"I read your column," muttered Mike the Grump, bent over his drawing board. "It didn't totally suck." "Why, thank you, Mike." I was genuinely touched. This was as close to a compliment as Mike the Grump ever got.
Spread out before Mike were his tools: a series of pencils, sharpened to a needle-point, and organized by hardness; erasers - pink, white, crumbly gum, kneaded, electric and eraser-sack; graphite sticks, X-acto knives, straight-edges, French curves and compasses, each carefully arranged to a pleasing distance from the edge of the table. Vertical bins overhead held a variety of papers, and boards, with each surface and thickness color-coded; air-brush and splatter brushes each have their own space at the rear.
"Usually I don't like columnists; they just have opinions about this or that, without any real knowledge. But you are an ... adequate writer. I would say that in the current crop of comic writers you are certainly in the better category. Not sucky at all. You don't repulse me." For Mike this was gushing. He once referred to Alan Moore as "An almost decent writer, when he doesn’t try too hard." Mike reads one or two novels every week, both modern SF and classic novels of fantasy and heroic adventure. Well-thumbed editions of Mallory and Ursula LeGuin shared space with Burroughs and Wells and Verne; not much Hemmingway or Vidal though. To Mike the important thing was in not over-praising ephemeral present in Art or Writing at the expense of his beloved classics; after all, if some modern hack was actually good, then wasn't Cervantes or Dickens or Robert E. Howard subtly diminished?
"The one flaw in your column," Mike continued. "Is it's content. I wasn't expecting it to sound so much like you." I sensed this wasn't a compliment. "You just talk about every day things, stuff that happens in your ordinary life. I was expecting that you would be talking about important movements in narrative art; you could use your forum to enlighten your readers as to interesting or worthwhile works in literature or cinema they might have missed, especially since most of your fans are pretty ignorant of the finer things." I considered as Mike continued to draw.
"Well, I have been thinking about a series on my favorite movies` their strengths and weaknesses, and how they have contributed to the filmic oeuvre."
"That's more like it! What did you plan to start with?"
"I'm not sure, either Cutthroat Island or Hello Dolly ; I also have a certain fondness for Batman and Robin, Silent Scream and At Long Last Love. " There was a considerable pause. Mike thickened a line, then using a shaved gum eraser, he shaped the broadened graphite into a perfectly weighted arc.
"You are aware that those films are some of the most meretricious failures and hideous examples of fluffy, commercial pap in the entire history of cinema -- that everyone with the slightest taste or knowledge considers them not only flawed, but failures and jokes?"
"I know there's been some chat in that direction. but I still like them."
"I see." Mike the Grump used a straight-edge to draw a long line across the bottom of his paper with the lightest pencil; he then darkened it by running successively softer leads over the same spot. As he contemplated the line, he carefully re-sharpened each pencil until the point was restored.
"You know, Bill," he said finally. "Using one's own life as a model in art has a long an honorable tradition; I wouldn't give up on it yet. Some of your little sketches were rather ... cute."
"Why, thank you, Mike. I'll take it under advisement."
Mike judiciously added a couple more lines to the huge drawing of a plunging horse spread out before him. It was an equine portrait of such electric power and realism that the beast seemed about to spring out into the room. It was an insanely great drawing; it had only taken him 15 months to get it this far.
"Mike, that is so good," I said, and meant it. My own horse drawings tend to be either amusing, or tragic. Or both. depending on your perspective.
"Thank you, Bill," said Mike the Grump. "I'm thinking of tearing it up. It sucks." Suiting action to words, he began ripping.
"I'll buy it! Don't tear it up!" I said desperately, pulling the huge, fragile thing out of his hands.
"I don't sell flawed art to me friends. I may not be much of an artist, but I'm at least above that." He jerked the paper out of my hands.
"But it's wonderful; what’s wrong with it?" He shrugged.
"The line quality is terrible; there's coincidence of form between the haunches and the back muscles, here and here; the highlight in the left pupil has never been right - I thought I could fake it, but it's not working." I squinted at the beautiful thing, trying to see what Mike saw; it was no use. It was lovely. I sighed.
"It's just so much better than I could do."
Mike shrugged.
"Of course, but that's your style Bill; things are supposed to look ugly and ridiculous when you draw them." One thing about Mike; you always know where you stand with him. I carefully removed the Blade of Honesty from my liver.
Mike took pity on me.
"Look." said Mike the Grump. "I can't sell it to you; I can give to you, though. It not like it's signed or anything. You can use it as a study if you want."
"Yes, Mike." He carefully smoothed another piece of paper down on his drawing board, then selecting a number 8H pencil began laboriously sketching exactly the same horse, in exactly the same pose; this time it would be perfect.
As I got up to leave I noticed a neat pile — or rather two piles — of torn drawing paper stacked with precision under the table; doubtless this was the graveyard of months of previous horse studies.
"And Bill...?" Mike spoke without looking up. "This time don't sign my name to it, frame it, and submit it to any damn contests."
"Yes, Mike," I agreed humbly. "But you did win that trip to Bermuda."
"True, but the weather was cold and there were too many tourists. Bermuda is flawed," said Mike the Grump.
