One At A Time

“I have incurred a lot of ill will in my day, and sometimes it boils over. There was one time when a whole shipful of men had had enough of me.”

- R. A. Lafferty, “One at a Time”

Sometimes a single sentence is strong enough to burn an image into the mind's eye. This is especially true of Lafferty's writing, where every sentence seems to land a solid hit (or scratch, or tickle, depending on the author's intent) and every punch seems to come from a different direction.

There have been a few illustrations I've done lately where one might look at the work and think, “Strange, I don't remember that part of the story.” This is one of them.

Note how the sleeves attach and note the hammer at the tip of the belt. McSkee “The Odd One” has been taking it one at a time with many a day between.

This was also another example of me trying to find a faster route toward a finished illustration. The background was all drawn into the computer with a stylus, while the character was clicked into existence via vector graphics.

Royal Licorice

 

He was decked out in Navajo beadwork and a Sioux war-bonnet when he spoke at the supermarket in Indianapolis. Indianapolis really meant Indian City, didn’t it?

---R. A. Lafferty, “Royal Licorice”

I read Royal Licorice just as the politicking engines were getting stoked for the 2016 presidential race. So perhaps it is no surprise that it was those aspects of the story that caught my attention and fed the illustration.

In the story, Candidate Johnson is a bumbling and disassociated sort of man. A political game player given renewed time with which to further bumble and dissociate himself (and appropriate other cultures for reelection).

I drew him with an disingenuous smile (referencing the lipless curl of a popular politician) and an even more disingenuous war bonnet; the feathers fanning outward like a peacock (or turkey?), disheveled, and incomplete.

Dressed a mess to impress the masses and failing horribly.