In praise of melodrama
I’ve been having a couple of weeks with waaay too much going on yet where I have waaay too much in my mind that I’d like to write or art about. Here’s a little bit of what’s going on…
Announcing…Commissions Open!
After a long hiatus, I’m now available for custom art jobs, aka commissions! I’ve done several over the years for friends, book club members, or coworkers, usually to commemorate a special life event. They usually take me on the order of 1-3 months to complete, given there is a lot of communication to ensure my work meets your expectations. If this sounds like something you’re interested in, you can
Reply to this email to inquire 📧
Request a commission via Ko-fi ☕
Go old school and contact me through my website ✍️
Writing projects?!
I have to come clean: most of my art time this month has involved writing, not visual art! I can’t say much here except that I have a Big Secret Project I try to work on for at least an hour every week. This project is So Big, it will likely take me years to complete. Intimidating? Yes. Fulfilling? So far, also yes.
This concept art is really all I feel comfortable sharing about it, perhaps indefinitely.
Mini visual art update: zines, zines, zines
I have what’s beginning to feel like an embarrassing amount of ideas for zines or perzines (personal zines), some of which are educational around topics related to IBD. I have a list to work off of, but I think it’s time to develop a schedule of sorts 😅
Squarely in the non-educational category is this zine, “I ❤️ pretty soaps”, that I started two months ago (!!) but have left to languish. True story: I do love a pretty fragrant soap, and I’ve become a bit of a connoisseur of them. There are other silly ideas for mini zines like this, too.
In praise of melodrama
Last weekend my spouse and I watched the latest component of the Tolkien cinematic universe, War of the Rohirrim. It was better than we both thought in terms of story line and emotion, though neither of us enjoyed the animation too much. For my part I thought the art itself was decent, but the actual animation of frames was stilted in an unflattering way. If you don’t watch a lot of anime but have seen War of the Rohirrim and want a comparison with where anime can be today, the series Demon Slayer by far has the biggest animation budget; watch some scenes (here, here, here) to get a feel for how mind-blowingly fluid animation can be these days (content warning: gore, since these are all fight scenes). But that’s not what we’re here to talk about.
By far my favorite emotional aspect of War of the Rohirrim, and arguably of the Lord of the Rings movies, is the melodrama. It’s easy to mock them due to a very specific way that actors deliver grandiose lines, but there’s also something kinda beautiful about it. For one, they clearly transport us to a world where people talk differently, and where people say things with their whole chest. On another level, seeing all kinds of characters — both in terms of “races” as well as societal roles — speak this way, it gives viewers of all stripes permission to feel big feelings.
Maybe you’re a war battle junkie, but for me I use the big battle scenes to go get more snacks or to chat with whomever I was watching them with. The stuff that keeps me glued to the screen are the incredible world-building…and the deep relationships. Yeah, sure, the stakes are high for the characters, but they also seem to actually care and have meaningful motives; in less successful works, I get the impression the creators raised the ante just to see how far they could take the story. I imagine Tolkien’s actual lived experience of fighting in World War I, called the Great War in his day, really factored into the way he wrote the original works, and that it would be difficult to snip away the emotion integral to the source material.
I don’t think I need to explain to you the value of feeling your big feelings. That said, I do think our current moment in time is one where it’s easy to default to repressing emotion in order to carry on with required tasks, but I think repression is only so useful. (Take it from me, as a Midwesterner I am an expert in emotional suppression and repression.) Additionally, there are people who eschew more dramatic kinds of art, finding it embarrassing or worse (I kinda used to be like this). If we don’t allow ourselves to experience the full range of emotion, positive and negative, we stifle ourselves; anger and sadness are often pitched as “negative” emotions, but they can drive us to fight back against whatever is causing us to continue to feel that way. Not properly processing powerful emotions can not only lead to lots of health issues (“the body keeps the score”, anyone?), but it also can, at a population level, keep us trapped in systems that no longer serve us.
Backing away from the political mic…a hot take: The melodrama inherent in LotR makes anime a genius change in stylistic direction for its cinematic presence. Dialogue and gestures tend to be very exaggerated in anime. Melodrama abounds, to the point of being absurd. Anime and manga are, anecdotally, ever-increasing in popularity in the USA (couldn’t find a good statistical source for this, sadly), and I do wonder how much the melodrama plays into it. Anime and manga are more styles of making animated films and graphic novels, respectively, and contain multitudes of genres and subgenres therein, so it’s very hard to draw conclusions. Still, I wonder.
There are plenty of other ways exaggeration factors into film, theater, and fiction, though I’d be writing a whole academic thesis to compare and contrast all of those. From camp to romance novels to shounen back to the plains of Rohan, we humans love drama in various forms; we may as well name it and embrace it.
Other recent sources of inspiration
I’m a recent Doechii convert. I have her latest single, Anxiety, on repeat.
I recently met one of the writers behind Earthly Matters, a newsletter-style project to teach people about climate change with a (dark) humor bent.
The graphic novel Prokaryote Season by Leo Fox (published by SF-based comics publisher, Silver Sprocket!) totally knocked my socks off. Messy queers in love, T4T romance, creepy aliens, surreal setting, and some really f*cking cool paneling. This is my shit. The paneling looks somewhere between the Brady Bunch intro and medieval manuscripts, and I literally am rereading the book this weekend just to soak up the lushness of it. There’s an essay here brewing about the confluence of medieval aesthetics, dirtbag queer romance, gothic ambience, and weird art (looking at you, Locked Tomb!)…