Baby swamp monster

And three paragraphs in honor of Kenneth Anger

I reached a major milestone last night: I “finished” the primary drawings for the second volume of The Congress of the Monsters. [Kazoo fanfare!]

For my newer subscribers, Congress is an illustrated book project that I’ve been working on for a couple of years - I published the first volume last fall. It’s a satirical fantasy about a group of bloodthirsty beasts who gather in an underground cavern to debate the most effective ways to capture and eat human beings. Any resemblance to actual congresses is strictly coincidental. 

Snark aside, I’ve been careful not to map these stories too tightly onto our current political landscape. To me, they’re less about America specifically and more about desire, power, compromise, and community - why do we want what we want, and how do we manipulate the world, each other, and ourselves in order to get it? 

The central character of the first story, “The Hunt for the Wicked Weapon,” is Phlurrgis the One-Eyed, the leader of the Brutikin party. He’s a small-c conservative who tries to hold onto the best of the old ways of life, despite the rapidly changing fairy-tale world he inhabits. His antagonist is Szovasza, who commands the Vorashavite party - an ideological body guided by a fevered vision of capturing and farming humans en masse (never mind how to actually get that done). 

Can you guess which one is Phlurrgis the One-Eyed?

My vision for the whole series is to change the POV with each story. Most will flip back and forth between these two principals, but other perspectives will pop in from time to time. This makes volume two - “The Affair of the Pairs” - the first story to center Szovasza. And I have to say, a seat-of-the-pants machiavellian gaslighter is a very fun character to write. 

In this story, we see baby Szovasza in flashback - she’s the runt of the litter, training herself to be tough. Here’s my illustration of her strengthening her leg muscles by throttling the reeds in her native swamp. 

The amount of sympathy I’ve been able to build for a Literal Monster is slightly disturbing. Lookit that pudgy little sprite! I’m actually surprisingly happy with my pictures on this one - I had mixed emotions when I transitioned from pen and ink to digital, but the flexibility it provides is invaluable. It would have taken more than twice as long to do draw these pictures the old way, and, since my aging velocity seems to double every week, I need any advantage I can take. 

I still have plenty of work to do - particularly, the cover design and the illuminated letters that open each section - so I’m planning to publish this by early fall to have some live readings and start sending it around to interested parties. I’m hoping to manage one of these a year moving forward - though story three has already been giving me plenty of problems, ugh. 

Have you somehow gotten away with not receiving a copy of volume one? Drop me a line to let me know - I’m very happy to send one along, with an inscription and drawing and everything. 

RIP Kenneth Anger (1927-2023)

Here’s where I found this photo - not sure of credit, alas

There are thousands of people who can better eulogize Kenneth Anger than me, but I had to say SOMETHING. It’s been years since I’ve seen any of his pictures, but they’re memorable in the same hazy way as a delirious bout of illness - the details may be unclear, but the sensation never fades. (Here’s a YouTube playlist - they’re all short, and largely NSFW.)

He died on May 11, and news of his death hit the press yesterday. But in a sense, Anger was always a spirit, fearsomely hovering over the second half of the 20th Century to warn us about our fate. These were not moral warnings - far from it - but existential mementos mori. All is dust, he seemed to say, especially that which we most revere. His fetishisms of youth, beauty, and aesthetic glory were knowingly chiseled on the walls of a pharaoh’s tomb. Hollywood Babylon, his lurid literary masterpiece, is a show-biz Necronomicon that invokes the spirits of our secular gods through curses woven from their sensational deaths. Just watch him roam the halls of the Chateau Marmont a few years back, a stylish nosferatu who hadn’t yet bothered to die.

It’s hard to say the world is poorer for losing him, because he wasn’t exactly mortal. He was most likely the latest incarnation of an ancient pagan deity, taking his peculiar form to plant words and images in our heads, only to fade and be reborn again for another century’s obsessions. Until then, raising Lucifer is as easy as rewatching one of his films. 

Satanically,
Jeff