YOU ARE HERE—Dave Sim's wrist, Summer solstice 2019

From the fax machine of Dave Sim:

25 June 19
Hi Sean!

Can you post this to AMOC? Your question about how I'm doing the "new art" is a sort of meeting place of the "new art" and a latest update on the wrist which I promised to keep The Customer Base updated on (since they're the ones keeping me in business):

I'm trying to avoid long-winded explanations of how I'm trying to "work around" the wrist. It isn't going to do you or anyone else any good and even primarily left-handed typing causes a certain amount of stress (i.e. typing caps where both hands are needed). I'm becoming more absolutist about that. No typing unless it's absolutely necessary.

What I'm learning to do is to break drawings down into the parts that need to actually be rendered with free wrist movement (i.e. without the wrist brace) and what can be accomplished by treating my right hand, wrist and forearm as One Big Piece of Dead Meat. The OBDPoM parts I can direct the pain to the middle of my forearm and that's good for a few hours of "drawing" as opposed to AN hour of actual drawing. "Drawing" for me is just archival pens and permanent markers. A chimp can "draw" using archival pens and permanent markers.

That's an exaggeration but I'm drawjng a distinction between

1) the GD/GV cover which was all free-wrist Stan Drake/ Neal Adams brush strokes and pen strokes literal-sized (everything on the cover was drawn on the 1Ox15 original) which I can't do often or for long.

2) the ATTRACTIVE COUSINS cover where the Super­Cerebus/Super-Cerebus Girl image is about 30% larger than the figures on GD/GV and it seemed a bad use of limited resources to "scale up" the Gustave Dore image and logo and do them by hand.

3) the AMICABLE SPIDER-VARK cover where I just redrew Spider-Vark himself from Benjamin's design roughly 30% larger than the ATTRACTIVE COUSINS proportions, i.e., HUGE. Which meant I could do almost all of the image One Big Piece of Dead Meat style, with some Japanese brush-pen standing in for actual brush.

(I have to send Rolly on a quest with my Japanese brush pen from 20 years ago to see if they still make them and if he can find replacement cartridges for this one. The modern ones are really feeble by comparison. I'm really sparing with using this one because it may be on the endangered or extinct art materials list. I only bought one as a novelty because Chester used them and I bought everything he used when we were at Curry's to see what I thought of them.) The plus is that with the one AS-V image I get 48 pages of comics, so it's worth putting the time in.

Cerebus the Feminist: because it's just Cerebus I could do closer to normal rendering size using my old tricks of using a Hunt 102 as a tiny brush by leaning on it. Genetic hand memory (which I learned existed by doing the tiny Cerebus in the GD/GV logo "Oh, hey, my hand knows how to do this, wrist brace or no wrist brace").

I could have done the Whore of Babylon but that seemed pointless since I'd have to either render her Cerebus-sized -- which Dore had already done far better than I ever could -- or Spider-Vark-sized which would have been pointlessly HUGE. If I could do it twice as good as Dore by doing it twice as big as Dore, that would be worth doing. Or if I was doing a John Romita Sr. riff on the original cover. What would a JR Sr. W.O.B. look like? As I did with GD and GV -- what would a Stan Drake/Neal Adams Dante and Virgil look like? -- that would have an internal logic and would be worth doing.

4) In between GD/GV and AS-V, technically, is SPIDER-WHORE (August 2020), the follow-up to AMICABLE SPIDER-VARK (July 2020). Benjamin faxed me a rough of the WoB in a Spider-Girl costume riffing on WHAT IF? #105 of which I knew .nothing (LONG after my comics-reading time). I got him to fax me the original but I don't really have a JR Sr. genetic memory. I picture JR Sr. and what I "get" is Jim Mooney inking Gwen Stacey and Mary Jane Watson (i.e. modified Supergirl). I could do the Whore of Babylon with MJ's hairstyle and Supergirl's facial features but I'd lose WoB in the process. 105 cover so I would know what we were riffing on. When I (God willing) get the cover image done, I have the last three pages of AMICABLE SPIDER-VARK and 24 pages of SPIDER-WHORE. In this case, riffing on a) primarily Frank Miller (which was what made me want to do it: that's what I saw in Benjamin's riff sketch) b) secondarily Steve Ditko c) thirdly Bernie Wrightson. c) was a surprise. I was just going to do Spider-Girl's costume details (what I could see from the fax, which wasn't much) and then I thought, Well, no, it's the Whore of Babylon in a spider-costume. The costume needs to be as DISGUSTING as SHE is. As DISGUSTING as a SPIDER is. If I'd have known that was going to happen, I'd have drawn her much bigger instead of doing the WHAT IF? parody logo (WHAT THE F? STARRING SPIDER-WHORE) and figure on the same sheet of art paper. The logo was a QBPoDM thing: a tracing of the S-M logo with the thick lines done with a SHARPIE FINE POINT (a little too thick but I'll live with it for the OBPoDM convenience sake) and the thin lines with a Hunt 102.

So now I need to do a part-Frank Miller, part-Wrightson OBPoDM inking job, trying to make it look like it's "free wrist" when what it actually is is: how small can I do OBP-DM rendering under the magnifier lamp while still keeping all the stress in the forearm and out of the wrist?

For obvious reasons, I'm not going to be doing TOO MANY updates like this. But this is as close to YOU ARE HERE as I can get with Dave Sim's right wrist, Summer solstice 2019.

Dave