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.

Rapscallion's Arbor

I'm not sure what the "Corsican screen" is meant to be, but this is another part of it.

Summer Retro: Plain Languages

Summer Retro: Three Fourths Rain Vacuum

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”.

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).

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.

Getting outa the adjacent ball of confusion

GLP is published two or three times a week, on Tuesday, Thursday or Friday, and/or Saturday. Like definitely.

A chalk empire for caribou

Fossils trapped in the wood of Khandeyar (2 versions)

Haunted Baptism

This panel is my current favorite misprint of GLP by Newark’s Star Ledger newspaper. Yost was usually delighted with the Star Ledger’s mistakes, but in this case he was silent about his feelings. Yost’s assistant, Ha Kim Ngoc, reports that she found an old clipping of this misprint tacked to the back wall of a closet in an empty bedroom of Yost’s house, after he disappeared on his trip to New Zealand in 1999.

For comparison: Hsieh and Tse Flee Thessaloniki for Grand Coteau

Liu Haichan and the Muse of Bismuth

"Bismuth has long been considered the element with the highest atomic mass that is stable. However, in 2003 it was discovered to be weakly radioactive: its only primordial isotope, bismuth-209, decays via alpha decay with a half life more than a billion times the estimated age of the universe." From Wikipedia, sourced to Dumé, Belle (23 April 2003). "Bismuth breaks half-life record for alpha decay". Physicsworld.

GLP Summer Schedule

Peacock Feather Collaboration

Hsieh and Tse Flee Thessaloniki for Grand Coteau

Jack Loki Encounters the Mighty Mighty of the Western Veldt

The Island of California

This is from the yellow wallpaper series. The top image is typical of the way we present and view Geranium Lake Properties on the internet. I am lucky to have access to color transparencies of Yost's original art, and the color is as brilliant and accurate as my computer can make it. GLP began as a black-and-white single panel comic (Yost was influenced by New Yorker cartoonists like Charles Addams and Saul Steinberg) and there exists a popular notion that Yost began to experiment with color only in the later years of the comic. Actually, his color experiments date from the beginning of GLP, and Yost used color in some of his early conceptual sketches.

Yost's distributors were adamant in their resistance against anything that was not black-and-white, but they eventually relented and accepted full-color work. Most newspapers received the color panels after they had been rendered into grayscale. Some newspapers chose to print color, with varying degrees of failure. The falures usually delighted Yost.

The bottom image gives you an idea of how the color of Geranium Lake Properties looked when printed in newspapers, beginning on the left with a grayscale representation.

Geranium Lake Properties as greeting cazrds

Get a free card mailed to you!

Photograph of 10 Global Forever stamps to be used for destinations outside the USA:
Two spots have already been taken!

Nothing but blues and Elvis and somebody else’s favorite song

Top to bottom: animated gif, comic, poster, all from the same motherboard.

The Never-To-Be-Opened Door

This comes from the same place as Tigorn’s Green Loam.

The circumspect embers of violence, the final twelve strokes

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.