A Skeleton Key to CAGLIOSTRO THE GREAT

Drawing Hugh Crane / Cagliostro the Great as both a prisoner and a stage magician was mostly just a straight forward attempt to visually summarize the character as depicted in RAW’s Schrodinger’s Cat Trilogy.

Though as my scribbling progressed I came to notice that this imagery also held personal meaning as a pretty on-the-nose metaphor for how I was feeling with my job as a Graphic Designer & Pre-Press Tech for a direct marketing firm.

It’s a pretty brutal gig in terms of soul crushing drudgery, a pure Rushkoffian nightmare, with constant & unreasonable deadlines, always on call responsibilities, and a pandemic related reduction in staff that saw my department reduced from 4 down to just me.

Though by and large, all of the people at the company, all the way up and down the corporate ladder, are entirely lovely and brilliant people. The people are beautiful, just trapped in the ruthless system of a genuinely tough business.

For the most part the job involves working with really big brands, some of which I’m happy to work with, and others decidedly less so. The credit card companies are the toughest to rationalize, though they’re somewhat balanced out by civil rights groups and some of the better charity organizations.

When rumors began circulating that we might get work from the Trump campaign I panicked and scrapped together an emergency back up plan, just in case they were true. It would have been a reckless and messy exit, but the rationalizations have to end somewhere. The rumors turned out to be untrue, or at least the deal went unsealed.

My back up plan was sincere, but impractical, the beatings continued but morale did not improve…

On particularly bad days I would stay up late applying for jobs somewhere, anywhere else. Though TBH the pure volume of work burned me out pretty good, and with most places still shut down from the pandemic, a feeling of hopeless resignation set in.

When I drew Hugh Crane as a prisoner I was drawing this resignation.

I was trapped, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t still make at least some magic, right?

2 days after I finished my drawing of CAGLIOSTRO THE GREAT – The prisoner, magician, mystic, escape artist, 2 things happened.

We received a project from Trump JR. & I got an email alert that my old teaching position was available.

I used to teach high school computer science in North Philadelphia. The job did not pay well enough to keep me afloat, which is how I ended up where I was.

Before I know what’s what, I’m being offered the same money I’m making at the current gig to return to my teaching position. How can I say no? IDK, bc I didn’t!

Just like that, I give my notice to the once inescapable prison that I’m leaving, and start a new life, closer to the heart.

Cagliostro says 10 people that know what he knows would be very formidable indeed, now I don’t know if I know what he knows, but I’ve just started my second week of teaching 500 7th-12th graders what I know, and that ain’t nothing to sneeze at!

N.B. I don’t think they necessarily mean it as a compliment nor an insult, but there is a strange consensus amongst students, across multiple years, grades and classes, that I remind them of Spider-Man / Peter Parker. They tell me this multiple times a week, not knowing that this is exactly the vibe I’ve been shooting for since I was like 8 years old. My class is a pretty easy A, bc with great power comes great responsibility :)))

A SKELETON KEY TO GOOD OLD EARTH

Around the time this comic takes place my Mom took me to Delaware Park to meet the Ultimate Warrior, we had to wait in line for like 7 hours in sweltering heat, but it was everything to me as a kid.

(If you google the Ultimate Warrior you’re likely to find some unfortunate opinions the actor who played him expressed, none of which were a part of his character, which remains a figure of extreme mystery, hailing from Parts Unknown.)

It’s kinda funny, given the whole darn point of this comic, how much I genuinely struggled to get it done. With no hint of irony, I basically re-lived the experience of becoming hopelessly frustrated with the creative process, to the point that I actually intended to scrap the whole thing numerous times. The only thing that saved it was that since I was working digitally the files remained on my computer and every few months I would stumble across them and revisit the wreckage to see if there was anything I could salvage. This process went on for 3 years. 3 YEARS! All over 4 simple pages.

So as much as I was remembering, and trying to share, this lesson that my mom taught me, I was also having to prove that I’d actually learned it, which wasn’t as easy as I assumed it would be.

THE SOUND OF SILENCE

I like using coincidence as a creative guide, because it feels like it opens up the process to something bigger than just my conscious imagination. For example, I was either going to give my Mom a Black Sabbath or a Simon & Garfunkel t-shirt to wear, (Her 2 fav bands) and just as I was about to commit one way or the other, a Simon & Garfunkel song started playing on a TV show I had on in the background. The TV show was The Leftovers and the song was featured in an emotionally climactic/pivotal moment.

So that pretty much settled that, because all things being otherwise equal between the 2 choices, it’s fun to let synchronicity tip the scales.

Though this set off another line of thinking, because the comic was already called “GOOD OLD EARTH” with “Old Earth” being Wu Tang slang for “Mom”, but now I’m thinking do I go with a Simon & Garfunkel reference for the title? Or maybe something from Black Sabbath, in a have-my-cake-and-eat-it-too kinda way? So I begin to scour song titles and lyrics for appropriate fragments to pull for a new title, and as I’m doing so, while having no luck whatsoever, sure enough in the background The Leftovers features a Wu Tang Clan song in a completely goofy and improbable scene. I stopped my search immediately and let the title stand.

DOVE STA MEMORIA

I long ago stole RAW’s use of “Dove Sta Memoria” as my go to epitaph, as “rest in peace” irks me as being overused to the point of meaninglessness. “Where Memory Lives” seems a more profound sentiment to me. Memory being the tricky, emotional, chaotic thing it is.

My mom had a tough life, especially her last few years, and after she died there weren’t many comforting words passed around about it, except from my older brother. Though my Uncle John, her older brother, managed to get something through the emotional maelstrom. “Remember the good times,” he told me. I was irritated when he said it, because I was a jaded and traumatized 12 year old, and it felt like an easy cookie cutter thing to say. But this story is what I remembered when he said that, and it was something I held on to. It must have been difficult to try to say anything to me at all, at that time, the circumstances being what they were, let alone something helpful, so it turns out he kinda nailed it.

Autobio comics bring in another level of trickery too, because I’ve learned through experience that adapting memories into comix comes with something of a cost. The memory gets partially overwritten by the adaptation. You lose the fuzzy edges and specific inexpressible ambiguities. The memory of the event and the memory of the comic fuse together in a weird amalgam.

I first noticed this in “I was a Teenage Six Million Dollar Party Horse.” An autobio comic about my being saved from a self destructive spiral by a compassionate homeless man. When I was working on the comic I was drawing the man’s face from memory, but now if I try to remember his face I can only see the comic version.

It’s a trade off. You get to have your memory transformed into an objective and shareable medium, but also you lose some of what made it yours.

(I think The Never-ending Story 2 has a bit about this, I remember it scaring me as a kid, though I can’t quite remember the details, which seems appropriate.)

In closing, The Leftovers is a great show, and I highly recommend it :)))