This is not the greatest comic in the world. This is just a tribute.
(For J. Harker)

Something a little different for you this week: A photo restoration.

This photo had a sad, sad life before it came to me. It was well loved however, as it must have been put in its frame fairly shortly after it was taken.  It was sandwiched into the frame with the frontpage of the newspaper Club Life, dated October 11th, 1890.

For those of you without a background in conservation, the operative word in the previous sentence is newspaper. Newspaper, particularly old newspaper, is full of all sorts of nasty reactive chemicals. By the time I got my hands on it, the newspaper had begun to dissolve under its own power.

As for the poor photo: At some point, the photo had become one with the glass. I’m not sure exactly what the chemical process was, but removing it was synonymous with destroying it. And that was the state of affairs when someone dropped it, and shattered the glass.

The owner brought it to me, and asked if there was anything I could do.  I blinked at her for a minute, and said I’d give it my best shot. The first order of business was to get it scanned, which was impossible in its current state. The photo had snapped along with the glass in some places, but was still intact in others.  The glass grated against itself every time I tried to move it, causing more damage to the glass and the photo. Flipping it over in order to scan it was out of the question. Also it was spitting glass slivers everywhere.

Painful as it was, I had to use a razor to finish the process of breaking the picture into pieces.  I scanned each piece separately, then I assembled them in Photoshop, which gave me this:

Thirty hours of work later, I gave this back to the client:

There are a few interesting things about this photo, beyond the reconstruction work.

First, it’s pretty clear that not everyone had the same idea about how to pose for a graduation photograph. The guys in the back are posed and proper, hats in hand, while others sit with either genuine or awkward informality. Most people look in the direction of the photographer, but others seem to deliberately stare somewhere else. Everybody agrees that smiling is bad, but that’s about the only consensus.

The Union College of Law later became the law school of Northwestern University.

Also, where the hell was this taken? A construction zone? An alley? Wherever it was, the guy lounging in the front felt obligated to put his handkerchief on the ground underneath him to protect his suit.

People knew how to put letters in their names in the 1890′s. Boy howdy. Here’s the best example, before and after.

Lastly, there are two women in the photo. One would have been unusual, and two is really something of a surprise.

The registry lists them as L. Blanche Fearing (to the left) and Mrs. Fearing.

That’s right. She has no first name, not for the likes of you, anyway. She is Mrs. Fearing. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Today’s post is a present for a guy I’ve been chatting about art stuff with on the internet. Because I am actually kind of a slow adapter to technology, (I don’t know how to post pictures to the forum we’re on) and because I thought it’d make a good post (*cough*lazy*coughcough*) I scanned some old comic character studies for you.

I’m testing out three stylistic choices here: the ‘diary’ approach to telling a story, using the city itself as an atmospheric character, and unconventional panels. Scott McCloud would be so proud.

Keep in mind these are a rough draft, so neither the text or images are of a quality that I’d want to publish. This is a just a place to let this character flail around a bit, so I can find out who he is. Some of it’s a bit inconsistent, but that’s okay at this stage. It’s like when you go to the shelter to get a pet: you can’t tell what they’re like at all when they’re in a tiny cage. When you take them home and give them space and some time to relax, that’s when you find out what you’ve got.

Text from the panel is typed below the image.

-Sometimes I wonder… whose hands do I have? Whose nose? I’m not going to seek him out or anything like that, but I still imagine sometimes what I would do if I met him on the street. Probably punch him in the mouth and mount his teeth on my wall.

- I’m a nice guy. Really. I just have the damnedest time convincing people of that.

-There are times when I sort of enjoy a good hangover.

- Mary. She’s what they call a ‘sensitive’. A bit clairvoyant, a bit telepathic, definitely psychic. She hates it when I smoke.

-Her job is to diagnose the problem.

-My job is to pull her out.

-The scientists. Creepy little bastards.

-They test everybody about once a month. They make a special fuss over me, because they don’t know how I do what I do.

They keep telling me to stop moping. It effects the test.

I told you I had a basalisk.

Don’t be alarmed though. This little guy is a pampered pet. I didn’t include any scale in the image, but he’s completely tame, and about knee-high. (He does have a tendency to jump up though, particularly if you’re holding food. ) In his world, the pseudo-millitary elite have a bad habit of keeping extremely dangerous animals as pets. As this is a feudal society, each of the lords tries to one-up each other at this. Basalisks are the most recent fad.

Pet basilisks can be made ‘safe’ by attaching a permant hood to the head and covers to the worst of the spines. (The head and back spines are springy, somewhat like pine needles. So long as you rub them the right way, petting a basalisk can actually be sort of pleasant.) These hood and covers are of course opululent, underscoring the wealth of the basalisk’s owner. The exact coloring and jewels involved in basalisk covers have historically been used to send political invitations, insults, and other information in a subtle and plausibly deniable manner.

Artistically, this was just fun. I set myself the moderate challenge of drawing a reasonably functional six-legged creature in motion, and I’m really pleased with how that turned out. I particularly like the feet: the one in front reminds me of how small showdogs with overlarge paws will fling the paw out in almost a snap-the-whip motion. Overall, I think I nailed the ‘cute but dangerous’ vibe. It was also nice to do a piece with lots of scales again. For a few years in highschool, I did at least one fully-scaled dragon a day.

This is Smidgeon. He’s a shoulder dragon.

See?  Shoulder dragon.

If you are into details, you probably noticed that Smidgeon looks a bit different between the two drawings. I’m still kicking around exactly what he looks like (Should the spikes go all the way to the end of the tail? Or should it be prehensile?) but I’ve made some progress in fleshing out the world he lives in.

The text on the reference illustration mentions Common and Noble Dragons. So far, my concept is this: In generic sword and sorcery pre-industrial world X, small dragons are common pets of the elite. (There are other things they keep as pets too… I have a basilisk illustration I’ll show you another time.) These dragons are both status symbols and hunting animals, similar to hawks. Although they have to work a small magic in order to fly, that’s the limit of their magical skills. These Common Dragons are really just animals, about as smart as a very smart dog.

In X, there’s a history of dragon lore and literature that is assumed to be mythological. Stories mention small dragons that could talk, and would intercede with the big dragons on the humans behalf. These little dragons were called Nobles, and the big dragons (your good old proper knight-roasting kind) were called Royals.

At the time my story is set, nobody’s seen or heard of a Noble or Royal in a few hundred years. (dun dun DUUUN!) Royals of course, are on the horizon. (I’m thinking a broken treaty…broken when humans forgot about it, ’cause they have this pesky habit of dying every eighty years or so. That makes for a much shorter institutional memory than dragons have. Funny enough, none of the dragons thought of that when the treaty was made in the first place.) It turns out that Noble Dragons are quite alive and well thank you: masquerading as Commons. There are actually small physical differences, but since humans have been breeding Commons selectively for a few generations, domesticated Commons look more like Nobles. My idea is centered on Smidgeon: a moderately valuable hunting Dragon owned my an up-and-coming human aristocrat. Smidgeon of course, is a Noble, and the story begins when a human realizes that.

But this is all background. Maybe later I’ll have some actual plot.