SR 1 PAGE FORTY-SEVEN

I was really uptight about drugs and alcohol when I was in my 20’s.

There’s a history of substance abuse in my family, so maybe being uptight saved me from disaster, but man… I must have been annoying as hell to be around sometimes. Judgy. Choosing to avoid specific chemicals is just fine, but getting all judgmental about other people’s chemical choices is a bummer. Reading back through these pages, that judgmental bummer-ness sometimes bleeds through.

Chill out, early-aughts Aaron!

But that’s coming from the perspective of someone over twenty years older. These days, I’ll have a drink every now and then. I still don’t do any other drugs but won’t judge you if that’s your thing. No biggie. I wonder, though, if that increase in chillness comes from not feeling the slightest bit of pressure to do those things anymore. My art college days and all the peer pressure that implies are a million light-years behind me. Back then, being straight-edge was a part of my personality I had to fight for. But in my forties, who cares?

Looking at Sera’s little footnote about people getting mad that doesn’t drink, I feel like she (meaning me) should probably chill out a little. But that note wasn’t written by a blasé 46-year old. It was written by an anxious 20-something-year old who felt intense pressure to conform to the world and was mad that people couldn’t just let them be. That anger is totally valid.

I still keep a hard line on vampire blood injections, though. Think I’m being too strict? KEEP READING, BUDDY.

(Dang, in panel two I love that texture on the paper contrasted with the hard lines of the Twitchriddle drawing. I should bust out my mechanical pencils again…)

SR 1 PAGE FORTY-EIGHT

Wow, eight minutes into “Bela Lugosi’s Dead.” Only a minute and a half until the end. Heartbreaking. Just noticed I have the title written as “Bela Lugosi IS Dead,” probably because I thought I knew the song so well there was no reason to double-check. (Always double-check.)

The Waves of Revulsion singer here is loosely based on a life drawing model I sketched many, many times at Cal Arts. A really theatrical fella we later found out was in a goth band. He was a nice guy, as most life drawing models are. He might have been new to the posing biz at the time, though, because he kept doing this one weird thing that exasperated our teachers.

At Cal Arts life drawing poses were very specifically timed. You might do some one-minute poses to focus on nailing basic gestures. Or you’d do a five-minute pose to work out key anatomy and tension points without getting bogged down in details. Or maybe you’d do a 10-15 minute pose to really get into the finer points of musculature, fabric folds, and lighting. Occasionally, perhaps, you’d draw a single femur for two weeks straight because your teacher was a madman.

(“Did you know…” the teacher would muse to himself, voice echoing with the collective wisdom of the ancients, “that God created the eraser before the pencil?” He would insist you erase most of the greater trochanter you drew yesterday and start again, better, stronger, more God-like, the ability to draw Tommy Pickles soon within your grasp. Erase and transcend…)

One-minute poses are particularly useful in animation school, because animators need to be able to draw quickly and get to the “point” of a drawing in a hurry. So imagine if after every one-minute pose the buzzer went off and the model announced, “DOES ANYONE NEED MORE TIME?”

It would be like if we all completed a 100 meter dash and the referee said, “DOES ANYONE NEED A FEW MORE METERS?”

Goth model guy did this over and over, even after the teacher asked him not to. Just the most puzzling thing. My guess is that the poor guy had programmed himself for more traditionally-structured life drawing classes and had trouble shaking it off. He got the idea eventually, though.

DOES ANYONE NEED MORE TIME READING THIS POST?

BACK TO THE PRESENT!

One more week of thumbnailing and I’ll have a first (super-rough) draft of SHOCK CITY book two. Then the grueling process of deciding if it’s any good or not can begin. Stay tuned next week to see if I’m staring straight at the floor!

NEXT WEEK: PONEEE!!