Whales and the Big Box

Whales are a recurrent theme in the new book I'm working on.

Somewhere around the midpoint of drawing this book, I re-read "Moby Dick" with some friends- smart friends that enhanced my understanding of this work. I am also very interested in Rockwell Kent's illustrations for the book. The drawing above is one of my panels where I am trying to allude to Kent's style.

Melville's descriptions of whaling elicit many different emotions in me. The excessive slaughter involved in the enterprise is disturbing, but at the same time it forecasts a great many things that we do today.

I used to think that Americans stopped whaling because we felt bad about killing whales. This turned out to be a misconception on my part. We stopped whaling when we figured out how to replace whale-derived products with petrochemicals. Petroleum is also an animal product: the residue of prehistoric animals.

I have started to see a connection between whaling and contemporary shopping. 19th century whaling was a global operation that produced scores of consumer goods. Contemporary manufacturing spans the globe in a similar fashion.

Making this scene I was reflecting on my many furniture buying experiences. I'm sure many of you have had similar "big box" experiences. The fourth panel on this page shows you what kind of lettering corrections I leave for the digital editing phase of the work. The arrow by the second panel notes the stray ink blob on the character's arm so I remember to erase it digitally.