love in memory - acknowledgments

A quick apology to anyone who has seen or may yet see their face here (if I was able to get even close to likeness or dare to make the attempt sometime soon), and had their true initials shifted to other letters of the alphabet — it was a small, transparent fiction I could make: a mark of care, I hoped. But as someone who felt a strange separation from my own name for a long time (is that me? am I just my name?), I realized immediately in doing it how important our own names are to other people, and how attached I was to your actual names, even to just your true initials. You’re not just your name, but sometimes that’s all others have of you. You know who you are. Again: you are beautiful, always.

Nate Piekos and his Blambot Studio. A true specialized professional (but still renaissance artist) dedicated to his exacting craft who is willing to share his expertise to make everyone’s work better. We’ve never written or spoken, but I’ve learned from his work and admire his too-often undersung craft of typography and letter design, especially so in comics. The text in the images is Blambot's Digital Strip BB.

Other comics creators too numerous to name, but specifically, Scott McCloud, who not only articulated and demonstrated the special genius of comics through his books Understanding Comics and Making Comics, but opened a window much wider that had been just a crack: to a world far beyond just superheroes, such as in his own beautiful graphic novel The Sculptor.

Kyle Webster's amazing digital watercolor (and many other) brushes. I’ve used them poorly for several years, trying to make art created on the screen look like traditional media, and whether mine here are successful or not, the look they create is like real watecolor, so, I'm sticking with it. Adobe recognized the work as something they should have as standard in their software, so now it is. Huge.

Because it was easy, quick, and inexpensive, and I was feeling urgency about getting this started, I made a font of my handwriting for the title and headings at calligraphr. You might want to try it yourself.

All the musical artists and your work mentioned here: I never would have made it without you and what you made. Friends and family who introduced me to music or radio stations that became so important to me, loaned me records, gave me tapes, favorite songs, listened to music with me: It’s a transport to another world, a deep, strange, magical connection. I am forever in your debt, and I can only pay with occasional pictures.