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.

Sunday, July 17, 2016

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

Tuesday, June 21, 2016

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!

Tuesday, June 7, 2016

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.

Tuesday, May 24, 2016

Other Etiquettes





Four years ago, I started posting pages for my asemic graphic novel Esgr Navigator on Tumblr. This novel of 229 pages has only appeared online, which is how I originally intended for it to exist, but a couple of months ago I started to explore what it would take to print it on paper. Before I got very far in the process, I decided to edit out a few pages that made me wince. Then I started to re-write, chopping up or aggregating pages, or combining them with new details. Then I started to add words into spaces that seem to beg for text. Then I had to stop and give the project a new title, Zomynesgr Avigatorsin, because it was becoming something else.

You can view another page from the project here.