The misprints of "Laid Down Gin"

On the back of the original drawing, Yost wrote in pencil: "brand new key unlocks them both".

Twice in murk and occidental damp

Why a Pit Bull Makes the Perfect Pet for Children

With All Lona Tomical

Parecem não ter fim

Hunkered down against a chunk of the untethered calico cross

(1) Latest version
(2) Later version
(3) Early version

Delft Y-Block Upright

Launder a Misapprehension

Lighthouse

Full Quill Ostrich, Straightcut and Manhattanized

This is another collaboration between Yost and Ha Kim Ngoc. A few months later, Yost published a sequel.

Adorned with three different papers

Not yet recovered from a meal with antique philosophers

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.

Cemeutatiorr Furnace

Adishesha Uncoiling

In Conversation with the Andes

Ranging from scarlet

Harsher than the plight that engulfed them

The Aperture is Square

The Wheel is Made of Ash and Oak

As Niewhilfen as Anything Else

Outer Dialog

Volodymyr Bilyk, Lin Tarczynski © 2016

This is the latest post in a collab series with Volodymyr Bilyk. I used a touch of Gary Barwin Blue in this panel.

Alkali Mismatched With Acid (plus 2 misprints)

A companion equal to life

This is a collaboration with Volodymyr Bilyk. After I posted this image on Facebook, Gary Barwin took our efforts even further–you can see all three parts of the complete work here.

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.

A sparse and slightly sweeter likeness

The snippet of asemic writing at the very top is clipped out of one of mIEKAL aND's Martian Love Letters.

Summer Saturday Retro: "Jacob finds a yellow feather"

Um, yeah, it's Wednesday. Sorry about the wildly irregular posting.

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