its okay to love superman

& lessons from a comic book artist

I’ve been told before that my social media presence wasn’t focused enough. That I need to post more music-related things.

Lately I have been showing more of my music on social media platforms, which is doing well, but I still feel a draw to share other stuff…. stuff like drawings, movies/music I’m really into, weird things on the internet I’ve been obsessed with… like, uhhh, the 1980’s Superman movie franchise.

me, attempting to bridge the gap between my various interests and make it seem cohesive

Here’s the thing though, I believe that as an artist, you can share your work and people will fall in love with it, but you will create a greater connection if you share your mind and people fall in love with it. I want people to know where my ideas come from, what I’m interested in, what I’m doodling in my notebooks.

I’d like to think that people follow me because they like my music, but I’d also like to think they follow me because they like my brain. There are a bunch of artists out there who I don’t necessarily love everything they’ve done, but I love how their mind works and what they’re hyperfocused on. So every time they release something new, I’m interested in what it is, because I am interested in their …uh, interests. You get me?

If something is making you PASSIONATE, then share it! You never know what will be the thing that connects you to someone else.

Every so often I get really interested in something and completely follow it down a rabbit hole (hello…. geology), and it seemingly has no relevance at all to music and my practice, BUT IT DOES. I think being deeply interested in lots of different stuff helps you be a better artist, and I think that learning from artists in different disciplines can help you solve problems and come up with new ideas in your own practice.

For example, I read the Batman comic Arkham Asylum last week. I gotta say, it’s less of a story and more of just a ~scary vibe~ for 50 pages, but the artwork absolutely blew my mind, and sent me on a mission to know more about the guy that drew it.

Turns out the artist, Dave McKean, has been super influential over the 90’s and early 00’s in so many ways. You can see his influence in film, graphic design, even album covers. When I saw this moon-man cover he did for Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, I instantly thought of Fall Out Boy’s Infinity on High album cover. It might not be a direct influence, but I swear they feel the same.

I ended up listening to a couple of interviews with McKean and gleaned these three helpful ideas from him:

Lessons from Dave McKean

The end result is not creativity

This thought came in relation to AI and how we can now generate images at the click of a button. I have been very careful about not getting too deep into AI image generation, because of various reasons, but I guess one of the reasons is what Dave says, that the finished product isn’t where the creativity lies. I like a finished image as a spectator but as a creator, I would never be satisfied with things just existing as soon as I imagined them. It’s all about the process. The process keeps us sane. The process keeps us learning. The process is the art.

Did you make it if there’s no physical object at the end of it?

In a world where we have too much stuff, this one is perhaps up for debate. Dave made a point that if there was no physical copy of the work, then did it really happen? Everything on the internet is so fluid and can fade in a moment (see: me and Angus trying to find episodes of a VH1 dating show from 2008 which doesn’t exist on the internet anymore). We think that the internet is forever, but is it really? I use Spotify every day but there’s something sad now about not owning the albums I love. Also, I no longer have a barometer for which albums I ‘love,’ because I don’t buy physical copies anymore.

It’s something worth considering — what do you own? What do you love? Does the fact that your work only exists online allows people to fully love it?

Accidents are good

Dave McKean said that he’d basically use whatever materials he had sitting around his desk to create pages — watercolour, markers, pencil… and then collage materials, photographs, etc. And if there were errant marks, or materials that dried weirdly on the page, then it became part of the final product. I’ve always enjoyed these moments when recording music, the little weird artefacts which become an integral part of the song: an ad libbed vocal, a wrong note, a bleed from another room.

Here’s a full interview if you are really interested in learning more from this guy:

things i liked

✶ Sooooo, obviously the Arkham Asylum comic. Also from the world of Dave McKean, this weird song he wrote with Neil Gaiman for their absolute nightmare of a movie, Mirrormask (which I have not watched yet, but it’s on my list)

✶ SUPERMAN SUPERMAN SUPERMAN. I am loving all the 1980 Supermans and all the little details in each movie. Lois Lane can’t spell! The bad guy has a ski slope on his Metropolis penthouse! Superman becomes bad for a spell and his version of being bad involves hitting on women and pushing the Leaning Tower of Pisa into an upright position! Also, please lets appreciate sweet Christopher Reeve:

✶ This song by Ratboys:

Thanks for reading. As always, if you like what you see, subscribe (if you haven’t already), and if you want to send it to a friend, just forward it on! And I am always happy to reply if you email me back.

Now off you go! Into the big wide world! And be good.

Olivia 🌈