Addition, multiplication, subtraction
I never was any good at math
I’ve been depressed. I work three day jobs in addition to my cartooning gig. I draw slowly, densely and often not very well. I occasionally see work from my peers with more forgiving work schedules. Petty, childish resentment and jealousy whistle through the ever-present cracks in my mental well being, dissonant notes sing cacophonously. It was crushing the other day, melancholy and doomed. Peers and friends rocket past me because they haven’t got my familial and financial obligations. They can work more efficiently and harder than I can because they aren’t fitting in two hours of tired drawing between dinner and going to bed so they can wake up and work their dead-end day jobs again. I’m tired.
That was pretty pathetic, right? I agree. I can usually tell I’m about to have a complete depressive blowout when this bullshit starts sticking to the walls piling up from the baseboards inwards. Great job as always filtering out signal to noise there, me. I don’t think these feelings are invalid but I do everything in my limited power to make them so. I get so bored with myself. Measuring the dirt beneath my nails and comparing them to anyone else’s.
I’m working on the fifth upstate book, still pencilling roughly a page a day. Fewer days, is all. I want to be a two book a year cartoonist, as long as I’m producing 40-60 page books. Feels attainable. I also want to travel around the country and do shows with my friends and meet new cartoonists. I’ve rarely encountered one I didn’t like. At the moment, what that means is never stop putting in the work, accepting that my employment situation cannot change without an accompanying personal and financial catastrophe, and make the most of the minutes available. It all adds up.
I pencil only so I can ink, so my pencils have an unfinished and hollow quality I don’t care for. They’re also by far more time consuming than inking, so this is what I have to share at time of writing. I’ve been looking at Corpse on the Imjin! by Harvey Kurtzman, Tex, illustrated by Goran Parlov, Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths by Shigeru Mizuki and all of those incredible Yoshiharu Tsuge books by D&Q. In Upstate, I decided early on to use fairly restrained, representational figure drawing to ground the naturalistic story I want to present. I worry now that after working primarily on this series for three years that I’ve gotten stuck there.
When I was in Ohio on the cartoonist’s retreat, one of the other artists there said that my black and white work feels like it’s waiting for color. She isolated something that’s bothered me about my work for years. Amongst other things, I often put too much noise on the page, rendering for the sake of the moving hand rather than the reader’s eye. There are terrific examples of this working (power couple Josh Bayer and Hyena Hell obviously come to mind) but it ain’t me. I’m a mark maker. I want to find a personal artistic balance between that impulse and reduction. Shapes of black, white and grey. Value. Gary Panter is in my veins forever, and I don’t want to fight him. I like him there. His hand has essentially hovered inches above my own on some of the work I’m most proud of. I am not him, however, and I
My family is German on my father’s side. My great grandfather died when my grandfather was a child, so he isn’t a figure of any solidity in the past few generations of American Pellnats. The main character in this story bears no intentional resemblance to any Pellnats, living or dead, other than that very particular teutonic rigidity and severity he brought with him from the old country.
One of the main reasons I wanted to write Upstate was inspired by the death of my uncle Eric, my father’s brother. He drank and smoked himself into an early grave. I don’t feel like I knew him well. His death was another in a long line on both sides of my family of substance abuse, undiagnosed mental illness, childhoods unexplored. My father never, ever talks about his childhood. My paternal grandparents are still alive and they’re odd, isolated, lovely people. Both of my maternal grandparents died of that familiar American cocktail; emphysema, COPD, lung cancer, kidney failure, poor diets, lack of self-care.
My maternal grandmother was one of the most depressed people I’ve ever met. My paternal grandfather is a strange, quiet man who reads omnivorously and collects radios. My mother's upbringing was one of abuse and poverty. My father never, ever talks about his childhood.
I lock myself in a room to write and draw as the sun and moon twirl across the firmament before I swipe a card and clock in at the bar, or the hospital, or to teach. I am sometimes infuriated by the suggestion that I should have to leave my work to maintain friendships with non-artists.
I have little patience for unqualified mental health diagnoses.
What does all of this mean? The pieces don’t fit together. They’re not of the same whole. I choose to present them plainly, flatly. I do not require that art should hold my hand, and I choose not to hold the hand of my readers. Upstate Five is about the Essen family, further back along the continuum of choice and consequence. Just like my family, just like yours.
I went for a walk in the snow around six this morning. It was hard on my knee and back, still not recovered after three months. Snow absorbs soundwaves. All I hear is the crunch of the ice sheet beneath the recent fall, the groaning of the padded denim jacket.
I miss New York. Snow, almost everywhere else I’ve experienced it, takes me back there in a brief mimetic shiver. There was a time when, unable to sleep, I would think of something calming. Snow, billowing around the elevated floodlights of a high school in Brooklyn, moving like a silent storming sea. I’ve since built up a mental resistance to the calming elements of that memory, but times like this can still take me back there, for at least a moment. It all adds up.
