PRESIDENT 'DOOSH' QUIMBY (TABOO #8, 1995)
Artwork: "President ‘Doosh’ Quimby" (as featured in 1995's TABOO #8, Kitchen Sink Press) ©1995, Rick Grimes. GRIMES: "'President Quimby’, despite its strangeness, is fairly self-explanatory. It is what it is, says what it is in a straight runthrough to the end. Also called "Black Butterflies". ‘PDQ’, with the scrapbook he just found, proceeds throo the two wings of the Spanish style grade school I went to, (still only a few blocks from me now), passing along the way, vignettes of dire import in the classrooms. Determinedly ‘laidback’ and higher-minded’, like he’s balancing a valedictory mortarboard on his head, or a stack of posture-practicing text books, he doesn't quite accept what's going on, or that he may be in some cartoon Hell. ‘Til the end when Canary Cat wises him up: "you’re not supposed to be here". And he flies away, leaving Devil Boy, who can’t follow, in tears. The characters in the classrooms are almost all from childhood versions, (simpler and happier), from the same drawing on what I think was a piece of shirt cardboard. (Excluding, here, the unfortunate on the gurney). ‘Quimby’ (his name has since been modified, tho’ apt for this story’s reality), came about by a different route. Overall the story, as a technical matter, was my belated attempt to get away from the plethora of raggedly and too-hastily ‘executed’ stories I’d been inking and reclaim my sometime ability to do cleaner tighter work. I think it did that, among other satisfying things and I am very pleased with it.Unfortunately, the originals were never returned. Cue the Devil Boy tears! The first appearance of Canary Cat, in any comic story. (Now, a ‘poet’). (Quimby has his own odd tale (s)). By ‘rights’, it should’ve been in my last Taboo, the swan, (or goony bird) song. Especially, too, with his departure as it is. Like each classroom also a prior, Taboo-story display, in cameo. In my mind it was the last." -- Rick Grimes (December 22nd, 2008). |
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