John Barleycorn Must Die

Ad 'ad hoc....'

2012-02-03T03:44:00.000-08:00

Due to personal 'Life Stuff,' we have decided to relieve ourselves of the pressure of posting every Friday. We are giving ourselves the freedom to post on an 'ad hoc' basis until such time as life decides to be a little more co-operative. We do plan to put postings up, but they will be random. For new readers, there's a years worth of material to check out on this blog - (links are in the left hand column) - with some interesting round the table discussions to keep you entertained between any new postings that we manage to cobble together before normal service is resumed.

The writing of the graphic novel, John Barleycorn, proceeds, all-be-it in a less consistent manner than we might have hoped!

Sincerely, Howard and Rex.

Yet more second drafts....

2012-01-27T03:18:00.000-08:00

H - While we work furiously on the third draft, which takes us ever further away from the second draft in terms of story, here is the next sequence of second draft pages to keep our readers entertained.

R - Shouldn't I say something?

H - No!

- 76 -

- 77 -

- 78 -

- 79 -

More Second Draft Pages.

2012-01-20T02:39:00.000-08:00

- 70 -

- 71 -

- 72 -

- 73 -

- 74 -

- 75 -

Magnifying glass?

2012-01-13T02:32:00.000-08:00

R - Howard, why have you made me bring a magnifying glass over?

H - Because I need it!

R - But why do you need it?

H - I’m glad you asked that, Rex.

R - Because...?

H - Because I want to talk about the process that I’ve been going through this week to get your artwork into the right format for Kablam (the print-on-demand company we’re using) so that we can then begin our third draft.

R - All right.

H - I’ve been learning to use the Photoshop Elements program, because we need to take the scans of your new artwork and merge them.

R - Merge them?

H - Yes. The new scans we have are in two halves because the art was drawn on A2 paper, which is larger than the A3 scanner we’re using. So the pages were scanned in two passes, and the images now need to be ‘merged’ together. Thankfully there’s a tool to do this in Photoshop which works on most of the art. Occasionally it doesn’t work, and then I need to merge the pages manually -- which can take rather a long time, as I need to match the two pieces up in layers and then ‘feather’ the join.

R - Feather...? Are you using a feather to join them up magically, like a shaman?

H - Yes and no. Mostly no. ‘Feathering’ is where I use another tool in Photoshop to blur the edges of the join so that any obvious join marks disappear…like magic!

R - Wow.

H - Then I have to ‘flatten the layers’ so that the two scanned halves become one piece of art again.

R - Do you use a rolling pin to flatten the layers, like some kind of magical pastry chef?

H - Yes and no. Mostly no. I press a button, called ‘flatten layers,’ and the computer does it…like magic.

R - Wow.

H - Once I have the picture as one piece, I then import a template which has our Kablam guidelines on it for the ‘trim,’ ‘bleed,’ and ‘live’ areas which we were talking about last week...and which I didn’t understand, in much the same way that you don’t understand computers. So Rex, do you think that computers work by magic?

R - Yes and no. Mostly yes. I have objective proof that computers are the creation of devil.

H - Where is this proof?

R - I just know it to be true, and I will reveal the evidence at the appointed time.

H - You always say that. What I think is that you don’t understand how computers work, and therefore you fear them; thus you project your fear onto a medieval personification of evil, called the devil, to deny your inability to come to terms with modern technology. Now, isn’t that the truth?

R - No!

H - Anyway, devil device or not, the computer is helping us to create our graphic novel.

R - The computer? All I recall is drawing endless pages with ink and brushes and pencils and hard labour...sweat pouring off my brow...hunched over a drawing board in a freezing cold attic, with nothing to warm me but a candle and a god given talent!

H - I told you last week, Rex, you really need to lay off the Kool Aid....

R - I can’t help it. How can something that tastes so good be so bad?

H - And I can’t help thinking we have somewhat wandered off the point.

R - Sorry.

H - So getting back to what I was trying to explain to you: After I have aligned the artwork up with our guide lines, I then export the picture as a .tiff file, which we can then import into Comic Life. That’s what I’ve been doing this week. A rather time-consuming task, I’ve discovered.

R - But you still haven’t answered my question, Howard. Why did you ask me to bring a magnifying glass over?

H - Because when I’m going through my files trying to find the various halves of artwork to bring into Photoshop, the images are so bloody small I can’t see them properly. It’s been taking me ages to find the correct halves to match up. Computers are great, but sometimes the old fashioned way of doing things is better. I can’t enlarge the tiny images on my computer, but your Sherlock Holmesian magnifying glass will do the job wonderfully.

R - Let me ask you a question then, Howard. Are you the devil?

H - Yes and no. Mostly no.

R - I knew it!

H - Unbelievable!

Top half of a prologue page...

Bottom half of the page...

Abracadabra: Two become one!

A new year begins!

2012-01-06T04:55:00.000-08:00

H - Happy New Year, Rex! How are you feeling as we start 2012?

R - I'm as well as can be expected, Howard, under the circumstances.

H - And what circumstances would those be?

R - The fact that this is the year in which the world ends.

H - I thought that was going to happen back in the year 2000? Was I wrong?

R - Clearly you were.

H - So why is the world ending this time, then?

R - Read the Mayan Prophecies!

H - I have. And from what little I understand of them, 2012 is the year that their calendar ends. Nothing to do with the end of the world. My calendar for 2011 finished a week ago, and the world is still here.

R - Look out of the window at this bloody rain and tell me the world isn't ending! I got soaked on the way over today.

H - Oh yeah, that's an unusual occurrence, Rex. Rain in Devon!

R - Look, we don't have time for this now, Howard. We have to hurry up and concentrate on publishing our comic.

H - Before the world ends...?

R - Yes! Or at least before one of us dies, for heaven's sake. 2012 will be the fifth year I've been working with this art work, and I want to move on! People get less time in prison for rioting than I've been subjected to with this art work!

H - Do you realise that you're inferring that rioting is less offensive, in the eyes of the justice system, than your artwork is...? Anyway, rioting is so last year, Rex. Get with the times!

R - Time is of the essence, Howard.

H - Time waits for no man.

R - Time and tide wait for no man.

H - Time takes a cigarette, puts it in your mouth...

R - I've never heard that one before!

H - David Bowie: Rock n' Roll Suicide.

R - That's so last century, Howard. Get with the times.

H - Okey dokey. So what does this year hold in store for John Barleycorn?

R - Our publication date is April 8th. Easter day, in honour of the pagan Goddess, Estra.

H - And before that we have to finish the comic, of course! After receiving our editorial critique in December, we managed to make a good start on the third draft by reinstating the 'Q and A' characters, before flu and the holidays interrupted our work. Then we began this year by making sure that all the technical requirements are in place for the printers: that we have the right size areas for live, bleed and trim (whatever they are), etc...

R - The 'live' area, Howard, is the area where the standard art has to be situated; the 'bleed' area is for any art work that leaves the page; and the 'trim' is the size of the page after the printers have put it through the guillotine. We need to leave the appropriate 'tolerance' for the process, to make sure that the bits we want on the page stay on the page and don't get cut off.

H - I see. I always forget that this is an area you actually know something about.

R - What, print production?

H - Yes. We're using a print-on-demand supplier called Kablam. We created our book using the computer program 'Comic Life,' and we want to make sure we have all of its technical issues sorted before we get our teeth fully into the third draft. When we present this next draft to our editor, and to a select few others for their feedback, we want it to look as nearly as possible like the final published comic.

R - Indeed we do.

H - This week we did a re-read of the story in order to see how much work we still have to do...and we were quite pleased with it overall, weren't we?

R - Pleasantly surprised!

H - There are still some character and pacing issues to address, and some scenes are still being shifted into new places...

R - ...and there are a few new spreads to be drawn, as well as some changes to already-drawn artwork. But it's close now. I can feel it, like a giant shift in the force.

H - What force is this of which you speak?

R - You know, the one of "may it be with you" fame.

H - Oh, that force. Good.

R - And what about the John Barleycorn blog, Howard? Where will it be going this year?

H - I'd like to apologise to our readers for the way it petered out towards the end of last year. Between flu and the holidays, the JB blog was a little neglected...plus the comic itself, as it nears completion, is now taking up more and more of our time. We do have two very interesting Around the Table discussions coming up, however, with writer Amal El Mohtar and artists Brain and Wendy Froud. I'd promised to get both of them up online before Christmas...but I failed, due to flu and general holiday stress. I shall now get them up just as soon as possible, so that's something for our readers to look forward to. Other than that, the blog will continue to track our progress as we near our comic's completion date...which you have just set in stone, you fool!

R - I didn't set it in stone; the stars have dictated that our book must be out by Easter, prior to the end of the world. Talking of which, what was all that nonsense clip art you put on my perfectly good John Barleycorn Christmas card two weeks ago?

H - I thought is made the art more festive, personally. You hadn't put anything Christmas-y in it.

R - I would liken your additions, sir, to putting graffiti over DaVinci's last supper.

H - There you go again, with your delusions of grandeur...

R - As I've told you before, these aren't my words, Howard. DaVinci himself came to me in a dream...

H - You really, really have to stop drinking the Kool Aid, Rex.

The JB blog 2011 Christmas card, pre Howard's clip-art fest!

Merry Christmas!

2011-12-23T07:49:00.000-08:00

Flu!!!

2011-12-16T05:33:00.000-08:00

Sorry, we're down with flu. Normal(?) service will be resumed next week!

The Reckoning...

2011-12-09T04:59:00.000-08:00

H - We've had our feedback from our editor, and it was very interesting, wasn’t it, Rex? How did you feel about it?

R - I was very inspired and excited!

H - At the time, or afterwards, or both?

R - More afterwards.

H - It’s actually quite hard, at first, to absorb such detailed and honest feedback on work that we’ve been so close to for over a year, isn’t it?

R - It is.

H - Let’s detail some of our editor's notes before we discuss our feelings about them at greater length, as I think that this is a very important part of the writing process: how one takes and uses editorial oversight.

R - Okay.

H - So, our editor took a week to read over the comic, giving it three reads. The first, we were told, was a general read, to get the feel of the book; and the second read was focused on plot and pacing, the third on character development and language. The good news is that the story works, in general, although there are a number of things that need revision. Chief among them is something which I think is common when creating ‘fantasy’ worlds, which is that we hadn’t yet explained our world fully to the reader. As our editor says, there are things we know about John Barleycorn's world that aren't yet down on the page. This makes the story hard to follow in places -- almost as if we assume the reader already knows who our characters are and how our world operates because we know it.

R - I think the more we worked on and talked about our characters and plot, the more comfortable we became with them, and we simply forgot that some of this was knowledge that we hadn't shared with the reader.

H – It's an obvious, and probably fairly common, mistake to make, which highlights the importance of giving the work to someone else to read who is outside of that closed creative environment. In our first draft, as regular readers will be aware, we had narrators called ‘Q’ and ‘A’ whom we used to explain a lot of the ideas that we are dealing with in our world: the mundus imaginalis, magic, various realms and mythical ideas about gods, etc.. And then we took those narrators out of the book in second draft, didn't we, Rex?

R - We did, because we thought the story had outgrown them.

H - We were worried about relying on them too much. We wanted a tight, character-driven plot, rather than relying on them to explain things. By taking them out in the second draft, we were forced to really focus on the mechanics of plot, and our characters' motives. This had the effect that we wanted of making the plotting of our story much tighter...but clearly it also meant that important information about the world was no longer being delivered!

R - Fortunately we still have the narrators' text from the first draft, so we had a fruitful work session yesterday re-introducing it into the second draft.

H - It was amazing how well it slotted in. With just a little bit of tweaking, that narrative device will serve to give the background information the story needs – and do it in an interesting way, without it seeming like mere “info dumps.” And yet, I think it was an important part of the creative process that we took the narrators out of the second draft, because this forced to look at other ways of delivering information.

R - Now we have the best of both worlds! A tighter plot, and the narrators have returned!

H - So going back to our earlier discussion: How did you find the experience of being edited, overall?

R - I really liked it, in the end. I completely gave myself up to someone with far greater knowledge of storytelling than myself, and I was grateful for the opportunity to have the work reviewed in that way. How did you feel about it, Howard?

H - I found it hard at first, to be honest, because someone is questioning what one has done and I always have to fight an innate resistance to that. I also have an emotional reaction against being ‘told what to do.’ I know that it isn’t what's really happening, but an editorial critique triggers something resistant inside, from childhood probably. I do work through that though, always, by putting the needs of the project above my own patterned feelings. And once I push the emotional reaction aside and focus on the work itself, it becomes very enlightening to learn where my ideas aren’t coming across, and to hear suggestions for correcting that.

R - Maybe it was easier for me, as I am not the writer of the book as such. Had the visual narrative been under question, I might well have been crying and stamping my feet....

H - Yes, like you did every time I questioned the need for certain page spreads! I think that, for both of us, once we had digested the editorial feedback over night it opened the book up to us afresh, inspiring us and suggesting a whole host of new possibilities and ideas. I can see why some writers find the idea and experience of being edited daunting, but a good editor helps one to find the core of what one is trying to say, and gives advice about how to make that accessible.

R - It's also brought me closer to some of the characters. I am able to empathise more with their story and I want to explore their relationships further.

H - That reminds me of another comment we received: that some of the characters weren’t yet fully explored -- and the subsequent discussion about this has led to a deeper knowledge of them and their drives.

R- One character in particular: the 13th Conjuror, who is still somewhat one-dimensional. I've suddenly developed an empathy with him. I want to show another side to him in the story.

H - I think for me, coming off the back of the editing process, I am left with several things: The first is relief that the book isn’t just complete rubbish! Then secondly, I have an expanded awareness of things that we'd missed out in this draft: world setting issues, some character motivations, and a lack of clear emotional reactions to events by some of the characters. And from that awareness comes an understanding of how I might correct those things, and also excitement about how better written and more substantial the book will become when I do.

R - After talking to our editor, we have pulled an entire scene which wasn't really relevant…

H - …and we’ve added a completely new scene, which is relevant.

R - We’ve extended two scenes in order to deliver more information, and change the pace…

H - …and, as mentioned above, we are re-introducing the narrative voices.

R - For all of you who are awaiting the publication with baited breath, we are getting closer now!

H – Before we go, however, we want to acknowledge how delighted we are to have received a Liebster blogging award from Katherine Langrish. We'll talk more about this in a future post, and “pay it forward” to other blogs we like. We've been so busy with the edit to give it our full attention this week, but we're honored and we'll post about this further as soon as work on the project settles down a bit.

While we wait...

2011-12-02T03:32:00.000-08:00

H - Our graphic novel is with our editor, and next Monday we get feedback.

R - So while we wait with baited breath, here is a deleted scene in which John goes to a Tarot reader.

H - The Tarot reader is Glady, who is a Romany gypsy. In my original book, 'Immortales', Glady took one of her eyes out to throw to John, as he needed the 'eye of a seer' as a bargaining tool. In Rex's version of the story, the eye was changed to a coin.

R - And in the novel now, John reads his own Tarot, so this scene was deemed redundant. Enjoy!

Aftermath...

2011-11-25T05:10:00.000-08:00

H - After a week-long bender celebrating the first birthday of our blog, we are shattered and tired and other adjectives of a similar kind. We have just handed the completed second draft of John Barleycorn Must Die to our editor, and now we're awaiting her comments, nervous and excited in equal measure. So...

R - So this week we're presenting a couple of pages that didn't even make it into my very earliest draft of the comic.

H - Ah, then it's not just me that wantonly orphans whole pages of artwork, Rex!

R - No, apparently not.

H - I'm vindicated!

R - <sigh> Meanwhile, we're keeping our fingers crossed for the well-being of the second draft while it's in our editor's hands. Wish us luck, everyone.

H - And thank you for your birthday messages last week!

Happy Birthday!

2011-11-18T06:20:00.000-08:00

H - Happy Birthday, Rex!

R - Thank you, thank you, Howard. And may I say the same to you?

H - You may.

R - It’s one year ago today that we pressed the button for the first time, and the ‘John Barleycorn Must Blog…,’ I mean the ‘John Barleycorn Must Die’ blog entered cyber space.

H - And it’s been quite a year! For the blog, for our graphic novel, and for the world at large, hasn’t it Rex?

R - Yes.

H - One year ago we were fledgling bloggers, our hands held by Rima Staines as she talked us through the process of throwing off our Luddite selves and becoming cyber-men. We'd no idea that we'd have the 'Around the Table' series of chats with so many interesting and talented people, did we?

R - No, and some of them have done very well for themselves since then! Also, we didn’t know that our blog would be read by people all around the world, even in Tonga.

H – That was one of the most amazing things for me, that we could put up a post and within hours people as far afield as America, Brazil, and New Zealand were reading it. Our ideas about the novel itself have also changed dramatically over this year. We've just finished the second draft of the comic, and it's very different from the first draft. There have been changes made to the story, and to the characters, in reaction to the first draft -- almost as if the first draft had been a proposal for the project that we had pitched to ourselves. We'd liked the proposal, but we'd then sacked the writers and gotten newer, better, writers on board. We're pretty pleased with the result! There's still a lot of work to do, but it does feel like we have the book now -- whereas at the end of the first draft, it just felt like we had a jumble of ideas that didn’t really correlate to each other. So what do you think of this creative process, Rex? Of 'discovering' the book as we worked on it? Was it in any way how you expected it to be?

R - You know it wasn’t, Howard.

H - What did you expect it to be like?

R - Initially I thought we'd just be tweaking my original story, even though umpteen people had told me that my story had failed miserably and was totally inaccessible. I actually thought I would give it to you, and you would line it all up, and that would be it. Three months, tops! Instead you ripped the novel to pieces, threw out about a third of it, and made me draw seventy new pages!

H – I'd just 'line it up,' huh? Your incredible self-delusion is worrisome sometimes. So what’s next then, Rex?

R - We start the third draft…

H - ...which will involve going into the story in even greater depth and ‘seeding’ specific plot points throughout. It should be a 'consolidating' draft, rather than a 're-constructive' one. I’m sure you'll prefer that, won't you?

R - I will!

H – It's not only our story that has changed in this past year; the world around us has changed too, hasn’t it? Regular readers of this blog will know of our increasing obsession with the synchronicities we've observed between our work and world events. It's as if the world is 'waking up' at the moment, with a light being shone into the corruption that is inherent to our system. This is something that you and I talk about a lot each day, Rex, in reference to our work...yet rarely discuss on the blog. Why is that, do you think?

R - Because our blog is about our book, rather than our politics.

H - But we both believe the book to be a product of our philosophy and politics, do we not?

R – That's true. We do. These things underpin the story.

H - Our novel is influenced by and comments on ideas that are bubbling in the world at the moment, albeit in a metaphorical and metaphysical way.

R - Yes, in that sense we are diametrically opposed to the views of the right-wing reactionary Frank Miller...

H - ...who recently wrote that the Occupy movement was made up of ‘thieves and rapists’! A bold, confrontational, and factually inaccurate statement if ever there was one.

R - I never liked Miller's work anyway. It's saturated with violence and abuse, most often towards women.

H - And what are your views on Glenn Miller?

R - He’s dead, isn’t he?

H - Is he?

R - Yes.

H - Oh. Is Elvis dead?

R - Yes.

H - Did a man land on the moon?

R - Twelve men landed on the moon.

H - Did Dianna die in an ‘accident?’

R - Yes.

H - Was Kennedy killed by Lee Harvey Oswald?

R – No, he was actually killed by a man who lives in our village, who claims that he shot him from the grassy knoll when he was just a ten year old boy. He’s an expert marksman and I, for one, believe him!

H - Was Obama abducted straight after his inauguration and replaced with a puppet of the 1%?

R - The evidence would suggest that is a distinct possibility.

H - Can a millionaire from Eton ever really understand the needs and difficulties faced by ordinary people?

R – No, he bloody well can’t!

H – Okay Rex, calm down! On a lighter note: here, for the faithful readers of this blog, are some more first-draft John Barleycorn pages – which, we admit, become exponentially more irrelevant to our story with every ticking second! But first we'd like to post a clip of Stewert Lee, our favourite comedian, in celebration of this blog's first birthday. (We posted a clip of him on our first-ever post.) Enjoy! And thanks, everyone, for following us for a year!

R – Howard? I have a statement to make. Marilyn Monroe was my mum, and all I know about my father was that his initials were JFK…

H - Shut up, Rex.

11/11/11/11/11/11

2011-11-11T03:11:00.000-08:00

11/11/11/11/11/11 by Rex Van Ryn.

The 11th millisecond of the 11th second of the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of the 11th year of this millennium. We hope this moment in time brings you good fortune!

Coincidence or Zeitgeist? You decide! Part 3

2011-11-04T04:22:00.000-07:00

H - Well, Rex!

R - Yes, indeed, Howard, well!

H - After our sojourn chatting around the table with Alan over the past two weeks, we are returning, like dogs to a bone, to our ever increasing obsession with coincidence! We hadn't planned to...

R - That's true.

H - But....

R - But there has been such an avalanche of coincidences/synchronicities over the past few weeks that I am starting to think that maybe Barry Manilow was right: "Could this be magic, now?"

H - I had a very interesting discussion about coincidence and synchronicity last weekend with Dis, the co-publisher of Hadean Press. Dis mentioned that in esoteric thought, this repetition of coincidences is known as the Golden Thread, and can be viewed as an indicator that one is on the right path.

R - ...As distinct from the Silver Thread, which keeps you attached to your body when you are travelling on the astral plane.

H - ...Or the Copper Thread, which is used to conduct electricity.

R - ...Or the lead sheets that people pinch from church roofs and turn into gold.

H - Over three months ago, Rex, you drew the page below as part of a spread for the very last scene of our book. As readers can see, the 'camera' is pulling back from St. Paul's Cathedral to a small sapling. In our story, the sapling is of great symbolic significance. It represents a re-imagined, transformative process. Little did we know at the time that St. Paul's would it itself become so topical a symbol around precisely these issues!

R - Incidentally, the price of gold is at an all time high. Does anybody want to buy any lead?

Around the table with...Alan Lee. Part 2

2011-10-28T02:51:00.000-07:00

H – Alan, you could have been a gallery artist, but you chose to go into illustration instead. Your art is almost always linked to stories: to text by authors like Rosemary Sutcliff or J.R.R. Tolkien, or to Greek, Celtic, and Arthurian myth. When you're not illustrating a particular text, do you still view your individual pictures as telling a story? You talked about capturing the essence of a landscape. Does this 'essence' always tell a story?

A - I think so, yes. When I draw something, I try to build some kind of history into it. Drawing an object that has a certain amount of wear and tear or rust; or a tree that is damaged. I love trying to render not just the object, but what it has been through.

H - So you are trying to capture time, in a way?

A – Yes. For instance, when you're drawing an old tree, you’re finding the story of that particular tree, where a limb may have been chopped off at one point, and the bark has grown around the wound. . . or a willow has grown so top-heavy that it has fallen and the trunk is lying on the ground, and the branches have started to shoot up again. You're drawing what you're seeing in front of you, but you are also drawing something that has been there for a hundred years or so. . .and I just find that fascinating. I spend quite a bit of time in my garden, just looking at trees. I spend a lot of time day-dreaming, actually. Sitting on a river bank, and drawing the river, or a bit of tree where a flood has come and lifted it up so you see the roots. And I just love that. It's almost like an excavation of the landscape.

H – One of the reasons that I like the Devonian landscape is that it has a sense of what I would call 'process' going on in it: you see the roots of the trees in the banks, gripping layers of earth and stone accumulated over time; it’s really magical. I can’t define why, it just seems magical. I guess it’s because crumbling walls and gnarled roots lead to the places of the imagination. In shamanic practice, there is that idea of finding a hole in the ground down which you travel into the spirit world or the depths of the psyche. Those holes provide access to a level of imagination and consciousness....

R - The lower world.

H - Yes, the lower world.

A - There are certain places that I keep going back to. There's a stretch of river, not far from where Brian Froud lives, that I keep going back to. There was one little tree that had fallen, and some shoots that had started to come up from it, and I photographed it, and did some drawings of it. Then I went back five years later, and those little shoots had become saplings. Then five years later, they were trees. I have been drawing that particular tree, that meter square area over the course of 30-odd years.

H - It’s like a time-lapse illustration!

A – Yes! I can get really happy just looking at a weed or a sapling growing in a crack in a wall....

H - Me too. There is a sense that life just ... is. It will always find some way to exist.

A - It's nature's momentum towards diversity and growth.

R – Well, if I see little bits of weed in a wall, I just pull them out. They make me really angry! Like graffiti.

H – So weeds are nature’s graffiti, eh, Rex?

R – Yes, and it's wrong! It's entirely wrong.

A - You can stay out of my garden then!

H - Getting back to the relationship of art to landscape: Alan, you’ve spent a lot of time in New Zealand over the past several years. Has that started to affect your work? Is your art still rooted in Devon, or is it being influenced by the new landscape?

A - The strange thing about being in New Zealand: It's a strikingly beautiful landscape, particularly the South Island with its mountains, and I’ve been photographing a lot, and putting those landscapes into the films, but I haven’t been inspired to do any watercolours based on the New Zealand landscape.

H - Is that because you don’t have the time, due to rigours of the film schedule?

A - It's not only that; it's also to do with the medium. Watercolour is such an English thing, perfect for capturing the wet and sodden, and clouds scudding across the sky. . . but I find that cameras are much better at capturing New Zealand.

H - Watercolour is your main painting medium?

A – Yes. The other mediums I like to work in are pencil and charcoal – but I find they don’t really work for capturing New Zealand either. British hedgerows, for example, are so rich and diverse, but in New Zealand a hedge is just one kind of plant that’s been put there by farmers as a wind block. There are wonderful views and forests in New Zealand. . .but there is something so rich about the landscape here in Devon, where I know the history. People have walked down these same paths for thousands of years.

H – I used to travel a great deal with my theatre company, and I find that when I travel I change a lot. I am a very different person when I go to France; and another different person when I go to Spain. Perhaps that's because I am an actor, and I just transform into someone else. I exist in different ways within different cultures. So it’s interesting to me that you don’t go to New Zealand and say: “I’m determined to paint in watercolours, even if the medium doesn’t work here.” Using a camera seems to allow you to find a different part of yourself to explore.

H - Have you ever tried oil painting?

A - I've tried oil and acrylics. I find my automatic process makes me treat them as if they were watercolours --

R - I can see how that would be problematic!

A - -- so I tend to work quite thinly and build up in washes. But I love oil painting. I do have a bit of a problem with the smell. I get quite giddy.

R - That’s all part of the process.

A - The interesting thing is that watercolour would generally be thought of as more immediate, and temporary, whereas oil would be reserved for a major painting. So you might do an initial sketch in watercolour and then paint in oil. But I do it the other way 'round quite often: I’ll do a sketch in oil for a watercolour painting. And the reason is that very often I find myself drawn into the same habits; I’ll reach automatically for the same colours, whether its oil paint or watercolour, and then I'll go through the same process each time, so they tend to end up the same. In order to find a way of getting to something different, starting off with a rough sketch in oil -- where you work out the various tones and composition -- gives you a model you can work from in watercolour.

H - So, if you start with a medium that you don’t use all the time, that automatically makes different ideas come out?

A – Yeah, it adds a kind of uncontrollable random factor. . . which is certainly present anyway in watercolour, to a large extent, which is what I like about it. It’s a kind of conversation with the medium, rather than forcing the medium to obey your will and conform to the image you have in your mind. With watercolour, you put on a pool of colour and splash water into it, and it will flow in a particular way that suggests the next action. . . so there is that intuitive automatic element that I like. But still, being able to break habits is a good thing to do occasionally. So sometimes I’ll do a rough in Photoshop, for example.

H - That was the next question that I was going to ask, because another topic that has been coming up in our conversations is about artists working directly on computer. Do you do that?

A - Yes I do, particularly if I'm working on a film. In film, you're dealing with photographic elements, so there just doesn’t seem to be any point in producing a watercolour painting, which would then need to be turned into digital form anyway. So when I was working on Lord of the Rings, I picked up Photoshop. It was a very steep learning curve, because I'd never owned a computer, or even sent an email.

H - And you found you were happy with it?

A - Yes, I picked it up very quickly. Mainly because I was doing it all day, every day, for about three years.

R – Wow. Very proficient.

A - And I quite enjoy it. I enjoy the way that you can change things without committing to anything, which appeals to my indecisive nature. You can put on an extra layer, then take it off. It is also a nice way of doing a rough that is going to end up as a watercolour, so you can arrive at something that is slightly out of your comfort zone. Then when you do apply the skills of watercolour, it is just that little bit different, and fresher.

R – I want to introduce a new subject, and I know it's one you'll like. What about tango, Alan? Are you still dancing out in New Zealand?

A - Yes, very much so. It’s a huge part of my life now.

R – When you were talking earlier about story and myth, I was wondering if you relate tango to these things -- because Argentinian tango is a very improvisational dance form, isn’t it? Do you find you are telling a story when you dance with a partner. . .or am I just being fanciful?

A – There is a storytelling element in there. The tango form is a little like the blues in that you have a kind of structure. It’s not as rigid as twelve bar, but it's very much a storytelling medium -- and there’s an element of call-and-response, and a particular arc in the musical form, that suggest a story. It's about being in the moment, with the music; and responding to your partner, and the particular feeling and momentum in her body in any one moment. It’s a very concentrated thing; you can’t think about anything else while you are doing it. If you try to hold a conversation, it just kind of falls apart. The music was what really drew me into tango. Everyone knows a few of the more popular tango classics, but once you get into it, there’s such a rich field. It’s astonishing, this kind of miraculous musical form that developed in a very small locality: two cities on either side of the River Plate, in Argentina and Urugauy. It started in the 1880s or '90s, and there are all kinds of mysteries, myths and stories, about how tango started and developed. It was first of all considered really low-life, almost reptilian. Something to be avoided and not talked about. And then it became this word wide phenomena. . .and I could go on talking about tango forever. . . .

R - I knew you enjoyed it. As an artist, everything feeds one’s art, doesn’t it? I'd assumed that was the case with you and tango, and you have just very eloquently shown me that I was right. It’s exactly what I'd imagined, that sort of trance-like state that you achieve when you dance.

A - Yes, but its also to do with movement. I try to get that into my pictures: a sense of movement, something flowing through. A while ago, I realised how much I'd been drawing dancing figures in the corners of my sketchbooks for years before I discovered tango!

H – It seems that tango combines two things in your art that we have touched on in this chat: First, you've talked about drawing a tree and having that sense of oneness and essence, and you clearly find in tango too. You've also talked about trying to draw swirling eddies in a stream, trying to capture that movement. It is almost like that oneness and movement has come off the page and into your life in the form of tango. You are famous around here now probably as much for your love of tango as for your art….

R - I’d say notorious.

A - Notorious? That sounds good to me.

H - Alan Lee, notorious for your love of tango! That seems like a good place to end, I think. Thank you, Alan.

A - Thank you.

Alan Lee.

Around the table with...Alan Lee. Part 1

2011-10-21T03:33:00.000-07:00

Alan Lee was born in Middlesex in 1947, studied at the Ealing College of Art, and worked as an illustrator in London before moving to Devon in 1975. He is known the world over for his illustrations for J.R.R. Tolkien's books, as well as for Faeries (with Brian Froud), Castles (with David Day), Merlin Dreams (with Peter Dickinson), Black Ships Before Tory (with Rosemary Sutcliffe, for which he won the Kate Greenway Medal) and The Mabinogion. He is also a film designer, having worked on such films as Legend, Erik the Viking, Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings (for which he won an Academy Award), and, currently, The Hobbit. When he's not on a film set, Alan works from an old stone barn in a small village on Dartmoor. His other interests include tango, playing blues guitar, and long walks through the countryside.

H - Hello, Alan! Thank you for joining us today.

A - Hello to you both. It’s a pleasure.

H - I’d like to start today by talking about the relationship between art and landscape. It's a theme that has surfaced in many of our “Around the Table' chats -- and it's one that seems especially relevant to your art, much of which appears to be very influenced by the Devonian landscape. How conscious are you of that influence, and did it develop when you moved from London to Devon?

A – Yes, when I moved from London to Devon, it was, as much as for any other reason, to get closer to landscape. As a child, I lived on the edge of the green belt just outside London, so there were fields and trees and canals and rivers. It was quite an interesting area, but it was also a landscape that had the detritus of the town and factories spilling over into it: there were factories beside the canal, gasworks, pig farms and slaughter houses. When I look back at my work over the years, I can see there are certain things that keep cropping up. . .which perhaps is me trying to work my way through the landscape I'd lived close to as a child. My friends and I would go and hang out in an area where trees had been chopped down to make way for extra Council Houses. All the trees were piled up in one corner of the field, and they stayed there for about five or six years. It was a kind of a graveyard for these oaks, which seemed huge to me at the time. It became an area for our camps, and it felt like a slightly dangerous wilderness, where you always had to avoid other gangs of kids.

R – So Alan, you were in a gang?

A - No!

R – Ah, that’s a great shame. I was hoping you'd say you were!

A - I was in a couple of ‘clubs’ though....

R - I see.

A - One was The Booby-trap Club. I was the prof., because the booby-traps were all my idea. The rest of the club just kind of hung out to watch me.

H - Did the traps work?

A - Yes. Often they worked on me!

H - What sort of traps were they?

A - Things like buckets of water poised above an archway...that sort of thing.

.R - Were they set up to catch rival club members?

A - No, just anyone.

R - Indiscriminate, then.

A – Yes...That landscape was very much to do with water: rivers, and gravel pit lakes, and canals. There was a canal just outside Uxbridge that was a resting place for narrow boats. We used to go down and find these boats: some were afloat, and some were sinking into the mud. They were just completely abandoned, so we would untie them and punt them 100 yards down the canal, and then abandon them again.

H – It makes me think of my own childhood. We lived in Gloucestershire and we would run around as a gang of children, from the oldest at eleven, down to me at five. It was very rural, and our imaginations would be fired. There were still bomb craters in some of the woods leftover from the war, which would often make our games very war centered. When you talk about punting a barge down an abandoned canal, Alan, it makes me think of how children, left to their own devices, use their imaginations to create stories and adventures.

A – When I was a child, it was just post-war, and there were Pill Boxes and Air Raid Shelters and a lot of cement and concrete ruins with collapsing walls. I guess they were kind of prototypes for the castles and stuff that I got interested in later on.

H – So when you found yourself drawn to myths and fantasy as an illustrator, was there a clear connection back to your childhood world? It sounds like it was a very fertile place, in the sense that your childhood landscape was imprinting images on you.

A - I didn’t realise it at the time, but looking back, yes. Certain things that I enjoy drawing now I can relate to certain things in that early landscape. When I started to draw, most of my influences were from other painters and illustrators, so I was drawing landscape at second hand, really. The trees were Rackham trees, or trees that I had seen in paintings rather than from my own observation...and I started to feel this was a real lack in my work. Everything was too generalised, and not based on real experience. Then in 1975, after having worked for some years in London as a book cover illustrator mainly, I came down to Devon and stayed with some friends up on the moor. In the course of this one weekend, wandering around the moor, finding rivers and ancient woods, I realised that everything that I would ever want to draw was actually here. There was so much richness in the texture and forms of these fantastic trees...and I decided in the course of that weekend to come and live here. I looked at a couple of houses, found one, and made an offer on it, all in that one weekend!

H – Your encounter with the Dartmoor landscape must have been a deep, profound experience. You just knew, then, that this was where you had to be as an artist?

A – Yes. I mean there were other reasons for moving here as well, to do with being fed up with London. Just finding the litter, noise, and dirt of London getting to me.

R – Alan, I understand that you looked at the cottage that I'm currently living in!

A – Yes, it was on sale for £5000....

R - Wow. I think my current landlord paid a little more for it than that!

H - Did you notice an immediate change in your work when you moved down?

A – Yes. It happened pretty quickly. I just started walking, sketching, and taking photographs of the landscape. Brian Froud had moved here at the same time, and we started to work on a book about faeries. Brian was finding inspiration in the landscape too. We didn’t go walking together: he would go off in one direction and I would go off in the other. Brian would just walk and walk and walk, and then hide himself in his studio to work, but I'd take a sketchbook along with me. I found that just the act of carefully delineating the form of a tree, working directly from nature, meant that when I subsequently invented a tree it was more naturalistic. It was almost like programming those elements into my inner computer, and then releasing them. I found that to be a wonderful way of working, and elements of landscape in my pictures became more based on the particular.

H – Another question that's come up in our discussions with other artists is whether they consider their art and spirituality to be linked. I wonder if you feel there is a connection between your work and your understanding of spirituality?

A - It's certainly true that, somewhere along the way, a spiritual aspect to the act of drawing developed...although I’ve never really thought about it too much, never examined it too closely. But there is something that is a little like...reverence...when you are drawing from nature, paying very close attention to every little detail. I think it's about the idea of there being some kind of unifying connection. The word “spiritual,' to me, means ‘connection.’

H - Of yourself with...?

A - With the landscape, yes.

H – I would imagine that drawing and observing something in such close detail could be experienced as a form of meditation.

A - And what you are doing with all these disparate elements, by drawing in graphite in one medium, is embodying the unity that lies behind everything...so clouds, leaves, trees, water, they are all captured in a net of grey silvery lines. Maybe it's just metaphorical, but it feels like it is capturing something of the essence of landscape. Some kind of unifying thing behind matter.

H - So when you look at nature, there is an 'aliveness' there that you are also trying to capture in the picture...?

A - Yes! And very often it's elusive. For every good drawing that I have done, there are whole drawers full of drawings where I haven't quite captured what I was feeling or seeing. I spend quite a bit of time by the riverside, just drawing eddies of water around rocks. I find I don’t look at anything properly unless I'm drawing it. I try to really look, following every single shape, every line, every form. As much as anything else, drawing is a way of getting myself to really look at something. Drawing people is the same. It's a privilege to be able to sit and look at someone for an hour; to look closely and to work out what is happening with all those forms and shapes.

R - You’ve used some people in town as models for your illustrations, haven’t you?

H – Including me, in fact!

R – Yes, wasn't Howard the model for the cover of J.R.R. Tolkien's Children of Hurin? Did you draw him first before creating the painting?

A - No, I took photographs of him. It’s not my preferred way of working, but sometimes it's the most practical thing to do.

R - So you’d rather work from life?

A - Yes, I’d much rather work from life, or from my imagination. I don’t really enjoy working from a photograph and trying to recreate it.

H - Rex, I've heard you say that you draw from your head, and you have to get the picture out quickly before it disappears.

R – Well yes, Howard, that's true, but that's specific to creating storyboards for films. When I draw a storyboard, the director tells me what to sketch: a bunch of people around a table, for example, seen from a bird’s-eye view. . .or whatever. Then I “see” that image in my head, and it doesn’t necessarily last very long, so I need to hammer the drawing out quickly, before I lose the image. So, I don’t draw with the same focus and intensity as Alan does, unless the intensity comes from the story I’m telling. It’s not about looking at something to the nth degree, it’s just about getting the story across.

H – Do you also hold a picture in your head Alan? Or, does the picture reveal itself to you through the process of drawing?

A – Very much the latter. I often don’t have a clear idea of what I am going to be drawing when I start, unless it is for a very specific purpose. Most of the time, I just sit down and draw a line, and it isn’t really related to anything other than this vague feeling of movement or atmosphere. That line will lead to another, and then forms will start to appear, and figures will start to appear. I usually start things very intuitively, and sort of watch the process, almost as a spectator . . . and then at some point I have to think about what I'm creating, and consciously shape it. If I am doing something for a film or book illustration, then I'm also thinking about a lot of other factors, such as composition and story-telling.

H – Another thing we've been discussing with various artists is the difference between creating commercial work, where you've been asked to do a specific job, and one’s own personal work. I suppose it’s obvious, really, that there would be a difference -- and I don’t know why, but when we first started these discussions I was surprised by this! Clearly, as an illustrator or film designer, when someone gives you a brief and says 'I want you to draw such-and-such,' it's going to be a very different creative process than when you are drawing just for the sake of drawing.

A – Yes. And sometimes it’s harder, the more specific the brief, to actually stick to it, because one is constantly wanting to go off in other directions. I can really see this when I do book covers. In all my roughs and working drawings, you see these tentative lines in the middle of the page, trying to get to grips with the composition and subject...and around the edges of the page there are multitudinous cavorting figures and completely random and surreal things going on. Sometimes there's a relationship to the central drawing, because the margin sketches will have been sparked off by it. If I'm drawing a nose, for example, there will be an array of these huge, malformed, odd noses on these various creatures around the edges of the page. So a lot of the energy that I should be putting into the brief gets spent in this kind of doodling.

H - I sometimes have a similar problem when devising theatre pieces. Often I'll start by having my cast play games, to see how they work together -- and then, through play, we'll begin to explore images, themes, and ideas in the piece. Almost always an idea will emerge that seems far more interesting than what we're supposed to be doing – and I’ll spend far too much time developing it before I finally, reluctantly, put it aside. I love that part of the creative process: when an image or a theme appears that you weren’t expecting. But then, in the end, you have to put it aside and get back to the project at hand.

A - That’s the story of my life...

Come back next Friday for part 2 of this 'around the table' chat.

Coincidence or Zeitgeist? You decide! Part 2

2011-10-14T04:44:00.000-07:00

H - Well, Rex, we have a follow-up to last week’s post, don’t we?

R – We do; and I have this pre-written statement: “While we've been writing our graphic novel, we've been using the term 'sky-fall' to describe an event which our protagonist is trying to prevent. Lo and behold, last Friday, the very day we posted ‘Coincidence or Zeitgeist? You decide!,’ the title of the next James Bond film was announced, and it was...Skyfall.”

H - Hmm. Does that go beyond coincidence into espionage, do you think?

R – Well, yes. Yes I do.

H - Though our lawyers have pointed out that there should be an ‘allegedly’ in there somewhere. (NB: we have no lawyers.)

R – But I think we should get some lawyers, fast! I can’t wait to be be in legal dispute with the biggest film franchise in the world. It will be fun, won’t it, Howard?

H - No!

R – Oh. Okay.

H – Last week we had some interesting comments on the subject of coincidences, which has lead to one of our many work-avoiding discussions. Claire Briant thought that perhaps mankind works in cycles and so ideas keep naturally cycling around. This made me think of Shakespeare’s plays, and how they remain relevant to audiences far removed from the audiences of his day. (Assuming, of course, that Shakespeare's plays were written by Shakespeare...but that's a conspiracy theory for another day.) I think it's because the plays examine such deep, archetypal work, in terms of themes and character, that these archetypal themes inevitably keep resurfacing throughout history. There will always be political intrigue, people who over-reach themselves or are lost in indecision at crucial moments. There will always be young lovers confused over love's passions, or separated by religious, family or social conventions.

R – Mermaid's comment highlighted mythological and historical figures being relevant in cycles. These figures become archetypal in our minds.

H – Ninnian Kinnear-Wilson (the mask-maker we used in my theatre company, Ophaboom) says that often people have an archetypal story that they live out, and almost as if they are helplessly tied to its plot -- which is why one often sees a public figure heading towards a car crash while seeming unable to stop it happening, even though the coming crash is glaringly obvious to everyone else. It's almost like they become the story, or the story becomes them! I used to wonder sometimes, whilst putting a Commedia mask on, whether those archetypes were hovering above the earth somehow, waiting for an actor to put on the mask so that they could play in the human world for a brief spell. Sometimes two actors, who had no knowledge of each other, would find the same voice or laugh or movement in a mask – which supports my idea. This links to Plato’s ideas about 'the plane of the ideals,' which has influenced our graphic novel, hasn’t it?

R - Yes. I'm reminded of my own experience of running myths until they are done....

H - Go on, then, do tell.

R - When I worked in advertising, I played out the myth of 'the ad-man fueled by alcohol and cocaine.' Everyone warned me this would end in tears, and I knew they were right, but I couldn’t let the myth go until it was finished with me.

H - Hmm. Was it the myth that you couldn’t let go of, Rex, or the cocaine and alcohol?

R - That’s a good question, Howard. Um….

H – Getting back to Comments on our last post: Katherine wrote about synchronicity. What do you know about that, Rex?

R - Didn’t Sting invent the word?

H - No! Sting wrote a song about it, but the concept was originally Jung’s. Synchronicity is about events that seem to occur by chance but that actually having meaning when observed together. So what might be the meaning of the synchronicities that have surrounded our comic over the past weeks, then Rex?

R - I have no idea.

H - Might it be that we are on the right track with our novel?

R - Well, yes, obviously that.

H - Or that we are on the wrong track, and should abandon it and go back to our day jobs?

R - I don’t have a day job! This is my day job. So if I were to abandon it, and go back to my day job, I’d get caught in a paradox of my own design, from which I may never return!

H - Hm. Yes, there is that attraction. Anyway, below are some photos of your initial draft from over a year ago, Rex, mentioning sky-fall: partly to prove to our readers that we're not just making this all up in some crazy paranoid delusional state, and partly because it might be of interest to some of them to see some of the very first, First Draft pages of John Barleycorn Must Die.

Next week, finally, as we've been promising: ’Around the Table with...Alan Lee’!

Coincidence or Zeitgeist? You decide!

2011-10-07T02:45:00.000-07:00

H - Rex, I understand today you wish to discuss a phenomenon that has been intriguing you since we started work on this book. Is that true?

R - Yes.

H - Well go on then.

R - Well, Howard, I’ve noticed that no sooner do we explore a subject that we are writing about, but that it appears suddenly the whole world is interested in the very same. The latest of these has occurred around our use of Henry VIII and Will Sommers in our novel. Yesterday I read on the BBC today website of a play at Hampton Court called ‘All The King’s Fools,’ which explores Henry’s relationship with his Jester, Will Sommers. There is also a new TV show, called Henry 8.0, starring Brian Blessed, as Henry, living in suburban London in the present day.

H - And what conclusion do you draw from this, Rex?

R - Well, is it coincidence?

H - It could be...or, it could be something else.

R - Like Zeitgeist?

H - Indeed. Whether coincidence or zeitgeist, it does give us the opportunity to post a few more of your deleted scenes, showing Henry VIII and Will Sommers in a police station!

Zeitgeist 1?

Zeitgeist 2?

Zeitgeist 3?

First draft p56 - 67

2011-09-30T04:16:00.000-07:00

H - The popular vote two weeks ago was for us to continue to post pointless and irrelevant first draft pages, so today we have a treat for fans of all things irrelevant. Here are the next twelve pages of the first draft for your delectation and delight. Anything you'd like to say, Rex?

R - I am genuinely astonished at how much the book has changed since this draft.

H - Yes, it's very odd to revisit these pages, isn't it, when the second draft has moved on so much?

R - Yes, and for me these images are all four years old, as they were part of your original 'Immortales' book. Looking back, these images are very different from how I would approach a story now.

H - And a slight caveat: There are places in these pages where the images don't match up fully with the text -- such as where Sophia holds a tape recorder in her hand, and where a few of the tarot images mentioned in the text don't relate to those shown. But hey, that's first drafts for you! Enjoy.

John Barleycorn awakes in the mundus....

2011-09-23T02:57:00.000-07:00

H - Thanks for your responses last week, and as a result we have decided that we will be posting some old and pointless scenes in the future.

R - And, Howard, we will be posting new scenes....

H - ...but without dialogue balloons, Rex.

R - Indeed.

H - And after last week's post with much talking and little art, we thought we'd reverse that for this week's post, and have little talking....

R - ...and lots of art!

We're back!

2011-09-16T07:16:00.000-07:00

First Draft!

H - Here, we are then, Rex, back from our ‘holiday.’ Feeling refreshed?

R - Yes. Exiting the space shuttle one mile above the earth was certainly a refreshing experience.

H - ‘Exiting?’ that’s an interesting way to describe being thrown out!

R - I thought we agreed not to bring that up again, Howard.

H - You're right, Rex; what happens in space stays in space.

R - Indeed. In space no one can hear you scream.

H - Although I did hear you scream, didn’t I? Very loudly. In my ear. For a mile.

R - I refer you to your previous comment: what happens in space, etcetera.

H - What was your favourite part of the holiday, then?

R - I liked painting the Grand the Canyon.

H - Yes, that was fun…

R -

H – And…?

R - And what?

H – And, what was my favourite part of the holiday…?

R - Oh, yes: what was your favourite part of the holiday, Howard?

H - Well, since you ask, it was the peaceful two days I spent on the Great Wall of China when you were unconscious after your spectacularly unsuccessful attempt to walk through it!

R - Hm!

H - I’ve been looking at the postcards we sent, and at some of the comments people made, and I wish I had taken Fernanda’s advice and taken a hat with me because the sun in Cairo was very hot…though due to ‘events’ we weren’t there very long!!! There seems to have been some concern about the arm and leg you took with you on holiday, Rex. Perhaps you’d like to explain?

R - They were from a classic chesterfield chair!

H - Which you took on holiday?

R - Yes, of course, I never leave home without them.

H - Unbelievable!

R - No comment.

H - While we were away, during all our mishaps, missed flights and misunderstanding-induced adventures, we were also working, weren’t we?

R - We were indeed.

H - Before we left on our trip, readers may recall that we had just finished the first draft of the comic. During our long waits in departure lounges we've been hard at work on the story: taking scenes out, putting them back in, taking them out again, putting them back in again in a different place, finding massive plot holes, fixing massive plot holes, creating new massive plot holes, fixing new massive plot holes, re-ordering scenes, re-re-ordering scenes, extending some character’s roles, reducing other character’s roles...and then doing the reverse. I think it’s fair to say that the story has changed.

R - Unrecognisably.

H - Indeed. We now have an air-tight plot.

R - And a new character!

H - Yes. And in the last couple of days we've hit upon a new way of working for the second draft.

R - We are kind of working-shopping the story and characters, like you would a play. I've never heard of a graphic novel being created this way before.

H - Rather than working with your images on the computer, as I did in the first draft, I am using the original art work and telling the story to you, out loud. After each telling, we discuss ideas that come up, and then incorporate these ideas into the next ‘telling’ of the story. This is quite similar to how I devise theatre shows, and it is working really well at the moment.

R - And it’s fun for me because it reminds me of when my Mum used to read comics to me as a kid. Also, I’m more engaged with the writing now than I was with the first draft, when you would write alone and I’d read it later.

H - That’s right. Now, as regular readers of John Barleycorn will be aware, the blog (as promised) has undergone something of a re-design. We hope you like it! But for anyone who is feeling nostalgic, I’ve taken a screen capture of the old version of the blog, so you can reminisce about the good old days.

R - Ah the good old days, when there was rationing, teachers could cane children, and smoking was good for your chest.

H - Rex?

R - Yes?

H - Shush! I need to tell the readers about some of the exciting things coming to this blog over the next few months. We've got some great 'Around the Table' sessions coming up: artist Alan Lee discussing the early influences on his work; writer Amal El-Mohtar on creativity and Tarot; artists Brian & Wendy Froud on the subject of artistic collaboration; and more. We'll also be showing you more pages of art from our graphic novel, both pencil roughs from early in the process and the final inked spreads that we're working with now. We've got a special musical project in the works, drawing on many local talents...and a 'podcast' post...and the Grand Opening of the John Barleycorn shop. All served up with the usual witless rambling, I mean, the usual insightful dialogue from me and Rex.

R - And are we going to put up any more of the first-draft pages of the comic, Howard?

H - Well, funny you should ask that, Rex, because as you well know, we are undecided. Since the story has been changing as it solidifies, those early pages are almost irrelevant now in terms of plot…

R – But…

H – But they might be interesting for our readers nonetheless, as an archive documenting the evolution of the tale.

R - So…

H - So we’re going to leave it to the will of the people. If you’d like us to post out-of-date and pointless scenes every few weeks or so, then leave a comment and let us know, and we’ll be happy to oblige.

Postcard 6

2011-09-09T08:47:00.000-07:00

Postcard 5

2011-09-02T02:44:00.000-07:00

Postcard 4

2011-08-26T02:53:00.000-07:00

Postcard 3

2011-08-19T02:44:00.000-07:00

postcard 2

2011-08-11T23:24:00.000-07:00

Postcard 1

2011-08-05T02:23:00.000-07:00

festa!

2011-07-29T04:00:00.000-07:00

Rex and Howard, off on Hols!

H – So what are we doing today, Rex?

R - Well, this is going to be our last blog post for the summer....

H - You mean we're going to take a break? A holiday?!!

R – A working holiday, Howard.

H - Hm. 'Thought it was too good to be true.

R - Yes, there’s no rest for the wicked.

H - So we won't be posting over the next four weeks?

R - No, we won't be writing new posts -- but we're going to send postcards to the blog every week, with views from our holiday tour of the world!

H - Great! And then when we get back at the start of September, a lot of stuff starts to happen, doesn’t it?

R - It does.

H - Would you like to enlighten us further?

R - I certainly would. We're going to have a new look for the blog, for starters.

H - Wowsers!

R - And we also have a fascinating ‘Around the Table’ discussion with our village's favourite son. He’s the boss, he’s the pip, he’s the championship; he’s most tip top…he’s Alan Lee.

H - Double wowsers!

R - That’s right. We should explain to our readers that I managed to kidnap Alan whilst he was briefly back in town a few weeks ago. We plied him with croissant and coffee and had a very interesting chat about his art, his tango, and his misspent youth running with the Ruislip rebels.

H - Now you’re making stuff up again, Rex. I’ve told you about that before....

R - Sorry!

H – So, as well as a new look for the blog, and our 'Around the Table' chat with Alan, what else is there for readers to look forward to?

R – We're going to open a shop.

H - What?!!

R - Well, Howard, it appears that there are some self-proclaimed John Barleycorn addicts out there, and I believe that one should feed one's addictions.

H - Are you sure...?

R - Yes. Don’t you remember the old saying, “starve a fever, feed an addiction”?

H - No, actually I don't. What are we going to sell?

R - JB mugs!

H - Triple wowsers, in me trousers!

R - You can’t say that! It sounds a bit...rude. You could say, “Triple wowsers in me jumper,” if you like.

H - That doesn’t rhyme, though.

R - Don’t be elitist! Do rhymes have to rhyme in order to be rhymes, now?

H - Yes, they clearly do, Rex. And that is why I am the writer, and you are the drawing type person.

R - I see.

H - And so, dear readers, au revoir. We'll send you a postcard every Friday, and we'll be back again at the beginning of September.

Next stop Heathrow!

ad referendum

2011-07-22T02:43:00.000-07:00

H - This week we dive into the mundus for the first time. It's a strange place, so keep your wits about you.

R - Hold onto your hats...

H - Yes, quite, Rex.

R - ...tie your boots up tight, clip on your harness, pull up your socks, put on your cricket box, adjust your goggles, tighten your belts, feed your dogs, tether your camels, lead your horse to water, say your prayers, buy your shopping, leave a note for the milkman...

H - Rex!

R - Yes.

H - Shut up!

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vita brevis, ars lunga

2011-07-15T03:59:00.000-07:00

H - It was very interesting to revisit our ‘Around the Table' discussion with Yoann Lossel over the past two weeks. Since the original conversation took place a few months ago, I’d forgotten half of the things we’d talked about. Reading the transcript of it brought back some lovely memories.

R - I have repeatedly said that they are a charming couple, and I think I have been vindicated in that opinion.

H - Vindicated?

R - Yes!

H - Why, who was against you?

R - Everyone is always against me, Howard, as you well know.

H - I think you might be a little bit paranoid, Rex.

R - Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not all out to get me.

H - Who on earth would be out to get you?

R - On earth?

H - Don’t start all that nonsense again. There are no aliens trying to abduct you, Rex.

R - We’ll see about that!

H - Well, while we’re waiting, what will we post this week, Wex?

R - Huh? What do you mean, 'Wex'?

H - It’s alliteration, Rex. Alliteration.

R - …

H - This material’s wasted on you. Never mind. What do you want to talk about?

R - Um…I’d like to talk about the three new Tarot cards I’ve just produced. “Ah,” I hear you cry, “there are only twenty-two major arcana cards in the Tarot; how can you possibly produce more major arcana?”

H - ….

R - I said: “Ah,” I hear you cry, “there are only twenty-two major arcana; how can you possibly produce more major arcana?”

H - Oh for heaven’s sake, Rex, yes, I'll say it: Ah. There are only twenty-two major arcana; how can you possibly produce more major arcana?

R – Well, since you ask, Howard, the answer is that in the spirit of this enterprise, I’ve changed them.

H - How have you changed them, Rex?

R - One of the characters from our story has been pulled out all together, and two characters have become far more relevant to the tale, hence they've found their way onto the John Barleycorn Tarot to replace two other characters that have diminished in importance.

H - This character shift came about during one of our Days of the Long Knives, when we cut several scenes, and merged others together, in order to make the story flow better. We're now happy that the story arc is working, and the first draft is going on a pace.

R - Yes.

H - So who are these new characters, Rex?

R - Maria Cross, Maggie’s mum has become Le Monde. Maggie’s friend Ally has become Le Toille.

H - And we introduce the rather charming character of Death!

R – Yes, I tried several versions of Death -- first of all looking at the traditional Tarot death card, with the skeleton, and then, after several unsatisfactory attempts, opting for a comic book Grim Reaper, who is more in keeping with the style of the John Barleycorn Tarot.

H - Let’s have look at them then….

Maria Cross

Ally

Death!

around the table with...Yoann Lossel. Part 2.

2011-07-08T06:44:00.000-07:00

Part II of our 'Around the Table' discussion with Yoann Lossel and Claire Briant. (For Part I, go here.)

Dramatis Personae:

R - Rex Y - Yoann

H - Howard C - Claire

Crépuscle Impérial.

Y – I would like to show a painting that is part of a larger project, as it may clear up certain points we've been talking about. Also, I would like your opinion, as you are part of another culture.

H - Have you got it online?

C - He's got it in his pocket!

R – Wow!

H – It's a USB stick, Rex. Welcome to the brave new world we live in!

Y – This piece is called “Imperial Twilight.”

H - “Imperial”? Is that from a French historical perspective?

Y – No, it’s not “imperial” as in French royalty -- what I wanted to show in this painting was the Celtic notion of royalty: the man, the King, linked to his soil, to the landscape. If the landscape dies, the King dies. If the King dies, the landscape dies. Landscape and man are very linked in Celtic myth. The ancient role of the King is this way.

H - This is something that is also important to [my wife] Terri, very fundamental to her work and being: that landscape and community are linked. Shakespeare explored this relationship too; in Macbeth, for example, when Duncan is murdered, nature goes crazy.

C - In this painting, the central figure is a woman, so it is also related to the notion that the woman is the soil. Without a woman, without a Queen, there is no kingdom. That is why Arthur chases after Guineviere, after Lancelot steals her, because without a Queen there is no crown.

Y - This is very true, because man and landscape cannot be separated -- and if you do separate them, life has no meaning anymore. Your landscape makes you what you are. I want to show the importance of this notion in my work. It is also the same with social context and political context. It has no meaning for us anymore. It just constrains us. I want to put more of the sacred in my work, to come back to the primary things.

Beta.

C - What Yoann wants is your first impression of the painting….

R - It’s very, very beautiful. Who was your model?

C - A friend of ours.

R - She’s gorgeous.

H - Because of your use of the word “imperial” in the title, it brings up thoughts for me of Britannia (who is a mythic figure here in England, a female personification of the British Empire), as the woman in your painting is sitting on a throne. What is she holding?

Y - A dagger.

H - Pointing towards her?

C – Yes.

R - And the throne is a tree?

C – Yes. It's a real tree, an elm. People around where we live, in Broceliande, say it is a tree that you have to visit before you enter the forest because it is your door. It is really big, and the branches here are like two arms just hugging you.

H - She is holding the dagger out, but pressed into her.

Y - Yes. This is the first painting of a series of paintings in which the subject will be shown as a double: in its Golden Age form and in its Twlight form. Here, in the Twilight version of this image, the woman represents the land and the dagger is placed against her heart -- but she's just supporting it there, she's not putting it into her heart herself. If the land is to be killed, to be sacrificed, then you are the one making that choice. This is an invitation to think about the choices you are making. She says: “I am dying, the spirit of the land is dying, because you are not believing in me anymore, you are not paying attention to me. You are putting this dagger against my heart. If you truly want to do this, I won't stop you. It is your choice. But make that choice wisely. After all, if you choose to kill me, I will come back, because I am immortal . . . but you are not!”

Gamma.

C - So think!

R - There are shades of this in John Barleycorn as well.

H – Yes, there's a story line in our graphic novel that follows this idea...

R – ...as though we are writing in tandem with what you are painting.

C – Yes, every time we read your blog, we say: “Those guys are thinking like us!” We can see where you are going.

Y - I very much wanted to discuss this with you, because there are so many things to compare between my work and your work. I am very happy to be here.

R - And we are very happy to have you here!

H - Another idea you've brought up that resonates with our work is the sense of choice, of paying attention to the choices we make. This is a very important thing for me, both spiritually and politically.

C – It is always about choice.

H – Yes – and yet society, it seems to me, so often makes the wrong choices! Life presents us with choices all the time -- between “this” and “that.” If you choose “this,” there are certain inevitable consequences; and if you choose “that,” there are other consequences. When we look back at history, we see bad choices made and we see the consequences of them -- but then we seem to go on making those same choices again, somehow expecting a different result! On the personal level, too, we so often blindly repeat negative patterns in our lives – seemingly unaware that we can actually make the choice to behave differently, and therefore create a different outcome. The consciousness that I want to awaken, through the use of this theme in storytelling, is that at any moment one can chose to do things differently. You don't have to wait for things around you to change. You can make a choice and make a change yourself.

Y – Yes, that is what I, too, want to show. It is very important, not for just me, for all of us.

H – Can I ask you a technical question now about what medium you work in? Some of the illustrators in our previous 'Around the Table' discussions started off as painters, but now work primarily on computer....

Oblivion.

Y – I am a painter foremost, and this is book is my bible: La technique de la peinture a l’huile by Xavier de Langlais. Again, it is all about making choices. I am trying to tell something; I want my paintings to bring a message to people, like in older times. . . so why not use the older ways? This book has all the old techniques -- even how to mix your colours yourself. You know, van Eyck had a better technique than painters three or four hundred years after him, and even now some of his methods are still a mystery to us. Oil paint is very demanding. You need to posses the technique or you will ruin it.

C - You do have to be very aware of the time it takes to work in this way. For example, this painting takes two days of work, and then ten days of drying, and you have to do this again and again and again.

H - So that's very different than the speed of working on a computer!

Y – Yes. It's related to the idea that we talked about earlier, about the spiritual nature of art: The way to work is to think your work, and then pass this out to your hand, and from your hand into the matter.

R - So thought becoming matter…which is a form of magic.

Y - Yes!

H - Do you work on computers at all then, Yoann, when you are doing illustrations or book designs?

Y – After the painting, yes. And you, Rex? How do you work?

R - I love working with pencil or inks on paper, or oil paint on canvas. I don’t work on a computer at all.

H – When we spoke with Didier Graffet, he told us he works on computer a lot, but is trying to go back to painting. Dave Wyatt illustrates on computer as well, but is returning to painting and drawing for his personal work. The commercial world demands speed, but it seems that when artists want to do their own art, they return to pen on paper.

Y - I think that work that is not brought into the material world is not really existing.

Skála.

H - David said that as well, that work created digitally is not “real”...

Y - It is nothing.

H - ...and printing it out isn’t the same as actually having the tactile artwork, made by hand.

R - I came back to painting maybe seven years ago, after years of working in commercial illustrating and story boarding. It was the first time I'd worked with oils, and it was an absolute delight.

Y - Oil painting nourishes itself on light, and on time -- both the time that passes, and the time you put into it. In this way, it nourishes the artist in turn.

R - Can I just mention Rembrandt? One of the reasons that I love Rembrandt so much is because his technique, in his latter years, allowed him to do amazing things with just single strokes. Like the way he interpreted pattern on cloth: If you back off from the picture, the cloth looks very real; if you get up close, it's just a very fast movement of the brush. No one else can do that like he did.

Y - This book, La technique de la peinture a l’huile, says that each painter has his own technique. It is something that develops out of old techniques, but also contains something of himself too, a chemistry that can’t be imitated. Rembrandt used a lot of resin in his paint -- the resin makes it a touch thicker, but at the same time the paint is still transparent. Nobody uses that resin anymore, but it is a necessary ingredient in his paintings. It gives a glaze to the paintings.

H – We are almost out of time, but before we finish, I want to quickly return to a previous conversation about colour, and ask a question. What is your favourite colour, Yoann?

Y - I cannot choose, because each colour is important, and each colour is telling a story. That is why I dress in black, because I do not want to make this choice! But of course, in art you must make a choice, you must find the right colours to tell the story of your painting. And if you do this right, so your painting will be right. Again we talk of the importance of making choices.

H – Thank you, Yoann, and Claire, for making the choice to come and talk with us today!

R – Yes, thank you both. It's been a real pleasure.

We end with this drawing that Yoann gave to me, Howard, as a gift when he left Devon. Thank you.

Around the table with...Yoann Lossel. Part 1.

2011-07-01T03:12:00.000-07:00

Yoann, Claire, Howard and Rex.

French painter, illustrator, and designer Yoann Lossel was born in 1985, studied at the Ecole Pivaut in Nantes, and now lives in the Forest of Broceliande in Brittany, a landscape steeped in Celtic and Arthurian myth. Yoann is an attentive and contemplative traveler through mythic and imaginary lands, seeking to weave colour and light into pathways of connection between body and spirit. In this he is inspired by his immoderate love of the Masters: the compositions of Velasquez, the colours and atmosphere of Monet, the light of Turner, and the symbolism of Morreau, as well as by a passion for ancient tales and the mysteries of the natural world. His paintings have been published in a number of books including Le Chaudron Magique, L'Univers des Dragons II, and The "Sir Lanval" Exhibition Catalog; his distinctive book designs have appeared in Le Chant des Brumes and other volumes.

Yoann lives and works in an old stone farmhouse with his partner Claire Briant, a writer and potter whose ceramics have been exhibited both in Brittany and elsewhere. Both artists joined us "around the table" during their most recent visit to Devon. We should note that this discussion, in its original form, was conducted in both French and English. Claire speaks both languages fluently (and did a valiant job of translation in both directions), Howard speaks French, Yoann speaks some English, and Rex speaks English only -- so conversation ranged back and forth between the two languages. In transcribing it into English for this blog, we've tried to keep the sense and spirit of our talk intact.

Dramatis Personae:

R - Rex Y - Yoann

H - Howard C - Claire

H - Hello to you both; it's great to see you again. I remember that the last time you were here in Devon, we sat in a pub until the early hours having a very deep metaphysical conversation about art.

Y - Yes. I remember.

H - So I’d like to start our conversation by asking: In what way do you find art to be a spiritual practice? An easy question to begin with!

Y - I think that there is no difference at all between my spirituality and my painting, because those things all come together. I develop my spirituality by painting, and painting develops my spirituality as well. My look (the way that I view things) continually strengthens my perception that there are many different ways of looking at things -- so if painting develops my spirituality, I also, in turn, use my spirituality to look at my art in a different way. My work demands that I do a lot of research, and this increases my knowledge -- which has an impact, again, on my perception, and most of all on my intuition.

H - As a theatre practitioner, my theatre work and my spiritual understanding have been linked -- in large part because I work with masks, which have long been used in spiritual practices world-wide. But the theatre that I produce isn’t necessarily spiritual. It has spirit deep within it, but it doesn’t necessarily…

C - It’s not religious.

H - No, it’s not religious. Do you see your finished product, your art, as spiritual?

Y - There are two kinds of painting that are very different, one must remember. At first, historically, a painting was intended to deliver a message. The message was in the painting. Then, in the 19th and 20th centuries, there were illustrators, like Rackham, whose paintings or illustrations were at the service of the message, but were not the message itself....

Morrigan

R - It’s said here in England that illustration sells something, but a painting sells itself.

Y – Yes, and this difference is something I keep in mind. Before the First World War, in France, there was something very pure in art, and then between the wars, something broke. After that came a time of commerce, marketing, and we're still in that time today. I want to be back in the period where art was pure, and to deliver a message.

R - Certainly that timeline rings true in England too.

H - Do you think it was the war that “broke” this purity?

R - I think this possibly began with the First World War, and then continued during the Second, but certainly the big World Wars did change many things, including art.

C - Probably our favourite period of art history is the Art Nouveau period.

R – At the turn of the 19th century.

C - Yes, so just before the First World War.

H - I’m going to change the subject a little here.... I tend to think of French artists and dramatist (and this is probably a stereo-type) as very deep philosophical thinkers...which I don’t believe is necessarily the same in England. Is there any truth in that, do you think?

C – No, I don’t think that's so in France.

H - Clearly I'm entirely wrong, then!

R - That's just nonsense, Howard! That's just your projection. Your fantasy.

H - I have the image of the French artist-philosopher, like Camus, with a Gitanes hanging out of the corner of his mouth, sitting in a cafe….

Y – But there are also a lot of English artist who I admire a great deal. It can be easy, when you admire someone, to make them over philosophic in your imagination!

H – So perhaps it’s just artists in general, then, and not a French trait.

C – It's about the personal, not the general…. But thank you!

H - It’s a pleasure.

R - I’ve experienced some of this projection, myself. When I was a child I was left-handed, and at school they made me use my right hand. About twenty years ago I started to use my left hand again, so now sometimes I use the left hand for drawing and the right hand for inking. Some people have seen me do this and have made it out to be very mystical. I once heard a story about myself where, apparently, I was working with both hands at once!

Y - It is interesting, the history of the idea of the left hand being ‘wrong.’ It goes back about two thousand years.

H - In Italian, left is sinsitra. “Sinister,” of course.

R - In my first school, I was hit with a ruler if I used my left hand, so I didn’t. I would use it privately, of course, in secret. This was in the early sixties, so not that long ago. They were still doing things like that. To me!

H - Of all people!

C - This was happening in France too.

R - It’s a tragedy!

H - Yoann, I get the impression that you do a lot of research into the esoteric when you create art. We had a comment on our blog a while ago, from Rima Staines, talking about artists' use of the Golden Section. I wonder, when you do your work and plan it out, do you specifically put esoteric design into your paintings?

Geis

Y - “Esoteric” is very subjective. Symbolic, of course. I deliberately use symbols in my painting. Esoteric...what is esoteric? Esoteric for whom? Can you define it?

H – Yes. Hmmm.... No.

R - You just said “yes,” Howard.

H - And then I said “no,” Rex, but I'm going to say: maybe. Yoann, you ask: “Esoteric for whom?” -- which I think is an interesting question. What is “esoteric”? There are strands of philosophy that one can define as esoteric threaded throughout Western history, from Plato and the mystery religions through gnosticism and the Renaissance, right up to the present day. Scholars such as Antoine Faivre point out four main characteristics related to esoteric concepts, one of which is the notion that there are “correspondences” between different levels of being, so that the material realm, the realm of ideas, and the spiritual realm have links between them.

Y - It is like a tree.

H - Yes, that is a common symbol. Another characteristic of esotericism is a sense of “living nature,” which is that the whole of nature is alive, conscious….

Y – Okay, okay! Yes, then, it’s very, very esoteric, my work! The role of the artist is to wake up consciousness. What you say is very true. We are all connected to an ancient memory -- a humankind memory deep inside us. And as artists, we are under an obligation to create something new out of it. For example, where we live, in the forest of Broceliande, we have a strong Celtic tradition and the myths are very present. Some people who are living there are trying to dig up the ancient Druidic tradition, and to walk this path. But it is a path with no path, because it was an oral tradition, so nobody today can know what the old traditions really were. You can walk this path if you want to, but if you are aware that the old path is not existing anymore, you have to walk, I don’t know, along beside it, or below it. We can recreate a new path, because we are aware of what once was and what we can do now.

R - As artists?

C - Yes, of course.

H - Before I studied Western Esotericism, I would look at traditions from other parts of the world and be inspired by them . . . and they were very good, you know: Taoism, Buddhism, etc...the spiritual side of religion. We have this sense, here in the West, from these old myths of Europe, that there was once a Golden Age from which we have fallen -- as if somehow the ancients “knew” more than us. But actually we can start right here, now. We don’t have to look back to ancient times and say: what did they do? We can be inspired by traditions of the past, but we're human, just as the ancients were, and we have the same ability to create our own path. It’s just a path of the heart, after all, of rising consciousness....

Reflet de L'Autre Monde

C - The Golden Age is a myth, a story; it isn't necessarily real in a literal sense.

R – Exactly.

Y - It's important not to make a confusion between spirituality and the acts related to spirituality, like ritual. You can base your work on the ancient spirituality and philosophy, but to base your work on the ancient rituals created for different people in a different time, is meaningless.

H - In my own field, Commedia dell'Arte, what my theatre company tried to do was to base our work on the spirit of Commedia, not the historicity. Some people look back to the work of the Comédie-Française in the 19th century, or the earlier Commedia of Italy, and try to replicate it -- but those historical form of Commedia have no meaning to audiences today. Actually the meaning of Commedia passed through the Comédie-Française: it inspired their work and then passed on. If you try to go back,you create a museum piece, not living theatre. It no longer resonates. We have to take the spirit of the form and create Commedia that relates to the modern world.

Y - Bien sûr, bien sûr.

H - Can we just go back a little now? You said that the job of the artist is to raise consciousness, and you obviously believe that strongly....

Y - It is more than obvious. It is the basis of my personality and choices in life. I am not here to save the world. Politicians are here to make laws, and the religious are here to help people to reveal themselves. Artists are here to show very clearly the social contexts, and maybe to critique them. They walk alongside the change in paradigm.

Don't miss Part 2, next week....

ad referendum.

2011-06-24T07:16:00.000-07:00

H - So, Rex, we have the next sequence of first draft pages this week, where we catch up with Maggie's tale.

R - Yes.

H - Okay. What’s wrong?

R - I'm sulking today.

H - I can see that. What’s wrong?

R – Well, just when I thought it was safe to go back to the studio and re-engage with our book, I find there's been a further three scenes cut, making a total of 60 pages of art work gone from my original story. That’s six, zero, Howard. 60.

H - Well, yes, Rex. Coming back to the story after my stint in Portugal, we both decided that those scenes were holding up the flow of the piece.

R - I'm not saying it wasn’t a mutual decision. I’m just saying.

H - Right. Is that why you've just shown me the comment that The Real Anonymous made on one of your posts whilst I was away?

R – Maybe....

H - Well, let’s look at it then. He (or she) writes:

“When does one decide to collaborate, or not to collaborate in production? Is it inevitable, ie: is everything essentially a team effort to bring a work to fruition? How do strong minded creatives blend seamlessly together? What are the individual skills and contributions? Does it help to have a tolerant personality - or at least a strong business model?! What are the advantages and disadvantages of collaboration - are there unacceptable compromises etc? Does it help to be crazy? Must there always be a ‘fall guy’?!! What is the give and take?”

There are a number of interesting questions in TRA's comment. It seems that at this moment we're addressing the subject of compromise: how must one compromise in order to create a collaborative work of art? I grant that you are having to do more than your fair share every time we take art work out of the book. I know that each page of art has entailed a lot of work, and it must be hard to let it go for the good of the overall project.

R - Well, thank you, Howard. I just wanted an acknowledgement of that.

H - So are you feeling better now?

R – Yes, I am.

H - Talking about the skills and contributions that we each make to this collaborative process, it's obvious to me what yours are. Your ability to draw scenes in such an interesting and skillful way, and at such speed, still amazes me.

R - It’s okay, Howard. I told you, I’m fine now. I'm not sulking anymore.

H – Oh, good. And, of course, the plus side of cutting those scenes is that you get to draw 70 new pages. That’s seven, zero, Rex. 70.

R - Don’t push it.

H – Well no, I probably shouldn’t. Um....I wonder what my contribution to the graphic novel is?

R -

H – Rex...? I was saying: I wonder what my contributions are? I guess one contribution is that I'm helping you to tell the story in a comprehensible way. Creating a story out of pre-existing artwork certainly has its challenges, but there are also advantages to working within these confines – similar to the way that working within the restrictions of the haiku or sonnet form can shape a poet's ideas. I don’t think we would have come up with this particular plot and set of characters if we hadn’t started in this topsy-turvy fashion, with the art work first.

R - But we'll work differently next time, won’t we?

H – Yes, we will. Definitely. This is a crazy way of working! Next time, we'll create the story first, illustrated with rough sketches -- and only once each spread has passed muster will the pages get pencilled and inked. No cut scenes! What will you have to moan about then?

R - Don’t worry, Howard, I’ll find something.

H - I’m sure you will! Talking about accepting changes, we have to ask our readers to accept a little change too, don’t we?

R - Yes, and I hope they can do it with the same magnanimity and good spirit as myself.

H - Quite. So then, dear readers, we have warned you before that the comic pages posted here are in first draft form. As you read the following pages, one thing you need to know is that the earlier scene where Vali first meets Maggie in the Mundus has changed a little. In the scene we're showing today, she says: “The Tattooed man knew my name.” This wasn’t in the first draft of the previous scene, but will be inserted into the second draft. Rex and I hope you all enjoy the new pages:

- 38 -

- 39 -

- 40 -

- 41 -

- 42 -

arcana imperil

2011-06-17T02:43:00.000-07:00

H - Hello, everyone. I’m back and fully functioning now, and want to say thanks to our readers for all the words of welcome. So then, Rex....

R - Yes?

H - Is there anything you need to tell me?

R – Er.... Nope.

H - Everything went smoothly, then, whilst I was away?

R – Er.... Yep!

H - Buttons got pressed?

R – Indeed they did.

H - Blogs got posted?

R – Indeed they did. Why do you ask?

H - No reason. It’s just that some of the comments last week seemed to affirm your capability a little too strongly, to my mind, and I've wondered if I shouldn’t look through the posts to make sure that everything functioned properly in my absence. Also, Terri has been decidedly cagey whenever I talk about the blog ….

R - You know what, Howard? All’s well that ends well. It’s not going to help anyone dredging over past posts. We have a book to write and it's time now to press on. Draw a line under it all. Never look back. Onward and upward.

H - To infinity and beyond?

R - Absolutely!

H - Well the blog is still here, so you obviously haven’t deleted it. The Internet is still here, so you managed not to blow that up! So, I guess that whatever happened, or didn’t happen, is just water under the bridge. I’ll do a deal. I won’t look, you don’t tell. How’s that?

R – Agreed. Absolutely. Yes, that sounds very fair. The first rule of blogging is don’t talk about blogging.... So then, what have we got for the next couple of weeks for our readers to look forward to?

H - Well, Rex, I’m glad you asked that question. We are back to working full time on the comic from Monday, now that I have recovered from my excursion abroad; and next week we will be posting the latest first draft pages, where we find out what happens to Maggie after she has been thrown out of her home.

R - Yes, that should generate a bit of pathos, shouldn’t it?

H - There will not be a dry eye in the house, I suspect.

R - Then we have the long-awaited “Around the table” interview with Yoann Lossel and Claire Briant?

H - Yes. It's all recorded in my laptop, and I just need to transcribe it. I haven’t listened to it since we first recorded it, and I am eager to listen to it again. My memory was that it was a fascinating discussion.

R - It really was.

H - So, aren’t you going to ask me about Portugal?

R - Yes. So how was Portugal?

H - Don’t ask.

R - Okay then, I won't.

H - Do you remember the discussions we've had on this blog about art and life mirroring each other?

R - I do.

H – Well, that happened again in this instance. In the end, the play we devised wasn’t called The Tempest, but: Commedia Dell ‘Arte: Lost and Found. This seemed to be a more appropriate title after the work ran into a tempest of its own. It actually ended up being a great show, but it was a little like pulling teeth to get there. I’m glad to be back here. With you. Writing.

R - Did you get to wear your funny masks, and do some dances and stuff, like you do?

H - Do you actually know what I was doing out there, Rex?

R - I thought you were doing funny dances and stuff, like on the Ophaboom DVD you showed me, where your legs were going all over the place and you were dressed like an old lady or something….

H - I was directing the show.

R – So...?

H - So, I wasn’t doing funny dances. I was getting other people to do funny dances.

R - Oh. Right.

H - And what were you doing, while I was away, apart from running the blog ‘smoothly’?

R - I’ve drawn 26 new pages of art.

H - Wow. That’s a lot.

R - They have yet to be inked…but you need to look over them first and check that they are all okay.

H – Well then, let’s go and do that ….

cursum perficio

2011-06-10T04:47:00.000-07:00

R: You're back! Hurray!!!! The blog is saved...er, I mean, the blog is back to running on full steam again.

H: Slow down, Rex. I've literally just got back, and I'm completely exhausted. We're going to have to keep this post short today, and put up one final piece of deleted art work. I'll be back at full steam next week.

R: No, no, no! Let's do it today! You're here, I'm here, the readers are here. The Rex and Howard Show is live again!

H: Alright then, Rex. As you know, I haven't been online while I've been in Portugal, I needed to keep my mind focused on my work out there, so why don't we have a look at what you've been up to here while I've been away --

R: Er, maybe you're right. Let's wait till next week. No need to look at that now, Howard.

H: But --

R: In fact, you're looking very, very tired indeed. Maybe you should go to bed. Rest. We'll start up again next week...here, let me press the button...

Goddess 1

Goddess 2

Rex Week III

2011-06-03T00:50:00.000-07:00

Page 1

Page 2

Page 3

Page 4

R - Okay, this is getting crazy now. I’ve lost my notes about this week's post, and I’ve wiped my hard drive, whatever that is, and I can’t think of what to say about these scenes. I'll be glad when Howard's back. I need help! Hmmm, maybe his wife will help me. She's good with words. TERRI! TERRI!

T – Good lord, what is it, Rex?

R - I need help with the blog!

T – What are you doing here in my kitchen? Why aren’t you working at your own house?

R – I don't know. This is where I come to work every day, isn’t it? Isn’t that what I do?

T – Well, yes, when Howard’s here, but —

R – When is Howard coming back?

T – (sigh) How many times are you going to ask me that? He'll be back from Portugal next week. Now, what's the problem?

R - I don’t know what I’m doing! What am I supposed to write? Howard usually starts a post by asking me questions, but I can't very well ask myself questions, can I? I don't want to run the blog anymore! I've gone from being Captain Kirk to the guy in the landing party with the tight red shirt who gets killed on the planet.

T – Rex, what are you talking about?

R - I don’t know!!!

T - All right, calm down. I'll make you a cup of tea. Just take a deep breath while I put on the kettle. Would it help if I asked you some questions about the art?

R – Yes!

T – Okay then, let’s go through this week’s deleted scene. Isn't that what you're meant to be doing?

R - Thank god somebody knows....

T - The first few frames of the sequence are close-ups of hands and feet, which seems to slow the action down. Why did you decide to draw it that way?

R - I wanted readers to have a sense of: I don’t really know what is going on here, but I don’t think it's going to be good. Hitchcock does this a lot in his films. In The Birds, for example, when the protagonist finds a body in the local school, there is a long sequence of the man searching the building looking for his friend. He goes down a lot of long corridors. This was designed to agitate the audience and create a sense of stress. When the man finds the body, Hitchcock focuses on the corpse's eyes in a series of three jump cuts...and we see that the eye sockets are empty. The birds have pecked them out.

T – Gross.

R – It is truly a horrific sequence.

T - Is that why there are birds in your scene, too? As an homage to Hitchcock?

R - No. They're just there because Ray keeps pigeons.

T – Oh. So then talk me through the rest of the scene.

R - We don’t see the antagonist immediately, just his hands and feet. We don’t know who it is, until the reverse cut, which reveals Ray, looking at a photo. On Page 3, the flight of the birds emphasizes his madness. Ray has actually ripped open the feather pillow that he used to smother his mother-in-law, but the idea here is that in his mind he sees the feathers as a flock of birds. Then, when he leaves the flat and enters the hallway, he is confronted with himself -- as in: What have I done?

In the first set of notes Howard wrote for this scene, the cat in the hallway talks to Ray, instructing him to confess to the murder. We were intending to imply that the 13th Conjuror was manipulating the cat. Both Howard and I really liked the idea, but in the end, Ray wasn’t an important enough character to justify the length of this sub-plot, so the whole thing was cut.

T – The same thing happens when writing a novel. Sometimes there are scenes that are perfectly good in themselves but that don't serve the overall plot, or that slow down the pace of the story. You have to take those scenes out, even when it's painful to do so.... Is there anything else you want to say about this art, or are you finished?

R – I'm finished.

T – Well done!

R – Thank you! I feel much better. But Howard will definitely be back next week...?

T – Just press the button and publish your post, Rex.

R – This button?

T – No! No! Good lord, don't touch that one!!!

R – This one?

T – (sigh) Yes.

Rex Week II

2011-05-27T03:37:00.000-07:00

R – The art in this week's post comes from deleted scenes focused on Ray Butcher, Maggie’s step-father....

Page 1

Page 2

Page 3

Page 4

Page 5

Page 6

Page 7

R – These pages were dropped only a short while ago. Both Howard and I liked the sequence a lot, and we even toyed with the idea of extending Ray’s plot-line beyond the original drawings...but ultimately we decided the scenes didn't work in the overall story, and so they had to go.

Talking of which, I hate to admit it, but this week’s blog post very nearly didn’t work either. “All you have to do is press a button,” is what Howard said, but I don’t just have to press a button, I have to think, and type, and spell, and turn the computer on and off! The Luddites were right, we should have listened to them! Smash the machines, I say, smash them! Has no one ever seen Terminator, or Battlestar Galactica?! Machines are evil! So count yourselves lucky that I managed to get this blog post together at all....

Right. Now, where is that button? I need to press a button…. Is it that one?

No.

That one?

No.

Ah. Must be that one….

Rex Week I

2011-05-20T00:03:00.000-07:00

R - Hello, this is Rex Van Ryn, Captain of the Starship John Barleycorn, and this is my blog! In this week’s post, I shall introduce you to the first of the scenes deleted from our graphic novel: six pages of art that would forever have been lost to the world were it not for this opportunity to give them a proper public viewing!

Page 1

Page 2

Page 3

Page 4

Page 5

Page 6

The art was originally drawn for a never-completed story, The Machines of God, as an action sequence over which a narrative would run. I later re-worked the pages into the first draft of John Barleycorn Must Die -- but Howard cut them when he was working one weekend and, mysteriously, one of the pages of this sequence turned blank! He took this as a sign that the sequence should be axed. He’s like that. Most people would have just re-loaded the page. However, after he had ground me down with hours of justification for his actions, I finally agreed that the sequence was surplus to requirements, as it slowed down the action of the Prologue.

I'm going to take this opportunity to tell you a little about the initial ideas behind the scenes, which will demonstrate the thought process I go through when turning a story into a sequence of drawings. This sequence follows our young heroine, Maggie, on her journey from her home in Tower Hamlets to Central London, where she meets her friend, Ally. On the way, she steps over a drunk, navigates some of the local pond-life, and views London Town from the top of a bus.

Some of the more observant amongst you may have noticed that a few of the pages we've posted so far have a bird motif at the top, and Page One of this sequence is no exception. Whereas I’d love to claim this has some deep esoteric meaning, in reality it is just a page extension, necessary because the format of the comic changed from A4 to standard American format. This format change happened when I first took the art from the three unfinished comic projects (Immortales, Machines of God, and The Wallpaper That Ate London) under my wing and decided to create a single new story (John Barleycorn). The bird motif that I used to extend the page size is one of those 'happy accidents,' as I now think that the repeated use of this motif also serves to unify the various scenes.

The narrative of the first two pages, above, is designed to emphasize the vulnerability and isolation of the young girl. I show that the lift is out of order, so she is forced to take the staircase. At the base of the stairs, from a worm’s eye view, there is drunk slumped over his bottle and piles of rubbish. Since they are in the foreground of the frame, we see that the girl will need to step over them both. Were I to reverse the shot, so that we look down the stairs, the sense of danger would be lessened.

On exiting the stairwell, the environment is hostile, dark, and it's raining outside. The tower block literally towers above the girl. This shows a harsh side of London, as many people experience it: the city as a lonely, threatening place. In The Machines of God, the young heroine (who was not called Maggie in that story) was very capable of looking after herself on the streets, as we see in the scene above where she takes swift action to overcome the threat of a gang of boys. But this was not the image we wanted for our Maggie in John Barleycorn.

I particularly like the sequence of drawings where the girl is sitting on the front seat at the top of a double-decker bus. (This is a position I liked to sit in when I lived in London myself.) As well as giving us a strong sense of Maggie's isolation, it also evokes the feeling of being on top of the world...like being in a lighthouse.

I hope you enjoy looking at these pages of art (ruthlessly discarded by Howard) as much as I enjoyed drawing them.

Now...which button do I press?

nihil declaro

2011-05-13T23:36:00.000-07:00

H – I'm going to be away for the next four weeks, Rex. How are you going to cope?

R - I shall cope perfectly well, thank you.

H - Good! I’ve set the posts up, so all you have to do is to press a button. Can you manage that?

R - I’m not a complete Luddite, Howard. I know how to press a button!

H - We’ll see, we’ll see. In this week's post, I want to wrap up a few themes that have been developing here on the blog and in the Comments section over the past month or so; and to talk about what's supposed to happen next, while I'm away. Are you ready?

R - Yes.

H - Let’s pick up on something we spent a long time discussing when we started this blog: our decision to post our first-draft comics pages here. This is primarily a “making of” blog, examining the process of creating a graphic novel (aimed at readers interested in “creative process” issues as well as comics fans) – rather than the kind of comics blog where a final story is presented in weekly installments. Because of this, we spent a good while debating what we should post here by way of comic pages, since normally one doesn't publish first-draft work! However, we realised early on that in order to discuss the ‘making of’ our novel, we'd need to introduce some of the characters and plot lines -- otherwise the blog would be full of story references that readers wouldn’t understand. It would become nonsensical!

R – Yes, but on the other side of the argument, we didn't want to lead people down plot routes that might end up changing radically in subsequent drafts; we didn’t know if that would be fair to them. Or to let them become invested in characters that might have to be altered or cut.

H - Ultimately we took the decision (for our American readers: made the decision) to post the first-draft pages and be damned. Partly because we had no idea whether anyone would even be reading our blog at this stage --

R - We hadn’t anticipated such an avid audience!

H – -- and partly because these kinds of changes between drafts are part of the creative process. So we're going to carry on posting first-draft pages from the novel...but I’m afraid those of you on the edge of your seats waiting for more story are going to have to be patient! In between postings of those pages, there will continue to be 'Around the table with' discussions with other creative artists, and 'making of' posts like this in which Rex and I ramble on about…

R - …stuff.

H – ...our working methods. For example, as the world within the mundus has developed, we've realised that we need to do more research into some of the historical periods we touch upon: Tudor England, the English Civil War, America in the 1920s and 1960s, etc..

R - We don’t have to go into enormous depth, though, Howard. We don’t have to become experts on these subjects, do we?

H - No, but I'm sure that as we look more closely at these periods, our research will throw up ideas and themes that will influence the feel of the comic. I'm reminded of a comment that Mermaid left here on JB a few posts ago, about living in a time of change. The periods we've just listed were all times of immense turmoil. Did people living in these times, I wonder, have a clear understanding of just what they were living through? This quite fascinates me, this idea of how we view, and are viewed by, history. Will future generations look back on us, then, and wonder why we allowed so much bloodshed over religious ideas that are based on such antiquated texts? Or will we be the generation that finally breaks away from this? And if not us, then which generation will?

There's a technique I use when I'm going through a difficult situation, or want to achieve something new in my life, which is to accept the fact that my current situation will change, because ultimately it can’t not. Even the mighty Roman Empire vanished into the dust of history. Once I have meditated on this and truly accepted that change is inevitable, then it's just a matter of negotiating the point in time when that change is going to happen. In my mind, it’s no longer a question of if, but when.

R - I agree entirely. “I am Great Ozymandis, King of Kings…”

H - Ah, Shelley!

R - Exactamundo!

H - And now, Rex, we must discuss a more important issue than the overthrow of tyranny and the tides of history….

R - Which is?

H - Last week, in Chris’s comment, we were referred to as the ‘Laurel and Hardy of comics creators.' So, the question is: which one of us is which?

R - Well, I’m clearly Stan Laurel.

H - How so?

R - Because I’m the one being picked on and insulted all the time, which puts me squarely in Stan Laurel’s shoes.

H – Oh, right. Okay...I guess.

R - Why? Do you think differently?

H – It’s just that I kind of think of you more in the Oliver Hardy role.

R - Why do you think that?

H – Well, you know…you have a similar physique.

R - Are you saying I’m fat?

H - I’m just saying you have similar physique to Oliver Hardy.

R - How dare you!

H – Well honestly, Rex, how much do you weigh?

R - About sixteen and a half stone.

H - I rest my case.

R - You can’t rest your case, Howard! You’ve proven nothing.

H - You’re right. I can’t rest my case...because…I have to pack my case for Portugal, as I Ieave tomorrow!

R - Nice segue, Howard.

H - I thought so. It leads us nicely into explaining to our readers what's going to happen to the blog while I’m away. You'll be in charge for the next three weeks, posting deleted scenes of Maggie and Ray Butcher, and discussing why they were axed. Then, when I return, we'll have the next set of first-draft comics pages ready to post; and then the week after that, we have the next installment in our ‘Around the table with…’ interviews.

R – Yes, I’m really looking forward to that one! Tell them about it, Howard!

H – A week ago, we had the privilege of chatting with Yoann Lossel, an amazing French painter and illustrator, and his partner, Claire Briant, a ceramicist. We're not able to post the discussion sooner as we haven’t had time to transcribe it yet, but we'll do so when I get back from Portugal. It was a very fascinating dicussion, and one not to be missed.

R - I had the pleasure of spending a day with them afterwards, and truly Howard, they are such a charming couple.

H - So that's all to look forward to in late June, when I return to Devon. And now I can put the moment off no longer. Rex, I place the blog into your capable…I place the blog into your hands. Look after it, care for it, nurture it….

R - Hooray! Now I am at the helm of my very own star ship!

H - Oh god!

R - It will be Warp Factor Ten all the way! The engines will ne take it, but I will boldly go where no man has gone before! Brace yourselves. I am setting a course for the heart of the sun -- a three week ride of thrills, spills, and crazy pills. I will finally allow the scenes that ended up on the cutting room floor to see the light of day.

H - Rex, next week's post is all set up and ready to go; you just have to press a button. That's all.

R - I know, I know. But on the basis that a picture speaks a thousand words, there’ll only be a fraction of the drivel our readers have become accustomed to. And each week I will be presenting a special, in-depth introduction to the series of sequential images: explaining the thought processes behind their creation, their heroic struggle for recognition, and their tragic demise at the hands of the tyrant. It will be my very own Director’s Cut...and like Ridley Scott, Alfred Hitchcock, and Orson Wells before me, I will blaze a trail, defying the studio bosses and speaking truth unto the nations. It will be the John Barleycorn blog, Howard, but not as we know it!

H - Rex, what on earth are you talking about? What studio bosses?

R - Will Rex survive the weeks of solitude? Will he triumph over technology? Will the button be pressed on time? Tune in next week, same Bat Time, same Bat Channel….

fortes fortuna adiuvat part 4

2011-05-06T03:05:00.000-07:00

H – In this week’s post, we're going to wrap up our introductions to the characters in our story, covering the last of the Major Arcana in your Tarot deck, Rex. It seems a good idea to finish these because I'm going off to Portugal soon, to direct a production of The Tempest --

R - And I get to take over the blog while you're away!

H – Yes. A worrying thought indeed. But I haven't left yet, Rex, so let’s look at the last of the characters:

13: Death - Ray Butcher.

H - Ray Butcher is Death.

R - Death Ray! Flash Gordon conquers the universe!

H - You see, this is exactly the kind of nonsense that makes me worried about what's going to happen whilst I am away!

R - It's exactly the kind of nonsense that has been edited out of this blog, time and time again -- and exactly the sort of nonsense that it needs, in my opinion.

H - Like I said, I haven't left yet, so let’s get back to Ray. Ray, who is represented by Death.

R - He brings about the demise of a central character! ...Or does he?

H – Yes, he does, in a manner of speaking; and that will be in the next set of comic pages that we post, on my return to Blighty. We’ve met Ray before, of course, as the alcoholic, feebleminded ne’er-do-well who threatened to kick Maggie out of her home. One reason why we didn’t post his Tarot card last week was that we'd originally cast him as The Devil, but that card is now…

15: The Devil - Maximillian Knight.

H - …Maximillian Knight, who is a fire-and-brimstone preacher.

R - Enough said. That's all this character needs in order to be the Devil, in my book.

H - Although there are also greater depths to him, plot wise.

R – Yes, for he's another of the 13th Conjuror’s puppets.

18: The Moon - ?

H - Number 18 is the Moon.

R - Yes, she is one of my favorite characters and absolutely critical to the story.

H – Actually, we have absolutely no idea who she is yet, do we Rex?

R - Er, no.

H - We hope that the process Jon described in the Comments last week is going to start to work with this character: that she will make her role known to us in the next couple of months. Luckily, she doesn’t first appear until quite a way into the book.

R – Ah, but she's the subject of a fourteen-page spread that I plan to draw in your absence, Howard!

H - Hmmm. Well, Rex, if you don’t mind having more cut scenes, then fill your boots (or, for our American readers, ‘go to town’).

R - My word!

H - Next week will be the last post before I go. We’ll talk about what's supposed to happen on the blog while I am away – such as posting art from some of our previously cut scenes, which I know you are excited about.

R - Oh yessssss!!

H - Seriously, though, getting back to this Tarot card: we do have a few ideas about this character, but nothing fixed yet.

20: Judgement - Oliver Hardy.

H - So, Oliver Hardy. Obviously a character in the mundus.

R - Yes. He is the Oliver Hardy of the films, as in Laurel and Hardy, but within the mundus he dresses like Doctor Watson, as in Sherlock Holmes. He is a detective who works for D.C.I Norma Jean Baker (Marilyn Monroe).

H - And his partner is…

21: The World - Stan Laurel.

R - Stan Laurel, of course.

H - So, we have Henry the VIII as a judge, Marilyn Monroe as a Detective Chief Inspector, and Laurel and Hardy as detectives!

R - Yes.

H - Quite a strange police force! But the piece de resistance is that the Chief of Police is none other than…

22: The Fool - Will Summers.

H - ...Will Summers, Henry the VIII’s fool. I think he's one of my favorite characters! And it's clear why he represents the Fool in the Tarot deck – although, unusually, he is number 22 instead of the usual 0. Why is that, Rex?

R - “Whoever shall be first shall be last, and the last shall be first.”

H - That may well be true, but why is this card number 22 instead of number 0 in your Tarot?

R - Because that’s how it was in the Bacchus Tarot, which I based my Tarot on. And I wanted to keep the 0 as a substitute number, in case of emergency.

H - Very wise. So, there they are: all the major characters in our story...except one.

R - Yes, Glady, the fortune teller. But she is the one who ‘lays’ the Tarot, so she is not ‘in’ the Tarot.

H - That sounds very profound! Be in the world, but not of the world.

R - Don’t try to bend the spoon, but know that there is no spoon.

H - Many a mickle macks a muckle.

R - What!?! What does that even mean, Howard?

H - It’s Scottish.

R - And you’re worried about me taking over the blog for a month!

fortes fortuna adiuvat part 3

2011-04-29T04:25:00.000-07:00

H – In this week's post, we're introducing more characters from our story via your Tarot deck, Rex. We can’t put them up in chronological order because – since December, when you drew them all in a fit of excitement -- several of the plot points of our story have changed, and thus we're changing the tarot qualities of some of the characters.

R - Well at least I did them, even if some of them are wrong!

H - Calm down, Rex, it wasn’t an accusation!

R - All I’m saying is, I took action; that's all I’m saying.

H - Hitler took action, Rex; as did Stalin, and Mao, and Genghis Khan, and Castro, and Bush….

R – Well, I just drew a Tarot deck. I don’t think its a fair comparison.

H - No, you’re right. I apologise. You are in no way like Hitler, or Stalin or Chairman Mao…or Bush.

R - I do like the odd cuban cigar, though, and I quite like the way Mao dressed. He always looked very comfortable.

H - Unlike you in your heavy coat – which, if the comments from last week are anything to go by, is a grandma’s coat for wearing to the cinema!

R - Shall we actually talk about the Tarot now, Howard?

H – Er, yes. It's an odd assortment this week, with some characters from the world of the mundus, some from our world, and Mathr Rindhr -- who readers have already met as the mother of Vali, the trance dancer.

11: Cromwell - La Force

H - So, Cromwell. What is Cromwell doing in our story?

R - He's one of our mundus characters. He has the title of the Lord Protector, which basically means that he is a benign dictator within the mundus. He is Force, because he holds the power to make decisions, and has an army of parliamentarian soldiers.

H - Roundheads?

R - Actually, they were called the New Model Army. 'Roundheads' was a derogatory name, used by the Royalists, because they wore ‘pot helmets.’

H - Is that so? I never knew that! Rex, perhaps we should explain a little about our use of archetypes in the mundus. I see each of the historical characters in the mundus as the embodiment of the archetypal energy that drove the same figure in the real, historical world. This energy is like a wave, which has emanated out from the realm of the archetypes to touch and influence people in the material world: in this case, Cromwell. The actions of Cromwell then ricocheted back into the mundus, and influenced the archetypal character in turn. So it's kind of a symbiotic relationship.

R - The archetype itself has no form within the mundus; it is, as you say, an energy. If that energy is drawn on very powerfully in the world, it reflects back into the mundus and creates a form. Hence we find Cromwell in the mundus, and Henry VIII, and Marilyn Monroe, amongst others.

H - So when we meet Cromwell in the world of the mundus, he's not quite the same Cromwell we know from the English Civil War (particularly as it's 350 years later now), but he has some of the traits of the man Cromwell, and some of the same personal history. I've been researching the English Civil War for this book -- and as a result, every now and then I've experienced brief flashes of emotion imagining what it must have been like to live during those turbulent times. What must it have been like to decide to rise up against oppression, to maintain the secrecy of conspiracy, and to put ones name to a document calling for the death of the King? One would have lived in constant fear of the knock on the door by the King’s men. This is a very zeitgeist concept, as it is happening in many countries right now -- though in Cromwell’s time the battles were fewer and further between, and there wasn’t as much bombing to fear.

R - There was some bombing though. They did have cannon!

H – What, just one?

R – No, Howard. For heaven's sake. The collective name isn't 'cannons,' it's 'cannon.'

H - I never knew that.

R - Perhaps you need to do a little more research on the period, my friend.

H - Let’s move onto the next card….

12: Crawfoot - The Hanged Man.

H - Our readers have met Crawfoot a number of times now. He is the lackey of the 13th conjuror, here represented by the Hanged Man. What does this card mean in the Tarot, Rex?

R - It means no movement. You are literally suspended.

H - Anything else?

R – No. At least, not that I can say at this moment in time.

14: Maggie - Temperance

H - Maggie is represented by Temperance.

R - Yes, because she is our heroine.

H – Why 'temperance' for the heroine?

R - Because she is the voice of reason in all this.

H - But we can’t say much more than that, can we? She is a character with particularly tricky plot twists, and we don’t want to give the game away!

16: Mathr Rindhr - The Tower.

H - The Tower represents change, doesn't it?

R - Yes, it is the old ways becoming out moded.

H – And that's one of the themes of our story, isn’t it? Old ways and beliefs becoming bankrupt.

R - Also one of the themes of contemporary society, it seems.

H - Yes, I agree. You know Rex, sometimes I get the feeling that the world is undergoing a paradigm shift in it’s understanding of itself...

R - I really do too.

H - ... and that the internet is one of those catalysts for change, like the printing press once was, or the understanding of the helio-centric nature of our solar system must have been.

R – Well, I don’t know about that.

H - What do you mean, you don’t know about that?

R - I don’t know about helio-centric.

H - Is that because you don’t know what it means?

R - Yes!

H - It means that the sun is the centre of the solar system, rather than the earth.

R - Oh, okay, I knew that; I just didn’t know the word 'helio-centric.'

H - Well, that’s a relief; I am sure Copernicus will rest easy! The concept of paradigm shifts in the way we view the world links back to our previous discussions on magic. We have a collective view of how the world functions and then at some point someone challenges that view. Eventually the collective view of the how the world is perceived changes too, and becomes the new paradigm, which in its turn is challenged and becomes redundant. But, anyway, back to the cards!

17: Colonel Massey - The Star.

H – Here is Colonel Massey, another mundus character.

R - Yes, she is Cromwell’s number one.

H - Why the Star card for her?

R - I really don’t know! This character is still undergoing development. It wouldn’t be fair for me to say very much about her...

H - You mean you don’t know..?

R - I know she likes strawberries, and wears armour.

H - In all honesty, not all of the characters are going to fit perfectly into a Tarot deck. Massey's not a major character, so she has been somewhat ‘crow-bared’ in. Is that a fair comment?

R – Er, yes. I'm afraid it is.

19: The Sun.

H - We can’t say anything about this character, can we, Rex? It would spoil the whole story! What we can say, however, is that the image of the character is based on an 1825 painting by Thomas Lawrence of Master Charles William Lambton.

R - Yes.

H – This image was drawn originally for my book, The Immortals, as a representation of a demon called Mammon.

R – Yes, I was being ironic. I thought a ten year old boy in a velvet suit representing the least erect of the demons would be funny.

H - Yet it wasn’t…

R - No, I suppose not! Can we end with a song this week?

H - Why not, maybe 'Tarot' by Andy Brown, from the 1970's TV show, 'Ace of Wands.' Click on play to hear some 'out there' seventies madness...
R - Excellent choice!

ab hinc

2011-04-22T04:00:00.000-07:00

The new working process.

H - So, what's today's post about, Rex?

R - It’s about…well, we’ve reached a point…it's, um, the creation of our production…studio. Our production office.

H - Very eloquent. What about it?

R - Well, we're now in production. We've finished the pre-production work and we're now producing our book. We have a specific time frame for completion of the project, which is very do-able, and I'm delighted.

H - The pictures today are of the John Barleycorn studio as we have set it up this week, in a two-room cabin near the woods behind my house. One of those rooms is my office, the other is an empty room I usually use for martial arts and theatre practice – and we've now turned that second room into a work space for our graphic novel. In many ways it seems that we've taken a long while to get to this point. But that's the nature of how this graphic novel is being gestated and will be born, is it not?

R - Yes.

H - When I showed you my ideas for how to set up the studio, you told me that it looked like a miniature film production office.

R - Yes. It reminds me of some I've worked in as a storyboard artist.

Rex is puzzled.

H - So my question to you then, Rex, is: Why didn’t you suggest working like this before?

R - Because we've spent a good five or six months sitting round your kitchen table working. It was only last week, when you took down the punch bag in your dojo and made it available for John Barleycorn, that we started coming up here to work, laying the art out on the floor. And it was only after that that you suggested we should put the art up on the walls. Also, remember, it's only been the past week or so that we've been working full-time on the comic, so we didn't need a dedicated workspace as much as we do now.

H - Yes, many good changes seem to have happened as a result of our making the decision to work full-time on the project. Neils Bohr, the 20th Century quantum physicist, used to stage mock gun fights with his lab assistants, using water pistols, because he wanted to find out why it was always the gunslinger who drew his pistol last who would win the fight. He came to the conclusion that the second gun slinger was what he termed ‘decided.’ He didn’t have to think, he just reacted, and thus was faster at drawing his pistol.

R - What has that got to do with anything?

H - I don’t know. Maybe we will find out in the fullness of time! You know, Rex, there might be another reason we've moved to the dojo. We're in the middle of a heat wave at the moment, and the studio's porch is a perfect place to work in this sun!

R - Absolutely.

H - Which begs another question, Rex.

R - Which is?

H - Since we're in the middle of a heat wave, why are you wearing a long, heavy, black velvet coat?

R - I don’t know what you're talking about.

H - Well, you do know what I’m talking about. I’m talking about why you're still wearing that velvet coat in the middle of a heat wave.

R – Well, Howard, it’s because it's the only one I have.

H – Okay, Rex, I’m clearly not going to get a proper answer out of you about this; and to be honest, if you want to sweat like a stuck pig, then you’re free to do so.

R – Well, at least I am not prattling on about water pistols....

H - Back to our discussion: We've now laid the graphic novel out in sequential scenes, and it's displayed here on the walls in a way that makes each scene easily identifiable and accessible. We can see at a glance where new art work is needed, and we have an over view of the story from beginning to end. We have information about the characters at our fingertips, not just stored inside a computer. This means that when we discuss them in the future, we will be able to take character information listed on sheets of paper out onto the porch and ‘walk with them.’

Howard is puzzled.

R – Yes. Except, um, Howard, I don't know what 'walking with them' means.

H - ‘Walking with’ lets us act out little sequences which will help to solidify each character’s role in the story, including exactly what they know about the plot at any specific time. I had a realisation, when I came to write some of the scenes, that I didn’t know what it was that some of the characters did or didn’t know about the overall plot. Perhaps this is something other writers experience too: a difficulty in distancing oneself from one’s own omnipotent knowledge of the story. Does that make sense?

R - I think what you're trying to say is that because you know everything, from start to finish, it's sometimes hard to remember that the characters don’t know everything as well. Their reactions and responses aren’t going to be your reactions and responses.

H - Very well put, Rex. I suspect we will also find that being surrounded by the characters and story every day means that we'll absorb them into our psyches even more. We'll be catching relationships and correspondences subliminally, which should give us a deeper understanding of the book. It's as if, starting this week, we're submerging ourselves fully into the story and the story-telling process.

R - So how are you finding working full-time?

H - It’s good! It's taken quite a bit of pressure off our workdays, since we can work as long as we need to each day. Also, our focus isn’t being split between competing projects now. When my theatre company used to rehearse a new show, we'd often go to a farm in the south of France, which was in the middle of nowhere. The farm was set up as a theatre retreat, and had no TV or other distractions. We found that the amount of work we were able to do there was exponentially more, even though, paradoxically, we also spent a lot of our time relaxing. When we rehearsed back home in London, we'd often come into rehearsals distracted by everyday living - traffic problems, housing problems, etc. A large part of the day was wasted on these things, rather than spent working. In France, all we did was work, eat good food, and lie around in the sun – and we got an enormous amount done. Similar to how you and I have been working this week, in fact, Rex!

R – Yes, I’ve found that even though we’ve only added a few hours to each work day, the output has been amplified by 200 or 300%.

H - That’s not possible. By definition, the most you can have is 100%. I would have thought a man of your pedantic nature would have know that, Rex.

R – Hmm. It’s a pity you took your punch bag down, Howard....

Relaxing - Tilly is puzzled!

ad referendum

2011-04-15T02:28:00.000-07:00

H - Today then, Rex, we are posting pencils of the pages where we meet our magician John Barleycorn for the first time.

R - Yes. It’s very exciting.

H - As we pointed out last week, they are not finished pages. In fact some of the ones in the middle are a bit rough.

R - Yes, they’re scribbles.

H - Yeah, I can see that, Rex. That’s what I’m saying.

R - No. That’s the term they use in the industry, ‘scribbles.’

H - Oh, right, I see. I so often forget that you worked in the industry and you actually know what you are talking about.

R - How so?

H - Well, you do such a good job of disguising it most of the time.

R - Why you…

H - On with the show!

- 28 -

- 29 -

- 30 -

- 31 -

- 32 -

- 33 -

- 34 -

- 35 -

- 36 -

- 37 -

per aspera ad astra

2011-04-08T03:18:00.000-07:00

H - We start with a picture of a wall this week. It seems apt, don’t you think, Rex?

R – Yes. I do.

H - Honestly, sometimes you’re so frackin’ monosyllabic.

R - Yes. I am.

H - It’s like that is it?

R - Yes. It is.

H – Right. Before we explain about our three week foray down a cul-de-sac (a phrase which the French apparently do not use!), we have pleasure in announcing that we will be posting the long-awaited pages introducing our magician, John Barelycorn, next week. The pictures on this post are teasing tasters from those spreads. In keeping with the nature of this blog as an exploration of our working process, the pages we'll be posting next week will be in 'scribble form,' rather than the more polished finished art of the comics pages we've shown here in the past.

R - Howard, why don’t you explain the link between these John Barleycorn layouts and our journey into the brick wall? And try to do so, without using expletives from Battlestar Gallactica or resorting to any French, please.

H - I’ll try, but I can’t promise! Last week we explained that we were working on a new idea for how to progress with the novel. We were both very excited by it. . . .

R - But come this last Monday, we realised it was totally impractical, from just about every angle!

H - Yes. So, after licking our wounds and wallowing in self pity, we've gone back to our original plan and way of working. And we're now trying to salvage something out of the three week detour. This is often part of the creative process, after all: to go down blind alleys. One has an idea, starts to follow it, and most of the time these ideas pay off . . . but occasionally they don’t. This is one of the latter occasions. The idea we had is too complicated to explain, but suffice it to say it would have meant a great deal of new work over the next year or so, taking the project in a whole new direction. And suddenly we stopped and asked ourselves: But do we want to take it in a different direction? And the answer was: No. So what does one do in a situation like this?

R - One looks for anything useful that can be brought back from the detour so that it wasn’t a complete waste of time.

H - Right. The new story sequence introducing John Barleycorn being a case-in-point.

R – Yes, indeed. I think that John’s reveal is now much better than the way we'd had it before, hence we are adding new pages for this. It tells us more about John and Reeve in a few spreads than we were able to explain in entire chapters further on in the book.

H - 'Which we would not have discovered if we hadn’t gone down this particular blind alley. All of which reminds me a little of one of the questions we put up in last week’s post: Do you need to go on a journey in order to discover there is no journey? Did we need to have what on the surface appears to be a wasted three weeks in order to discover various aspects of the work?

R - I think we did. We know our characters in even greater depth now, and that will be important in the work ahead.

H - We also found out that in order to bring this novel to completion by the end of the year, we are going to have to change from working part-time to full-time on it. A big change in our lives, and finances! We're more determined than ever to have the book finished and ready for publication by the end of the year -- whereas the new idea that we'd been flirting with over the past few weeks would have pushed the work well into next year, and possibly further; and this brought up a lot of issues for you in relation to your artwork, didn’t it, Rex?

R - Yes. Yes. Since the art for the book (as readers may recall) comes from three other projects that were never completed, I've been working with these drawings, in one form or another, for nearly four years. It is already tricky for me to produce new art work for the book which can intermingle with the existing artwork. Not that the style or presentation of my work has changed, but the underlying sensibility of how I tell a story now -- as compared to how I told stories four years ago -- is quite different. I can’t see myself still working within the limits of this structure one or two years on from now. I need to finish this project, and then move on from this art.

H - I can relate to that very well, as on occasion I've been asked to re-create theatre shows that I'd once either directed or performed in. More often than not, there is something missing when one comes back to an old show. It’s as if the initial spark has gone, that ephemeral part of art. The muse, perhaps, has moved on, and one seems to return to a shell which no longer has much meaning. It makes me think of Shakepeare’s take on this in The Tempest (which, incidentally, I'll be directing – in a Commedia dell'Arte version -- at a theatre school in Portugal, in May):

‘And like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself.

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve.

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind.’

R - So say we all! I think that our characters are relieved that we've gone back to our original plan. They were becoming worn out by the new demands we were trying to place on them. They'd stopped speaking to me. Now they're talking to me again in a fresh way, because they know that their story is going to be told soon. They want to be let out into the world to play, and to say what they have to say, rather than having us forever trying to find out more and more about them, and squeezing them dry. We should leave them with some privacy.

H – I agree. So, Rex, I think I managed to explain our three week diversion quite well, don’t you? And I didn’t resort to expletives or French!

R - Yes, Howard, very well done.

H - So all in all, despite being really fracked off at the start of the week, we have realised that our the last three weeks have in fact been a worthwhile soujourn…

R - < Sigh! >

ubi dubium ibi libertas.

2011-04-01T06:41:00.000-07:00

Crow, Magician, Cat - Rex Van Ryn original, 1981

H - As a result of the positive feedback we received on the comics pages we put up three weeks ago, we're going through a process of change in the way that we're planning to publish our graphic novel, which we are very excited about. We're still clarifying how this is going to work, which means that there is going to be a short delay before we post the next pages in our story. While we are busy working on this, we thought we'd just post art today...

R - However...

H - However, our last two posts have elicited such interesting and detailed comments that we couldn't resist joining in the conversation. In particular, comments from Jon, Mermaid, Terri, and the two Anonymouses (apparantly that is the correct plural!), together with a new post that Dharmaruci put up on his Astrotabletalk blog, have created a mini “Movable Feast,” focused this time on magic, science, and the nature of reality. This lead Rex and me into some interesting talks, which in turn brought up the following questions which we’d like to throw out into the general discussion.

Is there an objective reality?

H - Yes, I believe there is: in the sense that there is ‘existence,’ and existence is an objective fact. This is not something that one could ever completely define however. In the Kabbalah tradition, as I understand it, it is suggested that there's a realm of existence that we can never ‘know.’ At the start of the Taoist classic text, The Tao Te Ching, there's a wonderfully absurd discussion of the futility of even attempting to discuss that which the text is about to discuss in depth! After years of trying to find that ultimate reality, I have been forced to accept that it is just a mystery, and will forever remain so.

R – Is there an objective reality? Absolutely not. Unless there is.

Is dogma created by taking the mystery out of religion?

R - Is the Pope Catholic?

H - Yes, he clearly is. Now answer the question.

R - All right then. Probably.

H - Okay, I think that dogma is partly created by the removal of the mystery, but is also often quite deliberately created as a ‘political’ act in order to keep people under control.

Is magic an internal process? If so, is it only an internal process?

R - It is, but magic can be externalised if you bring someone into the process. For example there is the story told about an assassin who called a man at 6:00 on Monday evening, and told him that by 6:00 the following day he would have killed him. The man was duly terrified. The following day, the assassin called the man again at 6.00 to say that he had changed his mind and was going to kill him at 6:00 the following day. The man’s terror increased. This continued each day of the week, and by Friday the man died of a fear-induced heart attack. Of course the effectiveness of this method of assassination relies on the victim's state of mind. If the recipient of the phone call had simply said “f**k off,” the assassin wouldn’t have been paid!

H - I absolutely believe that magical principles can be used to bring about change within oneself, and in that way it is an internal process – but then the effects of that change are almost inevitably manifested outwards as a consequence. I'm intellectually satisfied (through my studies of quantum theory and esoteric philosophy) that, in theory at least, it's possible for one to directly affect the material, external world through internal processes; yet I'm not quite as certain that it's possible in practice. Or rather, I think that it is, but it's hard to prove, and thus drifts into the territory that Dharmaruci describes as 'delusion,' so is best left as an open question....

Are matter and consciousness intimately connected?

R - Yes.

H - Yes.

If you are creating and acting on a magical intention, can one ever fully know the consequences of that action?

R - No, you can’t.

H - This question arose when we were discussing magic and the conversation turned to the issue of ethics in a relativistic world. This is something which often exercises my mind. Can we ever know the consequences of any actions? There is a Taoist tale which goes something like this: Once there was a farmer, whose horses ran off during a storm. The villagers all commiserated with him, saying, “That’s terrible!” The farmer said, “Maybe.” The next day, the farmer’s son, who had been out searching for missing animals, came home with a herd of horses that were even more beautiful than the ones they'd lost. The villagers said to the farmer, ” “How lucky you are!” The farmer said, “Maybe.” The next day, while breaking in one of the horses, the farmer’s son fell off and smashed his leg...etc., etc.. While we can’t ever fully know the consequences of any actions, magical or otherwise, I do think that the intention under which one takes an action has an influence on its effect.

R - Yes, I think that’s a fair point. I don’t think it’s necessarily true, but it’s a fair point.

If one can’t be certain of consequences, how then does one decide to act in any given circumstance?

R - One tries to do the right thing.

H - If there are no absolutes to judge by, how do you know what is the right thing?

R - You don’t. It’s a personal thing, what one considers personally is the right thing to do.

H – Errrr...

R – See, you can’t think of an answer either can you?

H - No. I concur with your previous statement, damn it!

R - At last.

Does Aleister Crowley’s dictum, “Do as you will is the whole of law,” imply a lack of compassion?

R - I always thought it did, until you gave me your view on it. Now I don’t know.

H - I think it depends on whether the ‘w’ in will is capitalized or not. If it is, then he is referring to the Will as a force, which is a magical principal -- which could mean that what he is actually saying is that the Will is the moving force of creation. We are all using our Will all the time, though most of us are doing so unconsciously. If the ‘w’ is in lower case, then I take that to mean “do as you want,” without the corollary statement: “but harm none” -- in which case, it almost certainly does imply a lack of compassion.

Does one need to go on a journey in order to discover there is no journey?

R - Yes and no.

H - Do you want to expand on that?

R - Does this spring compete with last spring to be a better spring?

H - WTF!

R - That’s all I’m prepared to say.

H - My answer to the original question, then, is...probably. And does this summer compete with last summer to be a better summer, Rex?

R - You know full well it does, Howard.

H - Damn you!

Is love the closest thing to truth?

R - I'm not answering that. It's too poncy a question.

H - Even though you were the one who stated that it was, in our discussion just yesterday? With a tear in your eye.

R - That was yesterday. I’ve moved on.

H - Unbelievable!