Hermanubis

Peggy
January 22, 2021

So I was sitting around late at night, a little stoned, reading some books of ceremonial magic, when something in the back of my head sat up and said “hey, you should draw Anubis”. And, well. I mostly did. Sorta:

Hermanubis is a Greek deity who is somewhere in the space between Hermes and Anubis in their roles as psychopomps, which is a fancy word for “the nice guy who shows up after you die and gently leads you to the underworld”.

Both of them have other jobs – Hermes deals with commerce, transmission of knowledge, speed, travel, thieves, and sleep, while Anubis is a bit more focused, with responsibilities like ruling the land of the dead before his brother Osiris took over, mummification, and presiding over the judgement of your soul. But Hermanubis is where they blur together into one slightly saucy jackal dude, who definitely shines with the dark light of the Underworld rather than the bright light of Divine Knowledge. He’s still a beacon, though.

Illustrator, one hour, no sketch. I should try to get this printed on very deep blue card in gold.

a fresh coat of paint

Peggy
January 18, 2021

According to my file dates and names, I built this version of my website in 2011. Visually, it remained pretty much unchanged – I built a few new styles for the various comics, but largely I just changed it by writing new blog posts and uploading pictures and comic pages.

Today, I found myself suddenly compelled to sit at some picnic tables under a highway overpass in City Park (this is much nicer than it sounds, trust me) and work on a new front page image.

I chose to keep it similar to the old one:

…but holy crap it’s a lot more detailed and fluid. And it probably took less time to do, too. The new one took about an hour and a half, plus some more time digging up my old CSS toolchain and changing the rest of the website’s colors to match. (Hooray for CSS pre-processors.) I’ve got no idea how long the old one took, but I have a vague memory of struggling with that under-chin angle on the face. This time I just knocked it out quickly, and came back for one brief touch-up near the end; I think I mostly spent my time fooling around with more detailed takes on the caduceus, and deciding how frilly to make the big swath of hair. Also this one, like, kind of actually looks like me, if you ignore the fact that I sure as hell do not have that kind of ass, damn. If only.

I guess I’ve changed elemental associations from Fire to Air or something? I have no idea what that will mean for the future. Maybe I’ll be back here in another decade or so with a new take on this.

Anyway. If you wanna see it in its full glory then go visit the front page of my site.

megapolisomancy 1: the freeway

Peggy
January 18, 2018

come to within a block or two of the freeway

and sleep

with your spine aligned to the flow

open up your senses (no, the other ones)

and just dip in

like a pelican skimming the surface of the water

like a spaceship skimming a sun’s photosphere with its fuel scoop open

don’t take too much, you see, you’ll drown

perhaps make a few passes, skim down going both ways, bring in a bank of the opposite polarity to better balance within

but be careful, you’re not the only one to know that all that hurry, hurry, hurry going in one direction for years on end carves open its own kind of ley line

and be careful to not get sliced to ribbons on the complex harmonic fields generated by the intersection of whole cloverleaf (i found Rez to be a useful metaphor to pass through intact, YMMV)

now i know why I miss LA, it’s a giant hole in the world torn by its neverending gyre of freeways, and it must be real good for sucking in popular stories or something, because it is our nation’s source of Dreams.