Strange Steps

Episode Two Hundred Twenty: Strange Steps.
In which heels turn black.


1 comment:

  1. Just a few weeks on, and I don't remember what was going on when I drew this one. Most likely, as with much of my life these days, this was a last minute scramble to pull something out of a hat.

    Squidman parrots a line from my therapist - 'how do we make sure you don't carry this neurosis wherever you go?' These words are falling on six year old me, in that 'Little Ingmar' photo of me on vacation, in Arizona, no doubt: angry, petulant, defiant. (This photo has shown up before in this comic.) Those ears turning practical advice into something oppressive.

    The Soap Strip frame was pulled from a Twitter feed, I think. A computer-generated metal head with moving panels opening an closing. Mutable, empty, elemental.

    The Pharm frame ... this had something to do with the out-of-context interpretation of an audio treatment. Taken, in this way, as condemnation of an obsessively repeated baseline minimization of the self. In the frame, the figures pale compared to the space in which the refrain is sent out and returns.

    The Eno frame is a quote from Dr. Michell Chresfield, U.S. History professor at the University of Birmingham, UK, from an appearance on Greg Jenner's "You're Dead To Me" history podcast ("Josephine Baker", 3/13/20). Baker, obviously, a class example of someone who put in the work to make the world better, despite a host of obvious obstacles.

    The yellow/orange coloring here is kitchen turmeric. I'd run out of the usual slightly beige tinted drawing paper, and turned to a bleached-white pad. Cartoons drawn on this paper are problematically washed out, and so I've tried coloring with coffee grounds and, in this case, turmeric, to give it a baseline against which I can adjust tint. I like the texture, but, as is always the case with turmeric staining (why must I always wear good white shirts to Indian restaurants?), it is overwhelmingly distinctive.

    The title, and tag line, from Yeah Yeah Yeah's 'Hysteric' (from "It's Blitz", 2009). Gingerly walking forward, the path is lit, but it is lit by coals that burn the feet. It just felt appropriate; I do love that song.

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