The Sim/Fetch Dialogue

Part One: "Further In and Further Up"

2/4/04. Letter #2 Toc's response to Dave's letter of 1/29/04

Dear Dave

"Wow! Oh-my-god!" says Toc (the atheist [with the accent over reverence]). Wow! I have no ideas how to thank you. I am so disarmed and opened-from-the-middle by kindness. Thank you.

Really-truly Thank you.

It's weird to always be outside where you can't get a reading of the world reading you. You take your readings and offer your soundings, but you never can know if anyone gets it ... accept... by such a kindness as your letter.

I believe that I'll always be outside (my niche, my habitual habitat), I didn't imagine there was anything but an imaginary audience for the kind of psychological landscaping I'm interested in (not yet at least). I am so THRILLED that you and Gerhard liked it.
It makes sense to me that you guys would like it based on your own work.
Again...Thank you again, and I promise not to thank you again.
My pal Tree says, "But what if he pulls you out of a river one day?"

I am very much looking forward to what you guys do next.
I have been looking forward to number 300 since number 265. If I find I really like something I will wait out the publication of its finish before reading it. I am very partial to feast and famine style (everything) ... reading.
My box-of-Cerebus goes back to #5.

And funnily-enough, I lived in a tiny room-box for ten years two houses down from Mr. BWS in the (tiny) town of Woodstock, but...1 never had a word with him and I only saw him maybe twice in the ten years. (Though I loved Conan too when I was a kid).

I sent the essence of your letter off to the hand-full of friends who like what I do. I sent it as my proof of life on my dust-mote (of course none of them read comics ... YET). I described you as the Robert Bly of comics. I chose Robert not only because I love his images but because of how politically alert he is. (And funnily enough he also got into a wrangle with feminists over his book "Iron John" back in the early 90's. Check him out if he ever comes your way he is so much more a visual experience than a read one).

I am sorry that you had to use up some of your luck on my account back at 9/11/01. Luck is manna. Beside that city-sized weight of sadness that coated every salty burnt smelling particle of ash still drifting down 2 days later, besides that the city had become a militarized zone below Houston, besides that everyone on the street spoke softly with larger eyes and a cringed listening, 3 people out of the expected 300 showed up at my opening, and each with a strange hat on. We peeked at them from the back room while getting pissed on Harps. Beside the reciprocating shock waves of holy hatred and confused sadness and people beautiful reduced to their un-constructed selves, there was for me in all of it a mythic scale... wink.

Please don't kick back for too long, the inertia of the world is a grating potato and the revolution taking place in comics needs your blood to wet the wheel. Ho-ho!
("Surrealism is a world of carefully mix hot metaphors, of visual poetry and it's condensation of words." -Comrade-X)

Your pal

Toc

PS - Stuff I've included:

A pile of give-away-comics of everything I've been able to print so far, if you ever come upon anyone you think would like it ... please please pass the salt. I didn't use your credit card. Your kindness was worth far more then money so how could I be so mundane.

Some pages from my second big (27"x 42" .3mm pencil on, 33"x51", 200 pound cotton PH paper, Kids of Lower Utopia; Letters from the Front Lines V6 N03) ongoing comic (a 46 page comic for my next show in the fall of 05 or spring of '06).

The cover of my comic V2 No1 which is just waiting around for a donor. If I described how poor I am, it would make you laugh out loud at least it has that effect on me. (I've decided that self promotion is a not-so-subtle test to see if you can be distracted from your work).

I've included a print-out copy of Kids of Lower Utopia V6 No.1 Chapter 1 (this first book of 18 pages is done in ink). And I included the beginning of Chapter 2 which will be a second comic done in pencil with a 30 page notebook of a hand written dream in its middle, (all done at 6.125" x 9.625"). The following is a note to a friend about this comic; and why the change in medium.

"Volume six of The Lost and Found Season of the Most Pope Joey, number one of Kids of Lower Utopia, chapter one featuring, Daffodil Dash Eleven and Softdoor Scout Finnagain. So this was the comic I was working on when Roger Ricco knocked on my door in the spring 2000. I was working on page 18, and after his visit I immediately stopped working V6.1 and began V6.2 which I had already mapped, though I hadn't mapped that it would be done large in pencil, I hadn't thought I would ever be able to afford to print a pencil addition which costs 16 times more then ink. But despite the degutting-of-moneys, pencil returns me to the bright and shiny place of my childhood, and I am convinced that the long machination of our individual subconscious' set us up (and that's as close to "God" as I'll go) and sent Roger to remind me of the very live and original voice of that most humble of creatures: pencil.
Now I just can't go back to ink, so the second book of this comic is in pencil starting on page 20. When it is done then I will cry about money. But for now I am thrilled to get back to the exhilarating speed of doing just a comic, I had forgotten the reinforcing nature of a spiritual proletarian-ism that fills me when I work comics.
Art is so bogus, so embarrassingly feeble, waiting for a kind word from such a dull gene-pool. Oh for the little rich, they turn us into flimflams-gips and carneys for our crust, always juggling the money away from their novo largesse. Oh blessed are the insecure marrow-suckers and cake-eaters. (A bitterbit of HaHa!)"

Finally I must say that you of course don't have to write me back, I really appreciate your recent letter and I am replete with it's encouragement so don't feel like all this verbiage looks for a reply. I am just this way when I am shut away in my rooom-box... my eagerness is allowed to run free. Yeeha.

So that being said; lastly (way beyond finally) I've included an essay on "why-a-comic" which is a question that I've winged so many times that I thought it would be useful to have it written. It includes a redefinition of Scott McCloud's; "juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence."
Why did I include it? I wanted to create a definition that did not beg acceptance but spoke it as granted by the potential inherent in Comics. And... if you see anything, (other than everything), that erks you I would love to know. Feel free to add and subtract, multiply and divide.

Why-a-duck

I am asked often enough the question; "Why-a-comic," (since the by-product of my comics is art), to warrant finally writing a useful answer. Other than comic's emphasis on art as narrative, it is because the system works. The distributors (Diamond in particular) are savvy enough to recognize the economic value of mutations and thereby maintain an open system for the new and different. There are very few limitations in self publishing (compared, of course, to being dead), Diamond asks for a professional presentation; such that you make it easy for them to distribute the work, and that is pretty much all they ask for. This seems reasonable since they are in the business of business, and comics are just their lucky commodity.

But mostly why-a-comic is because to publish a personal comic is within the economic grasp of the poorer class, where artists, for the most part, live. Why are artists poor? Because the art is always smarter than the artist and thereby does the choosing, (choosing its own expression). And if you make art and if it is your life, and if your work does not fit the fashion of the time, than you will necessarily become part of this poor class... or you will quit. In such a wealthy country as America to be poor is to be invisible because most Americans' can not conceive of anyone with an intelligent reason to be poor.

Every image has its story, its internal dialogue with time. Everything in form lives and dies in time. So every young struggler I meet, I ask them what their work is about - and when they tell me, I say; that is your story and these are its images, publish a comic, see who responds. An essential part of the process of art is that of putting the work out into the world to see if it is sentient enough to live on its own, this understanding of objective distance can not be realized in any other way. But... putting it out into the world has little to do with other peoples opinions, it's really just a way to get that final juice of your own reading, (the reading of what you did, and so ... will do next).

The audience of a comic is in a sense a single buyer of a piece of art -- that is the comic. All those three-dollars come together to make a single amount that pays for the life of the work. And over time more and more audience trickle in increasing the recompense which supports the future work, the next comic -- the next show.

The audience of comics are the ones who define the limits of what a comic is, they are the actual critic. A small but consistent part of the entire comic audience seems to willingly participate in an ongoing search for the new and subversively interesting mutations in visual story telling, they encourage mutation with their three dollar votes. It is a very direct response that includes question, letters, and discussions in critique, it is very live.

In the gallery system the dealer stands between the audience and the artist, weeding, choosing to show one over another as the representative (elected by the dollar-vote) of a constituency (their clients). The gallery dealers know their clients' taste and the limits of their attention. They attempt to educate and cajole their clients into new realms of perception... slow work... for big money. The gallery takes half and doesn't say to the artist; we like your work allow us to sell it for you. What they say is; I like this, I like that, can you do more a-this to a-that. They know their market -- you don't, and you had better be limber enough to participate in this game of willingness or you will find out that there are thousands waiting to take your place. The few changes asked of me were innate within my work and excellent ideas. (Friends... you are not your ideas you are the way and the skill with which you feel them). A gallery is a business and has a monster overhead and must do what it takes to stay alive. That is the way… it works.

In comics the much more direct power of the audience to participate in the choosing of their own culture is exhilarating. Eventually some part of that initial searching audience, by virtue of their mutual dollar, becomes a single loyal patron of that artist's work, and even the poor can afford a few votes each month. The live-ness of this system is a direct check against the stagnation of the medium by the domination of the addictive mundane consistency of corporation comics. (I have imagined that the thinking for supporting this work is; better this than nothing).

Another answer to why-a-comic is that; the comic is an art form that travels. Instead of gathering an audience in mass and traveling a distance to a gallery to see the work, the art travels to the audience. It comes in a compact, replaceable, disposable, recyclable, and all around hively humble form: a comic, whose intimacy of voice does not fade or change by size of editions or time. The conservation of useable time is a strong influence on everything in our culture including art; we live for the higher protein of the Edit.

When my son is performing some questionable action I say to him, "Are ya helping or hurtin?" There are feudal overtones to the ownership of original art, in its small way comics are helping to move the world towards a more proletariat percept of value where the value has moved from the physical thing (of the art) to its expression as experiential-ideas. And once while traveling In Elysium I met a kid who said to me (about art), "If you can't print it... you're on the wrong side." "Helpin-or-hurtin," is a good question, it's the kind of question you can't help but ask when you have a kid.

Another answer to why-a-comic (that is maybe too esoteric) is that because of the very personal pacing of the medium -- the amount of silence inherent for each reader, the potential for reading a kind of non-linear perceptual leaping by intuition - is maximized. If a comic is a list of images in a formal proximity that initiates a narrative experience -- a subconscious inductive/deductive narrative flowing, then it strikes me how this definition applies to certain kinds of poetry as well. I heard Robert Bly once say that some of his poems were "gathered" as if he had readied the table for a feast just to see who would show up. This is also is found in the Spanish and Persian poets, we call it surrealism or mysticism but it's really just a form of surrendering to intuitive thinking (traveling inward by means of the subconscious) these poets spoke a figurative poetry that read the world as a conscious conversation, and maximized distance between metaphors. Verbal images set in a formal proximity with other verbal images causing a narrative flow ... is poetry.

Comics are a medium where the incantations of poetry can arc across in juxtaposition with the direct-observations of visual-art, while both are embedded in the silence inherent in the personal pacing of the medium. In comics that movement between images, verbal to verbal, visual to visual, visual to verbal and back, within that agreeable and formal proximity, has such potential of tension (measured in absorption) that the compelling could equal the Heart's own velocity, allowing you to feel that little amber juice in your chest that makes beauty so addictive. Of course... that could just be me.