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...

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...

Dreams and Anguish - February 2025

I am God: The current President of the United States has declared (through an official White House social media account on Twitbox or...

She is God: The Inultaru do not have the problems with genders that bedevil Americans. They do have a question of genus that has been fiercely debated in their academic communities since...

Dreams of Krishna: I am full of thoughts, to the brim and ove...

Dreams and Anguish: “Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.” – Eugene Ionesco...

Cleft and Fallen: This style of mask, which is pierced in places and carved all the way through the material of the mask, so that it incorporates several lacunae as...

Four Masks for Mercy Maybe

Yost wrote “5CB” on the back of these four unpublished masks, which means we know they depict one of the Five Carthaginian Bodhisattvas (aka the Silver...

6EQUJ5

Creatures of Catastrophe

Today the screen doors are open for the second day in a row. Yesterday temperatures pushed confidently into the seventies (Fahrenheit) and today’s forecast is...

6EQUJ5

Towhee and Junco

Wolf Moon

In 1993, the first full moon of that year, the Wolf Moon, brightened the night sky on the eighth of January, so it is a safe guess this unpublished Geranium Lake Properties comic illustrates...

6EQUJ5

Rhymes With Nemesis

It was back in September when I first dug this Geranium Lake Properties panel out of the archive. It originally appeared in “A Feast of Eels is a Meal of Mystery and Mud”, a story in which Jack Loki witnessed the eerie phenomenon of the Greenrise Convergent Surge. I felt it would make a good post for October, suitable to the Halloween month. But then I encountered Yost’s artwork for some Pete Cafferata albums and I became distracted by the research for the Square to Gemini post.

I set this comic aside, along with the cover art of Pete Cafferata’s so-called Christmas album, and then forgot about it. Only to find it again when I started putting together the story behind Cafferata’s Rollicking the Latest Apocalypse, which I hope to post soon. Meanwhile, belatedly, please enjoy today’s offering.

2024 June

Three in June...

6EQUJ5

Postmodern Fable

In today’s post, alongside images from Wm. Yost’s unfinished graphic novel, The Last Lost Memoir of Casanova, is an excerpt of Yost’s 1998 interview from Occurrences magazine. Yost was...

A Green Weld Rusted

6EQUJ5

2024: May

Summer Breathing Down the Neck of Spring: These are masks of two demalions that personify Hildegard von Bingen’s concept of viriditas, which is one of Yost’s favorite themes. The first one is Ethullosba from the Jack Loki adventure “A Wasteland of Linen”, the second is Ingottanyl from “Forgotten Dances of Survival and Kindness”.

The Lumenist, Part 1: By the time of her interview with Meg Gannon*, a few days before the release of The Lumenist (Glass Octopus Press, 1978), Gralie Bohe was already impatient with...

2024: April

A Mask of the Eyrillim: First off, I think this might help: Eyrillim is the plural, Eyrilmonghet is the singular. Eyrillim is the Inultaru name used for members of...

Darn It! Late Again: Yesterday morning, while browsing through files of unpublished images in the Geranium Lake Properties archive, I came across these two panels with their depictions of the moon and...

Five Carthaginian Bodhisattvas: According to Ha Kim Ngoc, there should be at least sixteen Geranium Lake Properties comics marked in some manner with the abbreviation 5CB, but it is no surprise to me that...

Spring Cleaning: A package arrived at the GLP archive last week. The archive was closed at the time. I imagine the sign on the front door said “Closed For Spring Cleaning” in a...

A Package from Terror Addams Part Two: I did not mention (in my last post) this other item that Terror Addams included in their package because it deserved a post of its own*. I am thrilled to reveal that...

Travesty Is A Verb: Missing Pages: “Triple/Triad Goddesses” was what Yost had written in the Two Teddy Bears Journal under the heading “TIAV Masks”. An arrow indicates that this is a description of a mural in the Other Space Museum on...

Three Months in 2024: January - February - March

Twelfth Night: I felt that I needed to wait until after sunset before I posted the Twelfth Night mask of Kordeyn Guhtellop, the Three Nights demalion. I also expected this would give me enough time to unravel...

Non Nostri Chaos Circulus: I have seen this Geranium Lake Properties comic identified many times as Mother Jackal in her guise as the Rescuer of Witches, so the first thing I want to say...

Dependent Arising: This is an image of Yost’s final version for the album cover* of The Empty Space, the second album from Chansons de Geste. Which was the side project of two members of...

Socrates Would Appreciate a Good Wurncheolf: Today is the holiday we call Dpajormymy, and here in this unpublished Geranium Lakes Properties comic we have Kordeyn Guhtellop, the Three Nights demalion, wearing a...

Living in a Black and White World: Digging through the mazy warren that is the Geranium Lake Properties archive, I have unearthed several files dedicated to GLP comics that appeared in various zines, amateur fanworks and...

The Height of Wit: We’ve had some funny moments on this blog in the past ten years. You may have missed them, my sense of humor can be subtle sometimes. Other times...

Harrow (Complete in 5 Pages): With this post I am continuing our journey through a black and white world, with an abstract comic I created to fulfill a request from Zeszyty Komiksawe...

It Pours: Two posts in the same day! I have been saving these coloring pages for a rainy day activity, and right now I am waiting for...

Springing Along: The equinox came and went a few days ago, but spring had been springing along for at least a month before that. We had a mild, wet winter, so...

Holy Fool: After six years of constancy, the roster of players in the band Immanis et Inanis changed several times between 1985 and 1994, when they finally broke apart and declared that the band was entering into...

Non Nostri Chaos Circulus

I have seen this Geranium Lake Properties comic identified many times as Mother Jackal in her guise as...

Dependent Arising - This is an image of Yost’s final version for...

Twelfth Night - I felt that I needed to wait until...

A Walk on the Moon - In the traditional history (which is more legend than...

Seven Ales and Ciders

The two Geranium Lake Properties comics in today’s post were not published in newspapers. They were included with six...

6EQUJ5

Sharp as Holly

We are not famous in our neck of the woods for...

6EQUJ5

Eighth Day Cake

...on the eighth day, jackalopes will tell you, He Ate Cake. Which brings us to the honored-but-not-too-revered Jackalopian tradition of eighth day cake....

6EQUJ5

6EQUJ5

Jackalope Mask

Another fine jackalope mask designed by Alice Aroumbeyski, a mask that Yost presented as one of her self-portraits. In the “The Ringer in the Substratum”, Alice has a conversation with her childhood friend Kamlyn about the suitability of wearing this mask to the wedding of a cousin who is essentially a stranger. (Alice had not spoken to her cousin for 16 years.) The two women decide that Alice should save the mask for her own wedding to Jack Loki.

Kamlyn was actually named Alice when they first met, when the girls were four years old. They did not become boon companions instantly, but because “a lamentable conspiracy beyond our control” (Alice’s words) kept throwing them together, they agreed to an alliance. The two girls decided that having the same name was “tiresome and traumatic” (Kamlyn’s words), so one Alice became Gwynne and the other Alice became Kamlyn. After a few years, Gwynne decide to become Alice again, but Kamlyn kept her name into adulthood.

6EQUJ5

Bat Signal

6EQUJ5

6. Maskyrinth 2024

5. Masks For All Seasons 2024

4. Twenty-Two Variation 2024

3. Twenty-Three Masks 2024

2. Full Phiz Masks 2024

1. Masquerade 2024