GUE 5: Don't Tread On Me

A one pager? Unfortunately for you, yes. But fortunately for me, this tidy piece of something emulates the greatest literary genre the world has ever known— the high concept short story. There is a lot I could talk abut here; not because I think the comic is some kind of profound tour-de-force, but rather because I think the high concept in question here sort of gently brushes up against a number of themes and concepts that I have a particular interest in. But it seems counter to the nature of art to just lay all those out here, so instead I’ll just allow the comic to just sort of steep. I will give the fans an obvious freebie, however; yes, this is clearly partially inspired by the now-debunked evolutionary theory behind the Heikegani Crab’s striking appearance. You may have heard of it before. If not, off to wikipedia with you. 

I will say this— I think the ‘punchline’ of this comic is carried by the fact that there really aren’t a lot of situations where it’s morally acceptable to huck a piece of garbage off into a random direction, and this is one of them. Render unto mother nature what is mother nature’s, fool— this is a move I’m sure I pulled off in my camp counselor days. 9-year old traumatized by the sight of a partially cannibalized insect corpse? Uh, one second kid, just look over there for a moment. Whep. Finished explaining the concept of decomposition, via a bluish hunk of rotting wood? Don’t need this thing anymore. Whoosh. Apple core during cookout? Fuck it, the ants are eating good tonight. Wheeeooo. 

Since this is a relatively short patron blurb, I’ve included some bts sketches as well. While designing them, I ran a common problem in the narrative art world; that is, showing the audience a piece of art that is, within the narrative, supposed to be transcendentally beautiful. There are a lot of clever ways to get around this.

 1. One might simply never show the art in question, only allude to it (done here with the Madonna Fly). 

 2. One might operate in medium where the maguffin does not, like a TV show about the world’s greatest chef or a comic book about the world’s greatest musician. 

 3. One might dodge it completely, like 30 Rock does, and make their in-universe tv show completely terrible.          

 4. Or take the Metalocalypse route, and simply create a whole universe of complete morons, by whose standards the real-world Dethklok music would be phenomenal. 

5. And of course, you could also just grab the bull by horns, and actually just show the damn thing—often with embarrassing results. (See: the Manga Blue Period. Sorry man. It just doesn’t work that way.)

I guess I’m doing here a mixture 1, 4, and 5? If you were to smash a bug that looked like the one in panel 1, would you be moved to such intense remorse by the appearance if it’s broken body that you felt almost physically ill? Well, probably not. But can you really say it, with certainty? If you saw it up close, saw it moving, saw it manifested in real life, uncensored by the cartoony art style? Well, still probably not… but you can’t say for sure. There’s an X-factor to these sorts of things; anyone who’s ever had an unexpectedly good first date can tell you that. 

Coming off the tails of such a similar story in GUE 4, I made a real point to try and draw a distinction here. These are not perfect replicas of the human form; they are more like gestures to humanity, reminders. (Ahh, am I saying too much?) And so I wanted to make the beautiful, but not in a sexual way, and somewhat alien despite their tender familiarity. To that end, the species we see Mel smash was partially inspired by the model Grace Jones, who was undeniably attractive, sure, but whose intense features made her look, at times, less like a call girl and more like a  cubist painting. I don’t have a species name in mind for this one; maybe something like the What Have I Done Fly? Though they aren’t actually flies, of course…

Hermes also got a sort of soft redesign here, which is to say I actually made him less soft. Like much of the GUE cast, his was a design that I had drawn first, and then made up the personality and backstory afterward to suit. His round face and diminutive size always fit him as a devious rascal-type, but in hindsight, never really made much sense with his backstory as a supermodel. (It also doesn’t help that one of the younger-looking characters ended up being the source for like 80% of the comic’s sex jokes— not something I intended or even really considered, but which nonetheless felt a little weird about in retrospect.) Doing the Satan comic felt like a boot camp in drawing male beauty, however, and so I’m coming back with a vengeance to try and sculpt a more killer face card for our problematic friend here. It’ll probably be some time before I really feel out the precise formulation, (one doesn’t want to veer into ‘Handsome Squidward’ territory) but I’m throwing up a couple of design sketches nonetheless. Enjoy or whatever