My day job is basically all about thinking through a process. In fact, the way I teach academic writing is rooted in how I draw. I was not a strong student, though it was mostly due to the fact that I hated being a student, which led me to eventually flunking out of college.
After a year, which gave me some time to focus, and a long meeting with the Liberal Arts Dean, I got back into the school I flunked out of, but I knew that wasn’t enough. If I wanted to graduate I’d have to find a way to care about school. I asked myself a simple question, “if I find school difficult to do, what do I already do well and can I apply how I do that to getting schoolwork done?”
Art was the obvious answer––I knew how to make a drawing. So, I disassembled my artistic process and tried to apply it to things like studying and writing papers and, for me, it worked very well.
That kicked off a lifelong interest in this thing called “process” across all spectra of creativity––it’s interesting how so many people can accomplish the same thing but in unique ways. Success is not always about creating a process, but more about finding the process that helps you get stuff done, which is literally all I do for my students.
But that interest persists in my artistic life and––as I’ve become more active on social media like Instagram––I find I’m chronicling my process more and more, moving from the sketchy mess of a layout to the inked lines of a final panel.
While looking through a folder on my desktop titled “Drawing Videos”, I came across one I never finished editing. It was recorded near the end of Chapter 3, so while not immediately relevant, it does show an interesting process I have had to use when making Chapter 4––what happens when I need to redraw a panel?
Enjoying this strange synchronicity (as the beginning of the semester approaches, I find that I ruminate more about process than normal), I decided to finish up the video––complete with commentary––that shows how I go from a page with a very bad panel to a finished page with a much better one.
It’s not a secret that I’m a fan of the ’80s metal band, Twisted Sister. In fact, on this very website I havedrawneachbandmember in my cartoony style to pay tribute to their influence on my life (which was later shared on their official social media channels and still pops up occasionally on their feed, which is cool). Their music––and their attitude––said what I needed to hear at an impressionable age, despite it being nearly a decade after the band had broken up by the time I found them.
A previously unreleased image compiling all five drawings of the members of Twisted Sister.
Knowing that, it’s probably not surprising to hear that I follow the band on various platforms, including that singer Dee Snider.
Earlier this week, a user on Twitter––someone called @ShannaHamm––asked a simple question:
Name the @deesnider song that speaks to you the most and why…go.
After giving it serious thought, I replied with two songs, because I’m an over-achiever when it comes to my passions. First, the title track off of Twisted Sister’s third album, Stay Hungry, as well as the closing track off of Standby For Pain, the second and final album by a post-Twisted band, Widowmaker, and the song, “All Things Must Change.”
@ShannaHamm asked for clarification, so I did my best to summarize my thoughts without going into a multi-tweet tirade:
“Stay Hungry” speaks to me personally, “All Things Must Change” spoke to me in the context of Dee’s life and career. The closest thing to singer/songwriter-metal I can describe. It showed me that heavy metal could be more than teenage angst.
“All Things Must Change”––and the entire album––make up a powerful statement by Dee. Released in 1994, it was a hard time for heavy metal music as alternative rock and roll––spearheaded by the likes of Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and Alice in Chains––took the rains of heavy and angry music from the metal bands that were previously leading the horse.
It seemed to be just as much of a hard time for Dee Snider as he fought to get his new band off the ground with a new sound (their first album was much more traditional ’80s metal) and lyrics that went beyond simple tropes of gruff masculinity and teenage angst.
Instead, Standby For Pain is a portrait of a man looking at––for lack of a better word––the ruins of his career, one that came down simply because culture changed and he flew too close to the sun on wax wings. The songs are painfully personal and revealing and mature––”mature” in a sober, thoughtful, and complicated way. Beyond Dee himself, it stands as a eulogy for an entire genre––and its honesty is nearly unprecedented in metal at that point. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that Dee and his band truly broke new ground with this album by offering such an unvarnished and private look inside a heavy metal musician’s psyche…and pairing it with amazing riffs (seriously, the musicianship on this album is outstanding).
I rebuffed the album initially because it sounded much different than what I expected, but as I gave it time and focused listens, I found much more to mine from these songs that most of Dee’s other music, and it soon became one of my favorite albums of all time, one I pushed onto friends, forcing them to appreciate its artful anger and sadness. Of all his music, this album would be the one thing I would love to talk to Dee about if given the chance to only talk about one album’s worth of music.
So, imagine my surprise when Dee Snider actually responded to my thoughts:
My songs are sometime very personal, trying to share feelings that too often we keep to ourselves. I was going through a rough time when I wrote All Things Must Change. So much was slipping away. Glad you got its truth. https://t.co/aYDyn3ZJrV
I did respond, thanking him for the album, trying to get across how important an album it is to me (and how I think it’s actually an important album to the genre, but that’s just me), knowing he may see it but would not be likely to respond. But then, he did:
Dark time for me and one of realization as well. But is was also the beginning of my climb back to the land of the living. https://t.co/OSwMOUAvog
I may never get to actually have a sit down with Dee and talk about things like the Standby For Pain album, but it’s nice to see that the aggregate personality I assembled for Dee in my head over the years––gathered by sifting through his music, his interviews, his writings––seems to be fairly accurate: a thoughtful, empathetic guy who is more than the wild hair and fuck-off attitude, though that is certainly a major part of him, too (and I’m glad).
To put a bow on this, the website/blog, Metal Head Zone, thought this exchange was newsworthy, building a short article around it. I clicked on it when Twitter showed me the link, not realizing it was built around my tweet (okay, mine and someone else’s, too), thinking it was just the result of some Twitter algorithm that saw me interacting with Dee Snider.
Altogether, it has been a few strange days, but no less memorable and amazing.
I’m never quite sure what to talk about in these commentaries, but I always manage to find something to say.
The big thing with this video is that it officially unveils another new character (aside from the previously announced Geoff)––The Rook––for Chapter 4.
Not out of nowhere, The Rook was mentioned in Chapter 3 by Juan John as being the current holder of Long John’s clothes. It seems she held onto the clothes while her colleague, The Bishop, went to deal with the Juan John problem.
It’s because of Juan’s utterance of her name that I felt like this video wouldn’t technically constitute as a spoiler. Also, without the context of the scene––as well as lacking any colors and lettering––I figured there’s not much risk in keeping the process hidden for the sake of the content.
Let me know what you think of these videos as I’ve been adding commentary; please let me know if there’s anything you would like me to talk about as I ramble over the comically sped-up inking as I would like to give the viewer as focused and interesting commentary that I can possibly provide.
Reprinted from an 1879 column printed in The Chico Morning Chronicle-Record:
'Famous gunfighter––though currently riding under the guise of a bounty hunter––"Long" John Walker's stoic, monolithic presence draws the attention of every room into which he steps, even in spite of his severe penchant towards laconicism. The apparent contradiction extends to his dress, as his already massive frame is extensively layered beneath strata of wool, leather, and cotton garnished with smaller adornments made of ivory and precious stones. As the ostensible leader of the trio of "bounty hunters" known colloquially as "The Johns" (after the fact that all three members share the name, though the record is unreliable), he commands through nuanced gesture, threatens through twitches of the eye, and famously shoots running targets at rifle-distance with his standard Colt model P (I can personally vouch for this feat and while many of his other popular descriptors are the work of dime novels, this claim is irrevocably true). While his motives are kept close to his dandily clothed chest, there is no doubt that no man alive wants to be on the bad end of his gun's sight-line.'
