Artwork: "The Time Piece" (panel excerpt, w/ notes) (as featured in 2011's PARAPHILIA XIII, Díre McCain & D.M. Mitchell) 2011, Rick Grimes.

RG: "Am mostly happy with this one. It came out how i pictured it, except for the last two panels. I should have redone them.

Hy Eisman used to tell us we couldn't put little signs, 'like Dick Tracy', into our art to tell people what we had meant to do.

But, along with other perks, this site is a great place for that. So, here I go again... (Those easily bored may busy themselves elsewhere).


Originally, I intended to use Weird Dick's gloved hand for the "were i, had I an intuitive character of good conscience" line.

I pictured explaining here that it did not mean Weird Dick was in this story; the narrator is groping for some possibility of a quality he himself may not have-- but I immediately found the cartooniness of such a hand, by itself, to be distracting. With likely a reference meaningless to most. So, I scrapped it. Too fast perhaps.


And, in the last panel, I was only going to show the bound figure still only about to be tortured. With a clawed hand, the real hand of the narrator, half reaching, the scene dissolving. But, again, it wasn't going to convey what I wanted and blocked too much of the scene.

I impulsively refilled panel 11 with a quickie critter too much like 'Dolly' in my old Taboo story. The multiple hands, with arms too short to reach, an overemphasized excuse for it's not helping the victim.

It may pass for clever, but to me it's rather hack. As is panel 12.
  
I should have stuck to my guns and used an eraser, (to confuse a metaphor).


Since, overall, "The Time Piece" seems to be about suspense--- physical suspension of the 'sloth' on the wall, of Time, of torture. Of relief, decisiveness. Of even ordinary salvation. Nothing much should be happening yet. The narrator probably should not ever be seen.

But that would have been too static? Ya got me. Do I even ever know what I'm doing??


My wan and wasted, doodly depiction of the torture is lukewarm at best. I've done this before. Perhaps one needs 'more' practice at the real thing to draw it right. Better if I leave that to the 'experts'. Then, they may not generally be great draughtsmen--those heavy hands calloused by invasive tools.


Well. There's always some percentage of dissatisfaction to bother me  forever after doing something. I consider myself lucky if I get more than a third of any page the way I wanted it. Damned ol' creativity.

Perhaps I'll have to do a sequel to get it 'more righter'. Write this  one off as a chapter that doesn't quite get its matter said. I can already  see the little 'testicle' guy venturing into the hallway..." ---Grimes  12/16, 29/'011