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On Sobriety and keeping an eye on your characters . . .

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 Deadpan Stan.     I take so much in stride anymore that I get amazed when I back up and actually reflect on what exactly is going on. I created this character (or maybe “discovered” is a better term) over 20 years ago when I was crafting comics in college. Someday I’ll have to expound more fully on the nature of all the characters I had created over that time. Seeing how they’re all little facets of my own subconscious displaying traits I was ignorant of at the time is just . . . weird.      So Deadpan Stan was an undertaker with a drinking problem that played a kind of Wile E. Coyote vs. Roadrunner game with another character — a mostly naked man with no head. His goal was to capture the obviously dead naked man and put him in the grave where he belonged. Deadpan was never successful. Even when he was able to get the corpse into the ground, the corpse had friends who would dig him out.      After many years marinating in the seasoned wine of time, the spiritual reality (or what oth
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My experience with Jim McMullan

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As a second-year illustration student at the School of Visual Arts, I sat confidently in Jim McMullan's figure drawing class working through yet another series of five minute poses. This would have been my second semester in his class, and I had the notion that I'd picked up a few things. I was blending the High-Focus Drawing ways of thinking with inspiration from Egon Schiele . I recall having the distinct impression that I was making some significant progress. My drawings were pretty different from the character the rest of the class was attempting to achieve. The elegant lines that Jim tried so adamantly to train us to execute were replaced by something resembling the scrawlings of someone crippled with rheumatoid arthritis. After some time, Jim came over to me and sat down.  "You're not a genius." He said.  This obvious news had been hovering near me for a long, long time just waiting for a willing conduit to deliver it. It was devastating. I think he said a
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