xxiv: indulgence, originally uploaded by sparrowsfall.

Straighten yourself and you will not stand steady;
Display yourself and you will not be clearly seen;
Justify yourself and you will not be respected;
Promote yourself and you will not be believed;
Pride yourself and you will not endure.

These behaviours are wasteful, indulgent,
And so they attract disfavour;
Harmony avoids them.

no other fish in the sea: #13 the trip to kansas part 2 (february 1997) [page 2], originally uploaded by sparrowsfall.

the second page of #13

xx. wandering, originally uploaded by sparrowsfall.

What is the difference between assent and denial?
What is the difference between beautiful and ugly?
What is the difference between fearsome and afraid?

The people are merry as if at a magnificent party
Or playing in the park at springtime,
But I am tranquil and wandering,
Like a newborn before it learns to smile,
Alone, with no true home.

The people have enough and to spare,
Where I have nothing,
And my heart is foolish,
Muddled and cloudy.

The people are bright and certain,
Where I am dim and confused;
The people are clever and wise,
Where I am dull and ignorant;
Aimless as a wave drifting over the sea,
Attached to nothing.

The people are busy with purpose,
Where I am impractical and rough;
I do not share the peoples’ cares
But I am fed at nature’s breast.

no other fish in the sea: #13 the trip to kansas part 2 (february 1997) [page 1], originally uploaded by sparrowsfall.

i don’t know if i pulled this image of a house out of my head, or if i actually found a picture to draw from . . . memory seems to indicate that i made this up, but if i did, i was doing pretty good.

the armadillo brothers are seen here for the first time; not particularly well-drawn. armadillos did not prove particularly easy to draw, especially in the context of luche libre. the brothers are, as you see, ernesto, emilio, and barracho; i believe that barracho translates loosely as ‘a drunk,’ and barracho is seen drinking a little more than the other hermanos armadillos–but they all drink like fish anyway, so who’s to tell the difference?

when i was growing up, before the modern wrestling era began in the 80s, wrestling was a rather itinerent and small-scale sport; wrestlers were liable to appear in a small burg, rent space in an old high school gymnasium, set up a ring, and go to town on each other. year after year the posters would be plastered up in the dimesore windows, and you’d see familiar names. bulldog bob brown was one of them; bruiser bob, gama singh, and harley sweetan were others. i never saw these men battle–or perform, i suppose: but the tough looking bald guys glaring in grainy black and white out of the garish two-colored posters were something to behold; they usually showed up in the same season as the donkey basketball circuit, which i did see, once. if you haven’t seen donkey basketball, i assure you that you will die in sorrow and shame, because it oughtn’t be missed.

it’s a strange world that they lived in, i guess, going from town to town duking it out in matches sometimes for real, other times prearranged. i suppose you’d never for certain what the other man intended to do. it’s a long ways from the loud, obnoxious soap opera that ranges through middle america today, and when bulldog bob brown won, there was no notion that the other guy might have taken a fall. bob beat him, and that was that, and every kid in the elementary would eagerly discuss the results.

so i imagine los armadillos hermanos the same way in my comic: they go from match to match, big and small, and it’s all real. their great enemy, who appears later, is el gringo loco, who, it turns out, was a CIA director in his former career. they are always struggling to overcome him, in matches from veracruz to kansas city, and never quite succeeding.

they are mexicans, of course, as well as armadillos, but they love tejano–you can see they wanted to listen to selena. she’d been dead less than two years at the time, and i had just discovered her music. another missed crossroads in our culture . . .

i’ve done worse layours than this one. i like the house,and the kitchen scene; zephyr is a brand of appliances that i made up, and you will see it often in sparrow’s fall.

you may observe in the corner on the second page my old phone number. i don’t know who you’ll get if you call it now; it certainly won’t be me. i started including it at this time in hopes that some pretty girl who loved my comics would call me up to talk to me about it, and then we’d go out. this happened less often than one might have expected it to.

no other fish in the sea: #12 the trip to kansas part 1 (february 1997) [page 2], originally uploaded by sparrowsfall.

the second page of #12

xxi. accept, originally uploaded by sparrowsfall.

Harmony is only in following the Way.

The Way is without form or quality,
But expresses all forms and qualities;
The Way is hidden and implicate,
But expresses all of nature;
The Way is unchanging,
But expresses all motion.

Beneath sensation and memory
The Way is the source of all the world.
How can I understand the source of the world?
By accepting.

no other fish in the sea: #11 hung over (february 1997) [page 2], originally uploaded by sparrowsfall.

having ensconced these four friends in kansas city, i now sent them haring off into the wilds of kansas. (my friend martha told me that she wanted them to come back to the city, and was worried that they would stay out there.) i don’t know why, for certain, i chose to do this: i think i wanted to draw nips with a car, and then of course had to send them driving somewhere for a while . . . kansas seemed likely, because it was flat and lonely and empty, which appeals to me. so i gave them the unlikely excuse that nips’ mexican wrestling team was staying at his grandmother’s house, and sent them on their way.

the car drawn here is nothing in particular . . . just a generic 1940s/50s chunk of steel–in my head i heard a distant, long-dead ad-man say, here’s your brand new 1954 car! as if it were a name brand, but that’s neither here nor there. nips car has been recently redefined as a tucker in my contribution to the 2003 SPX anthology. a tucker is pretty close to this anonymous car, but has obvious differences. but i felt that the tucker was interesting enough, and this episode was remote enough in time, that no one would really care about continuity problems like that. it’s interesting to compare how this story played out versus how the SPX submission looked. i shake my head at how different the drawing is now; and then i shake my head again at some of the similarities.

again, there are plenty of panelling problems here on the front page; ‘the trip to kansas’ title is difficult to read and i would certainly do it differently today. the panel of christopher and chirp going down the stairs together, and the three tiny panels at the top of the page are jyst difficult to place in the context of the huge panel amorphously hovering beneath them. the second page, although not terribly well drawn, at least resolves some of the issues with the comic’s panels. the main panel on the first page, however, i like so far as the perspective and the snow goes; echoes of it have cropped up elsewhere.

and lo! speaking of things that crop up elsewhere, a scrap of lyrics from ‘i know it’s over’ from the smith’s 1985 album, the queen is dead, crops up here. i have just noticed this for the first time, and am more than a little fascinated, because that song forms the whole underlying theme of a much, much later comic, ‘vauxhall and i.’ i am completely certain that i did not remember i had used that lyric here four years earlier.

other remarks: the wash was a little sloppy. i think that the drawing and inking took so much time that i was in a big hurry to get it done, and skimped on control and quality at the end. the bumper stickers are difficult to read, but say, chester a. arthur was right, (i have no idea,) we are not alone, and hate my driving? call 1-800-go2hell. there’s a kind of x-files theme going on under the surface; i believe that the name ellens for the town where the grandmother lives is from an airbase made up for an x-files episode.

xxii. home, originally uploaded by sparrowsfall.

Accept and you become whole,
Bend and you straighten,
Empty and you fill,
Decay and you renew,
Want and you acquire,
Fulfill and you become confused.

The sage accepts the world
As the world accepts the Way;
He does not display himself, so is clearly seen,
Does not justify himself, so is recognized,
Does not boast, so is credited,
Does not pride himself, so endures,
Does not contend, so none contend against him.

The ancients said, “Accept and you become whole”,
Once whole, the world is as your home.

no other fish in the sea: #11 hung over (february 1997) [page 2], originally uploaded by sparrowsfall.

the second page of #11

xxiii. words, originally uploaded by sparrowsfall.

Nature says only a few words:
High wind does not last long,
Nor does heavy rain.
If nature’s words do not last
Why should those of man?

Who accepts harmony, becomes harmonious.
Who accepts loss, becomes lost.
For who accepts harmony, the Way harmonizes with him,
And who accepts loss, the Way cannot find.