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

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

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.

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

the second page of #11

no other fish in the sea: #11 hung over (february 1997) [page 1], originally uploaded by sparrowsfall.

“Bullshit. He’s just being pathetic to get sympathy. If we stop listening, he’ll find something else to talk about.”

sparrow’s fall in a nutshell, right there. but people kept listening, so . . .

of course, these episodes weren’t titled when i wrote them. i added these titles in 2000 when i was first trying to build a website. some of you may have seen it. it was a monstrosotiy, and an example of how not to put comics online. online comics should be easy to read and, if possible, easy to load; in an effort to make sparrow’s fall easy to load, i in fact made it impossible to read. a further irony: i never finished building the site because the process of dissecting each page into easy to load snippets became an incredibly boring, time-consuming, monumental task . . . at one point, i fiugred out that sparrow’s fall, amazing as it might seem, was approximately one 1 millionth of the internet, which, though a trivial number, indeed is quite large considering how many sites in fact existed, even in 2000.

it was one 1 millionth more than i wanted to deal with, tell you me.

moving on. number eleven here i was happy with. the front porch is drawn convincingly, both close at hand and at a distance. the wash is mostly controlled without tearing up the paper too much. there were only two ambiguously bordered and arranged panels, both related to roasting hot dogs and marshmallows, and the final panel was a hint of things to come. that panel, of course depicting snowfall, was created with our old friend wite-out. i really have to recommend wite-out for these situations; as i have said before, white ink is treacherous and globby, more of a sludgy paint than an ink. wite-out is designed to run smoothly and evenly, which is just what you want it to do. unfortunately it doesn’t really work well (read: at all) in a nib.

there were other nib-related problems here. obviously i’ve used too wide a nib in the panel where nips it pitching papers in the fire–or the ink was running out of the nib too quickly, which certainly also is possible. (another reason to use microns.) but all in all, it is the second most successful comic in the early part of the series; i rank only 1997 as better.

why the armchair, you ask? i’m not sure. people keep all kinds of odd things on their porch, and an armchair seemed right for the scene: once there, i durst not remove it, because it was now part of the continuity. i made a great effort,and still do, to retain all elements i put in. i’m sure i fail at it a lot, and the floor plans seem to morph uncontrollably, but i do try. however, i think it finally got too moldly and nips threw it away; it appears to have vanished lately.

and yes, there’s symbolism on that second page. i’ll let you figure this one out on your own.

no other fish in the sea: #10 but i wish i could quit (january 1997) [page 2], originally uploaded by sparrowsfall.

the second page of #10

no other fish in the sea: #10 but i wish i could quit (january 1997) [page 1], originally uploaded by sparrowsfall.

this was one of a very few comics that i have done that is not a linear story. i suppose in a way it is, if one assumes that these are the transpiring events of a day; and if you have ever worked at a copy shop, you know that it easily could be. but ever since, i’ve generally avoided doing comics with a semi-sourceless narrative voice, such as this one. somehow, to me, it makes it seem the comic less real–it breaks the psychological picture frame and drags another world into it, shattering the suspension of disbelief. in this case, the crow is speaking, and this really will not do, because the crow is death, and death does not speak. i would have done this comic differently, or not at all, if i had thought through the implications, frankly, i suspect that either this was a kind of throw-away comic, done because i couldn’t think of anything else at the time, or because i was so eager to write a comic directly discussing the copy shop experience that i didn’t come up with the right way to do it.

the panelling bothers me in several different ways. of course, as i am sure you are noticing, i didn’t use panelling in the traditional sense; somehow i had gotten the idea in my head that the only way to create panelling was either by straight, unbending lines or by white guttering, the lines i disliked; but the white guttering would prove increasingly confusing, despite all of my efforts to control it.. it worked the best when the panel was filled with enough drawing and wash that to borders made themselves, as in the first one. a sub-problem in the panellingare these little jaggy lines around the numbered items . . . they aren’t well done, and don’t add a whole lot. in retrospect, i would have drawn the entire thing as an ongoing, almost simultaneous series of events that christopher had to contend with–and this would have been closer to real life, because tell me you, there never was just one of these things happening. but no, i had to be fancy.

in independent comics there’s such a thing as being so independent that you are unreadable. don’t forget that. fancy may pay chris ware, but it probably won’t pay you.

the control of the wash is getting better, but you can see it is easy to overdo it. note the skins of my african american characters, and other such details. i was a little nervous about this one because of that, but out it went anyway,and people read it–or ignored it–just the same. as far as general drawing skills go–the businessman in item #9 obviously has just had his left arm wrenched out of his socket. no wonder he’s in such a bad mood. and the bitchy johnson county woman in item #3 looks like schwarzenegger arriving on mars in total recall.

yes, yes, yes, the shop was like this. quite a little circus. but plenty of indy comix people start there, or so i hear.

no other fish in the sea: #9 you’re hired! (january 1997) [page 2], originally uploaded by sparrowsfall.

the second page of #9

no other fish in the sea: #9 you’re hired! (january 1997) [page 1], originally uploaded by sparrowsfall.

‘possums are citizens of the world.’ this is indeed true, and i’m glad nips tells us this. but where is otto’s? nowhere, that’s where.

built, conceptually if not literally, on the ashes of the briefly great restaurant shop lucille’s, otto’s malt shop was one of my favorite hangouts for several years, indisputably the best malts and the best burgers in kansas city, otto’s is no more. i know a little of the story, but there’s no point in telling it. it was built in an old garage at 39th and wyoming, next to boomerage and revue, two thrift/specialty stores. note in the establishing shot (and from this point on, establishing shots become very common with me,) the neon sign over the garage doors; the doors would go up on warm days and all summer long. god, otto’s rocked. the general scribbling before the door is meant to be snow and a puddle on the lot. the people who see other than the main characters were all staff there, of course.

otto’s was fond of the press i gave them and was a dropoff for sparrow’s fall for a long time. i even designed and created their menus for them. i miss the place a lot. its replacements, an outpost of joe’s burger joint, and now rumí (a mediterranean restaurant who’s food i can’t say i like at all,) don’t hold a candle to it.

all things must come to an end, i suppose. but here christopher is having a beginning. he has just been hired at a copy shop. you think he’d be happy to finally have a job, but he seems pretty depressed to me, and he already has a few horror stories. (he’ll have plenty more as time goes by.) his troubles are of no real interest to the animals, of course, and after dismissing the shop as incompetent, they begin arguing about nips’ new sideline: managing a mexican wrestling team. luche libre was a little less well known then than it is now, and i had just watched a special about it on tv. the idea captivated me, so i showed off my new knowledge here in sparrow’s fall. nips kept this up for quite a while, managing los hermanos armadillos; i think that los hermanos do most of their own managing now, because they seldom get mentioned anymore.

in technical details, i really think that in most panels, this is almost the best i have ever drawn chirp, even today. nips hasn’t achieved his more modern puffy cheeks; however, you can already see the stronger definition i’m giving the snout fur as opposed to the face fur. the wash has become quite even: i was beginning to understand how to spread and use it before it soaked into the page. wash is a difficult beast: you can’t have too much water or it becomes blotchy and ugly; you can’t use too much ink or it lays down too dark and you lose control over shading and detail and areas of contrast. you have to use the widest nib you can handle, and load it up as heavily as you can–but not too heavily, or you’ll dribble it where you don’t want it as you transport the pen over the paper, or you’ll make a huge pool where you don’t want one right as you hit the page. tricky, tricky.

a last note: in the view of the troost copy shop–and this is the new troost, not the old troost shop where i began working in 1991, there is written in the windows soon abandoning an inner city near you. this was daring. the place is unfond of criticism of any type, and the fact i was pointing out that the troost store was pulling up stakes and moving to state line could have gotten me in a lot of trouble. however, i didn’t get in trouble, and i didn’t get fired: although i eventually did leave the job, years later.