To Borrow or To Steal?

In doing a little research for this post, the origin of the quote I wanted to start with is in question. It’s often attributed to Pablo Picasso but similar versions were apparently uttered by Igor Stravinsky and maybe even Steve Jobs. It goes like this and you’ve probably already heard a version of it:

Lesser artists borrow; great artists steal.

I’m going to try and explain my interpretation because I think it’s worth sorting out. As a borrower of anything, there’s an implied return of the borrowed back to the owner and is never actually owned by the borrower. Stealing on the other hand, is the taking of something from someone else and claiming that it is now theirs.

How does one borrow or steal as an artist? I’ve spent my whole life creating in a number of disciplines and there’s a somewhat universal development to all of them. When I look back at my childhood and adolescence obsessing over comics I know I spent a great deal of time trying to draw like whatever artist I was fawning over at the time. Sometimes I’d come close to making a drawing that passed muster to my uneducated eye and I could convince myself that I came close. It’s really thrilling after lots of sketching, drawing, stumbling and falling on your face to hit gold and make something that validates your efforts and looks like your artistic heroes. To see what you admire and love in other artists reflected back to you in your own creation is a big moment in any artist’s development. You made it…but did you really make it? If your work immediately recalls another artists work, have you created an original of your own or have you borrowed the look of another?

Art is ultimately an intellectual endeavor even when it’s in a purely visual medium. The art that you create and proclaim a masteriece is the accumulation of a series of decisons/reactions to steps in its creation. If you leave a pencil line with the hope that after enough of them, you’ll have Conan, then it is in your mind where you decide whether or not that line fits in your plan. Do I keep it or do I erase? The drawing you end up with is the result of deciding there’s no more to be done. Eventually everybody consistently matches the look of another artist’s style and the blush of matching your master starts to wear thin. At least it should.

This is the crossroads. Are you going to be satisfied standing in the shadow of another artist? Does the work of the master validate the work of the junior artist, or pull attention away? In my history of drawing, I’ve gone through this dilemma many times. Probably any time you’re exposed to the work of an artist that changes your assumptions, it’s normal to grapple with it creatively. That’s the process of influence.

Eventually, however, paying attention to the decisions you make creating art over and over, will teach you about yourself. The decisions you make in your art reflect your unique perspective and experiences. Your job as an artist is to be true to that. The artists you emulate, you’ll soon realize, have undergone similar transformations of processing influence not into perfect recreations of past work but into something new. If they had emulated their creators, you’d not be mimicking them, you’d be drawing from the work of their original. So that’s the difficult responsibility of theft it’s that you have to take it and make it speak in your voice. Hide the theft of those older ideas by transforming them into something new!

It’s a responsibility of the artist to have the courage to stand on your own out from the shadow of another. If you’re repeating what’s already been said, you’re saying NOTHING.

Why, Star Wars?

I was 6 years old when Star Wars Episode IV came out in 1977. No one, not me or any of my friends, could have imagined Star Wars before we left the theatre exhilarated and electrified. It was one of the few times people would simply go back to the end of the line and see it again.

All the biggest film releases came to the Tivoli Theatre in Hamilton, Ontario and it was there that I saw Star Wars. Just a few doors down was Dreamland, a musty corridor of some of the most fascinating things on earth! Fangoria, Famous Monsters of Filmland, Cinefantastique, Starlog were just some of the many delights that I was first exposed to there. Seeing Star Wars or any movie at the Tivoli, always included visits to Dreamland and this ritual created a fusion of film, comics, fantasy, science fiction and horror that has been the heart of my imagination ever since.

People forget this but for a long time it wasn’t ‘cool’ to like Star Wars. It probably had more to do with fans of the movies moving on to an interest in girls, cars, jobs or other concerns of adolescence. Almost everyone still liked the movies but people just didn’t make a fuss about it. It wasn’t a thing to proudly display a Star Wars t-shirt, cap, key-chain, backpack etc. because to do so made you look a little childish. When the re-releases happened, I was excited to see them and I know I enjoyed them. It was a way for many of us to try and relive those first experiences by seeing those films almost like new. Honestly, even with the new effects, I really liked the movies and I was reminded of my love for them but I don’t think I felt as charged as I did as a kid. It just didn’t speak to me or inspire me to the same degree. Coming away from these movies, my friends and I were excited to see what they had in store for us in the prequels.

When the prequels started coming out, I saw them all at the theater (The Phantom Menace three times!) and felt that they improved but the takeaway for me was that they didn’t live up to their promise. I saw Phantom Menace three times because my good friend and I both agreed that it was terrible. It was so hard for us to accept that we went again to make sure we weren’t wrong. Surprisingly we liked it better the second time and when we were lacking something to do, it was easy for us to go for a third time. Unfortunately, it seemed like Phantom Menace only worked for us on even numbered viewings. After the third we had decided it just wasn’t good. I don’t think we were angry but there was great speculation about where George’s genius went. Watching the remaining prequels was successively less disappointing but the movies didn’t inspire or elevate me.

I don’t have a child with whom I can relive it, so I have very little investment in the latest sequels. When I hear about petitions to make The Last Jedi more to fans’ liking, I’m honestly perplexed. Why the insistence on a particular vision of Star Wars? Should it not change to reflect its times or at least how the world has changed and we’ve all matured since the original films? How can we really expect a single story to be continually expanded and always have it deliver the same jolt as it did the first time so many years and views later? And if the contemporary take on Star Wars is so distasteful, why are we so needful of this that we effectively tell the filmmakers how to do their jobs for us? With all the vast array of diversions available to us at all times, why insist that this be something it’s not, rather than just collectively move on?

My theory is that these stories aren’t what we need now because they don’t and can’t deliver the same elevation we all experienced the first time. Star Wars Episode IV was a smash, runaway hit because it was a heroic tale that resonated with us on a deep collective level as discussed by Joseph Campbell in his interviews with Bill Moyers. It also spoke to the world of 1977. For a country in a deep recession and big cities mired in crime and hardship, people began to flee to the suburbs. Most kids like me grew up in the suburbs and I could relate to the feeling of being on the furthest star from anything cool. The seventies also came on the heels of a very turbulent decade in the US. Nixon was president, the unpopular Vietnam war was dragging on, there was deep systemic racism and segregation at home with rampant inequality for women, gays, blacks, latinos, students, workers and more. The notion of America as an evil Empire was not far from people’s minds. Many could easily relate to these characters in their struggle and their triumph stirred hearts across the globe. Sure, there were the breathtaking special effects but I think it was the way we all felt exhilarated that a monolithic and dark regime had been bested by the underdog they never expected. I think it’s that feeling that people are desperate for and the stories today just don’t deliver. Don’t too many of the heroes today arrive on the scene already with everything they need to achieve the happy ending? Perhaps our faith that the rebels and the skywalkers are always fated to win has taken away enough of their underdog status to make them less relatable? What elevates an audience is a hero who, like us, doesn’t feel guaranteed to win and in life has no assurance of a happy ending. Without these kinds of heroes, the stories are going to be less compelling.

When you take into account the primacy of the fans today, they feel entitled to demand a Star Wars that they LOVE, or at least like a whole darn lot. Certainly the amount of money spent on Star Wars merchandise and ticket sales should guarantee that. I think fans are wanting something from Star Wars that can no longer be attained. They express a need for something else because what the filmmakers are providing isn’t what they need. And just like that 6 year old me would never have been able to describe Star Wars until I saw it, fans today are demanding better heroes but think those heroes have to come from things that they know like Star Wars. They don’t. Fans are really demanding something that speaks to them as forcefully as the original and there’s no way that can happen except in a new form.

What form is that? If I had the answer to that question, I would be feverishly working away on it right now. Unfortunately the corporate system is just not going to give you anything new as long as you keep buying recreations of some of your favourite stories from 40 years ago. If you keep supporting all those things that have existed for decades, you are unwittingly investing in getting nothing new and therefore effectively starving yourself of exactly what you need, really powerful stories. For corporations, it’s easier to keep selling you the same ideas than to risk their money promoting something that you may not like. So it’s diminishing returns, folks.

What’s the solution? As fans you can’t hold the writer’s or artist’s hand while they create and you can’t really expect Corporate owned intellectual properties to deliver what you need endlessly. They can always use the media to hype the latest Star Wars movie into the stratosphere for ticket sales, but the movie will likely never deliver what you need and so the disappointment is acute. So corporate license holders will continue to profit and because money is their only goal, they’ll not change the model that takes your money and doesn’t offer you much in return. My advice is to reward the creators who give you something new with REAL heroes. Many will give you heroes that are like you on an identity checklist of race, sexual orientation and age but unfortunately that doesn’t elevate everyone. Because I feel so disenfranchised in my own life, I’m attracted to characters that no one would expect to win. When those underdogs become their best selves and do great things, that’s something everyone loves regardless of race, colour, creed or planet.

The More It Works

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I work with music playing like everyone else. Sometimes it’s a pleasant diversion, a mood or a serendipitous soundtrack to what I’m drawing and very rarely it’s a voice out of your own past speaking to you. Yeah, okay so it isn’t that exactly, but hearing, Parquet Courts’ The More You Use It today, struck me because I seem to be yelling some variation of its lyrics almost every day. My versions are never nearly as catchy or as hooky as theirs. Here’s a sampling of the lyrics from that song:

Express yourself without the tools that they give you
Want something they didn't tell you to want
Say something without the words that they fed you
Find something they didn't tell you to hunt for

Because the more you use it, the more it works
The more you use it, the more it works
The more you use it, the more it works
The more you use it, the more it works
The more you use it, the more it works
The more you use it, the more it works
The more you use it, the more it works
The more you use it, the more it works

Be yourself and not the figure they mold
Look for something they've been trying to hide
Do something you were never told to
Don't keep it to yourself, don't keep it inside

Later on…

Yeah, listen up, listen up everybody
What could I even mean?
Could it be your teeth? Could it be your eyes?
Could it be your mouth? Could it be your spleen?

It's kind of like all those things
It's kind of wrapped into one
The more you use it, the more it works
The more you use it, the more it works

Yeah, define yourself, not in title
Embrace a concept not taught in school
The more you use it, the more it works
If you waste it, you're a fool

When I lived in Brooklyn, I listened to music on commutes to and from the studio like everyone else. In 2014 or 2015 things were very hard but I still look back a little longingly at those times. The Parquet Courts had released Human Performance, their third LP in a row and its more somber tenor was good but I always preferred their jauntier, angsty punk more. So to hear The More You Use It today was loaded with nostalgia, melancholy and passion. What does it make you fee?

Just food for thought. Use it.

What is Art?

It’s always really impressive when one starts something with a quote from another, probably smarter, person, right? In this case, I’ll start with a quote from Norbert Weiner, who I think is giving us the plain facts about the Meaning of Life. Yeah, he figured it out. He writes in The Human Use of Human Beings:

…to be alive is to participate in a continuous stream of influences from the outer world and acts on 
the outer world, in which we are merely the transitional stage. In the figurative sense, to be alive to what is happening in the world, means to participate in a continual development of knowledge and its unhampered exchange. 

We’re all taking in influences through various sensory experiences and in many ways these change who we are and thereby inform what we put out into the world. Our life is a constant feedback loop of experiences coming in from reality and then our reactions (informed consciously and subconsciously by experience) outward to reality. When they say “Life is Art” (whoever ‘they’ are), they’re right. The making of art is not about the destination but rather this process of taking in new information and manipulating reality back in response. The artist, is the process of evolution and you can do it, too. The artwork itself can be anything really but whatever it is, it should represent who you were at the time of creation.

Whatever influenced the artist, existed before them but what they create should not…or there is no evolution. In other words, as a very simple example, If someone says in your ear, “speak into an ear” and you turn and repeat the message, “speak into an ear” onto the next person, have you contributed anything new to that message? You moved someone else’s message forward but none of it was yours before entering your ear or leaving your lips. Did it need to be you that moved that message along? Probably not, right? So your influence, should you simply repeat what you are told, is not recorded and moved forward. Being beholden to the original erases anything unique to you and nullify’s your existence as if it had nothing to add to the dialog.

What sometimes enrages me and always disappoints and grieves me is the preference of great schools of learning for the derivative as opposed to the original, for the conventional and thin which can be duplicated in many copies rather than the new and powerful, and for arid correctness and limitation of scope and method rather than for universal newness and beauty, wherever it may be seen. Moreover, I protest, not only as I have already done against the cutting off of intellectual originality by the difficulties of the means of communication in the modern world, but even more against the ax which has been put to the root of originality because the people who have elected communication as a career so often have nothing more to communicate. 

This quote is also from Norbert Weiner’s The Human Use of Human Beings and I agree that the reduction of the individual to part of the machinery of reproduction of another message is death. So many of us spend so much of our day moving others’ agenda forward without much in exhcange. And too many prefer the comfort of others’ ideas rather than listening to their own internal voice. It’s as though it’s preferable to creatively huddle around an accepted idea than break out and do something outside the herd. It certainly isn’t life if at the end of it, you’ve left everything completely unchanged.

Before and After by Andy Warhol. Casein and pencil on canvas.

In Andy Warhol’s Before and After, he appears to be commenting on this process of transformation. Taking a small, cheap newspaper ad and creating a large scale painting on canvas seems to be all that Warhol is doing without much change, right? Is there enough transformation of the message in Andy Warhol’s painting? I think so. The painting itself depicts an image demonstrating a before and after profile of a woman after plastic surgery and I think Warhol is commenting on his own process of elevating crass advertising into lofty art without really prettying it up. The painting is having some fun as it rubs our noses in the fact that he’s only really changed the size and medium of the image without any aesthetic improvement…and yet now it is art. Rather than reject this, we should embrace it because what Warhol is effectively saying is that the decision to see something of value in the rejected and discarded is the process of art. Anything can be art with your participation…so do it!

You can’t say that you don’t have the time or ideas to make art because what’s being said with Before and After is that the art ante is low but the change it sparks can be widely felt. Warhol happened to make visual art in many forms but the broad definition of art/life that he used applies to anything. Whatever it is that brings you joy and sparks your creativity, qualifies as your art. Even your relationships with friends is a collaborative art that you create together. Just put some of yourself into it and help it grow. Growth and having something larger to work towards are keys to a meaningful and happy life so I encourage all of you to do what you need to, to elevate yourself and the ones you love. Art is simply a distillation of the process of living in the world and contributing to its growth. You might be surprised how far the effects of even the smallest work of art go to improving reality. We don’t have to go so far as a nose job to improve people’s lives…sometimes a smile is all it takes.

Go make some beautiful art! Be your fullest self! Go change the world!

Juan DonJuan's Mind Control Menagerie

Over the long period of blogging silence, I’ve undergone a bit of a transformation. The long and the short of it is that my ideas and goals for my comics are likely to be very different from the aims of any professional writers and so I will no longer be collaborating on comics. The way the comics industry is structured, it tends to give importance to the writer as they are the only one that will carry any project to the television or film development stage. There are many other factors but I suspect a big one is that many independent comics publishers rely on intellectual property rights to stay afloat. It’s just too bad that in this system, the individual spent doing all of the character design, acting, set design, action choreography, cinematography etc. is almost an afterthought as a project moves to another visual medium.

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Keep your eyes on the Television game show prize.

As an artist working in comics, I’ve focused on only creator-owned projects because I felt that this was the sandbox where we could explore more idiosyncratic and unique ideas. It’s supposed to be an arrangement where the creators are just that…investing their creativity to a project. That’s my favorite place to be and for much of the time I worked with Joshua Hale Fialkov on the BUNKER, it felt like that. I don’t think I knew just how rare it is for an artist to have some input on the story. Too often we’re sequestered away to an inbox in which scripts are dropped into and send back various stages of realization/embellishment. That doesn’t feel as much like a creative situation when you have no say in what you’re drawing panel after panel, issue after issue.

Now I write comics and I illustrate my own writing. I’m not going to be writing for television. In my experience that places too much emphasis on the dialog (on the phone, in cars and in bars) to move the story forward rather than in the many inventive ways real comics affords. A drawing is not limited like a photograph and yet, that’s what many are doing to better help visualize their comics for tv. This thinking is a disease. In other words, it tends to limit the art to static stills similar to storyboards. I will not treat comics like a marginal medium to be used for some other medium’s goals. Instead I’m going to explore what comics can do better than anything else and follow where my imagination takes me.

Because I won’t be limiting myself to what can be expected to sell as a television show, I can grant myself the license to say what I want. I no longer have to appeal to the broadest consensus which I’ve found usually results in various forms of pandering (appealing to the most usually means going the lowest). Ultimately my goal is to raise people up with the stories I tell rather than trying to satisfy genre expectations, gratify misdirected ids and violent power fantasies. The goal is to bring people together by acknowledging that we all have more in common than we think and together we have very real power. That’s going to mean exploring a lot of the stresses we all share but don’t talk about; like economics, the validity of the myths we hold dear, our ideas of what it is to be a hero and more.

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Fresh start! Let’s call it…Future Proof! SMH.

Earlier this year I turned around a ten page short story in quick time to fill a last minute opening in an anthology. That story was based on an idea I had simmering for some time and eventually became, Future Proof. I’m quite happy with it and I think it’s artists responsibility to NOT rubber stamp reality but to comment on it and stake a claim for a better one. Not in the most broad and generalized uplifting platitude filled morality yarn but in stories that are critical of the ways we fall short in focused and specific ways. You can’t be so in love with the status quo and be a true artist.

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Ron DonJuan and Juan DonJuan break down the ‘news’.

That brings me to my most recent short, Juan DonJuan’s Mind Control Menagerie. It’s a caustic satire of the morality at play in our leadership class as surveillance freelancers chop it up over all the ways they keep the rest of us confused, disenfranchised and distracted by juvenile and puerile movies, television, news and more (some preview panels to the right).

In writing it’s very difficult to see your own story with the same eyes as your reader. It’s what makes editors so essential to the process. This morning after completing Juan DonJuan, I read it. I can never see it completely fresh but I think it’s good because it’s challenging and emotional, funny and acidic at various turns and sometimes all at once. It made me feel something no other story did and I hope you’ll feel the same.

Juan DonJuan’s Mind Control Menagerie will be available in print later this year in RAID.3!

Moleskine Monday 22: Human Mosquito Season

Working away from home on some creature designs. So far, I can't help but think these are circling a strange human/mosquito cross breeding. Stay tooned to this station for more behind the scenes insights in the coming weeks.

NCBD: The BUNKER 16 in Stores Today!

 The BUNKER 16 is in stores TODAY and things are coming to a head…literally. Go grab yourself a copy (if you haven't read 15, nab it if you can) and strap yourself in for the most explosive issue in the series so far. Here's a short preview to whet your appetite.

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Moleskine Monday 21: Modulistic Terror!

Imagine, if you will, an entire organism made of these little terrors. When necessary, all their fine filaments for legs disentangle and release each unit to scurry and hide this way and that. Inside they have a dymaxion-like bone structure that neatly interlocks with its neighbors. Now imagine during your day that the person next to you on your commute or in your adjacent cubicle is made of these. Happy Monday!