The "C"-word

Welcome to the inaugural launch of The “C”-word, a new comic strip by yours truly that pokes lighthearted fun at those cantankerous grumpsters who believe silly things with no evidence, i.e., Christians! Here’s the first strip. Enjoy!

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Infinite Corpse!

Hi, everyone! It’s been a while since I’ve done an update to the Success! blog. I hereby decree that this space is going to be a dumping ground for all of my comic illustration projects, including another forthcoming comic, tentatively titled “Atonement”, and a new comic opera, “Summerhaven” which are in the works.

In the meantime, I have some good news on the comic front! Recently I made a contribution to the Infinite Corpse project, which is an ongoing online story created by over 500 comic artists, including such luminaries of the comic and illustration medium as Carson Ellis, Alison Bechdel, Art Spiegelman, and Craig Thompson. To my excitement, the organization curating the project, the Trubble Club, accepted my submission. My panels had the immense honor of following Bill Griffith, creator of Zippy the Pinhead. I am truly humbled. Follow this link to see the panels and follow the story.

And while you’re here, this is what my three panels look like:

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The Success Timeline, Part 7 (2016 - 2020)

In March 2016 I returned to Germany and worked until the middle of the summer. I didn’t do much with Success at that time, because I was focused on working and trying to set up a new life in Germany for myself and my fiancée. It wasn’t meant to be for us to live in Germany, however, and I returned in mid-June. In July I got married. Around that time, I decided to get back into the comic version of Success. Instead of using the BAMBOO tablet, however, I had read something about a stylus you could use to directly draw on your iPad screen. I went to a store to buy one, and the salesperson recommended to me the Apple pencil. So, I went to an Apple store and tried out the Apple pencil with the iPad Pro. That was it. It was amazingly responsive, felt great to draw with, and I was hooked. I immediately envisioned the entire process for making my comic.

First, for all of the comic pages of dialog, I would download the comic panel layouts from www.comicbookpages.com, then in Photoshop I would input the text and lay out the speech baloons. Next, I would import the pages into Procreate on the iPad Pro and draw the images. Then, the finished page would go back into Photoshop for final export and uploading. To make the pages of music, I would layout the pages in Finale, import them into Procreate, and do the drawings. Simple, right? Cough, cough.

The problem, however, was that I couldn’t afford to buy an Apple Pencil and iPad Pro, especially after just having gotten married and come back from Germany penniless (ask me why in the comments!) So, I spent the next few months selling everything I could possibly part with and accumulating enough money to buy the equipment.

Finally, in 2017, I bought the iPad Pro and Apple pencil and began to work. It was glorious. I worked in coffee shops, I worked in libraries, I worked everywhere I went.

But the comic didn’t really get started in earnest until spring of that year, when I spent a few months in Crecy-la-Chapelle, France, doing some substitute work at a little Montessori school in a manor house basement. There, the head of school let me stay in the large manor house attached to the school. When finally I moved to France, I spent my evenings and weekends in Paris and drawing, drawing, drawing. One of my favorite places to draw was in the cafes across the river from Notre Dame (before it burned). I used to draw for a bit, go up to the second floor of Shakespeare & Co. and play on the piano, browse some comics, and then go back to drawing.

From that time, I hammered out a schedule. I estimated that it would take me 2 months to complete one scene from the play if I worked on one page a day. Not a professional graphic artist’s schedule, I realize, but it was manageable for a weekend warrior like myself. To keep myself honest and make sure I stuck to my schedule, I set up a Patreon account and elicited monthly contributions from the general public. My five contributors, (two if you consider that three of them were my wife, my mom, and my stepdad) helped keep me to my deadlines.

For the next three years I drew at a pace of almost a page a day. Wherever I lived or worked, I worked on the comic in my off hours.

In March of this year, 2020, I drew the final panel of the comic. During May of this year I sent pitch letters to about 50 comic companies hoping to get a print version of the comic made. The next step for Success is to create a full cast recording with professional actors. I think it would also be great to have them read out the entire book for readers as well.

Of course, my dream is to have the comic published in a print version. Can you picture it? If no publishers bite, I’ll probaby launch a Crowdfunding campaign. I’ll have more updates for you then!

Happy reading!

The Success Timeline, Part 6 (2011 - 2015)

While I was living and working in Germany, I went on several trips around Europe. It was in Cadiz, in Spain, that a bolt of lightning struck me. I was standing in a comic shop looking at a graphic novel, when an image of the graphic novel version of Success! came into my head. After years of having the idea laying dormant in my imagination and being unable to concieve of a way to marry sequential images with printed music, It occurred to me that the solution was simple.

I could place the action of the comic, the pictures, the panels, all the drawings, basically, in between the vocal staves and the piano part. It would be like having a score with sequential drawings in the place of an instrument! I left the comic shop buzzing with excitement.

When I returned home to Bad Homburg, I made this sketch.

First sketch of what would become the comic book version of Success!

First sketch of what would become the comic book version of Success!

At this point, I hadn’t decided whether to write the music by hand, or use printed music. This sketch cemented my decision. This sketch took me hours to make, from drawing, to laying out the elements, to scanning, to cleaning up, and there are still some wonky lines and some weird mistakes. But the music, it turned out, was the most difficult part. So, I figured out that if I were to draw the entire comic, it would take me about 10 years to finish by hand. I decided, then, to cut some corners.

Around that time my friend Anthony came to visit me and we went on a short trip to Berlin. He told me about drawing tablets that photographers use to edit their photographs. He used one for retouching or for doing different designs. With a tablet and my MacBook, I could draw my comic directly onto the computer in Photoshop, make digital versions of the music, and put everything together, again in Photoshop. This was what I needed! So in 2011, in a Mediamarkt in Berlin I bought a Bamboo tablet and got down to work.

But there were problems. Drawing on a tablet proved difficult and time-consuming. Drawing on a horizontal plane but looking at the lines emerge on a vertical plane was mind-boggling. Again it took a long time to finish a single page. In 2011 and ‘12 I drew the first half of the Prologue (from Nicholas’s entrance to the panel with the debutante in the bar) on the BAMBOO tablet. You can see how different those pages look from the rest of the comic. Still, I like some of the details I was able to get with the different brush sizes. In around 2012 I shelved the comic part of the project for a while.

In 2012, just before leaving Germany to go back to Portland, OR for a short stint, I had discovered the story writing engine Dramatica. After submitting the play to a local Portland musical theater guru and receiving a reply with 28 revision notes, I decided Success needed an overhaul. I revised the script a few more times, until, in 2013, I submitted the play to the National Music Theater Conference, where it made the 3rd round of selections before ultimately being rejected.

My short stint in Portland became rather longer than I had hoped. I ended up taking a pause from Success! in order to write songs for Rich Rubin’s play Happy Valley. I met Rich through Rachel Sakry, a wonderful composer and songwriter who’s self-produced performance of her play Whatever Girl inspired me to want to stage Success! Of course, staging a play is very expensive, and very difficult. I submitted the play to several local theater companies, none of whom wanted to take it on. So I revised it again and settled on a table reading. I recruited some great Portland actors and in 2015 my then fiancée and I invited people over for a round-the-table performance. Following the table reading, Success got another revision and another submission to the National Music Theater Conference. It was rejected again, having again made it to the third round of selections.

My “short stint” in Portland became longer than I expected and I didn’t make progress on Success until 2016.

The Success Timeline, Part 5 (2010)

By the time 2010 rolled around, I had finished the Montessori training and landed a job in Germany. At first I stayed with a nice family called the Reinke’s in the little town of Friedrichsdorf (actually a little town off of the little town). But by the spring of that year I had got my own apartment.

Me in the Reinke’s house, 2010

Me in the Reinke’s house, 2010

The apartment was a studio (With separate kitchen, bathroom, and living room) with huge sliding glass windows and a little balcony at 9 Kirdorfer Strasse in Bad Homburg. The Reinke’s were leaving town, and they needed a place to store their piano. By some miracle, my mentor and colleague Mirela got them to leave the piano with me. The piano turned out to be a small, bright, Wiltz brand upright piano.

The front of the building on Kirdorfer Strasse in Bad Homburg, Germany

The front of the building on Kirdorfer Strasse in Bad Homburg, Germany

Me leaving number 9

Me leaving number 9

Here in this little apartment, on the weekends and after work hours, I wrote the piano score for Success! on that little Wiltz piano. I also wrote the songs for the Reclinerland (2011) album as well.

Once the piano score was finished, I recorded a demo of the new versions of the songs with the new piano accompaniment.

The apartment at 9 Kirdorfer Strasse

The apartment at 9 Kirdorfer Strasse

Me working on the score with the little piano behind me

Me working on the score with the little piano behind me

Reclinerland HQ 2010 to 2012

Reclinerland HQ 2010 to 2012

Working on the piano score.

Working on the piano score.

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The Success Timeline, Part 4 (2008 - 2009)

Writing on the book for Success! extended into 2008 and took up even some of 2009. Here is an entry from my blog at Reclinerland HQ, dated April 2008:

“At first I thought my inability to sit down and write was due to my schedule. Then I thought perhaps I couldn't write anything because I was mercilessly dumped in the most cruel and inexplicable way last weekend. Then I thought maybe getting sick had something to do with it (cough). But now I realize, as I sit here with the entire weekend stretching lazily before me, that I just have writer's block. I'm officially stuck, you see, and there's no help for it but to blog.


The play I'm writing was really chugging along there for a while. I started with a basic idea of a plot about two brothers, one a savvy, successful fop, the other a brooding, sensitive failure. Having never written a play before, I thought I should do it right, so I've been working out of a book called The Art of Dramatic Writing. First and foremost, I established a premise for my play: He who digs a pit for others will fall into it himself. Good. Now I'm working on drawing the characters. So far, I have the two main characters filled out in exhaustive detail. I have their star signs, their Meyers-Briggs personality type profiles, their physical, sociological, and psychological profiles all fleshed out, including some bits about their backgrounds. Here is an example of the abridged profile for Nicholas Quite, my pivotal character:

Nicholas Quite

Physiology: Male, 27, 6'0, 155lbs, Light brown, straight thin hair, green eyes, fair skin, erect posture, graceful, very attractive, fashionable, trendy, wears expensive, well-fitting outfits from trendy Pearl District boutiques, handsome, too thin, has a girlish, weedy look.

Sociology: Middle class, lives in comfort, works as an art gallery errand boy, has a B.A. degree in painting, Nicholas's father was not his birth father. In fact, his mother left his birth father when Nicholas was very small. She remarried early. Dr. Quite, her second husband, was a wealthy doctor. He was a good man, but his career left him little time for his wife or for Nicholas. This didn't stop him, however, from adopting Nicholas's foster brother Gregory after seeing an article in the paper about a tragedy that happened to Gregory's family which left Gregory an orphan. Nicholas resented this move, although he liked the idea of having a younger brother to care for and pick on. Eventually, Nicholas's mother left Dr. Quite for yet another man, and Dr. Quite was left to raise two boys on his own. The strain caused him to drink, which in turn led to his death when Nicholas was 18. Nicholas, armed with another reason to hate his father, took over as guardian of his younger foster brother.

Psychology: Nicholas has a rather overactive sex life, he attends regular swinger parties at the house of the couple he's dating. He hates children and abhors the idea of marriage. He wishes to be the center of the art and fashion world. His chief disappointments are his parents. He resents his mother for marrying and leaving bad men, he resents his father, Dr. Quite, for being passive and too preoccupied with his career. Nicholas can't tolerate failure. He's exceedingly optimistic, sarcastic, quick-witted, and a social butterfly. He has a talent for influencing people. He's an Aries, which makes him adventurous, ambitious, impulsive, enthusiastic and full of energy. His Meyers-Briggs personality type is Extroverted Sensing Thinking Perceiver, or ESTP. This makes him a spontaneous, active person who derives great satisfaction from acting on his impulses. Activities involving power, speed, thrill and risk attract him. He is competitive and unscrupulous.

See? Now in order to draw the other characters, I just started with Nicholas and gave them qualities that were opposite him in every way. The end result was a wheel, similar to a color wheel, with all six of my characters laid out in opposite spaces. So if Nicholas is red, then Gregory, his brother, is green, etc. It's all very complicated, I'm realizing as I look at it.

And now on to part 2...”

Many of the blog entries at Reclinerland HQ from April 2008 are filled with musings about writing the script. Check it out at www.reclinerlandhq.com/blog.

After finishing the script, in late 2008 (or even early 2009) I spent two weeks housesitting for a family in West Linn, Oregon. They had a very large ranch house on a huge property surrounded by grassy hills and forests. In the house sat a little piano. Unable to really go anywhere except to walk the dog or take a short drive in their mini van, I hunkered down and, armed with my rhyming dictionary and an early version of Finale (the music notation program) I wrote the songs for Success! By this I mean I came up with the melodies, the lyrics and the chords. When I was finished with my two-week housesitting assignment, I had the lead sheets for all of the songs as well as the lyrics written in capital letters in the script.

If you want to know what writing a bunch of songs in a big empty house is like, picture me pacing the living room singing to myself, dancing around the house, or sitting at the piano plucking out chords. It was an arduous but extremely exciting process.

The property in West Linn

The property in West Linn

Going for a drive in the mini van

Going for a drive in the mini van

Once I had the lyrics and chords, I made some rough demos of the songs accompanying myself on guitar. When in summer of 2009 I went to Milwaukee, WI (ugh) to do the Montessori training, I took the demos with me. There, I met a lovely human being named Micah Hoffman, who turned out to be a real ham. I recruited him and some of my other friends from the training program to perform a reading of the play in one of their living rooms. We had a big pot luck and read the play. Micah played Gregory, I played Nicholas, and Jeni Wren Stottrup played Amanda. It was a blast. After the reading, I took lots of notes and used them to revise the script and the songs.

Revising some songs 2009

Revising some songs 2009

The Success Timeline, Part 3 (2004 - 2007)

In 2004, I made this sketch. I was clearly Imitating Erik Satie’s calligraphy style. At first, I wanted the music in Success to be hand drawn. I was going to draw all the music from scratch. But that idea quickly evaporated after I worked on this little picture. I drew all the staff lines here myself and it took a very long time. You can imagine how long 460 pages of music and comic would have taken to hand draw. This was one of the original reasons I kept putting off working on Success. But I wasn’t only stuck on how to integrate the music and the art, I didn’t even have a story yet. It was still just a dream.

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But then, in 2006, I graduated from Portland State with my undergraduate degree. I was working in a hotel during the summers, but when I graduated, I got a part-time job at a Montessori school, working their after-school program. At that time, my band Parks & Recreation had already played the Sasquatch festival twice, went on a West Coast tour, and had just released our first album. I was feeling creative.

I believe it was around this time that Chris Streng (Stratford 4), one of my oldest and dearest friends, suggested that he and I collaborate on a musical. I told him I already had an idea for a story, and ran the synopsis by him. He liked it, and suggested I switch the names of the brothers. Now Gregory became the down-and-out one, and Nicholas the smarmy socialite. I relished the idea of working with Chris on something, but I also realized I didn’t know anything about writing plays. So, I went to the book store to search for materials. After a long search, I settled on the amazing book The Art of Dramatic Writing by Lajos Egri.

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This book appealed to me because of its focus on character and conflict as the driving force of a play. According to Egri, when you line up two characters who are opposite in every way, place them in a situation where there is no escape, give them clear goals and desires, you end up with conflict, and as the conflict grows the characters plot their own play. I was also attracted to his ideas about every interaction in a play boiling down to thesis, synthesis, antithesis. Egri has an interesting concept of the roles of the protagonist and the antagonist, by the way. According to him, the protagonist is the character who starts the action of the play, who initiates and moves the conflict forward. In many contexts people think of that character as the villain, the antagonist. But in Egri’s concept, the antagonist is actually the hero, since he opposes the protagonist, the person driving the plot forward. The book resonated with me, and I used it to write the first draft of Success!. But first, I had to study the book. And that took some time.

But sometime after I finished the book, I began work on the first draft. I wrote many, many, many, drafts. I think there are 25 in all. At first I didn’t write the songs. I just wrote a script with a mind toward carving out space for the songs later. Many of the settings and characters in the play are based on my experiences in the music and art scene in Portland and New York.

The SHHH gallery, for example, is based on the HUSH gallery run by my friend Chad Crouch, who incidentally, is the person on whom the character Charles is loosely based. Chad, an even-tempered, gentle soul, is nothing like Charles, who is a bit of a hot head, but the two are similar in other ways. HUSH gallery was located in the Everett Station lofts in NW Portland, just north of downtown. Many local (and very hipster) artists had galleries there. In fact, during the song The Blue Rose Gallery, Inc., the name ideas that Gregory and his friends brainstorm (and my opinions of them) are all the names of galleries in the Everett Station building.

Timothy, the art critic, is based on Mark Baumgarten, who was a writer for the Willamette Week. In early drafts there was no Timothy, but a lawyer I briefly dated suggested that the people in the play needed some kind of local tastemaker who would be the authority on matters of what’s good in art. Timothy’s entourage of followers kind of satirizes the Portland hipster scene. The opening number, a kind of hipster Fugue for Tinhorns, is a direct parody of the self-importance of hipsters and art critics. I gleaned all the lyrics from that song from actual art reviews from the Willamette Week and the Portland Mercury. But I’m getting ahead of myself. I hadn’t written the songs yet.

The warehouse and the roommates were based on a warehouse in Williamsburg where I lived in the autumn and winter of 2000. It was in the Gretsch building, just south of the Williamsburg bridge, on the corner of 7th and Broadway. I shared a huge 3rd-floor warehouse loft that had been divided up into smaller flats by the guy who rented it from the owners, and to whom we payed rent. His name was Jim Gazlay, and the character Gazlay is based on him.

I moved into the space in September, and by the first of November, the owners really had cut the power, for the very reasons they did so in the play. Even though it was an amazing space and I loved living there, I couldn’t live with cold showers and no heat or light in winter. No one could. I remember walking home from work down Bedford Ave. one day and seeing the words “HELP US!” written in duct tape on the inside of one of the Gretsch building’s top-floor windows. The real Gazlay, just like the Gazlay in the play, used to always tell us the situation with the power was going to be resolved by the end of the month, and that we should pay rent like usual.

My flat was enormous, with 20-foot ceilings and a gorgeous view of the warehouses that stretched out into Williamsburg and Dumbo. From the common bathroom we could see all the way to the Twin Towers.

The other roommates are based on people I met while living there. Many of the people, but not all of them, were artists and painters. Mikey’s art is real. There was really a white hip-hop loving guy who painted enormous pictures of black mens’ heads. And Nora’s art, the cartoon characters having sex with meat, was real as well, though the person who painted those pictures was a pasty hipster who wore skinny ties. Julie is based on a girl named Paige, who was not an artist, but who really did work on Wall Street. While many of the other renters filled their apartments with bikes, studio equipment, and art supplies, Paige’s flat was elegantly decorated with a fuzzy rug, lots of satiny cushions, and even an enormous entertainment center, with flat-screen TV and everything.

Doing the research proved to be one of the most fun aspects of working on the script. In particular, I enjoyed researching the murder. I had to come up with a believable way for Nicholas to murder someone and get away with it. At first I was going to have Nicholas get a body from a morgue or something, but I actually had email exchanges with coroners and funeral directors who told me that even if Nicholas had an in, that would have been impossible. I did lots of research about people who faked their own suicide. One early version of the play had Gregory abandoning his car on the Fremont bridge in Portland, as I had read had happened in San Francisco. A guy left his car on the Golden Gate Bridge with the doors open and a suicide note. But he was caught.

I settled on Gregory “killing himself” by burning himself up. Originally he was going to leave the oven on and that was that. The gas would leak and the place would explode. But when my friend Colin Meloy had laughed at me one night because, according to him, people leave the gas on in order to suffocate, not to blow themselves up.

In the end, I joined a Portland Police forum and started talking to real police officers and detectives. I went back and forth with a particularly amiable officer who was excited about the project and walked me through all of the possibilities. He liked the oven idea, but agreed with Colin, and said Gregory would just have to light a match or start a fire once the gas from the oven had filled the place in order to blow it up. He also said that Nicholas would have to place the body near a window, so the air circulation would cause the fire to do more damage to the body. You should have seen some of the grim websites I visited to really learn how fire damages a corpse. I used one of the pictures as a model for the drawing of the corpse in Nicholas’s flashback in Act 1, Scene 4.

The real trick was in how to pass the body off as Gregory’s. The police detective told me that it would be impossible. The only way I could get an audience to believe it would be 1) if the detective investigating the scene was lazy, or jaded, and 2) if there was some identifying trinket, like a necklace, or a ring, that Gregory always wore. That way, a lazy detective wouldn’t care to investigate beyond Nicholas pointing to the trinket. So, I went with that advice and Gregory’s backstory was changed to accommodate his mother’s necklace.

A few more thoughts about the writing. Early on I thought it would be an interesting experiment to write the play in verse. I thought that might smooth the transition between dialog and songs. I also thought it might be cool to have some characters who got along together speaking in the same rhyme scheme, so that their dialog would kind of waive together in places. And then when you had two characters who clashed, their dialog wouldn’t quite match up. Plus it would be fun.

So I gave the characters different rhyme schemes. Nicholas and Amanda speak in straight rhyming couplets. Gregory and Nora speak in slant rhymes. The roommates all speak in blank verse, with I think 8 feet per line. Timothy and Charles and the hipsters speak in blank verse also, with 4 or 5 feet per line.

The apartment on 12th and SE Stark where I wrote the script for Success.

The apartment on 12th and SE Stark where I wrote the script for Success.

By 2007, I had a draft ready to be cut up for the songs.

The Success Timeline, Part 2 (1998 - 2001)

Today I came across an old Persian proverb that I thought was appropriate for Success. It reads:

“If you want to be appreciated, die or travel.”

Not only is this proverb à propos for the play, but I find it to be especially timely, since yesterday I received my first rejection from a comic company. The really nice and incredibly talented people at Top Shelf (home of such incredible work as Box Office Poison, as well as the work of Guy Deslisle, Chris Ware, and Jeffrey Brown), while they think Success is good work, decided to pass on it. No hard feelings, of course. It was a lovely, polite email, handwritten by the head of the company. Now I have about 20 other companies I’m waiting to either not hear from, or hear from.

Anyway, we left the Success timeline off in the mid-nineties. After my trip to Europe in 1994 I didn’t pick up Success again until between 1998 and 2001, when I lived in New York. There, my first big love, the amazing actress and filmmaker (check out Future Weather) Jenny Deller, for whom I relocated, exposed me to a lot of jazz music, especially the torch songs of Ella Fitzgerald and Etta James. Her brother Michael studied jazz piano. Watching Michael progress so quickly lit a fire under me to go back to school and study music.

I had already been studying general composition privately with an old Russian composer named Michael Zeiger. He lived up on the Upper West Side not far from our apartment at 171st and St. Nicholas. He played piano for a Russian choir who sang at The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine on 112th and Amsterdam Ave. I went to his apartment way up in Fort George every week for ear training and composition lessons. (Along with pop songs, I was trying to write a string quartet.)

But I began to crave to write that jazzy, show-tune kind of music.

At around that time I met a girl named Paige who had written a musical about a Broadway starlet who had a singing vagina. She asked me to write the music for the play. I wrote one song during a temp job for Infogrammes. (They found my lyrics for the song saved on their corporate server, where I tried to bury it, not knowing the entire company could see it. The file name was “vagina.” Man. On my last day, you should have heard how they snickered and laughed at me on the elevator ride down to the lobby.) Anyway, Paige and I fell out of contact and the play wasn’t to be.

I conceived the the Ideal Home Music Library project, but my experiments at that time felt incomplete. Although I knew a lot of music theory, I didn’t know anything about jazz. So I decided to return to Portland to study. Portland wasn’t my first choice, but it would have been impossible for me to work and go to school in New York, (to be honest, I hated it there anyway), and other colleges were too expensive. I even did a tour of Cornish in Seattle. Anyway, some of the songs I wrote in New York became part of the Ideal home Music Library, Vol 1.

I wrote a scene from Success. It was the scene where Nicholas and Gregory (then their names were switched) hatched the plan to fake the suicide. Jenny marked up my first draft and I think I may have rewritten it one more time. After writing that scene, I again left it at that.

Another important moment for Success occurred in New York as well. I was browsing in a book store—I wish I could say it was a hip book store, but think it might have been the Barnes & Noble on 86th Street, which was close to where I worked at The Harry Fox Agency—when I came across the Dover score version of Erik Satie’s Sports & Divertissements. I fell hard for those little pieces and I learned to play them on the piano. I was touched particularly by the idea of making drawings accompanied by music. The idea of creating a musical comic came to me then, albeit ill-formed. I wasn’t sure how to put printed music and sequential comic panels together. I did a few sketches, but nothing serious. I mostly just played around with little drawings with notated music in the speech balloons. That was about it. I filed the idea away for the future.

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The Success Timeline, Part 1 (1994)

In the summer of 1994 my songwriting compatriot in the American Girls Eric Larson and I went backpacking in Europe. After he got homesick and went back to the US, I found myself traveling alone. I ended up spending some time in the UK. I went up to London and then caught a bus to Glasgow, where I spent the night on the way to Edinburgh. In Edinburgh I attended a hen night. On the way back to the European continent, I passed through Dublin Ireland. In the end, I caught a ferry back to Europe.

Sometime during that journey I bought a copy of the novel Success by Martin Amis. It was the story of two foster brothers, Gregory and Terrence. Gregory is a hipster socialite who works in a gallery, attends Orgy parties at his friend Torca’s house, and basically lives the high life. (An early draft of the play had Nicholas attending a sex party as well. The scene in Act 1 where Nicholas visits Timothy and Amanda almost took place at one such party. ) Terence, Gregory’s foster brother, is a complete inept and sexually frustrated slacker. Throughout the course of the novel, the two characters switch status. Gregory ends up in an asylum, and Terence becomes confident and finds a loving relationship.

I was attracted to the shape of that story. I thought Success would make a good movie, or play. I left it at that, but the germ of that story planted itself in my imagination, to be developed much later.

Curtain

It’s March 1st, 2020. That means that, after 35 months of drawing, Success!, the world’s first comic opera, comes to a close.

In a later blog post, I’m going to chronicle the history of the play, from the summer of 1994, when I picked up a copy of Martin Amis’s novel by the same name in a bookstore in the UK, to about 30 minutes ago, March 1st, 2020, when I drew the last hash mark on those little tombstones and uploaded these final pages to the website.

Until then, I’m going to take a short break and relish the free time I have regained as a result of finishing a 3-year project. The free time won’t last long. In a few weeks I will begin the search for a publisher for a possible print version of Success!. It would be an absolute dream to see it on a bookstore shelf somewhere. While I search for a publisher, I will also be tweaking Success!, making small cosmetic changes and fixes, most notably where some of my early drawings look funny to me now. I will also begin work on my next musical play, which I’m very much looking forward to diving into. That play may or may not become the world’s second comic opera. We’ll see.

For now, I’d like to extend HUGE and HEARTFELT thanks to my wonderful and generous donors and patrons, who have made monthly contributions of their hard-earned moolah to keep the lights on here at Reclinerland HQ. I can’t thank enough the following amazing people:

Jim Hatton

Nima Khorassani

Patrick Gamble

Stephanie Johnson

Joe Streng

Judi and Ross Tandowsky

I will miss Nicholas, Gregory, and all of their friends (and enemies). I have had an amazing time drawing this comic, and I have further comic projects in mind for the future.

Finally, let me extend my heartfelt thanks to you, my readers, for sticking with me on this long journey. As always, more later.

m

EEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Well, that’s it for our friend (word used loosely) Nicholas. He’s gone. After we get a glimpse of what goes on in his morbid head, he pulls the plug on himself. The reader will allow me a bit of creative license, I hope, with the manner in which Nicholas ends his life. I’ve witnessed a hospital plug-pulling session in my life, and I seem to remember a giant lever being pulled and some machines being turned off, tubes pulled out, etc.

It’s a sad occasion for poor Gregory. But, after one more scene, Gregory’s story will also end. Oh, don’t worry, he’ll survive, but will he come to grips with what he’s done and what he’s lost, and how he’s transformed on the road to success? We’ll see.

After another month, this long project will be wrapped up, at lest, this first incarnation of it. There will be some editing, some clean up, some tweaking, but that’s for another post. Until next month, dear readers. Thank you for taking this journey with me.

Success, success, success!

The end is almost upon us, dear readers. I’m so excited to share with you this latest scene in Success! Nicholas really shows his true colors. I’m sorry the update is a little behind schedule. This scene took a long time because of the sheer amount of character designs, cocktail party crowd drawings, and other details, like backgrounds, textures, etc.

Next up comes the penultimate scene in the play. I won’t spoil anything, but we’re going to find out why all the other characters are so horrified at the end of this scene (no spoilers if you haven’t read it yet). What has happened to Nicholas? You’ll find out in a couple of months.

After that: the Epilogue. Yes, the entire story will be wrapped up by March, 2020. I’m so happy that you will have been with me through this amazing journey. We’ll have time for celebrations later. We musn’t count our chickens. See you in February!

A Day Late But Not a Dollar Short

Hello, dear readers. It was exactly 8 weeks yesterday that the previous scene in Success! hit the Global Interweb, and now, I hope you will feast your eyes on the latest scene, which hit the Net five minutes ago.

After behaving like a bond villain the entire play, Nicholas’s chickens have come home, and they are a roosting’. No longer the schmoozer he fancies himself to be, Nicholas is falling further and further apart as Timothy and Charles’s gallery giant popularity, Amanda sees through his ruse, and his demons come back to haunt him. It’s a sad state of affairs. I wonder what’s going to happen to him?

Will Nicholas atone for his sins? Will Gregory’s opening in New York as Jair Newman make a splash? Find out in the beginning of November, dear reader, when the next scene makes it onto the Ubiquitous World Computer Network. Until then, happy reading!

PS - If you’re enjoying the comic, don’t forget to head over to www.patreon.com/successcomic and sign up to make a monthly donation. For as little as $1 a month, you can help keep the lights on at Reclinerland HQ.

See you in a couple of months!

Welcome, iOS users!

I’m so happy to tell all of you that I fixed the problem with a new blank window opening up when you click on an audio file using an iOS device! Yay!

Now, you can read the comic and listen to the music on your iPhone or iPad!

By the way, I’m also working steadily on Act 2, Scene 5 as you read this. I’m looking forward to uploading it next week.

So, it’s with a happy heart that I welcome my fellow Apple users to Success! Happy reading!

A Midsummer Night's Upload

That’s right, my friends, the next chapter is live!

With the help of Nora, Gregory secures another show as Jair Newman. Timothy and Charles plan a gallery opening right across the street from Amanda’s gallery so they can funnel audiences away from Nicholas’s exhibit of Gregory’s old work, which, as we’ll see in the next installment, will turn out just to be Nicholas’s fakes. The plot is certainly thickening, my friends. I do hope you’re enjoying what you’re reading.

Incidentally, this song, “My New York Is You”, is one of the first “standards” I wrote way back in 2001, when I began work on the Ideal Home Music Library, Vol. 1. I wrote the song “My New York” with my old friend Jenny Deller, and actress/ filmmaker whom I was dating at the time. She and I wrote the song in a dark room in her parent’s house in Carbondale, Illinois in the spring of 2000, I believe.

This version of the song differs slightly from the original version, which appears on the HUSH Records compilation FLAG and on my second album. For Success!, I changed the couplet rhyme scheme from straight rhymes to slant rhymes, and turned the song into a duet. I also added the “New York, New York has everything…” verse.

But, in spite of the fact that this version of “My New York Is You” has changed, I still want to dedicate it to Jenny Deller, wherever she may be. If you do a search for the independent film Future Weather, you should be able to find her amazing filmmaking and acting work. Wherever Jenny is, I wish her success.

I also wish you Success! In fact, production has already begun on the next installment. Nicholas is continuing to crack up as he learns that the world doesn’t revolve around him. Look forward to that scene in September.

For now, if you’d like to support the comic, head over to www.patreon.com/successcomic for details.

Until then, happy reading!

It's Opening Night!

The next scene in Success! is live, my friends, and it’s opening night! Gregory and his friends show their work at the Blue Rose Gallery, and the public loves it. In fact, Gregory sells out! And now he wants to take his work to New York. What will happen? What’s going on with Nicholas? Find out in the next installment, due out in late July.

I hope you’re enjoying Success!. If you like what you’re reading (and hearing), consider becoming a patron. You can visit www.patreon.com/successcomic to donate as little as $1 a month to help keep the lights on at Reclinerland HQ.

Thanks in advance for your support. Happy reading!

How Hard Can It Be...

…to work daily on a webcomic? Pretty hard, my friends. Pretty hard. That’s why I’m so glad you’re here with me on this journey. Here we are, only about a month after my last blurb, and we have another scene from Success!

I’m excited to share this little scene with you. Nicholas is starting to overreach in his arrogance. His recent wave of success seems to be going to his head. There is a cynicism in his implied theory that art doesn’t take any skill or talent. His nihilism and his arrogance are starting to show. I think by the end of the scene, Amanda senses it. Time will tell if Nicholas’s new scheme will work. And what about the murder he committed? Is anything going to come of that? Stay tuned, my friends.

I hope you’re enjoying reading Success! If you’d like to support the comic and keep the lights on at Reclinerland HQ, go ahead and visit the donations page, or go to patreon.com/successcomic and become a patron. Your contributions really help keep this project afloat.

See you in a couple of months (if not sooner!) for Act 2, Scene 3!