Long John

WARNING: POSSIBLE PRETENTIOUSNESS

Sheriff Spencer was a character that grew quickly, but organically. Most of his development happened on the page, as I was drawing him.

In the original sketches, I (for some reason) tried to make him look like a younger Edward James Olmos, but, in my attempt to make him look like somebody real, I lost the style and, suddenly, I had a realistic face in a cartoony world.

I knew the Sheriff was a sad man, a defeated man who, though he maybe still carried an idealism that comes with being a sheriff, realizes how ineffectual he is. I wanted the badge to be morosely ironic. The face I landed on was utilitarian, in a sense––it just came together drawing shapes in my sketchbook, but it captured the exhaustion and weight of inefficacy while still showing the face of a man who used to smile. I guess the phrase is that it was “a kind face.”

I gave the sheriff the coffee cup because I always like drawing characters that have something to do, even if it is drinking a cup of coffee. It’s a focal point, something to follow from panel to panel, from page to page and establish a continuity between the still images (and, perhaps, ignore any bad continuity that may crop up along the way; as long as that coffee cup is right then I’m all right). It was only when I had drawn the second panel of this page that I realized who I was drawing, making a connection with my literature background. For some reason, Spencer looking down into that coffee cup brought to mind a stanza from T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”:

For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured my life out in coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

I’m not an expert prosodic analyst, but this imagery of a man somewhat blindsided as well as accepting of his defeat is powerful. That came to mind as I drew Sheriff Spencer looking into his mug, and my first thought upon that realization made him a much more sympathetic character to me, which altered his dialogue as well as his acting on this page, the previous page, and those still to come.