As gnarly and dubious as it is..

Resident Alien. Part 9.

I found this photo in a packet of prints that had been discarded from the original Resident Alien selection. Prints that did not make it up onto the wall as part of the final 2012 edit. This photo was in the first of 2 packets of rejects that I opened and I found it near the front. Seeing this photograph made me realize immediately that I would now need to go back and carefully review all of the original memory cards from this period and start my selection there, at the very beginning and from scratch. I had wondered if I could pick up on the trail of this 2012 print edit after first reacquainting myself with it, with the intention of returning to the original digital files later, to simply locate each image for re-editing and printing.

Having this original edit as 4x6 inch prints has been helpful for me to envision the volume of the pictures I am working with and it has been fun moving them around into pairs and pages to see how this looks here and what that looks like there. I’ve been enjoying myself and in the process I am indeed reacquainting myself with it. Pairs and spreads gravitate to one another while others wait in the wings for second thoughts. I’ll get an idea of what it needs and what I might need to keep an eye out for later. 

It's true that right now this selection is incomplete and long out of date and catching this photo in a discarded package confirms this. The prints were originally made up of all my favorite images from 2012 and I was a different person back then. In the last 10 years I have changed and my tastes have changed too. Even after initially sorting the prints into roughly 2 distinct piles of “yeps and nopes”, my pile of nopes was over twice the size of the yeps pile. This tells me my personal criteria for judging what I believe makes a “good” picture has changed too, a lot.

 

I only have the vaguest memory of taking this photo (Omaha Nebraska, I think, but I cannot be sure) but it indicates there may well be more as yet undiscovered photos waiting to be found. This floating potential key image of interest, this missing link, as gnarly and dubious as it is, marks the very beginning of the process of really considering this body of work with fresh eyes.

Regarding all the variables..

Resident Alien. Part 8.

 

As a dyslexic I was naturally drawn to reading narratives through pictures and comic books found me wanting. Words on a page were difficult to hold still, especially if I was distracted. Each word vibrated then seemed to collapse inward on itself from both ends, letter by letter after first flipping backwards and exchanging places. No amount of focus could keep them from doing it and everything was ineligible to me. I’ve sometimes wondered if reading via the reflection in a mirror might have helped me then because It all felt wired that way somehow. To really read took special circumstances. I had to be alone and it had to be quiet, which was rare in our house in those days, but I savored the moments when I found them. From one comic book panel to the next I tracked superheroes locked in battle as they tumbled down colourfully inked pages whilst regarding all the variables carefully along the way. Everything within the frame was essential and significant and I searched the artworks for signs and symbols with which to build a coherent narrative of my own from.

I wasn’t officially diagnosed as dyslexic until I was 19 years old and my entire life at school suddenly made a sick kind of sense. I could write but did not read well. My vocabulary was beyond my years, but I couldn’t spell any of it. I’d been pulled out of classes to show my work to people who were not teachers and tell them about the things they pointed to in my exercise books. For years I’d been bumped around from regular classes to remedial classes and back again with no apparent logic or explanation and I will never in my life forget the holy brutal horror hell of sight reading in front of a class full of vicious adolescent Droogs. Visits to the school psychologist followed this, but I think that was for another issue altogether..

A real life location that was not here..

Resident Alien. Part 7.

 

From the moment my consciousness came online comic books were there and they were one of the first things in the outside world that I reached out for as a child. One day in 1977 I was at the local newsagents with my friend and his punk rock big brother and I saw a small stack of Marvel comics at the end of the magazine rack and I headed straight for them. In our grey Garrison town full of army barracks stained by rain these comics looked like they had just materialized from another dimension and I remember wanting one so badly that it felt like a need. I only managed to flick through a couple of issues before I was bumped out of the way by the big brother who wanted to take a look for himself and under the watchful eye of the shop keeper he pawed through them with his dirty fingers made shiny by solvents and sniffing with the turn of every page. 

American comics were a rare sight for us in the UK then and only a few newsagents carried any titles and no title was ever regularly in stock so you had to buy from what was available and the choices were always limited. The punk rock big brother bought two and on the walk home he would not let me look at them or tell me which one’s he’d bought and I harassed him all the way. About a week later I was standing at our front gate talking with the dog next door when the big brother walked over to us and pulled one of the comic books out of his back pocket, rolled it up tight like a relay baton until its pages squeaked, then he slapped it into my hand and told me I could keep it.

Marvel Comics retold the old stories, the myths of gods and mortals, with elemental battles between good and evil being fought on the streets or high above the skyscrapers of New York City, which was then, in my mind, filled with superheroes. Comic books put America right into my hands and I felt it viscerally. Unlike the America on TV where nothing at all ever felt real, comic books were actual things that I could touch and carry with me and look at anywhere I wanted. They were like cultural artifacts from another world that was just as captivating for me as the comic book characters themselves. Even the ads, for the secret agent spy camera, live sea monkeys and x-ray spex captured my imagination. There was a wild creative fantasy taking place at a real life location that was not here where I lived. Comic books opened up one of the first true portals in my life and I have felt lucky to have been transported.

A few years later I found my way to the homegrown renegade sci-fi prophecies of 2000AD weekly and I read it without hardly missing an issue until I was in my 20's. When many of its most beloved artists and writers later left to join Vertigo Comics in the USA, I vicariously followed their careers out there too and I kept reading the graphic novels they published. Notably, but not in any way limited to Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, Grant Morrison’s Invisibles and Alan Moore’s Watchmen. These UK comic book artists and writers went on to revitalize the medium and changed the perception of comics in the wider culture in much the same way as the ‘British Invasion’ of bands from the 1960’s did with American music. For me this creative cross pollination between UK and American artists has always been an exciting one and part of my own family history.