Following Barney Banks - Sketches for part 2

Off the project happily for two weeks while teaching in Hawaii. I barely thought about this, except for during the plane flight in, where I made these sketches. Mostly looking for other crazy characters to introduce into the gallery of youngsters hanging around the campground where Banks winds up. I want them surreal, funny, possibly avatar-like, something someone might design for a lousy video game.

Next I sketched a few thumbnails for the next pages. Thinking what needs to happen is the introduction of MITCH, the box with dials and a handle that assigns something, or predicts something, or changes something, I don't know. These thumbnails so tiny, I got excited thinking I was working like Brian Eno here, the way he would throw out syllables and rework them until they made words. These half-sketched stick figures were just potential movement, potential compositions.





Plus- more ideas and images. A discarded, broken train car on the beach. For Banks it's a refuge? A stage? Also, a hippo in the water. It's a god, or in my writings, I'm treating it as one. In improv comedy, there's a game of speaking to your God directly, naming it, describing it. I'm doing this here to try to understand this damn hippo...



Next, I get down to drawing again.