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PAGE 31

There is a bit of the old “inside looking out” and “outside looking in” dynamic continuing here.  The precise layout of this new space is finally starting to take shape.  We can see the spot inside the exhibition where we had been on page 28. I find myself still enjoying something about the overall composition. I had been captivated with pattern in that cliched way that junior photographers often are; and I had tried to stick examples of pattern into various drawings.  Maybe this is the most successful example.  The central subject matter is the actual exhibition of framed pictures on the wall.  Nevertheless, the abundance of pattern dominates.  It is in the window frame.  It is in the brick, in the floor, in the coffered ceiling, even in the shadows.

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The ceiling seems much closer to the underside of the storm drain that I had initially imagined.  The plotting of the hypothetical shadows across this surface was its own time consuming challenge.  It wasn’t something I had originally envisioned - but these shadows seem to take over the role the cassette tape had played in the storm drain frame.  The shadows seemed to call attention to the ceiling’s contours.



The four framed pictures which are visible on the far wall show pages 29-36.  The previous wide angle drawing of the gallery is the picture furthest to the left. Immediately to the right of that we finally come face to face with a full-on version of the “Droste effect.”  We can see this very frame on the left.  If this drawing were larger, we would hypothetically be able to zoom into the smaller representation of this very frame and then zoom into a subsequent smaller version.  At the time, I regarded this kind of thing as akin to a visual trap.  This is like a visual “Black Hole.” Once we look into it, we cross a kind of event horizon (to continue with the black hole cosmology metaphor) that we can not escape.  We have looked directly at this visual Medusa and been turned to stone.  In medieval heraldry there is term for the appearance of a smaller and, perhaps, even similar coat of arms being depicted within the larger, full coat of arms: “Mise en Abyme.”  (See the example here of the coat of arms for the United kingdom) The term is French, meaning “placed into abyss.”  Abyss has a very specific set of meanings: a bottomless pit, a pit to the underworld or Hell.  It is presumably this visual “pit’s” endless quality - our inability to turn away, our being unable to awaken fully from the dream (only into another dream, and so on) that evokes the image of Hell. 



Well, here we are in this tomb like space, under the “grate,” in a “drain.”  I viewed this space (and all these negative associations) as the representation of the kind of underworld of the dead/non-living (Hell?) that our narrator/artist/Mr. Sidney had mentally consigned himself to.  This is the logical end of his narcissistic aesthetics.  In this particular frame, like Narcissus looking at his own reflection, the artist is looking into his own work.  The Droste effect takes over and the artist falls forward in endless fascination with himself into the well of endlessly repeating frames within frames.  Like Narcissus, he will drown in this well.  Two framed pictures off to the right we can see what would be pages 35 and 36.  Page 35 is depicted as one would expect; but pages 36 (the bathroom suicide scene) is shown here as just solid black - absence of light, death. That museum bench may as well be some kind of funeral bier.



One small detail really catches my eye.  There are hinges on the side of the window, as if to suggest that we can open the window and plunge headlong into our artist’s mentality.  Or we can stay out.  We can step inside and take on his mental attitude (remember, I was thinking of this exhibition space as a depiction of the space inside his “head”) - not a happy ending. OR (and this was how I viewed my role) we can understand this person’s interior world, have empathy for him, but still have the safe distance that the closed window can afford us.

​PAGE 32.PA

This is our final view of this exhibition space.  The long hallway framing makes it seem part of some larger and quite spacious institution.  We can see a bit of the space where yet another exhibition is being presented off to the right.  The light of the street lamps and the long shadows of the latticed windows are coming all the way out into the hall and stairwell.  We are now on the other side of the velvet rope from our narrator’s supposed exhibition.  Is crowd control really necessary? Or is that exhibition just “roped off” into some kind of alternate universe?  This unusual space is perhaps the most desolate and deserted we have seen yet.  No wonder.  The time seems to be 3:44 AM.



And what is with this clock?  This is the kind of thing that we might expect to see hanging above a 1960’s era two story bank lobby.  Perhaps there is some kind of “lobby” down these steps.  We don’t know.  Whatever the circumstance, this is a very LARGE clock for this space.  The railings at the left were yet another import from the Albany Academy - not quite what one might expect to see in the same place as this style of clock.

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The shading of the floor was done in much the same way that it had been done in the previous few pages; but the shading of the walls and ceiling has taken on a more unusual quality.  It comes off as a bit of sloppy workmanship as I look at it today; but I remember wanting the parallel line and cross hatched textures to have a kind sinister “vines overgrowing the building” quality.  There is a bit of an over the top “drippiness” in the shading up near the ceiling. I definitely wanted the wall to be an inherently stippled texture and I wanted the shading to be parallel lines.  Ordinarily the reverse would be a more effective division of labor: lines for the light portion and stippling for the shadows.  The floors here and on pages 29-31 are good examples. But I was trying to create a kind of cacophony of textures that I would later zoom in on at the top of page 33.



The frames at the bottom of this page were a unique challenge.  They were small enough that I couldn’t simply re-draw the top frame in a slightly more miniature proportion.  I had to actually create an accurate thumbnail that had a convincing breadth of detail.  It would be a couple of months before I would actually finish the frame on page 35 that is shown in miniature here, so I left it blank in the interim and then came back to it.



The top frame of page 32 (the long shot gallery hallway with the clock) has precisely the same perspective system and proportions as the top frame on page 35.  Page 35 even has its own time piece: the grandfather clock.  Showing these two framed pages side by side in the exhibition was a way to highlight this similarity so that when we “actually” arrive at page 35 (this is the first instance in which we are being shown the narrative “future”) it would be that much more obvious.  I will discuss this more on page 35.  The freeing the frogs scene from Spielberg’s “E.T.” (while E.T. gets drunk on beer and watches the kiss scene in “The Quiet Man”) was something that had influenced me considerably here.



The second little frame behind the velvet rope is the framed picture in which this very page would be displayed.  This is almost in profile, so we are only obliquely employing the “Droste effect.”  If the lower frames had a more expanded composition and thereby showed just a bit more, then we would have a full blown frame within a frame effect.  Here we narrowly skirt it.  The razor blade from page 35 is similarly partially cropped.  I was trying to make more explicit the connections between aesthetic narcissism (frame within frame) or endless self-referentiality (as shown here on page 32 - the left) and death (the razor blade of page 35 - the right).  Significant is the fact that these two framed pages are not consecutive.  They are being shown side by side, yes; but there is a missing framed picture missing between them, i.e. pages 33 and 34.

PAGE 33

This and the next page have always been some of my favorites in the sequence.  There is not a lot of flash in the actual drawings themselves; but I really like the quickness and the diverse quality of the transitions.  On page 32, I had decided to build up an intricate and slightly rough texture for the shaded portions of the wall to the right of the clock.  The top frame here on page 33 is a close up on this very corner of page 32.  This seemingly homogenous series of marks breaks up into chaotic and very non-uniform patterns. 



First of all there is the big fat line that denotes the edge of the frame on page 32.  Everything to the left of that line in this upper frame on page 33 is supposedly “empty” space; but once again (as on page 27), the space outside the frame is now “in.”  This is a bit like the vertical hold being slightly off on an old TV set.  The difference here is that it is the “horizontal hold.”  And, by the way, why does every single frame in this drawing sequence need to have a solid line drawn around it?  Am I trying to highlight some “boundary issues?”



I have always very much liked the Warner Brother’s cartoon titled “Duck Amuck.”  I think a comparison to similar vertical hold and horizontal hold problems might be in order here.



When one examines the shading more closely, we also get to see the gritty and insufficiently round stippled “dots.” In close up they seem to pile up in clumps, like poorly applied mascara. Even more - the lines are of different thicknesses.  They overlap and touch, revealing the motion of the not-so-steady hand of the artist.  This is like listening to a guitarist and hearing the fingers move up and down the frets.  As we plunge closer and closer to the frame, the artifice and illusion is breaking down into its constituent parts.



While the illusion may be breaking up, the central IDEA, nevertheless, remains the same: the time.  It is 3:44 AM. I chose this time because I thought it seemed very, very late - but no so late that it started to seem early (as in milking the cows at 4 AM early).  I wanted it to seem the most remote and uninhabited part of the day.  I remember choosing the precise time of 3:44:47 for an almost whimsical reason: 3+4-4+4=7.  Back to the idea of time... It remains 3:44:47 in the cavernous exhibition space.  Our loss of “horizontal hold” in the top frame shows that it is 3:44:47 in the mind of the artist who chose to make it that time on page 32.  It is also 3:44:47 in the space where the pocket watch in the middle frame happens to be (turns out to be in “the room).  The idea is that certain things (like time: not only precise measurement of time but also the very pervasive existence of time in all contexts) remain constant and “the same” even in different settings.  This mini-shift of our focus from clock-drawing-close-up to pocket watch is happening in the midst of a larger shift from the gallery hallway to the house hallway on page 35.  The juxtaposition of these two drawings (in miniature) at the bottom of page 32 is meant to invite comparisons.  How are they alike?  They have the same exact perspective structure, yes; they also introduce an unknown spaces on their left that feature large time pieces - a time piece that is in each instance set to the same time (3:44), the same time on the pocket watch.



Basically, we are being asked to believe that the experience of the gallery space and the house hallway are entirely congruent.  Those visual trimmings (made up of those lines and dots we are so helpfully seeing in close up at the top of page 33) - whether they be the Albany Academy like balustrades and patterned floors of an exhibition space or the interior of a suburban house - are merely that: trimmings.  They are like so much decorative “cloth” that drapes over a more intrinsic and deeper structure. ("All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event – in the living act, the undoubted deed – there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask!") That’s right.  This guy has been reading “Moby Dick,” remember!



What is that structure?  Is it the linear perspective that make 3-D illusions possible in 2-D space?  Is it the singular experience that our narrator has in both of these spaces? Or is it something as immutable as time itself?  Yes, it is all three simultaneously.  And above all it is about the persistent impulse that our narrator has to “stop time.”  He wants not only to freeze it, but somehow to exist outside of it...or (dare I use such grandiose language for his misguided impulses) to “transcend” time.  Oh what a mouthful!  What a load of crap! Just who is this guy, Gill?! Where the Hell did you meet him?



Hell? Exactly.  He is the part of me that just might wind up there.



As we are assimilating these various comparisons, we are also, once again, arriving back in “the room” by way of the pocket watch.  It is that same pocket watch that we saw in “The Confines of Overt Iconography: An Overview” frame on page 22.  Yes, this is the drawer; and there is that box, a little Longfellow cigar box.  (I liked the poet-like name; but I actually did own this precise box) It has cassette deck and audio component paraphernalia within it. In the bottom frame we see the close up of the “Realistic” cleaning fluid.



In addition to these objects in the drawer we also have the overwhelming texture of the darkened wood grain of the drawer.  The wood grain in the close up on the watch (the middle frame) is an interesting detail.  I worked very hard to try to capture actual wood grain; but when one gets this close the recognizable patterns start to break down (again) into more seemingly random and chaotic assemblages. The pattern here reminds me a bit of muscle tissue as seen under a microscope (“what is the underlying structure to things?”)



As we get to the bottom of page 33 we have a side by side display of two items: the watch and the box.  I presented these two heavy handed symbols  side by side here to show that our narrator is confronted with a choice.  We see on the next page that he chooses “the box” with its tape splicing kit and razor blade.  He chooses this bizarre sort of aesthetic as well as actual death at his own hand.  But what of the watch?

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Pocket watches have always had a peculiar attraction for me.  My father kept (from as long as I could remember) his grandfather’s pocket watch suspended in a bell jar like case on his bedroom dresser.  I was fascinated at a young age by not only the watch but also by its unique display.  Not only that - it was old! It suggested a kind of continuity that other objects lacked.  My great grandfather’s clothing, his New York City apartment, even my great grandfather himself - all these things were gone but; but the watch remained.  It hung there on my dad’s dresser as a reminder not just of the man who had once owned it but also of the relationships that existed that had made its arrival here possible.

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Like most young people of my generation I was quite familiar with Harper Lee’s novel “To Kill a Mockingbird.”  I had also repeatedly watched the novel’s 1962 film adaptation (How perfect!  Gregory Peck had been both Ahab and Atticus.)  The pocket watch plays a role as a symbol in both, especially in the opening credits of the film. There is the watch that belongs to Atticus. And then there is the watch which Boo Radley leaves as a token for Scout and Jem in the knothole of their tree.  The credits show us this watch amidst all the other tokens from Boo Radley collected in Scout’s cigar box.  The watch remains a symbol for a variety of human connections: father to son, generation to generation.  It is also a stand in for ACTUAL interaction in the case of Boo (at least until he reveals himself at the end).  Nevertheless, it is significant that the obvious connection between Atticus and Scout does not necessarily need to have this symbol. There is an interesting scene in which Atticus explains to Scout that he will give the watch to her brother Jem.  Atticus mentions a pearl necklace and a ring.  But that doesn’t matter on a deeper level.  Atticus and Scout’s relationship  exists anyway, symbol or no (Emerson: “All that you say is just as true without the tedious use of that symbol as with it.”)



These influences (among others) made my 1978 purchase of the antique, and barely working pocket watch I had seen in the window of a tiny shop in Heidelberg, Germany irresistible.  I carried this thing around with me for a year or so until it finally lost all its ability to keep ticking.  While this watch might have lost its ability to tell time, it still retained its ability carry symbolic meaning.  It turned up again and again in some high school era drawings, one of which I eventually mailed off to my then long distance girlfriend Sharon Wilkie - a grand symbolic gesture of...hmm...well, a gesture of something significant in the mind of a 17 year old.



Sharon and I went our separate ways before we went off to college.  She lived in the Toronto area (and I did not!). The distance was impractical; she also had probably had more than enough of my youngish, overly self conscious romantic nonsense too. That particular relationship was perhaps the only one from which I have ever been completely and unceremoniously “dumped.” (I believe this is the proper technical term) It is a story that I need not go into in much more detail here.  Suffice it to say that at age 17 - we moved on.



Perhaps, it had been something about wanting to have the proverbial last word.  I decided a few months later that, yes, we would go our separate ways; but not before I sent her this very pocket watch with the instruction that though we were done interacting she should nevertheless “hang onto it for me.”  This may have been an exercise in “setting that which one loves free.” (eye roll) At the time, I honestly believed that this would be the last I would see of the watch and the last I would hear from Sharon.  But it wasn’t.  We would meet again almost 3 years later (an eternity for someone my age). It was a favorable meeting, and one of the many outcomes was her returning this watch to me. 



My old pocket watch had finished its tour of duty as a symbol; but now that it had “come back,” it was no longer needed for its symbolic value.  This, by the way, was all taking place right as I was beginning this drawing sequence in 1982.  Yes, one of the many strands of thought underlying this very drawing sequence was an iconoclastic rejection of the over use of symbols - a need to outgrow it; nevertheless, I was overusing symbols right and left - or at least the part of me cloaked in the narrator’s persona was using symbols right and left.  Here on page 33 the watch is a symbol of life (the path our narrator does NOT choose) and also a symbol (for me personally, at least) of the way that one doesn’t need one’s relationships with others entirely mediated by symbols. (mine with Sharon, Scout’s with Atticus, Scout’s with Boo Radley, etc.)

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I find the cigar box and the cleaning fluid bottle to be very effectively rendered.  Whatever one thinks of this particular drawing style, one can see that I have almost entirely grown into it.

PAGE 34

​The top frame has the distinction of being the only 3 point perspective drawing in the entire sequence.  I had wanted this moment of our narrator’s decision to be most subtly rendered - or at least to be rendered using the most dynamic visual mapping system.  It is not a particularly special frame in terms of overall composition; but bringing the third vanishing point into it made it a more complicated affair to carry off.  Remember - this is a fictitious scene.  There was no way to capture it by life drawing.  Each of the individual objects had to be stuck into the 3 point system using subtle changes in the vanishing points.  All this is very straightforward for the accomplished visual artist; but, for me, this was a very big deal.  I was showing that “I” could do it if I really wanted to.



And just who is the artist here?



I had meant for almost all of the preceding drawings to be understood as having been drawn by my alter-ego, Adrian Sidney.  During the months preceding this I had been devoting a considerable amount of time to decoding Ezra Pound’s extremely complicated “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” for my undergraduate thesis.  That project had grown into an oversized 150 page discussion of just who should be understood to the poet responsible for each of Mauberley’s constituent poems.  Did Mauberley (the inferior alter ego of Pound) write it? Or did Pound?  And many shades of the two of them together were possible as well. 



Mauberley was an infinitely more complicated version of something like Randy Newman’s “Short People.”  Yes, Randy Newman was singing about short people.  The song SEEMS to be about short people...or is it.  “Short People” is actually about “the guy in the song” - the person singing it.  It was that way for Mauberley too.  And I meant for it to be understood in similar ways here.  Thus far Adrian Sidney has been in charge.  But as he drives his aesthetic car off a cliff here, sooner or later “I” (as in the real Gill Alexander, whoever that is) will have to take the wheel.  Yes, we may lose Sidney along the way.  In fact, we are about to lose him in this very frame; but at least I can bring back an account of “our” harrowing trip together out into the wider world as well as into our considerations of the world of aesthetics.



My choice to work in 3 point perspective here was an oblique way of introducing my direct, non-ironic involvement in the midst of this extended series of works by Adrian Sidney.  Perhaps, the Adrian Sidney in me would have gone directly from page 32 to 35 - thereby omitting these two pages and their emphases on choice (life vs. death) and aesthetic breakdown into constituent parts (the close-ups).  I consider the final pages (37-42) to be my direct post suicide epitaph on Sidney; but this is my earliest point of entry.



The drawer is full of items that are very recognizably mine. There is a black leather stationery holder I used (and still use) to hold sentimentally important photos, unused 15 cent stamps, a calculator, giant paper clips, envelopes (like the one shown on pages 2 and 13-16), the cassette labeled “Interruptions” (from the car) back in its case, Kodak film (remember the camera on page 13 had no film), film negatives (research for items to “put in” drawings no doubt), a ticket stub and an El Marko brand magic marker.

My closest friend in elementary school, Cord Reynolds had accompanied me on a memorably mischievous Halloween during our first grade year - dressed as El Marko.  Cord was an inspiring friend for so many reasons; but I remember him as the first person my own age who seemed to be able to draw with skill. I was remembering him here with this marker.  There is even that rosary hidden in the shadows.



It is significant that we see film but no camera, negatives but no prints.  We have a cassette; but it is locked away in a box (coffin?) and there is no means of playing it shown here.  We have envelopes; but they are empty and unstamped.  The envelope, camera, and cassette “trinity” (expression, identity, and perception) I mentioned while discussing the contents of the glove box are referenced again here in the apparent clutter of this drawer.  But this time, the message is about impotence rather than potential.  The drawer is a version of “see no evil, hear no evil.”



In the open cigar box, among the Q-Tips that would be used to clean the recording heads of the cassette machine is the empty space left by the box which now lies on the floor next to the chair.  A funny shaped grooved object that looks like some kind of mini mitre box is lying next to it.  The subsequent zoom down to the box reveals that this is a tape splicing kit and that the mitre box like object is the track used to bring the cut ends of the tape together.

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Of course every cheap tape splicing kit also comes with a razor blade to facilitate good, clean cuts.  I remember showing this series of pages to my friend Ron Wiesel right after I had finished it.  I hadn’t prepared him for what he would see; so I was very gratified when he launched into a good humored speech delivered in his best news-caster imitation.  “In an effort to refine and otherwise focus his own life, Adrian Sidney chose to edit HIMSELF with the splicing kit.”  Ron laughed with that deeply satisfied grin that all his friends would likely remember.  Then he made some joke about Sidney’s winding up on the bathroom floor rather than the cutting room floor.



Page 38 explicitly lays out the details of Sidney’s supposed suicide; nevertheless, I was gratified that it had been obvious enough just within the confines of this page that Sidney’s demise was about to happen.  The lower frames are the smallest of the entire sequence.  The breaks were meant to represent the vertical slashes that Sidney would have made on his wrist(s).



I was unsure about how to do this transition from the top frame to the hallway scene that would follow on page 35.  I had already pretty much committed to the hallway scene being next (remember the framed “side by side” pictures two pages previous.)  I was afraid that I might have boxed myself in without enough space to make clear what was happening.  I worried over this considerably for much of the month of August, 1984.  I bought every version of a tape splicing kit I could find in the hopes that something about the actual objects themselves might inspire me.



One night I was staring a hole in one of these kits when finally I noticed something about the packaging: half-toning! Remember I had just taken a crash course in printing for “Oasis.” In the clock frame at the top of the preceding page I had taken great pains to show how my own drawings seemed in close up to fall apart into chaotic constituent parts.  So too could commercially produced images “break down” into seemingly random bits.  Ah-Hah! I thought what better way to exit this two page sequence than the the same way we came in - through close-up! Through repeated close-ups to be precise.  Each subsequent frame is thinner - as Sidney’s increasingly smaller final fractions of a second run out.  So to does the level of detail decrease.  The closer we get, the more uniform the appearance - until finally we come face to face with that octagonal tile pattern from page 9.  This was the pattern I had wanted to resemble a grate. 



As we have a closer look at most things, we can become aware that things in general (not just commercial printing) break down into smaller bits.  “Ashes to ashes...”  So too does Sidney’s consciousness ebb away. “Dust to dust...” All to be washed away in the references to the drain.  Yikes!



Years later my drawing style would change considerably.  Stippling rather than line would dominate.  I moved toward this because I liked (intellectually) the idea of removing the personality in drawings by minimizing the stylistic abbreviations of line.  I liked the control it seemed to give me too.  In some ways I think I can trace the beginning of my focusing on this particular technique to these particular pages and their various close ups.  Have a look at some close ups of drawing titled “Cast” to see what I mean.



The top frame here has some real technical accomplishments; but some gimmicks remain.  The white outline of the El Marko is glaring.  That I would leave this one example in around a marking/drawing instrument was intentional.  The edge of the chair was yet another example of an excessively fat line that I had expanded simply to mark an outline and boundary.  The difference was that by now I was aware that I was doing it.  Starting on page 37, I would make a very self conscious effort to avoid line as a way of differentiating myself and “my” drawing from Sidney’s.  This frame, therefore, is basically the swan song for line.

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Some of the more wacky things about Ezra Pound were his crackpot economic theories. One in particular was his assertion that during eras in which borrowers had to pay excessive interest on loans that the painting produced during those periods inevitably used excessively heavy lines to outline figures.  “Usury age-old and age-thick,” is a memorable line from Mauberley.  I had no interest in figuring out if this assertion were correct; nevertheless, ever since I had become immersed in Pound I had started to finally check my own “age-old” habits of outlining.

Title. Double click me.

PAGE 35

PAGE 36

The dissolve of the tape splicing kit label into octagonal tile-like bits (apparently the smallest unit of visual representation) brings us back to that hallway we briefly saw on page 9.  This is the space that we understand to be immediately adjacent to “the room” we started out in.  Once upon a time we saw the cassette tape unspool across it - and go out the front door.  This front door is somewhere off to the left of the current frame.  We can see only a bit of that portion of the hallway that this front door would open onto.  We can see it by looking OUT through the window at the immediate left and then back IN again through the next window. Out then back in again through another type of opening....This is a process that mirrors the ways we have been transitioning through the various frames of the last few pages: out, then in, reframed, recontexted by visual metaphor, then reframed again.  We didn’t get to this hallway from the desk chair on page 34 by moving the 10-15 feet of space that it might require to physically reach there.  We, instead, plunged into the interior space of a piece of commercial packaging, packaging which JUST HAPPENS TO BE SO LIKE the tile in this hallway that the mere focusing on its shape was enough to bring us back here. There is an implicit comparison of each of these scenes’ constituent visual parts.



The larger comparison, of course, is the one we were invited to consider at the bottom of page 32:  how is this hallway like the gallery space?  Pages 35-36, themselves, comprise yet another unit.  They are another example of a three part, simultaneous presentation of a single situation - of the sort  that I discussed on pages 23-34.  In this scenario, the “main” frame is on page 36, the full page display of the bathroom where Sidney has gone to bleed out after cutting his wrist(s). Page 35 consists of the other two parts, a simultaneous long shot and close up.  The razor blade on the stark white toilet seat is the close up.  The hallway is the long shot.  The way to view the comparison made on page 32 in an even larger context is, therefore, to frame it more as the following: “how is the fully imagined exhibition space like the path to suicide?”



The hallway and the exhibition space have some obvious formal elements that are similar: clocks, perspective, shading.  But I also wanted to compare the experiences of being within each of these spaces.  On page 32 part of the experience of being in the exhibition is being able to look at the various pictures.  Does one “experience” a picture?  Is a drawing “somewhere” (is it a place?) where we might “lose” ourselves? If not properly mediated could it be one of those “interior experiences” such as what our narrator “showed” us during the journey of his unspooled cassette tape? (“afoot with his vision”)



There is a kind of escapism inherent in certain media, particularly that which employs the visual.  Woody Allen’s “The Purple Rose of Cairo” is an example of a kind of modern day Pygmalion story (the statue which comes to life) - the on screen characters come to life and interact with the “real” world.  But there is also the flip side: members of the audience enter the world of the film.  Arts imitates life. Life imitates art.  There are so many subtle influences that act on our individual and collective psyche.  What is it that creeps into our work (as artists)? What is it that creeps into our world (as viewers of art)?  There is a tension, a dynamic economy, a swapping of ideas between “inside” the art world and out.  This much is a routine observation; but what happens if our world and work become untethered from one another?  What kind of purely imagined life does this then become?



There is the fantasy world that comes out of reactions to stress.  I think of the now classic episodes of “The Twilight Zone” like “A Stop at Willoughby” and “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.”  That which is desired (it may even have a siren like appeal) is wished for, desired so much that it becomes an hallucinated and interior world, an alternative to reality.  In “Willoughby” the overwrought business man throws himself from the train in the belief that he is arriving at the idyllic and “slower and simpler” place called Willoughby. (Willoughby is actually the name of the funeral home that collects his body from the tracks).  In “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” a man about to be executed imagines his miraculous escape and eventual reunion with his beloved.  She throws her arms around his neck; and rather than feeling the comfort of her touch, he instead feels the violence of the hangman’s noose.



Sidney’s world (and the world he creates in his drawings) is bedeviled by this blurring of “reality” (he is a made up figure, so it is in some ways even more complicated). Nevertheless, he does have a rather high opinion of himself.  The long hallway shots that he has included on page 32 and 35 are his comparisons as well as mine.  I, Gill, allow him to make this comparison as a way to show that he is fully disconnected from reality and overcome by his imaginings.  Sidney believes that he is making valuable and interesting connections.  To a certain extent he is! (basically, I am Sidney with approximately 5% more power for meta-analysis) Sidney sees the page 32/page 35 comparison in a way that more closely resembles something like the “freeing the frogs” scene from 1982’s  “E.T.”  The classroom scenes of the young protagonist's kissing the “pretty girl” are a simultaneous allusion to “The Quiet Man” (showing on ET’s TV back “home”) and a way to highlight the growing mental bond between the protagonist and this kindly alien.  Yes, the boy solves age the old adolescent problem of how to “get” the desired haughty and unapproachable girl with a dose of the kind of “confidence” that John Wayne uses to solve his own “woman problem” in the other film. (or at least what passed for macho confidence in a bygone era)   Like the mythic “frog prince” the classroom kiss releases our protagonist from the “captivity” of his own shyness.  There is the connection of “ET to boy” through which this message of confidence is imparted.  This all happens amidst a flood of actual frogs being released. Then there is a whole issue that ET himself kind of looks reptilian/froglike. In short, this nexus of connections highlighted in this scene from “E.T.” is highly consequential.  For the sake of convenience lets all agree to set aside the “Amazing Stories” Spielbergian tone of nausea inducing boyish wonder.  Whatever one thinks about that, people are influenced, behavior is changed, new understandings are reached.

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While this is the kind of comparison that Sidney THINKS he is making, he is in fact highlighting only very sterile and academic concerns.  As Sidney receives pleasure (or at least satisfaction) from imagining a highly potent comparison, he is in fact merely foreshadowing his own death on page 32.  There are many connections being made in these past 5-6 pages.  Many connections can be read in the way they are presented by Sidney (“They got grubby little fingers /And dirty little minds /They're gonna get you every time/Well, I don't want no Short People”); but there is also the larger context that I, Gill, intend. (The guy singing “Short People” is an amazing jerk)



My father has always been passionate about his clocks.  I grew up with an old fashioned ship’s clock sounding out “the watch” with chimes of 1-8 “bells.”  There was always a clockish cacophony that I took for granted. (He would have to turn the chimes off whenever anyone else slept in the house)  Eventually, he acquired a grandfather clock very much like the one featured here. (the one in the drawing was modeled on an amalgam of the floor models in a high end Portland, Oregon clock store). 

​

The hallway featured here is entirely fanciful; nevertheless, there are some recognizable personal elements.  There was in fact a long hall right outside my bedroom door as a child.  There were steps to the basement at the other end of this hall.  As in the gallery frame, perhaps that blackened doorway on the left encloses a “Down” stairwell. In this hall from my childhood there was also a wall display of all the diplomas and certificates that my parents had collected over the decades.  One that was quite distinctive was my Dad’s Master’s diploma from Rice University in Houston, Texas.  It had an almost urn like shape that was created by the arrangement of carefully centered type on the vellum.  One can see a hint of this diploma on the wall to the right of the bathroom.  Also the louvred doors on the right are precisely like those that enclosed the laundry machines in my parents’ house in Wickford, Rhode Island.  These machines were off the hall just outside the room where I had begun and often worked on this very drawing sequence.



​I included the “MADE IN USA” detail on the razor blade intentionally.  I liked the stark black and white quality of the composition; but having some kind of wording there was useful.  I was drafting this at the time of the political conventions during the 1984 US Presidential campaign.  I felt at the time (and still do) that Reagan was a truly horrific figure.  He was horrific enough just by being himself and instituting his policies; but I had been even more horrified that otherwise intelligent seeming people (like my own family and friends) were genuinely swayed by his nonsense.  I felt that they and their equally misguided countrymen had bought into a form of willfully ignorant and delusion thinking (“Morning in America”) that was every bit as destructive as the delusions of Sidney - probably more. “MADE IN USA,” indeed!

​This page represents the climactic moment of the 42 page sequence.  It is many things; but subtle is not one of them.  The splatter and runny quality of the blood is over top - in the extreme. The over worked cracks in the tile and signs of general decrepitude are equally ham fisted.  Those fire alarms on pages 11 and 28 may as well have been thrown. This is a flashing red light on the dashboard of the drawing sequence.  This frame is a shrill scream: “Look! Blood! Death! Grubby Bathroom!!”

​
My wife Marsha worked for years as a costume designer for theater and film.  As I listened to her describe her job one of the things that I came to understand was that she needed to get into a character’s head, to figure out what design choices a character would make.  So too do production designers and set dressers make such choices.  With the choice of THIS bathroom I made a deliberate choice to NOT make a coherent set of choices about where Sidney lives.  Yes, there is what I have called the “dream logic” to the way I have chosen to decorate these frames; but here, there is a complete break between the hall and the bathroom.  To the extent that there is any coherent design “whole” to the house Sidney lives in, one could describe it as a generic suburban ranch house.  This bathroom, however, is that of a 1930’s era studio apartment.  How can I say that with such specificity?  Because it is almost entirely based upon my own personal bathroom (in a 1930’s era studio apartment)


Yes, I had grown up in a similar ranch house.  But, at that time I was 22.  I was a recent college graduate and I was also entering the world of studio apartments.  It could be said that I was living in both of these architechural worlds.  My bathroom did not look quite as grubby at a glance as this one does.  But why exactly does it look so grubby?  Sure some bathrooms have cracks; but, sometimes, when you start to try to fill a space with those kinds cracks, what one means to function as detail turns instead in to a kind of clutter and dirt. 


The visible P-trap under the sink is a legitimate detail; but it announces itself too much.  The stippled shading is too uneven and not dark enough.  The tile is overworked.  The faucets’ shadows are not coherent.  The shampoo bottle is just too busy.  The cheap towel racks are hard to distinguish. The wastebasket is sloppy. (I wanted to continue the image of the waste basket with the calendar from page 28; there is even a wastebasket on that page’s exhibition space) The toilet has a kind of interesting 3-D quality with the spherical shading and “shiny” reflections; but the stippling makes it look dirty.  It has that gas station bathroom quality.  I particularly liked the toilet paper roll and its lone hanging piece.


And, Wow! What a lot of blood!  I liked the fact that the black and white made the blood look almost like an accident had happened with a bottle of ink (the “life’s blood” of this work? OK, whatever.) Perhaps the most unusual detail is the bathwater.  Presumably, Sidney is in there behind the door.  Maybe we should even be able to see him.  Instead of having our look at him we get to see that squiggly, chaotic overworked line pattern that we have seen a few times before. (the tape deck and the car interior seen through the windows)  This heavily inked chaotic line has become the stand in for a person.  What endless sources of chaos people can be - when they are alive!  Sidney is dead and his own “chaos” has spilled out to change the appearance of the tub.  Perhaps, this is how Sidney envisions it.  Remember, this is Sidney’s drawing as well as mine.


Of all the ways to commit suicide - why this one? It did make a neat little package to have a cassette tape splicing kit furnish the final instrument. I suppose I could have framed the “story” around a different set of imagery, used something other than a cassette tape as an obscure symbol for identity. (and then chosen a related object to represent the undoing of that identity) Remember, when I started working on this, I had no idea that I would eventually be including suicide. As work progressed and as Sidney started to take on a more separate identity for me, arranging Sidney’s demise became inevitable.  And the cassette tape thing was something I was already working with, hence, the razor blade. I suppose there was something about how such a scene visually presents itself that appealed to me.  Think of some of the scenes in the movies in which bodies are found in this way.   Having the bathroom as its location is a way of introducing a certain kind of poignant, after-the-fact intimacy that would be absent in a more public setting.


Maybe there was also some kind of romantic association with “the bath.” I genuinely have no memory if I had been influenced by David’s “Death of Marat.” But that is certainly an image that associates a certain high minded romantic heroism with death in the tub.  Then there is that version of the Clytemnestra  story that has her dispatching Agamemnon in the bath.  The “Oresteia” is certainly not without its share of self consciously high minded and romantic notions.  Perhaps these are Sidney’s associations.  But what about “me,” i.e., the non-Sidney artist?  I liked including shampoo and toilet paper.  I liked including the notion of flushing and the idea of used Q-Tips in the garbage along side this suicide.  To continue the comparisons from the previous page’s discussion, Sidney’s bathroom and his depicted suicide (that which “completes” his aesthetic work) may be Sidney’s idea of “Willoughby:” high minded, romantic, idyllic, Marat, Agamemnon... Whatever you say Sidney.  But it is really just a dirty bathroom.  I hope he remembered to put the top back on the toothpaste. “Flush!” and goodbye.

PAGE 37

​As I have mentioned before, the drawing sequence breaks down fairly neatly into approximately 5 chapters.  There is the introduction to “the room” and its contexts on page 1-7.  Chapter 2  (the “I am a-foot with my vision” chapter of the unspooling cassette tape) consists of pages 8-18.  Chapter 3 (the chapter of the competing view points) consists of pages 19-26.  We have just finished chapter 4 (the chapter of the rapid reframing) that culminated in the suicide scene.  This page begins chapter 5, the epitaph.

​

Thus far in the sequence I had been self consciously drawing in persona.  I had been producing drawings which were meant to be understood as the drawings of the fictional character, Adrian Sidney. But “now” (a hard concept to nail down here) on page 37 Sidney is dead.  So who is in charge of the drawing?  The “mask” has not just slipped; it has completely vanished! Gill Alexander is, at last 100% in charge.  It is not as though I haven’t been in charge up until now.  I have.  At this point what I have lost is the persona that I can blame for my own aesthetic shortcomings.  I have to take ownership for what I am doing.


For several months prior to this I had speculated a great deal on how precisely I might reveal the “actual” me on these last 6 pages.  I shared some of my thoughts on this with Reed Art professor Michael Knutson.  He was a well known exhibiting artist at the time (as well as a professor) whose work consisted of large, cubist, geometric, abstract, acrylic paintings - or, at least this is how I saw his work from my rather undisciplined, English major perspective. I was later to learn that he had done more than his share of figurative and realistic work.  He was very open to hearing about how I regarded this already ongoing drawing sequence project when I first spoke with him in early 1984.  The notion of drawing in persona was something we discussed at length, and I think he may have even enjoyed discussing something like this if only for its “novelty” value.  But he also challenged me about certain key things that helped me tweek just how I would compose this epitaph.


As I have mentioned before, at the time I was up to my eyeballs in reading and writing about Ezra Pound’s “Mauberley.”  The idea that “style,” style of poetic meter, style of word choice, etc., could influence our understanding of what persona was to be understood to have authored a particular poem loomed large in my consciousness.  Perhaps, if I could change my own drawing style, I could also make clear that there had been a similar change in persona after Sidney’s death.  I proposed to Michael Knutson that I would try to “loosen up” my drawing style. “Interesting idea,” he responded; but he wanted to know much more specifically, “How?”  I showed him some examples in response. Oh my! I can still vividly see and hear his laughing and laughing at me. “You call that loosening up?!” What I had imagined was “loosening up” and change really amounted to not much at all.  It took his outsider’s perspective for it to become obvious to me.


Of course, he was right.  I was so desperately limited in my repertoire of skills that there was really no way that I was going to start drawing in any other kind of style. - grandmaster, minimal, or otherwise. I was drawing in the “Sidney Style” because that was all I could muster.  If there were to be a “change,” I was going to have to pick one or two ways to improve my already existing skills. (such as they were)  I finally chose two areas to concentrate on. The first was the development of greater varieties of textures.  The second was trying to eliminate “line” from my drawings in as many ways as possible.  The elimination of line actually seemed to gain the upper hand in my mind, particularly on pages 39-40.  Maybe I could not avoid being Sidney in some very important ways; but if I were going to create this epitaph for him, at least I would do it in the highest and most accomplished version of the “Sidney Style” possible.  I would try to out-Sidney Sidney.


Back to the frames at hand...


The three frames on pages 37-38 together make up their own unit.  They comprise yet another one of those 3-part main-shot/long-shot/ close-up linkages that I have described before.  The “main shot” is on page 38.  We get our first look at some genuine expository writing in the body of the newspaper article about Sidney’s death.  The lower panel on page 37 is the “long shot.” And, finally, the reframing of the bathroom scene on the top of this page is the “close-up.”


I liked that various elements of the newspaper presentation were hard to read properly in close up.  What are those rods? Why are they so close that they cast that kind of shadow?  What is going on with those marks off to the left? (the marks of the tracks that move the newsprint though the presses)  These are all a bit confusing at first.  There is the type we see in the article; but very few words are readable: gallery, show, picture, drawing, more, try, reed.  “D. Gillespie of the Oregonian Staff” helps put this whole frame in the newspaper context.  The Oregonian was (and remains) Portland’s main daily newspaper.  The Journal, its evening delivery cousin, like most cities’ second paper dailies, had gone out of business just a year prior.  I have been known as “Gill” from infancy; yet my actual name is “Douglas.”  I quite often would sign my school work with the name D. Gillespie Alexander, so that professors could associate the loudmouth “Gill” in their classes with the “Douglas” in their registrar generated lists of students.  D. Gillespie is yet another version of me.


Reproducing drawings in miniature is a harder task than it might seem; and it was most of what occupied me here.  The exercise of reframing was also about putting distance between the image and our viewing of it.  We had the chance to see the unmediated version of the bathroom scene on page 36.  Here we are seeing it made flat on a 2-D screen, cast in shadow, and even held behind bars. (literally) This life, the climax of a tiny sequence of drawings is merely a foot note in the day’s events.  “Get one to go!” (an actual ad) suggests the hyper-disposability of the paper and, ultimately, of Sidney’s story.  This newspaper context is a form of epitaph; but it is rather a dispiriting one.  Sidney’s story has itself been reduced to a piece of streetscape bric-a-brac.  A newspaper box - how forlorn!  Sidney is certainly not being described in the terms in which he saw himself. How soon we will forget this sad, deluded man’s story.


In the bottom frame we can see even more “bars” in what appears to be a store front. “CL” is for closed, we presume.  Is this the middle of the night still?  Amazingly, we have time on the meters.  “Expired” might be the obvious message to display here.  Sidney’s time has expired, yes; but I have dropped a few quarters in the meter for him.

​

There is something about the lower frame that I still really like.  The newspaper boxes and their multi-level directional shading is one of the most effective examples of what I have described as the “Sidney Style.”  I like the textures in the meter as well.  There is a wealth of detail here; but for some reason, the detail seems more integrated into the actual objects.  I was willing to spend a great deal more time on individual textures.  The bricks are a good example.  I went much darker than I had thus far; and every brick was different.  White space and black space were not allowed to stand in such stark contrast as they once had earlier in the drawing sequence.  One of the more subtle details is the patterns of light inside the store front.  Just what is that? The answer will emerge in a few more pages.

PAGE 38

I had planned for some time to offer an article in a newspaper as a means of explanation - mostly I wanted the opportunity to show a drawing printed in this newspaper; but when it came time to actually write this, I found myself wincing and cringing.  It is one thing to write in the abstract about a figure’s dissolution and drifting off into oblivion (see Pound’s “Mauberley”); but it is quite another to try to affix this abstract story to certain specific circumstances.

​
We are introduced to the figure of Court Gallery owner R. V. Leavis. This is a name inspired by British critic and academic F. R. Leavis who had been one of the first figures to try to unravel “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” in his book “New Bearings in English Poetry.”  I remember that “R.V.” was my way of saying “revitalized.”  He seems to be the sole spokesperson who can speak on behalf of the now deceased Sidney.  I had to eventually give Sidney a first name.  I chose Adrian because it reminded me of the Roman Emperor “Hadrian” - and his WALL.  “Bartleby the Scrivener” - a tale of WALL street was in the back of my mind as well.  “Sealed off and non-participating” were the primary associations in my mind.  Sidney, as in Sydney, Australia - the actual opposite side of the Earth - was also in my mind.  It seemed appropriate for an alter ego.  Now - and to a certain extent even then - the name seems clownish and awkward.  But I really didn’t care at the time.  This name is as good as any other was my thinking.


Leavis explains how he has exhibited the show - in just the manner it is shown in the drawing sequence itself.  There is some boiler plate about the uneasiness the suicide issue raised in Leavis’s mind.  Blah, blah.  The police in the form of Lt. Mauberley (how subtle of me!) have some more boiler plate to add.  “Blah, blah, fill up more newspaper space, blah, blah...”  It sounds stupid; and yes, it genuinely is.  But what is being established here is that our narrator, the artist, the creator of this sequence (I have given Sidney lots of names in this long annotation) has successfully created what amounts to a confluence of art imitating life and life imitating art. He has created what he thinks amounts to life’s perfect “reflection” in his work. (think of the hall of infinite mirrors) It is a capturing of a series of representations of art/reality at a single moment in time, 3:44:47 AM Monday, March 17, 1980, the moment of Sidney’s actual and exhibited death.  That which is sorted through in these 36 pages is in many ways a “life-flashing-before-your-eyes”-as-you-die moment.  These “moments” are meant as both simultaneous and sequential.


This was the era of “crazy artist” edginess, the beginning of the downtown art scene in NYC, and the era of popularization of the performance artist.  We now have people who subject themselves to surgery (“plastic” and otherwise) for the sake of art.  The idea that someone might be so crazily committed to a project in this “performance-artsy” manner was a pop culture meme in the early to mid 1980’s. 


But why does Sidney have to die?  Sidney has some control over his circumstances and over the circumstances of the exhibition of his work; however, he cannot control what happens to him or his work after the moment of exhibition.  His death is a stopping of the clock.  Yes, time (Sidney’s) stops at 3:44:47 AM; but to Sidney, this also stops the idea of time. There is a tinge of the quest for immortality in this gesture of Sidney’s.  To borrow some jargon from another field, it is as though Sidney is making his interior world “manifest.” First, he creates the aesthetic model of this world: the drawing sequence.  He presents it to the world with the help of his associate Mr. Leavis; and then he finally makes the actual world a representation of this model.  He conceives of the bathtub scene; he creates the drawing of it; he places the drawing of that scene within an actual, real world exhibition space (the very exhibition space referenced within these drawings; then finally he acts out his part, his death.


The process, as Sidney sees it, starts with his mental image. Then, HE makes these images “Manifest.”  It all begins and ends with him.  Of course, we are meant to see the implicit failure of his approach.  There is an entirely different way of describing this. Rather than making his world manifest, Sidney is really creating a much smaller interior world and simply choosing to live within it.  He is the narcissus-like figure falling into his own work.  He has stepped into the screen (“Purple Rose of Cairo” style) with his own characters.


Who exactly makes things “Manifest” anyway?  Isn’t that something that only the Divine can do?  What Hubris, Mr. Sidney!  That is what Nemesis, the figure in Greek mythology is for.  Nemesis seeks out and destroys those guilty of such hubris.  Yes, Nemesis was the one who took care of Narcissus and his little issue.  Like some kind of movie villain who announces to the hero, “I have only to drink this magic potion... rub this magic artifact... speak these sacred words... step into this magic energy field... (there are endless variations) and I will be IMMORTAL!”  Sidney has some kind of similar transformation in mind; but, as is the case with these movie villains, something has gone wrong.  The potion doesn’t work... the incantation is corrupted... the energy field is oscillating at the wrong frequency... Oh, no!  The villain shrivels up and dies like the Wicked Witch of the West.


Of course, no actual person really behaves in quite this way.  This is why writing this article made me cringe.  Sidney is merely the personification of a tendency, a tendency I may have caught a glimpse of within myself.


Except for this article - what is shown is the actual front page of The Oregonian for Tuesday, March 18, 1980.  I can remember spending time in the microfilm sections of various Portland libraries in order to pull it up.  I remember my Dad (who was by then working in financial services) saying to me, “Wow.  You didn’t just kill him.  You also killed the Dow!”  But that was in fact where the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed on Monday, March 17, 1980.  The Uruguay story is also from the real paper.  The layout of the front page that is briefly glimpsed on the previous page is taken directly from the microfilm.  Another detail that I remember is that having the “article” I wrote set into a version of The New York Times typeface by a commercial printer seemed especially exotic.  I can do it on my computer in five seconds today.


March 17? No, Saint Patrick’s Day didn’t mean much to me.  (The other side of Hadrian’s wall, maybe?? - No, that meant nothing)  In fact the actual day does not mean that much; but I had to choose one anyway.  I chose this particular day for a very obscure reason - by this day I mean Monday, March 17 (this Tuesday’s paper is in fact the NEWS OF Monday)


On the date in question - when Sidney is supposedly living in SE Portland - I was still in high school in Albany, New York.  The preceding few weeks had been an eventful time in my small world.  A very time consuming school sanctioned project that had taken much of my energy for the preceding 7-8 months had just been summarily cancelled for what seemed cowardly and deeply unjust reasons. It had been the production of a student written play (written by my close friend Jim Forni) that had attempted to create on stage the world of a fictive high school that very much resembled the school in which we were attempting to perform it.  Yes, there were some similar art imitating life issues there too. 


Next, over the weekend of March 14-16, my long distance girlfriend Sharon and I had broken up in a way that I found especially upsetting.  I don’t really want to make much of the actual relationship or the break up. (I might need an even more self indulgent website for that) Instead, what I was referencing with this date was a feeling I experienced FOLLOWING that break up.  I still vividly remember having lunch by myself in the school cafeteria on that Monday, March 17.  I remembered feeling especially discouraged as I distractedly “stared a hole” in the can of ginger ale I had been drinking.  If you can imagine some cliche of high school sentiment, I can assure you that I was reveling in it at that moment. 


What I remember was my coming to a sudden insight that I was simply going to have let certain things go.  Events had not gone as I had wanted them to. True enough.  There had been a sense of loss associated with this, sure; but I seemed to have an epiphany (while looking at that ginger ale can) that what I had really felt saddened by was that I had lost a certain reassuring narrative that I had been telling myself - about myself.  I was going to have to let the inner generated narrative go.  Events had overtaken me.  It occurred to me right then and there that I had a great many ACTUAL facets of my life that continued - despite the loss of this inner narrative.  This is not really much of a special epiphany.  Everyone comes to this realization sooner or later.  Call it “serenity.” Call it learning to “roll with it.”  Get up, get on with it and walk it off.


This moment seemed like an appropriate one for me mark as a fork in the road - a place where the more stubborn Adrian Sidney might have continued on and I might have changed course.  In the words of that great American “Poet” Donald Rumsfeld, “You go to war with the army you have - not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.”  And so too, do you continue to live the life you have - not the life you might want or wish to have at a later time.  Or so one of us realized one March afternoon in 1980.


Ron Wiesel and I later collaborated on a semi comedic comic book whose main character was an alienated and pregnant private detective named Molly Ott.  The absurd and very dark story was filled with a great many wacky characters.  Ron’s insurance salesman Jim Armstrong and his (then popular) video discs of Air Supply in concert made an appearance.  I remember a couple of three stooges based characters as well.  The villain was someone we had tentatively chosen to call Agmato Succubus (our pro-tem name that we had fun with; we thought we would change it later).  There were also some venal but relatively minor characters named R. V. Leavis and Adrian Sidney!  It seems that these hapless reprobates had become ensnared in Agmato Succubus’ web in such a way that they had chosen to burn down a gallery.  Imagine that! Apparently people died.  Hijinks ensued.  The comic book was never finished; but these absurd figures did have a brief life outside this particular sequence.

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