A Look Inside My Scrapbooks, part one
For the past decade I've been scrapbooking (as it's popularly called these days). I don't show my scrapbooks very often (they're mostly for my own amusement and inspiration), but today I thought I'd share a few pages with you.
We'll start with my first scrapbook, 200 pages in length, begun in April 1998. The cover is decorated with various stickers I found ...
In the first pages of this scrapbook I was inspired by William Burroughs, who used his scrapbooks to experiment with the cut-up method of writing. Here's a cut-up of mine, a combination of three news stories to create a news story in an alternate reality...
After a few pages I stopped doing cut-ups and began another kind of experiment, in which I pasted in pictures clipped from magazines, catalogs, and other ephemera, then free-associated a story from the images ...
Sometimes, while writing the story, I would also draw a picture. On this page you see my rendering of Popeye ...
Gradually, my scrapbook also became a sketchbook, in which I mixed drawings with collage work. Sometimes the drawings were later published. The drawing below, for instance, appears on the inside front cover of my comic book Villa of the Mysteries #3 ...
But most of the scrapbook drawings have not been published ...
On occasion, I've used published drawings in my collages. In the Manchurian Candidate collage below I used two panels from my story "This is MK-Ultra Baby" ...
I also use my scrapbooks to keep newspaper clippings that interest me. At the time of this first scrapbook, the upcoming millennium change and Y2K was much in the news, as were stories about the recent death of Princess Diana. I was particularly interested in the conspiratorial aspects and archetypal meaning of her demise ...
Roy Rogers, one of my childhood heroes, died that year ...
To be continued ...
We'll start with my first scrapbook, 200 pages in length, begun in April 1998. The cover is decorated with various stickers I found ...
In the first pages of this scrapbook I was inspired by William Burroughs, who used his scrapbooks to experiment with the cut-up method of writing. Here's a cut-up of mine, a combination of three news stories to create a news story in an alternate reality...
After a few pages I stopped doing cut-ups and began another kind of experiment, in which I pasted in pictures clipped from magazines, catalogs, and other ephemera, then free-associated a story from the images ...
Sometimes, while writing the story, I would also draw a picture. On this page you see my rendering of Popeye ...
Gradually, my scrapbook also became a sketchbook, in which I mixed drawings with collage work. Sometimes the drawings were later published. The drawing below, for instance, appears on the inside front cover of my comic book Villa of the Mysteries #3 ...
But most of the scrapbook drawings have not been published ...
On occasion, I've used published drawings in my collages. In the Manchurian Candidate collage below I used two panels from my story "This is MK-Ultra Baby" ...
I also use my scrapbooks to keep newspaper clippings that interest me. At the time of this first scrapbook, the upcoming millennium change and Y2K was much in the news, as were stories about the recent death of Princess Diana. I was particularly interested in the conspiratorial aspects and archetypal meaning of her demise ...
Roy Rogers, one of my childhood heroes, died that year ...
To be continued ...
posted by Mack White at 9:20 AM
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