Two Theories of Experience at Vraicking

Seasons Without Purpose: We are pretty darn sure that Yost created these two unpublished Geranium Lake Properties comics to be part of the frequently psychedelic Fifty Cent Trip. We do not know why they were not included and...

Typical Jackalopian Capriciousity: Class is in session for Uncommon Inultarumek 1.1A to 1.8D. Let’s eavesdrop for a few minutes on a lecture given by Professor Boromir Fandellacken1 as he begins his introduction to the Six...

Two Poems Series at Vraicking

Two Poems: Today, or tonight, your attention can be scattered, or passive, or broken, or healed, or too simple to work, or in front of you right now, or the result of your past mistakess, or a verb trying to be a noun, or a celebration...

Thorny Humus and Other Stories

Thorny Humus: Today, or tonight, is Yifteyzoumaymy, the third holiday in the Three Nights celebration. We can suppose Wm. Yost had his own reasons for creating this...

Three for Kol-Koy: Two days after I included Icon Number Fifty-Seven in this post from February 20, I found the officially published1 image for Icon Number Sixty-one. This mask is a portrait of...

Reyat-suki’s Winter Heart: This winter, I have not been inspired, not particularly, not generally, to continue the tale of “The Green Man in Winter“, but I thought that perhaps, with the onset of spring, on the last day of...

Irreshkwilmat was the Correct Answer: Our best guesses were wrong. This mask was neither the demalion Ummusenyobi nor Annaistrem-teyniva of the Annsugamfe. She was a variation of...

Political Cartoon: The word “political” does not need to be followed by the word “bias”. Biases are intrinsic to politics – we cannot have a political view without being biased. Truly, basically, we cannot have any kind of view without...

Four to Vraicking

The Resemblance of Genuineness: The masks of Dpajor, the entity who provides her name to the holiday of Dpajormymy (which is today, February 6), demonstrate a wide range of variability. The education of the mask-maker, or vizardwright, can make a significant...

Do we walk in legends or on the green earth in the daylight?: “A man may do both,” said Aragorn. “For not we but those who come after will make the legends of our time. The green earth, say you? That is a mighty matter of legend, though you...

Mourning the loss of what was never there: When I first found these mask portraits of Icon Number Thirty-One, I thought they were variations on the mask of Uruburza Yennildi. I assumed these two masks were unchosen alternatives to the mask that was printed by the Bureau of Yeltik Imbarrahju, much like...

Chisel Marks in Sandstone and Chalk: I am not especially familiar about growing up in other countries, but children in the United States are taught from a young age to believe that they can, and will, change the world for the better. And they will do it by doing nothing...

Rainbow Gods

It was my mother who fostered my love of irises, and for the maximum sentimental effect I suppose the ideal date for publishing these iconic portraits would have been Mother’s Day. We are now at the bedraggled end of the iris blooming season, but that does...

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Landscapes & Shelter for Frogs, Part 2

After the release of The Empty Space album by Chansons de Geste, Teri Ainsworth and Ross Kerrinza jumped back on the bandwagon of Bury Me Standing for...

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The Common Prayer

Once upon a time, there was a large faction of jackalopes who put a substantial amount of effort into trying out the Catholic religion for a century or...

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The Yellow Wallpaper

It is fair and partaking of no hyperbole to say that Yost was obsessed with the task of creating illustrations for “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The oft-told story is...

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They Come in Threes

According to the label, the three entities in the twenty-fourth issue of this series printed by the Bureau of Yeltik Imbarrahju (which began printing the Icons as...

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Arbor Day and a Giant Curlew

Tree Hoarding: For today’s post in the Cabinet of Curiosities that is this blog, I have chosen to showcase two pieces from the Geranium Lake Properties archive that have almost chirpy cracker barrel nothing to do with Arbor Day....

Down to Earth: On Monday April 21st a man took a long walk (reportedly 53 miles long) while wearing a giant curlew costume to raise awareness for World Curlew Day. It was Earth Day on...

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Sands Be Toast, Part 1

The mystery of the twenty-first demalion in the Icon series is not who she is – everyone knows who she is. The Wostimendiannut is the high priestess of...

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Peculiar Intent, Part 2

There are several ways of performing name magic according to Jackalopian traditions. Name magic is when you...

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Needful Exorcism

Today we have several variations of the mask worn by Jorjee Arrasho Dabbol Lu-Keya, who belongs to a group of demalions called the meyolla-Din, a name that is the accepted short...

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A sober and squeak-free summons

The people who admire GLP are a discerning but small group, and at various points in the last three years I have created fictional fans to swell the numbers of our tiny band of brothers and sisters. Plus I needed help writing the backstory of Geranium Lake Properties, and creating characters is an excellent first step to writing fiction. (The danger is that if you have too much fun writing characters you may lose motivation to plod onward with the relatively boring task of actually writing the story.) GLP's foremost fictional fan is Ha Kim Ngoc, one of those amazing American hybrids, a daughter and granddaughter of Vietnamese, Korean, Polish and Welsh immigrants.

Before she became Yost's assistant in 1991, Ha Kim Ngoc was writing and drawing "Somnifery", a comic strip influenced by Carlos Castaneda, Goya's Black Paintings, Lorca's theory of duende, and Little Nemo in Slumberland. "Somnifery" appeared irregularly in different zines during the 80's, notably Spongesucker, Ralph and Fascia. At the same time, Ngoc collaborated with Yost on a handful of GLP comics.

The ideogram in the lower right-hand corner of today's panel is a tribute to Harriet Lariat, a pseudonym used by Ngoc's Polish grandmother and her grandmother's sister-in-law, the writer/artist team who created Sue Generous and Bossy Oyster, a 64-page Golden Age comic book. The comic followed the crime-fighting adventures of a glamorous American housewife and her plucky Jack Russell terrier (loosely based on the characters of Nora Charles and her dog Astor from the Thin Man movies). Each issue featured several different stories, all the captions were written in Polish, while the speech balloons were in English. The authors hoped to educate Polish immigrants who were eager to immerse themselves in American culture. The title was printed by Eastern Color Printing and enjoyed a modest success within its target audience, published from 1937 to 1941, with a total of 31 issues.

Dirtbone fragments from an entirely new species of grass

Top is the misprint from Montevideo, Uruguay, from the newspaper El País, February 9, 1995. This is one of the misprints Yost preferred over his original work.

Myxomycetous Humor

This one's for the slime molds. If you are a certain type of Mycetozoan, this is hilarious.

(Tired of cute kittens? Click here for lots of really cute slime mold images.)

Asemic comics are published here two or three times a week, mostly on Tuesday and Friday. The schedule might vary by a day or two sometimes, depending on what's going on in my life, but if you check in on Tuesday and Friday, you can be 99% sure you will see something new.

Medusa was Somebody's Mother

Yost wrote "Mary Dow Brine" on the back of this GLP panel.

Medusa was the mother of Pegasus, the flying horse, and Chrysaor, a young man (and/or giant). They were both born in the moment when Perseus cut off Medusa's head. Chrysaor translates as "He who has a golden sword"; apparently he emerged from his mother's body (or blood) with sword in hand.

Two factors query and impart velocity

I will be trying out a two-day-per-week schedule for Geranium Lake Properties, on Tuesdays and Fridays. This week-end is going to be a busy one for me, so the next GLP comic will go up Tuesday, March 8.

Flirting with imperial culture

Asemic comics are still published here three times a week, on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, although I am thinking of going to a two-days-a-week schedule for GLP (maybe Tuesday and Friday) to free up time to devote to other projects. If you have an opinion on the best days to post, your input is welcome. I can't post GLP on Sundays and Wednesdays.

Two from Qoheleth

Top: The wisdom of incoherence
Bottom: The philosophy of the cliché

Qoheleth is a series of random-appearing panels within GLP, much like the Fifty-Cent Trip or the Yellow Wallpaper series. Wikipedia will tell you that Qoheleth is the author of Ecclesiastes. Yost once let slip that “Qoheleth” was an alias for a real person in his life. Gralie Bohe used it for the middle name of a cat, John Q. Public, in her novel, The Boy in the Yellow Leatherette Portmanteau. (This was the post for Thursday, Feb. 25, 2016. I have problems with time in the Twenty-First Century.)