Dear friends, as many people know, my wife Leela and I lost our most precious life force, our most generative, beautiful, gorgeous daughter, Rosalie, this past month.

Her passing was shocking, ripped a hole in our hearts, “My heart is a blast site” Leela said. A friend offered, “Rosalie opened a capacious space in your hearts” – capacious, capacity. I get it.

We had just moved from New York City to Gainesville, Florida, in search of a simpler, less stressful life. Rosalie loved, absolutely loved it here. I will tell more of this story some other day.

Leela and I will be spending time traveling, first to the Golden Willow Retreat in New Mexico, for people grieving and suffering from loss. Leela first heard about this on the radio show Snap Judgment, when the founder of the retreat told his story of losing his wife, then his mother and children all successively. That show was broadcast on my birthday earlier this year.

After a return to Gainesville, which we too, love and are committed to staying and working in, we’re going to spend a week in Hawaii, where we’ve been offered a small free artist’s cottage in Makawao, Maui, at the Hui No`eau Visual Arts Center. This is a place we taught at when Leela was pregnant in 2009, and it is where we were happiest during those first 9 months. It also gave us the kick we believed to move to a more beautiful place and to start a school and center dedicated to making art.

In Maui, we’ll scatter Rosalie’s ashes there in the ocean. I always said she was a water spirit. I still believe it.

We’ve had an outpouring of generosity and love from you all. We have cards and emails and postings of all kinds still to open and read; the deluge of support and love from you all has been our greatest strength.

We certainly didn’t wish it would take a tragedy to remind us that we are loved among our friends, and even strangers, but reminded we have been. We thank you so deeply for your words, contributions, prayers. All that was sent our way helped bolster us, strengthen us in this time when we were so deeply deeply in pain.

Leela and I have been together on a long path. Suddenly diverted, shocking, terrible, but the path out is still forward. In the darkest times, your support meant everything.

We are feeling a lot of bruised and conflicting emotions throughout all of this, but one thing has remained consistent: our gratitude towards the people who reached out to us. We honestly could not, and can not, make it through without you.

Love each other, and thanks.

If you ever met Rosalie Lightning, keep her in your hearts, and send us your fond stories or reflections. She was special. We miss her immensely.

Tom Hart

At the HOW TO SAY EVERYTHING blog, I’ll be detailing more about process, etc. Here’s I’ll just be broadcasting.

The following marks the largest single section of Let’s Get Furious, the largest sub-story in the book, called “Dennis Goes Down.” Dennis, clearly one of the world’s “1%” decides to go see how the rest of the world lives. He thinks they need a kick in the butt to get spending again. This was written in 2004 or 5, I think.

I was still drawing too small at this point, and figuring out how to use this small space. I don’t love these drawings, nor the color choices (the book is printed in black/white), but this is a pretty great long story. I’ll be posting the more  thing in the coming weeks.

I stole those teeth from Tanioka, the guy who invented “noseblood.”

Most lite, personal stuff has wound up at Facebook.

This site is full of good archives so keep looking. In the meantime, visit the new school, the new blog, the new baby, etc.

It’s paradise. Maui’s the first place for which I want to drag out that term, throw it around and see if it fits. It does.

The place is so full of life, of green and moisture and ocean and streams and lovely birds and wild-looking delicious fruits. It’s got wild chickens (see right (or is that one some sort of pheasant?)), lovely people, a defunct volcano (2 actually), hundreds of microclimates (including types of desert, tundra, rainforest, etc.), great coffee, silence, color, a love of art, the 4th best observatory on the planet (off-limits to the public), ranching, rodeos, plein-air art festivals, hula, keiki, craters, cattle, sugar cane everywhere, mangoes to die for, dragon fruit, glorious avocados,folk-art, giant trees, zen monks, taiko, pork-in-the-dirt, spam sushi, surfer car rental places, a long and fascinating history and tropical fish that will basically swim up to your cheek and kiss you in your pores, as if you needed one more reason to begin sobbing from the beauty of it all.

And the people are wonderful.

Hello to the fabulous Kelly McHugh, Caroline who runs the Hui, her wild and hugely interesting family, and to Maggie, Nathalie (Yay Nathalie), Keri, Miguel and Miguel, Lana, all the great students and the many others I’ve no doubt forgotten or whose names I can’t spell. I doubt anyone on Maui is so gauche as to google alert their own name, but in case Maggie Sutrov is listening, hello Maggie! Here is a link of her in the act painting her most recent splendid view of the island. (See bottom.)

And Travis Fristoe, if you go to Maui, you have a coffee waiting for you at HAZ BEANZ in Pai’a. They’re only open 7am – 1 pm so go early and then go sit with the sleepy dog next door.

For complicated reasons, what they printed was an unedited draft, as I hadn’t finished writing it. Nonetheless, it has the basics of what I wanted to say. So do the opposite of what Jeff Bridges says in “The Yin and the Yang of Mr. Go“, and don’t read it for my style!

(He implores a character to read his Joycean epic “for his style, man!” It’s a charming, stupid moment.)

Cartoon Allies begin their slog to Mocca

Slogging…

Ok everyone’s cheery

Greg Fenton shows off his Egyptian $20

It’s currently a mess of scaffolding and attempts at order, but some thoughts are getting in there.

Please see the SVA website for details about TWO continuing education classes I am teaching this summer, and one undergraduate class.

First, a solo class called a bit oddly, The Semiotics of Sequential Art: How Comics Rule. Monday evenings. This class will be about finding your voice, about following, focusing and articulating your idea in comix. I bring in tons of work to pour over, we begin with a number of quick exercises to get us going, then work on longer projects towards the goal of a single large-scale piece. It’s always a good class.
Next is the SUMMER INDEPENDENT STUDY SEMINAR that I am co-teaching with Lauren Weinstein. This class, begun last semester by Matt Madden was a great success, and Lauren and I will continue it this summer, helping self-motivated students develop and finalize their longer projects.

Above- if kids these days really really cared about vampires, there’d be a run on nosferatu dvds…

That’s it. That’s the moment. For some reason, this image resonates with me, sings in me, stops me in my tracks and makes me smile sometimes. I don’t know why. I don’t need to know why.

But if I think I about it, I understand: It echos my need for attention, and my glee in silly grotesqueries, and my delight in being brazen and especially in demanding that you want something from people. Something about those qualities make me love this moment- this dramatized, actualized, manifestation of those themes in my life. I am haunted by the Jon Lewis image above for the same reason, I think.

In fact, when I look at the last 2 1/2 years of my comic output, I now realize this was the governing theme: trying to be heard. No wonder these images speak to me so much.

We all experience images from narratives this way. There are always moments that sticks with us, for reasons we may uncover later.

I asked a couple friends for their “images that sing” and here’s what I heard.

One friend says he always remembers a moment from a 40s-era Dick Tracy comic strip, where The Brow is being squashed by a Spike Machine. The brow is desperately crying: “Oww. Somebody stop the spike machine.” Another friend said that an image from the movie The Shining always haunts her, of the Shelly Duval character dragging a knocked down out Jack Nicholson character down the hall and locking him into a food closet.

The first image is about pain, oppression, helplessness, and a desire for connection. The second, about empowerment after feeling victimized by someone you love.

—————”DON’T ANALYZE!” HOGWASH!—————

I’ve heard that people think it’s dangerous to analyze such connections, and that there’s a magic in not knowing how certain connections work. I don’t buy it. First: emotion will always work faster than analysis. Second: there will always be new things to be moved by. Third: let yourself be moved by the understanding, too.

Look at Kiki and Herb. Kiki and Herb are a faux-torch song duo who perform as if they are on a reunion tour of sorts. Their supposed heyday was decades before and now Kiki; damaged, drunken, spiteful and absolutely, desperately human sits on the piano basically dying, telling old stories and singing cover songs.

They perform a version of the 80’s hit “Total Eclipse of the Heart” which is quite moving, a little funny, and desperate. The final minute or so of the song is monstrously powerful. A crescendo has been building for minutes, Kiki is now riffing on the original’s “turn around bright eyes” motif. Kiki is quoting The Byrds, Joni Mitchell and louder and louder, she ends by screaming, yowling Yeats poetry (with Herb like a lost sailor shouting his background parts into the storm of Kiki’s desperation) “The falcon cannont hear the falconer… Surely the second coming is at hand…”, riffing more, “Turn around…. turn around… don’t turn your back on me… don’t turn your back on Kiki!!! Kiki loves you! Kiki needs you! Kiki would die for you!!!”

All this crazy manic energy has just coalesced, and you realize, the decades old “turn around” of the pop hit has been transmutated. Now its a plea: “Turn around, come back. TURN AROUND, STAND STILL AND BE LOVED BY ME GODDAMIT.”

Kiki -and if anyone is a falcon who can’t hear the falconer, it’s her- is crying for you to believe in her transformation, her second coming. She is turning and turning, and transforming and transforming, watching you walk away, but she won’t have it .TURN AROUND! TURN AROUND! The song ends with her demanding to have her love accepted. DON’T TURN YOUR BACK ON ME! KIKI WOULD DIE FOR YOU!

It took me dozens of listens to this song at full volume to realize all this. It gets more powerful each time I hear it, and the more I decode, the more it moves me to tears…

And of course, this moment too, is about being heard, like most of the moments that are moving me right now.
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What are your Images That Sing? What are they about? Pay attention to those, like anything you attend to, it will grow. More will appear, and they will strengthen your own work. DON’T TURN YOUR BACK ON ME!

because we as a race of creatures constantly want stories, we want
images and stories that can add to our ever changing (and not always
maturing) understanding of the how what and why of life? Why are we
here? How does it work? What the hell is going on anyway?

stories and images help us triangulate ourselves, find ourselves in
the sea that is the answers to these questions…

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Attaching images to images, stories to stories

this is the assembling that all narrative works from. Pulling from
your collected store of images and stories and creating more, explore
the existing paths already between them.

How do we do that. Go back to mess mode. But now with a starting place.

want to make a giant graphic novel? The connections will start to make
sense via plot. Of course the mother who discovers the knife is the
woman I imagined crying at the zoo… She went there because it was
where her husband was a custodian. She discovered the knife when she
found him dead in the pool. The woman’s story begins to emerge. She
must find her husband’s killer, and will learn more about… …

look to your other images and fragments. What else suggests a double
life, unsolved mysteries, or what else just calls out to be part of
this larger story?

Want to work in short forms? You’re more than halfway there. Connect
the two images… Tick that “story clock” one or two notches and get
out.

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notes re: sit com
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With good characters and the self discipline to sit down, you can
write dozens more of these effortlessly. The key is having good
characters, and injecting them with an interesting enough new
situation.

We always wonder about our plots? Is it funny enough? Grave enough?
Puzzling and suspenseful enough? None of this matters before you
sitting down to explore your characters. None of this matters before
you sit down to explore your characters. The only thing plot does is
enliven your characters…
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meta is different.