Platypus of Truth

It's been a few years since I last dipped in to the world of Robert E. Howard's sword-swinging barbarian, Conan. While the writing is always high quality, the racism and sexism that riddle Howard's oeuvre is hard to handle in large doses. After a good, long break, then, I decided that it was finally time to have a go at finishing my annotated edition of the complete works. The Servants of Bit-Yakin : The Servants of Bit-Yakin  returns us from the microcosmic novella that is The Hour of the Dragon  to the world of the standard Conan adventure story. Once more, we return to the pseudo-Africa that so dominated Howard's imagination. This tale, with its ruined city created by a lost race of white men who were able to perfectly preserve their corpses, and its eternal queen apparently owes its inspiration to H.R. Haggard's She . Rather than give us another She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, however, Howard evolves the adventure in his own way with the mysterious element  coming i...

After reading Glen Weldon's book The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture,  I decided to add my second encounter with the Dark Knight to our Netflix queue. What I knew of Batman as a kid came from the Adam West t.v. serial. Seeing Tim Burton's Batman  was a revelation. It cemented my love of the character for years to come. I think it's been well over a decade since I last watched the film, so it was with not a little trepidation that I popped the DVD into our home computer this past weekend. I'm glad to say that after all these years the 1989 Batman  is still a treat. The first thing that struck me was the art direction. Gotham looks like New York felt before Giuliani cleaned it up. There's that run-down Art Deco aesthetic crushed under the weight of steel girders and Brutalism all covered over with a thick patina of filth. We can feel the weight of urban decay. The helplessness of Gotham's dedicated civic leaders, the Mayor, Harvey Dent, and Co...

There's nothing quite like arriving late to the conversation. It's why I don't like being late to Christmas parties if I can help it. When I began reading Inklings scholarship (Tom Shippey on Tolkien, Doug Gresham on Lewis), I knew that I'd arrived late to the party. Things were being referenced or scoffed at that I didn't fully understand. Over time, I began to pick up on elements of the earlier conversation and orient myself. Recently, however, I've been able to go back and look at that earlier part of the discussion; specifically, the parts before the coming of Humphrey Carpenter and his monolithic J.R.R. Tolkien , and The Inklings . The particular works in question come not from Oxford insiders or authorized biographers but academics on this side of the pond who were willing to risk professional scorn by asserting the literary greatness of the Inklings and their associates. They are, respectively, Understanding Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings  (copyright...

Ok, so I couldn't resist... I've been fiddling around with Paint for my own amusement and using it to dress up a few of my pen and ink drawings. Spending time around the local comic shop with a few coworkers recently has also put comic book layouts are on the brain. My own efforts are about as far from Hellboy  or Rai  as I am from Pandemonium or 4001 A.D. Still, it's fun to play around with a little zero-risk creativity. Often we wish our hobbies were jobs. Jobs can be wonderful things when we love what we do, but they are also work. There are deadlines to meet and customers to satisfy. We may enter a business in one department and drift inevitably over time into another. In other words, when we're tied to the paycheck, we have to follow the money. In our unpaid hobbies, however, we are free. No one penalizes us for puttering away at side projects. The labor is unprofitable by definition. Henry David Thoreau worked for six weeks a year and then lived simply so th...

It all started with a whiteboard doodle during a brainstorm session in study hall. We were experimenting with pitches.  Suddenly, the room synergized and a story began rolling out with the force of a freight train. We had an idea -a great idea. How often do our thoughts come back to us with an alienated majesty? We discard them because they are our thoughts. Reading Ralph Waldo Emerson's Self Reliance  with my students this year, this passage struck me with the force of that freight train. Do I distrust my own thoughts simply because they are mine and not some paid authority? In a democratic nation, creators crave the votes of the masses; votes in the form of dollars. As the 51% (hoi poloi) become the arbiters of Right and Wrong, so the Paid Position tells us what is worthy (to agathon) and unworthy (to kakon) of our attention. Plato taught that we do evil through lack of knowledge. No person would knowingly choose the bad since the bad would inevitably harm themselves...

I'm always a day late and a dollar short to things. In this case, it's about two years late. Late to what, you ask? Well, my wife and I finally got around to seeing Cartoon Network's mini-series "Over the Garden Wall". It's a show about two brother who become lost in the woods and travel through an eerie feast of New England Americana seasoned with a with worthy of Homestar Runner . In short, it's the show I wish I was brilliant enough to create. As Emerson might say, it was my own thought come back to me with an alienated majesty . Beyond it's carefully researched aesthetic, the show is a delight for the classically educated. The bleeding edelwood trees have their true home in Dante's Inferno  while the talking beasts and witches' cabins are firmly rooted in the Brothers Grimm. There are subtle grecco-roman touches too: the need for two coins to take the ferry across the river, for instance. "Over the Garden Wall" is on DVD and c...

Not my all-time favorite Dickens book, but it has it's moments. Here we have a pen and brush marker rendition of a whiteboard doodle I did to help my students along. We're such a visual culture that some rudimentary art skills are almost a requirement for teaching these days.

The academic year is always exhausting and with a new position this year there hasn't been much time for reading anything that's not school related. However, I have managed to slip in a few treasures nonetheless. *Warning: Hellboy in Hell  spoilers* The first of those is the final installment of Mike Mignola's Hellboy saga: Hellboy in Hell: The Death Card . How do you end a series that has been going for twenty years? Hellboy's violent career as Anung un Rama, the World Destroyer, would argue a Big Bang. Unlike the movies, however, Mignola's Hellboy has always been more about the brooding silences and carefully worded dialog than the fights. We had our epic battle with the Dragon in The Storm and the Fury. In The Death Card , tough Hellboy harrows hell, defeats Behemoth and Leviathan, and slays the princes of Pandemonium, it is all done with a somber finality that rises above the the frenetic furor of an Avengers  or Batman Versus Superman: Dawn of Justice . In ...

You know, it's been years -maybe over a decade- since I last saw Bladerrunner . I think it was a director's cut, but I'm not even sure which one. It made a lot more sense than the first time I saw it; though even then the movie left a lasting imprint on my mind. I remember the way it played with light and dark. I remember the perpetual rain. Most of all (and who could forget them?), I remember those iconic light umbrellas. So here's a little colored pencil work on a rainy day in honor of a film that deserves all the attention it gets.

Poe's Ligeia is a mystery. Her features are un-place-able. She has no family. It isn't even clear how long she's been alive. What we do know is that she has deep knowledge of alchemical and occult forces. Here we have Ligeia as an alchemical figure with Lilith-like properties and Egyptian motifs. Not a little inspiration was pulled from the alchemist's laboratory in Hellboy: Wake the Devil .

As a fitting follow-up to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein , I decided to doodle my way through a bit of Edgar Allen Poe. I've asked my students to do the same as a way of interacting with the text, moving from consumers to creators. It's an honorable tradition. After all, it's hard not to see Lovecraft's debt to Poe when reading The Fall of the House of Usher  and comparing it to The Rats in the Walls , or Ligeia  and The Thing on the Doorstep . Lovecraft binge-read Poe as a child and then turned his own hand to creating. So here we have the mysterious Lady Ligeia with her impossible to place features and flair for consumptive look (hint: consumption was linked with vampirism in the backwoods of 18th century New England). Next, we have the opium inspired bedroom/ritual chamber where Ligeia makes her final grand entrance. I wasn't sure how that last one would look on paper, but Poe's aesthetic is unfailingly creepy whether in words or colored pencil.

Here is the final doodle in my Frankenstein series. As with the others, it is based on an original whiteboard doodle used in classroom instruction while teaching Mary Shelley's Frankenstein . I had forgotten how haunting the novel's final image is: The monster drifting away upon a small block of ice into darkness. As with Walton, the narrator, we have heard both sides of the story and are called to render judgement. What should become of the Monster? Like Shakespeare's Prospero, we are free to send him anywhere our imagination likes. I. personally, think that the Monster is slowly dying and with Frankenstein dead he has lost all possibility of repairing himself or fathering others of his kind. Whatever the exact nature of his interior life, it will be lost forever. The Monster imagines himself as Milton's Satan, but he is not. He is a Man, and that is far more and far less than even the greatest angel.

I'm in an American Short Stories unit with my students right now. As I looked at the list (Irving, Hawthorne, and Poe), I noticed that the chosen readings were all tales of the supernatural. For some reason, as early United States writers pondered what it meant to be "an American" their thoughts swiftly turned to folklore and the supernatural. Perhaps it was the influence of Romanticism and the Gothic craze that was sweeping Europe at the same time. At any rate, I thought I would compile my own list of favorite Gothic American Short Stories perfect for the Autumnal fireside. Washington Irving: Rip Van Winkle The Legend of Sleepy Hollow Nathaniel Hawthorne: Young Goodman Brown The Grey Champion Edgar Allen Poe: The Fall of the House of Usher Ligeia H.P. Lovecraft: The Shunned House The Dunwich Horror

Today's post marks the 300th literary musing here at Platypus of Truth. That journey began with a review of two of my favorite books: Aeschylus' Oresteia  and J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings back in '06. Ten years later, we're still going strong and still drawing as often as not from the literary canon. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein  makes a fitting companion to two originators with her towering fantasy that explores of the origin of pain. This is my third time reading Frankenstein . At first, I thought it was a Rousseauean fable placing the source of human evil in the corruptions of society. On a third read, the message appears more complex. Frankenstein and the monster he has created mirror each other. Both experience early tragedy, both are left to educate themselves, and both engage in highly articulate blame shifting that seeks always to root their evil deeds in the inattention of others. They are Milton's Satan: starting off proud and towering a...

This is a pen-and-ink version of a whiteboard doodle from my class on Frankenstein. Here we have The Monster fulfilling his promise to be with Frankenstein on his wedding night. Poor fool, Frankenstein believes that The Monster is coming for him! The silhouette style is meant to be a nod to German Impressionism, and influence on Mike Mignola's popular Hellboy  series. I used several of Mignola's Frankenstein illustrations from The House of the Living Dead  in class with great success. The students enjoyed seeing how Mignola's interpretation of The Monster matched with the images in their head. They're working on their own art project for the book and will be presenting their own creations on Monday. There are many ways to read a book. Mortimer Adler suggested that we do it pen-in-hand. I find it equally productive to do it sketch-book-in-hand.

This is another marker doodle copied from a whiteboard illustration that I used in teaching Frankenstein . Here, we have Frankenstein looking up at the mountains before he meets with the creature on the glacier. Ice is a recurring theme in the book where nature closely mimics the human action. Linking the monster with ice may be a reference to Milton's Satan who has his dominions amidst pyramids of ice in the northern reaches of Heaven (c.f. Tennyson's The Last Tournament  where the Red Knight's bandits make their last head like Satan in the North ). Nature and natural sympathies are the bread and butter of the Romantics, but I have been surprised this time by how overt a role Nature plays in Frankenstein . I didn't remember the descriptions of the Swiss mountains or the Rhine being so lengthy and vivid. In keeping with that, the lion's share of my doodles for this book have focused on impressionistic images of the setting rather than close-ups of the characters.

My students are reading Frankestein right now, so here is a modified version of a white-board doodle I cooked up for them. R. Walton imagines that he may well find the Earthly Paradise should he arrive at the North Pole. Frankenstein warns him of the dangers of obsession and proceeds to tell Walton how his own passion for scientific control of Nature led to his undoing. So here we have the northern seas giving way to the Earthly Paradise in the land of perpetual sunlight. The scene is enclosed in an elaborate terrarium that signifies Walton's desire for control and dominance cloaked in the flowery guise of Poetry. Medium: Brush Marker on sketchbook paper

After reading Glenn Weldon's The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture , I decided to brush up on my knowledge of the caped crusader. I began by revisiting Frank Miller's The Dark Night Returns . I was surprised to find it a much more nuanced and positive work than I remembered it. DKI , however, represents an alternate reality from the mainline of the comic. In that sense, it's as monolithic and archetypal as Nolan's Batman Begins  or Burton's Batman . To get a better idea of how the Batman of the comics has evolved, I turned to Jeff Loeb's Hush . I read the first issue of Hush  when it came out and never finished the rest. I think I disliked the art and was experiencing a distinct lack of funds at that time. After reading it all the way through, I still have issues with the art (Harley Quinn's non-existent backbone anyone?), but I do also see its virtues: it's incorporation of the strong-points of prior artists, its novel depiction of mo...

What's a story without a villain? Here we have one from that all-too-common unpublished novel. Still, Lucian here is giving me some more practice for my flat-color style. I'm not sure if I've arrived at the right level of creepy for a haunted New England garret, but this feels close. It needs more books, trunks, and candelabra. How do you draw Evil? Is it spiny? Is it ugly? Is it dark? Our villain here is meant to have the look of a corrupted C.S. Lewis -one who never went off to the "Old Knock" and Oxford, but who wandered off into the murky depths of Spiritualism. He's more at home now in William's War in Heaven  or All Hallows Eve  than on Perelandra  or the woods of Narnia; a sort of Eustace Scrub with the Necronomicon.

Another scene from an unfinished novel. After Bukatman's Hellboy's World , I decided to continue my comic book meditations with Glen Weldon's The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture . Between the two books, I've had some time to think seriously about comics in a way I haven't in several years. It's also inspired me (in my own fumbling way) to begin incorporating comic motifs into my own art with the art markers. Right now, that means a lot of Hellboy's black and flat color aesthetic. We'll see if it morphs into anything else in the days and months ahead.

The first full week of classes is over and that means an early end to this year's summer reading at Platypus of Truth. If 2016 saw fewer titles, they were no less enjoyable than in years prior. As usual, topics varied widely with trips into 18th century literature ( The Vicar of Wakefield ) and comics theory ( Hellboy's World ). Without further ado then, let's move on to the awards. Sun: The heaven of scholars always has multiple works vying for the title. This year presented a strong field with several works on colonial New England ( In the Devil's Snare , Escaping Salem , and A little Commonwealth ). Inklings scholarship can never be ignored with Jane Chance's A Mythology of Power  and Mark Atherton's There and Back Again running against Corey Olsen's Exploring J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit . Ancient Greece wasn't missing either ( A Storm of Spears ). With such a tough field, it's hard to decide but the award goes to Mark Atherton's There a...

‘I watch thee from the quiet shore; Thy spirit up to mine can reach; But in dear words of human speech We two communicate no more.’ And I, ‘Can clouds of nature stain The starry clearness of the free? How is it? Canst thou feel for me Some painless sympathy with pain?’ And lightly does the whisper fall; ‘’Tis hard for thee to fathom this; I triumph in conclusive bliss, And that serene result of all.’ So hold I commerce with the dead; Or so methinks the dead would say; Or so shall grief with symbols play And pining life be fancy-fed. -Tennyson, In Memoriam LXXXV Another scene from the same unpublished book set in a haunted house. I'm getting more satisfied with my command of the markers. I have a long, long way to go, but working through the new Star Wars  and Vader  comics along with a decade-over-due re-read of The Dark Night Returns  are helping a bit. Posting all this stuff is a bit like being Cosme McMoon in Florence Foster Jenkins : never goo...

Another character from an unpublished work drawn using the flat-color style of Hellboy .

Another picture from an unpublished series.

Here are two pictures drawn during a recent trip to visit family. Both are concept art for the forth volume in a series of unpublished novels which chronicle the strange life of occult detective Ronald Fairfax. The style is inspired by a read through Hellboy's World , an academic study of the comic (and comics in general) by Stanford professor Scott Bukatman. If you like Hellboy, or comics in general, I can't recommend this book to you highly enough. Incidentally, it was also helpful in understanding an illuminated manuscript collection we happened upon during our trip. In other news, teacher's meeting have started, so posting may become erratic over the month of August. It's already be an a-typical summer with far more pictures than book reviews and reading live-blogs. Oh well. It's always Strange Places for us here at Platypus of Truth, and we'll see what the Fall brings.

One of my favorite little quirks in the original Legend of Zelda  was the "bait". That meaty little chicken leg that you could always throw down when things got to hot to handle. I never beat the original Zelda title, though I got close. This, then, is my homage to Ganon, that shadowy presence never glimpsed in all his piggy glory until I got to A Link to the Past .

"It's dangerous to go out alone! Take this." These words were the passport to adventure for an entire generation of children. They're on par with "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away..." or "In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit". So here we have Link gaining his first sword, finding the magic sword in the cemetery, and encountering a moblin in the mazes of the Lost Woods. P.S. -Notice that the moblin is wielding his spear with a sauroter in the "correct" under-arm position and carries a javelin as a secondary weapon. Whether he has properly adjusted his grip to account for the weapon's rearward center of gravity is a matter of scholarly debate and may simply come down to a matter of artistic convention.

Today, it's towers and thunderstorms. We have the Tower of Hera from The Legend of Zelda: a Link to the Past  as it appears in the comic book version. Next, we have Barad-Dur, Tolkien's Dark Tower, inspired by The Lord of the Rings  board game. The medium, once more, is art marker with highlights done in colored pencil. Of course, every tower needs its denizens. Below are a stalfos and rocklops ready to meet any unwary trespassers.

Here are three more pictures inspired by the original Legend of Zelda drawn in marker with some colored pencil overlay. I don't know how the rogue octorok got a hold of Link's raft.

Looking around the web, I found inspiration for my next marker forays. Here we have the first dungeon from the original Legend of Zelda. The medium, once more, is art marker and brush marker with a little help from my colored pencils on Link's lantern. I love the imaginative world of the Zelda games. They are permeated with a sense of mystery and enchantment that begs to be carried over to the world of brush and pen.

I was looking for a reference to go with the last picture and came across this statue of Saint Bartholomew draped in his own skin from Milan. It looked like a perfect opportunity to play with my grey-scale markers, so I jumped right in. The finished piece reminds me a bit of those gorgeous renaissance grey-scales that Mike Mignola used to use as frontispieces for Hellboy chapters (a colored icon of St. Bartholomew actually appears in the first edition of Sir Edward Grey: Witchfinder ). Anyhow, this would do just as well heading up one of the chapters of a BadNun  graphic novel...

I decided to test out the technique I used for the stained glass in yesterday's drawing on another sketch for my study hall's t.v. pitch. This led to a discussion with my wife about the probable provenance of said window and its use in the post-Vatican II era. The window itself is freely adapted from a set of Tiffany windows created in Shelton Connecticut for use at Huntington Congregational Church (with apologies to Saint Joe's).

Huntington Congregational: one of my favorite sites. I've drawn the church in pencil and then gone over it with black brush marker and filled in the details with a combination of brush marker and art marker. Next time, I need to use a ruler.

Here are two more marker drawings from my study hall's t.v. series pitch. To the left, we have the local Capo thinking about his son's future over a bourbon on the rocks. On the right is our lead receiving a visit from The Voice. It's also looking like I need a range of flesh tones and a set of art pens...

This is another piece for my study hall's t.v. pitch . Here we have the Irish novice's childhood friend, erstwhile love-interest, and son of the local mafia capo (you can see why our novice might want to be a nun). Of course, if you think that's complicated, just see where the students were willing to go...

I was looking for some marker inspiration today and ended up turning to Shotaro Ishinomori's The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past . There's a village scene on the opening page that reminds me very much of a traditional New England township. There's even what looks like a saltbox church with a gothic steeple wacked on in the Victorian Era. So here's my reworking of a portion of that image as a further experiment in marker-craft.

Grad School is a good time for moody Goth animes -especially if you're a poseur. It's been years, but I do remember liking Witch Hunter Robin . So here's my attempt at the show's title character, Robin Sena. Prismacolor art markers and brush markers are again my weapons of choice (no orbo) with a little help from my Prismacolor colored pencils for the flesh tone. My technique needs more discipline, but I am better satisfied with this piece than with most of my previous art marker attempts.

Still working with my new Prismacolor art markers. This attempt looks a little more promising. I give you the "One and Only" Shiitake No Oni.

Exploring a new medium today: Prismacolor art markers. Today's image is Castle Sasune from Final Fantasy III (of the many jobs). The game's enjoyable, so I thought I'd take a stab at the art -though that doesn't come as naturally to me. Mostly, it seems as though it will take me a while to get a handle on this new medium.

The Farthest Shore  concludes the original Earthsea Trilogy. Le Guin has come back and added a further two novels after a long hiatus, but I'm never sure how I feel about their incorporation into the original set. Even The Farthest Shore  has differences in tone from A Wizard of Earthsea  and The Tombs of Atuan . For one thing, it seems as if Le Guin had encountered the works of J.R.R. Tolkien by the time she wrote The Farthest Shore  and that The Lord of the Rings  exercised a subtle, pervasive influence on both language and content. I was waiting in the penultimate chapter for Sparrowhawk to say to Arren "I'm glad you're with me, Lebannen, here at the end of all things". Whatever Tolkienian echoes there might be, however, The Farthest Shore  is still firmly a work of Ursula K. Le Guin. The world is her own, and she is in full command of it as Sparrowhawk and Arren go in quest of the force that is destroying all of Earthsea. No where is this more evident...

Never mind the Mi-Go... My skills-of-a-photographer still leave something to be desired, but here is my first-draft of the miniatures from Fantasy Flight Games' Mansions of Madness . I've supplemented the base set with all sorts of do-dads from my Warhammer collection and some old museum souvenirs I had lying around the house. Points if you get the inside joke with the cultists (aside from the obvious Cthulhu reference).