Super Heroes, particularly those who are sucked into the mundane realities of our own universe,  are something of a recurring trope of mine (in the past I’ve been known to handle such heady subjects as Cat Woman clutching grocery bags and petting an alley cat and Superman flipping through an iPod) so I knew that whatever image we decided upon, I wanted  the hero,  a villain in this case, to be placed  firmly within  the reality of our own world and not the world of comics.

Somewhat revealed to us is that the legendary rapper is in fact something of a stocky, middle-aged bald man, yet not all is given away: Doom’s hands still protect his identity, though this gesture might  in itself  reveal a story of playfulness, self-loathing, and a nagging hangover. — Read the Article.

The base of my operation is a swell apartment on Queen Street West, right in the heart of the matter, and the most central location I’ve ever enjoyed in this city. A very inspiring mess. Its caretakers (tenants–I’m their guest, they’re my friends) are Pete Ryan and Jill Wood, two terrific artists in their own right. For my first three nights in the place I was by myself, the happy couple was out of town, so I used their apartment as a place to go to in between coffee, sushi, and the movie theater. When they finally came in from their excursion, they brought with them a blackboard that they had snagged as a Christmas present.  Meanwhile I was busy looking for ways to avoid work, so I figured I’d start by drawing this blackboard picture to commemorate the occasion. Kind of a neat style for an illusion, perhaps I’ll market it into an entire portfolio some day, schedule permitting.

Happy New Year, by the way.

JD

Above is a poster/cover for a little holiday comic I’ve been working on. I hope to have it done before x-mas and will post it up here, so stay tuned  “true believers.”

Note: This comic was never completed.

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“Why is he so evil, why is he so bad? Is it cocaine, is it Hurricane Katrina, is it the corruption in the police force, is it his childhood? I said no, let’s not talk about all of these conceptual things and all this heavy stuff that goes on between directors and actors, I said let’s skip all this, we go for one thing: There is such a thing as the bless of evil, let’s go right for that.”

– Werner Herzog on Q, speaking on directing Nicolas Cage in the new film, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

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Seth, whose comics and illustrations may be familiar to readers of The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine, is also the creator of many of his own comic books, or “graphic novels” (a term he despises for its inherent discrimination against the word “comics,” which, he suspects, is a word that certain audiences still find distasteful). His talk was, not unlike his comics, a series of short stories told in succession, the ending of each he would punctuate with the nostalgic “bing” of a clerk’s desk bell. This was, in his words, “a cheap device” that he had “grown attached to.” The  stories were true life accounts from his own biography. Seth believes that comics are a medium best suited for auto-biography, and were presented more or less in chronological order. They also had nothing whatsoever to do with the slide show being presented alongside them (although here, it turned out, there was to be more then one instance of uncanny alignment of words and imagery. “So that’s why I draw things like hockey players even though I haven’t watch a game in 30 years” remarked the artist, just as a Montreal Canadian flashed a semi-toothed smile on screen).

Later, when asked by a member of the audience about the importance of the the past as a theme in his work, Seth remarked: “The question is, why am I so concerned with the past…” (the event was being filmed be the National film board, so Seth had to repeat all the questions addressed to him first, before answering them). Then to answer: “I feel that the past is inherently sad, because as soon as any moment happens, it’s gone forever, never to return.” Because of the subject matter of his work, his pallet of sepia tones, his style of brush stroke,  his daily implementation of vintage tweeds and brill cream, and the model 1940s town he constructed in his basement, Seth is sometimes referred to as a nostalgist, which is, as it rather cruelly turns out, yet another term which makes him bristle. Perhaps though, it is not that his audience is constantly searching for new ways in which to secretly derive his work, but instead that Seth is in fact an expert in capturing the ephemeral moment: that through his stories and pages of worlds, loves, and objects long-vanished, he is sharing with us the beauty of things to which we too have grown attached.

One of the funniest stories Seth told also happened to be one of the shortest. It was about a conversation that he once had with fellow cartoonist Chris Ware while the two were in Paris–a fact, it turned out, which was apropos of nothing. Seth: “I said to Chris, ‘Isn’t it such a shame that you’re only given so much talent, and so much wisdom in life, and that no mater how hard you try you can never make yourself any smarter or more talented?’ And Chris Ware, who is very talented, and very smart, just looked at me and said, ‘What are you talking about? Of course you can.’”  Bing!

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