Howard John Arey

Howard John Arey is a cartoonist and illustrator whose work has appeared in Hi-horse, Legal Action Comics, Shout, Radical Society, and Dell Crossword Extravaganza. He currently lives in Manhattan with his wife, Mira.

Basically, I'm reverting to type: I figure on doing a "low life" sort of block, with a building representing a burlesque theater, and a building representing a bar (and some other buildings, described ? or not ? below). The burlesque house will be distinguished primarily by a single image, which the viewer will either see by sticking his or her entire head into a hole in the building (which I guess would require a light inside somewhere, and somehow), or the building will be set up like a puppet theater and the image will be immediately visible as the back wall of the puppet stage. But there won't be any puppets ? or will there?!? I hadn't thought of it til now, so ? well, skip that. The image, anyway, is of a woman on stage, a dancer, and there's all guys in the audience looking at her, as one would expect, but one of them has stood up and with his gesture and expression you can tell pretty well that he's saying "hey! that's my sister!" or something along those lines. I've done a drawing of this that I'll scan and e-maill to you tomorrow, but I think it was the subject of some gilded era drawings, so actually you might be able to picture it pretty well already.

This building, like the next one, plays pretty fast and loose with the "building" idea, but it'll have windows and stuff all illustrating the front of it so that, I hope, the idea of its being a building will get across smoothly.

The bar idea is, like the burlesque house, it's a building and it's something else, in this case, the mirrored back of a bar (like you find in your average Irish "pub"), all with decorative stained wooden dowels and molding and so on that'll, in theory, look like bar furnishing and also like architecture. And it'll have windows, and a front door and stuff (like a building), hopefully the dowels will suggest columns in the facade of a building, the carved decorative molding up top will recall the top of a brownstone, say. And this building has comics strips, with a loose suggestion of narrative (but with some word balloons, I think), except here the panels are made to look like photos taped to the mirror of the "bar." I've got sketches of the characters I'll use in these strips that I'll scan and send to you, and these'll be my shared characters. I don't know if I want to include a description of their personalities or anything ? ahh, I think not, if that's alright. They're various kinds of barfly and bartender. And also on the mirror there'll be sentimental images taped up, not part of the narrative ? the Kennedys, Secretariat, weepy stuff like that. Will the mirror and the wood structures be real? Well, you'd think so, right? But then I have to find out if I'm "handy." It's been a while since shop class.

Hm. Now I'm thinking that I'd like at least one, ideally, two, other buildings in my cluster that aren't low-lifey but, rather, suggest cleaner, more sophisticated environments: a whaddyacall glass brick office building, maybe a sleek, lounge type bar ? my idea is, with the buildings, and the characters, within the one block I've got a few dichotomies going: dirty/immaculate, chaotic/organized, desperate/composed. But what kind of visual or narrative interest I create for the "sleek" portion, and how it all ends up to something deep and rewarding for the viewer ? O-ho, this is "to come."

I think I want people on the sidewalk, too, cause this'll be a streetlife kind of place, but of course they'll be hard to see. So I was thinking, how about inset-type panels attached to the buildings, closer to eye-level, but clearly referring to events on the sidewalk below? Sort of, Chris Ware style, with an actual or implied arrow indicating the origins of the image? Maybe I can do drawings of this that'll make that idea clearer, or make me realize it ain't such a hot idea.