Update schedule FAIL! But here it is, the last part of this series, a day late. It seems sort of appropriate that this was a struggle to finish because I was up to my neck in bureaucracy and stress.
It’s only good ethical practice to let you know that this comic is a conscious act of magic. (Shave my head, I wanna be wanna be wanna be Grant Morrison.)
And I can’t show you a youtube of it, but this is the song that was in my head while I was doing this: The Weakerthans – A New Name For Everything
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Wasted Epiphanies, Wasted Epiphanies. Wasted Epiphanies said: Click here for your metaphysical FREE GIFT! New comic: The Sleep of Habit part 3 of 3 http://bit.ly/6eRk2Z (part 1: bit.ly/8HnnUn ) [...]
That’s a great song. And now there should be a youtube video of that song, and a montage of your images!
Matthew: god yes, now that you mention it, that song would make a fantastic comic strip – it’s powerful because it’s stuffed with concrete details and visual images. That’s something I love about the Mountain Goats too.
I particularly liked this series – seemed almost like a manifesto for Wasted Epiphanies as a whole!
It’s interesting to me that you seem to associate the outdoors with ideas, secrets, imagination and so on. For me, rural environments are intimately tied up with the whole Sleep of Habit phenomenon. People work in urban environments, so they flee to the rural whenever they can in search of that particular feeling you can only get from wide, green spaces. But really I don’t see this as any different from collapsing in front of the TV. It’s what you do when you’re too exhausted for anything more interesting.
Dom: Interesting. I think in this case the dichotomy in my head wasn’t so much urban/rural as constriction/space – narrow horizons versus being able to see a long way. When it came to drawing the higher-viewpoint part it happened to come out rural, but I’ve done very similar panels looking out over city rooftops, or towards a city in the distance.
Come to think of it, considering that the idea I was trying to convey was not escaping to a different place but getting a fresh perspective on your existing habitual stuff, a view out over a city would have worked much better. Oh well.
It’s true that I get a lot of inspiration from nature, but cities inspire me in a different but equally important way. You can expect more psychogeography-based strips and more stuff under the ‘urban magic’ tag in the future!
Dom: and further, I guess the thing is that there are many ways of engaging with nature, some more habitual than others… and there are similarly many ways of watching TV, with your brain switched on to different extents. I personally find a trip to the woods more refreshing than telly, but the general point is that it’s not what you’re doing but your way of seeing that counts.
Excellent series. I can relate to it a lot. There are a couple of things I need to do in my life. Time to get off my arse. Well done.
James: thank you – and good luck!
I’m a little late back to this, but good responses, thanks!