's "Ship of Theseus" idea. I picked Reuben's Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus (see below) because of its fleshy, violent imagery and politically charged content.

Once I had the collage done, I realized that the sci-fi superhero (with my face) I'd collaged in on the right was rescuing the daughters (who were now models from a girlie magazine) so I titled the piece Preventing the Rape.

Click on the images to see larger versions.

Super Love People, Page 5

This week: the Red Sprite manifests himself.

Click on the image to see the whole page.

Fantastic Life Reviewed on The Comics Journal

Sean T. Collins gave my graphic novel Fantastic Life a very positive review yesterday on The Comics Journal. The review is here.

Moon Prince Page 75: What are THOSE Things?!!

Click on the image to see the whole page.

Degraded Cranach

I made a lot of digital work from around 1993 to 2001, mostly as a way to avoid the two main problems I was having with painting: that "conceptual" paintings - although  fun to think up - were boring to execute, and that the only places to show them (this was mostly pre-internet) were really elitist.

Nowadays, I'm back to painting (I'll start posting some new paintings in a few weeks) and I'm using those digital pieces as sources - except in certain cases, such as this piece, which I don't think would work as well (and would be crazy hard to paint).

Degraded Cranach is from 2001, and was made by feeding a jpeg of one of Lucas Cranach's Lucretia paintings through a complicated Photoshop "action" I wrote. The action was meant to degrade and corrupt images almost to the point of unrecognizability, so as to see what that would do to their meanings.

Mostly I used porn, which is obviously especially plentiful on the internet and left a nice underlying sense of "wrongness" even after all of this scrubbing -- but I also used art historical sources, as in this case. I was "batch processing" the images several hundred at a time, and then picking out my favorites from the results.

Cranach had painted Lucretia poised to commit suicide, with a dagger held to her chest - but in the "degraded" version she seems to me to be some sort of electric fairy or ghost, pulling what looks to be a nozzle out of her body.

Click on the image to see a bigger version,

Super Love People, Page Four

This week: Eaten!

Click on the image to see the whole page.

Moon Prince Page 74: What's that Beeping???

This week, Max and Molly get something else to worry about! Those poor kids!

Click on the image to see the whole page.

Five Pussies

Most of my "fine art" work is based on "found images" (as we say). Back in the 80's before I used digital imaging, this meant I would make more or less slavish copies of things I found in books and magazines and rely on the change in context to create new meanings for them (or "problematize" them, to use more art jargon).

Here's an example from 1988, showing the painting first ("When 'Pussy' Gets Her Back Up", which is on paper, about six feet wide and is owned by Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin) and then the source its based on :

Around 1990 I began to worry about the idea of making paintings (too elitist!) and started trying to make art as "open edition multiples" (more jargon which just means cheap prints in unlimited editions) - which eventually led me into making digital work and comics. Here's an ink drawing that I intended to use to make a "multiple" offset print version of "When Pussy Gets Her back Up" (the final print would have been in color):

Once I started working digitally I realized I could also stop copying everything so closely, and I started "restaging" the images using toys and other props. Here's a digital version of "Pussy" from 1998 or '99:

And finally, here's a page from my comic book novel "Fantastic Life" where the main character, a thinly disguised version of me, tries to explain the painting to a young lady who is "modeling" for him:

(Click on the images to see larger versions)

Super Love People, Page Three

This week, the Anti-Super Giant erupts from the desert!

Click on the image to see the whole page.

Moon Prince Page 73: A Shocking Discovery!

This week, certain things start to add up.

Click on the image to see the whole page.

Gorilla

Here's an old painting (it's from 1991) that was based on a shoe ad I saw in a window in Winnipeg. I liked the simultaneous vulva/phallus shoe, but also the fact that nature seemed to be in revolt.

This piece is about six feet high - we used to call paintings that big "kunsthalle" art because they transparently aspired to belong in the sort of big institutions that, say, Anselm Kiefer was being shown in back then (and probably still is).

Click on it to see a big version.

Super Love People, Page Two

The Blue Siren approaches a dormant Anti-Super Giant, half buried in the sand. She must awaken him.

Click on the image to see the whole page.

Finished writing!

If anyone following the Moon Prince story has ever wondered how long it's going to be, I can now provide you with the official answer, because I just finished writing it: 

Four hundred and nineteen pages. 

At one page a week, that means it'll take me another seven years to finish drawing it. And The Moon Prince is actually only the first book - there's going to be two more after that: Escape to Mars and The Callisto Stone. So, uh, please bear with me... I promise to have it all wrapped up by 2034.

Moon Prince Page 72: The Casimir Batteries

This week, lots of intricate drawings of mechanical stuff that took forever to draw.

Click on the image to see the whole page.

Sugar for The Moon Prince

Some awfully kind words for The Moon Prince from critic/cartoonist/visual artist Geoff Grogan over at the Pulp Ink blog!

"The Moon Prince" is the real deal--a classic for the webcomic era. Do yourself a favor--begin reading it today!" Complete post is here.

Interloper

Here's an old collage piece I did back in the 90's - and have been intending to turn into a painting for almost 20 years! Click on it to see a bigger version.

Super Love People, Page One

I'm going to start posting my original version of Super Love People, a short comic I did about three years ago which has been running as a serial in pood, the broadsheet comics anthology I co-publish with Geoff Grogan and Alex Rader. I'll put up a new page every Monday until it's finished.

I won't say much about it except that it takes place on a planet with four sexes.

Click on the image to see the whole page.