What else should I be?

Today is the Summer Solstice, Twenty Twenty Four, the longest day of the year and the official beginning of Summer. Today is also the ten year anniversary of this website. On the Summer Solstice, Twenty Fourteen, in earnest, I created this space so that I could show my comic book to the world. I had always drawn and created art, but it was all over the place. FLOLAS has given me a focus. It’s a singular project that I can feed all of my creative energy into.

It hasn’t been a solid decade though. As I’ve written about, there was a period of about two and a half years where I was working on something else. You can now view that project here. It never amounted to much, but I’m very proud of the artwork all the same. I’ve actually decided to go ahead and throw a lot of my old projects up on the “Other” tab of this website. FLOLAS is but the latest and greatest of my work, but I’ve been at this for a very long time.

Today, on its tenth anniversary, I’d like to take a stroll down Memory Lane and explain the origins of FLOLAS.

All Apologies

At home, in my little nerdy collection of Zelda books, nestled between Salinger and Hemmingway, rests my legacy of tomes. Here, from 2005, you will find the original purple spiral bound notebook simply labeled “Elements.” This was the first draft of FLOLAS. I also have printed out copies of all my FLOLAS notes ranging from 2013 to about five years ago. I wrote the rough draft of Elements in 2005, but it was very different then. It was set in the modern world and centered around a misanthrope, still named Sleeper. In this version, he smoked cigarettes and rode a motorcycle.

What else could I say? Everyone is gay.

FLOLAS is far from my first comic book. I’ve been at this since the 90’s. When I was a kid, in about third grade, my friends and I would bring Spider-Man comics to school and we would trace the cover art, trying to capture the magic of that artwork. We eventually started making our own comics. My first character was named “Cerebro,” named after the helmet Professor X uses to send his psychic signals across the Universe. The bad guy was named “Striper” because his suit was made up of stripes. I don’t have any of these comics unfortunately - they have been lost to time.

But there’s still plenty of cringe if you really wanna hear about it…

What else could I write? I don’t have the right.

A few years after Cerebro and his many adventures, I created “The Max Project,” a dark and grimy noir story about a tortured mutant freak hellbent on revenge against … something. I don’t think I ever even had a plot. I really liked Sting from the WCW and there was a show on MTV’s Liquid Television simply called "The Maxx” that I watched every week. These things marinated in my little eleven year old mind and the above images were the result. I remember my mom catching me drawing it one time and being pretty sure that she had failed me as a parent… “Why is it so violent?”

In the sun, in the sun I feel as one.

The years passed and I kept at it. Eventually, as I entered High School, I created what was then my Magnum Opus: FINIS. One day, I’d really like to come back to FINIS. It was a grand tale of a boy who was orphaned by a terrorist attack. His father was a great and noble Knight, but had been fallen, along with his wife, when a renegade named Nero bombed the cathedral where they were in attendance. The boy escapes and is found by an old blind man named Octavius whom trains him as his squire. The story was told in three parts: the first when he’s a child, the second when he’s a teen, and the third when he’s a man. Kind of like the story of Anakin Skywalker from the Star Wars prequels. Actually, exactly like Anakin Skywalker from the Star Wars prequels. FINIS was also heavily inspired by The Matrix, which had come out the same summer as Episode I, and my little fifteen year old brain could not handle it. I simply had to go home and write the most derivative, poorly done mishmash of the two as soon as possible…

Copyright infringing as it may have been, I still really like FINIS. I always envision it in black and white, with massive cityscapes and arching, snake-like roads. The Knights had glowing white eyes - remnants of their bioengineering from a long forgotten war. “Finis” itself is a Latin word meaning the end. The story was supposed to be about this boy and how he represented the end of things. This is why they feared him and tried to kill him before he rose to power, but ironically it only set him on that exact path. I dunno man, it ain’t half bad. I’ve always thought of it as a sister series to FLOLAS, with a similar name, similar themes etc. One day, when I have a long grey beard, I’d like to return to FINIS and flesh it out a bit.

I wish I was like you. Easily amused.

In college, I began writing Elements, which would eventually evolve into FLOLAS. The story changed mostly because I was tired of trying to draw motorcycles and cities and things that weren’t organic. In my twenties, I had fallen in love with the natural world. I wanted to draw trees and mountains and clouds and flowers. I didn’t want to dwell in the grim darkness of modernity - I wanted to dream. So the story became a love letter to nature. The characters would no longer be in a city, talking in buildings, living in houses. They would be out, wandering the landscape. No more greys and blacks - FLOLAS was to be full color and lots of it, as intense as I could make it.

Find my nest of salt. Everything is my fault.

This was around the time that I fell in love with Photoshop. I went to college first for Studio Art at Snead State, then for Computer Animation at Full Sail. While I still remember a lot from my Art History classes (ask me about Goya’s Black Paintings), I’ve forgotten most of what I learned about Computer Animation. I never was super good at it. At the time, the tools weren’t quite what they are now, and it seemed needlessly complicated. Of course, well over a decade before I went to college, the wizards at Industrial Light and Magic had brought dinosaurs back to life in Jurassic Park using early 1990’s computers, so maybe I just sucked at it.

My big take away from college was learning Photoshop. To this day, it is my most used and most cherished application. You can do almost anything in it if you’re clever; and as someone who had only really drawn with Bic mechanical pencils up until that point, swapping over to a proper Wacom tablet and a full copy of Photoshop was revelatory.

I’ll take all the blame. Aqua sea foam shame.

I even went back and tried to draw some FINIS in the early days. These were always experimental as I tried to get used to the hand/eye disconnect. With a Wacom tablet, you draw on a desk, but you’re looking at a computer screen. You can get a Cintiq, which is a Wacom tablet with a screen in it, but by the time I got one I was already used to the disconnect. To this day, I just leave the screen off.

Sunburn freezer burn. Choking on the ashes of her enemy.

This eventually lead to where I’m at today. In 2013, after many false starts and half hearted attempts, I started drawing FLOLAS. It was rough at first and I struggled to adapt my style and everything I knew about drawing and painting into a digital format, but I got there. Now, I prefer drawing this way. Going back to paper feels strange. Below is first ever page of FLOLAS drawn on a computer. I have an even older version drawn on paper somewhere, but I knew even then that I wanted this to be something I could make futureproof and eternally online.

Married. Buried.

Page 60 is almost done. I would’ve had it ready this week had I not stopped to write this blog. I’m finally to the big fight scene at the end, literally a moment I’ve been building up to for years. During this scene, the story should all click into place and you should get some idea of what’s going on: what happened to Ava, why is she wandering around the forests, and who is this Sleeper guy? All will be revealed. FLOLAS has been a joy. It’s great to focus your creative energies on one project and stick to it. I have just the right amount of OCD and stubbornness required for such a project. Thank you for reading and putting up with me to this point 🙏

Here’s to the next ten years.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

Coda

A few months ago, I was listening to music and a song got stuck in my head. It was “The Man Who Sold The World,” the David Bowie song, but covered by Nirvana during their 1993 Unplugged session. I had never much cared for Nirvana. I was just a little kid when they were big, and although I remember Smells Like Teen Spirit playing on repeat on MTV back in the day, it never really did much for me. By the time I developed a taste for music, Kurt Cobain was already gone, and I went with The Smashing Pumpkins and Radiohead regardless.

It’s a damn good song though. I’ve now heard the original Bowie version, and I don’t know, I think Kurt did it better if I’m being honest. There’s something about his voice: trashy, unrefined, like it’s gargling glass and ashes. It finally resonated with me, thirty years after the fact. One day, I was listening to it in the car and I heard the little bit at the end where the band was talking amongst themselves. It suddenly hit me that these were real people, not just historical rock gods, but actual flesh and blood dudes shooting the breeze in between sets. Suddenly, the tremendous sadness and profound loss of Kurt Cobain hit me like a ton of bricks, as if it had been waiting for decades for just such a moment to do so.

I became obsessed.

I bought Dave Grohl’s 2021 memoire The Storyteller and devoured it in just over a week. The I bought Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana by Michael Azerrad and also engulfed that. Nirvana is a singular moment in the history of popular music. They seemingly came out of nowhere, blew up the charts, dethroned Michael Jackson from the top spot of the Top 40, and then just as quickly ended tragically.

Now I’m about half way through Azerrad’s follow up book, which just came out last year called The Amplifications, which has less to do with the meteoric rise of the band and more to do with Azerrad meeting Kurt and interviewing him and the band. It’s far more intimate and he tries, with thirty years of hindsight, to dispel some of the myths and clear the air around this most enigmatic front man and the band that accompanied him.

I also bought Kurt’s journal. Knowing what I know now about him, he’d be truly offended that they published his journals posthumously. He tried so hard to keep some shred of his private life separate from the rock star persona; an ambition in which he was defeated in the end. Still, reading his journal reminds me so much of my own scribblings when I was his age. Even though Kurt Cobain was born in 1967, I’m far older than he ever was. I look back at myself in my teens and early twenties and I cringe, whereas that’s all he ever got to be. He never got a chance to look back on his early flounderings and reminisce.

Of course, Kurt is the reason why he isn’t able to do that… It’s true that he had a melody of maladies, be it chronic stomach problems, depression, ADD, and of course a heroine addiction. Still, it’s hard to look at him and see anything other than a genius. I’ve been toiling away at this comic book for well over a decade and hardly anyone cares. Kurt Cobain wrote a multi-platinum album.

He was also a very talented visual artist. He drew comic books. Krist Novoscelic, the other founding member of Nirvana and it’s 6’7 foot tall bass player, once said that if Kurt hadn’t died, he would have most likely retired from rock and roll and become a full time painter. After reading all these books about him, I can totally see that.

In the span of about three weeks, I went from only knowing a handful of Nirvana songs to knowing their entire catalog. Even their obscure b-sides and rarities. These dudes were prolific af. Even now on Youtube, new songs trickle in constantly from old tapes dug up from long lost shows. I can play most of Nevermind and In Utero on drums. If I wear a Nirvana t-shirt, I can definitely name five songs…

Drain You, On A Plain, In Bloom, Scentless Apprentice, Pennyroyal Tea.

There, hipster gatekeepers. Don’t come at me.

Probably my favorite Nirvana song now though is All Apologies. It’s the final track off of In Utero, their third and final album, and it’s quite simply an actual apology. It’s mostly dedicated to Courtney and Frances Bean, his wife and daughter, and it’s Kurt apologizing for the way he is in a very Kurt Cobain sort of way, draped in sardonic passages and light humor all while tip-toeing over very heavy subjects.

What’s interesting is his use of merisms, one of my favorite subjects. A merism is a rhetorical tool where you say two oppossite things at the same time to express something greater. A good example is when you’re trying to do something difficult, you might say you moved heaven and earth to do it. This means you did everything you possibly could have done. Here and there, high and low, now and then, ladies and gentlemen, and of course, rock and roll are all merisms.

Sunburn, freezer burn means that he can’t escape no matter where he goes. It’s too hot south, and too cold north - no matter where he goes, he gets burned.

Married. Buried. A merism that sums up an entire life. You spend the first part finding your mate and getting married. Then you spend the rest of it growing old and dying. It’s simple and dumb and boring and beautiful and terrible.

The ending is the best part though. He repeats twenty two times All In All Is All We Are as the music fades out. It’s actually an old Buddhist mantra, though I’ve had difficulty researching it’s origins and it’s debatable what exactly it means. I take it to mean though that you are what you do moment to moment. The sum of your existence is equal to all your bespoke parts - you are what you are right now and always.

Anyways… I’ll be drawing FLOLAS.