Retrospective - Delilah Dirk and the Treasure of Constantinople

Hello! I'm in the weird liminal space between Christmas and New Year's, and PRACTICAL DEFENCE AGAINST PIRACY is in the liminal space between The Inking Is Finished and Colouring Has Begun. I have a lot of time-consuming work to do — laying out the digital pages, lettering, and flatting — but none of that makes for colourful Patreon posts. So I asked you, "during this gap, would you like me to talk about some of my older work?" and several people said yes, so here we are.

This week, I'm going to take a look at the very first Delilah Dirk comic, DELILAH DIRK AND THE TREASURE OF CONSTANTINOPLE.

You may recognize this as Chapter One of DELILAH DIRK AND THE TURKISH LIEUTENANT, because that is what it is. Or, it is now. In 2007, it was its own thing: a 30-page black-and-white comic in the same format as traditional floppy comics. Relatively few of them exist. They were printed on demand, I made no more than 150 of them, and I only sold them at conventions for a few years.

When I look at it now, I wonder, what made a white Canadian guy in his mid-twenties decide to publish a short comic outlining the origins of a semi-mythical, tea-loving 19th-century English lady adventurer? It's not an easy question to answer, but let's see what we can see.

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As is often the case, the images in the carousel above are duplicated below. If you want a closer look at them, open the images in the carousel. I think. It's hard to keep up with Patreon's changes.

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In 2006, I was living in Vancouver, sharing a house with two good friends, and we all paid the same modest rent, even though I had the upstairs bedroom, which opened onto the room I turned into my studio/office. I'm not sure why they let me have that space. I didn't have to fight for it. Maybe it was because the stairs were so treacherously steep.

I was also commuting by bike to work at local animation studios, enjoying myself and playing Call of Duty on the studio LAN for an hour every evening. I was in my mid-twenties. I didn't mind the unpaid leave between studio contracts (see: unemployment) — I had no debt and was good at saving, so I happily spent that downtime making drawings for my friends on the Flight forums.

In highschool I'd poured a lot of time and money into reading Image comics — they used futuristic colouring techniques that made them so much prettier than other comics. But I burnt out on them, and for many years ignored comics completely. Then Mike Mignola did all that concept art for Disney's ATLANTIS, and like everyone else in animation school I swooned over it. So when I chanced to stick my head into a comic shop again in 2004-ish, I was primed to pick up an unusual one-shot from Mignola. I bought THE AMAZING SCREW-ON HEAD, read it many times and with great thoroughness, and just like that, I loved comics again.

Equipped with the figure-drawing and storytelling skills I'd learned in animation school, I started making comics again for the first time since high school.

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These two drawings (above) are some of the first Delilah Dirk drawings, probably from 2005-2006. They hung on the magnet board in my upstairs office for a long time.

I have occasionally been asked, "what inspired Delilah Dirk?" and I have always answered earnestly, and it has never seemed to please anyone. Maybe what they really want to know is, "why are you, A WHITE MAN, writing about A LADY… IN TURKEY?" How dare I. Because honestly, asking "what inspired this?" is a lot like asking, "which of the tree's roots makes the leaves grow?" (I apologize for this metaphor.)

I do specifically remember wanting to do a "gender swap" on the traditional notion of the adventure hero rescuing a princess, and that's how I got to that image on the right, above. Note the Frazetta-esque axe man in the background and compare to gender roles in most of Frazetta's work. My dad had a book of his illustrations which I used to peek at every now and then.

But Frazetta is only one small part of the puzzle. Every time I think about this question, I can pull out a different "inspiration." Here are some (edited Jan 2 to add more):

• Indiana Jones, obviously, but the feel of it, not the specifics,
• the story of the Elgin Marbles / Parthenon Marbles, or the Venus de Milo, at the intersection of art, history, and imperial arrogance,
• those Image comics and how dull their female characters were,
• Duck Tales,
• Amazing Screw-On Head,
• my father's photos of Greece, which lined the hallways of my childhood home,
• Calvin & Hobbes,
• Xena, Warrior Princess,
• Army of Darkness (the flavour of which I probably recognized in Screw-On Head),
• the Horatio Hornblower series of novels, with Hornblower's unshakable sense of duty, and, of course, The Boats,
• the Sharpe series of novels, with the same sort of ideas of duty and honour, plus friendship and guns and cannons,
• the computer game Prince of Persia (read Jordan Mechner's account of the original design of the game's packaging — you'll never guess who posed for illustration reference),
• that first Assassin's Creed game (maybe you can see a theme here),
• She-Ra,
• obviously: Disney animated features; but perhaps less obviously, Emperor's New Groove — my animation-school demo reel featured at least one scene with Emperor's characters; I got really used to drawing Kuzco and I see a little of him in my early DD drawings,
• and, honestly, a thousand more things, to varying degrees.

It was a sunny late-Spring day and I was on the porch when the central concept for this thirty-page comic arrived, fully-formed, out of thin air. The story would take the form of an officer's debriefing, his account would be literally unbelievable, and we would see the often-mundane truth in the artwork.

After drawing the first six pages, I must have got distracted. I'm not sure what made me stop, but I remember why I started again: I posted on the Flight forums, "here's six pages from a project I started," and Doug Holgate said something like, "keep going," and that was all it took.

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Kazu Kibuishi, who ran the Flight comics endeavour, used to have a "Flight" booth at San Diego Comic-Con, and if you were participating in the books he'd invite you down, help arrange hotels, and you could call the Flight booth "home" during the convention. Though I'm fuzzy on the timeline, this must have been where I learned that artists would make their own small comics and sell them at conventions, because that became my plan for TREASURE OF CONSTANTINOPLE. I finished up the comic in my after-hours and would print it in time for the next SDCC.

This (above) was the comic I had printed just to see what the quality would look like. I used Lulu.com, a then-newish print-on-demand service, and I was worried that it would look too much like it came off a laser printer. What's up with that cover, you ask? Why does it look like the cover to an early-2000s trance music compilation CD? I might have thought that I was committing myself to a lot of time in the company of 19th-century aesthetics, so maybe I'd do something fun for this one-off.

Above: "Super secret test print," set in Mighty Zeo, of course.

Above: no one gets away without a few typos.

I must have been pleased-enough with the print quality, because I finalized a proper cover and had a box of these shipped to my SDCC hotel.

Note the background (above) features an antique map. That's not something I'd necessarily do today, though I suppose the map would be in the public domain. I like the way it interacts with the arch, and though I'd draw the figures very differently now, I still like this cover. "Beige" might be a questionable choice, but it's in service to the Old Map Aesthetic, so I can't be mad at it.

I'm not sure why I chose to illustrate it in black and white. The technology existed to print it in colour. Maybe it was a cost-saving measure? I don't think it saved me any time, something I would confirm later working on SEEDS OF GOOD FORTUNE. I find that "painting" black and white is only slightly faster than working in colour.

That page on the left is an, uh… homage to this W.H. Bartlett illustration from Julia Pardoe's Beauties of the Bosphorus. At the time, I would have been referencing a low-quality JPEG. Since then, Ms Pardoe's Lonely Planet guide for the Victorian traveller has become available on Archive.org, and the Vancouver Public Library has a 200-year-old copy in their Special Collections. It was a pleasure to discover this around the time of DD2 and be able to touch a real copy after becoming so well-acquainted with the illustrations years earlier.

I think about the page above a lot, because it is simultaneously my favourite and least favourite part of this comic.

Don't read the next paragraph if you don't want to see all the problems in these drawings.

Why are her eyes so wide apart? What shape is her nose supposed to be? Why does her hair stand up so straight? Why do her arms and hands have essentially no structure? Why are her wrists so skinny? At least her face is relatively consistent on this page, even if it's not consistent with the rest of the comic. I do not know what she is wearing or what it would be if it were real garments. Why is there a boob window? Why is the cookie tin labeled "Mrs Timmins' Olde-Timey Tea Biscuits?" Even if the lettering were supposed to be English, it wouldn't be Olde-Timey, it would just be Timey. And, of course, the one that really, really chafes: why are they using a generic 20th-century Western mug to drink tea in 19th-century Turkey?

The answer to all of these questions is basically, ahh I was figuring a lot of things out. This remains the case. I continue to figure out things.

But! I love Selim's question, I love her reactions, and overall I like this joke and how it plays out. It sets up his values, it tells us a lot about her character (specifically: she likes his tea so much that she forgets to be offended), it's funny, and it's friendly. Would that every six-page sequence do this much good work.

(Mrs Timmins was a beloved elementary-school teacher of mine. Every bit of her schoolwork was a creative project, and she is probably the reason I blithely assumed that I could just make a book, no big deal.)

And then, on the very last page, the first drawing of DD with which I am happy.

A Patron Reader previously mentioned my moving away from a "graphic" style to a more "illustrative" style, and you can see that "graphic" quality here. The priority is the simplified shape of DD's face and torso (below). Three-dimensional form is subservient to the quality of the two-dimensional silhouette.

I worked that way for a while, pushing it harder in DELILAH DIRK AND THE AQUEDUCT, which would become Chapter Three of THE TURKISH LIEUTENANT. The driving motivation, if I recall correctly, was just wanting to find a style of representation that felt comfortable and gave pleasing results. I think, with PRACTICAL DEFENCE, I am starting to get there… for the time being, at least. Ask me again in another fifteen years.

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I don't know if any of this answers my original question, why this book? Maybe it is the arrogance of someone who has never — to the best of my knowledge — been discouraged from creative endeavours. Some of it is a bone-deep belief in the maxim of, "write the book you want to read."

But when I think about that, I wonder, "if someone else had made it, would I have read it?" Is it a book that would draw my attention? I'm not sure, and it's impossible to say now. I've been immersed in this world for so long I can't tell which is the chicken and which is the egg: have I made this material part of my life because I like it? Or do I like it because I've made it such a large part of my life? Does it matter? Can it be both?

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This little comic was subsequently nominated for a Will Eisner award. I went to the ceremony, where Samuel L. Jackson presented the award. I didn't win, but the fact that my name passed through the eyes, into the brain, and out the mouth of Samuel L. Jackson — that is a treasure I keep close to my heart. As far as positive reinforcement goes, that's nice. So I would keep going.

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This has been a look at my work from seventeen years ago! To me, it seems simultaneously so alien and so familiar. Does it look strange, compared to pages from PDAP (DD4)? Do you have work from seventeen years ago that you can look back on? How do you feel about it? What does it mean to you? (This is not homework, you're not my therapist, I'm just curious.)

Next week I'll try to speak concisely about THE TURKISH LIEUTENANT, assuming this is useful and/or interesting to you, Dear Reader. Careful, though: as I have demonstrated, all it takes is one person to express interest and I will absolutely barrel forward, full-steam ahead.

Until then,
I remain,
subservient to the quality of the two-dimensional silhouette,

TC