HOMUNCULUS, or Little Man

A new work just completed-- HOMUNCULUS, measuring 8 by 8 inches, drawn in ink, scanned and colored digitally. Some of the details surrounding the origin of the homunculus, or little man, as culled from various alchemical and folkloric texts, have been collapsed here into a single presentation, however there are several different recorded variations on how to grow a homunculus. It is truly the original test-tube baby, although attempting to raise one is sure to carry its own unique burden as the fate of its maker is inevitably determined by the betrayal of the homunculus.

Comic Box

In 2004, I constructed a piece that could be described as sequential art in a box-- a wall-mounted comic box. With the overreaching title Stompin' at the Bughouse with the Bugaboo Blues (Being a Broken Home Parable in Three Parts), Part the First: In Which the Child Receives Fear, Refuses Fear and Denies Fear, it was an attempt to continue making the sort of small, intricate drawings I was engaged with, but to find an alternate method of displaying them. I had a desire to reconsider the use of the frame and involve it more directly in what it was framing, for it to become an actual component of the content rather than simply displaying the content. Around this time, I was also unsuccessfully experimenting with placing double-sided prints into specimen jars, so as to remove the frame from the wall entirely but retain it as a distancing mechanism.


I have maintained a love affair with Marcel Duchamp's The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), since first viewing it at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2002. Among the complex set of reactions that I have had to the work, both reasoned and unreasoned, was a very simple appreciation of the optical fabric of the piece. It is a work that is at once a drawing and a painting as well as sculpture, occupying a zone that is simultaneously flat and dimensional. For me, a certain joy occurs in the constant need to relocate one's attention in response to the problem that arises in the work's transparency-- the simple fact that it is composed primarily of glass and therefore introduces a world of exterraneous information in the form of other viewers and indeed other works of art, orbiting at all times within its gallery setting. Duchamp dares his audience to readjust their relationship to how they look at art by undermining any possibility of fixed attention. Indeed, this is no idée fixe, as both the meaning and the perception of the work remain in flux.


Although I have never aspired to tackle such goals as those achieved by the likes of Duchamp, I had hoped to raise some minor viewing obstacles in the small scale realm of Bughouse. In the beginning there was a narrative in the form of an outline. There was to be three sections that described the childhood, adulthood and old age of a male character that was a cross between an insect and a human. In these three stages, his life was to be played out on a literal stage, with a proscenium of red curtains that described the shape of a house-- this was to be a domestic drama. A mini-narrative was then drawn up for each of the three ages, in which the bug-man matures through the accumulation of knowledge, which in his case is quite a painful process. Intersperced throughout this narrative of bug-man's life, is a kind of sub-narrative that I called Object Lessons. The Object Lessons, were comprised of objects seen within a suitcase. The objects themselves were broken into two categories: those used for survival by defense, and those used for survival by offense, although the two categories become intentionally interchangeable, as an object used for defensive purposes, such as a knife, could easily be used for offensive purposes. These confused lessons were therefore a kind of accompaniment to the bug-man's journey of violent self-discovery.


The box element was constructed to further complicate things. To throw off the viewer's perception of the narrative and, if they were willing, to invite them to piece a story together from the fragments provided. The images that comprised the narrative-- both the bug-man episodes, and the Object Lessons, were installed in the box, on opposite sides of one another, recto and verso, sandwiched within little black houses arranged in rows and tiers. The only way to view these images, was by pressing close to the box and peering either into a peephole the exact size of a penny, through which a beam of light would illuminate only a portion of the scene, or by angling the gaze through the side of a house-- revealing the entire scene. In either case, the revelation of the entire narrative in a single pass, was not to be achieved easily. The frustration of seeing was an integral part of the story. There were little secrets to be had within these black houses.


Unfortunately, I do not believe the narrative was formed well enough to reward such intensive scrutiny. The tone of the story was awkwardly realized and therefore inconsistent with the framing device, and the images were sometimes more confusing that revelatory. The hope to reveal something shocking in highly concentrated, controlled doses, in the visualization of bug-man's abusive and incestuous upbringing and subsequent forays into double homicide and cannibalism, was entirely lost and ultimately unneccesary. However, I do believe that the form of the work now requires re-examination, and having recently dismantled it, stands to be re-imagined for a fresh attempt.

Images: Ryan Standfest- Bughouse label, ink and shellac on paper in brass nameplate holder; Bughouse, box construction detail 1; Bughouse, box construction, recto view; Bughouse- bug-man narrative, ink on shaped bristol card; Bughouse- Object Lessons, ink on shaped bristol card; Bughouse, box construction, details 2 through 5, all 2004, total dimensions 12 x 12 x 2.5 in.

The Comic Image, Part One

I must confess that as a child I never actually read comics. By read, I mean the activity of reading the narrative through the use of text, rather than image. I never really read the speech balloons or the captions. It wasn't because I was uninterested in the idea of following a story, or immersing myself in the development of character or plot. Rather, for me, the image was all. If the artist was successful, then the nuances of character, the mechanics of plot, and the thrust of the narrative could be conveyed entirely through images alone. Oh I read quite a bit as a child, devouring every horror novel I could-- even those not meant for the eyes of a small boy. But when it came to comic books, I reserved my right to separate text and image. There was something so basic, so elemental, in following sequentially composed images that appealed to the childhood cinematician in me. So often, while laying about in bed at night, or sitting in a particularly dull class in school, did sequences unfurl in my imagination, as sequential narratives. Comics seemed to validate those private moving-image fantasias of mine.


I never really experienced what that peculiar breed of reader known as the fanboy, experienced. I never integrated comic book narratives into my life so that I became obsessed with every little nuance of the character's existence. I never felt threatened by changes in plot or even the governing laws within the comic book's established setting. Instead, I felt betrayed whenever the art suffered. I was indignant when standards began to slip and the quality of line or coloring trailed off into factory production fare, in which the individual hand soon gave way to that of a company shill fobbing off work for a quick buck. I took comic art very seriously as a young lad, even forming a pantheon of the gold-standard artists within my little artistic heart. To me, the true artists of the trade were never those that strove for any form of realism in their work. Rather, it was those who understood that the art of comics was a language unto itself that had a tremendous amount of flexibility in the realm of expression. I always gravitated towards artists who cultivated exaggeration, those who leaned toward the comical grotesque and who understood and underscored the term comic, before anything else. What made a thing funny, was not always in a joke or a snappy punchline, but it was in the visual telling. And in this case, the telling was in the use of line, color, scale, and above all the elastic possibilities of the body. For me, the more fantastical it was, the better-- it was like the artistic equivalent of defying gravity.


This meant that I began to wander away from the superhero fodder that clogged the shelves and bins of every comic shop, and started to seek out the pleasures to be had in publications like MAD, where it seemed all bets were off. Although MAD has long since lost its satirical stamina and traded its bite for something more likely produced by a dentureless geriatric, it once had enough madcap invention to capture my imagination and hold onto it long past the point of contact. The diagrammatic powerplay of Antonio Prohías' Spy vs. Spy, and the one-two punch of Al Jaffee's back cover fold-ins, were powerful examples of comic art invention at its purest, with an ingenious and deceptive simplicity that meant more to me than any scripted superhero soap opera of the day. In each case, these were also supremely economical expressions of visual wit that needed nothing more than a single page to convey an idea or multiple ideas. They were dense micro-narratives that did not require thirty-two pages of textual support to carry their weight. This meant alot to someone who preferred to read images on their own terms.



It is only upon intensive reflection, that I can identify my youthful tendencies as reaching for a compacted comic language delivered with a single blow within an image that could hold its own. I believe that is why, at a certain age when my visual floodgates opened ever wider, I gradually began to harbor a nagging curiosity for forms of visual expression beyond those found in comics. My impulses slowly led me to the existence of images that fulfilled that earlier desire for self-contained images, said more with less and did not have to be stapled into a book at all. They were so powerful in their individual voice, that they could hang on a wall with only the hook behind it providing a means of support. But I still retained the need for images whose strength resided in humor. And not just any humor-- nothing sentimental or sprinkled with cute. No, I wanted the bitter pill. I wanted those smart, MAD laughs that hurt a little and had something to say about something. So naturally, my inclinations led me to the work of artists whose voice took me back to that mordant sweet spot that derives a delicious tension from somehow being both smart and dumb, sophisticated and crude, complex and simple, quiet and loud, elegant and obnoxious. In short, images that carried a blunt sure-footedness in their sheer exuberant vulgarity-- something to chew on without anything in the way. Cut to the chase, but done smartly. This was a language I discovered to exist not only in the work of some of the finest comic artists, but also in the great 20th century artists I soon began to stock my gold-standard pantheon with.

(To be continued in Part Two)


Images: Unknown Photographer- Boy Reading Flash Comics (c.1960's); Basil Wolverton- Cover of MAD #11 (May 1954); Antonio Prohías- Spy vs. Spy; Al Jaffee- Acrylic Plastic Squirt Gun (1975); Al Jaffee- MAD Fold-In; George Grosz- Friedrich Ebert: Life of a Socialist (1919)

Fat Comics

In 2007 I began making a few small drawings with black and red Sharpie brand markers, on cardstock. They were essentially doodles of no great importance, in which I worked out little sequences in which the transformation of a form was charted in stages. Ergo, they were time-based images and by default, driven by a line of narrative action, however minimal, that had a beginning, a middle and an end. Did this constitute a comic strip? There was some interest to be had in these little Sharpie drawings. First, the line itself. When using a larger-width Sharpie, which I was in this case, the amount of ink deposited eventually exceeds what is necessary to describe a clean line. In other words, it bleeds. This is a wonderful chance element in making Sharpie drawings, as the imperfect, fat line, takes the polished edge off of what one does, and returns drawing to a more primitive state. Second, the notion of a minimal comic. Although this is an idea that I wish to explore and expand upon much further, this first foray into the bare essentials of sequential art lays the groundwork for an attempt at much greater abstraction in the comic strip form.

A Man and His Drawing Table

I can recall a time when the pleasure of sitting down at a table and drawing first entered into my being as a necessary component of my existence. When I became consciously aware of it, that is. For me, it all began with comic books. Around the year 1984, when I would have been nine or ten years old, I started buying comic books at the neighborhood drugstore in St. Clair Shores, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. As was customary at that time, I accompanied my grandfather as he went out to replenish his supply of cigars-- he preferred the cheap variety, in this case Phillies Tips. While he was making his selection, I wandered over to a set of spinner racks that contained the comic books. My first memory was of the smell that was present. Although there was the usual aromatic melange that seemed to emanate collectively from the pharmacy, the candy aisle, and the tobacco aisle, this was something altogether different. As I approached the racks, removed a comic book, and opened its cover, I became aware of the object I was holding through the smell that in retrospect seemed to result from the interface of printing ink and newsprint. I was hooked.


What comic book it was that I first purchased on that day, does not matter for this digression, nor do the particulars of a childhood of reading comics. Rather, what began that day was what I can now identify as an appreciation for the drawn image. For it was not long after I leafed through those printed-on pages of newsprint, that I found myself retrieving some sheets of paper, along with pencils and pens, struck with a compulsion to engage in the same activity that must have yielded the images I so loved in those little stapled issues. At first I copied, then I embellished, and then I tried to remake and improve upon. Soon, I was inventing images altogether. There was an intense cluster of years in which I would devoutly give myself over to daily drawing sessions with various boyhood friends. The routine was always the same: a stack of freshly purchased comic books, sometimes accompanied by a Slurpee and a fistful of pretzel rods from the local 7-11, a binder or notebook with blank, lined paper, and a selection of ball-point and felt-tip pens-- we rarely drew in pencil in order to raise the stakes. And then, for several hours, we sat and we drew and we bantered. There was something about being stooped over a desk or a kitchen table and letting oneself get lost in the building up of lines on a sheet of paper, that induced the most wondrous states of mind. For me, that was play. While others were practicing for team sports, or even studying for school, I would find myself wandering into the thicket of imaginary minutiae of a different sort of world, that of purest individuality-- a realm of boundless invention with no fixed definition, in which one felt more freedom than having to obey the arbitrary dictates of social pressure. No, this was different than what school and sports had to offer. This was solitude. And there was freedom in this solitude. I knew it. My friends knew it. And it seemed that this was our way of keeping adulthood and all of its attendant responsibilities at bay.


I must confess, that for me this seems to still be the case. I don't want to intentionally summon forth the oft-abused notion of "never growing up," but there is a particle of truth to the idea that when I find myself in a chair, alone and stooped over a drawing table, at night, with a single light illuminating the brilliant surface of the drawing paper, surrounded by all manner of pens, pencils, brushes, ink bottles, erasers, rulers and notebooks, I am that boy choosing something different than what is being offered up outside of my window. Here, at this table, everything is quiet. Everything has its own beautiful reason, separate from the chaos at large. Drawing at my table, late into the night, when everyone seems to be asleep, I feel very much awake with each stroke of the pen. A kind of meditative envelope forms around such a private activity. I am sure that an artist working in any medium may experience this, writers not excluded. However for me, it is that magic combination of this medium and this space, in which thought is carried out through the infinite permutation of line. And it is a certain kind of line. A line that, although produced in solitude, could speak to many others when released from the drawing table. It is the same line I recall loving from those early comic book days. And even now, once again, there are the stacks of comic books surrounding my drawing space. It seems to be all coming back.


Since those boyhood days of drawing from comic books, I have often been overcome by poetic reverie whenever I have seen a photograph of a cartoonist or comic artist, sitting at his drawing table. Particularly in those photographs from a distant time, that allow me to conjure romanticized notions about the early cartoonists working in a cramped studio space in a newsroom or even in their own apartment in the big city, during the summer with sweltering heat and old electric fans working overtime alongside radios, and the sounds of city traffic below. Or even in the winter with clanging and hissing hot water heaters and still the radio. In many of the older photographs from the 1920's, 30's and even 40's, the cartoonists are seated at their table, drawing, and wearing a tie and jacket, often smoking a cigarette or a pipe. I think of them being in a room together, a group of cartoonists, "gag men" bouncing ideas off of one another, trying out fresh jokes. I think of the smell of tobacco, the smell of ink, the smell of paper. I think of the sound the pens make when they scratch into the surface of the paper or board. While gazing at these photos, I often strain to read the surface contents of each desk, to glean what kind of pens they were using, what, if any, reference materials, what they were working on...whatever I can find. Some artists have a deep affinity for seeing painters standing before canvases, or sculptors working with wood or stone, ceramicists with clay, or even printmakers relishing the activity surrounding a printing press. But for me, it will always be those images of cartoonists at their drawing tables, dreaming up entire worlds in those little sequences projected onto those flat sheets of paper with simple lines and washes. When I look at those photographs, I say to myself: "That's what I want to be when I grow up." And then I catch myself: "That's what I want to be when I don't want to grow up." A man at his drawing table.


Images: Will Eisner- The Spirit (Self Portrait), published May 3, 1942; Rube Goldberg; George Herriman (c. 1916); Chester Gould; Jack Kirby; Steve Ditko (c. 1955)

Art Envy Oil

Another work culled from the archive. Art Envy Oil is comprised of three drawings originally intended for publication as a broadside, to accompany a selection of text by a writer based in Iowa City. Unfortunately, the project never came to be, but these images remain to stand on their own. The germ for the composition was a free-association on the theme of the text that I was to create a corresponding image to. That theme, as I interpreted it, was desire. Namely, the male narrator's desire for a specific woman whose physical attributes, such as her eyebrows and shapely hips, helped to fuel said desire. Around the time this piece was percolating, I was fresh from finishing my graduate studies in printmaking at The University of Iowa, and was preparing to leave Iowa for good, to return to my hometown of Detroit. Subsequently, the completion of Art Envy Oil took far longer than I had hoped. It became the thin thread that held my sanity together as I made the move, took up a couple of teaching positions at a university and a community college respectively, began and navigated a long-distance relationship with a wonderful woman I had met just prior to leaving Iowa, all the while living in my grandmother's basement and pondering my fate in the larger scheme of things. These three pieces served as a very small bridge from the end of my life as a student to the beginning of my life out of the protective womb of academia. None of this was or is intended to find its way into the drawings. My only goal was to hold onto that slippery notion of desire that originally set me on my way. That, and the need to create something a little more graphically assertive, indulging in my love of using brush and ink, and employing black and red. I should note that in two of the panels, the red is slightly "misprinted," that is, jogged a bit to recreate that wonderful "happy accident" of plates not properly aligned on the printing press. In the age of digital correction and polish, I yearn for those "misprinted" color images I devoured in the comic books of my childhood.


Images: Ryan Standfest- 1. Art (air); 2. Envy (novelty); 3. Oil (and cactus felts), all 2006, ink on paper, 14 x 18.75 in. (collection of Violet Lucca)

Stumblebum's Progress

You can see it here first, ladies and gentleman-- the first thrilling panel from yet another strip brought to you by the dyspeptic folks at Rotland Comicworks! Yessir, the little panel you see before you, is none other than Stumblebum's Progress No. 1. There will be many more to follow, and expect a self-published Stumblebum's Progress compilation to appear in the near future. We thank you for your continued interest.