Spider-Man, Frank Miller, The Fall and Bend Sinister!

 

Yes, there is a connection! Six years before The Fall's Bend Sinister album (1986) writer, Dennis O'Neil and Frank Miller, having discovered the band Shrapnel at CBGB, decided to incorporate them into the Spider-Man King-Size Annual #14. 

The term 'bend sinister' appears in the intro (above) as translated by Doctor Strange. In reality it has a few different meanings and why not introduce another? 

Now, Mark E.Smith was no doubt referencing Nabokov's novel of the same name when he titled The Fall's ninth studio album Bend Sinister, not only to prove his literary chops (as if we didn't know already) but because the phrase is so interesting, of course. That and the fact that 'bend sinister' was also 'used in older literature to mean a defect, stain, or stigma on someone's reputation', apparently. Smith may have been suggesting that society was 'stained' and defective or, perhaps, his reputation was at the hands of those in the media who did not appreciate him. Either way, I was surprised to see the band in the Spider-Man story chanting the term as they marched, Pied Piper-like, through the streets of New York. 

Shadows - the noir project

Do you know the world is a foul sty? Do you know if you ripped the fronts off houses you'd find swine? The world's a hell. What does it matter what happens in it? - Shadow Of A Doubt, 1943

The Shadows project continues. I try different techniques, styles, approaches...looking for not only one but possibly two or three that will work to my satisfaction. This is personal, I told myself the other day. It's personal in that it's taken so long to come to fruition; I've lived with it for a long time. 

More than that, it's personal because although it will appear in printed form and be available to purchase I know it won't have much appeal to anyone. It'll be even harder to sell than visual poetry. Why? because it will be something other than visual poetry, yet include elements of it. It will be something other than a comic, ie a narrative told in pictorial/text sequences, although it will naturally have a sequence of my own making which, perhaps, only I will partly understand.

The lack of conclusion in the 'story' will mirror its contents. There will be no neat ending. How can the mystery end? Because...

If, as is often suggested, we make art first and foremost for ourselves, Shadows represents that idea totally. If only I feel a real sense of satisfaction when it is printed, so be it. It would please me greatly though, of course, should anyone buy it and get something from it. 

TTFN!

 

The Shadows Comic Book Project (influences & inspirations) / Spillane - John Zorn

 

The Shadows project is under way, at last. I'm working with the texts I started to create in 2009. Yes, you read that right, 2009! As a totality, they form an assemblage/collage/cut-ups of various texts. You can imagine the problem(s) - where it ends (does it have an ending?) - how to end it - how to make them form something like a 'story'. That was the biggest challenge, namely; should it even be a story? Did William Burroughs worry about that when he assembled his cut-up 'novels' of the early 60s? I doubt it. Mind you, I have tried not to go too far down that particular route of literary dead (end) roads. 

Here I've posted some key influences/inspirations. Initially I saw it as a booklet but have since decided to make it a 'comic'. What is a comic anyway? A collection of sequential art. Right? Perhaps it won't be a comic in the normal sense then, if there is a normal comic since...when? The 60s underground comix? They at least, despite the radical nature of the content, followed a more or less traditional panel format. many comics have since broken the old form. I don't know the extent to which mine will, but suffice to say, yes, there will be panels, but also, I may break up that idea too.

You can tell it's a work in progress. I am still playing with presentation ideas and techniques. meanwhile, here's a list of inspirations/influences:

Sin City by Frank Miller (party for the visuals, also the noir aspect)

Hardboiled literature (pulp fiction, Chandler/Hammett etc)

Film noir (the mood, ideas/visuals)

Pulp sci-fi

John Zorn's incredible Spillane homage and The Bribe album

Elmer Bernstein (big, brassy mood music made for menacing action!)

Las Vegas grind (for the sleaze)

You get the idea. So visual poetry takes a back seat but has not been abandoned completely. I'll be turning to the Olympia and rattling off some typed work as and when I feel I need a break from inhabiting the Shadows. 

Thanks for calling in - TTFN! Do check out Spillane at the bottom of the page - a masterpiece!

Vispo: Ruler Of The Word / Happy accident - chance in art & the child-mind

 

Whilst trying to tidy up the papers on my table this morning I came across a sheet that I had printed on with a view to typing over but somehow I had spilt water on it, creating lines where the liquid had coursed its way through the print, leaving yellow/greenish trails. After initially cursing the spoilt paper I decided to add to the effect by trailing more water over it. I was going to just type on that but hit on the idea of using a children's illustration from Mental and Scholastic Tests by Cyril Burt (yes, it's funny, the kinds of books I've collected). This naturally suggested a kind of joyful abandon, as children's drawings do; free from adult self-consciousness and restraint. I tried to type in the same spirit, allowing for the fact that I'm a long way from my childhood. Whilst doing so, it occurred to me that I nearly always type like that anyway! 

Of course, being an adult who, by now, has typed many times in the name of visual poetry, I couldn't help but try to create some 'sense' to the picture, hence the pile of letters the figure stands on and the idea that they are dropping more letters at their feet. Oh well, it goes to show, you can never fully regain the child-mind.

Vispo print: Mindswap / Shadows - a science-fiction collage novel - excerpt / Spider-Man by John Byrne & Spidey vibes by Freddie McCoy + Bobby Hutcherson

Mindswap, RTomens, 2026

*

Shadows (excerpt)

Pale shades of evening...naïve, twitching, tottering citizens animated by the profound and the puerile...jerky shadows...the procession of twisted corpses...strange beings damned alive...all must endure in the grave city.

   Tongues are heard far away in the universe...

   Time and space devour the damned...cold stars flash mechanically...

   From the shores of death....I am the dagger and the wound... 

   Abstract thoughts...turning the individual...influencing a person's behaviour. 

   Past forms are charged with madness, the poison flows...a sad tomorrow...perceptions of reality continue to influence a person's attitudes...victims and executioners meet memories of the past...

Feet scurried in the yard.  I held my gun steady, barrel pointing up toward the sky. I could see a single star above.  Suddenly a gaunt yellow face hid the star from my view. The face started to shout and I fired. The face disintegrated and I jumped straight up, put a foot on the edge of the can and vaulted over.

   A chorus of shrill yells came from various parts of the yard. Flashlight beams flitted about. I stepped over the body of the Chinaman who lay alongside the garbage can and darted across the yard. From the window above, Foh Shen-Li shouted in shrill sing-song dialect, “Shoot! Shoot now! He must not escape!”

   I swung my gun up and took a pot-shot at the sound of  Shen-Li’s voice but missed because wood splintered the framework of the window up there.

   Lead winged past me. One slug tore at my sleeve but I reached the fence unwounded. 

   A dark shape hurtled at me and I straight-armed that shape with the hand that held the gun. The shape yelped and collapsed.

   I hoisted myself up on a garbage can alongside the fence and jumped. Shouts rose to a tumultuous crescendo behind me; a gun barked from the window above and just at that moment my foot caught on a projecting nail as I was clearing the fence. My arms went out wildly into the air and I hurtled over into the next yard. I landed heavily on concrete, the breath knocked out of me for the second. Then I got up and felt about for my gun which I had dropped when I fell, picked it up, and sped away through the yard, down an alley...

*

Spider-Man and Havoc 205, 1987

When I came across vibraphonist Freddie McCoy's Spider Man album from 1966 I thought it must have been to cash in on the TV series but that didn't debut until '67 so we can only assume that Freddie was simply a fan of Marvel comics and Spider Man in particular. Either way, arch publicist Stan Lee must have loved the fact that Spidey graced an album sleeve and a Jazz one at that. I wonder what the artist, Steve Ditko, thought. Not that Freddie exactly oozes Jazz chops on this album. It's a lightweight affair, aimed at who, I don't know. The tracks are all brief, having little space for anyone to do much more that briefly solo before returning to the tune. Bachelor pad music, perhaps.

I did warn you; Bobby Hutcherson, it isn't, although I could imagine it going down well in the kinds of Jazz clubs I went to in 80s Soho. This is Bobby Hutcherson...

TTFN

Funky Flashman, Mister Miracle, Jack Kirby / Art is the drug / The Mental Ratio altered book?

 Jack Kirby

The 'song in my blood' every morning says "Work, Robin! Work and be productive!" So I do, most mornings. Whether it's become just a habit or is an actual drive is debatable. Is it a drug? I need my fix! Like any addiction, I can get moody without having had the fix. 

Now that I'm retired I have the luxury of being able to make art every day. Once upon a time I dreamt of not having to go to work. For a few years on the dole I didn't go to work. I did some DJ-ing, but can't remember how else I used all that time. Listening to music, making some art, I suppose.

Here's something I did this morning. Having done a couple from the same book and laid them on the actual book, opened, they looked good, as if the whole hardback book was filled with them. So that prompted me to consider actually making an 'altered' book by typing on enough pages to repaste them back in as a whole work. I might do that. 

TTFN

Vispo: The Problems Investigated / Imperfect images / Keeping it real (art on paper)

 

The Problems Investigated, RTomens, 2026

Perhaps imperfection is good even with respect to presenting artwork? Surely not. But yes, I have to convince myself it is so because my printer is kaput, which means no scanner either, which means you will have to make do with photos of my work for a while. So I look at a scanner, darkly, having shaken it about, sworn a lot and almost reached for the hammer. 

Presenting my work as an imperfect photo takes some getting used to but there is something about it that's good in another way. It's more 'real', yes? You can see that it's not a digital creation. You can see how it almost becomes shaded in the lower third. The left side edge also has a clearly visible shadow where it rises from the paper it's laid on. 

These days perhaps photographing work to put it online is the only way to prove it's physical existence, as opposed to it's digital one. Not that this should matter, really, yet the 'real' as it was before computers still has an allure, for me at least. Why? It's a very real memory, an attachment to times when everything was on paper. The other day as I walked through the very much developed King's Cross area I noted the very few old buildings left in tact near St Pancras Station. They sparked memories of going to the area to get my fanzine Xeroxed. It was a community facility, therefore very cheap. Sometimes Mark Pawson would be there. Or Stewart Home. 

That was the early 90s. Feels like a lifetime ago. For you, perhaps it's more than an actual lifetime ago. Memories now don't so much stack up as form a misty whirlwind of images which come in and go out of focus. Attaching dates to them becomes almost impossible. I've often considered what it would be like to be a witness in a murder case and have to recall what I was doing on a certain day. We've all seen films where witnesses are regarded with suspicion when they can't exactly remember their actions. Trust me, as you age, you can sympathise. I would struggle to remember what I was doing last Tuesday, never mind months ago.

I deliberately made a smaller piece in the form of The Problems Investigated because I thought it would be easier to photograph. Tomorrow I may try A4 size. The issue is trying to avoid too much blurring from camera shake, of course. 

Must go now because I'm still working on the poster for the upcoming William Burroughs 3-day event. I thought it was done but one of the organisers decided to make actual posters rather than just a image for online use, so problems ensued regarding the quality of the image for enlarging. Yes, sometimes work on paper can be a pain in the arse!

TTFN!

Vispo / Ambiguity, art and pure vispo

 

untitled, RTomens, 2026

This piece is untitled because I couldn't actually engage my brain in order to create one - too hot - and the heat-induced lethargy strikes again, from the brain to the bottom of my body, to the end, the toes I think they're called. A long hot summer here in the UK. I played with carbon paper to get the blue letters in 'untitled'. It's a messy exercise since the thin paper easily crumples and catches when moving the carriage. 

I don't know if I really like the result but...then again, being ambiguous about a creation is OK. Certainty is such a bore, darling! Sometimes I definitely do not like what I've done. In ambiguity there is...a mystery, in a way. The ambiguous zone is not clearly defined. It's the suburbs of creation, having no definite border. It's uncertainty which sparks not only doubts but questions regarding the very meaning of 'good' and 'bad', 'successful' and 'unsuccessful'. My 'good' may be one viewer's bad. My doubts may not exist in a viewer's mind. They clearly recognise it as either 'good' or'bad'. 

There's always 'mediocre', of course. Perhaps mediocre is the worst of outcomes. It's related to bland and average and no-one wants to be associated with them. They're the dull kid at school who was neither hip nor totally square. They just were, with their harmless haircut and sensible shoes. One boy I remember at secondary school was supremely average. He never got told off. Never swore. Never dressed terribly, or very well. He was neat. He was bland.

No artist sets out to create the bland but they may aim for ambiguity. I confess I'm partial to ambiguity myself. That's very different from doing my best but feeling ambiguous about the result. I know full well that many texts I use in my vispo are ambiguous. Good. I like letting you, the viewer, interpret their meaning. I also like meaningless text which is still funny or potentially profound. One that could go either way is good as far as I'm concerned. 

A piece such as the one above may be considered 'pure' vispo. No words. In that mode, to include an actual word would be a sell-out! Not that I'm normally 'puritanical' in my vispo, as you'll have noticed. I still have a great love for words, albeit in minimalist form, as opposed to actual poems (god forbid!) or fiction. Much vispo, especially in history, uses only words, but that is not my favourite style. I like the combination of legible text and abstract letter shapes, clusters, lines. Regarding that, I am definitely unambiguous. 

TTFN

Vispo: Thought does not control misfortune / The impenetrability of other people's lives

That's a profound title. I must have got it from a book because I'm incapable of profound thoughts. I almost had some the other day whilst lying in bed. I was contemplating the impenetrability of another person's life with regards to accessing how they live, think, act and it struck me as a vast territory, them on the horizon and between us mountains, perhaps deserts, even oceans, all impossible to cross. That's as far as I got.

 

Punk collage / Me & Paolozzi / Digital collage

Black Spot Fallout Threat