The Spirit Cave is a coming of age, semi-autobiographical story. It is a black and white, hand drawn, pen and ink journal that I kept over a period of five years.
Each chapter is a story made up of dream sequences; they are told in separate vignettes that are woven together through the strange logic of stream of consciousness. The name, Spirit Cave, comes from the Lakota Sioux words, Wasun Wakan.
The stories follow Sparrow, a seeker, and the mystical and befuddling characters he meets along his way in and out of the underworld.
I am a self taught painter and graphic novelist who grew up learning how to draw from comic books in Oklahoma. When I was 17, I joined the circus, leaving high school just shy of my diploma by half a credit. I witnessed casual animal cruelty as every day behavior while I was working with the circus. The cruelty was not only given to the animals but to the workers themselves. After leaving the circus, I lived in various cities around the country, studying art seriously and painting every day. Eventually, I moved to New York City, and I have been living here since 1984.
I started The Key to The Secret Drawer book in 1994, then put it away for more than a decade, unfinished but not forgotten. Around 2016 I renewed my effort and completed the book a little more than a year ago.
It is a picto-poem with collage, paint and ink using text cut out and rearranged in the method that William Burroughs sometimes used in his text. Collage and cut out text used in this way seem to work very well together to create an absurd free flowing narrative.
Christine Berlin-Moss Waters and Henry George Helen are the main characters that tie the story together. By using randomly found words and phrases and reordering their meaning I am attempting to create a story that is more sensibility than sense.
Labyrthena was created as a long distance collaboration between my brother, Barry Curtis and I. He would send me a chapter in letter form and I would draw images of his descriptions as best as I could.
A tribute to film noir and pulp stories, Labyrthena tells the tale of a dysfunctional detective, Johnny Metaphysical, on the trail of an allusive, mystery woman with supernatural powers. She is everywhere, but nowhere to be found. What will Johnny discover in the course of his investigations? Could it be the man he is, or the woman inside of him?
This edition includes the first five chapters: Volume One.
COMING SOON:
