Very soon here I will be starting my summer job, so consider this the last post of the season. Hopefully, my next one will be from Chicago, IL. In any case, I wanted to make a sort of time capsule of all the work I consider serviceable and a few for the current story I am working on and will be most likely building off of this season while I am not teaching. So, if you’re reading this, thanks for stopping by. I hope you enjoy the very disjointed stuff I am about to get into.
COLLEGE
When I look back on my formative years in college the scene in Kubrick’s 2001: a Space Odyssey where the character is flying through a hall of colors and sensory overload parks itself parallel to my memories. While I never felt like I belonged, there was definitely a space for me to carve out in the zeitgeist on campus. I had a few good friends, some incredible professors, and most importantly a lot of art classes.
I graduated in a different America that I went in knowing. Or perhaps an America that had shown its true colors in the height of the Coronavirus outbreak. A half a million lives later and now we don’t even learn from our mistakes, elect officials who see all of us as numbers, and root for genocides and war criminals. We opened Pandora’s box and stuffed the clutter in the closet.
Cammy for Council!
A couple months before my graduation in 2021, my good friend and what I call my second father shot me a text regarding a local politician named Cammy Watkins who was running for city council. Apparently she was hiring around thirty artists for commissions around the neighborhood I grew up in (and was still living in at the time), and my second father had put in a good word for me. I met Ms. Watkins over a teams meeting with another fantastic artist named Bekah Jerde and we hashed out the details of our plans to meet at a studio in the neighborhood.
It was a surreal experience walking into the studio for the first time, especially since it was the studio of Wattie White, an artist I had studied in High School. Needless to say I was fangirling a bit meeting one of my favorite local artists and it didn’t really end there. We thought of the idea in accordance with my love of comics, to describe what I love about the neighborhood. To me, living in “Little Boho” was a very acoustic experience. My proximity to the river and to the concert venues across the river as well as downtown gave the Midwest locale a nostalgic cacophony of spackle that freckled my eardrums in harmonious intrigue. I depicted this in a four-panel, sequential art piece stationed at the back of a building I can no longer remember the name of.
The piece was a four-cell comic strip. Cells one, three, and four were on the wall of the building, while Cell two was placed on the condenser’s(?) surface. The three on the wall was a figure who stood to listen to the sound unheard, but whose feelings were manifested in color, raising the plug of their headphones to the sounds they hear. Taken by itself it could still be a cohesive piece, but looking at the second panel gives way to startling revelation, and was my favorite part of it ( I was pretty anal about the importance of this part of it I seem to remember). A great figure who’s head is replaced with a menagerie of feelers, playing a large cello across the river. I love the personification of a sound so indescribable that you can’t help but fall in love with it.
We debuted the piece a day before my last day of class, where I met Bekah’s other half, the endlessly talented Bart Vargas, and was again fangirling hard since everywhere I go I would always see his art on stoplight poles and walls. It behooves me as well to recognize the endless support and encouragement from Bekah during the process of this as well as gearing up for my final and, at the time, my own gallery opening for my college thesis. It struck me as strange when Bekah asked me if she could also sign her name on the piece. This was as much her idea and effort as it was mine, and without her help we could not have made something so insanely fun.
Trying Something New
After College I had to find work. An all too short summer later and I had found myself working as a paraprofessional for Spring Lake Elementary, in a combined class of around fifty kindergarteners. On the weekend and Wednesday evenings I was a barista at Spielbound Boardgame Cafe in Midtown. My coworker approached me one day, as I was doing some sketching in my notebook, and asked how much I charged for commission work. I gave a severely low number (I didn’t want to alienate someone I considered a friend, but I recognize this as a failing), and he had me design a few covers for his EPs. The music was all inspired by horror-movie monsters and so I had a lot of fun designing these while listening to his tunes.
SO…What now?
Since High School, I have always wanted to create a story. It began at lunch period with my best friend, Nick. I gave him a sketchbook of character sketches for a story about survivors in an apocalypse. It was strange how obsessed we were with the falling of civilization, I wonder if that says anything about a longing to watch our imperialist customs and capitalist war-machine fall, or if we were truly just bored. At the time I was inspired by media like the Walking Dead, Simon Stahlenhag’s Tales from the Loop, Things from the Flood, and The Electric State (no I have not seen the movie and wish the Russo Brother’s would sincerely go eat a bag of dicks), as well as games such as the Last of Us, Metro 2033, and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. I still kept the notes Nick and even his Sister wrote for me as feedback. One thing I will always love about his feedback was that it was honest. He circled portions of anatomy that made no sense, asked questions about things that were not well explained, and gave me praise for details that he picked up on. Since then, I have never had that level of transformative reception. College never offered anything since everyone was strangely socially inept (minus a few exceptions) and the professor’s calculative responses were as though they were read on a sheet rather than from the heart.
With that being said, the story went through a lot of iterations since then, focusing more on the science fiction elements of a humanity who lost themselves in the stars. The idea being that for so long, the people living in an unknown part of colonized space forgot their origins as a cosmic horror rose from the black gulfs of space, tearing away the fabric of reality and forcing the characters to achieve insane and accomplish herculean feats because the plot demanded it. Really riveting stuff I know. I was inspired by a lot of media that I had consume in the forms of old science fiction movies like the Thing, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, and Aliens. Something just wasn’t clicking for me, and around the time I graduated college, I would sit in cafes and just stare at an empty word document just waiting for the story to unfold.
Fast forward to a trip I took in Chicago in 2022. I’m looking for a new comic to start and my twitter feed is blessed with the most influential image I think I ever could have seen.
The image of the existential antagonist of Tom Parkinson-Morgan’s Kill Six Billion Demons grabbed me fiercely by the eyes and glued them to my screen as I scrolled through page after page of the web comic. My fundamental understanding of storytelling, paneling, and art was shattered by this (ironically enough if you’ve read KSBD) image of the Wheelbreaker. From there I began to read more comics and manga like Tatsuki Fujimoto’s Chainsaw Man, Firepunch, and Look Back. I read the work Q Hayashida’s Dorohedoro and loved its grimy art style and hopeless setting, a feeling I’d get looking at the game module for Mork Borg and the endlessly evocative work of Plastiboo’s Vermis and Vermis II: Mist and Mirrors (the former of which took me MONTHS to secure a copy of).
This one event in my life lead to the upward spiral of creating the story that I wanted to tell and finding out exactly what it was that I wanted to bring into this world. I never cared about the idea being a smash hit or a best-seller. I wanted this work of mine to be something that I wanted to read with characters I could get invested in, stories that left me wanting more, and art that was in a recognizable style.
That brings me to my current project: Bite and Bullet.
GOD OF CHANGE
When designing divinity for a world I wanted to just have fun. To me, one person’s “God of Change” is another person’s “God of Destruction.” There is so much interpretation when it comes to being what we would call a God. When designing Zeingavel I went to the inspirations of Norse Imagery for Thor, decorative chariots seen in ancient Rome, and pelting the guy with scores of arrows, swords, and other crude weaponry to show he had been in a fair amount of fights. In my story, there are many things we would call “Gods”, and I guess Zeingavel was my first.
THE DUMP
When making a world, the characters are always the most important bits. Every character is defined by aspects of the world. One thing that is brutally important is the ability to draw out questions from the observer, specifically, questions regarding the aspects of the world you’re creating in order to make the hook. I love sharing my fun little drawings with people and they ask questions and want to see close ups of different details and shapes. Characters in the story should serve as building blocks for the world, the very world they inhabit reflected in how they dress, their expressions, etc.
The Characters
In a typical fantasy story, the characters are heroes at the center point of the world’s plot. Characters must fight the dragon to save the city, defeat the evil lich to save the world, fight god, etc. While there is nothing inherently wrong with this type of story( Final Fantasy is fantastic, Wheel of Time is an excellent book series, and Lord of the Rings it TIMELESS), I wanted to try a different approach. The characters of Bite and Bullet are not the heroic figures of the story, just survivors of the typical “main characters” who had a hand in shaping the world to their liking. They are characters of motivation and have their own reasons for sticking together throughout the events of the story.
At some point in the world’s history, a mysterious force took control and steered the wheel of causality to down a road to desolation. The fate of the world is almost assured, but yet the character’s are blissfully unaware of the undoing, ignorant to the cosmic spiderweb their world had wandered into. While themes of Fear and Anxiety play a big part in the story, the characters also explore Love, Community, and Ascetism. Simply letting go and making the life they get to live one worth living, despite the horrors.
In a way, the story is a culmination of my own exploration of these topics. There are times I give up, rot away in my bed and listen to music until the afternoon sun makes my room unbearably warm. I have to force myself to wake up in the morning sometimes, and contemplate if sleeping forever is a better alternative to checking my bank account or email. I even considered giving up on myself last summer, running away to the end of the earth nestled in a grave of beautiful mountains.
But still, I persist.
No one gave up on me, and so I figured I’d give myself the same courtesy. My friends reach out, my siblings give me advice, my parents love when I call, and most importantly I still have a life I want to live. I never cared about money, I never cared about owning a house with a white-picket fence, and I surely don’t care what corporate-owned stooge the republicans put in office. This is a world built from our intentional communities, and I still have yet to find mine. I persist because there is still so much life left to live, so much love to feel for the world and for the people you meet, and so much fun fucking art to make.
So, here’s to a new chapter for the summer. I’ll be back at some point to add to this website, but for now, I wish you and myself a very good day.
-Jimmi