Little Muse

The little art fairy looked so light on her feet as she skipped along the desk. In truth most of her weight was carried by her wings that subtly fluttered and sprinkled dandruff everywhere. Or moult. What are you supposed to call that stuff? Fairy dust makes it sound very romantic. It disappears quickly unless preserved somehow, so it must be good eating for microscopic organisms. I don’t feel the need to collect it anymore. I used to, when she first showed up. I’d put it in little jars and huff it to hear the music of the spheres, see new colours and shapes and all that cosmic jazz. When she realized what I was using it for, she told me to snort it straight from the source so it’d be more potent. It do be like that…

When I was a boy, growing up in rural Kentucky, I had the best friend a boy could hope for; a weirdo uncle who bought me the kinds of comics my parents wouldn’t. In those pages I fell in love with art. Little Nemo by Winsor McCay, First Kingdom by Jack Katz, Cerebus by Dave Sim, series after series by people like Neal Adams, Barry Windsor-Smith, Rick Veitch, Bill Sienkiewicz, Walt Simonson, Art Adams… I knew that THAT was what I wanted to do. I wanted to draw comics. I didn’t really read the words that much. I studied the lettering, sure, but who cares about plot? I spent my adolescence learning how to draw, to paint, to apply screen tones and do perspective and panelling and shading and figure-drawing and all that shit. My room was filled with drawing guides and different sizes of paper, pens, pencils, erasers, rulers, sharpeners, markers, ink-brushes, canvases, watercolours, oil colours… just everything. I’d go out with a camera to take pictures of stuff to trace and reference for practice. I didn’t do much schoolwork in those days and my parents were extremely worried my bad habits would lead to me not having a proper career as an adult. That concern was changed when I was 17.

There’s this thing called “Devonian Berea Sandstone” underneath our feet in Kentucky. Under the land our family owns. Oil was discovered there. We became independently wealthy, and all of a sudden it didn’t matter two shits what any of us wanted to do with our lives, we could do it and money was no concern. So I got into an actual art school. Graduating from that, I went right back to making the stuff I wanted to make, this time with the intention of self-publishing it. There was a problem though. I had no idea what to draw. Years of learning things from professional teachers, developing skills and grinding away hours at getting really, really good… and there was nothing. I couldn’t make anything when nobody was telling me what to do. So I did the sensible thing and sold out.

Working for big comic book companies drawing superheroes is only fulfilling if you really love it. I didn’t. I just needed to draw, so I took their pithy pay checks and drew what I was told to the best of my ability. I became a sought-after artist, much like my idols. I got to meet many of them and they treated me with respect. Some asked if I was going to “make my own stuff” to which I shrugged and said “maybe if I come up with a good story to tell”. I was a star for a while, then my fame receded in favour of other new faces and I became just another reliable professional in the industry, someone who got his stuff done on time, didn’t make waves or rock the boat and nobody was enemies with. I could fill in as an inker or colourist or letterer or do cover art whenever needed, and I did. I enjoyed the work itself, but something was missing. I looked at some of the hottest artists around, who started saying they didn’t need writers and could do whatever they wanted by themselves. They tried. Most of their output sucked without good writers, and their art got steadily worse too when they were trying to wrap their heads around stories they weren’t equipped to tell. They asked me to join their little revolution. I said no. I kept my head down and kept drawing what others told me to. I was better than those guys, if I do say so myself. History can be the judge, hey?

It must’ve come as a shock to a lot of people when I quit the big companies with little warning and moved into a cabin in the woods. Comic Book Journal or Wizard or someone called to interview me about it and all I told them was that I’d sent them a letter to publish, same as publishers I’d worked for. My letter consisted of a picture of some meadows and hills and such, and had some of my finest, Eisnerian hand-lettering above it, citing a poem by William Allingham:

			Up the airy mountain,
			Down the rushy glen,
			We daren’t go a-hunting
			For fear of little men;
			Wee folk, good folk,
			Trooping all together;
			Green jacket, red cap,
			And white owl’s feather!

A cryptic answer and one that for years would be the last thing the world would hear of me. My family cared little about my comings and goings at this point, so they weren’t overly concerned with me moving into the deep wilderness with no phone lines. My mail was forwarded to a drop box in the nearest town, so if a journalist REALLY wanted to find me they could have. I guess I wasn’t that interesting news. But I wasn’t exactly hoping to be disturbed. I had found my calling, my inspiration… my muse.

One night I had been in the balcony of the apartment I then lived in, smoking while painting the cityscape half-assedly. Nobody had told me to do so, and it was hard to force myself. I tried to pretend I was doing a study for the cover of Moon Knight or something. I opened a beer. I drank a lot those days, stayed up late and would drag myself to the ol’ drawing board after noon to do my job. I sighed.
“Not working out?” a voice asked.
I turned around, alarmed. Nobody was there. Did I hear a voice from another balcony? I got up and looked around. Nobody else was out.
“You know the skies in the big cities are so boring” the voice said again. I turned and turned and couldn’t tell where it was coming from. I entertained the notion I had gone insane.
“I mean, with all the artificial lights you can’t see the stars. Your painting would be so pretty with a lot of starry sky. I wonder which constellations would be up there if we could see them…”
The voice was coming from much closer by now. My cigarette dropped and burned my bare foot.
“Gah!” I cried out and spilled my beer.
“Yeah, I get that way too when things don’t work out. But hey, just because we can’t see the stars doesn’t mean we can’t put them up there! Did you know you can make really cool starry skies if you use a toothbrush to apply the paint? I met this guy in Canada who showed me that!”
That’s when I was sure the voice was inside my head, it, or she, was describing a technique I had read Dave Sim and Gerhard using to do the covers of the fourth part of the Mothers & Daughters arc in Cerebus.  I decided to humour the voice.
“There’s no room for stars in that picture. The buildings take up too much of the top of it” I said.
“Well phooey to you! I’m putting in stars, here and here and maybe over there…” and that’s when I saw her.

A tiny, butterfly-winged woman in a hippie-dress and a woolly cap, a knapsack hanging from her shoulder, her hair in twin braids and freckles on her face, was dancing in the air around my painting and plotting white paint in the skies of it with what appeared to be my unused guest-brush (I didn’t have people stay the night after I caught Del Close trying to eat magic mushrooms in the bathroom) finally convincing me I had lost my mind for good. Except that the paint really did appear on the canvas. The stars gave it some nice character too, some soul that had been missing. The fairy must’ve been a figment of my shattered mind, a projection guiding my hand. This was fine. I sipped my beer and nodded approvingly at my accomplishment.
“The stars are an improvement”
“Aren’t they just? You know this one time I just set up a canvas on a rig that I could lie underneath of so I could stare at the Milky Way and paint it as I saw it, but then bits of the paint would fall on me and the ground, and in the morning I saw that the real work of art was the cloth I’d been lying down on” the fairy explained enthusiastically, puffing her modest chest and twirling in the air with her hands on her hips. She was describing an experience I’d never had myself, which began calling to question whether or not she was just a figment of my imagination, or something real. Something real… no, couldn’t be.
“You look like you’re awful confused, Mister”
“I am” I admitted.
“Well don’t tell me a big artsy guy like you doesn’t believe in fairies!”
“I…” there was hesitation, because I remembered, absurdly, that fact from Peter Pan; to say you don’t believe in fairies is a death sentence to the poor creatures.
The fairy before me grinned though.
“You don’t, do you?”
Unable to answer, I sipped my beer again.
“There’s no answer at the bottom of that bottle you know!” she said, twittering about my head.
“Are you telling me to give up beer?” I asked.
“No but it wouldn’t hurt you to share”
“Fairies drink beer?”
“By the thimble, Mister!”
“I don’t have a thimble”
“I do!”
She produced a thimble from her knapsack.
“To new friendships, Mister!”
I delicately poured beer in the thimble she used as a mug.
“What’s your name, little one?”
“Aria!”
“Here’s to you, Aria”
And then we got hammered.