Frustrated by his lack of skill, he developed a complicated and time-consuming way of making comics. First he wrote a script that described the action. On separate pages he made loose pencil layouts of panels. He fed the layouts into his typewriter and carefully typed segments of narrative into the allotted areas. After removing the paper, he used the typed sections as guides for what to draw.
Dad called his method of drawing “the steal technique.” He traced images from other works, transferred the tracing to a second page via carbon paper, and modified them by enlarging sexual characteristics. Then he inked and colored the pages. Dad believed that he enhanced any picture he stole due to an innate ability to improve everyone else’s work. A dozen thick notebooks held thousands of pages of source material, images torn from magazines and catalogs, divided by category: standing, sitting, sex, breasts, legs, and so forth. He dismantled hundreds of porn magazines to accumulate a reservoir of pictures to steal. Mixed in were images from lingerie catalogs, Heavy Metal magazine, and Entertainment Weekly.
As a very young child, I had a Superman coloring book my father had given me. I colored every page that featured Superman, which left the scenes of Clark Kent interacting with other characters. These were very boring, since everyone wore office attire, and I began coloring the suits brightly with different hues for the lapels and pockets. While concentrating, I realized that my father stood behind me, watching with an intense frown. He asked why I colored that way. Instantly I understood it was wrong. “I got tired of blue,” I said, and wished I hadn’t, since he was wearing a blue suit. He didn’t answer, just looked away, thinking for a long time. Many years later Dad asked if I remembered the incident and I told him yes.
“Me, too,” he said. “You taught me something then. There are no rules for coloring.”
He’d inherited deuteranopia, a form of color-blindness that affected his perception of the green-yellow-red section of the spectrum. This genetic flaw bothered him throughout his life. To avoid clashing colors, he wore dark clothes. The lack of rules for coloring freed him from the pressure of making a mistake. Blending color for subtlety was impossible with felt-tip pens. Most of the figures in his comics were unclothed, their skin blue or green. The hues were bright and flat. His lack of facility with color produced lurid and shocking, unusual combinations matching the intensity of the scenes.
Along with the comics was a personal document dated 1963, with the caveat that it be read after his death. He was twenty-nine when he wrote it. I was five. It was his only sustained example of personal writing. He referred to the comics as his “Great Secret” and revealed a deep concern about his zeal for the material. He worried that he hated women. He wondered if there were other people like him and, if so, how they dealt with their urges.
At age fourteen, he’d begun drawing comics that portrayed women in torment, before he’d had any exposure to fetish material or knowledge of sadism. The impulse was simply inside him; he’d always been that way. He called his comics an atrocity. The locked box in which he kept them was “full of my shame and my wickedness and my weakness.”
The document has a sincere quality absent in everything else he wrote. Without his usual grandiosity, the intent probing of his own psyche makes him vulnerable enough for sympathy.
I have wasted hundreds of hours at this, always fearful of discovery, always secretive, always aware of the sickness and hating myself for it. I well know the utter dream-fiction stupidity of it, even while continuing through page after gory, naked page after blood-splashed page, after ordeal-filled page. I know it’s silly, tom-foolery. And I’m ashamed: I know it’s sick.
I’m sorry, sorry. Who is to blame? It can only be my childhood . . . because these things took place in it, after certain patterns were formed, after certain circuitry was already branded on my mental relays. Mother, Dad, Judeo-Christianity, and my childhood friends.
It is the repressions, not the manifestations of unrepressed thoughts, that give us trouble. Apparently I am giving them vent, egress, by drawing page after page.
But what if I stop?
In 1957, just before getting married, he packed a decade’s worth of his art in a sack with rocks and threw it into the Cumberland River. He wrote that no one knew what it had taken for him to do that. He swore never to make such material again. Eighteen months later, he began The Saga of Valkyria Barbosa and worked on it for the rest of his life. It ran one hundred and twenty separate books that totaled four thousand pages.