The Great Arturo Aleatore

Here's another of those randomly-generated strips.

The two dealt panels, #2 and #4, are both swipes. If I recall correctly, one is from the Land of Nod catalog and the other is from the first trade of Paul Grist's Mudman. This is probably another one of those strips that will look better when it's reformatted out of the 2x2 grid.

As ever, I welcome your comments and input.

AlphaBots: A is for Astro Boy

I've been trying to decide whether I have time to do AlphaBots. After all, I had to bail from AlphaBooks after the letter Q, and I don't have a whole lot more time this semester, even though I have committed myself (apparently) to a weird new drawing project.

And then I thought, well, what if I combined the two projects? I'm supposed to have a deck full of random drawings; what if twenty-six of those random drawings, over the next twenty-six weeks, included an alphabet of robots, all drawn from different sources?

(The text in my Alphabots panels is still going to come from a lot of random places; this particular one is a version of a recent tweet by Matt Wiegle, edited for brevity.)

Don't see Astro Boy in that panel? (It's swiped from Tezuka's 1967 story "The Faceless Robot," which appears in the eighth volume of the Dark Horse Astro Boy reprints.) Oh, he's just little.

Do you think I'll make it all the way to "Z is for Zhora"?

King Kirby Day 2012

Today would have been Jack Kirby's ninety-fifth birthday.

As I have for the past couple of years, I spent a little time today copying a panel drawn by Kirby that lodged in my visual imagination when I was a kid and never completely got dislodged.

Don't look at it too closely. My work really suffered from a combination of scale and tool choice: I was drawing this way too small for it to get inked well with my ready-to-hand combo of brush pen and medium-fine Rapidograph. The colors are pretty nice, though.

Why do I do this? The pictures still, after all these years, have an eerie power for me, most of which comes (I think) from the seriousness with which I studied them when I was little.

Suppose you're walking in a ruined theater, where no one has set foot for twenty years. There's a little old upright piano in the dusty backstage wings, and out of curiosity you plink out a chord. The notes are hollow, weak, and a little sour, but you have to be impressed that they still play.

That's the way it is for me with these pictures. I think I would recognize that "organic director" in any context, even though Kirby only drew it once. (Lightray refashions it into something less horrible before we get another clear look at it.)

This year, I invited a few of my friends to join me in my observances.

Scott Koblish drew a panel from Kirby's run on Captain America.

Check out Ben Towle's Lockjaw pinup.

And dig Damien's Mark Moonrider.

I didn't have to invite Bully to commemorate the occasion, of course. He did it all on his own.

Ditto, Adam Koford, natch.

And Evan Dorkin? Nuff said.

Alphabooksbeasts: L is for Lockjaw and Lockheed

This week's non-Donjon Alphabooks entry comes from some of my favorite books when I was a kid and a teenager. That is, if you're willing to count them as books.*

I think it will surprise no one to learn that I read a few Marvel Comics between the ages of four or five and fifteen or twenty. I was pretty into The X-Men during the Byrne-Smith-Romita years, but nowadays I'd toss those books on the pyre in favor of some old-school Stan-and-Jack Fantastic Four. That's the real stuff.

So let's say L is for Lockjaw and Lockheed.

Can you tell from my inking which of these characters I'm more fond of?

This is another drawing that didn't get much time to develop (owing to the fact that I only finished "K" yesterday and had three ideas for entries today). In fact, I used my preliminary doodle as pencils, taping it into my notebook and tracing with a brush through the flimsy Moleskine paper. Here's the doodle:

Do you recognize the pose, or the background I swiped for the finished drawing? Identify the source (of both; it's the same source) in the comments section below, and I will happily send you a couple of alphabet minicomics or some other suitable back-issue prize.

Next week: things get deep (and briny).

*I know I'm stretching the definition of "books" for the second week in a row. All I can say is (a.) comics, even superhero comics, are fair game, (b.) these guys are definitely in some "books" now if they weren't then, and (c.) if you're anxious about it I have another post for you.

Alphabeasts: E is for Erina

I was thinking about hoaxing up a different source for this week's "Alphabeasts," but let me come right out and admit the truth: I got this week's critter from our friend (and the organizer of these alphabet projects) Ben Towle.



You see, when I say that E is for Erina, I am borrowing a demon from his (Almost) 100 Demons minicomic, which I think mainly survives as this tag on Ben's blog. (Ben, if the mini is still in print, let me know how people can order it!)

Ben's demons represent an awesome amount of visual inventiveness, and in a way it's a shame that I'm not drawing more of them. But if you want to build a whole alphabet out of Ben's demons, though, let me tell you right now that there aren't entries for Q, W, X, or Y. (So much for that plan.)

Looking at Ben's original Erina, I was stumped for a little while about how to pose my version. This is probably the single creature in my "Alphabeasts" set about which I have the least information—just a name and a single drawing.



At first, I thought that since the opposable thumbs give the Erina more ability to manipulate the world, I'd try to make the six-limbed canine devious, tricky, and canny ...



But looking again at Ben's drawing, the erina looked to me a lot more lupine than coyotine, so I rethought my ideas about the erina as a trickster demon. And since the erina seems to be a lone wolf, not a pack creature, I thought, "What's the main personality characteristic of the wolf?"

Then, looking yet a third time at Ben's drawing, it occurred to me that the erina is much sturdier even than the largest living canine—those are some thick legs. And so, I thought, it must be pretty big. Let's have it eating a bison.



I leave it for you to speculate about what it might be defending its kill against.

By the way, Ben's demons happen to have been created independently right around the same time that Mike and I were drawing our own sets of a hundred demons. I've still got copies of our Demonstration minicomic, if you're interested in getting a copy of it...

For next week, I have a few options. What do you think I should draw for the letter F?



You've got until Friday evening to tell me.

King Kirby Day 2011

Today would have been Jack Kirby's ninety-fourth birthday, and I wanted to celebrate the day as I did last year: by swiping one of the panels drawn by Kirby that was burned into my visual memory at an early age and lives there to this day.

I don't have much time to explain why I chose this particular panel—that'll be a post for another day, soon. But if you've seen the Favorites zine, this is a panel from the comic I wrote about.



Other people (and little stuffed bulls) will surely honor Kirby better. But I wanted to make sure I didn't let the anniversary of his birth pass without peering again into the mysterious power his images have over me.

Animal Alphabet: R is for Rhea

When I told Mike that this week's entry in the Animal Alphabet was going to be a creature connected to Darwin, Mike said, "So R is for remora!" And I invite you to linger for a moment on the mental image of a sharksucker stuck to our hero Charles.

But no, that's not what I had in mind.

In fact, R is for rhea. Specifically, it's for the lesser rhea, which used to go by the name Rhea darwinii and still is sometimes known as Darwin's rhea.



I'm willing to give a prize to the first person who identifies the source of that background.

You might already know why this ratite is linked to Darwin. During the Beagle voyage, while collecting specimens in Patagonia, Darwin was searching for a rumored smaller species of rhea. After a good deal of bootless hunting, as he tucked in to a meal, he recognized that the bird he was eating was, in fact, the undescribed species he'd been searching for. In other words, he discovered a new species on his plate.

Next week: a crazy fish with a crazy name.

Animal Alphabet: C is for Coati

For this week's entry in the Animal Alphabet, I picked out a creature I knew by another name.

Did you know there's actually no such thing as a coatimundi? Apparently people at some stage were confused by the differing habits of the solitary male and the extremely social female, and construed them as belonging to separate species; really, they're all coatis.

I plan to take my correction in stride. In fact, I've been happy to discover that the gangs formed by mama coatis and their kits are super cute. You should see them in the BBC Life episode about mammals: super cute, I say. (And, like many social animals, they can apparently be raised by people as pets.)

Anyway, C is for COATI.



Do you recognize what I'm swiping there? Do you want a prize for recognizing it, or just bonus points?

And if I said coati, koala, coati, koala, coati, koala long enough, would I get one of those critters for my very own? (Alas, I'm sure neither would thrive in Vermont.)

Doodle Penance: "8 scenes comics using pronouns"

This week's "Doodle Penance" is going to be unusual, because it's also sort of a trivia contest for you, our devoted (or casual) reader. The term that inspired this comes from someone who was searching for "8 scenes comics using pronouns."

Below you will find eight panels that feature ambiguous pronoun reference, or unclear antecedent.

I leave it to you, Dear Reader, to identify the things to which the pronouns in the following panels refer. (Mike and I have redrawn the panels, or else it wouldn't be a Doodle Penance, and at least one of the panels has been edited to remove the referent.)

For each item in this quiz, the correct answer will be "D: None of the above." Your task is to ferret out and state the actual, specific answer. You can put your answers in the comments section, or you can email your replies to isaac dot cates at aya dot yale dot edu, if you're worried about giving a good answer away.

The person with the most correct answers by the end of the week, or the first person to get all eight, will win a prize from the Satisfactory Comics back-issue archives.

UPDATE! A winner has been chosen! Stay tuned for an answer key!

Here are the questions:


1.


A. Spiro Agnew.
B. Alfred E. Newman.
C. The artist who put my eyebrows on the horizon line.
D. None of the above.


2.


A. Having my horns tickled.
B. Awesome old folklore.
C. Ron Perlman's singing voice.
D. None of the above.


3.


A. Passing my Classics final.
B. Setting all forty-eight VCRs.
C. Applying antiperspirant.
D. None of the above.


4.


A. My pet anole.
B. My new composition for panflute and timpani.
C. My hairstyle.
D. None of the above.


5.


A. A copy of Playboy from the '70s.
B. The Special Edition of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
C. A big bag of Cheetos.
D. None of the above.


6.

A. The collapse of Lehman Brothers.
B. The skyrocketing cost of ink.
C. The rise of furrydom.
D. None of the above.


7.

A. The hatching of a tyrannosaur egg.
B. The blooming of a hybrid tulip.
C. The reconciliation of Alan Moore and Paul Levitz.
D. None of the above.


8.

A. The publication of The Collected Pogo.
B. The creation of heart-friendly Krispy Kremes.
C. The musical adaptation of the film adaptation of the graphic-novel adaptation of a postmodern mystery novella.
D. None of the above.

Doodle Penance: "elijah and the widow bread craft"

This week's "Doodle Penance" post comes to us from an anonymous Google-searcher (aren't they all anonymous?) who wanted to find "elijah and the widow bread craft."

I can understand why this searcher must have been frustrated. The encounter between Elijah and the Widow of Zarephath comes up fairly frequently in history paintings, as in this piece by Bernardo Strozzi—



—but there are relatively few paintings of Elijah's first, rejected plea for the widow's son's resuscitation.

You see, the Bible leaves a lot of these details out, but after the widow's son dies, Elijah improvises a solution with a few slices of bread and some crusts, hoping that God will breathe the boy's soul back into a new, healthy body:



The widow is apparently not satisfied with this undeniably big favor. So Elijah has to pray again, getting the soul into the boy's old body, along with the additional request that the old body not be sick any more. What a hassle, right?

One thing the Bible leaves out, but this image makes clear, is that there was a big mess to be cleaned up when the widow wigged. Because, you see, that jug of oil was blessed in such a way that it would never be empty. When she dropped it on the floor, it kept pouring out oil until the whole room was ankle-deep in deliciousness.

But fictive things wink as they will, don't you know.

I haven't been able to track down the original Renaissance painting of this image with Google, so I guess our google-searcher will have to console him- or herself with my cartoon rendition. Still, here are a couple of notes I took when I was looking at it.



Okay, Mike— What have you got?

...Okay, Isaac! I'll show you soon! (But first, I will violate protocol to say that I really like your doodle--indeed, I LOL'ed.)

Truth be told, I understood the search term a little differently. Everyone knows the story of Elijah's departure in a mystical vessel, the chariot of fire. And many believe that someday Elijah is fated to return, to herald the coming of the Messiah. Some of those who think they know who the Messiah is have called that figure "the bread of life." So what more appropriate vessel could Elijah use for his later, annunciatory visit than a vessel made not of fire but of the staff of life, bread, itself? And what more symbolic emblem to fill the sails of the One who will overturn Death than the deadly hourglass of the black widow spider, thereby reclaiming a terrible image just as the cross, that tool of capital torture, was reclaimed as the token of resurrection to the life everlasting?


Yes...here comes Elijah, sailing with word of the Messiah on the S. S. The Widow, a craft made of bread. I'm sure that's what our Google-seeker was looking for.

Swipe File #7: In the Air with Brancusi & E. H. Shepard

Has it really been six months since the last Swipe File post? Indeed it has. Our Elfworld story is the monster that ate the blog! Alternatively, it's the hero that rescued us from nostalgic navel-gazing, but here I go again with the magnifying glass on the details of comics past...

In issue 4 of Satisfactory Comics, two of our swipes featured birds. One was our swipe of museum art, Brancusi's beautiful Bird in Space, which can be seen at the Guggenheim in Manhattan or right here in an image from the Gugg's website.

We owed this museum swipe to our friend and contributor Steve Newman, who submitted "Brancusi's Bird in Space" in response to our appeal for "a noun or noun phrase" that would be "featured prominently in a fable or adventure story." That's how we ended up making a character out of the sculpture--the Golden Bird of Mystery:


I think this remains our only swipe from a sculpture thus far.

The other bird featured in issue 4 is the beloved Owl (aka Wol) from A. A. Milne's Winnie-the Pooh, as illustrated by E. H. Shepard. He's only one of six owls included in this scene featuring the Parliament of Owls, but apparently the Parliament meets at his own house:


That's Owl at the top right, of course.

When I'm busy in my office but not so busy that I can't receive visitors, I put a sign on my door that says "Please knock if an answer is required," in homage to Owl. And here's an inadvertent homage to Shepard: the person who sold me the scanner I used to prepare this post owns an original Shepard pencil drawing of Pooh-related art. Too bad he wasn't selling that for cheap!

Page 7, Inked

I had a cloudy bunch of pencils for page seven before I left town for SPX, and I'm only now, a couple of weeks later, done with the inks. But I've had a very busy couple of weeks.

The good news is that we've just got three pages to go. (The bad news, of course, is that we have to wrap up the story somehow in those three pages and still satisfy our final set of constraints.)

Here's the way page seven seems to have turned out. Please click on the picture to enlarge it to legible size.

That kick to the jaw, by the way, is totally dedicated to Chris Sims of the Invincible Super-Blog.

You may also wish to compare the thumbnail of p. 7 with this slightly distorted version of Marcel Duchamp's most famous painting, Nude Descending a Staircase.


This version of Nude Descending is wider than the original, so that I could put it under my page and lightbox the layout of the painting directly. In fact, I was still doing that when I had inked every one of the figures on the page, to get little areas of light and dark to "match up," not that it matters. Not very much of the original comes through, in the end, but I hope that some of the kinetic, multiplanar chaos carries over. When I color this image, I'll try to stick to a yellowy earthtone palette, which should help make the swipe more noticeable. (That will probably also make the captions easier to find in amid all those lines.)

I have to say, it was fun to draw the figures a little larger this time.

Swipe File #6: At Sea with Géricault, Horrocks, & Escher

When I was a young lad, I first saw many of the better-known masterpieces of the Western art tradition in a multi-volume series of Time-Life books about such artists as Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Goya, and Cézanne (I believe that the lone American artist in the series was Winslow Homer, and the only living artist represented—at least, he was still alive when my mother bought the series—was Picasso). The books naturally provided some context for each of the eponymous artists, so the book on Goya, for example, featured work by his predecessor Velázquez, and the book on Picasso had work by Braque, Matisse, and the like.

I mention this simply because I have the hardest time remembering that the painting that inspired the following swipe (from Satisfactory Comics #3) isn't by Delacroix, because I first saw its original in the volume devoted to him:

No, credit for the famous painting of The Raft of the "Medusa" belongs to Géricault:

Apparently, though, young Delacroix posed as one of the dying men for this painting, so its place in a book about his own work goes beyond art history into personal history.

Also apparently, we can't respect the seriousness of masterpieces like this one. We couldn't even respect the high seriousness of Dylan Horrocks's wonderful graphic novel Hicksville, because we plopped three of its characters into the soup just below our Medusa-raft:

Recognize these guys from Horrocks's original? Here they are, not staring dumbly at the viewer but engaging the reader with some heady subjects:

Our swipe might have looked better if it were inked with a brush, as in Horrocks's own drawing (apart from the facial tattoos, which look drawn with a pen). Alas, at the time of this swipe we were still toiling with Micron felt-tips for the most part.

We later treated M. C. Escher's work with slightly more respect—though it's largely satire-proof, since his work usually concerns formal experiment and visual play rather than overtly "serious" matters like death at sea or colonial expropriation of land. That said, his work does prompt interesting reflections on perception and identity, and the extent to which identity is determined by what and how one sees. Consider the serious failure in the following swipe, from Satisfactory #4:

This image quotes elements from Escher's Three Worlds, but it only shows two of the worlds—the world underwater, where the fish waits, and the world atop the water's surface, where the leaves float. But Escher's original shows a third world, the world of the neighboring land, in the reflection of trees across the surface of the water:

I think it's a beautiful image, and I think it offers a shrewd retort to those of us who are too quick to deny depth to Escher because of the shiny surface of his art.

***
Next in the Swipe File series: In the Air...

Swipe File #5: Mike (Hellboy) Mignola

In a comment to one of Isaac's recent posts, the blogger Bully, the Little Stuffed Bull, quibbled with our use of the term "swipe" to refer to any sort of artistic imitation, be it homage, parody, or outright copying, even when there is no attempt to conceal the influence (or source) being imitated (or pilfered). I readily grant that the narrower sense of "swipe" usually connotes artistic skullduggery, but we will continue to use the term in the wider sense of all the many kinds of imitation, whether under- or overhanded—though of course our own swipes are all of the latter variety.

That variety can be pretty various, even when it involves swipes from a single artist. Today's case in point: Mike Mignola, whose work first came to Isaac's attention in his fine Hellboy series. In Satisfactory #5, we offered a classic swipe of a specific image from Mignola's hilarious one-shot The Amazing Screw-On Head:
The picture behind Cassia on the wall of the Museum of the Horrible comes from a series of pin-ups of "three horrible old women and a monkey [sic]." We swiped the old women in previous panels, not posted here; here's the last of the pin-ups in Mignola's original:

Our simian isn't as squat as Mignola's, but we did strive to make it a very close copy. (I have to say, though, that the beast looks more like a chimpanzee than a monkey to me—and, as Isaac would be the first to tell you, a monkey ain't no ape. See Satisfactory #7 for more details!)

This wasn't our first imitation of Mignola, however. Two issues earlier, we followed Mignola's compositional lead in designing the cover to our untitled maritime adventure. Though Isaac's original post about Satisfactory #3 shows just the front cover of the comic, the issue actually features our lone wraparound cover, explicitly identified in the extreme left margin as an “homage to Mike Mignola”:

It’s not based on any particular Mignola image, but the overall design incorporates elements learned from Isaac's close scrutiny of many of Mignola's covers. The main principle at work on the front cover (the right-hand side of the above image) is the use of a triangle as the basic shape to organize the composition. That principle may not be very evident in our finished product, but it did determine the overall arrangement of our three main characters, and it seemed like a real insight into Mignola’s practice, at least when it comes to his covers for the collected volumes focusing on Hellboy. Take a look for yourself:



It works in group shots, too, even when the background looks busy:

See what I mean? Triangles.

Beyond that compositional tactic, we obviously exaggerated the black and white contrasts throughout our drawing. Black and white contrasts were also nicely showcased in the inset drawing of a magpie on the back cover (to the left of our picture above), a discrete scene of quiet natural calm set against the menace of our silhouetted Kraken. This contrasting image was another stylistic move borrowed from Mignola, but my own library of his work is too meager for me to provide our models, and those quieter images aren't easily found in an online image search (they tend to be printed on back covers and non-story pages, which don't lend themselves to advertising). You'll just have to handle an actual Hellboy volume to see examples of such inset drawings by Mignola himself.

Overall, swiping different aspects of a given cartoonist's work, such as Mignola's, has helped us diversify our approaches to various artistic matters, from rendering individual images (as with our chimp) to page layout (as in our cover) to character design (I'm pretty sure there's a touch of Mignola in our beloved cannibal mermaids, also from issue #3). There's technical value to be had in the simpler, classic swipe—it does take a degree of skill to imitate a drawing closely, and it's useful to see where our drawing of a chimp fails to match Mignola's exactly—but there's even greater utility in learning principles and techniques that can be abstracted from any specific drawing so as to solve new artistic puzzles in other contexts.

I want to conclude with a bit of pre-Satisfactory silliness that also featured a nod to Mignola. In October 2001 I drew my first minicomic, a belated birthday present for Isaac called Isaac Comics and Stories. All but one of the stories and features relied on swipes of characters from comics that Isaac particularly loved at the time, and Mike Mignola's Hellboy had a cameo on the back cover—or at least part of him did, as one element in a very feeble homage to Chris Ware's construction projects:


Why I indicated the Right Hand of Doom with a B escapes me at this juncture, as does the reason for my perverse habit of illustrating Isaac with a widow's peak (he hasn't got one, and I don't draw him that way anymore). In any case, I'm not sure exactly how to classify this image in the taxonomy of swipes; but we all remember what Eddie Campbell thinks of "definers," don't we?

Swipe File #4: Herriman, Sacco, Moore & Gibbons

Still a few comics swipes to mention from Satisfactory Comics #2. We almost fudged the comics swipes in this issue, having forgotten to include one in the first story we produced, and in the second story Isaac's choice of swipe was obscure enough that he pointed it out in a note on one of the inside covers. Here's what it looks like:

Now pretend you hadn't read the title of this post. Would you have known it for an image borrowed from George Herriman's Krazy Kat of April 11, 1926?
Now might be a good time for me to apologize to Herriman—and to Isaac—for my less-than-perfect imitation in the inks on our swipe of this curious clock. When I inked this story, I was (unusually) not across a table from Isaac, nor was I even in Connecticut. In fact, I was nowhere near my copy of the first volume of the Fantagraphics Krazy & Ignatz series, where Isaac found that image, so I stuck as closely to his pencils as I could (and now the inker's apology morphs into blame for the penciler—nice!).

In context on Herriman's original page, the clock is strictly filler, one of many central panels that ran in Krazy Kat for a while which were narratively unimportant (the syndicate required page layouts that were susceptible to various resizings and reshapings, which necessitated the odd panel that could be omitted). Still, Herriman routinely made these spare panels interesting to look at, and their jarring difference from everything else on the page can create an odd effect. Something of that effect may come through for the swipe in the context of Isaac's story, where it's part of the furniture of a dream landscape. Herriman's usual Coconino County backgrounds often seem dreamlike in their ever-shifting contours, so I suspect that Isaac's swipe also had its tonal role to play in this sequence, quite apart from its service in filling our swipe quota.

There were at least two other likely reasons for Isaac to have swiped Herriman in this issue. First, he admires Herriman more than Kelly, and since I'd already put a Kelly swipe in issue #1 it was time to honor the cartoonist that Kelly himself admired the most. Second, he had plunged headlong into that first volume of Krazy & Ignatz, then hot off the presses, and the material was fresh in his brain (with alarming consequences for the prose of his emails).

This second reason—the currency of certain comics in our reading—has accounted for a number of our swipe choices. It went some way toward the decision to include a tiny image of Joe Sacco in the crowd scene on the cover to the Yeliz half of the comic:

We'd been reading Joe's work a lot around the time we assembled this issue, and putting him on the cover was our brainstorm to squeeze a swipe into this half of the comic after we'd left one out of the story proper. It also seemed appropriate because one of Joe's most impressive strengths as a cartoonist (and specifically as a cartoon journalist) is his composition of outdoor crowd scenes. In this, our first such scene, our wobbly grasp of perspective is woefully evident—the man being snake-charmed to the left of the panel looks like a giant in the uncropped image—but we got better at that over time.

We also got better at our cartoon self-portraits, which look lousy in this drawing; but then, Joe Sacco doesn't really look like his self-portrait, either:
I know this because Isaac and I had the distinct pleasure of spending some time with Joe at an academic conference on comics that was held at the University of Florida in January 2002, and I got to see Joe's irises with my own eyes (similarly endowed, however rarely I draw them). Joe was very generous with his time and his knowledge back then, and on later occasions, too. If any of you blog-readers have yet to read his work—whether his long-form comics journalism in Palestine, Safe Area Gorazde, and The Fixer or his shorter stories collected in Notes from a Defeatist and But I Like It—then I urge you to seek it out!

There's one more swipe from issue #2, from the cover to Isaac's story "Getting Over Laura." This time the swipe comes as part of another one of our "extra features" repeated in each issue, namely our self-portraits. Isaac had a little fun with it by placing us at a Hallowe'en party with masks on our faces. He modeled them on actual masks that we had each made for Hallowe'en years earlier—in Isaac's case, an awesome papier-mâché insect mask [Edit: plaster, actually], and in my case, a familiar cloth confection topped with a hat:

Yep, in middle school I went as Rorschach for Hallowe'en. But the pattern that Isaac pictured wasn't the one I made for myself—that would have required too much sewing! My much simpler mask was based on this Dave Gibbons drawing from the first issue of his and Alan Moore's Watchmen:
It's Rorschach shocked into silence after being teleported away from Doctor Manhattan and Laurie Juspeczyk. Me, I was shocked into silence when I thought about Dave Gibbons carefully inking all those little parallel lines in the fence, making sure that each bit of wire overlapped its neighbor in the appropriate way. Whew! And I thought sewing was tedious!