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

The other night I spent what amounted to almost seven hours in my notebook sequestered in my room to the sounds of cars, trains, and gatherings below my apartment. In a peaceful yet malformed and psychotic haze I was able to really crank out some good stuff onto my notes. That night I dreamt I witnessed the entire history of the world I had written about from the perspective of every person who lived in every age, the next morning I got straight back to work.

One of the most inspiring moves for me personally is to look at artists whose work I admire. The first is a set of videos by the YouTube creator M4NTICOR3, specifically the videos titled “What the Seminoles Fought,” and “What the Pilgrims Buried.” What makes these pieces of media so striking to me is the attention to detail needed in order to take a piece of the United State’s history and bring out this skewed perspective. For example, “What the Pilgrims Buried,” is about Tisquantum, or Squanto, as he was known, and follows his understanding of a mysterious set of bones that helps the food his tribe sustains themselves on. His mother tells him not to bother with the bones, but a powder from the fossil ravages the Patuxet and leaves Tisquantum as the only survivor. Later the Pilgrims come overseas and Tisquantum shows them how their tribe would grow the corn from the ground, revealing the set of bones that are unlike anything ever seen and have an almost divine, hellish, feel. I highly recommend taking the combined eight and a half minutes it takes to watch these pieces of short-form horror media. In any case, what I love about them is their incorporation of history and the esoteric, how the very normal people of our world came into contact with things that they simply cannot comprehend save for a few grounding colloquialisms.

The other piece or rather pieces of media that I relish in is the artwork of Rael Lyra. His work and specifically his art for the “Forever Winter” stands out as my favorite pieces of evocative, near hopeless, neo-futurism. From his work I can understand the inspirations from Nihei’s “Blame!” to even some more niche literature like Jeff Vandermeer’s “Borne” when it comes to a few character designs featuring biomechanical augmentations maintained using insects. When I look at Lyra’s work I feel as though he takes the idea of “a picture is worth a thousand words” and sends the limit through the stratosphere. I cannot emphasize enough how much you need to look at his gallery right now.

In any case, the inspiration gathering had lead me to a feeling I want to capture in my own work, especially when I am building this new world. A concept I refer to as “Uncertain Voyeurism.” The idea being that elements of the world exist as they are but through the eyes of the characters and more importantly, the reader, these elements are not necessarily drawn out for them in a literal sense. Take for example a scene of the frontlines. Take a group of adventurers who stumble upon an entrenched position. What do they see? A banner they do not recognize waving below a set of speakers set to signal alarms or maybe even prayers, huddled soldiers with partisans dug into the dirt as makeshift deterrents for oncoming enemy troops, great cannons in the distance that fire off in uneven spans of time, corpses and incense burners hung from their gargantuan barrels. The purpose of all of these little details is largely left to the reader using a magic tool a lot of people forget they have called “trust.” I trust in a reader’s ability to deduce stuff by looking at striking concepts.

I’m not going to continue any longer. I recently got a flu shot this morning and I feel like dirt.

Anyway, take care and have a good day.

-Jimmi

There was a moment yesterday when I sat my ass down and wrote countless notes both physical and on my desktop as well as spending hours working on maps and studying geography all for me to scrap the idea and want a more stylized and interesting world not restricted by the rigidness of the imagined nerds in my brain going “erm, mountains don’t form that way.” At that point I have to step back and used the imagined angst to instead decompress and watch something to clear my head.

In this instance, it was the Rankin and Bass movie “The Hobbit.” A classic from my childhood and as soon as the main melody began to play I started singing along to it. I was shocked to see how well the movie holds up for pacing as well as general fantastical whimsy. The animation is definitely dated, but not in the way that you would say a jack-o-lantern you still have on your porch is, rather the way that a fine wine or Idris Elba would be considered “well aged.” I did not know that I was going to rock as hard as I did to the “Down, down, in Goblin Town,” song. It truly rips. Not only that but one thing I praised the modern retelling of the Hobbit ft. Martin Freeman (those movies generally suck when they’re not adhering to the events of the 98,000 word story), was the song that the Dwarves sung. The way the song sounds in the old movie is one I actually prefer simply because it has the hallowed and timely sound that a movie from the period would, think of the main theme from Jim Henson’s “The Dark Crystal.” I loved how they’re not really doing any fighting until the Battle of Five Armies and even then, the fighting is made to look pointless and dumb.

It was through watching that movie that I realized for my own fantasy world, it was lacking a little of that sort of magic that made the Hobbit a timeless classic. I think Modern Fantasy tends to divert too much into the grit and forgets its roots. There are really good examples of gritty Fantasy that still leaves so much to wonder about and mythicize, especially with works from Brandon Sanderson who has sort of been grandfathered as the one above all when it comes to Fantasy authors. I’m not saying that is a bad thing, not in the slightest. I believe there is a fundamental difference between something being realistic and something being simply believable. Believability is way more crucial to fantasy than realism, because it still has the wiggle room to be weird and weird is always better. Things need to be weirder plain and simple.

It was this line of thinking that brought me to looking at esoterism and specifically alchemy. Magic, at least to me, is a fundamental pillar of fantasy. When I think of “Wheel of Time,” I remember Morraine and the Channelers. When I think about Greek Mythology I am instinctually drawn to Hecate, the mother of Sorcery, and when I watch the Lord of the Rings, I want to be Gandalf so bad. Wizards are simply just the coolest Fantasy archetype. I was telling my friend, Sam, the other day how I everyone always says being a hobbit would be the coolest because you can smoke weed and eat cheese all day but that is something I could do in reality. I want to cast spells and have a sword called “Foe Hammer,” ponder orbs and study in vast libraries or towers, have a cool little familiar maybe too and wear pajamas all day while being essentially the most powerful and mysterious being in existence.

Wizard glazing aside, the point still stands that Magic is inherently one of the more important pillars in a fantasy world’s creation. One of the stranger yet more widely recognized esoteric arts in our Anthropocene is that of alchemy. Some of the anecdotal information about alchemy regarding how some believed that flies were birthed from rotten flesh because they were seen buzzing around corpses is so funny to me because it was like we as humans were inventing a magic system based on the metals and physical laws that were not well understood. Not to mention, despite me saying being an all-powerful wizard would be just the coolest, having limits to magic and especially to the powers that can be used by those who would use it makes magic SO much more interesting. Alchemy became a good base for how I wanted to go about designing my own magic for my own world. It’s gone through many different trials and notes, but truthfully the best part of the world is getting to bury all the mystery and wonder with it, allowing readers to uncover things on their own and trusting that they have the capacity to imagine the things that can be done with a tool.

Unrelated in any way and because I think segues are overrated, I recently got accepted to a teaching job for the summer in Gypsum CO. I’m excited to start and what that will mean in the road to come is less posting over the summer. By less I mean, functionally none. My plan is to make a big page of the projects the kids and I get up to as well as some documentation of things that I see that are cool, people I meet, etc.

Thanks for reading, if you’ve stuck around. Oh and Happy Easter, I guess. If you celebrate of course. Which feels disingenuous coming from me, but hey *finger guns* religious trauma.

-Jimmi

It was days like this, when I was walking with my little sister back from having coffee with some close family-friends, or when I’m spending hours talking to my friend Sam for our weekly sessions of productive banter, that I am reminded of how cool it is to have people in your life that care. There is not anything in the world that seems so large and intimidating when it is thrust next to the infinite invincibility of good conversation.

Vulnerability is something I have struggled with for reasons I cannot rightly fixate on. The many times I’ve been able to spill my guts to someone or maybe even to myself, the emotional responses from yours truly is more of a result of the act of being vulnerable as opposed to any sort of emotional exposure. I know what you’re thinking, “what a weird way to start a paragraph.” For our weekly talk on facetime, My friend Sam and I talked a little bit about vulnerability. Truthfully it felt like learning to walk again, we found that it is very easy for her to talk about the things that have happened in her past, yet the second I try to reciprocate and show any sort of hint of my own history, my body simply refuses. I find that I can’t even look people in the eye talking about this stuff.

Adding to the list of things that I need to discuss with a therapist (whenever I get around to finding one again), I did find that I also have an uncomfortable habit of making light of very serious situations. More often than not I am more likely than not to simply make a quick, albeit humorous, remark. It’s not that I am incapable of having a serious conversation, as was evident from a shouting match my sister and I got into the other day. Do not be mistaken, we were not shouting at each other, but in unison at how the country has gotten just a wee bit fucked up. Something I noticed while having these conversations was my ability to string together my own humor with some very serious talking points. As I am typing this out, I am realizing that it is far less funny to dissect why something may be funny in the first place.

Anyway, I am beyond grateful for the people in my life. I had a few successful (at least in my own opinion) interviews for some work this week, so things are looking up for me for the future. Sam mentioned something today about allowing myself to be in a space that would let me be safe for a while. She highlighted how I used the word “fled” when I described my exodus from the Midwest. I agreed with her that I didn’t really allow myself to feel safe, even when I was here in Wenatchee. I simply decided to sit in my room and rot for weeks. There’s so much cool stuff happening, even here on the tail end of the country. I am glad the people in my life could help me see that and I am glad that I am starting more and more to find the good things in life.

Anyway, Bungie announced a new (or returning) I.P. in the form of Marathon. Games like that usually don’t interest me in any way, but what captivated me was the eight-minute long short film they released for it whose style I instantly recognized.

The anthology serious “Love, Death, and Robots,” on Netflix is a mixed bag. There are some episodes that stand out among the rest (crab-boat), and there are some stinkers. My personal favorite and the one I found myself re-watching constantly was Jibarro. The episode follows a deaf knight who’s company is killed by a Siren. Because the Knight is deaf, he doesn’t hear her and instead watches helplessly as the other knights are drawn to her and drown in the lake she inhabits. The whole short is beautifully made, directed, and has excellent music. It has little to no dialogue, just incredibly visual and acoustic stimuli. So you can imagine my excitement when I instantly recognized the filmmaking style present in the short film Bungie commissioned for their new game. Not surprisingly, the what I am calling “highlighter color scheme” works wonders for making this incredible sense of style come to life. In its early life, Marathon was more of a demo for what would later become the Halo games, most of the story revolving around aliens united together against humanity, humans using A.I. that can run rampant and cause more harm than good, etc. I am glad that the endlessly talented art team has found a new and unique voice for this series and I am absolutely frothing at the mouth waiting for the artbook to come out.

In any case, I did some art of my own for the love of the new style.

Anyway, this post was a little disjointed and riddled with non-sequitur, but I appreciate it if you stuck around. Have a good week.

-Jimmi

Hello. It’s the start of week and the start of a fresh set of posts.

This week has truthfully been a blur. The week both began and ended with my new tradition sponsored by a friend from Corpus, our “Gay Aunt-Tea,” patent pending. I remembered something from our last call, in which there was talks about giving myself some grace as I was not doing well in a position without employment and was deep in a period of severe self-loathing. However since then this week has been all the more productive in terms of finding out what I have planned in the coming sixth months, even if I still have to find a job here for a little extra dosh.

I’ve been having a few really bizarre dreams as of late. I think I had my second “nuclear disaster” dream? The first one I remember incredibly vividly, even down to the heat that washed over my face watching the bombs drop on the Omaha City skyline, giving the night sky it’s very own sun. The second one was interesting in that I guess it was more of a helio-centric nuclear meltdown(?). I was standing on my balcony with my little sister and telling her that the sun was about to die. She told me she didn’t want to get sucked into a singularity and be helpless as our atoms stretched and pulled like taffy for both an infinite amount of time and merely a few seconds, unwriting our very existence before our eyes. She usually isn’t this irrational. In any case, I told her not to worry herself, that our sun was a special kind of star that was too small for a black hole. Instead, it would expand well past its usual size and completely overtake us in a blazing storm of solar heat and winds. That seemed to relieve her a bit.

I don’t think I want my dreams to be a recess of thoughts and ideas that I’d rather not dwell upon. After one-shot session of D&D, one of our friends told us to try lucid dreaming, as though it was as simple as simply selecting the option at the beginning of a sleep session. I don’t think I’ve ever had a lucid dream, I simply think that deep down my brain simply wants to put on a show and have movies starring me play. Sometimes they are horror movies. If there is anything I’ve learned from teaching Kindergarteners, it’s to just let the child put on their performance, even if it adheres to no particular structure of narration or has no discernable story beats. I mean, is it so hard for one of these kids to just read some Joseph Campbell? In any case, my inner instructor is just there to give a few vapid applause when the curtains go, even if the dream was less narrative structure and more admonishments of past embarrassments and mistakes. My favorite.

I look foreword to sleep. It was actually my dreams that inspired many of the writings and drawings that fill my sketchbook and Procreate file space, sometimes my own brain becomes a self-fulfilling Pinterest board of characters, monsters, and places. If I dream the rest of my life in stories without an ounce of lucidity or control, then I don’t think it’s that bad. My brain is pretty damn good at telling myself stories, and sometimes the stories cross the veil of sleep and into my notebook. It’s my hope that some other like-minded individuals resonate with these stories or just think they’re neat. I’m not picky.

In any case, this is going to be a good week. I hope it is for you too.

-Jimmi

In trying to make this space more accommodating to both my art as well as my general thoughts on daily living, I have found that every step in the right direction has a few feet of elevation with it as well. This site and more broadly, my own art, will not be for everyone. However on this ever shifting digital megastructure, I am confident I can carve out my own niche. I hope in a few years I can look back on this blog and think “holy hot damn why was I so self aware in these posts?”

Regardless, this is the first post in a blog that I plan on continuously adding to in the future. Going forward I have plans to select a couple of days a week for art and for maybe just my own rambling.

For now, let’s see where I am at presently speaking. More for me then anything else, considering how absolutely down the toilet my fluid memory is.

In October of 2024 I moved to the Pacific North West to live with my sister, who at the time was attending a college here in the small valley-town of Wenatchee. Since then, I have been fired from a job (again), and have contemplated a shotgun wedding in Canada for no reason and totally not related to the election back in November of 2024. On the bright side, my apartment was next to this really bitchin’ bike trail that was basically 25 miles if you did the loop plus the stretch to Lincoln Rock State Park or just 10 miles if you’re like me and said you’d do the 25 but your knees starting aching by the sixth mile. Apart from that, there was also our friends who lived in the Hills towards Cashmere, and my sister’s surrogate parents for part of her college time here in Wenatchee. They were really good folks, almost made me believe the rest of the town was like them.

In any case, I plan on moving back to the Midwest here soon. I have a couple of job interviews for some summer work in case living in the Windy City of Chicago is, financially speaking, out of the question for the time being. While I think I’d visit Omaha, I don’t think I’ll ever truly live there again. It’s a great city, underappreciated as all hell, but having lived there for two decades I can plainly say the wonder has certainly worn with time. My idea going forward is to see what the City of Chicago has, considering most of my friends and family are holed up there, it’s close to a body of water, as well as the aforementioned Canadian border. I have always loved the dense city, there is comfort in its claustrophobia, and has been my promised land, so-to-speak. I can’t really explain why, I’m drawn to it in an almost supernatural pull.

At the time of writing this, I am sitting at my desk and listening to Sigur Ros. I am kind of content right now basking in the uncertainty of unemployment and uncomfortably laying on my side from the weight of performative independence. Although much of what I am feeling now is overshadowed by the simultaneous and maybe misplaced excitement I feel for going somewhere new. It feels like I’m standing at the precipice of a new path every single day, and while somedays I feel like hibernating for a few days, I think that I am finally starting to heal. It sounds so corny, and yeah it probably is, but hey rarely does life let you start over, why not try it out?

-Jimmi