April Newsletter

Happy April! Today, another piece of Scholars comes out - “CCF”, one of the first musical ideas for the album, but one of the most difficult to complete. I’m still figuring out what it’s about, but it seems to have something to do to coming back to a love you’d forgotten was there.

I can’t predict why anyone might like my art, but one reason I think I’ve heard is that it’s fun to go through the works of someone who engages with their own work - going back to older pieces, picking them up, revisiting and repurposing their ideas. I agree, and that’s why I’ve always done that. I think it would feel untrue to try and vacuum-seal each new work and present it on an isolated pedestal, when the truth is that everything comes in its context. I’m just moving around the same pieces I had to work with ten years ago, maybe with a few new tricks and skills now. (This doesn’t so much apply to “The Scholars” since it’s a band work, but as far as my own contributions go, it’s definitely true.) I’d rather be honest when I’m picking up a thread that isn’t so new - ultimately, they all come from outside of me, anyways. So I like to keep playing around with old songs.

One artist who has done way more with the same kind of ethos than I have is Cate Wurtz. My March was fairly free of events, so I’ll use this month’s newsletter as an excuse to talk more about her comic Crow Cillers, which ended last year, and which is absolutely worth reading if you like to see artists hearkening back to their own art, watching ideas you’ve already seen before get expanded on.

Crow Cillers is a comic series in the guise of a TV show that ran from 2014 to 2024 through Cate’s Patreon. For nine years, for eleven months out of the year, Cate would bang out the door the last day of the month with a new “episode” of Crow Cillers - usually about 21 pages, but sometimes longer than 40. (In its tenth and last year, Cate put out a ‘movie-length’ finale to the series.) I don’t know how most webcomics run nowadays - back in my day, a weekly schedule for pages was common enough, but I haven’t seen anyone besides Cate run on this pace of delivery successfully, let alone for a decade. The monthly deadline meant that each episode was going to be what it was going to be: if Cate’s computer crashed midway through the month, the rest of the episode would be drawn with paper and pencil. Episodes like these were often some of the best ones. Cate has a particular skill for improvisation, encountering unexpected ideas and roadblocks and incorporating them lightning-quick into a larger vision.

It’s this sense of improvisation, reacting to the immediate, that makes Crow Cillers so exciting to read through. There’s an ongoing plot worthy of real television, which I won’t spoil for you, but there’s also so many changes and surprises in it that would have been impossible if it had been in any other medium. It isn’t pristine or calculated; it’s a living document of ten years of life lived, transformed into art. It’s ten specific years. Trump’s 2016 election casts a dark shade over the end of Season 3; you can see the specter of AI slowly creeping into the webscape reflected, or even predicted, in the enemies of the final seasons. Nothing feels contained or safe about Crow Cillers; it’s a fictional story that our reality bleeds freely into. Anything can and does show up in it: Cate’s own life, her older comics, characters from other shows that gradually turn into canon Crow Cillers characters.

Like I said, I feel like there’s a deeper truth to art that plays loosely with its own borders. We live in a culture where most entertainment has a certain lamination to it. It’s part of the canon; it’s a glowing cube on your subscription service; it’s protected under copyright law and the authority of mass-media advertisements. All of that sucks the life out of art, literally. Art comes from living people; that’s what gives it value. And people can’t be laminated - they’re messy, and they exist in context; they need air, water, food, community, love to survive. That idea is at the heart of Crow Cillers, and its steadfast adherence to it makes it one of the most valuable works of art I’ve seen in my time.