I am cursed/blessed by Too Many Happenings in Life 😩

1. In July, I moved this website’s hosting away from my former publisher into my own server. This meant having to safely transfer 200+ pages and completely rehauling the internal CMS guts of the site. After a week of tinkling, running around and slamming our heads, here we are! Everything looks almost the same… except for some aesthetic updates, which I am still WIPing.

Very thankful for Kevin and Chuck of Black Candle for all their work with the site migration. Even with my webmaster familiarity, I wouldn’t have been able to do all this myself. xD

Excited to be beginning the comic’s new era!

Speaking of new era…

2. I mentioned a [REDACTED] in the previous page’s update… well, I can finally un-redact and happily announce: I am now a permanent resident of Australia!!!

I am so grateful for my friends and peers in the Australian comics community who supported my application for residency. The migration stream to gain this permanent residency isn’t an easy one (I applied via my “artistic achievements” and proving that I can “become an asset to Australian culture” – which I jokingly call the Clout Visa or the Most High Stakes Arts Residency program).

Fortunately and unfortunately securing the residency meant a new wave of life admin tasks: signing up for public healthcare, updating taxes, a whole bunch of stuff. @_@

3. Since the last update I thumbnailed 100 pages and sketched nearly 50 – which is a really good sign!

Though it bothers me that I had to take so long to finally upload this particular page (barring the website and life admin obstructions), I am glad I took the time I did. I finished reading a fair number of philosophical books/essays about art and culture and history that helped clarify my thoughts about Alexander Comic as a whole, and how I wanted to design Book Two’s direction.

One of the major artistic ambitions that underpin Alexander (and why I wanted to place the latest Romance in the medium of comics) is the dissolution of history as an easy, clear, linear ideological narrative. I wanted to turn history instead into simultaneity; to overlap it with the present and the future. I think comics as a medium is very good at presenting simultaneity and manipulating construct, but it’s also in tension with the idea that it is a sequential (linear) art. Normally panels and gutters are in service of a linear reading order. “A then B then C”. Except, in Alexander, panels and gutters have to also be “A and B and C” (plus “A or B or C” but that’s for a future update).

This spread is representative of “A then/and B then/and C”. It presents multiple things:

– the sketch of the original (discarded) spread: which used to be a typically sequential narrative of the meet-cute of Alexander’s parents, Olympias and Philip back when Book Two was in writer’s block hell. I decided to keep the original sketch, even if obscured, because of…

– the sketch of the current spread: I’ve been thinking a lot about art as a carrier of its author’s life force. Most of the time we see a piece of art as itself, as a completed standalone object at the moment we encounter at, without necessarily seeing it as an object representating all of its creative processes. Think of seeing a glass bottle as “a glass bottle”, and not “the machinery+factory labour+skill that makes a glass bottle”. This is why I’ve chosen to put the original and current sketches together – to transform the process into the art object itself.

– and my scribbly notes: these are ideas that inform what is to come for Alexander Comic. Most of these are thoughts that coalesced from the theories of art and history I’ve studied over the years.

Footnotes

1. Theses on the Philosophy of History, by Walter Benjamin AND Angelus Novus, by Paul Klee: an essay I read relatively recently that justified and clarified where my thinking was approaching.

2. The Carrier Bag Theory of History, by Ursula K LeGuin: this essay has influenced Alexander Comic since its birth.

3. The Medium is the Massage, by Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Flore: the way this book presents ideas is very interesting… not as a series of thoughts, but as text superimposed on images, and images subverting text.

4. Seeing Making: Room for Thought, by Kevin McCaughey, Adam Michaels, Susan Buck-Morss: the most recent successor to what The Medium is the Massage did. This book took me so long to finish, but it is such an experience and worth reading.

4. Every age has its own Alexander: a paraphrase of my consultant’s refrain.

5. The Hero’s Journey / The Monomyth, by Joseph Conrad: you may remember The Hero’s Journey being the subtitle for Book One. The narrative structure of the so-called monomyth is informative to Alexander, just not on face value.

6. My consultant finally has a cameo with me. :,)