While I decode the dark ramblings of the blog monster that hisses in my ear at night, you can check out my first published poem over at Everyday Weirdness (January 20th). Let me know what you think: christian@theincompletes.com.

-C

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I won’t bore you by talking about the album that can be found on a veritable galaxy of blogs, but if you aren’t listening to Merriweather Post Pavilion by The Animal Collective, then I feel sorry for your danceless bones.

Normally, I say a clever bit about the comic and then move on to deeper ruminations about life, the universe and well, everything, I guess.  Today I’m driven in from the rain to stew in my own thoughts, and the image of Sayuri’s back haunts my mind.  It’s a funny thing to live a life and recreate it in cartoon form, candy-coated, and with the licorice whip of hilarity.  Seems like a good day for escapism.

When the heavens open to cleanse us, drowned the worms and let the vines drink of the earth, I cancel everything I can, I fix myself statuesque at a window painted with dreary landscape, book in hand.

It began with mice and swords on a backdrop of sleepy moons, beds turned boats, and Wild Things.

All the kids went screaming to sand and bars and flying balls and I more than anything wanted to climb Redwall and watch the adventures of Matthias.  At that time books were nothing more than a Colosseum, me in a distant seat, marveling at the tiny rodents and the seeming meaninglessness of their wars.

The comic age came in on a three-colored inky wave.  Calvin and Hobbes and their toboggan carving philosophy through the blank snow slate, Neil Gaiman lifting the veil of the dream scape to let you peek inside, Daniel Clowes to set hypnotize into nightmare fever, Alan Moore to stir your brains a bit, and Sfar to set you back where you belong.  In the paneled, devouring pages I learned the value of retracing life in swooping lines and basic hues in order to make sense of the most simple parts of life, to project yourself onto a stick figure and then do horrible and wonderful things to it.  Learn your strength by proxy.

East of Eden reached out, took me by the throat, and squeezed.  The patterns woven throughout Steinbeck’s genealogy raised like scars in my own.  I could change and make the world a better place.

“Make your own Bible.  Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.”

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

And so I set to tearing pages, scribbling under lines, seemingly defiling the things I loved so much.  But it was nothing like that.  Each new work was an opportunity to discover the world, to go inside and see how all my invisible parts worked, to find answers to patch up old wounds, and ultimately build a bridge of paper and ink, of elegant fonts and leather-bound spines, to those distant mountains sitting atop clouds that yesterday seemed so unreachable.

-C

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 18th, 2009 at 12:00 am and is filed under All Comics, Incompletes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.