Lucian Gregory

Okay, so I fell through on my promise to post something every day, and pretty quickly. Sorry! But give me a break; the Stumptown Comics Fest is this weekend, and in addition to helping everyone around the studio get ready, I'm putting together my own portfolio to show editors and stuff. Very intimidating!

Lucian Gregory is a character introduced in the first pages of G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday. He's an "aesthete anarchist," and a delightful straw-man, who falls into an ideological dispute with the protagonist, Gabriel Syme, who, along with the narrator, is basically Chesterton by a different name. But shortly thereafter, the rebellious poet introduces Syme (an undercover "philosophical policeman") into the company of the world's most dangerous ring of anarchists!

Here is GKC's opening description of Gregory:

"...the red-haired poet was really (in some sense) a man worth listening to, even if one laughed at the end of it. He put the old cant of the lawlessness of art and the art of lawlessness with a certain impudent freshness which gave at least momentary pleasure. He was helped in some degree by the arresting oddity of his appearance, which he worked, as the phrase goes, for all it was worth. His dark red hair parted in the middle was literaly like a woman's, and curved into the slow curls of a virgin in a pre-Raphaelite picture. from within this almost saintly oval, however, his face projected suddenly broad and brutal, the chin carried forward with a look of cockney contempt. This combination at once tickled and terrified the nerves of a neurotic population. He seemed like a walking blasphemy, a blend of the angel and the ape."

My picture is not worth a dozen, much less a thousand, of Chesterton's words, but my hope is to at some point illustrate in comics form a scene from this book, or at least draw a decent pin-up of it's seven main characters (code-named Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday). Everything I've ever wanted to say, Chesterton has said it already and better. For months now I've been dreaming of writing a story where the characters were purely allegorical and had no personalities beyond their respective ideologies, but in Thursday I have already just that.

edit: I will say I'm proud of Gregory's gesture. My original conception was to having him point up a finger, mid-tirade. Way too Platonic. This way, he looks more like he's shaking his fist at God!