Platypus of Truth

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.