My comics are hyper-sigils too

First, here, at long last, is my spankin' new, all-deluxe, Collector's Edition DVD version of Cubicles, my 2006 24 Hour Comic. Click it or stick it, chumps:



You may have already read the wretched thing (and if you haven't, get ta steppin'), but the sweet feature I'm proudest of on this dee-luxe go-round is the video journal. Much like last year, I recorded a little diary entry at the completion of each page, but this year I've stepped it up to video, rather than audio only. Now you get to watch me waste away as well as listen. Fun for you and the kids!

Also, there's a wee bit of Jer-in-action video magic buried in the subsequent pages of the 24 Hour Experience link, courtesy of Joe and Rebecca Taylor. Give it a click or two.

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Not sure if you managed to watch the Grant video I posted a few weeks back, but, if you have, you probably thought a little about magic. And spells. And sigils.

Grant swears up and down that his comic (the still-sublime-after-all-these-years Invisibles) acted as a sort of sigil, or even "hyper-sigil", casting a spell over his own life and world. The events he wrote about literally magicked themselves into reality and he began to experience duplicate scenarios as the characters he'd written, particularly the ones he identified with the most.

Maybe bullshit, probably bullshit, but you can't help but wonder.

And the past few days, I've been disturbed by the fact that I keep running into the same friggin' person over and over again, a person with a seemingly liquid identity, just like Charley experienced in Cubicles.

She's a short, middle-aged latina woman with sharp, distinct features and she was the cashier that helped me yesterday at Office Depot. 10 minutes later, she was the cashier that helped me at Target. And today, she stood in front of me in line at the bank, wearing her work uniform: Subway.

If it's not the same woman, they're triplets. This is no joke.

Or. And hang with me. My comic made this happen.

Go ahead. Laugh. I'm a lunatic and a narcissist.

Comics as magic objects, as spell-casting iconography. Tt!

And then I remembered Calvin Carson and the Ghost of John Lennon.

Backstory:

I can't remember a time when I didn't regularly draw little comics for myself, for my own amusement. In high school, I created a character (an anthropomorphized lion) in the hopes that he might become our school's mascot. I drew a few pages of comics about him, had some t-shirts printed, called him "Calvin" and that was that. Nobody remembers but me.

When I was 17, I made a new incarnation of Calvin: now he was a skinny white kid with blondish hair, a high school student. He dressed like me and acted like me and was only a little bit better looking than me. I began a comic about Calvin Carson's Adventures in the Pod Dimension, or something like that. Poorly-conceived sci-fi. Again, yawn.

College: I wrote him into a play for our theater group, Remnant, and even played the part of Calvin when we toured our show. Calvin as a post-college, failed artist (my worst fears realized).

Later, I wrote my first screenplay. The main character? Take a guess.

I was Calvin. I fixated on this character and identified with him. I wanted to will him into existence.

And in 1995, I met Carey Moyer.

I really wanted to ask her out, but I was not a ladies' man and I just didn't have the stones. Friends gave me encouragement, but I was jelly. Frustrated, I drew a comic starring, surprise, Calvin.

I called it Calvin Carson and the Ghost of John Lennon.

The plot, in a nutshell: Calvin obsesses over Christine, his object of desire. After failed attempts to ask her to the Homecoming dance, he goes home, draws a circle on the ground, lights candles and begins to chant a magic incantation made up of John Lennon lyrics. A ghostly Lennon appears, assists Calvin, and the three bop off to the dance.

That's where the comic stops, 8.5 pages in. I never did finish it.

But the day I worked up the nerve to finally ask out Carey, I concentrated on that comic. I studied it. I dressed in my Calvin clothes, trudged over to her dorm, and did it.

That was 11 years and two wedding rings ago.

So here's where the story gets embarrassing, because I don't know what to think. But I have to ask and, while I'm asking, I might as well punctuate my embarrassment by publishing it on the internet:

What if Calvin Carson was my sigil?

Am I casting spells without knowing it? Does it work that way? Can it?

Am I losing my mind?

Lunatic and narcissist. Let's go with that.

Labels: comics

posted by Jeremy Bear 7:30 PM

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