Inktober: Miscellany IV

Shan Yu

Delwin (Original character)

Autumn Spirit

Inktober: Miscellany the Third

The Shadow

The Final Sacrifice

Morpheus

Damien Stockholm (Original character)

Froggy

Inktober 2017: Miscellany

Mr. Tadge Blackbriar

Self portrait in skullpaint

John Mitchell, original character

Inktober 2017: Lawless/Wettest County in the World

On this blog I try to focus on books, but I do like movies, and sometimes they overlap! I came to this book via the movie Lawless, in which Tom Hardy plays one of the Bondurant brothers, and after researching the movie a little I discovered it's based on a book that recounts a semi-true story.

Tom Hardy as Forrest Bondurant

The book version is by Matt Bondurant, a part fiction, part history pried from his own grandfather and news clippings from the 1930s, and it's titled 'The Wettest County in the World'. The genuine historical facts are that the Bondurant brothers existed, they were bootleggers in the prohibition era, and they were involved in a soot-out with a federal officer that resulted in an official investigation later known as the Great Franklin County Moonshine Conspiracy. Jack and Forrest Bondurant were both shot and both survived to testify in court, and it was found that the federal officers in charge of enforcing prohibition were instead taking a cut from the bootleggers.
All of that is true, and you can find the original newspaper articles about it still. The author's grandfather was Jack Bondurant, the youngest of the trio of brothers, and would not talk about the incident much but what little he did say sparked an interest in his grandson. The book is story woven around those facts, and the movie is based on that story.

Forrest Bondurant for Inktober

The real Forrest Bondurant (Actually James Forrest Bondurant) was a thin, sickly looking man who survived the Spanish Flu when he was younger, and in the book he's described in a way that fits the few photographs that exist. He is not intended to be the main character of the story, that role belongs to the youngest brother Jack. While the book was an interesting read to follow up the movie, it's a little difficult on its own because the story is not linear. Rather than simply following Jack's story of the events leading up to the shootout, and what followed, the book cuts between that and the efforts of a reporter visiting years later and trying to piece together the events from the close-mouthed locals. It's a slightly confusing way to deliver a narrative.

In the movie, Shia Lebouf plays Jack, and the narrative ostensibly follows his story (there's no reporter in the movie at all). Tom Hardy as Forrest manages to steal the show, though, and that's not just my opinion alone. Apparently he was cast for his performance in another movie where he was looking pale and sickly for the role, but when they filmed Lawless he was in the process of bulking up to play Bane in the Batman sequel so he was not what they were expecting. His version is a different character altogether, a human tank who rules over his brothers with mumbling and grumbling and brass knuckles in the pocket of his cardigan. He's a strangely maternal figure, and gives the impression he'd be happy sitting darning socks and quietly running his restaurant/gas station, but he also lays out his enemies with a couple of swift heavy punches and engages in shocking violence to protect his own. For all that the story is a good one in either format, it's the movie version of the character that I like best.

Presented here is both my Inktober version of Forrest doing the mending, and a more dynamic painting I did earlier this year, for the full dichotomy of the character.

Forrest Bondurant (Watercolor)

Inktober 2017: Miscellany

Doctor Who / Tom Baker

Cat skull

Octopus debating Halloween costumes

Raven with hands

Ace from Mad Max Fury Road

Shiv Lightly (my bard character for D&D)

Inktober 2017: Poison Elves

Lusiphur Malache

When I was younger, there was a time that I spent a lot of time reading comics. While I went through some of the more conventional Marvel stuff (X-Men, X-Calibur, some Dr. Strange), when I got older and moved across the country I gave away or sold most of it. The stuff I held onto was mostly Sandman by Neil Gaiman (There will be later posts on this, trust me), and every old issue I had of Poison Elves.

If you're a comic book fan and you've still never heard of Poison Elves, I can't say that I'm surprised. I grew up in a little city called Bellingham, WA and the creator of Poison Elves was a local guy. An artist named Drew Hayes started the comics as an independent publisher, working in black and white to keep print costs down and telling the story of a violent young elf named Lusiphur Malache, living in a vaguely medieval fantasy world with a more extensive backstory than he ever quite got the chance to put down on paper, but hinted at with the material he did put out.

While he was a little bit older than me, Drew Hayes moved in some of the same social circles that I did in High School and college, and it remains one of the big regrets of my life that I never got to meet him and tell him what a formative influence he was on me. It seemed like at least half the people I knew did meet him, and he was a not infrequent guest at the parties at a place near the college we all jokingly dubbed Freak Manor. From his work, his very open letters that prefaced each issue, and what I heard from people who did meet him, it's clear he struggled with depression. His character was one who railed against an unjust and uncaring world, and often ended up holding the short end of the stick.

I moved away from Bellingham in late 2000, and one of the last things I did was send him a piece of fan art and a letter.

Drew Hayes died in 2007, of a heart attack.

The body of work he left behind is a little graphic, with an issue that's even straight up titled Sex & Violence, but the thread that runs through it all is that it's Funny. For a series that centers around an assassin, Poison Elves is heavy on the comedy, and that's a big part of what always kept me coming back.

It's a wry, cynical kind of humor sometimes, but every moment that things start to get too morose, the jokes start cracking again and swing the tone around. The purple marauder (on the far left cover there) is a misogynist so over the top that's he's a joke in the first place, and it's both funny and satisfying to see Lusiphur give him his due.

My own rendition of the purple Marauder

There's some raunchy jokes, and plenty of gore in black and white, so I'm not trying to misrepresent the comic as nothing but light-hearted fun. The female characters are all drawn in classic comic style, with big breasts and legs for days, but they also tend to be independent and able to take care of themselves, many of them unattached and not looking attachment. There's sex here, but it's treated as consensual and adult, and never one-sided. These are things I didn't really notice, when I was younger, but in retrospect they're aspects that I appreciate because not all comics treat women this way. There's flaws. but Poison Elves remains an old favorite and a heavy influence on my art and my own comic ideas. Thanks Drew.

Fleece and Talon

Inktober 2017: Thin Man vs Fat Man

This post is kind of a two-for-one, since I recently finished this book and the Inktober is somewhat related. I was introduced to the Thin Man by the old movies, with Myrna Loy and William Powell, so when I came across the first of the books in a thrift store I figured I'd go to the source. The characters here are presented much the same as in the movies; devil-may-care, hard drinking and pill popping, and with a surprisingly loose marriage. In the movies Nick and Nora Charles eyeball other men and women and each acknowledge the other has wandering eyes without having much of a problem with it.

In this first novel, the crime they fall into investigating centers around Nick's own ex-wife, who he seems to still be on remarkably chummy terms with. I'm not saying that's unusual in that day or this, but it seems unusual for it to be presented in media so freely. Nick and Nora are a fun couple to read about, but probably hard to get along with in real life. They throw parties, booze it up, flirt with everyone they meet, and approach crime solving as an inconvenient intrusion on that life. It's a fun read, with modern language and a tangled crime that satisfies my love of mysteries.

On the other hand, Dashiell Hammett saw the movies and wrote the books, and then decided his own characters were utterly insufferable.

His answer to this came not in the form of novels, but instead in new scripts he wrote for a long series of radio plays. In a direct snub to the Thin Man series, he titled it The Fat Man, and every radio series must have a star. A lot of longer-running radio plays went through multiple performers in the lead role, but there was only ever one Fat Man, and that was J. Scott Smart. Being a hefty man himself, Smart not only voiced the primary character, Brad Runyon, on the radio show but also even played him in a movie of the same title. As good a writer as Dashiell Hammett was, J. Scott Smart is reported to have had a hand in editing the radio scripts himself, altering and writing some of his own lines. While the Thin Man book was a fun read, if there were novels of The Fat Man series I would track down and read every last one.

Where Nick and Nora Charles fall into detective work sideways, Brad Runyon does it professionally. There's a point made of his close alliance with the police force, a very real-world truth that most film noir seems to make light of. While he does sometimes drink, there's none of the excess of the Thin Man books and movies, and his only real vice might be food but despite the title there really aren't any fat jokes besides the occasional nod to his size, mostly from Brad Runyon himself. As a character he is hard-working and down to earth, and I get the impression that he'd view his counterpart with skepticism if he met him, then ignore him and get back to work.

The radio plays and the movie can both be found on YouTube with an easy search, and I highly recommend them. Today's Inktober is a portrait of the Fat Man himself, a character who doesn't appear in any actual books but certainly deserves to.

Inktober 2017

Helping a local beekeeper has been eating my brain, and maybe I should make a separate post about that, but I thought this was a good place to drop my current attempt at Inktober.
Much like the 365 project I founded this blog on, Inktober is a shorter-term creative project, where you're supposed to do an ink drawing every day through the month of October. It doesn't have to be anything super fancy, just a doodle. Some people do amazing more detailed work, of course, but some of us have less free time for art, unfortunately. What I draw will probably vary greatly, depending on my chance to sit and do art for a length of time. Anyways, I'll try to post them here in batches, and maybe this blog won't look so lonely.

Queen Bee ready to duel with her rivals

Medieval beekeeper

Buster Keaton, because.

Kitten from work