Author Archives: bc

COMING FORTH BY DAY

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A Skeleton Key to OSIRIS JONES GETS AN ICE CREAM

The idea for this comic popped into my head fully formed, like an email attachment from the great beyond, and translated to the page almost effortlessly. I say almost because the last little detail I wanted to add, the hieroglyphic translation of the monologue on the first page, proved strangely elusive.

“I AM YESTERDAY, TODAY, AND TOMORROW.
I HAVE THE POWER TO BE BORN A SECOND TIME.
I AM THE SOURCE AND CREATOR OF ALL THE GODS!”

A passage I picked up from a PBS Pledge Week showing of the Joseph Campbell documentary Sukhavati – Place of Bliss, while I was laid up with a broken hip and fractured arm. (Same time as I was studying the Tale of the Tribe w/ RAW, et al.)

For the life of me I can’t find or remember where I picked this up from, (Campbell? Leary? Wilson? Narby?) but this enigmatic passage from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, has a modern answer, of sorts.

What is of the past, present, and future, with the power to be continuously reborn, and is the source of all our fantastical imaginings?
DNA!

I think I got so stuck on the importance of having the hieroglyphic source of this quote in the comic, because of this anecdote from RAW’s Prometheus Rising:

“I am He that was, and is, and shall be,” a sentence from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, in hieroglyph and in his own handwriting, was found on the desk where Beethoven composed the Ninth Symphony and all his later, aeon-spanning “evolutionary” music.

My assumption that these mythic hieroglyphs would be easy to find and pop into my otherwise finished comic slowly but surely faded away, as my hours long search stretched into a 3 AM delirium, and on into a week long expedition into the furthest corners of the internet. I eventually gave up on the web and shelled out some hard earned cash for a print copy of E. A. Wallis Budge‘s The Egyptian Book of the Dead, with its line by line translation of the ancient tome, but still no dice! I scoured the almost 400 pages of that thing, to no avail, and briefly considered trying to reverse engineer my own translation, but having come this far, it felt wrong to just fudge it.

At this point, the search for reference to a throwaway visual gag, that no one but me would care about, had now taken a week longer than the creation of the rest of the comic! Eventually, luckily, and thankfully, my persistence, and my Temple University Academic Journal subscriptions, paid off, and I found a satisfactory source for the translation.

This was in 2009, and now flashing forward to 2022, where I’ve just finished remastering the art for the comic, and am about to republish, when I think back to my struggles to translate the opening bit, and it occurs to me, I never documented my source! I don’t actually remember where this translation came from. My only assurance is that I trust my stubbornness enough that I probably wouldn’t have given up unless I found something pretty solid, but that same stubbornness being still very much intact, that trust doesn’t cut the mustard.

And so guess what? The whole thing repeats again!
Though this time with a bit more clarity.

I figure out that I’m looking for Chapter LXIV,
AKA Utterance 64, of The Egyptian Book of the Dead,
Whereby one cometh forth by day from the Netherworld.

And that there are 2 versions:
One from the Papyrus of Nu and another from the Papyrus of Nebseni.

Original source material from the 15th century BC
From the Papyrus of Nebseni (Brit Mus. No. 9,900 Sheet 24

The reason I couldn’t find it in the book I bought is because that particular version of The Egyptian Book of the Dead is based on the Papyrus of Ani, which is missing that chapter.

With this important distinction in mind I manage to turn up another E. A. Wallis Budge book, with the elaborate title, The Chapters of Coming Forth by Day or The Theban Recension of the Book of the Dead, the Egyptian Hieroglyphic Text Edited from Numerous Papyri.

The good news is that this book has the hieroglyphs I’m looking for! But the bad news is that there’s no accompanying translation. So I can’t be sure what’s what.

I then turn up still another E. A. Wallis Budge book, with an almost identical and equally elaborate title, The Book of the Dead: The Chapters of Coming Forth by Day, The Egyptian Text According to the Theban Recension in Hieroglyphic, Edited from Numerous Papyri, with a Translation Vocabulary, etc.

And you guessed it, this is the exact reverse of the other book, and contains the English translation, but no hieroglyphs.

Between the 2 though, I have numbered lines that I can match up, and am now in the ballpark.

And really, it looks like my 2009 effort matches pretty well! It picks up about halfway through line 2 and ends about halfway through line 3. Some of the symbol stacking is different, but clearly whatever reference material I found back then is at least talking about the right turkey.

Having fallen down yet another multiple day internet rabbit hole, chasing this same damn funny bunny*, I’m hesitant to leave well enough alone without some sort of smoking gun, so I decide to once again plunk down some cold hard cash for a physical book, with still another elaborate title. This one looking like it was written by an SEO algorithm specifically for someone in my unique position:

READING HIEROGLYPHICS – A Very Ancient Text: CHAPTER 64 THE BOOK OF THE DEAD Extracts from the Papyrus of Nu and the Papyrus of Nebseny By Bernard Paul Badham

I mean, pretty on the nose, right?

So I just got my grubby mitts on a copy of READING HIEROGLYPHICS, and am very happy to say that it appears to very much agree with my original 2009 translation. Again, there are some minor formatting differences, and Badham’s English translation differs slightly from both Budge and Campbell, but his line by line translation agrees exactly with the starting point I have in the comic, which was my main remaining doubt. (I’d include his translation, but this book was only published in 2016, and I’m guessing this passage is the main draw for this very niche publication, and am loathe to steal his thunder)

Anyway, after all that, I feel comfortable allowing the original hieroglyphs to remain :)))

* “According to some damn book I lost (sorry!)
Osiris really means Divine Hare”
Robert Anton Wilson to me in an email, circa 2005.

And now the only other minor bone of contention, OSIRIS JONES.

The name Osiris Jones also comes from Joseph Campbell, in a lecture about Egyptian Mythology, Campbell explains that according to the Book of the Dead, upon their demise, every Average Joe becomes identified as one with Osiris, JC then appears to riff a name for this everyman/God hybrid, “Osiris Jones, let’s say.”

Here it is straight from the source:

A subsequent googling would suggest that I was incorrect in assuming that Osiris Jones was an arbitrary stock name that Campbell came up with off the top of his head, because it appears to be a direct reference to a 1931 book by Conrad Aiken called “The Coming Forth by Day of Osiris Jones.”

I didn’t know this until just now, but apparently James Joyce was somewhat panicked when this book came to his attention, according to Richard Ellmann’s Joyce biography, “the title of Aiken’s book sounded so close in theme to Finnegans Wake that it seemed more urgent for him to read the book than for him to move” out of the path of a rapidly expanding WW II.

“Osiris Jones has not yet come forth by day or by night and I am waiting for a copy of that biography to be sent me by Gorman or his publisher.”
Letter from James Joyce to Maria Jolas dated 7 September 1940.

There appear to be several records of Joyce attempting to acquire a copy of Osiris Jones, but it seems doubtful that he was able to find a copy before he died just a few months later.

See also “Chaos – Hurray! – Is Come Again”: Heroism in James Joyce and Conrad Aiken

A looser connection, that I was indeed aware of at the time, involves the late, great Ol’ Dirty Bastard. The first, and so far only, member of the Wu Tang Clan to pass on. One of ODB’s numerous nicknames is Osiris, as he announces on “Triumph” the lead single from Wu Tang Clan’s 1997 album Wu Tang Forever:

“WHAT Y’ALL THOUGHT Y’ALL WASN’T GON’ SEE ME?
I’M THE OSIRIS OF THIS SHIT”

Amongst all his other names, suchlike Ason Unique, Dirt McGirt, Big Baby Jesus, and innumerable others, his government name was Russell Jones. It takes a little bit of cherry picking, but it ain’t too hard to find Osiris Jones in the mix.

My version of Osiris Jones debuted in the Spring 2006 issue of the Maybe Quarterly, albeit spelled as “Osirius”, perhaps as a portmanteau of the Egyptian God and the mythic Dog Star, but honestly, more likely, just a misspelling!

These first depictions of Osiris Jones were giant 3ft x 3ft paintings.
Funnily enough, given the backstory, the first image is based on the title page of the first edition of A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake.

This blue skinned pharaoh character began to pop up continuously in my work, such as on the cover of the Winter 2006 issue of Maybe Quarterly.

Or again in the Summer of 2007 with Big Justice

And plenty more besides!

The blue skin was about trying to create a more inclusive mythic iconography, that could work within a planetary society. In 2009, when James Cameron’s Avatar emerged, with its global box office dominating blue skinned cat people, it made pretty specific sense to me.

The problem with the name Osiris Jones didn’t occur to me until 2014, when I was prepping the first print edition of Weird Comix #1, in which the Osiris comic is the lead off hitter. It suddenly occurred to me that OSIRIS JONES sounds, and maybe even looks, like a rip off of OSMOSIS JONES, a 2001 live-action/animated movie, starring a blue skinned cartoon character, voiced by Chris Rock.

I don’t know why I thought it mattered, but I decided it was a good idea to change my character’s name to Osiris Smith, thinking that the main gist of the bit was Osiris + a common everyday surname, not realizing I was leaving behind almost 100 years worth of contextual resonance, and for what? To not step, ever so slightly, on the toes of a movie barely anyone remembers?

So forgetting all that noise, for this updated edition, the name Osiris Jones has been restored.

Enclosed are links to all 3 iterations of the comic:
OSIRIS JONES GETS AN ICE CREAM (2009)
OSIRIS SMITH GETS AN ICE CREAM (2014)
OSIRIS JONES GETS AN ICE CREAM (2022)

P.S. I have done what James Joyce could not! And acquired a copy of Conrad Aiken’s “The Coming Forth by Day of Osiris Jones” Same 1931 edition Joyce was chasing too :)))

WITH MY LOOKS…

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A Skeleton Key to FAHRVERGNÜGEN!

 

Originally made in 2008 for The Hic-Up, an excellent punk rock zine out of Wilmington, Delaware. This was an esp heady era, when I was sharing studio space with the great Todd Purse, and we were working in, what I called, The House of Ideas, surrounded by our wonderful friend group.

It got so I started using the assemblage of cool cats as a writers room of sorts, crowdsourcing ideas, workshopping art styles, etc. I remember we went around the room for an hour to come up with the phrase “ivory frock” to describe Marilyn Monroe’s iconic dress for the original punchline.

The comic was originally a metaphysical riff on the now old and mostly forgotten SNL skit Astronaut Jones, starring Tracy Morgan.

The joke being a sacred moment ruined by a profane outburst.

A coincidence of opposites w/ Albert Einstein & Marilyn Monroe, a pairing that seemed both natural & nonsensical, and which I assumed, at the time, that I had invented.

Years later, I ran into an optical illusion featured at the Franklin Institute, which when looked at closely appeared to be a picture of Albert Einstein, but would transform into a picture of Marilyn Monroe when viewed from far away.

The same trick could be accomplished with almost any subject matter, I’m sure, but I felt encouraged that someone else had connected the same 2 dots. Little did I know that, in our Rule 34 world, that was only the tip of the iceberg…

“You simply cannot invent any conspiracy theory so ridiculous and obviously satirical that some people somewhere don’t already believe it.”
– Robert Anton Wilson

If you Google “Albert Einstein and Marilyn Monroe“, as I recently did, you will be treated to a featured headline announcing:
“Marilyn Monroe may have had an affair with Albert Einstein.“

The hell you say!?!

The next result offers to inform you:
“Why Marilyn Monroe wanted to sleep with Albert Einstein“

These headlines stem from the same source, Shelley Winters, who was roommates with Marilyn Monroe when they were young struggling actors.

Winters recounts in her autobiography, and told David Letterman in 1989, the story of the 2 girls writing a list of the famous men they were interested in, on which Monroe included Einstein.

“Marilyn, there’s no way you can sleep with Albert Einstein. He’s the most famous scientist of the century. Besides, he’s an old man.”

“That has nothing to do with it. I hear he’s very healthy.”

Several years after MM’s death, SW was at the apartment of the Strasbergs, Marilyn’s foster parents, who inherited her belongings, and amongst the things she left behind was a silver framed photo of Einstein, which was signed with the inscription: “With love, respect and thanks. Albert Einstein”

But don’t take my word for it, here’s Shelley Winters telling the story to David Letterman:

There’s even a movie about it! Insignificance (1985)

The characters are unnamed, but the intentions appear crystal clear.

More recently there was a stage play version of Insignificance performed in Portland, OR, keeping the alt history alive.

Now I hate to say it, but I’m not sure it’s more plausible that Marilyn Monroe had an affair with Albert Einstein, rather than just that Shelley Winters wanted to have something interesting to say on TV, but who knows!

There also appears to be a copypasta fan fiction story about MM & AE that pops up in several places around the web, which incorporates the “with my looks and your brains” routine:

At a dinner party, Einstein and Marilyn sat next to each other. After a few flutes of champagne, she cooed in his attentive ear: “I want to have your child. With my looks and your brains, it will be a perfect child!”

Einstein replied: “But what if it has my looks and your brains?”

Though I’m not that crazy about that joke being performed by those 2 characters, because the whole reason MM is an enduring personality is because she isn’t just a dumb blonde, but rather a thoughtful person who seems tragically self aware about the complex dynamics of embodying an icon/symbol/object.

It’s a great song though!

A few years ago I had an experience at a comic con where a nice lady was flipping through my comix, got to the page with Einstein crassly coming onto Marilyn Monroe, appeared visibly bummed, put the comic down, and walked away.

I suddenly got how easily that joke could be misunderstood and that the context was too dependent on trusting that there were good intentions behind it.

When it came time to prep new print editions of my early WEIRD COMIX, I knew the joke wasn’t worth the misunderstanding, but still thought the archetypal team up of Albert Einstein & Marilyn Monroe was worth exploring, so I went in search of inspiration for a new ending, and did indeed find it :)))

Enclosed are links to all 3 iterations of the comic:
FAHRVERGNÜGEN! (2008)
FAHRVERGNÜGEN! (2012)
FAHRVERGNÜGEN! (2022)

JENNY EVERYWHERE

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HAPPY JENNY EVERYWHERE DAY!
(Annually on August 13th)
https://www.jennyeverywhereday.com/

“The character of Jenny Everywhere is available for use by anyone, with only one condition. This paragraph must be included in any publication involving Jenny Everywhere, in order that others may use this property as they wish. All rights reversed.”
—The license for Jenny Everywhere

I also created a copyleft logo for JE that is available in PNG, EPS, PSD and AI file formats :))) CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD ZIP FILE

JENNY EVERYWHERE CHARACTER RESOURCES:
Jenny Everywhere (TV TROPES)
Jenny Everywhere (WIKIPEDIA)
Jenny Everywhere (PDSH)
The Shifter Archive Project

JRJR vs. MR. T

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A Skeleton Key to THE DRAGON’S GIFT

While I was waiting in a super long line to get a sketch from John Romita Jr. a nice old man struck up a convo with me about comics. He asked me about my favorite characters and stories, which at the time were Spider-Man all the way. So we talked extensively about all things web-headed while the line slowly moved forward. Eventually he would shake my hand and wish me well, then he walked behind the table and sat down to start a signing session. Wait, what? Lo and behold that whole time I was talking to Jazzy Johnny himself! John Romita Sr., what a nice guy :)))

So now it’s time to get my sketch from JRJR and I requested a drawing of Wolverine, which he sketched out first in rapid pencil lines, creating a faint image of Wolverine chomping on a cigar.

As he’s drawing he keeps yelling things across the aisle.

He then switches over to a marker to ink his Wolverine sketch while his yelling across the aisle becomes more frequent and much louder. Then I notice an absolutely unmistakable voice is screaming back! It turns out I’m stuck in the middle of a shouting match between JRJR & Mr. T!

I can’t really tell if they’re joking or not! JRJR is cracking up the whole time, so probably? Maybe? IDK!

JRJR is yelling to Mr. T that actually he is the one who is a fool, contrary to popular belief, and that JRJR, in fact, pities Mr. T.
A dubious claim to be sure!

I walked away with my super awesome Wolverine sketch and not sure what to make of anything anymore :)))

Additional contextual support for THE DRAGON’S GIFT

1.) IMAGE SUCKS

My neighbor was a super big time comic book collector. One of those guys that would buy 3-5 copies of EVERYTHING that came out on a weekly basis, and boasted a comic collection of hundreds of thousands of issues, with complete collections of numerous big name titles. He also had a subscription to the Comic Buyers Guide, which in those days was printed like a newspaper and delivered bi-weekly through the mail. After he was finished with it he’d pass it along to me, and I loved it!

To a 12 year old it felt like I was getting a real look behind the curtain at the workings of the industry. Probably mostly it was advertisements and public relations, mixed in with some genuine heartfelt fandom. In any case, I loved it, esp Peter David’s “But I digress…” column.

CBG was, generally speaking, not particularly crazy about Image Comics.

Back in those days the creation of Image was defined in much different terms than it is today. These days the creation of Image is rightfully celebrated as a revolutionary victory for creators’ rights. But that wasn’t the discussion I was hearing back then, so far as I knew, Image was about writers vs. artists & style vs. substance.

The Image stance, from what I understood, was that the art was more important than the story, which I very much disagreed with! And my experience of those early Image books was, sure it looks cool, but the stories are so dumb.

At Comicfest ’93 Peter David & Todd McFarlane participated in “The Great Debate” which I didn’t attend, but assumed was in regards to this disharmony between writers and artists.

Though actually the debate was about whether Image had been treated fairly by the media.

The fact that I had no clue at the time that Image had anything to do with creators’ rights suggests maybe they were not treated fairly after all.

Maybe I was being fed bad info from a comics media with a vested interest in maintaining corporate hegemony?

Or maybe I was a kid who misread the situation?

Or maybe there actually was a genuine antagonism between some artists and some writers in the industry, which the creation of Image exacerbated?

Most likely a heady mixture of all of the above and then some!

So basically, when I said “Image sucks” I thought I was saying that I valued substance over style, but it turns out not to have been so simple :)))

2.) MY HAT

In the comic I am sporting an Atlanta Braves baseball cap, which by itself is pretty unremarkable, but at the con itself caused quite a commotion, because this event happened to coincide with the Philadelphia Phillies playing against the Atlanta Braves in the 1993 NLCS.

I came by my Braves fandom somewhat honestly, with a step brother from Georgia, and my Dad’s cable service only coming with 10 channels, 1 of them being TBS. The Braves were on TV every goddamn day and I was lured in by their winning ways. Also, at school, it was considered pretty dorky to root for the home team, and it was much preferred to have your own team.

Wearing a Braves cap at that time & place was considered treason, probably especially with the ’93 Phils being so super cool & beloved that their legend has only grown in the decades that have followed.

The Phillies would go on to beat the Braves 4 games to 2 and advance to the World Series. So the last laugh was def on me!

3.) The Comics

The original Savage Dragon mini-series, at that point in time, was pretty damn expensive. All 3 issues were def wall books at Comicmania, my local comic book shop.  All told Larsen’s gift probably cost him at least $25, which seemed like a fortune to a 12 year old in 1993.

Also, now that I think about it, this experience almost certainly led directly to this one.

PSYCHONAUT COMIX #2

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Take another candy-colored head trip through koan-fusing adaptations of psychedelic memes, both ancient & modern, in this magically curated comix collection!

Come explore the outer reaches of inner space! #FINDTHEOTHERS :)))

FREE DOWNLOAD

King Mob in Philadelphia

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An accounting of GM Magic


I met Grant Morrison briefly at a signing in Philadelphia in 2002.  I was 21, hungover, sleep deprived, and rather well in tune w/ the dune (Stoned). (This being the day after the first Punk Rock Prom on Madison Drive.) I’d brought a small collection of my comix to show them, which I clutched nervously.

Through the fog I was trying to think of ways to communicate quickly and clearly that I was hip to real arcane shit. My skepticism about the explanatory power of a few short words, esp. in matters zen, led me to briefly entertain the harebrained notion that the body language of a hearty *THUMBS UP* might somehow be the ticket.  As the line shuffled forward I decided the more practical approach would be to ask them if they read Robert Anton Wilson.

Along my way to the front of the line my shyness and introversion also changed my mind about showing them my comix.  Which suddenly seemed like a stupid and embarrassing thing to do.

Frank Quietly was at the signing too, parked right next to GM.  I got to him first and gave him a copy of Earth 2 to sign. While exchanging pleasantries w/ FQ I heard someone say, “Did you make these?”

I look over and Grant Morrison is happily flipping through the comix I had decided not to give them!

Mind you, I was in a few altered states at the time, but my genuine experience was/is of having no clue when/how they got those comix.

They were indeed a reader of Robert Anton Wilson, succinct encouragement for my work was offered, they signed my copy of Animal Man #26, and off I went.

Though just as I was stumbling away I heard a booming voice call “Oi!”

I turn around and GM is beaming a huge grin and pointing at the hand lettered title block on one of the comix I gave them:

“SUBURBAN LEGEND COMIX: Sort of like Alan Moore before he stopped selling drugs and read all them books”

Thence they gave me an enthusiastic *THUMBS UP*

A few months later GM opened up a short lived website for their new creator owned work, wherein I had a cringe inducing fan letter published, with the following generous response from Morrison, reproduced here in its original glowing red :)))

YOU AND YOUR KIND ARE THE ONLY THING THAT KEEPS ME SLOSHING FORWARD THROUGH THE SILT OF TIME.

THERE’S ONLY ONE GENERATION. I’M GLAD TO SEE THAT IT NEVER DIES

The Great Escape

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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 :)))