Collection of exit and fire safety signs

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"Burners and Bombs"

eerie sequence from SORTIE 2: I AM A MAN OF PEACE (prelim pages by me, inks & finals by the incomparable & extremely handsome @meanbossart) that i still super enjoy, this part was a joy to write hehe

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Sortie de métro rue Botzaris, Paris 19e – stylo bille 8 couleurs, carnet n° 139, 16 octobre 2023.

SADS, Sortie, and the Theater of Violence, an Essay

In the lead-up to "A.M.F.", as the group is discussing the plans for Stone's "feast," Garv asks, "Why have these last ones been like this big fuckin' production?" (SADS 4: 59)

Production. That's a loaded word.

Production connotes the making of theater, or perhaps film—generically, a performance. More specifically, it connotes the act of putting together such a performance, realizing it, bringing it into being. The use of "production" there is far from the only time such a connotation graces the opening scenes of "A.M.F." Earlier, Mal asks whether Stone intends it to be a "free-for-all" or if he will "give [them] direction in the moment." (SADS 4: 34) Direction. That's a loaded word too. It could be innocuous enough by itself, but in a scene already rich with the motif of performance its presence is anything but innocuous. And the scene is loaded with that motif; after all, Stone's response to that question is to say, "I do the whole thing, and you guys watch me." (SADS 4: 35) The scene has direction, production, an actor, and an audience. Is there any way to escape the conclusion that "Feast" is a piece of theater?

Theater for whom? In that moment Stone portrays the other four as an audience to his performance—"It's that control over the insurmountable being witnessed by those around me" (SADS 4: 42, emphasis mine)—but those lines are blurred from the beginning, for he says that he also wants to help him "lift and maneuver things as necessary" (SADS 4: 36), and, of course, they will be having sex with him. It turns out that the apparent audience members are actors too. That fact forces a look at the inverse thesis: if the audience is the supporting cast, might not the star be an audience member too? Of course he is, for he is a consumer whose role is "gorge [himself] on" it. (SADS 4: 42) Perhaps the only with an utterly ambiguous place in the production in "Feast" is Evan—Evan, who was so unambiguously cast in his role—who also happens to be the only individual with no agency at all in the situation; how ironic that the only true actor is the only non-agent.

In many ways the framing of "A.M.F." as a performance is remarkable, but it's also absolutely not alone in being framed as such. The lead-up to "A.M.F." crystallizes the theme of violence-as-theater, but that theme has been floating around, even intensifying, since the beginning. That's the essence of Garv's critique of "Feast" and the previous murders: they are "this big fuckin' production." Garv seems remarkably attuned to the increasingly performative nature of the murders, as is evidenced by the way that he favorably compares Jake's to the others' murders in "BOG" as well (SADS 5: 91–92). Though undoubtably part of his motive in making that comparison is to keep Jake on his side, his "production" comment in "A.M.F." suggests that Garv is legitimately critical of the escalating role of performance in the murders. Even Garv sees the murder in "A.M.F." as predictably theatrical based on the increasing theatricality of the previous murders.

In that light it's only logical that Garv initiated the events of "BOG" in the way that he did. If you are attempting to ensure that an event cannot become a piece of theater, how do you go about that? You bring the actors in without a clue about what they are to be doing; you bring them in uncostumed (Stone even arrives in his work scrubs); you bring them in when they weren't expecting to be brought in. The irony, of course, is that "BOG" is just as theatrical as its predecessors. Try as he might, Garv cannot scrub it of theme, allegory, metaphor. Perhaps the attempt to de-theatricize the murder in BOG fails ultimately because, with that many actors in the room, Garv's careful decontextualization merely results in an improv. Perhaps a witnessed act of violence is doomed to be a performance.

To butcher an old cliché, when a lone actor commits a murder with no one around to see it, is it still a piece of theater?

Sortie forces a reckoning with that question. One of the more remarkable shifts that occurs between Sad Sack and Sortie is that Sal's acts of violence in Sortie are designed to be unwitnessed. Hence the frantic phone call to Father Morgan when Harris' son is unexpectedly home at the time of the murder. The need to be unseen is somewhat of a theme that haunts Sal throughout the first three issues of Sortie. When he orders Ivan to stay in the room during "I am a Man of Peace," Sal says, "He just saw my face, so he can't leave this room alive." (Sortie 2: 91) One might read that as a dark joke—Gary and Ivan probably assumed as much, though it's hard to imagine either of them could have lingered on that for too long given everything else occurring at that moment—but it's impossible to ignore the fact that Sal is telling the truth about his intentions with Ivan. His honesty on that front lends credence to the idea that he's being similarly honest about the relevance of Ivan seeing his face. That he remains unwitnessed is of vital importance.

That the murders in "I am a Man of Peace" take place mostly "off-screen" to the readers further serves to strip it of an audience, as does the implication that it occurs mostly outside of Sal's recollection. Sortie unstages its violence, forces Sal out of the role of an actor and into a different role altogether, one in which the nature of the violence he enacts cannot be veiled by the mechanisms and context granted by theatricization.

In doing so it asks: This is no longer a performance. Who are you to still be watching?

Breaking formation by Treflyn Lloyd-Roberts Via Flickr: Hurricane R4118 peels away from the cameraship during an air-to-air sortie above the Buckinghamshire countryside. Aircraft: RAF Hawker Hurricane Mk.I R4118. Location: above Wormsley, near Stokenchurch, Buckinghamshire.

ding dong

i love sally

one thing to you

you gotta go and do

you gotta be awake today in the half-light

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What did you do today, Spookie?

Oh nothing, just cursed the makers of Perler beads for throwing some of their products into a plastic baggie.

There are 4,000 beads in this picture.

I bought a bunch of new beads for crafting (I made sure most(??) came with the trays as I know myself better than that and have to have my things organized or it can lead to meltdowns. It came in 2 bags full of assorted beads and y'all I nearly cried. Thankfully after 3 hours, my wife and I were able to finish sorting them.

My glow in the dark beads and all my new colors have arrived.

@meanbossart & i have actually been longtime comic collaborators for about 6 years now (sheesh!); i typically do story + preliminary page drafts, then he does inks + colors/tones, & then i come back in for spot cleanup + speech bubble lettering. theres obviously wiggle room & we've bled over into each other's "roles" tons of times lol but thats usually how task delegation shakes out when we do our thing

heres a snippet of a violent action sequence from SORTIE 1: BETHANY (sept2021, we're 3 books in out of 6 or 7 on this project), & as you can see we clearly have a one / yuusuke murata dynamic going on LOL. RJ's the stronger illustrator while i adore working with the sloppiness & energy of The Sketch, and i really love comparing the starts to the finishes & seeing whats been improved upon vs what bonkers sketch aspects have been preserved lol

your art is so coooool! What would you say were your biggest influences on your style? Is it something that you intentionally developed or did it just kind of happen?

Thank you so much! While i dont seek to emulate it 100% i take a LOT of inspiration from western comics, my favorite artists are Sean Murphy and Jason Shawn Alexander.

But i think the real culprit behind how my art developed are all the ongoing projects i have in tandem with my partner @barbatusart, we've been working together for many many years and have many comics out for which he did the roughs and i did the final art. This resulted in us both kind of borrowing a lot from each other's styles!

from the comic SORTIE 3: GALLONS, theres no way to illustrate how much we've influenced each other without spamming you with a timeline of work, but this gives you an idea.

you can check out the comics here if you want, but please be thoroughly warned that the further back you go, the more violent and angry our work is, our tastes have both mellowed out a lot throughout the years but we both come from edgy bestg0re backgrounds 😬 we're still proud of the work we did and the stories we told, but its admittedly not really entirely representative of who we are any more. If you're thinking "wow but your stuff is STILL pretty visceral and scary" then well, take that as your warning! It can get a LOT worse!

LUCKILY, i can at least say we have always had hard boundaries and have been thoughtful of who gets exposed to what we do, so there are explicit content warnings for every comic in their storefronts and you can take them to heart. If you choose to check them out, please read them thoroughly.

Sortie de Bellême, route de la Chapelle-Souëf — stylo-bille 8 couleurs, carnet nº 135, 16 février 2023.