Inktober 2019
Hellboy - Original Ink & Paper sketch by DUNCAN FREGREDO
I performed the digital color separation on Mr. Fregredo’s original piece. I just want everyone to know that this is HIS art, not mine. The original piece (which he graciously sketched for me) is framed over my desk. Every article I write, is created beneath Hellboy’s watchful eye. NOT EYES. Eye. That’s significant if you’ve read the books…
What is the most punk-rock thing you can think of? Banned DC? Sid & Nancy? Fugazi turning down their Bonnaroo invite - bc they deemed the $40/person ticket price exorbitant?
For me, DIY (Do It Yourself) is the most punk rock thing. It is the distillate, the most concentrated presentation punk rock’s animating chemical. If you want it, get it. Don’t wait for it to happen. Make it happen.
Energetic.
Simple.
Punk.
DIY till you die. I believe in it with every rip in my skinny jeans.
Aging is changing me. It is forcing me to reconcile how I live with what I believe. My relationship with the DIY aesthetic is a prime example. Let me give you the backstory.
DIY has held my intellectual allegiance from the moment I first heard Rocket To Russia, but as we all know: believing with your head and acting on that belief are two different things. St. James said that he demonstrated his faith through his works - i.e. the proof of true belief is found in actions taken. Applying my DIY beliefs to my creative process did not come naturally. In fact it took time, stagnation and an 11-year-old kid to awaken its primal power.
Ok. Can you stay with me?
If this article is about growth, then I gotta show you how I used to live, so imo jump to a chapter of my life that I’m not particularly proud of - Graduate School. A lot of things went wrong for me in grad school. While burning myself out and picking up a host of unhealthy coping mechanisms, I discovered my favorite storytelling medium: comic books. One January evening, I stepped out of a sleeting, wintery mix into Forbidden Planet NYC. That night, I walked out with a copy of Hellboy: Darkness Calls under my arm written by Mike Mignola, illustrated by Duncan Fegredo, colored by Dave Stewart and lettered by Clem Robbins. I was back the next night to buy The Troll Witch & Other Stories.
As my academic dreams crumbled around me, I threw myself headlong into the strange, joyful world that was the indie comics scene in 2012. I don’t want to gush too long or hard, but Becky Cloonan was poppin out mini-comics (now collected in By Chance or Providence), James Harren & John Arcudi were tearing it up both in Rumble and BPRD: Hell On Earth, Nick Dragrotta & Jonathan Hickman’s East of West remains (in my mind) the best scifi western since Cowboy BeeBop, while Emma Rios & Kelly Sue Deconnick’s Pretty Deadly stands out as the best WESTERN since LEONE, and (of course) there was Saga by Fiona Staples & Brian K. Vaughn. It was an embarrassment of riches for comics readers to be sure. For me the crown jewel among all of these books was Mike Mignola’s Hellboy In Hell.
It resonated with something deep inside of me. Mignola encapsulated tensions I felt within myself as he drove his titular character step-by-step towards his story’s end. I was caught between who I was & who I wanted to be and, like Hellboy, I was afraid of who I was becoming. Last month, I wrote an article arguing that storytelling is a gift from the storyteller to the audience. Hellboy in Hell was exactly that.
Somewhere amidst the emotional tumult of laying my academic dreams to rest, a new ambition sprung up and out of that warm graveside: I wanted to make comics! My own comics! I didn’t need approval or permission! I just needed…wait, what do you need to make comics?
At a bare minimum, you need:
Someone to write the story.
Someone to draw the story.
Someone to publish the story.
I knew I could do the writing. Like, not to brag, but I was already a published author in The Journal of the American Chemical Society b-words! As far as publishing was concerned, I’d figure that out after the thing was made.
Mostly I just needed an artist to illustrate my stories because, well, I couldn’t draw.
I don’t care who is saying it, the previous sentence is always false. False, in the absolute strictest sense of the word. Of course I could draw. Everyone can! It’s not so much that I couldn’t draw. I was actually just embarrassed by my own skill level. I was a 20-something millennial who couldn’t draw much better than an 8-year-old, so I did what any member of my generation would do: I sat around and blamed The Bush Administration. I spent the rest of my 20s hoping someone would draw my stories for me. I spent it hoping I would get picked, hoping that someone would just let me make comics. I was a simp to my own dreams.
Where was my defiant DIY spirit?
Buried in my head & divorced from my actions.
Looking back, it’s easy to say, “Give YOURSELF the permission!” And ya know what? Maybe I should have, but I did not have the strength. I was paralyzed by my inspiration. I wanted to create something as majestic as Hellboy In Hell. I wanted to to write with the lyriscism of Daytripper or crystalize the creeping dread of Demeter. Instead of picking up a pencil and learning how to make the thing that I wanted to see in the world, I sat around and hoped that someone else would make my dreams come true.
If you have spent any time at all on Low Art Punk, you know something changed. You may think I woke up to the realization that I was being a total sad sack. You might assume I shook the dust off, shed my mopey outlook and embraced the power of DIY, but you’d be wrong. I sat inanimate. paralyzed. waiting. I was 32-years-old when I was given permission to draw again. That permission? It came from an 11-year-old.
At the time we were going through some hard stuff as a family. Enter the Inktober Art Challenge. For those unfamiliar, during Inktober (i.e. October), artists create a new piece of art each day based on a prompt list. This takes place largely on social media platforms. At the time, my daughter was in elementary school, so she did not have any accounts of her own. I asked her if she wanted to do the challenge together. We would draw our pieces each day and I’d post them to my IG. She said yeah & we got going.
It was…incredible - a once in a lifetime experience. Drawing daily was transformative for both of us. It was also hard, like really hard, coming up with and finishing a piece a day. As it turned out, that creative difficulty was not a bug in the system - it was a feature.
Each day we had a new art assignment that gave us a mental break from how heavy everything in our lives felt in 2019. (Heh. We thought 2019 was tough? Good thing we discovered ART THERAPY before 2020 hit, am I right?) More than that, it gave us an outlet to actually process what we were going through.
Art therapy is real, bro! Finally, and most relevant to this article, it gave me a context where I was not afraid to pick up my stylus and make some marks.
The only reason I participated in Inktober 2019 was to connect with my daughter. I wasn’t trying to dunk on her & I didn’t care who saw/liked/disliked what we were doing. We embarked on the journey together and we finished - 31 days of consecutive art - 62 new pieces between the both of us! I actually got all of our pieces printed onto a fleece blanket and gave it to her for XMas that year. It was pretty sweet.
So how did this change me? By the end of Inktober, I noticed that drawing was getting easier and I was getting…better? Like, not, “Good,” but better. I was enjoying it too. Enjoying the challenge & the experimentation. Most of all, I enjoyed becoming friends with my daughter. Don’t get me wrong - we have always loved each other, but that month we bro’d down. Hard. We became homies.We started a tradition & we haven't missed a year since. Dudes, I am indebted to that little girl, because she gave me the confidence I needed at a time when I was spineless. Her presence and partnership made me feel like it was totally OK to be 33 years old and a piss-poor drawer. She removed skill as a barrier to creation. As a result? I started growing.
In the subsequent years, I kept drawing and started writing. I popped out my first comic in 2020 - fulfilling the dream born in the ashes of my graduate school experience. With distance comes perspective. As I look back on 2019, I know (I KNOW) there was no way I would have stopped dreaming and started doing were it not for my daughter. She gave me the permission to create that I could not give myself. She pulled me onto the creative dance floor when I was gazing longingly from the sidelines.
So what’s the most Punk Rock thing you can think of? To me, it’s the DIY spirit applied to middle-aged change. The gutsiest thing in the entire world is that 40-year-old mom at the piano recital plinking out Ode to Joy. It’s the lumpy, middle-aged jogger who is out there getting it. It can’t get more punk rock than these two, because they are overcoming embarrassment to get where they want to be. They are not there for you and they don’t to give two shits what you think. Fuck dying of a heroin overdose on a park bench, middle-age change is punk rock in its purist form.
I’ll catch you next month on the 3rd,
-JT⚡
Ok, so I gotta add a POSTSCRIPT.
I want to write something here that’s only for some of my readers. This isn’t for everybody. Feel free to stop reading when this no longer applies to you. Ok. Who’s it for?
This POSTSCRIPT is for the reader who wants to make something.
Doesn’t matter what it is. There’s a thing that isn’t in the world and YOU want it to be there.
Some of you ARE making THAT thing and that fills my heart with JOY. Could you reach out and tell me about it? Hit up my contact page & shoot me an email! I want to see what you’re up to & I’d love talk about it!
Others of you are not making that thing - your thing. Right now, no one is adding it to the world. I just want you to know this: you are needed on the dance floor. We need your voice & we want your story to become apart of our own - so join us! Look. I am out here. I am dancing & yeah, I have no rhythm, but maybe I’m finding my own.
Get ready, because right now imo reel you in.
My advice is this: Get out there and MAKE Something - not “The Thing.” Just SOMETHING.
Make something truly terrible.
Make something you will be embarrassed OF and make that sucker quick.
Make it. Finish it. Then make your next thing.
If you rinse and repeat, over and over, again and again, you will discover at some point that you no longer hate everything you make. Further on up the road, you will find YOURself actually liking your new stuff.
That is the call I could not give it to myself, so allow me to pay it forward to you.
And if you choose to answer
If you choose to make it
If you choose creation
It would bring my HEART such joy.
