Stop me if you’ve heard this
one before. Cartoonist, short of ideas, has to fill the blank page before the
sands of time run out. Draws herself drawing herself, filling one panel. The
story is…the cartoonist is short of ideas, and has to fill the blank page
before the sands of time run out.
Cartoonist takes a break to grab food.
That’s good for at least another two panels. A skilled operator can parlay this
edible move up into double that with a waffly retread of literally going back
to the drawing board.
Next panel. Cartoonist turns to audience and
explains where her ideas come from. There’s a mention of a deadline. (Cue
cartoonist now with back to the audience, staring out at a New York sunset.
Cartoonist lives in a flat in Shireshire, England, but gets another five panels
out of the imaginary New York transition anyway.)
*
And I’ve managed four paragraphs and a tenth
of the blog post from…waffling about a cartoonist doing the old dog-ate-my-artwork
sketch. This is a good ploy if you are six years old and must write a one-page
story with really really big looping handwriting helping you out on the padding
side of things.
Note to the believers: this doesn’t actually
work if you are six years old. I stared in disbelief at the writing of those
believers, looping their letters like stricken biplanes trailing smoke and
flames in the First World War. You’ve flown your Sopwith Pencil over half of
France just to write three words.
I find myself a third of the way into the
month, after vowing to blog by the second of November at the latest, and still
no blog post. Things get in your way. You stumble into icebergs and trip over
autumn leaves. That polar bear comes calling for coffee. There’s tidying. But
there’s always tidying.
If things look too tidy, there’s something
wrong. I’m tempted to knock over a stack of things, just to avoid the tidiness
of too much tidiness. But that’s folly, and the world knows this. I hit on the
idea of blogging about something that suddenly takes unfeasible amounts of
research.
Checks notes.
That stalled blog is half a blog. Out of
semi-nowhere, yesterday, I conjured half a blog from airy nothingness and fairy
gossamer. And I just had to fucking stop. There was too much to say, and a pile
to research, just for a blog with nothing much to say.
I bought a book. It was damaged by smoke. This
led to many tangents and much fact-checking. I concluded I couldn’t complete
the blog within the span of a single day – I had other commitments.
And so. Did you ever hear about the
cartoonist, short of ideas…
I could find a specific example. But that
means crawling through the stacks of books and firing up a scanner. I can at
least go and look, just to prove to myself that the book is in the same place.
It shouldn’t be possible to lose track of a
book in here, but I was once trapped in my library. This makes me sound like Marcus
Brody, who managed to get lost in his own museum.
Checks bookshelves.
Okay, clambers
over things and reaches the exact shelf to check bookshelves. I call that a
win.
Passed Marcus Brody on the way back.
Well, that padded another line. Also, I
didn’t fire up the scanner. I used the camera instead. And that padded another another line.
We have a winner: Dori Stories, which gives us the artist on the front cover drawing
art as a means of padding out the story. Mission accomplished. I was writing
about a smoke-bedecked book of selected letters: Raymond Chandler, the culprit.
This took too long.
But here I am, one day later, taking a
detour into the work of Dori Seda. Also deceased as I type, along with Raymond
Chandler, but who knows…maybe Dori just died “retired from public life” to
live out the rest of her vampire existence in private.
Dori had a thing for vampires in her comic
strips. And she was very close to her dog.
Checks notes.
I’ve mentioned Raymond Chandler in eight
blog posts, including this one. But this is a first for Dori Seda. I should
have mentioned her sooner. She was an artist of the 80s who couldn’t leave the
80s. Dori was dead and gone by the time I flitted through her loose vampire-stomping
turf in the Mission District of San Francisco.
Told you I made up that New York sunset.
In reality, sticking with the vampirism, Dori
was more likely to witness a San Francisco moonrise. She was an artist who was
an artist before she became an artist. Her interest in ceramics, coupled with
smoking, and lung problems aggravated by her ceramic work, took her away far
too soon.
I can see her carving a career out of
ceramics, constructing those seashell-like fancies, without ever turning to her
blank drawing board. But comics lured her with the siren call. She was in the
right place at the right time to be accepted for the style of panel stories she
told.
And I’ve reached that point, the point at
which my Raymond Chandler blog stalled. Words dissolved in research at this
point yesterday. Write a blog within a day if it requires great research. But
write a blog in a single sitting if you can.
This blog post, casually referencing Dori Seda,
doesn’t require much toil by way of study. (Something of which Dori would
doubtless approve.)
After all, she made it easy for me to make a
reference by putting her artistic struggle on the cover of the book I sought.
She didn’t do that. People who cared about her work did that on her behalf, and…
Okay, I interrupted myself by picking the
book up and checking the price. Yours for $19.95 on the edition that found its
way into the stacks. What does that cost now?
Jesus Christ, Fenton!
Two grand for this book. And £2.80 delivery.
A steal. No. Wait. Fuck that. This is a deal-breaker. Should be free delivery. Don’t
buy it, folks. It’s a trap.
Flitting through the book, I come to a
photo-story about Dori starring as Sylvia
Silicosis. Fucking hell, that’s too close to the fucking bone. But that’s
her, all right, down to the quick of the nail. In the abandoned Raymond
Chandler piece, I made the point that biography only gives you a sketch of a
person.
“Harsh but obvious fact: no biography truly
covers a life.”
And this is true of the compilation on my
bookshelves. We have immediate visual access to Dori and her cat-bedecked
ceramic pieces. Many of her drawings are inhabited by vampires people
with pronounced incisors. And so it goes.
She’d have loved and hated the digital art
world in unequal measure. I guess she’d have sat through the Ghost World movie or the Crumb documentary thinking, there’s Zwigoff making movies. Who did he
fuck to get the movie dollars for that?
With Zwigoff directing the documentary on
Crumb, there’s a feeling that the two are just having a reunion of Crumb’s
band, the Cheap Suit Serenaders...in which Zwigoff played on cello and borrowed
time. Terry Zwigoff is the kind of character who couldn’t get the money
together to make a Dori Seda movie
that wouldn’t do justice to Dori Seda anyway.
It is
only through the power of the interwebs, and possibly Castle Grayskull, that I
found my way to the sound of R. Crumb’s voice. He’s been preserved in digital
aspic, on a BBC radio slot known as Sweet
Shellac, that you can find on The YouTubes.
On a semi-regular basis, Crumb would
announce Hello, folks, tell you who
he was, and then dip into the nostalgia of Jug Bands. Not the sort of jugs
Crumb’s art is known for. At least the radio slots are listenable. Zwigoff’s
documentary on the Crumb family is eerily watchable for an unwatchable
document.
But where do we go for the merest glimpse of
Dori Seda? Not hard to track down, now. She drew the poster for Gap-Toothed Women, a short documentary
on that subject by Les Blank, Maureen Gosling, Chris Simon, and Susan Kell.
Dori died about a year after appearing in
the documentary, and, being Dori, she pretty much had to fight to be included
as a gap-toothed woman in a documentary about gap-toothed women.
We can access the snippet featuring her
poster art on vimeo. Dori was excluded from the final documentary, but final is a relative term to artists. She
dropped in, explained her worth as a comic book scribe, and would’ve sashayed
out with her dog by her side if they’d had time to film nonsense of that
stripe. Well. Damn.
She was very close to that dog, though. We
know this from the immortality granted to Tona in the comic strips. Maybe there
was an earlier dog named Day. Now
Dori haunts my bookshelves, asking if vimeo
is a dirty word...and, if not…why not?
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