Lexington, KY - J. Todd Dockery says he intuitively created his self-published graphic novel "In Tongues Illustrated." Accordingly, it's somewhat hard to describe. I wouldn't try to find a plot if I were you - there is plot (multiple and various), and you can
hold on to it for a couple pages or so, but then the channel changes and you're on to someone else's story. There's a femme fatale, a bumbling super-hero, a cut-throat gang, freak shows, a lost hand, fishnet stockings, mutants, Italian food, historical nonfiction, lots and lots of cigarettes, a stable of not-so-super heroes, booze, knives, guns, pollution, aliens... Oh, and I think there's also a love story in there somewhere.
It sounds kind of fantastical, but Dockery's pen and ink drawings are dark, somber, sometimes languid. He feels no need to make such varied vignettes frenetic, or even the need to make them relate to one another. It's actually refreshing, like free association storytelling.
"Its almost more like a collection of poems," Dockery says, describing the book, "and the themes of the poems connect to each other, and I'm leaving quite a bit of room for whoever's experiencing it to connect some dots or find something in those abstractions. But I'm not under any illusions that if you grab 10 people on the street that they're gonna think this is something you can easily enter into it."
Dockery lives on a quiet dead end street on the north side of downtown, in a cottage that's painted in colors a bit more interesting than the neighbors'. He wears a fedora, even in the living room, horn rimmed glasses, a goatee. He smokes hand-rolled organic cigarettes and collects records.
"I have a soft spot for crackpots, the fringe of the fringe," he says, which certainly encompasses the group of characters in "In Tongues Illustrated."
Besides the comic book heroes and villains, there's a non-fiction vignette about the not-so-famous novelist Harry Stephen Keeler, an extremely prolific writer whose mom committed him to an insane asylum at an early age. It's pretty interesting stuff, and I couldn't tell as I read if Keeler was a fictional Dockery character (mockumentary "Spinal Tap" style), or if he really was an early 20th century novelist. He might be a crackpot, and is definitely the fringe of the fringe, and the New York Times wrote about him in 1942 (quoted from "In Tongues Illustrated"): "We are drawn to the inescapable conclusion that Mr. Keeler writes his peculiar novels merely to satisfy his own undisciplined urge for creative joy." Which sums up J. Todd Dockery as well. "I definitely relate to artists who create because they have to," he says.
His style reminds me of other local "outsider" artists, like Mike Goodlet, whose darkly mysterious multimedia pieces are made of obsessive pen and ink drawings on scraps of paper, and prison-inmate-artist Marvin Francis, whose sculptures share a similar visual vocabulary as Dockery's pages. And as an artist, Dockery never wanted a publisher for his book.
"In Tongues Illustrated" grew from Dockery's experience with "zines" and underground comics, ever since he was a teenager. If you're not familiar with the now-historical zine, it was an art form from the '70s, '80s and '90s (practiced largely by dorky scene kids) made possible by cheap forms of reproduction like photocopiers and displaced by cheaper forms of reproduction like Internet forums and blogging. Which is kind of a shame, because zines were way cooler than blogs are. You had to be cool to know about zines, to get them and to care enough to read them (and I mean 'cool' here in the science fiction, Star Trek convention sort of way). The best thing about zines, and what they'll always have over blogs, is that they were (are) a labor of love. A zine maker has to shell out the money to get photocopies, and then he has to go home, staple them, fold them and distribute them. The effort gave a zine a bit more credibility than a blog has today.
There were music zines and comics zines (or comix) and zines about hitchhiking, and toward the decadent end of the zine era they started being collected into books, which is what "In Tongues Illustrated" resembles: a collected art-comix-rock n' roll-noir zine.
"I wanted to do a limited edition book that could also be like a portfolio - a graphic novel meets art book," Dockery said. "I really wanted it to have this handmade look to it."
On this level, the book is obviously a labor of love for Dockery. He paid for it to be printed, picked the perfect paper and assembled each book by hand. He even printed the covers on his friend's antique letterpress.
Dockery's financial ambition was to break even, but really he just wanted to get his work into people's hands. "At the end of the day, I did it because I wanted to do it and needed for it to be there, so when anybody likes it or says something positive, or gets something out of it, you've obviously communicated something to them, and that's what I'm looking for."
"In Tongues Illustrated" is available at the Morris Book Shop (408 Southland Dr., www.morrisbookshop.com) and online at www.jtdockery.com.
Dockery is also an exhibiting artist in the Lexington Art League's current exhibit "Comix," which features a wide survey of other comic creations from local artists, in the Downtown Arts Center (10 a.m. - 5 p.m. Mon. - Fri.; 10 a.m. - 4 p.m. Sat., 141 E. Main St.). The exhibit will be on display through March 28.
Other homework: read more about fedoras, Harry Stephen Keeler and Zap Comix on Wikipedia for starters. Also, check out Dockery's Web site jt.dockery.com to hear some music by Dockery's bands The Smacks! and Miss Kitty Twister & Her Hot Dogs.