WOLF like me.

matttaylordraws:

If you pay attention to the monthly comic book solicitations, you’ll notice that my name is absent from the listing for issue five of Image Comics WOLF (the book i have been drawing with Ales Kot, Lee Loughridge, Clayton Cowles and Tom Muller). If you were to look into the future and see the solicit for issue six, you wouldn’t find me there either. And you might then think: ‘hey, what’s up with that?‘ 

So here’s what’s up with that. After four issues of surly private investigators, tentacled down and outs and, well, wolves, i am leaving WOLF for pastures new. Which I know isn’t all that common on Image books where you have a creative team locked in and they tell the story they wanted to tell. You’re probably thinking: “maybe there’s some behind the scenes shenanigans that they’re not telling me about.“ 

So here’s the behind the scenes shenanigans that they’re not telling you about. Comics are HARD WORK. And as it turns out, they’re harder work than i ever anticipated. Also harder than I anticipated: trying to maintain a full time gig as a freelance illustrator alongside a monthly book (in the same time I have been working on WOLF i have produced somewhere north of fifteen portraits, eight movie posters, four book covers, a bunch of editorials and comic book covers and full artwork for three albums). The reason for the full time job is because, I only got my first cheque for WOLF about three weeks ago and I’ve been working on it since January (that’s just the way it works with Image books, where you won’t see money until a couple of months after the first issue).
Even harder still: doing all of this with a new baby (her name is Nico, she is one year old, and she is wonderful - thank you for asking). 

I’m pretty sure I should have listened when seasoned comics friends told me how much hard work comics could be, but I was way too confident that I could juggle everything and still get to bed before midnight every night. I have a newfound respect for monthly artists having tried and only just managed four months of it! 

WOLF had a difficult birth with some changes in personnel as we were just getting started, then a first issue which was 28 pages, then 39, then kept on growing to eventually 58 (and there was some great stuff which was cut after it had been drawn and some sequences were reworked and moved to different places and in one case a different issue - including, i kid you not, a zombie Heidi Klum which was one of my favourite pages and I hope will surface somewhere). The release was initially scheduled for April, then moved back to July. None of this is uncommon, but for someone who is used to working on fairly rigid deadlines with illustration, being one part of a machine like this was a bit of a shock. And that’s before we even get to moments of my own stupidity like leaving half the pages for an issue on a different computer and completely forgetting to upload them to be coloured. Before issue one had dropped I was already very aware that it wasn’t going to work on an ongoing basis and so we agreed that I’d do the first arc and then hand over the reins. 

I’m immensely proud of the story we have laid the foundations for and i’ll be continuing to read the book now that Ricardo Lopez Ortiz has joined the team.

 
And so for now, my brief flirtation with monthly comics is over. But not with comics in general because I have a few things lined up already to keep me busy over the next year. Things I can work on slowly and surely and not have a monthly panic attack over. 

To be continued.

Working with Matt was great and I’m hyper-grateful for the experience and the book we built together. The start of WOLF was a clusterfuck for many reasons, mostly my own (bad health, too many deadlines, changing perception of the story), and I’m impressed that we made it through without deciding to shoot each other. Especially Matt. 

And now…drumroll: Ricardo Lopez Ortiz starts on WOLF with #5 in January 2016!

The Feminine Grotesque: A Unified Theory on Female Madness in Cinema and American Culture (Series Introduction)

madwomenandmuses:

[Joan Crawford photographed by Eve Arnold]

I have a madness in me as real as my own heartbeat. It has three names: anxiety, bipolar disorder, and anger. It’s the last one even my closest friends have never seen. As a child, my mother taught me these were things to be ashamed of. When I got angry over some perceived slight or my inability to meet whatever goals of perfection she laid out for me she would invoke the name of my abusive father. Reminding me how I inherited this anger from him. So, I turned my anger inward and it festered into self-hate. It’s especially easy to hate myself right now as I moved in with my mother after a suicide attempt this spring, hoping to get my life back on track but instead I’m falling apart, the seams are showing. My therapist tells me I need to figure out a plan to move so I can be free of my mother’s toxicity, regain my independence, and start a new chapter of my life. All of which I’m finding hard to do given my circumstances at the moment. So, I write.

Female madness is a preoccupation of mine. For over a year I have been developing my own theory that explores the way female madness is framed in cinema. Films of the Feminine Grotesque continue the questions and preoccupations of 1940s women’s pictures primarily within horror but at times finding a home in noir and fantasy. The Feminine Grotesque is a genre, style, and thematic preoccupation that truly begins with Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and continues with Queen of Earth.

The emotional, social, and psychological problems that are specifically connected to the character’s sense of womanhood provide the meat and gristle of this genre. The questions of women’s pictures turn on their pretty heads in the feminine grotesque. The tools of beauty—physicality, dress, makeup—become weapons that wound as much as they empower.

Like women’s pictures, the feminine grotesque offers visual liberation from the confining strictures of the patriarchy. No matter how temporary, women are able to see themselves as bold, defiant, vulnerable, sexually realized, ambitious, and hopeful. The films of the feminine grotesque obsess over female desire and subjectivity. But even with this strong feminist impulse, the genre is muddled by endings that show these women integrating themselves but lacking any hope for a future. In cinema, there is rarely hope for the madwoman.

Madwoman (noun)

1. A woman who is mentally ill.

2. A woman with a transgressive place in society because of her anger, sexuality, and/or refusal to play by the rules.

3. A woman rules by her passions (see: Taylor, Elizabeth).

4. A woman of fire and music (see: Davis, Bette in All About Eve).

I redefined madwoman as an act of reclamation. An act of learning to love or at least come to terms with the part of myself I hate. As a teenager I found a sense of family with the real and unreal women that now make up my pantheon of madwomen. They became my sisters and aunts and mothers and mentors that I always yearned for in real life. When I’m honest with myself, which usually happens around 3 a.m., I still yearn for this sort of sisterhood in real life. This series is ultimately about these women.

You’ve seen her before. She’s Lilith refusing to lie under Adam. She’s Zelda Fitzgerald in in the sanatorium. She’s your ex-girlfriend that drank too much and laughed too loud and in the dark muttered about her intense fear of becoming the mother she barely knows. She’s Medusa. She’s your best friend from college whose red lips seem abhorrent, like some open wound speaking all the things women aren’t even supposed to think. She’s the mess you don’t want to clean up. She’s me. Or maybe you’ve seen her on screen in the overripe sexuality of Nicole Kidman in Stoker. Or in the gunshot loud shriek of Bette Davis facing the mirror image she can’t escape in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Or she’s the warped legacy that Joan Crawford has become in the cultural imagination. These women have been with us for a long time and they are legion.

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