So? Is it true?
What it?
You know, it, they prodded. They got around to the reason for the call: Can you do us a spot illustration of it at the wake for an article we’ve commissioned? We’ve got a journalist to write about comics in San Francisco.
No can do, we would say. Too squeamish.
Pay is five hundred.
When’s it due?
Can you create a cannibal-theme silkscreen poster for our Walpurgis Night Concert Festival? Budget’s two hundred.
A hundred to do an illo of Hick Elmdales and Biz Aziz for the Arts section of the Chronicle?
When Gabby Scavalda called from Manhattan to settle a glitch in the strip, Patrick tried to pin her down. Tell me the straight dope, Gabby. What’s my problem? All I get is weird slapdash freelance work. Why won’t the big syndicates pick me up?
Patrick’s dew-dapped dreams of his own successful newspaper strip had all but evaporated after years of harsh rejections. His latest foray— White Collar, about a polar bear employed as a middle-manager for a large corporation of penguins, had been turned down by every syndicate. He was ready to pack it in.
If there was anything Gabby liked more than permission to give the straight dope, we never saw it. She’d looked at some of Patrick’s pitches over the years out of courtesy and had an idea what was going wrong.
Gabby told him, You’ll never get in the papers if you give up. I can’t speak for another editor but here’s why I might pass if I was looking for a new strip and saw your work. First, it’s very professional. You’re a pro. You know what you’re doing. So I look closely. You have excellent handling of your line weight. Thin lines spread out beautifully around bends and turns, and there’s nice shadows. But so what? This is the funny pages. Your character designs are fundamentally flawed—there’s nothing likable about how you draw them. They’re derivative. And there’s nothing fluid about your panels. The movement is all over the place. Editors get migraines from strips with bad flow. Everything looks stagnant or composed willynilly. Your own ideas aren’t original, that’s the biggest problem. The gags don’t work. The humour is overweened. The funny is not funny. Your writing’s not up to snuff. Your characters need depth. Here’s the upshot, Patrick: you’re better as an inker. You’re an astounding inker. Maybe you should find a partner who can come up with the ideas and scripts and can pencil the panels for you to ink.
Dejected by the stumble, meanwhile Patrick took care of most of the buzzes at the door that were cartoonists and other types of artists looking to buy a dime or a quarter of the inspiring shit that we kept replenishing in the laundry hamper, which still reeked something special. Its properties remained untested no matter how many we turned on to it and now swore by it.
One time a syndicate called for Patrick. This was not one of the big five syndicates. Rather, this was Impetigo, based out of Milwaukee, whose business focused on the free weekly underground newspapers the other syndicates overlooked. Impetigo—with quote attributed to Wally Wood for a slogan: Sex, Violence, and Horror—had illustrators, sex columnists, saucy horoscopes, and the like to fill out the arts and entertainment listings—they syndicated underground comix full of twisted scenarios and frustrating anti-punchlines. The comix editor wanted to know if Patrick would be interested in doing a Life in Hell–style comic strip about cannibals and the devil. You know, the editor said, as a kind of wink to issue nine.
What a blow to learn industry as far down the ladder as the Impetigo Syndicate had heard about his rejections. Patrick agreed to prep a strip even though the money was worse than what Wendy paid.
That’s to say, on top of the animated Strays summer Christmas special perpetually due, we agreed to do freelance on the side. It was all for editors and designers who wanted the same thing: Make sure it’s in there. And if they didn’t want a literal representation of that night, they wanted the mood. And they wanted the credibility of our names. Our ambition made us say yes to most everything (except Impetigo), even when we ended up working for free (Mark would say yes to anything, he was so dipso by then). Like Frank’s plans overseas, we prepared for a potential future when we might not have the luxury of being assistants on Strays and freeloading at No Manors.
The more work that piled up, the more we divvied it up among the four of us. Twyla pencilled the comic strip. Mark pencilled client work. Patrick inked both. Rachael ran the show. When there was time for the summer Christmas cartoon, Mark pencilled keyframes and Twyla drew in-betweens. Patrick did most of the inking and painting onto the final sheets of celluloid. He and Twyla shot most of the stop-motion cinematography.
Our idea for the cartoon was to mix and match every animation technique in the book. Traditional cel animation interrupted by puppetry segments. Clay stop-motion animation. Mummenschanz-style mask theatre.
On an episode of Entertainment Tonight around this time, correspondent Leonard Maltin took viewers behind the scenes with Hollywood’s most famous creature-makers, the special-effects guys who made the monsters. Creator of the creatures in Sinbad and Clash of the Titans and more, Ray Harryhausen showed Maltin how he used a basic stop-motion technique to bring to life his skeleton army, deathmatch dinosaurs, rampaging cyclopses, and royal snakemen. Harryhausen followed one rule: If you want to draw a dog, first you have to be that dog. He filmed himself acting as his monsters, then used a reel of his own mime as a frame-by-frame reference when he moved his models bit by bit in front of the stop-motion camera.
So that’s what we did. We acted out every scene in the cartoon and filmed it. By eighty-four, not only did we have ten minutes of animation, we had a complete live action version we’d shot on a camcorder with us as actors.
So, while Wendy bounced from nation to nation on her sexful adventure with Frank Fleecen, our days got hairy bananas busy. There was no leisurely freeloading for us. The question was, how to get more work done? Sleep fewer hours. Sleep in shifts. Cycle through jobs. Eat more and darker chocolate. Skip showers and baths for days. Fuck it, let the hair grow on our faces and legs. Heat frozen fish, chicken, or whatever else goes nice with ketchup, guacamole. More coffee, more shrooms, more bud. Draw until our hands looked like pencils and our noses doubled for erasers. Coffee all night. Forget to put the garbage out or clean the toilets. Like in a horror movie, we decided to split up, divvying chores, more deadlines. Put the summer Christmas special on the backburner, again.
31
In February of eighty-five, Justine Witlaw went ahead with an exhibition of Jonjay’s artwork.
I waited for half a fucking decade. I’m not waiting around forever. What else is there to do? she said. She promised to deposit his half of sales in a trust account to accrue interest during his absence. If he ever made a withdrawal from there, that was another matter.
Titled after a line Jonjay wrote on the back of a bristlecone pine study: From a History of the Secret Origins of the Universe. Justine showed ten of the most beautiful examples of Jonjay’s rubbings of the sailing stones’ trails, in large white wood frames and displayed in a snaking wave along one white wall of her gallery. On the wall perpendicular was a selection of his White Mountain series, watercolours of the cliffs and bristlecone pine trees. Across from the rubbings, she had her interns reproduce all the Death Valley traces at one one-hundredth of the actual size to fit them together onto a print (one of five, unsigned) to be studied for their shapes’ strange similarity to the branches of the bristlecone pines. On another wall was a drawing on plaster of a pi-perfect circle Jonjay had drawn freehand one night on the wall at Justine’s apartment in Russian Hill. She had the piece of plaster cut out of her rental and carefully framed, then the room replastered (at a cost of well nigh five thousand). Next to the circle on plaster was photodocumentation of the inverted pentagram in the other circle he’d painted freehand, on the door to Wendy’s lime-green Gremlin’s carport, and of the pentagram’s redo by the Evangelical boy next door.
A salon-style, loosely diamond-shaped cluster of sm
all framed pictures completed the first of Justine Witlaw’s two white cubes dedicated to Jonjay’s doings. This salon was of ephemera. The coracles at sea Jonjay painted with a palette of rotting vegetables. All the absent-minded sketches he had made over the years while watching TV in between the bigger, more mysterious projects that delayed this show. His forays into comix. His sketches for the logo of Ruthvah ~ For Men.
In an adjoining cube, nine televisions and nine VCRs displayed late-night babble from Jonjay’s library of ninety-nine VHS cassettes. Titled Icing Sugar, 1981–82, the setup showed Jonjay’s curatorial of subliminally cheap late-night pawn shop commercials, hair-raising talkshow interviews, surreal newscast footage. At around the half-hour mark, all nine screens would show footage of the giant pile of mysterious white powder blocking traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge. Footage of the event, snippets of commentary, clips showing the mini-crash in the stock market as a result of the mysterious white powder, and his recordings of the public announcement of the scientific results. There was no mention of his—or our—involvement in the incident.
Another cassette contained a ninety-minute edit of his indoor mountain climb of No Manors, from the basement to the attic and down again, titled No Mountain.
In the centre of the gallery, a piece called JNJY—three arcade games flashed Jonjay’s astounding high scores on Pong, Pac-Man, and Donkey-Kong, which visitors to the gallery were invited to try to beat.
Opening night, it was Mark Bread and Biz Aziz who got all the attention normally reserved for the artist. Justine guided her clients to us by saying that we had lived with the missing artist. Mark is my artist, Justine said, and you all know of Biz Aziz. Everyone did seem to know Biz, perhaps through her performances, and now also for the storyline of issue nine. Old Russian Hill retirees, the blue-chip collectors, they all wanted Mark to tell them—what did it taste like? Again, Mark ended the evening locked in the broom closet heaving red wine, beer, and cheese into a mop bucket. Justine pulled Biz Aziz aside and said, I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to ask, but could I show some of your artwork? I think I could do a lovely job presenting them here, that is, if you’re willing to sell.
Don’t curse me, Justine, said Biz through downcast eyes.
I won’t.
You can’t put some crazy hex on me.
No hex, Justine said. I promise. What kind of hex?
Don’t ask. I’m impervious anyway. Got my own hex. Hex curses hex.
Justine pressed her hand to her heart. Justine assured her: The art work, the hard work, the work, that’s what my gallery is about. Original works from your comics on the wall—, she spread her fingers out as she envisioned, —and mannequins on plinths wearing your costumes.
Irwin Gerund, covering Jonjay’s exhibition for Shepherd Media’s entertainment segment on the six o’clock news, said the show was the one San Franciscans have been waiting years to see. And does not disappoint. Not only is the artist missing, adding mystery to these exquisite works, but the range of materials is breathtaking. Video, found art, watercolours, pencil, ink, and even graphite rubbings of the desert floor …
STRAYS
Every weekday morning while Wendy was away, we tuned in with millions of others to Shepherd Media’s Replicant Fitness to watch host Manila Convençion do android aerobics. We called this inspiration.
Manila’s body strained realism. Fairy-tale proportions. Instead of narrating her own moves, Manila silently followed the guidance of a disembodied, erotically husky female computer voice saying And a-one, and a-two, and a-three … Manila was backed up by three more superfit women also dressed as replicants: extreme makeup, skidpunk hairdos shaved and shorn in weird ways and dyed weird colours, fishscale sequins on top, fake-anaconda-skin bikinis, fishnet and spandex bodysuits, clear plastic jackets, all four replicants stretching in sync to Donna Summer’s I Feel Love, Herbie Hancock’s Rockit, George Clinton’s Atomic Dog, Planet Rock by Afrika Bambaataa. The four replicants did erotic android aerobics reminiscent of both private dancers and break-dancers, juking on their backs, jerking on their stomachs, humping to the side, bumping to the back, stretching calf muscles, stretching thigh muscles, working those glutes, working those glutes some more, and back on their backs, glutes, thighs, glutes, abs—another hard workout on another foggy night in the middle of a busy street in NeoTokyo, surrounded by electronic geishas and courtesans, security robots, blackmarket crimelords, motley convicts, patrolled from above by flying police spinners. Sparing expense, Shepherd Media bought the shell of the muggy, nocturnal city street used in Blade Runner for backdrop. Rain occasionally wetted their clothes. We didn’t necessarily follow along with the routines.
When Replicant Fitness was over at noon, it actually felt dirty, as if we had all masturbated together. The steamrooms were out of the question now. So many people around us had died of AIDS, sex itself was becoming a turn-off. Aerobic eroticism was enough. We split up to double up: Twyla ground the coffee beans for Mark to brew a pot while Patrick and Rachael cycled downhill to the coffee shop without a name to collect any faxes from Wendy—it housed the unofficial Strays fax machine—and buy four more espressos to drink cold after lunch’s coffee.
The coffee shop had no name, no signage, but was special at the time, for it had a massive iron roaster right on the premises, a huge thing imported on a train from Guatemala. We went there for the espresso. It was conveniently located right down the hill on Mission Street. When we wanted more than the coffee at home, this was where we went. Wendy had found the place. She liked to go there because there were lots of giant handmade wood tables, great for drawing on, and big enough to fit a group of seven. A longtable away from the longtable, she would say. Plus the unpredictable customers all made perfect subjects for sketches during the hyperactive upswing on the fierce caffeine. A lot of her ideas came from sketches done at that coffee shop without a name.
We were on our third pot of homemade coffee by the time the nightly news came on, when we heard President Reagan confess he never drank coffee at lunch. I find it keeps me awake for the afternoon. Old man.
Here at the manor there was no cut-off hour. Noon, midnight, what’s the difference? Four A.M. was as good a time as P.M. to brew a pot. We drank cup after cup of sunlight. How many hundreds of pots did it take to animate the Strays Christmas special?
32
Wendy returned to the manor in the middle of April or May—perhaps as late as June of eighty-five. She carried with her three identical pieces of wine-coloured Louis Vuitton box luggage in small, medium, and large, inside of which were designer clothes, pounds of books and comics, and more work for us. Yes, Rachael, take a good look at the handwritten list of contracts she’d signed with businesses overseas in regional and foreign merchandise deals, reproductions, licences, and the one she was most proud of: to design the interior mural of the U.S.A. cultural pavilion at the eighty-eight Winter Olympics in Calgary, Canada.
We’re going to need more freeloaders.
How’s that Christmas special coming along? she asked us.
No thanks to you, said Twyla and turned her back and almost started to cry.
What’s the matter?
We blamed Wendy for our failure on that front. Instead of hiring professionals, as sane people must have at some point advised her to do, she spent at least a hundred thousand dollars of her own money to let us dawdle over this dream of hers. The hours we clocked, the years gone by—compare that to what we’d accomplished—ten minutes?
We decided to show her what we had done.
Rachael set up the movie screen in the spare bedroom. Patrick massaged her feet. Mark rolled joints. The ambiance was set.
Out of the twenty-two minutes of screentime her script had to fit into, we now had about ten. We had lost six minutes trying to figure out how to include this massive celluloid background and then gained back three minutes in less than a month of work. We showed her the new beginning with the sweeping, three-minute tracking shot. Then we spooled in
a few of the scenelets that would go in between the regular action. The cartoon opens with Buck walking alone, drawn in a style that’s flatter than Disney but his movements have the same Disney smoothness. Before the first commercial break there’s a pan across the lot to meet up with Murphy and all of a sudden the style switches rudely—as a joke—to Hanna-Barbera’s low-budget corner-cutting roughness. That’s what Murphy says when he pulls at his fur and comes up penniless—time to start cutting corners. When viewers return from commercials, they don’t return to the same style at all. Instead they get a pixelated black-and-white MacPainted version of Francis the rabbit delivering a speech. It turns out to be the image on a television set. Clay next—for a dream sequence Nicki the parrot has we sculpted the entire cast and made a 3D set. Felt puppets and a set made of painted cardboard for another interruption. Us in costumes stop-motion. We even did that. There was always an excuse for these jumpcuts and unsmooth transitions. The transitions from technique to technique, though not seamless, didn’t need to be to function, and we thought the whole thing had a rhythm that held it all together as a piece. Kids these days watched rock videos on MTV, we thought, and were savvy to our leapfrog from clay to paper, chalk to salt, wireframe models to computer animation. Or so we hoped.
Amazing. I love it. It’s beyond weird so I’m in love. Wow. Keep going.
She seemed distracted.
I think you all deserve coconut Nanaimo bars, she said and opened the lid of a white pastry box in which a dozen of these confections lay in layered slabs waiting for us to eat.
The Road Narrows As You Go Page 36