Leg Art Comics #1

Let's start with the origin story. Lance Hansen asked me to contribute to his anthology, Seduction of the Innocent, (the concept being artists depicting women reading comics, in the tongue-in-cheek pin-up tradition). My idea was to create a fake comic book cover for an issue of "Leg Art Comics," a cover within a cover as the cover model is also reading another issue of the comic, which includes a feature, "J.T. Dockery Explains...'Why I Am A Leg Man!'" Ripping off the logo from Crumb's "Big Ass Comics," and the image taken from famous leg photographer Elmer Batters, I was playing with the concept and making a bit of fun of my own personal preferences when my particular male gaze turns towards the direction of the female.

Fast forward a bit, and when finding myself with more time than usual spent online due to the shifting circumstances of life, I realized that even without a masturbatory function, I was still making it something of an enjoyable hobby to waste my extra time looking at photos presented on the internet by bloggers and such who shared a similar preference/fixation. And in looking at the photos as something beyond smut, it started to become almost scientific as to why certain images spoke to me. But not so scientific that I could easily "explain why," but I could document these images that spoke loudest to me with my sketchbook.

With this process of documentation of my journey as a leg man begun, it quickly became apparent that at some point down the road, I will collect these sketches into a modest book. That book, of course, will be called "Leg Art Comics."

With the blog, I am presenting a sneak-preview of this project, this journey. And we'll start at the start at the beginning with a foot. Sometimes being involved as I am involved in the enthusiasm of delineating the female leg, there's a common misconception that the female foot is excluded in this equation. The combination of the leg, foot, and haunch creates a holy trinity of legginess, just as, say, the nylon stocking meeting the exposed flesh of the thigh meeting the clip of the garter belt is another holy trinity. One element does not exist without the relationship to the other, and there are even more trinities hidden within this multiplicity of trinities within the leg, but we shall not go further into that now.

This episode of Leg Art Comics was brought to you by Secrets in Lace.

Last Page Blues

I was conscious of this being the last page of my most recent sketchbook as, first, I actually didn't have the money to get a new one, and then found myself waiting another bit on top of that for a back ordered new one to come in the mail. So I also was consciously just pecking away here, adding a bits every so often, making that last page last.

Of course, that's not all that different from the usual stream of consciousness jive I'm often laying down, you might say. But a slight difference for me is that I can feel the passing of time. Recently my health went south, and I've experienced the kind of physical anguish I wouldn't wish on a dog. Some of these phrases and figures seem to predict my plight, document it, and then toss some random other goodliness on top for flavor. "It has memories in it," as I wrote.

I went for the longest I've ever been in recent memory without an active sketchbook going. Luckily meeting a deadline for an upcoming book release/art show in January and working on those pages made me not miss the habit as much as I might otherwise.

For the good times, my fiends, for the good times...

Eat it. Sit on it. Smell it.

The text is from some graffiti that was written with dry erase markers on one of the freezers back in the kitchen of Gumbo Ya Ya. I just put down in cartoony loony language what the words inspired.

In Tongues Illustrated Future Past #9

The text on this one says it as succinctly as any other crass, throw-away commentary I could concoct (I suddenly feel like Stan Lee here), "And with this apathetic internal rupturing we eject these components."

And as we depart from these waters, future-past, and steer the ship through the starry seas, above is Louis Bickett's snapshot of these almost but not quite forgotten left overs from In Tongues installed in the show.

In Tongues Illustrated Future Past #8

There are all sorts of ways to travel. Prehensile.

In Tongues Illustrated Future Past #7

It's hard to get past one's own self. Or it can be.

In Tongues Illustrated Future Past #6

It's easy to let things go.

In Tongues Illustrated Future Past #5

"Still keener hunters," long before I was thinking about this blog, is a line I copped from Herman Melville's Confidence-Man, but the sentiment is in fact mine.

In Tongues Illustrated Future Past #4

Answering the questions you forget to ask yourself with more questions.

In Tongues Illustrated Future Past #3

I was riffing/ripping off poet Charles Olson. Or was it Ezra Pound? If one can't remember from whom one is stealing, does that make for an original statement? I ponder these things and just like I said back when, "If I knew what I was doing I could wish to tell you."

In Tongues Illustrated Future Past #2

Cute and cuddly can lead to a certain disquieting darkness. Slugs of unknowing and other monsters of discontent often slide underneath. I fear what's between the lines. Or to quote Redd Foxx on the subject of violence, "I wouldn't slap a crippled sissy."

In Tongues Illustrated Future Past #1

"Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know."--Donald Rumsfeld

I found a scanner buried behind the barn. It's not the best scanner, but it'll do for one that I dug up from under the dirt.

Speaking of finding things under the dirt, last Feb. when I had a Lexington gallery installation of the original pages from my book, In Tongues Illustrated, I discovered in my archives a collection of strips, almost more like sketchbook drawings, which riffed on the content of the book. I had at one point fiddled around with the idea of running these strips along the bottoms of some of the larger pages in the book. That idea got scrapped, and the drawings put up and forgotten about until the show.

So now, in the spirit of full disclosure, I'll post a series of these aforementioned "lost" outtakes/deleted scenes.

In this installment, we see that "Cosmic Denial" ain't just a river on the outer rings in the X-R41 Nebula. Is the astronaut at left preparing to fix some unseen mechanical issue with the tool in his grasp, or is it a weapon with which he is about to attack? I wouldn't mess with the guy in the foreground, if I were me. The character in the background, over the horizon, seems to be throwing an ineffectual punch, or is is more of just a showing, "terroristic fist bump"-style, of solidarity? These issues seem like, as Rummie put it, "known unkowns."

"Studio Visit"

Chase Martin over at the Institute 193's blog pays me a "studio visit."

Same old song. I'm miles from the nearest scanner in my current incarnation. Also, barely touching a sketchbook right now as I'm knee deep in cranking out new pages of Spud Crazy to the exclusion of all else.

Some day, as the man said, this war is gonna end.

I've Had A Lot Resting On My Mind Lately

It can be difficult to be free of the things that rest heavy on one's mind. I take the metaphor and draw it literally. How 'bout you?

Don't Say I Didn't Warn You

Me and Bruce New down by the duck pond. Be there or be square.

Sometimes I Feel Like I'm in the Rubble

Which is not necessarily the same thing as feeling like Barney Rubble.

I Go to Places

I go to places. I walk around in them. There the architects grapple with issues not yet fathomed and are rewarded for such efforts. The citizens are not afraid of nightmares, but live them in harmony with waking moments. In the galleries, the works are in progress and occasionally updated.

J. Todd Dokken

1987. The artist purchases Dokken's Back for the Attack on cassette. Taken with the recording, the artist then, with a paint pen, draws the band's logo on the back of a jean jacket. A trench coat length jacket at that. Later, no longer impressed with his own attempt at lettering, the artist covers up the handmade logo with a mail ordered back patch that reads: "KISS: If It's Too Loud, You're Too Old."

2010. The artist replaces his long lost tape with a used compact disc copy of Back for the Attack. Seeing that while there is some filler on this recording, he remains taken with it. Oddly depressed and uplifted simultaneously by his own acceptance of the junk rock as transcendent material, the artist draws the logo again, this time in his sketchbook as opposed to on his apparel, along with portraits based on the photos in the disc's liner notes.