MOTHer: The Play & Process Art ~ Part 1

MOTHer - a play the words 'mother' and 'moth' ~ is something I've mentioned in passing before briefly. It'll be a cross between a play and a musical. It has a few songs, but it's mostly a weird little stage play.

Some producers are already are interested do a modest budgeted version in the Bay area... and i think we could raise any remaining money on kickstart or something if needed.

For now, it's just a series of script and sketchbook pages... making a mess, littering  my studio floor.

My goal was for it NOT to come out as a comic. Only as a book full of sketchbook pages, paintings and the printed stage play notes,  probably later next year.  Or when ever it gets finished.

But here's the idea, in brief:

An insomniac female illustrator, and mother lives in the late 1800s and works in her art studio, atop a art nouveau looking lighthouse.

Her life cycle starts each night, as she sleeps all day. Each dusk she has a half a dozen friends-assistants-helpers in the lighthouse that over see her clothes sowed and bought by the city folk below.

But the twist is: she doesn't just designs and make clothes: her body literally morphs into whatever decade she's dreamed up. Thus she's 1900s mom, then next night she becomes a 1920s mother, a 1930s.. and so on. Her body literally changes into, say,  a 1940s style dress with the big shoulder pads, for example.

The idea, (weird as it sounds) is an exploration of how different periods of history and fashion not just affected women, but inhabited and transformed them. Each evening after MOTHer sheds her skin from the (1950s for example), (or clothing) for the decade...

Each decades Mother forms a moth like cocoon at dusk, then transforms hatches into her own daughter, a NEW  mother for the next generation, (in this case, the 1950s). Then the daughter leaves her mother each morning, which always is a huge surprise to Mother, even though she knows from precious Moth-Memmory Generations 'this is what daughters do'. Find passion and adventure outside of the nest.

Her daughter (during each time period) is off to sea as a pirate, or in a civil war, or various other worldly adventures.. This slightly echos Puccini's Madam Butterfly and Henry David Hwang's M. Butterfly, but if you haven't seen either, it doesn't matter. Thus the image of the Cio-Cio san (Madamn Butterfly) awaiting her lovers' return by boat, in my MOTHer play ... becomes a heart broken Mother awaiting her daughter's return.

Why a moth? No idea. It just felt right. There's many moth references in Bimbo too... also in Carlos Castanedas work. There's also tons of magical and mythological stuff about moths nocturnal flights on delicate powered wings. Markings and Pupa they hatch from. Moths (in my mind anyhoo..) ties all these wildly different fragments together.. the lighthouse is where she's drawn too, for example.

So for now, here's a few rough sketches. Also i wanted to take a single page I've painted already, and show how i tried to worked it into the MOTHer sketchbook itself.

above, I start by ripping it between her nose and lips...

careful now...

now one more rip... one between the two women's faces i think..

..but first lemme add some contact paper to glue the back of the watercolor paper.

..burnish it down so it sticks on there.

Peal it up... this stuff is pretty sticky, but an gummy eraser will get rid of the sticky bits.

Okay... here's my three pieces. burnished down pretty snug.

Pretty sterile looking right now, isn't it?

At this point it'd be easy to lose confidence in the whole thing - i thought about ripping it up here, but decided to push forward and see if some added color won't help..

Yup, these guys again. I may be relying on them too much, but like everyone said in the comments, it's not the tool itself, just the freedom it creates when you use it, eh?

Brown pads help a little, but we're not out of the woods yet..

Let's try some orange now...

and a quick montage of acrylics laid down in a hurry too...

Okay, this weekend i'll finish it up. Don't worry, it may not be as strong as the woman in stripes above, but it'll look a LOT better than t does now...

Weird how all this technical art crap is carried out... all because of a bizarre little abstract idea that starts in our heads. The first idea for MOTHer was a Cronenberg type of little short film.

But i realized i wanted such a surreal story to have some heart and be 'metaphor focused'.. and not just a excuse for visual excess.

I wanted it about characters you care about, not cool freaky visuals alone.

As absurd as it is, doing on the stage, made me make it realer ... on a personal level.

Hey. Even if this sucker never gets made,  or IS made and  is a total flop (which most plays are) - i'll still consider it a small weird-ass personal victory to see it on staged in the bay area..

and maybe film it in high def video, so everyone who ISN'T there in person that that night... can check it out. Maybe post it on a blog or something?

The cool thing is, no one goes into into either Theater or Comics get rich.

 Just because we're foolish (or lucky enough?)...

to love the process of creation itself, eh?

a secret about 'Secrets'...

Before I got into mainstream comics (whatever that really even means anymore), I wanted to be an underground comic artist. They died out before I even got into comics, though... The only indy books back then were Cerebus and Elfquest. So I missed out—unless you count the Maxx (some of which looked more like it belonged in an issue of Heavy Metal instead of a super hero comic). In fact that's where I got the idea for the extra "x" in the Maxx logo; underground 'comix' were sometimes spelled with an x.

But all this aside, I was sad that I missed out on the underground stuff.     : (

Years after the Maxx, after I wrote and drew the Batman: Secrets series for DC... here's a little something you probably didn't know. Near the end of the story I tried to talk the editor into doing a Zap Comics Robert Crumb tribute... my thinking was, it's a surreal story, and old underground fans would get a kick out of it, but if you hadn't seen the back cover of Zap comix number one... here's a crappy low rez copy because I'm too lazy to scan the book myself.

So I took a shot, but the editor wouldn't go for it. I was so pissed at the time! Here he was ruining my chance to be rebellious and do my nod to undergrounds! 'Course there was the issue of Crumb being upset, but I figured we'd ask him—but it never got that far.

Here's the rejected page I submitted as the splash of issue 5 of Batman Secrets: 

Here's the printed version in the comic, all colored up and looking swell by the astounding colorist Alex Sinclair.

Looking back on it, cute as I thought I was being at the time, or rebellious, or whatever the heck I thought I was being—in retrospect, it DOES totally seem jarring to the story's style. I still like it, but it's like an inside joke... to myself.  I got enough of those out of my system with the Maxx, and in that universe, stuff like this could fly. Sorta.

It's funny. As annoying as some editors are... interesting how *sometimes* they can have a point, and, like, make the story actually better, huh? Go figure.    : )

Also... I am way behind in everything I owe to everybody, so apologies to any of you out there who are wondering why I have time to post my blog but am late with YOUR stuff. Well, my apologies! Here's one more excuse...

TOO MANY PAINTINGS...  yikes! It's a compulsion.

Need I say more?