Moebius & The Airtight Garage: No. 3 … I ink the body electric

The Airtight Garage started off as a bit of a larkish bagatelle but as the book progressed, Moebius employed more and more stylistic & technical variations: fast vs. slow, chicken-fat vs. clear-line, etc. But it’s in the very first section, the Major Fatal prologue, that he really played his hand, as we gambling inkers say.

I have to confess that page 10 is one of my favorite pages in the entire AG. It’s a classic example of direct inking, where the penciling is minimal and the inking is mostly improvised on the fly. Such a strategy compels the inker’s hand to show its stuff without resorting to any stylistic subterfuge and is not for the weak-hearted and handed.

The rule of this page (and yes, the first three rules of black & white camera-ready art that pleases the eye are still in force) is zen-like in its simplicity:

4. Ink to reveal the hand, not just the objects being rendered

It’s all about the hand, its presence on this page is overwhelming, much more so than in most commercial work Moebius (and other illustrators) did. Until several years ago, most book & high-end magazine work preferred a crisp, slick surface. The hand was usually hidden behind a Potemkin village of polished, impenetrable marks and on the whole, readers seemed to prefer it that way.

The Major Fatal prologue was a bit of a reaction to this. On page 10, the hand shows itself everywhere — but never clumsily. And it’s not just the obvious scribbling on the man’s face in panel 1 or the nervous foliage in panel 3. The entire pattern created by the hand’s movement leaps forward to create a nervous tension on all levels.

Panel 2 is exquisitely well-inked and deserves careful study. The background has vanished and we’re left with a brilliant, fast passage of contour drawing on horse & rider. It is so fast that we can see the delicate marks of the half-lifted nib whenever it changes heading. The nib is omnidirectional, it’s rounded enough to move spontaneously in all directions, unlike more precise nibs which catch and “sneeze” ink when moving too fast.

This gives the hand free rein to manoeuver and also allows the physical liquidity of the ink to flavor the rendering. That is to say, the ink blobs and crawls a bit (and each brand of ink behaves differently) whenever the hand’s impetus overwhelms the nib’s inertia.

The movements are economical, the nib leaves the paper as little as often, note the liquid parsimony of the man’s splayed hand. The description of the horse’s head perfectly breaks up the positive & negative spaces and then the pen goes down the neck, first hatching from 1 o’clock to 7 o’clock, then squiggling nervously and executing a half-spiral before exiting that passage.

Here’s an overlay explaining this. It also shows the same rapid, automatic movement of the hand that has rendered the man’s face in panel 1. The whiskers are grizzled with nervous scribbling while the eyes & nose are perfectly described with furious hatching.

This sort of fast, unthinking and rhythmic angling of a nib around a spherical volume not only describes an object; it’s also provides an immense, somatic pleasure to the inker’s hand. It feels right. The pleasure of movement is the key. The experienced hand’s muscle memory renders such angling passages with gusto. And as I've mentioned before, this "stabby" spherical movement was the foundation of Moebius' crosshatching technique, a technique which we'll analyze in a later posting.

I mentioned the stylistic Potemkin village before. The inker’s hand is often hidden behind one and to be honest, it’s not such a bad thing after all. This writer, in his own inking, has deeply immured himself in a byzantine, utterly impenetrable Potemkin village of inking. Perhaps one day I’ll venture out and mingle with the local mujiks but for now, I prefer my hand to remain hidden. The somatic pleasure of intricate crosshatching has its own peculiar intensity, in particular when rendering the long serpentine arcs of deeply spherical volumes at obsessive length.

It’s important for modern inkers to remember that not only are they entertaining eyes but that they are doing so by making a unique hand-made object. Electronically shuffling numbers and facts in the digital Potemkin village of virtual reality pays better but the mental and physical pleasure of highly skilled manual labor has its own rewards. The mass reproduction of these objects is a subject unto itself but for now, the point is understanding how Moebius built his success upon his hand, upon the specific marks and general patterns that its movement made upon the page.

His performance was not only conceptually stimulating, it was also physically grounded in the reality of muscle and nerve and steel and paper and ink. The Airtight Garage was a mental and physical performance on all levels.

Finally, here’s two examples of pen work which show the hand. I apologize for the da Sesto’s quality, my main reference library is 600 miles away and I must rely on the internet for these drawings.

Albrecht Dürer, pen & ink

Cesare da Sesto, pen & ink

These are pen and ink performances from the early Renaissance, one in the Italian style and one in the German style. I usually choose mechanically reproduced examples (to match the three rules of The Airtight Garage) but this time I wanted to show the naked hand, so to speak.

We artists work in a world obsessed with creating perfectly commodified virtual realities which disdain the ethos of the skilled hand — for both commercial and conceptual reasons, I fear. But the airtight performances of Moebius — they dance elegant rings around the clumsy shambles of these latest re-inventions of our human reality.

The rhetoric of the hand, it's a resurgence of the Baroque aesthetic, in essence, and it re-affirms the power — and utility — of drawing happily. Ecce homo faber!

NB. One other thought has occurred to me regarding the stylistic display of the hand in inking: the use of Rapidographs & felt-tip markers. There are many inkers who do excellent work with the latter tools but this curmudgeon must confess that he harbors the sneaking suspicion that these artists' work would be even better with dip pens … the mono-width nib doesn't really show how one's hand has pushed and pulled and scrabbled about on the paper with the nib. The convenience is outweighed by the reduction in stylistic options. Crosshatching is deadened, the hand-heavy style is restrained and as for clear line with Rapidograph — the horror, the horror!

Moebius & The Airtight Garage: No. 2 … on a clear-line day, you can see forever

Last week’s look at page 36 of The Airtight Garage was such jolly fun with its talk of constrained rules and Goldberg Variations, I’m determined to carry on in the same inky vein with a look at page 77 of Moebius' Garage.

I mentioned then that Moebius went through a clear-line phase before returning to his (cross)hatching habits but I should have been more precise: he went to a relatively orthodox clear-line phase, for he already had a modified clear-line "house" style of his own which he used with great effect, especially in the AG. He had several variations of the style and on page 77 we see an excellent sample of one of them. The first specific rule of this page (always bearing in mind the first Three Rules: keep it black & white, camera-ready and pleasing to the eye) is:

4. Use supple, relatively fast lines to render contour and explanatory texture.

This is the fundamental principle of the clear-line style, as practiced by such masters as Hergé, Joost Swaarte, Ted Benoît, etc. Its commercial appeal is obvious although it has one catch: it requires thorough draftsmanship to execute well. Needless to say, Moebius had no problems in that department and his clear-line, both in the AG and his later “minimalist” phase, was eye-popping.

His hand — never forget the physical testimony of the hand! — moves fast on contour then speeds up and down on detail, lightly varying pressure upon the nib to create swell. The whole page looks all-nib, with some lines twice inked to reinforce the rule of thicker towards the foreground & edges, thinner towards the back and centers.

Even when the smaller lines look mono-width, they are not. Look carefully and you’ll see the ceaseless, minute waxing and waning that a dip pen gives to the line. Inkers who use Rapidographs lose much in line energy, much more than they gain in convenience. They are often forced to keep lines shorter so as to not betray the spindliness of extended passages. The line breathes when one uses a flexible nib, and when the hand is fast and confident, the result is lively to the eye.

This is a conversational page, talking about shape and texture at a brisk (but not hasty) pace. The pen flirts at times with calligraphy but moderates the ratio of line thickness to white space just enough to avoid the brush & ink corporate American comix look. The latter style, which is often a clear-line style, tends to flex the line severely with mixed results.

The problem with hard-core clear-line, especially black & white clear-line, is that the lack of detail often bores the eye after a while. This is a violation of Rule Three (always make the page attractive to the viewer) but Moebius was a law-abiding inkster. To keep the eye happy, he modifies the clear-line by:

5. Rendering lots of detail with anything but explanatory hatching

There is far more detail rendering here than in any page by Hergé or Benoît. Yes, there is slight hatching to indicate a few shadows but generally, the pen is in a bas-relief mode of thinking. Volumes are indicated by rendering around their outer edges or even leaving them blank and rendering the space behind them to make them pop. The rendering itself is mostly texture and sub-contour and the former is often a sub-species of the latter.

The background of tier 2 is technically brilliant. Note that it's optically registering as a minimal 20-30% on the grey scale, ie., the classic Moebius high-keyed look but sans spotting & shadows. Note also the faces of all the figures in all the panels. Clear-line usually symbolizes faces (at the expense of realistic backgrounds) but Moebius has taken care to make each face spare but precise, using the language of figure drawing, not cartooning. The difference is subtle but essential.

By normal clear-line standards, the entire page — and the backgrounds in particular — is over-inked. But look carefully. All the marks are still contour, they are all explanatory, they are all well integrated into the white. There is no risk of confusing the eye, in fact, the opposite is happening, our eyes are enjoying the visual patterns of obsessive detail because they are firmly grounded in optical reality. Our eye loves realistic contour even more than the convenience of orthodox page navigation — confusion is attractive if it is done just so.

The total effect is a pleasing optical confusion of foreground and background such as we saw on page 36. Rule 5 (which operates to satisfy Rule 3, the satisfaction of the eye) has been further modified to:

5a. Make everything precise and dreamlike at once by maintaining an infinite depth of field through obsessive detailing.

Note also the lettering scheme of the last 2 tiers. The lettering is so muscular and supple (and with a brush, the show-off!) but without balloons the morphology of the writing melts back into the semiotic ooze of marks which spawned it. I guess even the words are not really there, either.

This drive to detail, this French-fried chicken-fat, was one of Moebius' deepest impulses. When he went orthodox clear-line, he also made several statements in print about wanting to shed these obsessions but in the end, he went right back to them. The horror vacui was a basic element of his style, even in clear-line, and style is an expression of personality. Moebius was an honest stylist. The Airtight Garage is a genuine self-performance.

The game of art is the game of personality and obsession and desire. Aesthetic and structural rules encourage the deeply seated, collective human language of picture-making to speak clearly through the trained hand, without useless visual solipsism.

On a more practical level, if you're clear-minded about yourself and your obsessive goals, your style will sort itself it out. Above all, avoid passing fads and short-cuts, they encourage character weaknesses and will literally stunt your growth.

The clear-line style is ancient in commercial illustration, it dates back to Greek vase painting and East Asian block-printing. Let's take a look at one of its first appearances in mass-produced Western commercial book illustration, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. Here's several page spreads by an anonymous artist, along with some sharp type-setting by Aldus Manutius, that old slicky-boy of the composing room. Note that all three of the basic rules are in full form here, in both type and ill0s.

The clear-line of these illos is not as over-rendered as Moebius' baroque variations but it is equally effective. The general aim is still the same: dazzle the reader with a stripped down but compelling approximation of optical reality. There's more about the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili here and guess what? It was constructed according to various obscure constraints of a symbolic and allegorical nature, rather like The Garage.

Constraints and rules! They are the inker's friends, not their chains! Accept the hermetically sealed confines of your own airtight garage and feed your head!

Moebius & The Airtight Garage: No.1 … I Ink Therefore I am

Here’s a first installment in a series of critiques of the (mostly) pen & ink techniques of the late Moebius (Jean Giraud). I plan to intersperse them with my Snark GN postings, so don't freak out, fellow Carrollians.

For now I’ll focus on his Airtight Garage, a scorched-earth masterpiece in which he rang through almost all the changes of pen and brush, a bravura performance which utterly blew this inkster’s mind when he first saw it in Heavy Metal in the 70s. We could sum up The Airtight Garage as a comix version of the Goldberg Variations, a series of constrained deviations to delight both connoisseur and professional.

Good inking is a performance, frozen in time by the medium of mass-reproduction, and like all performances, it follows rules, overt or otherwise. The Airtight Garage has 3 basic rules:

1. Only two colors will be used: black and white. (1)

2. All artwork will be camera-ready, ie., cleanly inked with no excessive wasted work when reduced (dropped-out or filled-in line-work), no shadows, sloppy pro-whiting, left-over penciling, etc.

3. The final results will be attractive to the viewer.

The last rule is crucial, it is the Prime Directive of the commercial illustrator. In fact, all 3 of these rules are commercial in nature but that’s beside the point for now. What matters is what Moebius added to these rules, employing different constraints upon different pages with results reminiscent of the salad days of Oulipo.

Let’s start with a great page from the AG: number 36. What are the rules of this page?

4. no brush work, only pen and furthermore, at least one pen was a nicely flexible nib (using different nibs on the same page is a double-plus-good inking practice … although using only one nib can also serve as a good constraint).

5. minimal crosshatching, almost entirely hatching

6. a high-keyed lighting scheme, ie., inking mostly in the 0-40% zone of the greyscale, with only a minimum of shadows and spotting. This tonal scheme is one of the hallmarks of The Airtight Garage; Moebius loved the contrast of delicate tonalities spotted with a few judicious dark passages and it gave his inking a solarized feel, an American southwest desert lighting scheme which contrasts deliciously with the French sensibilities of the (minimal) plot. We should also note that, all theorizing aside, high-key inking is often faster to execute.

The first tier sets the tone of the page. The loose hatching on the backs of both the man and the woman semi-serves as a contour function, roughly indicating volume. There's a minimal crosshatching, normal to the long lines and probably done wet on wet. The man’s hatching lines are drifting too far apart to integrate with the white. They are functioning on their own, tending more towards pattern/calligraphy instead of tone/local texture.

There is a ratio between the thickness of an inked line and the thickness of the adjacent white line (2) that when done properly creates an effect I call “petillance”, a sort of optical sparkle similar to the chromatic analogue of simultaneous contrast. The effect works with both hatching & crosshatching but because Moebius kept the AG mostly high-keyed, we see little of it. Petillance works with any line width but rarely below a 40% over-all tone. The amount of reduction also effects it and that should be taken into account when using it.

The Beardsley drawing shown here is a classic example of petillance (a bit dark though, which is not a requisite of the technique) and Beardsley would have been aware of it thanks to the commercial wood-engraving techniques that had become obsolete in his own lifetime.

In page 36 of The Airtight Garage, the girl’s hair in tiers 1 and 2 has nice passages of petillance in them, which is why they look so satisfyingly rich and crisp to the eye. In addition, unlike the man's back, the girl's hatching in tier one is mostly petillant, owing to the tighter spacing in proportion to line width (or vice versa, the white lines are sized in a better proportion to the black lines).

The backs of the figures in tier 1 have locked in the general inking feel of the page. Moebius had a penchant for letting his lines shed their tonal and volumetric function and work in a more calligraphic, patterned manner, weaving them in and out of more tonal hatching/crosshatching. This calligraphic business creates a powerful rhythm on the page and it requires a flexible nib, really good hot-plate paper and most of all, a steady, confident hand moving quickly.

In fact, one could classify all pen work by the velocity of the hand moving the nib. Faster means more swell and taper, more energy and also, more reliance on draftsmanship. Slow is the speed of a more classical and conservative crosshatcher who focuses on rendering volume, shade and texture and eschews the bravura of calligraphy.

Which leads us to the starting rule of this particular page, or at least of the first two tiers:

7. Make lots of optically long lines.

There’s a bit of dashing and dotting here and there and a soupçon of crosshatching but on the whole, the lines in the first two tiers are long and draw attention to themselves, especially by avoiding petillance. Long lines require either slowing down to make them seamless, or, as Moebius loved to do, butting medium long, mono-width, unswelled lines end to end. The hatching in the very first panel shows this butting nicely. It avoids using crosshatching to create the darks and goes straight into a solid spotting. This butting together of shorter lines was a basic move of Moebius’ crosshatching (and most French crosshatching of the time) and when done as crosshatching, it means simultaneously advancing & rotating nib and hand in an orbit around the axis of the implicit spherical volume.

The hair passages in tiers 1 and 2 are not only petillant but also governed by lines of beauty. Note that in the uppermost left-hand corner of the 2nd tier, the man's hair drifts so far apart that the lines tend to cease cooperating with the white, although their natural tendency to revert to purely calligraphic lines is subverted by a loss of curve and swell (3) in certain spots. The lagging of this passage is confirmed by the slight shakiness of the lines; my suspicion is that Moebius was going too fast to bother with turning the page to a more comfortable angle.

NB. On the other hand, just to show how attention to detail pays off, Moebius takes care to make the borders of the whole page petillant, using the classic scotch rule so beloved by those wood-engraving petillistes of yore.

The shorter line-work of the rendering of faces and wall in tier 2 makes a good optical foil for the superb calligraphic passage of the three guards standing in the door. When doing linear rendering at a smaller scale, judicious omission is critical — one is creating a pattern, not tonal volumes — and Moebius flavors the contour lines with delicate flecking and dotting which he also deploys in the girl’s face. Note that most of the minimal marks of her face still cling to the invisible grid of the contour lines governing an implicit and undrawn crosshatching.

Then he moves down and lets the girl’s neck go calligraphic, along with the back of her seat and her shoulders. This panel is quite beautiful, the mixing of techniques creates an infinite depth of field, in other words, Moebius avoids the traditional use of a focal design point and lets everything in the panel come forward all at once. The effect is dreamlike and precise at once.

Tiers 1 and 2 are inked in a somewhat different style than the bottom of the page; down here Moebius speeds up his hand. The lines get shorter and the remaining long lines are really the contour lines, which are far more jumpy than before. One might say that the bottom of the page has jettisoned the long-line rule, in which case, we’ll decide to amend our last rule to:

8a. Speed up on the last tier’s inking.

The bottom of the page is executed faster and reads faster, more energetic and jumpier. The final panel has some very long contour lines (almost naked in their avoidance of thick-thin calligraphy and relying entirely on the skillful negative spacing of good draftsmanship to succeed) but most of the linework is fast and “stabby” with the nib. Note how the spotting of black shadows in the first panel of tier 3 is so nervous that the white flecks go petillante, which gives the lighting scheme that classic Moebius solarized desert feeling — even indoors!

The reason for this change of rule? Who knows … pressing deadlines? Some unexpected Lebanese Sunshine? A hot date for the night? I think we have here another axiom of our art-as-performance-game, an axiom which eludes some critics:

9. Be prepared to go aleatory. Stuff happens, finish the page no matter what.

Perhaps Moebius sped up on purpose or perhaps he just got distracted by something, we’ll never know. In any case, we clearly see his hand speeding up but still remaining accurate.

One of the paramount qualities of Moebius’ inking style was the dominance of the hand. His physical pleasure in drawing shaped every line, every panel and every page. He reminds me very much of Velasquez or Rubens at their best (which was superhuman), where the brush movements revealed their total immersion — and joy — in the visual story. (4)

The long line rule is a basic move in inking and Moebius tended towards it more and more in his career until he entered a genuine clear-line phase for several years. It should be pointed out that his draftsmanship was so good that this was an inevitable development. Technique is mastered to be thrown away at some point and I think he felt that clear-line would satisfy this zen-like rule. Alas, not only was the garage airtight but his draftsmanship seems to have been so innate that he could not throw it away. (5)

More to the point for us lesser inking mortals is that fact that the long line rule is essentially a calligraphic move. At the foot of the page Moebius slips into a faster mixed tonal-calligraphic mode with a nervous, shorter line, but the calligraphic still dominates. As a French inker, Moebius was well aware of the classical line tradition and for the French (as opposed to the German/Dutch tradition) it really begins with the calligraphic, not the volumetric attitude.

To round things off, let’s have a sample of hatching with a long-line and without significant petillance from Albrecht Dürer, the Renaissance master who perfected and standardized the two poles of line-work: the fast-calligraphic-hatching pole and the slow-tonal-crosshatching pole. Quite an accomplishment and more to the point, both styles still attract the jaded 21st-century eye (see Rule #3) and reproduce well (Rule #2) at a minimal cost (Rule #1) when done properly.

We are all Dürer’s children, even Moebius. Different technologies allowed the latter to greatly expand the rules of the inking performance-game but both men relied on this final, most important inker's axiom:

10. Draw, don’t just ink. And remember that you’re drawing with white.

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(1) Moebius used zipatone on a few pages but technically, it’s still black. Anyone who’s ever shot photostats or film negs will confirm this to any readers who want to quibble over this point. Stipplers may want to weigh in also, if there's any of them left.

(2) The white of the page is not an empty space; it’s the equivalent of the black ink. Never forget that you are drawing with white at the same time as you’re drawing with black, and oftentimes you’ll ink better in tricky passages if you keep your eye focused on the white — not on the black — as you ink.

(3) That is, swelling the line-work not by pushing on the nib but by drawing another line very close to it, often merging into it and sharing its curve.

(4) By visual story I don't mean the conceptual ideas and symbols, but the purely nonverbal meaning generated by the visual structure and components of a picture: its 2D vocabulary, grammar and syntax. This is the quality which delights what was once called a “good eye” in the business and it is the heart of good draftsmanship — not mindless realism or slick technique.

(5) Was this because his draftsmanship and personality were the same? A fruitful subject for the introspective pen-ster with a taste for existential inkery. The very word draftsmanship is so misunderstood these days, it seems to be mistaken for having a camera-eye or something similarly dullard. Draftsmanship is a translation of reality into movements of the hand which speak pictures in the eye's native language — not the language of words or dull habit or style.

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NB. If you're interested in the late 70s/early 80s comix & SF scene in North America, including the French Wave of Heavy Metal, there's a very fine blog here … Nicollet, Loustal, Caza, Moebius, plus the great Paul Kirchner, Chaykin, lots of journeyman SF cover art … I'm keeping my fingers crossed for some Nicole Claveloux and a bit of B&W Bilal

Fit 8, pg. 81/2 … The Origin of Snark in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

Well, isn't this jolly? The Baker's vanished at last, leaving his fellow Snarquistadores in their usual state of slack-jawed bafflement. The assiduous illustrator has little left to work with in this cryptic stanzel — German Snarkologists call it the "Unheimliche-Jumpunkt" — except for a wandering sigh disguised as a passing breeze better known to the authorities as "Jum."

The illustrator's task is not made any easier by the general ambience of fruity-headed lunacy which saturates the entire poem and renders all such illustrative chores, well, choreful indeed. Try drawing a breeze in these drearily monotheistic times, when the zephyrean and borean puffy-cheeked gods which once provided hot and cold running air to the art-loving masses are relegated to wine labels and New Age tattooes.

As for the wandering sighs, they are but a consonant away from the Wandering Singhs, a subspecies of sticky-fingered North Indian circus folk with a penchant for small change and unattached nautch girls, ie., not only un-drawable but all-in-all unfit for genteel Carrollian society.

Which leaves us with a visual and even moral problem: in a world which lacks clear-cut visual solutions to most such questions, what's a young artist to do? Luckily for us, a contemporary acquaintance of the Admirable Carroll, the photographer Oscar Rejlander, once confronted that very same problem.


Oscar Gustave Rejlander, “Two Ways of Life”

His solution was an epic montage photograph, “Two Ways of Life," which depicted a generic specimen of Modern Victorian Youth confronted with a choice between Evil (naked party chicks brandishing fulsome jeroboams of French plonk) and Good (fully dressed college co-eds armed with deadly dull social and moral compasses). Tough choice, eh?

After a bit of gentle persuasion involving the traditional lead-weighted feather duster, this illustrator persuaded the Fellowship of the Snark to step into Rejlander's tableau vivant and pose for the stanzel in question. The subtle moral and factual questions posed by Carroll's verse are now neatly translated into a clever post-post-Modern, crypto-Victorian meditation upon whatever it was that the verse was about.

And just what is this verse about? It's about choosing between a wandering sigh and a passing breeze in the Carrollian Multiverse's police line-up of suspected villains, between saying "jum" or merely maintaining an awkward silence … the two ways of the Nonsensical Life!

Fit 8, pg. 81/1 … I ♥ Darkness

At the heart of every story, epic or romance ever written, chanted or gurgled in the shower lies what literary experts call the "darkness" — hence the phrase, "heart of darkness" — the place where the malevolent gist of the entire plot keeps itself warm and dry.

We've arrived at such a "heart of darkness" in our Hunting of the Snark and unlike certain sissy-boy writers who needlessly tie their literary loincloths into Gordian knots over such naughty anatomical dilemmas, we shall bash on regardless. They haven't made the darkness yet — hearty or not — which can't be crosshatched into submission by any ink-sodden, nib-drunk illustrator worthy of the name.

This business of "it's a boo" has troubled the minds of Snarkologists (both of them) through the centuries because it functions just like the murder weapon in a classic, Golden Age detective story — with one slight difference: there's no murderer, no motive and possibly not even a victim. Plus, the detective is really dumb* …

Has the Baker just been conked on the head by a Snark-subspecies-Boojum? Or has he been conked on the head by someone whose name begins with the letters "boo?" Or has he been conked on the head with a Snark-subspecies-Boojum by someone whose name begins with the letters "boo?"

Plausible candidates for the latter position could include John Wilkes Booth, Daniel Boone, Booth Tarkington or even George Boole, the English microcephalist anteater. But eventually, suspicion will fall on the head of the Mistuh Kurtz of our sordid little Snarkian Hearty-Darkness, the Boots.

Oh yes, Boots, we've had our eye on you for quite a while now, ever since you showed up for work disguised as Charles Darwin. Who better than Charles Darwin to play the role of a Snark-Hunter's Heart of Darkness, the man who more than any other toppled the edifice of Victorian thingum-a-jig with the shocking fritter-my-wig of Evolution, a theory so radical that it makes American politicians' heads explode to this day?

I could go on but frankly, I've evolved and I think you should too. If you need more "evidence", you can console yourselves with the cheap thrill of realizing that the paintings on the wall behind our bewildered Snarkistas refer to both the Boots and the Boojum at once.

I can't remember how or why anymore though, this illustrator's heart of darkness has spread to his brain and he's unable to 'ink rationally. Cue sabre and jewel-rattling from the Gods …
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*The final evolution of the mystery genre will be the creation of a fictional detective so mind-numbingly stupid and thick that he does not even know that a crime has been committed. The name of that other sublime Polish peddler of heartful darkynesses, Witold Gombrowicz, comes to mind as a literary candidate for such a venture … and for readers who crave the genuinely obscure, yet another sublime Polish fresh-lit peddler, Stanislav Lem, actually did write such a mystery (The Investigation), or at least one in which no crime was committed, practically the same thing, logically speaking.
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NB. The death of Moebius is the end of a glorious era in comix. If you make a living dipping a pen-nib into India ink and then ensuring that the final results are both camera-ready and legible to the average viewer, you regard Moebius as the undisputed master of the art.

If time permits, I'd like to do some posts about his pen technique, but for now, what I would like to point out is that Moebius proved, over and over and over again, that the thorough mastery of the basic, fundamental skills of art trumps being fashionable every time.

No matter what today's critics may say, draftsmanship matters. Very few of them can even define the term, much less understand why it is the god of all the visual arts. Cultivating good draftsmanship starts with being honest to your eyeballs.

Look at crappy art, you will make crappy art. Look at Moebius, draw happily!

Fit 8, pg. 80/3 … lizard snark king

Lewis Carroll plus William Blake plus Aldous "Turpentine" Huxley minus Jim "Tuneless Yodeler" Morrison equals the above stanzel, which we'll call "The Deadly Door of Perception" for ease of reference.

We've been inkily slouching towards our Snarkian Gomorrah of Fit the Eighth for some time now and while the Baker plunges into his liminal, yet oddly minty fresh chasm, it's time for us to review a few facts about the Snark and Life in general.

Discovering the Meaning of Life is mostly a matter of using one's common sense, of which there's such a short supply on hand that we can safely say that for most of us hairless, bipedal, ex-arboreal monkey-people, common sense has been rudely vacated by Nonsense. The hairless ex-monkey most commonly regarded as the finest purveyor of Nonsense by his fellow simians is, oddly enough, Lewis Carroll. I say oddly, for the fact that Carroll's assessment of the Meaning of the Life was mostly Nonsense is, upon careful examination, plainly common sense.

Bereft of his ancestral, arboreal habitat and thick, warm pelt, shivering in the perpetual English sans banana or even breadfruit, the Admirable Carroll reacted as any sane primate would: he kept himself cozy by mentally relocating to what we now call the Carrollian Multiverse, a warm and dry place where everything made sense to its Creator and no one else.

The other inhabitants of the Carrollian Multiverse, simian or not, lived well-adjusted and productive lives, secure in the knowledge that their world lacked any substantial meaning beyond such odd snippets of semiotic white noise as the number 42 or the overwhelming prevalence of the letter B in their names. Potemkin Village semiotics, the experts call it, and it's a handy thing to have about when parsing over the Meaning of Life, Snark-Hunting style.

If only you and I had the metaphysical cojones to take this challenge and jettison our own simian cerebelli, but no matter, for any readers still bothering to follow my well-sedated argument will now put down their bucket of filthy water and filthier squeegee and pound the argument's windshield in an incoherent rage: what about the Baker? He faces his imminent annihilation. What's the meaning of that?

The annihilating chasm that the Baker is about to plunge into is our world, the world where common sense glibly peddles the Nonsensical axiom that everything must mean something just because it looks that way. Stung by a spasm indeed, our monkey-brains have been and always will be, by the door of perception.

Makes perfect sense to me.

Fit 8, pg. 80/2 … If a snark could talk, we could not understand him

The story so far: The Rev. CL Dodgson, disguised as Lewis Carroll, has insinuated himself atop a crag whilst playing at being a Baker in an anapaestic search of a snark. His demise looms large …

Readers who have been following along at home will probably recognize the setting of this stanzel for it's the very same setting in which our snark hunt began, way back in the paleographic pages of Fit the First. Less memorable readers will have to make do with this pithy observation: that Lewis Carroll gets away with murder!

Gosh, how many poets could pass muster in any modern MBA writing program spouting off verse in which a hero clearly named as "The Baker" is then immediately re-branded as a "hero unnamed?"

Or is Lewis Carroll insinuating that one's function cannot serve as one's name? Lesser minds might dismiss all of this as overly hirsute hair-splitting of the highest order but that's the beauty of Snarkology, don't you see? It's a Big Mind/Big Beard thing … and even if you don't, you will have to admit that an Anglican deacon moonlighting as a logician whilst writing anapaestic verse devolving upon the theoretical demise of his own fictional doppelganger, it's a debauched semiotician's fantasy come true — hubba hubba!

All of which is a ghastly sort of slovenly guttersnipe's shorthand for saying that our poet's refusal to allow practical function to cohabitate with symbolic function is quite cheeky indeed! Why, it undermines the very basis of language and symbolic logic itself, it's an underminery of the very same sort as, say, an Anglican deacon-cum-logician devoting his life to the promulgation of utter Nonsense.

Form and function, the desperate wags of the Carrollian Multiverse!

There's a snark in my Lion!

I was planning a double-header for this week, a nice bit of fresh Snark commentary and also an update on the NYU Poetry/Comix discussion that I participated in last Friday … the latter event was a lot of fun and the other poets were very interesting & talented & energetic young people, I have much to say upon the entire topic … except for the fact that I've returned home to discover that my 2-month old Macbook Pro now likes to take 24 hours to boot up … it's running now but I'm waiting for an external HD to arrive so I can wipe and re-install and/or take it to Apple … if any mac techies are reading this and have some opinions on why Lion is so funky (it's been buggy for a while with slow boots & lots of privilege/permissions problems), feel free to email me …

Meanwhile, here's a re-run from the Snark files …

The frontispiece to Fit the Fifth, Commentary Number One:

1. It's not a hunting of a snark, where the snark is the object of the chase … no, it's a hunting undertaken by the snark. This simple grammatical confusion is an object lesson in prosodic clarity for those who care about such things.

The Butcher and the Beaver are beyond that sort of thing by now. They're into a sort of kinky ecclesiastical cosplay based upon the works of Hieronymous Bosch and James Tissot. Best not get too close to either of them or you might lessen …


The frontispiece to Fit the Fifth, Commentary Number Two:

2. After all that hellish ruckus in the infernal Malbowge of Fit the Fourth (sorcerers, falsifiers, circus folk and magazine publishers), we shall now ascend ad astra, as it were, to the quieter purlieus of Fit the Fifth. This canto, the longest Fit of Lewis Carroll’s Hunting of the Snark, is known amongst illustrators as the Purgatorial Fit, for its immense length requires the consumption of vast quantities of cheap whiskey and hot curries to keep up one’s strength.

Of course, in former times, illustrators such as myself needed no such artificial stimulants to come up with the goods. Employed as we usually were in the embellishment of manuscripts by various monastic establishments, we busied ourselves with the production of all manner of fantastical and grotesque creatures in our spare time. These bizarre critters, sometimes called grylli, were invented by Antiphilos the Egyptian, according to Pliny the Elder, and they proved very handy indeed in the spicing up of what was otherwise a pretty dull sort of life in your typical 12th-century scriborium. However, the grylli soon escaped from their cages and ran amuck, as such artificial creations always do, hooting loudly while drunk on the front lawns of right-thinking folk such as St. Bernard, who had this to say to the cops later on …

"What are these ridiculous monstrosities doing in the cloisters where monks pray and study? To what purpose are these unclean apes, fierce lions, these half men … quadrupeds with a dragon’s tail … a dragon with a quadruped’s tail … a horse ending as a goat … a horned animal ending as a horse."

What purpose indeed! Let’s ask this typologically portmanteau-ish gentleman that we see pictured above, sitting on his rock and minding his own business, let’s ask him what he thinks of these oddly unreal grotesqueries that are popping in and out of Nowhere (or Unwhere, to be precise) to trouble his devotional contemplations.

Is he St. Anthony, possessing the legendary self-control of the Father of Monasticism, and thus ultimately indifferent to these sensory diversions, dismissing them as Satan’s spurious blandishments and threats? Or is he the Butcher, possessing no discernable cerebral aptitude at all and thus ultimately indifferent to these sensory diversions, dismissing them as the Beaver’s feminine blandishments and threats?

Yes, for some time now, we have suspected the Beaver of having little enthusiasm for hunting the Snark. It seems more and more evident that her function is that of a clumsy sort of romantic distraction, a distraction designed by a certain someone who wishes us to relax our vigilance and our powers of concentration — but to no avail, dear reader, for our watchword remains Snark!

Yes, it’s Snark that we are really hunting here, it’s Snarks and Boojums and all the other imaginary paraphenalia of idle illustrators, sensorily-deprived Early Christian anchorites and versifying Oxford dons! This is the Beaver’s Lesson to the Butcher!

It was a Snark that St. Anthony was hunting in the Antiphilian Egyptian Desert, it was a Snark that St. Bernard banished from the overheated monastic bullpens of the Middle Ages, and yes, it was a Snark that slapped a funnel atop its head and blustered his way into Hieronymus Bosch’s studio by claiming to be a Gov’ment Man hunting down an escaped gryllus.

The cheek! The nerve! I cannot countenance her any longer, yes, away with this Beaver’s Lesson, yes, get thee back to a punnery!

Of course, what is the snark hunting? She's hunting for readers, of course! As they lessen
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NB. Flout 'em and scout 'em, and snark 'em and ink 'em; thought is free.

Fit 8, pg. 80/1 … crouching tiger, hidden snark

The Bellman is referring to his acolyte, the Baker, who is played here by Lewis Carroll, who is himself being played by the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Both of these players were the guiding genii and prime movers of what scholars now call the Carrollian Multiverse, a multi-bibliarium transcending time and space and logic wherein many curious beasties and a few human weirdoes lived their freakish lives.

As I've pointed out before, this poem we call the Snark is the only Victorian verse epic (or epyllion) that has withstood the test of time. As such, it is a direct descendant of such literary blockbusters as the Iliad and the Odyssey and we all know what that means … for example, the famous device of the Homeric epithet — rosy-fingered Dawn or sticky-fingered Odysseus — has been handily transmogrified by the Admirable Carroll into the Carrollian epithet.

We can see two of them in the above stanzel (stanza+panel). One of them is Thingumbob, a Carrollian epithet which the Baker gladly accepts for the simple fact that he had forgotten his own name, way back in Fit the Second. (Need we mention, parenthetically of course, that this amnesia is a sly exegesis upon the Adamic Nominative Imperative that is made so much of in the Book of Genesis? I thought so.)

Another Second Fit epithet for the Baker is Candle-ends, an epithet which I'm sure all of my readers will instantly remember as being the English equivalent of the Chinese ideogram known as "xié", ie. candle-stub.


Xié : Candlestub


The "xié" ideogram has been liberally sprinkled about this stanzel to reinforce this Sino-Carrollian epithet, an epithet which curiously enough was also the nickname of one of Carroll's best friends, the charming Alexandra "Xie" Kitchin. We see her here in a photograph of Carroll's, a photo in which she plays the role of a rather diffident Chinese tea merchant.




Alexandra "Xié" Kitchin, photo by Lewis Carroll

Naturally, all this Carrollian epithetting cannot hold a candlestub to that Greek guy Homer's epithetting but on the other hand, the Carrollian Multiverse is not one of the world's top importers of Porsche sports cars and is in no need of a Eurozone bail-out. Who's talking Nonsense now, eh?

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NB. I'll be signing copies of my Snark and also participating in the Poetry and Visual Arts Roundtable, February 17, 2012, 2 - 4 p.m. at the Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House, 58 West 10th Street, between 5th and 6th Avenues, NYC. This will provide a rare opportunity for myself to leave the house without being pelted with freezing rain, snow, ice and poutine … featured poets will also include Sommer Browning, Matthea Harvey, Mark Leidner, Bianca Stone, and Paul Tunis. More info here …

Fit 8, pg. 79/2 … The Snark, O Muse, inform, that many a way wound with his wisdom to his wished stay

Our Snark hunt has entered the ultimate phase of its prosodic peristalsis, the infamous Fit the Eight, the Vanishing.

Big paradox, huh? The final product of the greatest Nonsense Epic Ever Written will be the Nothingness of being Vanished Away. That's pretty Heavy, so Heavy that it's plunged all the way to Light 'n Trivial.

Which brings us to another textual dilemma: from whence comes this sudden penchant for capitalizing things? Is it a suppressed orthographic memory of this artist's oddly Teutonic heritage? A sticky caps key? Or is it just another haphazard attempt at maintaining the pretense of Deep Meaning without actually doing anything about it?

Smarty-pants readers will sneer at this back-handed attempt at defining Carrollian Nonsense, they will scoff derisively at all this muddling of Form and Meaning. Less intelligently clothed readers can gape, slack jawed, at the above drawing which illustrates a band of Snarquistadores wandering through a room which is lavishly adorned with portraits of their communal Creator, the Admirable Carroll — and their soon-to-be-vanished colleague, the Baker!

Muddling through a hagiographic tribute to one's creator (a self-generating universal mono-iconostasis if you're a particularly old-fashioned Hindu) is pretty much shorthand for life itself if one happens to be religious. The frisson of it all is made even more frissony by the fact that this particular creator, the Rev. C.L. Dodgson, was a genuinely religious man who puttered around his own creator's world in the mad gardener's guise of Lewis Carroll.

It all means something and I'm sure it's pretty amazing and really cool if I could only think of what to call it* … which is, of course, the Illustrator's Primal Dilemma: I cannot say it, I can only draw it. Like the Beaver, I keep bounding along on the tip of my tale, at a loss for words but well-stocked with pictures.

NB. I'll be appearing at the Poetry and Visual Arts Roundtable, February 17, 2012, 2 - 4 p.m. at the Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House, 58 West 10th Street, between 5th and 6th Avenues, NYC. This will provide a rare opportunity for myself to publicly rant about comix and poetry with other ranters in a location that is nominally warmer than the one I rant in now … featured poets will also include Sommer Browning, Matthea Harvey, Mark Leidner, Bianca Stone, and Paul Tunis. More info here …
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*Recursive ontological solipsism with a pictorial side-order of temporal glaciation? Lost in the fun-house? Total perspective vortex?

Ink the Bismarck!

The press of deadlines has addled my inky brain box plus I'm just darn tired … so, no Snark explications this week, but instead this drawing from the files, a portrait of Johannes Brahms, the Noble Savage of Wilhelmine Germany.

That sleek, burnished, savage sound of his … grovel, Lady Gaga, grovel!

NB. If you want to waste even more of your employer's time, the poetry-loving folks at TheThePoetry.com have posted some of my de La Fontaine translations with artwork here. I'll be appearing at a panel discussion in NYC that's being organized by Bianca Stone, one of the poets behind TheThe and we'll be discussing poetry & comix. More info to come.

Fit 8, pg. 79/1 … the memories of a man in his old age are the deeds of a snark in his prime

My Newt Gingrich illo (see last posting below) possessed so much mojo that this Snark illo of mine is probably going to break the internets. Sure, to some people it's just a picture of the Fellowship of the Snark girding their loins for the heavy-going of Fit the Eighth but to some other people it's voodoo of the highest order.

These other people know that the verse quoted here is actually an Anglo-Saxon galdor, cunningly disguised as the refrain of the Victorian era's only genuine, certifiable verse epic, The Hunting of the Snark. Its author, the Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, devised this Fit as a cunning disguise for a particularly violent dénouement of his literary protagonist, the Baker, who was himself a cunning disguise for Lewis Carroll, the well-known cunning disguise of the good Reverend.

None of this matters much to modern readers (particularly American ones), some of whom seem to have difficulty remembering that only a few years ago, Newt Gingrich announced that “the idea that a congressman would be tainted by accepting money from private industry or private sources is essentially a socialist argument.”

Substitute the word "congressman" with the word "illustrator" and the above drawing quickly becomes an inevitable reality, spawned by the unholy conjunction of this illustrator's Snark and a small bit of private industry known as Melville House. Doubtful readers can test the veracity of this statement by purchasing a copy of our Snark GN and seeing how tainted this illustrator feels afterwards … none at all, I can assure you.

Thimble, care, fork, hope … the fetish objects of a political cargo cult which roams the post-postmodern halls of power, charming the pants off the American electorate with mere smiles and soap.

NB. This elective affinity for Newt springs from the basest of motives, I can assure you … a long-ago, half-remembered encounter at the AEI during yet another one of those fruitless, inane job interviews which blighted this artist's salad days … which brings us (finally) to this:

"What we need today more than anything else is to invest in beauty, because beauty is harmony … But we invest in chaos, because chaos is much more profitable than peace ...." — Vangelis

Newtonian Physics

If you're a political junky and a devotee of Unadulterated Nonsense, the Republican primaries in the USA are pure catnip.

Newt Gingrich seems poised (once again, yawn) on achieving total world domination of some sort and I cannot resist posting this illo that I did many years ago, in his salad days as Speaker of the House in the 90s.

In the best nation on earth things can only get better!

Fit 8, pg. 77 … is that a snark in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?

Parental Warning: This week's Snark posting contains scenes of paranoiac-critical crosshatching and surrealist innuendo that may not be suitable for younger readers.

Devoted readers will know that I've made the frontispiece of each Fit of this Snark into a visual pun of some feeble sort. They will also know that the Snark itself is concealed in each frontispiece, vamping it up in the cunning disguise of an Unsleeping Eye, ie., what is the Snark? — it is Eye!

Undevoted or even flagrantly promiscuous readers will wonder what all the fuss is about. Are they being thickies or is there no discernable pun in this, the very last frontispiece of the very last Fit (or Fitt in the traditional Anglo-Saxon) of our GN?

Well, it all depends upon your definition of what a pun is, or even, as a certain American libertine once noted, upon your definition of what "is" is. For what we have here is not a literal Vanishing but a visual Vanishing, a Vanishing away of the poet Lewis Carroll (upon whom the soon-to-be-Vanished Baker is modeled), out of the 19th-century British Raj and into the natty decor of a 1930s Upper West Side apartment furnished by none other than Salvador "Avida Dollars" Dali.


Face of Mae West Which May Be Used as an Apartment by Salvador Dali (1935)

We've already had a go at Dali and his paranoiac-critical method, an addictive type of eye-candy which can lead to dilated pupils, loss of motor coordination and workplace giggles (better known as Gateway Surrealism Syndrome), but I think we've successfully plumbed new depths here by insinuating the Admirable Carroll into the private residence of the legendary Mae West, a woman of genuine capabilities. Hubba hubba, as they say here in Montreal (although it's a silent "h", bien sûr).


Lewis Carroll AKA Charles Lutwidge Dodgson AKA The Baker

More sober-minded readers will ponder the fact that the portrait of Carroll used as reference by this artist was made by Oscar Rejlander, a talented photographer whose work will be cropping up again on page 81, thanks mainly to his public domain status, the poor dope.

My drunken, slobbering, tie-askew, pants-disheveled readers can skip all that and go ahead and google ( a portmanteau of "go ogle") Mae West, a woman who carnalized the Bellman's Clochetic Rule of Three into a handy dictum which fits discreetly into any young lady's purse, viz. “I'll try anything once, twice if I like it, three times to make sure.”

NB. The Boot's well-turned ankling is no accident, it is — the shape of things to come!

Fit 7, pg. 75/3 … work is the curse of the inking classes, part two

Leaving someone to their fate is all the rage in certain philosophical circles. The smart set calls it a feeble-minded tautology but we think it's a splendid excuse for yet another obsessively cross-hatched depiction of Karl Marx shaking his fat German booty in a tight-fitting Hindustani harem outfit.

Of course, if you just tuned in to this GN version of The Hunting of the Snark, you're probably eying the exit by now, eager to get away from all this eschatological psychobabble but if you're a regular habitue of these parts, you'll know that all of the above is just another example of this artist's singular inability to clearly explain whatever it is that he's up to.

The shehnai-playing monkey and the bewigged barrister-pig are window-dressing for the real "meat" of this stanzel is the squiggly, blobby bits of ink encrusted on the right-hand margin, the ones that spell out the word "BOO". This word's grim import will become clearer later on but for now, I suggest that you avoid making eye contact with it.

Snark drawings are the New York subway-riding winos and psychos of the illustration and comix world; reeking of strong ink and sour, week-old tautologies fished out of filth-ridden dumpsters, they spell nothing but trouble, especially of the B-O-O ilk.

So go ahead, give 'em your spare change if you want to but you know what they'll do with it, don't you? … far better to leave them to their fate while you scurry back to your cozy, safe home in the predestinarian suburbs …

Meanwhile, a propos of nothing in particular … here's Terry Gilliam's take on making a living in the arts:

"If I'd actually learned any of the lessons, I wouldn't be making films anymore. I try not to learn. I spend most of my life unlearning …"

Soyez zen, Mr. Gilliam!

Fit 7, pg. 75/2 … drive your snark and your plow over the bones of the dead

This stanzel is jam-packed with jolly bits of scrumptious, Nonsense-soaked Carrollian references. Would it interest you to know that —

1. mimsy is a portmanteau of miserable and flimsy. The word is current throughout the Carrollian Multiverse, ranging from Snark Island to Looking Glass Land. The islanders pronounce it with a marked rolling of the "r", while the Spiegelmans and womans prefer to drop the final, silent "o".

2. the Banker is rattling his bones and fingering his hair; the former is a reference to Mister Bones, a stock character in Victorian minstrel shows who would literally play himself, ie., play the bones … and the latter is a probably just the Banker luxuriating in his newly-minted, windswept locks. In short, he's vamping, ie., playing himself.


WILLIAM STANLEY MOUNT, THE BONE PLAYER

3. the deliciously well-turned line, "words whose utter inanity proved his insanity," is a cleverly veiled jab at the letter "S", whose appearance inside a word, say inanity, seems sufficient here to render it unfit to operate heavy machinery or make major financial decisions. There's a yummy whiff of the Eternal Recursion here — the primum mobile of the Carrollian Mutliverse — since this petty defaming of the letter "S" is itself a classic example of the inability of most phonemes to just get along. Why can't they learn to live in peace with one another? It's utter insanity, their communal inanity.

In short, more of the same for 2012 …