Frank Miller’s 1986 “The Dark Knight Returns” was the comic that made me love comics. It has influenced countless amounts of people since its release. This morning I sketched one of my favorite panels from memory.
Hey y’all. It’s been a while hasn’t it? WHO CARES.
So I have this digital painting that I work on in between digital painting. Therefore I only work on it maybe a couple times a month for less than an hour. It’s basically a warm up. Like, “Okay, gotta get in the mood. I’ll paint this shoulder pad quickly and move onto whatever project.” Anyway I finished it today.
It’s Batman of course, duh. I referenced that picture from The Dark Knight. You know the one. Anyway, yeah, work has been arting me HARD. That’s why I haven’t updated much. Haven’t touched me comics either. BUT I WILL!
Yuh see, I have this little Batman figure on my desk and a post it note that reads, “Never Give Up.” Because it’s true. Be like Batman!
Scarecrow may have broken his mind, Ra’s his senses, Joker his spirit, Dent his hope, Bane his body, and Talia his heart…
I DID NOT WRITE THE BELOW POEM…I ONLY drew the above picture.
This is the place.
It breathes, it eats, and, at night, beneath a crawling ground fog with the luster of vaporized pearl, it dreams, dreams while tiny predators stage a nightmare ballet in sharp black grass. It is a living thing it has a soul, it has a face.
At night you can almost see it.
At night you can almost imagine what it might look like if the swamp were boiled down to its essence, and distilled into corporeal form; if all the muck, all the forgotten muskrat bones, and all the luscious decay would rise up and wade on two legs through the shallows; if the swamp had a spirit and that spirit walked like a man…
At night, you can almost imagine.
You can stare into those places where the evening has pooled beneath the distant trees, and glimpse an ambiguous shifting of the darkness, something large, large and slow, its movements solemn and inevitable, heavy with clotted, sodden weed that forms its flesh, its skeleton of tortured root creaks with each funereal pace, protesting at the damp and sullen weight, within their sockets its eyes float like blood-poppies in puddles of ink.
You can inhale through flared nostrils, drinking in its musk, green and pungent, there is the delicate scent of mosses and lichens adorning its flanks, there is the dry and acrid aftertaste of the pinmold that spreads across its shoulders, fanning out in a dull gray rash.
You can stand alone in the blind darkness and know that were you to raise your arm, reaching out to its full extremity, your fingernails would brush with something wet, something supple and resilient, something moving.
