Hello, Creatures of Light & Shadow!
Before we get to today’s comic, I wanted to make sure you heard about my upcoming virtual workshop, Haiku: Imagination & Observation. It’s set for April 27th at 10:00 am PDT. Registration is $35, unless you also happen to be a paid subscriber to this newsletter, in which case you can attend at no additional cost. (If you’re a paying member and don’t have your discount code, click here to copy and paste the code that you can enter at checkout).
During this one-hour workshop, I’ll share tips and strategies for adding more life and emotion to your haiku and several exercises for pulling poems from the world around you and from your imagination. I will also be doing some improv haiku where you suggest the genre or subject for the haiku, and I will compose it live!
You can register at the Weirdo Poetry store, and I hope to see you there!
Haiku Comic
lonely Jupiter sparking below god's toenail, sunset's afterglow
Drafting Table
I’m trying a new newsletter feature in which I talk a little about the creative process for a given poetry comic.
This haiku was inspired by the scene I witnessed when I came out of Walmart at around 8:30 pm the other night. The sky was not fully dark; there was still a faint, ethereal glow from the recent sunset. There were no stars out except Jupiter sitting below a barely-there crescent.
I worked on the haiku on the way home and wrote it on my phone in the driveway. Originally, the second line was “sitting below God’s toenail.” I didn’t like “sitting”, and I decided that I liked the lowercase god to contrast with the capital Jupiter in the first line. (though in the comic, everything is in caps). I tried a few different words to replace “sitting”. Shinning seemed the best fit, but it also felt boring. I use that word too much when writing about the night sky. Rolling through the possibilities in my head, I hit on “sparking” and enjoyed how that word made me think of the old cigarette lighters that you had to click a few times before they would spark into a flame.
For the comic, I wanted to capture the way the claim crescent moon hinted at the rest of the sphere, cloaked in shadow. I replaced the landscape of strip malls and neighborhoods that were in my view at the Walmart with something like the Cascade mountains.
My goal with these comics is to ensure the best reader experience. I use a larger-than-typical font size. Usually, I also place the text against a box to facilitate reading. However, the panels I had drawn did not lend themselves to boxes; they blocked too much of the art. Instead, I changed the color and left them against the almost-night sky.
Thanks for reading!
Be the weird you want to see in the world!
Cheers,
Jason
Thank you for the detailed description of your process. It was very informative.
Your haiku paints a vivid, cosmic picture using just a few words. It personifies Jupiter as lonely, maybe highlighting its distance and isolation out in space. Describing it as "sparking below god's toenail" adds a touch of whimsy and imagination, likening a distant celestial glow to something tiny and overlooked, like a spark under a giant’s toenail.
The mention of "sunset's afterglow" ties it back to Earth, connecting the vastness of space with the familiarity of a sunset. It's a beautiful blend of the grand and the intimate, all captured in a brief moment.