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

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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...

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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

 

Comic strip vispo: Holy smoke, Ev!

 

RTomens, 2026

Vispo: Antisocial / Being antisocial / The self-belief of an artist

 

Antisocial, RTomens, 2026

"Don't be antisocial" someone once said to me. A girlfriend...when we were supposedly being sociable but I didn't find the company agreeable. Instead of being rude, I clammed up. Confronted with either blatant ignorance or plain stupidity I tend to clam up. Or I used to, back when I knew more than two people, socially. 

I'm not inclined towards being rude...actively. But. Yes, being quiet can be rude. I'm a temperamental artist - ha-ha! That's my excuse. No. It's not. I don't have one other than the genes I was born with...if they determine character, which I think they...might?  

It's not that I've ever felt a sense of superiority, you understand...except when in the company of common people who are not artists! Ha-ha! I must stop making those kinds of jokes...you'll take me seriously, perhaps. If anything I play my talents down. Arrogance is not a virtue, after all. Who is more annoying than the braggart blowing his (it's usually a 'him') own trumpet for all to hear. I wouldn't mind if that metaphorical trumpet signalled a talent on a par with Louis Armstrong, but it rarely does.  

Yet bragging, I'm sure, gets people places. After all, who's going to buy a timid, insecure soul? What do they project? Weakness? A lack of self-belief? To sell oneself one must be in promotional mode! Yes, it's true. I have rarely been in a position of having to sell myself, unless you count job interviews and in those, I suppose I did try to be the 'right person for the job'. Unfortunately, most of those jobs were ones I didn't want in the first place.

How does an artist sell him/herself in a world where they feel they don't belong? By 'artist' I mean creatively inclined, which immediately places someone outside normality. Because society may only embrace the successful artist, ironically. The struggling one is of no use. He/she is unappealing! Look at them,trying to make a go of...what? Being an artist? The fool! Their chances of success are virtually zero! A mug's game! So my dear ol' dad would tell me regularly, without ever saying 'mug' because that wasn't in his vocabulary. Instead he offered what he considered to be sound advice, which was to get a trade. It probably was sound advice to a working class boy. Like all sound parental advice, I ignored it.

Vispo for sale: Help! Art! Help!

 

Available here

Mind Games booklet for sale!

 

I have a few copies of my booklet, Mind Games, left over. It's available to purchase on eBay.