Do you know who Bernie Wrightson is?
Bernie Wrightson in 1972, when I was a freshman and sophomore in high school, created for D.C. comics the character known as The Swamp Thing.
Of course,
being a stupid kid at the time, I totally ignored his genius with pen and ink, ink and brush, and fascinatingly dense forests of intricate detail.
I didn’t really get it until he joined The Studio with Jeffery C. Jones, Michael Kaluta, and Barry Windsor-Smith (whom I idolized for his work on Conan.)
And while in college, consuming everything available by The Studio that I could find and afford, I fell in love with his deeply dark and brooding illustration work for a new edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
Frankenstein had 50 illustrations by Wrightson that firmly established the fact that by drawing with black ink you could show in startlingly real ways the qualities of white light. That appealed to me both literally as a way to make beautiful art and metaphorically, as that last thing was what I was doing with my own life, drawing the darkness to get to the beautiful light.
Most of his work
was drawing monsters; werewolves, zombies, the creatures of H.P. Lovecraft, and numerous things from nightmares.
But it has a definite beauty of its own. Darkness, evil, and corruption brings out the quality of what is light, righteous, and pure. There is truth in approaching reality from the dark side of the equation.
Of course, he would also do work on heroes like Batman, because the darkness breeds its own defenders of justice.
I am not so much a fan of monsters as I am a believer of taming the monsters who beset us as we try to make a worthy life for ourselves. But I can definitely see where Bernie Wrightson has been doing exactly that with his brilliant pen-and-ink artwork. Sadly, he will be doing no more of it since we lost him in 2017. But it is a legacy he left behind that will make his light continue to shine forth from dark places for a long time to come.
My wife constantly tells me I am wrong… about everything. And I probably am. So that is not right. And if you think that’s my wife in the picture, you would be wrong. She’s much larger than that in real life.
Catch a Falling Star 
Humble Pie
The difference between who you want to be and who you are is humbling.
The recipe for humble pie requires good, clear eyesight.
And you need a reliable mirror that only shows the flaws in the reflected image, not in the mirror itself.
And you need to look at every detail in the whole of you. Even the secret things that you tend to conceal from everybody, especially yourself.
And writing a novel, if you do it right, is a form of baking humble pie.
The good and the not-so-good is reflected in reviews, which are often written with mirrors that have flaws.
But what you see, if you are honest with yourself, can show you that, even though you are far from perfect, you are exactly what you are supposed to be.
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Filed under artwork, autobiography, commentary, empathy, feeling sorry for myself, irony, Paffooney, self portrait, strange and wonderful ideas about life