Jon Gorga's Blog

Proud to present my latest comic: a short sci-fi romance! This time with art by Beck Kubrick and colors by HonkyTonk Comics Ernie: 

A VERY long time in the making, as rough versions of these characters and these scenes first popped into my head only months after I graduated college! I was extremely blessed to have the talented Beck Kubrick (@beckkubrick) choose to work with me on this and doubly blessed that she brought in Ernie (@HonkyTonkComics) to color it. Thank you both so much! 

Beck can be found at https://beckkubrick.com 

and 

Ernie posts comics at https://honkytonkcomics.tumblr.com 

~ @JonGorga 

It’s really quite simple. 

“The World” means your everything. Literally. Your “planet” means just this physical spinning rock but your “world” can mean your community or your whole industry but also everything our species has ever known or will ever know. Lock, stock, and barrel. Ideas, emotions, places, products, your Dad, your Mum, and Benedict Arnold. The baby and the bathwater. Everywhere and anywhere in the Universe. The whole shebang. Obvious maybe? It’s a starting place. It’s the WHERE. 

“The Culture” means what you do. This cuts across nations, industries, families. Again, it could just mean what happens in your community or your industry but it could be everything humanity has ever done or will ever do. Art is part of culture, but so is religion, history, politics, science, cooking, etc. Some cultures clash. This is why people like Jill Lepore are foolish when they assume something isn’t art because of the culture it came from. The academic grouping called the Humanities basically encompasses the disciplines that study Culture. Cultures are grounded in populations that are grounded in a specific time or its essential qualities, its zeitgeist. All of this forms the context for the next thing you do. It’s the WHEN. 

“The Arts” means… Art is… Well now, this is where people begin to lose their fucking minds, isn’t it? This is where all the debate lies. This is what gets people rankled and fuming. This is what makes people confused. Some say it’s everything with an aesthetic. Some say it’s everything that has no practical, survival-based purpose. I prefer to think of it something like: creativity acting on the world. Anything that happened or was made or was said when something looked at reality and said “What if?” Small questions and big ones alike. Just as in the scientific definition of work: force exerted on the world, it can happen anywhere at any time to anything. Here’s one of the craziest parts— get ready for this. Part of art is often creating representations of things from the World, or indeed creating entire “Worlds”. That’s what they call WORLDbuilding. So you can have everything else on this list IN this one. So everything else on this list can, contextually, be this one without diluting it. “The Lord of the Rings” is a work of art that contains so many fictional people, works, places, and entire cultures in its fictional world, its diegesis. It has its own who, what, where, when, how, and attempt at a why. The World moves around the Arts and the Arts grow out of the World in an attempt to explain everything. It’s the WHY. 

Scott McCloud’s extremely brilliant and extremely simple definition of art.

“The Mediums” mean the ongoing set of expectations for the delivery method of your art. Paper or canvas? Will it move or be static? Is there audio? Or are you making art of an idea or a dish of food? Yes, the food you eat and a few other things can straddle the cultural divide between art and practical human life needs. The form it takes matters as it alters the content, and the context, and the feeling. But the form can’t negate the creativity within, to the literal contrary! The imposed limits of each form encourage creativity. The form is just the frame you put something in. This is why people like Bill Maher are plainly wrong when they say something isn’t art because of its medium. Framing, plating, screening, composing, shooting, printing, drawing. It’s the HOW. 

“The Genres” mean the ongoing set of expectations for the content of your art. Stock characters or archetypes? Common situations or tropes? These aren’t necessarily bad! Artists sometimes just want to say what they need to without getting lost in detail. Settings can change but expectations about them rarely do. A “dock” is different from a “dick”, obviously. But both a “dock” and a “dick” can mean extremely various things in a gangster novel and in a sci-fi novel. This is why people like Martin Scorcese saying something isn’t art because of its genre (or distribution or cost) are flat wrong. Every art medium can have genres: from barbecue to baroque, from Afro-Futurism to constructivism. Everything beyond that is specific to exact works or a series of works or franchises. It’s the WHAT. 

I’m not some super-genius. I’m not infallible. But I have been thinking about this, writing about this, and arguing about this for twenty years. I might change this with time, ain’t nothing written in stone. Argue with me about it, anywhere and everywhere. We each get to live in this crazy, huge, potentially never-ending World, with its Culture of Works in Genres & Mediums in the Arts. Everyone who has ever existed are all in this equation. You are the WHO. 

So don’t judge other people’s stories, just take them as they come. Don’t be an ivory tower art snob or a couch potato entertainment junkie, wait for the thing to say what it has to say. It’s not hard. What’s harder is making the stories. You need a how, a who, a where, a what, a when, and somehow, someway we come closer to discovering a why. That’s what art is and what it’s for.

After spending the wee hours of the morning reading my housemate's copy of the latest issue of Poets & Writers I find myself thinking:
I'm the owner of a comic-book shop.What the fuck am I doing?
I can almost hear the fourteen-year-old I used to be screaming: THAT WAS PLAN B!! YOU GAVE UP PRETTY FAST, ASSHOLE! I didn't give up. Not consciously, anyway. That said, I have some responsibilities and those responsibilities preclude having much time to do what I really want: write.
We'll see about that on the permanent. We'll see.
~ @JonGorga

After spending the wee hours of the morning reading my housemate's copy of the latest issue of Poets & Writers I find myself thinking:
I'm the owner of a comic-book shop.What the fuck am I doing?
I can almost hear the fourteen-year-old I used to be screaming: THAT WAS PLAN B!! YOU GAVE UP PRETTY FAST, ASSHOLE! I didn't give up. Not consciously, anyway. That said, I have some responsibilities and those responsibilities preclude having much time to do what I really want: write.
We'll see about that on the permanent. We'll see.
~ @JonGorga

This is a list of people who've saved the world as discovered/encountered by Jon Gorga starting Friday March 16, 2o12. It will be updated as needed.


So, to clarify:
ANYONE (i.e. fictional or real)
who SAVES (i.e. rectifies entirely or partially a standing or potential disaster)
the WORLD (i.e. any society of intelligent beings)

Martin Luther King Jr. counts but so does Luke Skywalker.
Superman will be counted the first upcoming time I read a comic in which he stops Brainiac from shrinking Earth for preservation but not a second time and JFK AND Khrushchev will be counted the first upcoming time I read about how they resolved the Cuban Missile Crisis. No one can make the list twice.


Current count: 8


1. His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso, for respecting both his people and the Chinese in the creation of a Tibetan government in exile allowing his culture to continue to thrive. 3/16/2o12
2. Caroline McKinnon, for her social work utilizing comics with children both in Africa and urban Brooklyn. 3/17/2o12
3. Rock Braddon, for defeating Dr. Diaboloque's plot to become ruler of the universe in the ludicrous short story reviving The Space Legion in "Crack Comics" #63. 3/18/2o12
4. Andrew Hamilton, for winning printer John Peter Zenger's case against the colony of New York in 1735, the first win of its kind and the bedrock of American freedom of the press. 3/19/2o12
5. Chief Justice Hugo Black, for spearheading the judgement that ruled in favor of The New York Times continuing to publish The Pentagon Papers, allowing the US government's internal record of the Vietnam War to become public history. 3/19/2o12
6. Seth, the "power-guy", for smartly saving the power to turn back time for the right person keeping a timeline in which the Nazis won WWII from becoming permanent in the fourth episode of the third season of "Misfits". 6/9/2o12.
7. Jackie Estacado, The Darkness, for slicing the throat of The Curator before he could use the Thirteen Artifacts to destroy the entire universe in "Artifacts" #12. 10/25/2o12
8. Alice Meehan, for working as a public defender in the Bronx. 11/30/2o12

There are good things all around you if you're wise enough to see.

So this is me doing "A Softer World".
Sort of. Because they're amazing.

It's also me doing Tom Waits.
If that makes any sense. Because he's also amazing.

Suggested tracks:
"Small Change (Got Rained On With His Own .38)"
and
"What's He Building?"

Kinda-sorta video version?

Next, less about me. Finally.

~ @JonGorga

New comic for ya: Recommended listening: "You Don't Drink Coffee" by Chuck Coleman.
The theme song to my last year of high school and first year of college...

Senia and I have been working on this slowly since mid-way through college, so after five years, you can finally read it.
The always wonderful and helpful Miss. Senia Hardwick, again, writes poetry at:
http://headachesandworry.blogspot.com

~ @JonGorga

Buying shoes for yourself is hard. Well, a little bit anyway.


Confession? I called my Mom and e-mailed her photos before putting down money on shoes. Smart or insecure? I'll be damned if I know.

~ @JonGorga

My friend Senia Hardwick and I have noticed new work from a unique graffiti artist underneath the streets of New York City: He/she/they tickle me.

~ @JonGorga
P.S. ~ The talented Senia Hardwick has a poetry blog at http://headachesandworry.blogspot.com

Been out of this game for a while now, so here's a softball to get us started again:
And that's the way I like it.

~ @JonGorga

P.S. ~
I haven't been posting my comic regularly here of late because I've been concentrating on my consulting work and my retail work. I'm now in a more financially secure place and the comics can start rolling out again.

P.P.S. ~
This comic was produced to connect with my recent editorial over at The Long and Shortbox Of It about comics culture in New York City, my adopted home.