Thursday, August 18, 2016

Marrakesh Express


Top: Sunset in your eyes
Bottom: Garden in your hair

For this, published for the 20th anniversary of Woodstock, Yost was fairly unambiguous. Between 3 and 4 AM on August 18, 1969, Crosby, Stills and Nash played their set onstage at Woodstock. One of their songs, from their luminous debut album, was Marrakesh Express.

Friday, August 12, 2016

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.

Thursday, August 4, 2016

As the Phaneritic Xenolith Told His Tale


This is one of the half-dozen GLP comics that have “Adv it Lith” penciled on the back, which is Yost’s abbreviation for “Adventures into the Lithosphere”.

Tuesday, August 2, 2016

Skinny Bear Days (the latter, more extravagant half begins to fray)



…in which we can see asemic writing I made from an image of Hildegard von Bingen’s Lingua Ignota. Also used HvB as a source for “This could be your name, no. 156” (below).

Thursday, July 28, 2016

Eking alkali from the rip output


The title for this piece is an example of something I think of as asemic language. The words come from English, you could call them real words from a real language, and they are arranged in a grammatically correct form. Yet the title is asemic because I don't know what it means. I have my own inexact impressions of what the title might mean, but I can't dictate its definition with authority. This is an aspect shared by all my asemic work.

We're back to a regular schedule! Abstract comics and asemic writing will be published here three times a week, on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.