A Mask of the Eyrillim

First off, I think this might help: Eyrillim is the plural, Eyrilmonghet is the singular. Eyrillim is the Inultaru name used for members of an egg-collecting (and egg-selling) guild.*

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Fennel-Sowing Time

Among the Inultaru, the summer solstice is a traditional day for sowing fennel seeds. In the vast and multifarious pantheon of minor Jackalopian god-spirits, Lord Oba-olu, the Smallking (also Weedking) of Other Fennels, Corianders and Chicories, is a deity that is appreciated without excessive enthusiasm. He does have his votaries, but they observe their devotions within exact limits.

Yost had made two GLP comics for the 1988 summer solstice. By the time the art for the second piece was finished, Yost had decided to keep it to himself. He had been experimenting with his technique, the piece had become overworked, yet he was happy with it. That happiness did not mean he thought it was suitable for publication. He felt it was a private communication between himself and himself, that it was not meant for sharing with the rest of humanity.*

Unfortunately, his sister-in-law, who was acting as his assistant at the time, sent it off to the distributor with the usual batch of GLP comics. About a third of the newspapers ended up publishing it, while half published the first one, and the rest published both.

Yost loved and admired his brother, but his regard was dimmed with a measure of disappointment when his brother married the woman Yost would later introduce to friends and strangers as Sister Dundergong. Her name was actually Dennisita. (Yes, her father’s name was Dennis, good guess!) As an assistant, Dennisita was unreliable and unprofessional, she disliked Yost and he disliked her. It was a strange situation that somehow endured for over two years, until it ended in the final months of her pregnancy with her only child, a boy named (can you believe it?) Dennis.

About a year after Dennis (the Third?) was born, Sister Dundergong made it known that she was ready to resume her duties as Yost’s assistant. Luckily for Yost, at that moment, Ha Kim Ngoc was renting a room from him while she was house-hunting, and she was paying most of her rent with labor as his assistant. Yost officially hired Ngoc as his assistant, and then thoroughly enjoyed expressing his regrets to his sister-in-law.

*Yost mounted the original artwork in a faux bamboo frame he bought at Goodwill for $2.00. It hung for many years in his foyer next to an arrangement of papier-mâché masks and iron trivets. I was told that it now hangs in a Shinto temple in Hawaii, but I don’t know if I believe that.

What the Moth Sees

I have two slides for today’s GLP comic, each is a representation of a subtle color variation. I don’t know which variation was submitted for publication, and Ha Kim Ngoc was surprised to learn that a second color variation exists. She thinks the color happened in the processing of the slide, but she can’t say which variation is more true to the original artwork, so I am posting both images.

I think this misprint from Newark’s Star-Ledger is a lovely tone poem of sepia, chestnut and ivory, but Ha Kim Ngoc is sure Yost hated it:

Twelve Orthographic Mysteries of az-Akordalkiermat

I received an e-mail last week from Yost’s former assistant, Ha Kim Ngoc. She is sheltering-in-place in the company of Henry D. T. Wadsworth, her hedgehog, Philo the Great and Terrible, her Lynx Point Siamese cat, and the assorted tenants of her salt-water aquarium, plus she usually has a very small and somewhat temporary population of poultry in the backyard. She was a heavy smoker of cigars for twenty years and is somewhat susceptible to pneumonia, which may put her in the high-risk category for the coronavirus, especially since she is no longer young. However, she is not worried, her health is good, and she is more concerned with providing care to her menagerie.

She had seen the poster where I had collected twelve of my favorite GLP comics as of April 13, 2020. She sent me list of her own current favorites, twenty-five comics from a span of eight years. A list that, I noticed, included quite a few pieces made outside the five years she worked for Yost.

She also included a list of twelve GLP comics she is convinced are ones made by Yost under the influence of az-Akordalkiermat, an alliance of Jackalopian scholars, shamans and alchemists.

There is a half-price sale on greeting card going on at Zazzle. You can get the above GLP panel, “An offering to fire, water, the moon, and the gods of the road”, on a card here. The promo code is ZAPRILOFFERS.

Clarity is a Piece of Static (The Camelford Prosimetrum)

This GLP comic appeared in various publications around the world on June 23, 1986. In a recent e-mail to me, Ha Kim Ngoc brought my attention to another GLP comic with the same date, a panel that was never published.

There are a few GLP panels that bear duplicate dates, and more than a few GLP comics bear a date that seems to have no relation to the day they were published. There are several theories floating around the GLP fandom for this. One theory is that time itself for Jackalopes is less linear and more malleable than it is for humans. Another theory is that the numbers Yost put in the top right-hand corners of GLP comics do not represent the date at all, even though most seem to correspond to it.

The only representation we have of the never-published comic is a damaged slide. It depicts a part of the Camelford Prosimetrum:

We can now recognize the Camelford Prosimetrum as an undeciphered kiGamnch artifact, and can guess it is some kind of document that was printed or painted on a piece of tapa cloth. The document was originally (and fancifully) named the Eidsvoll Maqamat by the second Baron Camelford, who discovered the artifact in Malacca or Sri Lanka. While the artifact was in the possession of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, it was simply identified as “ceremonial bark cloth”, 132 x 180 inches, from 19th century Fiji. The bark cloth disappeared from the museum in 1978, with not even a photograph left behind in the record of its existence. The image for this print here was recreated from a sketch made by an unknown art student from the College of the Pacific, Stockton.

We now suspect that art student was Yost.

Mild Steel Recipe

This panel is the one most misprinted in the history of Geranium Lake Properties color printing errors. It is accepted as common knowledge that no newspaper, out of the 17 that printed GLP in color, got it right. According to Ha Kim Ngoc, it is Yost’s least favorite misprint, an opinion she expressed to Michael Veerduer at the Strand bookstore, where they were both attending an event celebrating the 6th anniversary reprint of The Boy in the Yellow Leatherette Portmanteau by Gralie Bohe. A part of their conversation appeared in print in the New York Review of Books, June 10, 2010.

In the universe of Geranium Lake Properties, mild steel is the nickname for a legal psychoactive drug commonly used by the Hahnquikzarra* (short form is Quikkir), the mainstream culture that exists outside of Jackalopian tradition. The culture is assumed to be modern American life, since the geography of GLP is often set within the United States. Most people have guessed that mild steel is a synonym for caffeine, but the GLP historian Michael Veerduer argues that caffeine, in the form of coffee, occupies a sacred place in Jackalopian tradition. He also points out that one of the most significant qualities of mild steel is its lethality for children. Other people have proposed mild steel as a representation of nicotine or firearms.

Pictured here is the misprint from the Toronto Star. More misprints can be viewed in this poster for sale at Zazzle.

*Probably the same culture identified as the Hahnoqqiplu, or the Hahnoquimmish.

The Stele of 14-Shull Min, from Izabal, Guatemala

When melissadawn (one of my co-conspirators at Ello) showed me a picture of N52 magnets I started digging through my image files, looking for today’s GLP comic. Her image had reminded me of a note from Ha Kim Ngoc, Yost’s assistant and occasional collaborator, about a puzzling inscription. “Drawn by magnets” had been written by Yost in pencil, in one of his most easily recognized forms of handwriting, on the back of the original drawing for this comic.

The original art for Geranium Lake Properties is in an inaccessible place, spirited away by the Italian media corporation that claims ownership of Yost’s intellectual property, but I have a nearly complete set of images made from high quality transparencies of Yost’s drawings. This incomparable resource was entrusted to me by Ha Kim Ngoc. Along with the image library, Ha Kim Ngoc gave me copies of her notes about the creative history and physical characteristics of the drawings.

Full Quill Ostrich, Straightcut and Manhattanized

Above is another collaboration between Yost and Ha Kim Ngoc. A few months later, Yost published a sequel, “Puncture His Habitat”:

A sober and squeak-free summons

Image 1: Collaborative effort for Geranium Lake Properties by Yost and his assistant, Ha Kim Ngoc
Image 2: Ngoc’s initial contribution

The people who admire GLP are a discerning but small group, and at various points in the last three years I have created fictional fans to swell the numbers of our tiny band of brothers and sisters. Plus I needed help writing the backstory of Geranium Lake Properties, and creating characters is an excellent first step to writing fiction. (The danger is that if you have too much fun writing characters you may lose motivation to plod onward with the relatively boring task of actually writing the story.) GLP’s foremost fictional fan is Ha Kim Ngoc, one of those amazing American hybrids, a daughter and granddaughter of Vietnamese, Korean, Polish and Welsh immigrants.

Before she became Yost’s assistant in 1991, Ha Kim Ngoc was writing and drawing “Somnifery”, a comic strip influenced by Carlos Castaneda, Goya’s Black Paintings, Lorca’s theory of duende, and Little Nemo in Slumberland. “Somnifery” appeared irregularly in different zines during the 80’s, notably Spongesucker, Ralph and Fascia. At the same time, Ngoc collaborated with Yost on a handful of GLP comics.

The ideogram in the lower right-hand corner of today’s panel is a tribute to Harriet Lariat, a pseudonym used by Ngoc’s Polish grandmother and her grandmother’s sister-in-law, the writer/artist team who created Sue Generous and Bossy Oyster, a 64-page Golden Age comic book. The comic followed the crime-fighting adventures of a glamorous American housewife and her plucky Jack Russell terrier (loosely based on the characters of Nora Charles and her dog Astor from the Thin Man movies). Each issue featured several different stories, all the captions were written in Polish, while the speech balloons were in English. The authors hoped to educate Polish immigrants who were eager to immerse themselves in American culture. The title was printed by Eastern Color Printing and enjoyed a modest success within its target audience, published from 1937 to 1941, with a total of 31 issues.

A few drafts from the narrows

I hesitated to include the following artifact in this post. It is a digital file of a scan of a bad xerox copy of an extremely dirty piece of paper that might not be authentic.

This little piece of evidence indicates that today’s comic is an illustration of Kipling’s “How the Whale Got His Throat”. It comes to us from the collection of Algernon and Agatha Dawe-Saffery, a brother and sister from Burnley in Lancashire, England. They are fans extraordinaire of GLP and online compatriots of Ha Kim Ngoc, Yost’s former assistant. The claim for this scrappy memo is that it was written by Yost, and it reveals the meanings for the symbols used in “A few drafts from the narrows”. Ha Kim Ngoc has her doubts, and has stated that the writing is unlike any writing she has seen from Yost. The Dawe-Safferys counter that Yost wrote in many different styles, and was always inventing new ones for his “natural” asemic handwriting.

On the back of today’s comic, “Fitch. R D” is written in pencil by Yost. This could be an abbreviation of “Fitchburg Road”, which appears in the Kipling story.

Geranium Lake Properties, turn one hair

In this panel, I am feeling the end of fall, and the first frosts of winter. Ha Kim Ngoc identifies this as part of Jack Loki’s translations of Shakespeare for horned lizards, but she does not tell us which play this panel illustrates. To me it looks more like Dickens, especially at this time of year, when I have already watched my first Christmas Carol movie. “Mothers and daughters” is the note Yost penciled on the back

Geranium Lake Properties, Shakespeare for horned lizards

Ha Kim Ngoc says this is from Macbeth. The universe is telling me it’s King Lear. Who knows what the horned lizards think?

Geranium Lake Properties, when the pied ordinaries of your grief become mute

On the back of this comic, Wm. Yost penciled “Series: Jack Loki translates Shakespeare for horned lizards” and “Phrynosoma platyrhinos or coronatum?” His assistant, Ha Kim Ngoc, says there are more than a dozen panels that belong to the Shakespeare translation series, but she is not sure this panel is one of them. Yost wrote his ideas down on pieces of paper, scraps or envelopes or whatever was handy. He jotted all sorts of things on the backs of his GLP panels, including phone numbers of people he never called, titles of books he never read, and confirmation numbers for bills he paid over the phone.

Asemic comics are published here three times a week, on Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday (or sometimes Saturday night).

Vraicking

poetry and other artifacts

Tag Archives: Ha Kim Ngoc