Hi again, Primate Posse! Thanks for sticking with me while I take a semi-break to concentrate on my other art endeavours. Also thanks to all my fellow cartoonists for the encouragement to continue. You guys are the greatest! 🙂

Anyway, guess what? There really is a Stan Dickie (well sort of). And there really is a song called (I Found Jesus) Under a Truck. Please click the link to listen to it. I recorded it myself doing all the vocals (I’m not really a singer, but I do my best with what I got!) and guitars (the drums are just a loop and I would love to put some bass on these songs some day). Stan Dickie is an alter-ego that I created for my Master of Fine Arts thesis. As it says in the comic, Stan is a country/rock “star” who I wanted to use ostensibly as a vehicle to satirize contemporary masculinity and traditional patriarchy (and as you can see a little religious satire crept in there).

The background on this is: early on in my MFA program, I started to write songs to use as soundtracks to simple cut-out animations i was creating. But I started to realize that a character was forming in my mind and I actually stopped animating to work on developing him. I also started to perform in costume as Stan and really felt I was on to something. When I finished the program, I considered creating a comic strip about Stan, but decided to go with my GITM concept which was already fully developed (before I ever went to art and then grad school). But I thought I’d bring Stan in to Gorilla in the Midst at some point. And hell, maybe the songs can draw a few more readers to the site? You can also check out standickie.com.

On another note, for the exhibition I am currently in in Montreal, I was asked to do a performance as Stan at the opening and I also wrote 2 new songs which I’ll add to Stan’s website soon. In the meantime, here is a link to the stop-motion animation we created in Montreal over a 4 month period. At the very end, over the credits, you can see a little bit of what the cut-out animation I was doing in school was like. Here’s the link Espejo Negro.