The Dark Inventory

From 2011.

Though Elspeth is supremely powerful, she is only too aware of the weakness that inherently comes with that.  A god will always be less real than the life it creates, and so in tending to this inbalance, Elspeth knowingly puts herself through periods of weakness, reality and submissiveness in order to retrieve experiences of a darker yet more powerful nature.

Achieved by temporarily trading her pockets to a benign ghost (in this case, the ghost of a volcano, seen in the print 'Elspeth & The Dreadnought Rising') for a tool of control, here she has traded her pockets for the Helioxical Head which keeps her tied to Savage Patter, the king of a measured restraint.  

Elspeth awoke on the isle and was immediately committed to the daily task of feeding waves and sharpening the whale teeth rocks that jut from the shore.  The flow of life in the sea that surrounds the rock is deeply tied to the tiniest of emanations from the typhonic memory of Patter.  His pirate wit and stone-cold drive honors the immediate environment and swamps it in sources of misadventure and yearnings for discovery, but he is a cruel and cold pebble, heartless in nature, making this is a boring, dull and yet necessary part of Elspeth's cycle.

The blessed skywhale is oft hidden from view a la deus ex machina and waits to release Elspeth from her toil at exactly the right moment.

An old picture but an important one for me.  It was a rarity at the time, in that it has only one character visible, and also that it sold out.

From what I considered to be my first proper series, it was the 23rd and last to be drawn.  Of those 23 drawings about 18 I liked enough to sell prints of, there are 5 lay dying somewhere.  One of which was called 'The Planopticon Idly Mourned'.  Maybe their titles will get turned into something else.

The Fox is an aspect of the familiar of all the characters featured previously and is heading (back) to the Mountain to collate the information and feed it back into the source (me).  He was my idea for a cosmic animal, one that all the other animals would look up to and revere, mainly because I think foxes are cool and probably a bit because of the cosmic coyote that Homer encounters in the Simpsons.  Oh and Grant Morrison's fox friend from Animal Man had definately cropped up around that time.

The mountain is in the shape of the Mortality Symbol, which has become my logo, and follows my name on all drawings.  It began life in an email conversation with a friend during dull hours at the office about patterns, apophenia, synchronicity and magic and stuck with me as my own alchemical symbol because I could pile so much meaning into it.  Meaning that I could then, and still do, use to come up with more ideas for drawings, hence the title.  The mountain is the heartbeat and the fox is the blood.  
I can't say much more about it without breaking something.

Soon after this picture Elspeth came into being.*  I like to think the collected effect of those 18 live pictures and the 5 dead ones was the birth of the theme of the next series, Elspeth & The Subatomic Dredge.

*born from a paper egg onto the steps of the mountain.

Elspeth finds it easy to manipulate the tools of gods.  This is of great annoyance to the demimonde and villains of the dark inventory who must undergo countless trials and record to memory vast amounts of arch-chemical, verb-symbolic and ink-laden magick for even a sample of her skill.

Here she is mastering the quasi-branched Sentinel Rot, much to Calavera's chagrin.  She later bestows this tool as a means of subatomic transport upon Ravel, giving him the ability to travel through worlds with ease via sprawling branches.  Calavera has become the epitome of a Want failing to find the Need and in the process burns the country he comes from to the ground in order to retrieve the treeskill.

The Cruciverb Knight (An Arathmetition) strikes up a chord-full and bilious tempest to renew the fading heart of the blessed Lord Speak.  Someone whispers "Yes, this is really happening.".