Char Man

The sto­ries of Char Man are wide and var­ied, but they all seem to agree on two details: the guy burnt to death, and he’s still around.

There’s a stretch of the 118 free­way where he’s said to jump onto pass­ing vehi­cles, spray­ing blood and fire on the wind­shield to cre­ate unsafe dri­ving con­di­tions for the unsus­pect­ing motorist.

My friend Kurt and I were dri­ving that road at some obscene hour, and it occurred to us that we did­n’t want to expe­ri­ence this. It felt very like­ly at the time that we were about to.

So, I did what you would prob­a­bly have done; what any­one would… I wrote him a theme song. 

I guess I thought this would some­how re-frame the expe­ri­ence; give us a new per­spec­tive so we don’t pan­ic like oth­er dri­vers when he choos­es to intro­duce him­self. And let’s face it — every­one needs a theme song.

We sang it again and again until we were safe­ly out of range.

This is that song:

There’s also a fol­lowup piece, “Char Man’s Hol­i­day” (for the unpro­duced sequel).

You can lis­ten to that as well:

Note: the vol­ume is unusu­al­ly low on this one for some rea­son. I’ll fix that… someday.

Idea Ship

I made this image as a Christ­mas present for artist and activist Phil Yeh, who cre­at­ed and owns the Winged Tiger and Patrick Rab­bit char­ac­ters pic­tured, and reserves all rights to them.

Phil’s work is about pro­mot­ing lit­er­a­cy and cre­ativ­i­ty, and I used this project to pull myself out of a cre­ative slump. It seemed a poet­ic fit.

If you haven’t read Winged Tiger Comics & Sto­ries, the scene depict­ed might not make a lot of sense to you. Patrick Rab­bit is a car­toon­ist with writ­ers block, and the Winged Tiger is using its mag­ic to drag Patrick all over the uni­verse to ask artists where they get their ideas. Wher­ev­er pos­si­ble, the answers come from Phil per­son­al­ly inter­view­ing those artists, and the comic’s art­work incor­po­rates sketch­es that they give him. It’s an inspir­ing com­mu­ni­ty effort, as well as a tech­ni­cal­ly daunt­ing col­lab­o­ra­tion. To read more about or pur­chase Phil’s books, vis­it wingedtiger.com.