The Five Mistakes We Will Keep Making

A panel from the Valley of Gheionnim series. Reputedly, seven panels from the series exist, and Yost planned to make twelve in total, but I have only five transparencies in the collection I received from Ha Kim Ngoc.

A few drafts from the narrows

I hesitated to include the following artifact in this post. It is a digital file of a scan of a bad xerox copy of an extremely dirty piece of paper that might not be authentic.

This little piece of evidence indicates that today’s comic is an illustration of Kipling’s “How the Whale Got His Throat”. It comes to us from the collection of Algernon and Agatha Dawe-Saffery, a brother and sister from Burnley in Lancashire, England. They are fans extraordinaire of GLP and online compatriots of Ha Kim Ngoc, Yost’s former assistant. The claim for this scrappy memo is that it was written by Yost, and it reveals the meanings for the symbols used in “A few drafts from the narrows”. Ha Kim Ngoc has her doubts, and has stated that the writing is unlike any writing she has seen from Yost. The Dawe-Safferys counter that Yost wrote in many different styles, and was always inventing new ones for his “natural” asemic handwriting.

On the back of today’s comic, “Fitch. R D” is written in pencil by Yost. This could be an abbreviation of “Fitchburg Road”, which appears in the Kipling story.

Geranium Lake Properties, turn one hair

In this panel, I am feeling the end of fall, and the first frosts of winter. Ha Kim Ngoc identifies this as part of Jack Loki's translations of Shakespeare for horned lizards, but she does not tell us which play this panel illustrates. To me it looks more like Dickens, especially at this time of year, when I have already watched my first Christmas Carol movie. "Mothers and daughters" is the note Yost penciled on the back.

Geranium Lake Properties, when the pied ordinaries of your grief become mute

On the back of this comic, Wm. Yost penciled "Series: Jack Loki translates Shakespeare for horned lizards" and "Phrynosoma platyrhinos or coronatum?" His assistant, Ha Kim Ngoc, says there are more than a dozen panels that belong to the Shakespeare translation series, but she is not sure this panel is one of them. Yost wrote his ideas down on pieces of paper, scraps or envelopes or whatever was handy. He jotted all sorts of things on the backs of his GLP panels, including phone numbers of people he never called, titles of books he never read, and confirmation numbers for bills he paid over the phone.

Asemic comics are published here three times a week, on Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday (or sometimes Saturday night).