Demonstration (May 2004)

In the spring of 2004, we undertook an interesting exercise in cartooning, inspired by Lynda Barry's excellent book One Hundred Demons. More to improve our drawing and visual thinking than to plumb any inner recesses, we resolved to draw one demon a day for a hundred days. The best of our results from that exercise are collected in this "oversized" minicomic -- 24 pages of doodles, sketches, and strange ideas.

For each of the demons we chose to present, we include a bit of prose explaining something about the demon: where the idea came from, whom we were imitating, what the demon reminds us of, or what we've come to think of it. Here on this page, for example, (you may click to enlarge) ...

...I have a few words to say about the linguistic origin of the "Dark Abbess," Mike talks about an early "failed" demon and his all-in-one-line satyr (with a nod to our friend Jeff Seymour's Satyrn minicomic), and I acknowledge a visual debt to Dan Clowes (and the "Nunzilla" toy).

We're also able to juxtapose a few demons in interesting ways, as you can see on this page:


If you're not deeply involved with comics, you might appreciate the set of footnotes that we include in this book, giving a little more detail about a few of the people we reference in our explanations and captions. Although there's no story in this book, and although some of my early drawings in the project are kind of clumsy, there are a lot of ways in which Demonstration serves as a nice introduction to our visual style or our collaborative oeuvre.

We've been pleased to see the demons pop up in a few other places, too. A couple of them had cameos in Satisfactory Comics #5, in among the other weirdies in the Museum of the Horrible, even before we'd finished our fivescore. Tom Motley also used quite a few of them (including my demonic self-portrait) in his first story for the Mapjam.

Since Mike posted a little last week about his devotion to Walt Kelly, I thought I ought to include an image of this little guy, who is one of my favorite results of the project, and who is one of the critters that cropped up in Satisfactory #5:


Demonstration is 24 pages, at 8 1/2" by 7". Each cover is different: the demons on the cover are rubber-stamped on there, and we had several different stamps to choose from. (Some covers feature doodles instead of or in addition to the rubber stamps.)



If you'd like a copy, you can buy it at our Storenvy shop.



RARR!