-while this version of the site and all it’s features are new, we felt it was worthwhile to carryover some of the content from the old blog into this new format. The first few entries are from the projects premier at Bloomsday ’08….

While I’ve kept many working journals over the years, this is the first one I’ve ever thought about doing in an on-line environment. Blogs, like typing, are relatively new to my working method, so I hope people will bear with me as try keeping track of what could very well be the next ten years of studio production.

(Yikes! That’s pretty scary when you say it aloud!)

The idea for doing a webcomic of James Joyce’s ULYSSES, like many other ideas in personal and professional life, was born in a bar. Two years ago (Bloomsday ’06) I and another cartoonist attended the Rosenbach Museum’s Bloomsday reading here in Philadelphia and, just around the corner, was my own neighborhood bar of the time, The Bards’ Irish Pub. I’d been a fan of the novel for years and, like most people I know, tried reading it five or six times before finally making it through. It is, without exception, the most difficult novel to read the first time that you’ll ever want to read again and again. My friend, a fan of the book who had sheepishly admitted to not having made it through his first time reading yet, started talking about how difficult, how intentionally oblique, Joyce was in the text and claimed that he got a much more pleasurable, and easier, experience of the novel from hearing it read aloud than he did by doing it on his own.

I had to agree. ULYSSES is, quite intentionally, a monster.

If hearing the inflection of other voices in this text does in fact make the reading any easier than, I started to wonder with my cartoonist friend, what would it be like to see the events of the novel acted out?

So, deciding that the day was too hot to go back and listen reading as elliptical or difficult as those from “Circe” or “Oxen of the Sun,” we decided to order a couple of more beers and sit in a nice dark, air-conditioned bar and talk about how ULYSSES might look as a comicbook.