Running down the memories, wrapped up in desire

I spent this morning listening to Secrecy and playing Solitare Mahjong. I don't know if the reader has spent time with any variation of this computer gaming staple, if they have they might agree it's pretty conductive as a backdrop for active thinking because it engages on a very shallow level, requires calculation of a couple moves ahead at best. It's no Go game, but it's not mind-numbing either like Peggle or whatever. Secrecy were a pretty emotional band (really worth a blog post in themselves) and although I'm familiar with the lyrics to both Raging Romance and Art In Motion, they're often vague enough that subconsciously my own emotional experience fills in the ambiguous space. Their singer in particular, does this half-step note ascending plead with his voice a lot that holds some teenage angst connotation for me.

So here I was in relative solitude, brain and heart activated, what could ever come bubbling in the conscious surface than my own woeful adolescence? Perhaps another factor that contributed was that I awoke this morning from the common recurring semi-nightmare of being back in high-school, going through finals (badly). Come to think of it that's probably the catalyst for what I came to think about and not the music+game combo. I probably put on Secrecy exactly because of the dream. Trying to sort out subconscious-to-conscious causal paths is complicated. Anyway, this is a post about a girl. Due warning that I'm going to be pretty honest below and if you have a heart it probably is going to remind you of your own teenage heartbreaks and do you really want to have a melancholy morning?








Fair enough.

I think I was fourteen or so, I was taking English after school. I was a bad student in school but very good in English due to an early fascination with heavy metal and adventure games. English held my interest long enough to learn, unlike most other subjects, basically. So in the English classroom was my only chance to academically gloat. I now realize most of my classmates disliked me for it though they were quiet about it. I can now see why, it's pretty embarrassing to see an awkward teenage introvert desperately grab his chance to show off, must have been pretty overbearing. A common post-facto realization I have about myself is that I'm overbearing.

So I was the classroom know-it-all for once in my life and this - I theorize in retrospect - had the uncommon side-effect of getting this girl to be interested in me.

We talked a lot before and after class, she was very enthusiastic about getting to know me to which I adapted surprisingly quickly (introvert kids do not necessarily lack a big ego). I wrote her *a lot* of heavy metal mixtapes because though CD burners existed back in ancient 1998 I didn't have one. She showed enough enthusiasm for me to keep on doing it. She was trying, I realize, to cut out a small space in her reality for me by adopting some of my music taste which should have tipped me off that she was interested in me for reasons other than my record collection. Were I more experienced in these matters I'd have caught up but hey give me a break, I was fourteen.

This went on for close to a year I think, perhaps more. In any case it was thereabout that a mutual acquaintance told me that she knew for a fact that our mutual friend wanted to be more than a friend to me. It rocked my world. Up to that point it hadn't entered my young mind that such a very attractive girl would be into me. The reader might remember how at an innocent age when they looked at beautiful people they didn't connect that with their nascent lust, that's how it was for me, I realized just how beautiful she was and how I'd like to get together with her in the space of the few seconds after being informed that she was interested in me.

The rest of this story demonstrates how whatever Gods that may be are cruel masters.

As it was explained to me much later the common friend that had informed me about her interest had also told her about it and she freaked out because she was into - or in a semi-relationship with - this other guy about whom all I remember was that he had a small motorbike and was a 'bad boy' so he had me at a startling disadvantage. She didn't want to risk ruining our friendship or whatever, I don't think I'll ever understand this rationale, I've had sex with all my close friends and it's always worked out great! Anyway, what happened was that as I was trying to make my gentle (some would say weak-ass) advances she shut me down in the severest way, which, dear readers and humans, is not found in the finality of a confrontation (wish I were so lucky) but instead in constant evasion. She left just enough room for us to keep on being friends but not enough for me to ask her out, it was a pretty confusing guessing game for young Helm and what was most confusing of all was this feeling of mounting anger inside me. I can since summon this feeling at any time I think about that situation and it's a hollow orb in my chest that pulls inwardly my sanguine humour leaving me exhausted but manic. Manic to DESTROY.

What I felt before that when considering my interpersonal prospects was a sort of resignation. I felt like an ugly child and even uglier teenager (thin, hairy, pretty awful acne too, and earlier than most of my friends!) so I had devised fortifications to shield me from disappointment: I didn't even try to get anywhere with girls. The anger was new and it had to do with how - I realize now - my emotions had been toyed with, being constantly offered something and then once I reached for it, pulling it away mockingly. At the time I couldn't internalize this anger, I got pretty passive-aggressive with her, to the point where I straight out stopped talking to her/avoided her. There were some lapses where we'd start talking again and I'd get passive-aggressive again, and the more psycho I got the more she became cold, though never decisively frostbitten, like the Sphinx she offered riddles and I always had to torment myself for the answers. It took me a long time to understand the mechanics of mutual attraction and the memories are pretty embarrassing, but what it comes down to is she - like most women I've discussed their relationships with - had mistaken emotional fortifications against the chance of a relationship as self-assuredness, and she was attracted to this guy that had his own world-view, his own tastes, his own desires and dreams and wasn't afraid of anything. This guy wasn't me, though. As my weaknesses unfolded in front of her she was gradually appalled. There was a quiet violence, a horrible manipulation to get what I wanted and for her to get what she wanted instead, whose truth crystallized in me only through masochistic later-life repetitions of this same situation. Hopefully I think I've broken out of that loop for the last few years.

You might think how a girl not having a relationship with me isn't such a big deal and how your own memories of actual relationships that failed must be way harsher. It's not that simple, it wasn't that we didn't have a relationship, we did. We just skipped from friendship and then courtship, straight to the painful breakup without the good stuff in between. No acceptance, no safety, no stability, just alternating scalding hot showers of promises and freezing dips into the pools of denial. Afterwards I learned that her best friend had, when she deferred to her on what to do about the choice between myself and 'bad boy', told her to adopt the avoidance routine so she could have both; Thanks a lot for a hellish summer, her friend.

Well at some point English class ended, I got my couple of Proficiencies and she didn't and had to stay on, hah! take that! . . . We lost touch and I went on to have my heart ruined by a string of other women, but the first one will always be special.

I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I had segued from pre-teenage innocence straight to the emotional stability found in being accepted and loved during these years and although the anger was internalized (and used for good!) until it wasn't needed anymore, I don't think the deeper wound will ever go away. I'm still paranoid in any relationship (sexual or otherwise) that I've outstayed my welcome, that I'm being a burden. I do not trace all of it back to that situation when I was 14-15, but it certainly didn't help. And it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy also because when you think that way, you extrude doubt and fear when you should be all about self-assuredness and capacity. I ran into a pretty bad combo after this and it culminated with me giving up on sexuality and emotionality (or as Robot-Helm would have said *hrrhk* IN-STICT *kkrk*) on the whole for 3 years, but that's a completely different story.

Adversity shapes the psyche in positive ways also. I try to be sympathetic for anyone who is being deprived of what they'd like to have and especially of the bitterness and anger that prolonged denial creates. The only way for such a selfish animal like the human to allow other people's heartache to touch them is if their own heart is spacious. The world is cutting and carving little pieces out of it, the sooner one comes to terms with what they're left to work with, the better.
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Say yes to everything

art by me and Dave Stoner

Here's an interesting opinion piece by one Dave Eggers. I don't know who this man is or what he has contributed to the cultural landscape (probably because I'm Greek) but the piece stands on its own and it got me thinking. These thoughts I typed in on my computer and it is said that the reckless and brave may search for them below.

A noble adventurer you are!

So, the impression I get from this is that Dave Eggers is a happy man. He must have found a degree of contentment in the positive feedback loops that are built into his daily life. The phenomenon he describes (the mental trap of 'keeping it real' and being venomously disappointed in those that don't) I believe occurs first and hardest during one's puberty for the primary reason that that period is characterized the most by inner turmoil and cognitive dissonance between what one desires the world to be and what others pressure one to accept is.

I haven't met anyone that doesn't have some knee-jerk reaction against what they perceive as missteps from the true path in the lives and careers of their favorite artists. I believe that most of all this happens because that distant failure acts as a reminder of our own very proximal shortcomings in adhering to what usually is a strict moral code. A code not borne out of practicality but from a necessary interpretation of causality. This happens because that happened and that's bad. Our morality is based on simplifications and generalizations and that's not the space in which real human beings live.

Humans live in the ambiguity of constantly shifting and complex situations, where the true way is dim and even if one manages to follow it it doesn't always feel as good as one would expect it to be. That's where Dave Eggers lives but Dave Eggers is a happy man because he's successful, and I don't mean this in the strict financial sense, he is successful because he has made sense of his environment and function and has perhaps achieved a degree of inward pacification just through constant, busy reinforcement of positive routines. He can do a little bad (hang out with Puff Daddy) because he's doing a lot of good, is what he's working towards with listing his charity work. I get the impression that Dave Eggers is a huge workaholic also.

For those of us that haven't found our place yet, his words, while admirable, are more distant. His rationalization of how doing is living and not doing and complaining is poison rings true (as many "it's all MY fault" sentiments do) but is no less far away for it. Existential ennui leads to strings of smaller disappointments because second-guessing and dissecting small happenings and paralyzing/analyzing is what people without a work they enjoy and a social place in the world that respects them etc end up do for a living. Well get a job, Dave Eggers might say, say yes to all the things you say no he might continue. Some people don't get asked anything they could say no to, though.

People bitch because they're unhappy, is what I'm getting at, and while Eggers is taking a stand for his own sense of self-worth with the above text, victimizing the complainers doesn't help in understanding. He builds a straw-man, a very comfortable and common one in fact; the disaffected youth who's preoccupied with tearing down his idols and marginalizes a large part of that experience as 'poison'. He doesn't touch on what makes one like that at all. Is there perhaps a social system, a dynamic that creates disaffected youth, is perhaps the modern world not good for one's psyche? This aspect, the difficult aspect of the discussion isn't touched on, instead he explains how saying yes to meeting Puff Daddy is a good thing, otherwise he wouldnt've met Puff Daddy and he's a curious man. It's a sentiment we can all share, wouldn't we rather fulfill our curiosities instead of not? But is life this playground of curiosities to be fulfilled? Is it perhaps also a constant battle for (psychological besides physical) survival where if you misspent your time and effort you might have screwed up everything for good? Not everyone has risen above like Dave Eggers, I mean.

People are unhappy because the world is a suffocating place and not everybody will happen on the blessed circumstance where talent, ambition and luck converge to get a them their comfortable niche. I appreciate Dave Eggers' sentiment and his positivity and I'm glad that he's not successful and also disappointed anymore. if I ever get to where he is I hope I'll be saying similar things. But home is far away right now, and there's doubts and harsh judgments and self-loathing still that cannot be ameliorated with the suggested 'be positive!' mantras. Willpower will not make me a happier man, it is mostly, depressingly, luck that will. Until then I'll make what I make and complain about how this or that isn't true and has disappointed me sometimes, it's not poison in itself, it's a reflection of a world that disappoints. Sometimes when the world doesn't come knocking with beautiful, curious opportunities, the only way to keep sane is to knock on the world oneself.

-Helm
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Psychocartography

Mandatory check after the jump this time, friends.



Some creative zooming might be required to achieve both a holistic view of this page and its individual parts.

Unlike the spread posted below, this more recent pile of secrets still hurts. Revisiting this in detail to re-letter it reminded me of the acute psychological condition I was in when it was made. There is a honor in remembering it seems but there also is a sadness. Perhaps a couple of years from now the emotions that fed this will be crystallized more into a picture and less into a mirror.

With this page, my backlog has all but been depleted (there's like 3-4 pages I didn't deem good enough to post and a 18-page 24hr comic which I'm not terribly fond of either). This means I have achieved what I set out to do with this blog initially, which is to give a permanent digital home to work that I felt had been perhaps misrepresented in initial publication (this is a fancy way of saying that nobody that would want to see most of these would be able to where they were published).

This blog as an experiment has been very successful. The communication with you readers reinstilled a degree of self-confidence in me and I even put out the Asides Bsides book on that strength. I thank you sincerely for this. Even if we were to be done now, I would still rank this whole endeavour as probably the most important thing I've attempted in the past couple of years.

As I do not want this to be done though, I think it's time for to consider further options. Naturally it is impossible to keep the rate of posting I have on this blog now the well has run dry. I am currently - albeit slowly - making some more short comics. I have at least 3 4-5 page stories I need to tell in this period and I am assembling material for them at a discrete pace (you may detect from how I write here that there is a chance that I might abandon making comics after that. This isn't because I seriously think there will ever come a time when I throw the towel, more that I find it psychologically supportive to think of a future without any hardcoded certainties). The initial plan B was that when I would be done with my past work I would continue to post my new pages as they appear, here. I intend to do so, but I urge readers to not expect updates in the usual rate of once every 3-4 days anymore, as comics take a long time to be made. (Actually, comics can be made quite faster if I were employed to make them, but seeing how I am not, my own conscience sets the pace). I say this because it seems there's about 50 people visiting every day... take the bookmark from your daily folder and put it in your bi-monthly folder, please :)

I put the question to you, kind readers and humans, on the material of future posts. Should I post only when a page is completely and utterly done, or would you also be interested in work-in-progress (along with a hefty amount of comic-theory-ramblings) posts that might make less sense/spoil the end result ? Naturally if I can post WIP-stage work it means I will post more often (while still not at the past pace) but at the expense of the novelty of a finished page.

Also, on the strength of positive reception both here on the blog and for the book I recently put out, I am thinking I want to work making comics as a professional again. I think the Greek market cannot provide for me even barely reasonable compensation for the sort of work I do (at least not through the current channels) so it might be the time that I should start looking for opportunities to be published abroad. How exactly to do this, I am not certain. Any ideas are welcome. I suspect the first thing to do would be to make a bio / portfolio section on this blog with some standout pieces from the archives here and a few words on who I am and what I am willing to do to survive. This only makes sense because I don't expect an editor stumbling on this page to have the time to read the whole blog to tell what I can do, and seeing how I don't post my most recent work on the top of the blog they might be confused further. I'll do this soon.

If it were up to you, which pieces (let's say up to 4 stories) from those on this blog would you select for such a purpose?

Ah, well. I'm feeling a bit sad now. Was it really just 6 months with this blog? It felt longer, it felt busier. Felt like I had more purpose than usual. I'll try to go with this feeling.

- Helm
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A 24hour comic! (Page 1)

Alright alright. Page one of five. I don't have much time I gotta go out to pick up my black cat from the doctor (his masculinity, it has been destroyed!) and then I have to bumrush the printer dude to get my book on its way to being done so we'll talk more about what's going on here later. Here, let's try a different idea! If you want some clarification on anything that's going on in this page, why don't you ask me in the comments and I'll be back later tonight to explain? Yes! Reader participation! Yes!

-Helm

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Worse things than being late!

I did a 24hr comic this weekend, which is to say, it's not 24 pages but it's a full story done at the best of my ability in a span of 24 hours. It came out 5 pages. It'll be a while before it arrives on this blog but hey, I made it! Expect the next full page within the next couple of days.


You like to read a lot, don't you?

-Helm
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Anger Management

Man, this comic. It's a bit overwrought and I feel the way I drew the dude's face is quite bad, but I like the idea and the format. Upside-down speech is a good visual cue for subconscious thought patterns. I also like how the line-work in the top and bottom row is delicate and thin and the violence panel is made with a big brush that chops up the space harshly between space and object. If only I had structured that face traditionally a bit better. You can't improvise everything.

This idea came to me when I was visiting Brussels with my dad. I was very sad at the time, to the point where I couldn't sleep at night, and I paced and paced the hotel room (again a hotel room), I did endless series of push-ups to tire myself out and I broke the washroom's basin by mistake. Actually the worst of all of that is when you lie in bed trying to sleep with one ear on the mattress and you play rhythmic patterns with your fingers and hear them reverberate through the mattress, booming at the empty silence.

So perhaps the ugliness suits it! I have rationalized a small win for me right there.

On the formal level: 1) same face on all panels, slightly worked over to avoid cut-and-paste effect, but effective emotionally. Stonewall face. 2) throat gurgling sound effect: it works. Don't always put actual letters in sound panels, it's very useful to upset the reader expectation sometimes. 3) I went with the throat punch for extra cruelty. Of course nobody aims there on purpose but man if it happens it's much worse than a face hit. 4) Story starts 'after the fact'. The reader is encouraged to fill in the blanks. The 'plot' doesn't matter here, what matters is the human situation. When you just have a single page's worth of space you need to cut the most inessential corners and retain the gist of it. This was good practise for me regardless of how many pages a next comic I do will be.

Also, I wanted to say: thank you if you forwarded the comic to any interested friends. I really appreciate it. Don't hesitate to drop me comments, though, I see lately they've been sparser. That's fine, I understand there isn't an infinite amount of things to be said about what turns out to be a pretty homogeneous body of work but still, any communication is welcome.

- Helm

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Robotboy

This is pretty much my favorite page from the newspaper batch. I think! I don't have much to say about it directly. It was a lot of work to draw but I think the visuals serve to the textual flow here pretty well. I'm not much of a writer (or at least I don't feel like one) and, let me be candid here, I don't feel like much of an illustrator either. This is a reason I am a comic artist. My drawings might not be stellar or my writing sublime, but I'm an okay combinatorial artist between the two. That's what most comic creators have going for them, being reasonably decent at two different crafts.

Enough about me, how about that robot boy. Have you noticed what a sad image it is, a vacant playground? An even sadder one is a playground with just one child there, alone. Steel yourself for the cruelty that follows is immeasurable, child.

For the lovers of comic art theory, note the open background panel that pervades the whole picture and on which the comic finally culminates on. The whole page is a cubist painting in this way, different viewpoints at the same time. Not so much literal time passes as spatial dislocation, until the end panel pulls it all together with a final symbolist reference.

A word about the robot symbol. This is a variation of the popular DESTROY ALL HUMANS! Red Robot. I think it was popularized by Diesel Sweeties, I am just now searching on Wikipedia about it. When I adopted it there was no Wikipedia. Usually it's portrayed like an emotionless destructobot bent on total human devastation (besides Bob Ross, who gets to live) but when I looked at its big red face with huge yellow eyes I just see a little kid so there you go. I've drawn this red robot a million times, it's not a pop culture reference anymore. It is mine, but in the interest of disclosure, I thought I'd mention it.

On other news, process post soon. Ptoing helped me with this wonderful little banner for the blog:



which I've attached as my signature in the forums I frequent. I don't know what else to do, so I've reverted to 1930 marketing practices "USE BRIGHT COLORS TO CATCH THE ATTENTION OF THE VIEWER" heh.

-Helm

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Deep Inside the Earth

I'll start with the customary "how did this ever see print in a large newspaper without a long history and audience in comics?!" Now that the interrobang is out of the way, this is a comic made under peculiar circumstances. To not go too far into it, at the time my sense of priorities was somewhat unreal, I wasn't seeing the meaning in a lot of things, generally perspective was skewed. I took my time with it and I made certain it worked like I wanted it to work. It breaks various narrative rules to the point where it might be a bit unreadable as a comic, but at the time I didn't care about that. There is a case to be made about interesting art being created when the artist has a disregard for common wisdom about how his art form of choice works, but that goes only as far as you as a reader finds this particular comic to be interesting. Frankly I'd be surprised that people would see this and feel any impulse to read it.

There is a common concept in comics that if the words overpower the images, the reader skips text or skips page. The vice versa doesn't apply as such, but if a page has no text or very little text, most readers read it VERY FAST, which is a good communicational tool for the aware comic artist. Generally more than 30 words per panel (given a print size of about a4 or smaller and a regular typeface size) is a good limit, and if possible, that text should be broken up in favourable places in the panel, not infodumped on the top or whatever. This comic breaks this rule in a big way, ripping word from image at the seams, making this less a comic and more "prose with some pictures behind it". Or is it "pretty pictures with some inconsequential text on top"? In any case, I was aware of this and chose this particular harsh juxtaposition to serve this story when I made this in 2006. I do this a couple more times in the future in these series, with variable degrees of effect.

There were artistic concerns here. The whole page is mostly drawn with a pentel inkpen, I generally avoided my usual 0.1 marker scribbling. I didn't want the images to look packed with detail. In the visual arts there is a distinction between 'detail' and 'visual information'. The difference is that detail may carry information but it also may not, and just be there to pack up the image, to inspire awe to the viewer... the "oh wow, look how many little lines!" effect. I do this occasionally because awe is a useful tool for a comic artist if they can pull it off. But here I wanted the information to be there, but not so much detail. The trees read as trees, sand reads as sand, rock reads as rock. There isn't anything "playful" about this, it's a very unappealing page by design, artistically. There are no elaborate cloud patterns, no cute little creatures amongst the rocks and grass, nothing distinctively alive and relatable. The effect I was going for - and I really hope it comes through - is not of 'nature as the natural state of man' but a nature that is alien, distant and which has irrevocably sworn off the human. This theme of discontent is the one that is echoed in the text. What would you feel if you were to leave civilization behind only to find nature rejecting you harshly, not letting you in? You thought you were a natural being but you are spoiled by your years as a human being. The breeze doesn't seem soothing after a month sleeping on the ground, the trees do not mellow you with their shade but are forever there, quiet and together, against the one who absconded from his own. We think we are alone amongst the crowd but there are other, far more fundamental types of loneliness.

I often entertain fantasies of leaving, going somewhere far away and leaving everything behind, everybody forgetting my name and who I was. I don't know how common this is. These moods hit me most when I am unhappy, which is reasonable if you think about it. This comic was made during a bout of sadness, and in a way it simulated my impulse to leave and go far away. It simulated it and it also simulated its probable outcome of marginalization, of alienation even in the animal state a natura. Is a sad man less sad when he is running away into some cheap primordial fantasy of vast plains and trees and nothingness? It is pitiful that one would choose to return to his human ways just to retain some semblance of sanity through communication and expression, even more pitiful that he would have nowhere to send his messages. Pitiful, and unambiguously human.

The human state of self-awareness is inherently pathological. There are ways a living mechanism can break and become evolutionary deadwood. They are the exact same ways through which a living mechanism lucks out on a new characteristic that advances it in the food-chain. Genetic mutation is an 'error' in this way, the results of this 'error' are painted as favorable or unfavorable strictly in the practical terms of whether the mutated creature seems to survive better or worse. Self-awareness for the human is an evolutionary variation that was in this sense, excellent in keeping humans alive and in control and thriving. However there exist pathologies that are special to the thinking, feeling being that are completely alien to your cat, or even more, to a cockroach. These pathologies will brand us evolutionary deadwood. These are existential concerns, or to say, they emerge from the human ability to discern between itself and its environment and to plot a theoretical end to his life by comparing to outward death. Your cat doesn't know it will die, nor does it know it is governed by chemical impulses nor does it really "know" anything, because it is not self-aware. Your computer doesn't "know" anything either in the exact same way. Every day we breed small, inward deaths inside us through the knowledge of the outward death, through comparison and contrast with otherness. Fantasy and reality in constant, brutal friction. The same tools that enable us to overcome are the ones that destroy us. This self-awareness creates an illusion that somehow the conscious, that small part of a very complicated, interfacing mechanism that is a human being, is 'in control', is holding the metaphysical rudder of the being and makes free choices, unaffected by each and every fiber of its mechanism. Pathology. This comic is yet another examination of this pathology in action. For what is more broken than the machine that has been given the ability to say 'I am broken'?

-Helm
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Meet Bernard Chrome, Man of Many Failings

Johnny seems to be missing in action so excuse the slight delay in putting up new comics. I am in the middle of making the needed material for another Process post so that's coming soon as well. Also, excuse the lettering, I really don't enjoy it so it might be a bit difficult to make out here and there! Give me my Johnny back!

Bernard Chrome here (Γεράσιμος Τσίγκος in Greek) is a character I had created for a the series of sadistic strips you see above. I considered the strip work I had to do for the paper in some ways more difficult to do than the full-pagers, which goes to show that I'm not much of a strip artist. I haven't uploaded any of them to the blog so far because well... on one hand I wanted to save something for the print edition, on the other, I kinda like the format of the single-pages without the strip breaks which were mandatory to the paper anyway. I kinda like those four though so here they are.

The most defining characteristic of Bernard Chrome is that he is completely without any sympathy from his creator. This isn't a lovable loser who tries and fails but oh well, life is the true lesson, and all that. I detest Bernard Chrome both in his physique and his aspirations and wish the worst for him.

From the four, the Chlorine incident is my favourite. That I didn't have him yelping in pain in the last panel, but instead opted for the horrifying silent scream is a nice touch if I say so myself!

The last one is really kind of an anti-climax, I know, but this string bending fear has been a deeply-rooted one for me so I had to illustrate it at least once in my life and who better to use as a lab rat than the worm itself, Bernard.

Oh, by the way, the grotesque muscle-man in the header of Asides Bsides? That's Bernard's eventual fate. Can you spot any other page protagonists?
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