N

I . Th e M e a C u l p a S t o r y C y c l e
I I . D e s e c r at i o n
I I I . Th e G a r d e n

Negative Space

[ comics by jeff johnson 1992-1995 ]

I V. B e c o m i n g U n m o u t h l e s s
V. A d v e r t i s e m e n t s f o r M y s e l f

 Foreward: Black & White, Full Bleed . . . . . .6

Preface: Horror Vacui or Amor
Infiniti?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .7

I. Mea Culpa

Introduction: O, Felix Culpa!. . . . . . . . . . .8

Cover of Mea Culpa #1. . . . . . . . . . . . . 13.
The Waiting Room . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
The Art Class. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
Cover of Mea Culpa #2. . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
The Application. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
The Dog and the Pussy . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
Fortune Cookies. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
Burial Rites. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
Back Cover of Mea Culpa #3. . . . . . . . . . 30.
Blood Money. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
Inexplicable Critique. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
Slice of Life. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
Soft Head. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
Inside Front Cover of Mea Culpa #2 . . . . . 45

II. Desecration
Introduction: So I Desecrate. . . . . . . . . . 46
Narcissus in Hey, Sailor. . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
Betsy Pays Her Last Respects . . . . . . . . . 56
Betsy Learns a Lesson About Men. . . . . . . 59
Vagina Dentata. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
The Babies. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
Scary Bear . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
Bite, the Hand that Feeds. . . . . . . . . . . . 68.
Anna Bomination. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
Gruesome Charlie in No Erect Penises. . . . . 70.
Armageddon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76.
Warm in the Hands of the
Ice-Demon, Part II. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
Questions I Cant Answer. . . . . . . . . . . . 78
Voluptuous Dog: We Are Alone. . . . . . . . 80
Poison Love. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
Nurture the Devil . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
Homesick. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
Snake Doctor Blues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
Devour Her Until She Explodes. . . . . . . . 97
Confronting Dog. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
Ten Big Toes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
Birth. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
Illustration for The Stranger. . . . . . . . . . . 99
You Are McGlades Suck. . . . . . . . . . . 100
Beware of God. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
Mother and Child . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
The Dead Condemn the Living . . . . . . . 103
Cover for The Roadkill Review . . . . . . . . 104

Cover for Kombat Xmas Issue . . . . . . . . 105

Desecration. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
Flyer for a Signing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
Cover of Nurture the Devil #1. . . . . . . . . 109
Happy Birthday to Me . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
Back Cover of Nurture the Devil #1 . . . . . 112
Cover of Nurture the Devil #3. . . . . . . . . 113
Fall . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
Postcard for Nurture the Devil . . . . . . . . 115
Postcard for Desecration. . . . . . . . . . . . 115
Advertisement for
Nurture the Devil . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
Front Cover for the Desecration
Cassette Tape. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116
Inside Cover for the Desecration
Cassette Tape. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116
Text for the Inside Front Cover
of Desecration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116
Logo Design for Headveins. . . . . . . . . . 116
Inside Back Cover of Desecration. . . . . . . 117

III. The Garden

Introduction: Danger in the Garden. . . . . 118

Part One: Weeds. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
Part Two: Thorns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136
Part Three: Flowers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146

IV. Becoming Unmouthless

Self-Portrait from 1989. . . . . . . . . . . . 173

Assorted Photographs & Self-Portrait . . . 174
Two Self-Portraits from 2012 . . . . . . . . 176
The Divided States of My Nationself . . . . 178
Self-Portrait as Dogsbody in the Machine. 178
The Shame Flute. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179
Self Serve. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179
Out of Print . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 180
The Gaps in My Unemployment. . . . . . . 181
56 Covers from 1978-2005. . . . . . . . . . 182
Bio Version 2. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183
Bastard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 184
What I Do. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 186

V. Advertisements for Myself

Auto-da-F / adf.pdf . . . . . . . . . . . . . 188

Sad Brat, Bad Star. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189
Rebuke the Mind & Debride the Flesh . . . 190
Inviolate & Nosebleed. . . . . . . . . . . . . 191
Because No One Specifically
Asked Me Not To. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 192
Duh: A Book. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193
Be Still. Keep Moving. . . . . . . . . . . . . 194

Foreward:

B l a c k & Wh i t e , F u l l B l e e d

d like to propose a book collection

of my work from 1992 to 1995. Its
called Negative Space and the body
of it is divided into three parts: a.) The
Mea Culpa Story Cycle, b.) Desecration, c.) The Garden. The hair upon the
head of this corpus is d.) Becoming Unmouthless, a gallery of selfies from 1989
through 2012. Its corrective eyewear
provides part e.) Advertisements for
Myself, which will point the interested
reader in the direction of the other volumes into which Ive packaged all the
other years of my life.
Its formatted as an 8.5 x 11 perfect
bound book, 194 pages, black & white
with a color section to include the covers from Nurture the Devil. Ive built the
book so that I could print it through
Lulu.com, the print-on-demand website. But Ive nurtured the hope that I
could interest a publisher.
The material includes pages which
were published in Zero Zero, Dirty
Plotte, Buzzard, my self-published book
& tape set Desecration, Mac Tin Tac,
The Stranger, Blab!, Screw, Kombat and
perhaps some others I cant remember
right now. Other than that, it collects
the complete Nurture the Devil.
This book is one in a series of volumes
which, together, comprise my entire
output from 1987 through 2015; I
have set out to organize my life into
books, because thats where the best
part of me comes from, and because no
one specifically asked me not to. I am
a compulsive self-archivist, and these
sixteen volumes constitute the organs
of my self-collected library.
Heres a list of those volumes, with a
brief note on each:
0.) Crawling From the Accident: a trilogy of juvenilia.
a.) Someday This Day Will Never Come:
automatic writing poetry.
b.) Warm in the Hands of the Ice-Demon: a
short story
c.) Communion: a fragment of a novel.

1.) Sad Brat, Bad Star: collects my comics material from 1988-1992, plus the

sixteen finished pages of my unfinished

graphic novel of the same name. Its
available for $15.00.
2.) Negative Space: You are here.
3.) Inviolate: or, You Never Know, You
May Be Suffering Needlessly: This is a
color, hardbound book which includes
a partial facsimile of a sketchbook of
mine called I Suck, all my comics from
1995-1998 (most notably, a colorized
version of For Fucks Sake), a color zine
called Nosebleed, a self-collage called
Voluptuous Dog, and other things. Its
6 x 9, 152 pages with a wraparound
dust jacket, and no one will buy it for
$45.00.
4.) Nosebleed: The Quarterpage Book:
Contains every mini-comic/zine made
between 1992-2015 thats a quarter of
a letter-sized page or smaller. 253 pages; 4.25 x 5.5; pdf only.
5.) Auto-da-F: A sketchbook memoir,
reprinting the four sketchbook zines I
made between 2003-2010 and including so much supplementary material,
youll feel just like youre shooting up a
speedball of me. 6 x 9 248 pages, available for $16.00.
5.5) Auto-da-F: The Ouroboros Edition:
or, The adf.pdf: An expanded digitalonly version of my sketchbook memoir,
with alternate scans, color versions of
things and so much more supplementary material youll feel just like youre
overdosing on me. 12 x 9; 313 pages.
Only $3.00.
6.) trannyjunkiewhore: a collection of
comics and fumetti, maybe fifty pages
or so. All of which have been written,
and all of which are, as yet, undrawn.
7.) Apeiron: fourteen pdf books, four
dvds and one cd, all of which is intended to illustrate the messy form of
content.
8.) w/o [without]: One book and three
cds of musical furniture.
9.) The Collected Tankoven: Too Much
& Too Little: I made a collaborative zine
in 2012; this is available for $15.00.

10.) Be Still. Keep Moving: Self Help

for the High-Risk Set. These seven volumes, plus the extra seven books and
the audiobook video, together represent
over 600 pages of black & white and
color self-collage. This was my entire
output of 2014, a fecund year in which
I derailed a few trains of thought into
a mitigated wreck of a quasi-comics
idiom, thereby giving birth to a messy
essay made of words and pictures. The
second volume, Rebuke the Mind & Debride the Flesh, is available for $7.77.
11.) Drosophila 1-5: Five color pdf
books from 2015.
12.) Sketchbook Facsimiles: A series of
sketchbook facsimiles, of which the
first and, so far, only number is The Heresiarch Sketchbook. More are intended.
13.) Duh: a book: essays on futurism,
mixed with memoir and personal essays. Contains the essay Pain, Paraphilia & Pseudo-Psychosis. Available for
$10.00.
14.) GUT (Grand Unified Theory): this
is a body of works which fall under the
descriptor of wall art; that is, drawings
and paintings which are meant to live
under hung glass and which partake of
the cult of the unique object.
15.) [sic]: this is a collection of work
which has not been wrought for the
eyes of others. It may or may not remain invisible.
All of the books Ive made available
through Lulu.com are accessible here:
http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/jkjohnson

My entire output may be found here,

on Google Drive:
http://tinyurl.com/org5suc

If you like, you may contact me here:

jess.johnson.1970@gmail.com

All relevant links are now being routed

through this address:
http://jessjohnson1970.
wix.com/matterhorn

Preface:

Hor ror Vac ui or Amor I n f i n i ti?

Do I Hate Emptiness or Love the Infinite?

The u rge wh ich d rive s the decorator to go on f i l l i ng any

re su lt ant void i s ge ne ral ly de s crib ed a s h o r ro r vacui...
Mayb e the te rm amo r inf init i, the love of the i nf i nite
wou ld b e a more f itti ng de s cription .
~ E.H. Gombrich, The Sense of O rder

illing up space is, for me, a function of using my own obsessivecompulsive tendencies as a motor.
OCD, for me, seems to be a function
of sexual frustration (and I mean OCD
in a conversational sense rather than a
clinical one). Which is fitting, as all my
work is about the betrayal of childhood
by adulthood, and sexuality guards the
border between the two like a threeheaded hellhound.
I named my comic book Nurture the
Devil when I proposed it to Fantagraphics twenty-odd years ago. This
title came from one of the automatic
writing pieces I did as a teenager, inspired by William Burroughs Naked
Lunch. I take it to mean that one should
transmute weakness into strength
by adjusting the parameters of ones
craft. For instance, Im a relatively poor
draftsman who reflexively crosshatches
in the margins when Im writing; hence
my style, which is principally textural.
There are many points of failure in my
execution of the pages between these
covers, according to my self-assessment
of my comics. But one of the things Im
proudest of is my synthesis of style.
Starting with the Mea Culpa stories,
my comics manage to look like everyone who influenced me, and at the same
time theyre recognizably mine. Where
I fall most short of the mark is in the
mechanics of comics narrative. Im less
of a storyteller than a crafter of worlds,
which sounds grandiose until I add that
these worlds I make are ones in which
the basest human motivations are mag-

nified and mirrored for our collective

mortification.
Im not being self-effacing to win you
over, or to distract you from my giant
ego. In fact, Ive willfully suppressed my
judgment of my own work in the interest of being a good caretaker of it. If I
am not for myself, who will be for me?
as Rabbi Hillel put it.
Its with this in mind that I have indulged my most shameless self-archival
urges. Ive packaged the collected output of my life into volumes, of which
this is the second of twelve (see pages
192-193 for mention of the rest). Why
have I done this? Certainly not to accomodate any putative audience, hypothetically slavering for my content. I
dont deny that I would love to see my
work find its audience, but Im not so
deluded as to believe that it will happen
just by making the work available.
I make these books available because
Ive chosen to live within the set of possible worlds wherein some use may be
found for them. Also, by organizing
and packaging my past into discrete
volumes, I hope to reduce the volume
in my head by a few more decibels. In
other words, putting this book to bed
will help me sleep at night.
Im an egoist rather than an egotist. I
dont think Im better than anyone, yet
when it comes down to it, it really is all
about me. That this perspective is the
most universal aspect of consciousness
makes it no less compelling to each self

who peeks out from its own two eyeholes. Art is the desperate attempt to
render the carcass of subjective experience into universally yummy sides of
meat (sorry, vegetarians, for my bloody
metaphor).
In order to put you, the reader, behind
my eyes more effectively, Ive appended
a section called Becoming Unmouthless
to this collection. It contains a selection of self-portraits, self-descriptions
and selfies from childhood to the present (which is, as of these words, August 14th of 2015, just to be precise).
I have gone through a dialectical prism
of selves in my (nearly) forty-five years
of life. I was born Jeff; Jeff wrote and
drew the comics herein compiled. Jeff
tried hard to be a brain without a body.
When I turned thirty, I spent a decade
as Jessica, as near an antithesis to my
previous self as I could arrange. Now
Im Jess, and Ive returned to using the
male pronoun. (To add one final kink
to my evolving naming convention, Ive
taken to signing myself as J. K. Johnson,
which encompasses all three names under one umbrella). That this represents
a synthesis, a progressive move rather
than a regression, seems to be a difficult sell for most people. And whatever else I may have claimed before, and
despite my penchant for obfuscation, I
write principally to be understood. So
Im asking you, dear reader: please try
on my glasses for an hour or so, and
meet me at the halfway mark between
my astigmatism of situational bias
and yours. You contain multitudes alreadyso why not make room for me?

Introduction:

O, F e l i x C u l pa !
Notes on the Mea Culpa Story Cycle

iven the title Mea Culpa, which

is Latin for my fault, the fact
that these ten comics are about
guilt shouldnt be surprising. However,
Id like to think the content could be
enriched if I explicate the context for
each; hence, the following itemized list.
Dee, mentioned herein, is Deirdre
Antoinette Goodman, my girlfriend/
ex-girlfriend/wife/ex-wife from 1989
through 2001. For more about her, see
my book Auto-da-F I-IV (see page
188). Speaking of which, I obviously
have an affinity for using non-English
phrases in titles; rest assured, it is entirely a function of my desire to appear
more clever in your eyes, dear reader.

1. The Wait ing Ro om :

his story marks the arbitrary dividing line between my work until
then (collected in Sad Brat, Bad Star
see page 189) and the material thereafter. After floundering a little with
using proper art materials, rather than
the cheaper Uni-Ball pens and water-

based brush-pens that marked most

of my previous output, I hit my stride
here with this little story that derived,
at least in part, from Jim Woodrings
Frank stories. Introducing myself as a
mostly-reactive character whose words
are garbled into incoherent scribbles, I
set upon the six-panel page format that
would see me through the next couple
of years, blithely disregarding the standardized comic-book format. I always
wanted these to see print in magazine
format, really.
I wrote and drew this story in the aftermath of a particularly tumultuous
period of time, during which Dee had
undergone total renal failure and I
had totalled my first car, the light-blue
Acura Integra which has since taken on
the hues of a symbol for me. The two
years or so during which I had that car
were a conspicuously untroubled time;
Dee and I were in love, attending UGA
together, both our healths intact, and
my comics were, to my mind, flowing
like magic from me. In the months preceding this story, roughly the spring of
1992, Dee and I had moved out of the
dorms and into an apartment together, along with my high school friend
HK. Dee was sinking into depression,
certain she was getting ill, and we essentially broke up just as she had the
seizure that was to change both of our
lives.

2. The Art C l ass :

hen I was drawing these comics,

I was a student taking courses
towards a BFA in Fine Arts with an
emphasis on drawing. Abstract Expressionism was pushed in painting classes,
and gestural drawing was advanced
over the sort of tight, lightless, hermetic boxes of ink I was decidedly into
at the time. I was immune to even the
most benign influence, Im sorry to say,
but Ive found I often thrive in adverse
weather.
The professors class upon which I
modeled this particular hell was not
particularly hellish. There were other
classes and other personalities on hand
far more odious upon which to hurl my
gut-full of bile. This choice of tarrget
was purely a matter of timing, along
with the added deleterious effect of
taking a class over the summer quarter.
I gather that the innocent professor got
wind of this story through a mutual
friend, and took some offense. This is
unfortunate, but its far too late to apologize for my fictional abuse of the man.
Nothing personal; its just the business
of making art without class 101.

The guilt I faced over all of this mess

fueled a sudden creative surge (not an
uncommon phenomenon for me) and
obviously engendered the title Mea
Culpa. I think the germ of the story
rose from an experience at a doctors office, but that memory has since been effaced. Certainly, at the time, there were
plenty of nightmarish hospital visits
and such from which to draw.
Left: Deirdre & I, New Years Eve 1989. Above: The same, at an Atlanta Braves game.
Next page: At Bizarro-Wuxtry for the Hate-Ball signing in 1992. [Photographers unknown.]

N e g at i v e S pa c e

Jeff Johnson

3. The Appli c at i on :

was acutely aware of white guilt at

the time, as racial politics had found
me where I lived by way of Dee and
her family. She looked as if she could
be of any race, with her lovely caf au
lait skin, dark eyes that appeared to be
all pupil, and her untamable mane of
thick black hair. The family she knew
was African American; her father had
been white, German, and completely
in the dark about her existence. Her
mother insufficiently veiled her ambivalent shame for her daughter. My
family was very white, very Protestant,
and southern enough that our (my and
Dees) perfectly charming two-person
fondue of miscegenation put my father off his golf game. She vacationed
with us without incident during the
six months or so before my dad finally
asked me about her ethnicity. It took
a year of passive aggression from him
before we finally had a blow-out and it
came to light that he had deep, racially
biased misgivings about our relationship. He wasnt proud of it, but there it
was. I was shocked, having never heard
a racist word from either parents lips
all my life. I expressed my disappointment by avoiding trips home, and by
getting a part-time job at Pizza Hut as
a petulant stab at independence (putative though it was, as my college career
was entirely funded by my folks, and I
still had an eighty-dollar a week allowance [I know its vulgar to speak of such
things, but thats the sort of spoiled lout
I am]). I expressed my disappointment
in part, by writing The Garden, which
comprises the third part of this collection. Our families never met in the
twelve years we were in each others orbit, and thats a shame, because it might
have made for a good story.

the hierarchy of the establishment

which was entirely based on my own
idiotic racial profiling. The cringe I
used to feel for such crushing moments
would linger long after the amount of
time needed to surpass the negative
aversion mark necessary for behavioral
self-correction; I used to wallow in
those little blood baths of guilt until I
finally stopped thinking of my past as
part of the permanent record that informs my current grade point average.

a folder of master copies. Two or three

hours later, Id stagger out of the fluorescent lights with the smell of toner in
my nostrils and a box full of folded, stapled and trimmed booklets for which
Id not paid a cent and for which Id use
as inventory to sell, trade or promote
myself to the whole wide world, as yet
unwebbed (well, there was a hint of an
internet, I guess, but it wasnt noticeable to me yet). The dude who scares
the dog away is Jim Stacy.

4 . The D o g & the Pu ssy : 5. Fortu ne Co okies :

rom 1991 to 1993, I was actively

engaged in the culture of minicomics and zines which proliferated
in the pre-internet, snail-mail world of
P.O. Boxes and Kinkos (now a part of
Fed-Ex). Thanks to Devlin Thompson,
manager of the Bizarro-Wuxtry [now
simply Bizarro] comics shop in Athens, I was introduced to Jim Stacy, who
worked the night shift at Kinkos, and
who was kind enough to tolerate my
imposition when Id show up at three
in the morning with a caffeine buzz and

his little anecdote issues from a

rare evening spent in social intercourse with people who werent principally Dees friends. This sounds bad,
and it was, but when I met Dee, I wasnt
able to talk to people in any way that
would encourage them to seek out my
company, except out of some combination of obligation or pity. Kellye Smith
and her boyfriend at the time welcomed my company for an evening, and
Ive never minded being a third wheel,
for whatever perverse, inverse principle

The incident, inexpertly outlined here,

happened somewhere during my search
for a job. I made an assumption about

I. Mea Culpa

the huge wall of huge wall art is a tiny

six-panel comics page taken out of the
context of its rightful place among other pages.
Sometimes, being willfully out of step
will punish those you love for your actions, while rewarding you. Sometimes
its still worth it to do so, and necessary
to learn to live with the guilt.

9. S lice of L ife :

I
of self-exclusion to which I inwardly
adhere. We ate Chinese and watched
The Rapture with Mimi Rogers, directed by Ridley Scott. Kellye painted
the portrait of me painting (see above).

6. Bu r i a l Rites :

cant remember, for the life of me, if

the phone covered in eyes was an unconscious or conscious swipe from the
bountiful scraps left over from devouring Jim Woodrings feast-for-the-eyes
comics. Im indebted to his aesthetic in
the structure of these stories, as mentioned above. Unfortunately, I made a
terrific ass of myself when I was able to
rub elbows with him socially. But thats
another story.
I reference Nabokov here by way of the
Kubrick film of Lolita, from the part
in which Humbert is informed of his
wifes death.

7. Bl o o d Money :

utomated teller machines were

first making an appearance across
the United States at the same time I
was starting college. I was in weekly re-

N e g at i v e S pa c e

ceipt of an allowance of spending money above and beyond that which was
strictly necessary to sustain me, thanks
to my family. And this munificent sum
was a source of some ambivalence, given
the strain I felt from the situation described in item #3 above. But it was also
the means by which I was able to follow
the exciting world of independent or
alternative comics as it unfolded in the
early nineties. So this story is a balance
statement of that ambivalence.
I travelled to San Diego in 1992 for the
Comic-Con; the city episodes are taken
from that trip. The weird creature in
page three, panel four is meant to express my demonization at the hands
of circumstance. Page fours floor is littered with ATM receipts.

8. Inexplicable Critique :

here was this one art teacher I had

in college who was gifted at the
patter of promoting ones art; there is
nothing essentially wrong with having
such a gift, but he rubbed me the wrong
way. Egoists hate egotists. Anyway, critiques in his class could often be excruciating, especially if what you bring to

previously alluded to a part-time job

at Pizza Hut. I was an assembly-line
automaton charged with food preparation. An albino manager was stealing
from the till and giving me a cut for a
while, thinking I was aware of what he
was doing. But I was completely oblivious; I didnt figure it out until later how
I was unwittingly complicit. There were
no consequences for me when he got
fired.
I was a haughty little turd amongst my
co-workers. I drew effigies of managers
on bladders of sauce-filled pizza dough
and stabbed their faces bloody, for the
amusement of one redheaded co-worker named Jessica, who was the principal inspiration for my chosen name,
ten years later, when I started taking
estrogen and presenting myself as female. I also liked killing flies with the
spray-cans of yellow gunk with which
we oiled the pans.
Of course, this one concerns the way
you wreck the world around you when
you write about it. Every insight is a
kind of brain damage.

10. S oft Head :

To p l e f t : p a i n t i n g o f m e b y K e l l y e
Smith, 1992. Opposite page: four
photographs of me and Dee, 1992.

Jeff Johnson

ith this one, the central character, already identified as me,

is located more precisely in time and
space. The narrative goes inward, which
has the effect of again robbing me of
my voice (the first two of these stories,
remember, feature a mute protagonist,
or at least one whose vocal output is
garbled). The use of Prismacolor grey
tones further renders the five pages as a
purely subjective window upon events.
The event, in and out of focus here,
was an evening of drunken excess and
bad behavior, in which I made an ass
of myself and was banned from downtown Athens by a law enforcement officer. I was fortunate not to have been
arrested; thanks to Devlin Thompson
for interceding on my behalf. The incident which didnt make it into the story
here was this: walking to Devlins car
after the show that evening, I grabbed a
stray empty bottle from its perch upon
a waist-high brick wall and hurled it,
heedlessly, into the center of the teeming weekend night. It easily could have
chosen fragile flesh and bone, or metallic plastic and glass, upon which to land
and shatter into several thousand causally asymmetrical fragments. Instead, it
wisely landed upon the pavement. Still,
it fell at the feet of of an alarmed cluster
of fraternity boys, who felt duty-bound
to report my apparently unwarranted
act of aggression to a nearby policeman.

hese stories could well be seen as a

run-through of possible approaches to doing an autobiographical story of
the sort that seemed so wildly fecund
in the early nineties. Like Melvilles The
Confidence-Man, the main character
evolves through the episodes in order
to connect more fully with a backdrop
world that remains constant, more or
less. From being a mute to being locked
in his own head, my namesake tunnels
through a gauntlet of stylistic gambits
in order to escape his own devices.

I. Mea Culpa

No one wants to create a world which

makes ones life smaller, after all. The
cost of Joe Matts wonderfully addictive
comics about addiction is that someone
out there is trapped being Joe Matt for
the rest of his life. The life of the artist is not only fodder upon which for
scholars and academics to feast; it is the

face upon which the mask of the artist

is molded. This is why Ive set out to
become my own biographer and critic,
in a sense, within these pages and elsewhere: so as to corner the market on
myself and invite speculators to join my
absurdly optimistic self-valuation. Get
in on the ground floor while you can.

11

I. Mea Culpa

I. Mea Culpa

13

Introduction: . . .

S o I D e s e c r at e

Ite m i z ed , Gossipy Note s on Al l I Hold Sac red

Ever y th i ng s ac red and i nv iolable provoke s prof an ation and v iolation .

~ C ami l le Pagli a

read De Sade after reading Camille

Paglia and Angela Carter, and I
think I picked up Carters The Sadeian Woman on a tip from an Alan
Moore interview. I dont mind admitting that my shelf has, over the years,
hosted a whole syllabus of authorial heroes respawned from Moores conversational repertoire. All stories are true,
Mr. Moore has written, and I see what
he means, but I can do him one better:
All texts are sacred, I assert.
1. Narcissus in Hey, Sailor [Boys
Can Be, 1994] [Top Shelf #8, 1999]
I had devoured the entire Popeye collection from Fantagraphics immediately
before I wrote this. It was my most
well-received story, insomuch as it was
seen at all. It was intended to appear in
the first Nurture the Devil, and would
have, but for legal niceties.

2. Betsy Pays Her Last Respects

[Nurture the Devil #2, 1994] I wrote
this story originally in 1987. What can
I say? I was an odd duck in high school.
3. Betsy Learns a Lesson About
Men [Top Shelf #8, 1999] I sold this
story to Screw, along with #19 on this
list, but I dont think they ever ran it.
4. Vagina Dentata [Dirty Plotte
#8, 1993] Julie was such a sweetheart
to include me in her beautiful comic
book. And despite what item #38 says
at the bottom, we never shared a kiss.
That was a joke by someone whose initials are BS; JD countenanced the joke,
however.
5. The Babies [Nurture the Devil
#2, 1994] I traded these three pages
to Jim Woodring for the last page of
the first Frank story, which I sold on

eBay for part of the money with which

I moved to New York in 2003.
6. Scary Bear [Nurture the Devil
#2, 1994] Its like a Krazy Kat love triangle, but more vulgar.
7. Bite, the Hand that Feeds [Nurture the Devil #2, 1994] I had entirely too much time on my hands as a
young teenager.
8. Anna Bomination [Buzzard #13,
1995] I wish Prince would do a cover
of this page.
9. Gruesome Charlie in No Erect
Penises [Zero Zero #4, 1995] This
story was originally written to be in
Blab!, but Monte Beauchamp wasnt altogether pleased with it, so I reformatted it to fit a different screen ratio and
passed it along to Kim Thompson. MB
then suggested a story which became
the right two-thirds of item #14, but
once Id made it thoroughly repulsive,
this wasnt greenlit, either, so item #17
was devised. The title was originally
Dancing Frogs, but it changed once
KT gave me an editorial requirement
for being in the pages of his anthology,
Zero Zero.
10. Armageddon [Buzzard #13,
1995] Each balloon is an anagram for
Deirdre Antoinette Goodman, or Dee
as we all called her. (See the introduction to the Mea Culpa section of this
book if you dont know who that is).
11. Warm in the Hands of the
Ice-Demon, Part II [Buzzard #13,
1995] The first Warm in the Hands...
was a short story I wrote when I was
18, and is available as a pdf book if
youd like to read a bit of my juvenilia.
12. Questions I Cant Answer
[Nurture the Devil #2, 1994] In the
photograph on the opposite page, I am
posing with the seven pieces from said

N e g at i v e S pa c e

Jeff Johnson

exit show. Of these, only two remain in

my possession.
13. Voluptuous Dog: We Are
Alone [Buzzard #13, 1995] This
was an attempt to make a comic which
would use repetition in a way analogous
to the way Philip Glass writes music.
14. Poison Love [Buzzard #15,
1995] This is two stories in one; the
right two tiers of four out of the five
pages and the top right four panels of
the fifth page comprise the rejected
story mentioned in item #9s notes. The
rest of it is a different story without
such a convoluted pedigree. Together
they make a lovesick casserole that tells

the story Ive already recounted in the

Mea Culpa introduction. What it adds
are references to these events: 1.) I
moved into a room in a trailer home for
$70 a month, 2.) I almost lost my fingers when Dee had a gran mal seizure
in bed with me, and 3.) I presented her
with an engagement ring when I asked
her to marry me, the purchase of which
was greatly aided by having such cheap
rent.
15. Nurture the Devil [Nurture
the Devil #1, 1994] Hey, lookitI
made an abstract comic! The writing
comes from a bit of automatic writing
I did when I was seventeen; this writing
is collected into a volume of juvenilia

called Someday This Day Will Never

Come, which is, again, available as a pdf
upon request.
16. Home Sick [Nurture the Devil
#2, 1994] This bit of writing also derives from my adolescence. It is also in
the aforementioned volume, in an unabridged state.
17. Snake Doctor Blues [Blab #8,
1995] Im not a blues afficionado. I
dont hate the blues, you understand;
I just dont want to mislead you into
thinking Im one of those cartoonists
who are into that. Also, I have no special fondness for vinyl, and I loathe nostalgia. But I dig the past just fine.

Previous page: A drawing from the original version of Betsy Pays (here, Gives) Her Last Respects, circa 1987.
Below: My exit show, marking my graduation from the University of Georgia with a BFA in drawing.

I I . D e s e c r at i o n

47

29. Desecration [Desecration,

1995] This one ended up on my
brothers wall while he was in college.
Now I dont know where it is, and no
one remembers anything. See picture
on previous pageits the second from
the left. How do you lose something
that big?

18. Devour Her Until She Explodes [The Stranger, 1993] The
background pattern was photocopied
from a book on fractals, which I read
after absorbing Alan Moores threepart interview with The Comics Journal
in which he talks about Big Numbers.
The first photograph of Dee I ever took
was of her with her face in her hands.
The cat in her lap sits more or less
where her dead kidneys were, and its
word balloon is filled with a cover blurb
from a porn magazine.
19. Confronting Dog [Desecration,
1995] I often think I shouldve been
raised Catholic or Jewish, for all the
guilt I shove up my ass.
20. Ten Thumbs [Desecration,
1995] This is the best piece of art in
here. I traded it to an alcoholic artist
friend in exchange for some scribbly,
eggy mess he made. His stuff sells for
thousands, though, unlike mine.
21. Birth [Mirrors, 1995] This was
an illustration for a chapter heading of
a comic book by Marc Tessier.
22. Illustration [The Stranger,
1993] I did this in the offices of The
Stranger when I visited Seattle, previous
to moving there, in December of 1993.

N e g at i v e S pa c e

23. You Are McGlades Suck [Desecration, 1995] I traded this page to
Peter Bagge for the one-page Girly-Girl
comic in which she gets the boy character to drink a nasty brew of yucky crap.
24. Beware of God [Desecration,
1995] I thought this was so clever of
me until I saw Al Columbia include it
in the background of one of his comics.
Speaking of whom, I indirectly inspired
AC to bring his comics to Fantagraphics, because he figured if someone who
drew as badly as I was making whey
protein out of semen, he might as well
get in on the action.
25. Mother and Child [Desecration, 1995] Based on a drawing I
made in high school.
26. The Dead Condemn the Living
[Desecration, 1995] The words in the
cloud above are the words to item #15.
27. The Roadkill Review [Desecration, 1995] A friend of mine in Athens asked me to do a cover for his zine,
but then he never finished #6. Sorry for
killing your zine, DK!
28. Xmas [Kombat, 1994-95] I
dont know, I think its kind of cute.

30. Flyer for a Signing [1994] I

did one signing in Athens at BizarroWuxtry and one in Atlanta at Criminal Records. Dee made an assortment
of foods for the occasion, with the end
result being that, in Atlanta, everyone
thought we were a catering company
pushing samples. I hid behind the
counter most of the time, having gotten
stoned twenty years before I learned
how to be stoned.
31. Nurture the Devil #1 cover
[1994] Yes, thats a tiny penis head
poking over the top of those panties.
32. Happy Birthday to Me [cover
of Nurture the Devil #2, 1994] This
Prismacolor drawing is a yard across
(see photograph on previous page
second from the left). Its somewhere
out there, on the open market. I sold
this and all the color pieces from my
exit show through MB. Years later, with
some money in my pocket, I tried to
buy it back for the same price, but water
doesnt flow uphill, yknow?
33. Nurture the Devil #1 back cover [1994] This acrylic painting was
the cover of Crotch Potato #2. The filler
below is collaged from porn and photographs of me and Dee.
34. Words of the Devil [cover of
Nurture the Devil #3, 1994] This
cover was drawn from a Paul Gauguin
painting Ive had as a print ever since
1988, when I saw an exhibition of his
work at the National Gallery in D.C.
35. Fall [back cover of Nurture the

Jeff Johnson

Devil #3, 1994] This color page is an

unofficial member of the Mea Culpa
story cycle.
36. Card for Nurture the Devil
[1994] I sent these out to a mailing list
of comics stores in advance of the first
issues solicitations.
37. Card for Desecration [1995]
I sent these to some people I thought
might like to buy this book & tape set
I made along with Lon Huber (RIP),
who made some porny computer collage filler for the first Nurture the Devil,
and who provided same for panel #4 of
page two of item #1.
38. Advertisement for Nurture the
Devil [1994] This ad ran on the inside
front cover of the issue of Dirty Plotte
which included item #4. It may have
run in The Comics Journal. Who can
remember?
39. Front Cover for the Desecration Cassette Tape The soundscapes
are all exquisitely crafted. Thanks, LH.
40. Inside Cover for the Desecration Cassette Tape When I drove the
Fantagraphics van from Seattle to San
Diego, along with Jordan Raphael and
an intern named Simon, we stopped by

LHs home in San Rafael and partook

of his hospitality.
41. Text for the Inside Front Cover
of Desecration I saw Camille Paglia
speak at the Savannah College of Art &
Designs Atlanta campus two years ago,
but I chickened out of meeting her.
42. Logo Design for Headveins I
made this for Brad Angell, whose company, Headveins, distributed Desecration.
43. Signed & Numbered Card for
Desecration I grew up on book & tape
sets, so it was a particular pleasure to

collaborate on this project.

44. Inside Back Cover of Desecration BA was my ally when I was starting out working in Fantagraphics order
department. My enemy down there
was a guy whose name is an anagram
for loathsome man. But Im sure hes nice
enough to people who arent actively
being an asshole to him.
45. Fear [Nurture the Devil #3,
1994] This page is on the back cover if
youre having trouble finding it. Again,
this was something written by my seventeen-year-old self in 1987. Do I look
backwards too much? Perhaps.

Previous page: The Fantagraphics kitchen sink. Above: The van we drove to San Diego was like this one, but without the ink.
Below: The red, blue and black color separations for a cover of The Stranger, a Seattle weekly paper.

I I . D e s e c r at i o n

49

II. D e s e crati on

I I . D e s e c r at i o n

51

N e g at i v e S pa c e

Jeff Johnson

I I . D e s e c r at i o n

53

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Jeff Johnson

I I . D e s e c r at i o n

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Jeff Johnson

I I . D e s e c r at i o n

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N e g at i v e S pa c e

Jeff Johnson

Introduction:

Danger in the Garden

wanted The Garden to be all of the

following: Sophoclean Greek tragedy, B-movie pornographic horror
flick, daytime television melodrama,
childrens book and underground
comic. I also secretly wanted it to fix
the gender dysphoria with which Id
been wrestling since my pre-internet
puberty hit me. Ill leave it to you to decide whether the former set of criteria
were met, but Im sure it comes as no
surprise that the latter wish was not
fulfilled at all.
The house in which I grew up from
second grade through high school had
a backyard adjacent to an undeveloped
plot of land, in spite of the fact that we
lived in an area which was being actively
chopped up into new subdivisions of
suburbia as quickly as possible. This
was Marietta, Georgia, in East Cobb
County, just outside the perimeter of
Atlanta, Georgia, and in the eighties
it was a hell a of right-wing Christian
heaven for many like-minded folks. I
wrote the original version of The Garden when I was eighteen, still living at
my parents house. I never finished it,
and lost the pages, but the fundamental
story returned to me five years later, in
1993, when I was looking around for
a longer, more ambitious story to sink
my teeth into after the Mea Culpa story
cycle was complete.
If The Garden is Sophoclean at all, it
is due to the circumstantial metaphor
suggested by the arrangement of our
house on a hill at the end of a head-like
cul-de-sac, opening in back upon a vast,
hidden woods. The central characters
are aspects of a single self, each one

N e g at i v e S pa c e

struggling to assert his or her will within the frontal lobe of paneled rooms.
Some members of the family move in
secret, buried deep by the overgrowth
in the back of that selfsame consciousness. And so forth.
The melodrama shows whenever theres
a clumsy resort to exposition; the aesthetic choices scream (broadly speaking) of Robert Crumb and Maurice
Sendak. When the grandfather, as the
diabolical villain, sees his wicked plans
die with his giggling, horny golem
henchmen, we know were in the piebald arena of bad horror. But to make
a claim for this story as a work of pornography will require an argument
which makes sense of the coexistence,
within these pages, of visceral revulsion
alongside the tease of creepified raunch.
Therefore, for the purposes of the moment, lets lose the legal definition of
pornography as art which is designed
principally to engage the prurient interest of the viewer. This may be sufficient for its manifestation as mere
imagery, but, if youll indulge me, lets
adopt a view of pornography which applies better to storytelling, one which
defines it in terms of the relationship
between characters. Lets call a book
or a movie pornographic if it is one in
which every connection between Alice,
Bill and Corky has any sort of apparent
sexual dimension, not just as hidden
context but in a way which makes itself
physically known to the characters, and
which both contributes to the narrative
and influences the relationships between the characters.

What does this gain us? Well, it allows

for pornography that eschews titillation
altogether, or which wields the common, brute iconography of lust against
the reader, or which sets itself up as
erotic, then turns anerotic for an effect
which has less to do with sexuality itself
but everything to do with how weve repurposed our sexuality for the sake of
the social contract. And, if I may be so
bold, it allows us to read a story like The
Garden as a work of a particular kind
of genre fiction, one in which the genre,
which doesnt exist outside of its fifty
pages, is disposablea single serving
size, if you will. This genre (anhedonic
pornography, perhaps) is implied into
being by implicating A, B and C in the
crime of having their own libidos made
manifest as flesh or word.
As De Sade created a godless world
when he wrote, I made The Garden a
world without love. The connective
bonds which chain us to each other
may be used or abused, may hinder us
or help us. In the world I inhabit (along
with you, gentle reader), its as much
one as the other. But beneath the dark
mulch of The Garden, there is no underlying sentiment such as would bind
us from each other with sufficient force
to cancel out our meanest impulses.
In the story, Lily and her father may
say that they love each other, but this
doesnt stop them from inflicting acts of
immense cruelty on each other. Much
like our world, you may submit. And
youre right. But these poor creatures of
mine live in a world where the threshold between nurturing compassion
and natural cruelty is unforgivingly illdefined.

Jeff Johnson

Anyone I know whos read this story

invariably asks me, upon completion,
whether or not I was molested as a
child. Until recently, I laughed dismissively and complained of my golden,
untroubled youth. Until recently, I
hadnt considered the question carefully enough. I write of this elsewhere (see
my essay Pain, Paraphilia & Pseudopsychosis, in my book Duh: a book), so
I wont go into it much here, but there
is reason to believe that I was indeed
sexualized by an adult hand when I was
seven.
Before this ever allegedly happened, I
had already begun to create the alternate world within which all my erotic
fantasies still play out. The world of
The Garden is a variation on this playground. Theres a whole body of work
(mostly unfinished and/or destroyed)
derived from the interplay between
worlds. The Garden represents one of
the few instances of a crossover from
my private output into that which is
intended for any sort of wider visibility.
I had never read about sex magic before
writing this story. I suppose I invented
it, just as I invented masturbation. My
earliest drug of choice, long before I
experimented with any others, was
the sort of trance state which obtains
when a degree of sexual excitement is
sustained without release for days or
weeks on end. My adolescence was pitted with such oily blemishes as these.
I would go to school with a corset on
under my clothes to enflame my sense
of otherness and to exacerbate the hotcheeked shame I already felt at being an
aberration among other humans. My

libido was an inexplicable curse to me,

and I still feel that there are no sufficient descriptors from which to choose
that might bind me to any particular
tribe.
I felt as one, for a while, with the transgendered folk among whom I flocked
when taking the first awkward, tentative essays into my early transition. I
began, not long after the glow of belonging had settled, to differentiate
myself once again from the phylogeny
within which I found myself included.
The terms of my particular delusion of
uniqueness were perhaps too fine for
anyone to read who didnt possess my
specific astigmatism. I didnt want to
belong to any club that would have me
as a member, to paraphrase Groucho
Marx (with whom I share a birthday).
But parallel to this reflexive act of ego
was a supportable rationale, which was
that I didnt care to work at becoming
another version of myselfI wanted
only to relax into whatever kind of self
was already in me.
Setting aside the no-prize that my self-

searching would eventually win me,

a decade later, the perverse rigor with
which I held to my isolationist stance
would mostly serve me well while I
navigated the labyrinth of living mythologies that fill the gender divide. Minotaurs and other such monsters, after
all, are but unregistered metaphors of
atavistic self, only problematic when
unrecognized as such. To name is to
tame the profligate variety of flora and
fauna that fuck and feast with innocent
abandon until humanity is granted the
taxonomic charter by its parental, anthropomorphic god.
I wish the story Ive etched with brush
and ink worked better as as immersive
narrative, but for what its worth, it
functions just fine as my own personal
creation myth. Every dark brick of it fits
together with a mortar made of semen
and menstruum to form the foundation
of a sort of humanism predicated upon
misanthropy. The part of us Ive learned
to love is that which only begins beyond the binary mischief of male and
female; the only aspect of self I trust is
that which has been freed from lust.

Previous page: Lower page border

from Nurture the Devil #1
Right: The covers of Crotch Potato #1
and #3, the mini-comics wherein
Part One of The Garden was serialized

I I I . Th e G a r d e n

119

III. The Garden

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I V. B e c o m i n g U n m o u t h l e s s

N e g at i v e S pa c e

Jeff Johnson

Right tier from top: mixed media self-portrait from 1987; working on floor in 1989; 1989 sketch (photograph by mom)

Left tier from top: 1978; 2003; in my dorm room in 1989; in Marietta, posing with my self-portrait in 1989.

Ive made five decisions in my life. The rest of it

Ive just navigated my vessel between courses
of most likely probabilities. 1.) I decided to fall
in love. 2.) I decided to stake a claim in comics.
3.) I decided to become gender-amphibious.
4.) I decided to forsake estrogen for testosterone as part of a devils pact to regain my creative momentum. 5.) I decided to never again
have a boring conversation with anyone.

Left tier from top: 2012; 2015; 2004. Below: Drawing from 2005.
(Top two photographs by Melissa Anthony)

I V. B e c o m i n g U n m o u t h l e s s

175

write and draw, and have conversations with people

in realtime. I talk a good game, but Im a flake. Like
Tiresias, I spent a decade as a (trans-) woman. Like
Fellini and Hugh Hefner, Im a manqu cartoonist. I
live in an honest-to-god Merzbau. I cant remember a
day when I didnt feel like everything was on the edge

N e g at i v e S pa c e

of collapse. Ive cultivated an

aptitude for banal brinksmanship. I share a birthday with
Groucho Marx, Gandhi and Sting. Like you, Im here;
like anyone, I link my linguistic chains together and
plot, some day, to invent some new idea of freedom.

Jeff Johnson

orn Oct. 2 1970 at Wright-Patterson Air Force

Base in Dayton, Ohio, Jessica (ne Jeff ) Johnson enjoyed a golden childhood of love and
affirmation before the fall. Puberty hit hard and ugly
and incomprehensibly difficult in the upper-middleclass suburbs of Marietta, Georgia, owing largely to

I V. B e c o m i n g U n m o u t h l e s s

her congenital gender dysphoria and its concomitant guilt

and alienation from humanity.
She adopted an artist pose, alone and apart from the
world at large, and clung desperately to its implicit
promises of eventual posthumous validation.

177

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Jeff Johnson

gmail.com

n.1970@

jess.johnso

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Jeff Johnson

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183

eff Johnson is now Jessica Johnson. She lives in Atlanta, GA, where she works as IT
Director for an advertising agency. She is also the art director of a quarterly magazine
serving the transgender community. In her larval incarnation as a depressive cartoonist,
she concocted the poisonous Nurture the Devil (Fantagraphics) and a supplementary host of
noxious substances; a contaminating mess of dark mixtures, all distilled from the inky outpourings of an overactive guilt gland. Shes all better now. [written in 2001]

ts probably a good thing I never brought too much attention upon myself with the comics I did. I imagine that escaping from the shadow of ones former self gets much trickier
with a little bit of fame. As it is, Ill always have the Jeff Johnson corpse dragging behind
me, in a psychological sense. Im detached from it emotionally, and it does seem like someone else produced that stuff. The level of anger, guilt and self-loathing that fueled all that
bile (bile in a good way; I have no animosity towards it) is, thankfully, no longer accessible to
me. Yet, when I do put brush to paper, I feel like Im required to compete against that former
self. Its all just voices in my head, of course, but those are ultimately the ones that matter.

N e g at i v e S pa c e

Jeff Johnson

uch of the accepted genderrelated language that circulates by virtue of its implied
authority is, in fact, so grimy with cultural assumptions as to be completely
devoid of value. Many of the received
concepts of the transgender community
itself are questionable. I speak only for
myself when I say that my ultimate goal
is to discover and create myself, with
no assumption untested by rigorous
interrogation before admittance into
my mental landscape. I never mind
talking about this; I only recoil at the
obviously-rude questions posed by
antagonistic strangers. Hey, are you a
girl or a guy? My wit deserts me under
assault; confronted with ill will, I retreat into my coccoon. To my credit, Ive
held my head high in the crowd, and
whatever stares I receive are beneath my
notice, unless its an appreciative stare
and he or she happens to be cute. Im
not overwhelmed by the compulsion
to take a mental poll of everyone in the
room to see if they read me as male or
female. I dont care. I am myself, and I
walk in my world, not theirs. I think the
projected confidence goes a long way
toward warding off potential antagonists. I ride public transportation, after
all, and I havent had a problem yet. Let
me back up, give you the framework. I
began seeing a therapist in late 2000,
at the insistence of my then-wife (more
on her later). I chose a therapist who
specialized in gender issues, and I knew
that the core of my problems were with
gender identity, but there was so much
other crap surrounding and obscuring
it, that I felt incapable of disentangling
my Gordian knot alone. It took me a
long time to ask for help; I had just
turned thirty, having been pursued by
a relentless depression for all of my late
adolesence through adulthood. I hated
myself, and only felt worthwhile to the
extent that I could create something
beautiful, even if it only depicted the
cell-walls of my own misery [Nabokovism]. My relationship was built on the
exercise of making my depressive mate
Deirdre happy, and in her happiness
I found the vicarious impersonation
of my own. Nothing within me was
built on solid ground, and inevitably
the untenable structure of my inner
life collapsed. I felt suicidal on a daily
basis, but was unwilling or unable to

I V. B e c o m i n g U n m o u t h l e s s

take decisive action in that direction

(sometimes its good to be a Libra). I
knew my life was incompatible with
my suppressed and incomprehensible
desires (if you ever become a god, and
you want to make one of your creations
suffer, couple a male sex drive with
a female self-identity, wind the poor
bastard up, and watch him go insane
(Anthropomorphic God appears
courtesy of Laughble Cultural Assumptions, Inc., all wrongs deserved)), but
the only self-esteem I had came from
outside of myself, and of the two pillars
that had supported me (comics and my
relationship), only the relationship was
still standing. And it had deteriorated
steadily from the time we were married,
in 98. So, I hit bottom. To accelerate
slightly, talking to my therapist helped,
and meeting other transgendered folk
did the rest. Accepting the reality and
its consequences allowed me to unload
the forty pounds of guilt and selfloathing Id accumulated. I specify forty
pounds because I started running every
day, and eating more selectively, and
my excess weight slid right off. Deirdre
and I separated, and I started taking
hormones on Nov. 1, 2001. My sense
of self emerged almost immediately,
no longer drowned out by the noisy
publicity campaign of misinformation
propagated by my body since adolesence. Testosterone is a powerful drug,
you know? I went full-time at work on
Oct. 1 of this year, the day before my
birthday. Everyone at my job, from my
wonderful boss down, knows me as
Jessica now. I get fewer stares in public
than I did earlier, when I was androgynous enough to register a definite blip.
I kept wearing tight shirts over my
budding breasts, which didnt help me
pass as a boy. My voice is a dead giveaway, though its just this side of male,
and not very deep. I havent spent the
time training it higher, partly because it
seems counterintuitive that my transition should involve conscious alteration
of myself, rather than a relaxation of
unwanted behaviors and social baggage
that were never my own to begin with.

y profession, Im shepherdess and

protector of a flock of computers,
mostly Mac with a handful of neglected, ghettoized PCs (inverse microcosm) at an advertising agency. I keep
them safe from the wolvish humans,
and as much as I can, I try to improve
diplomatic relations between the species. Its a very left-brained occupation
for a right-brained girl like me, but I
have fun with it, and I like to think Im
a much better communicator than most
techies, and far more attractive besides.
Hence, Information Technology girl,
the girl of the moment with the precious pout lipglossed on all the magazine covers, the cross-platform token
transsexual goddess of the network, the
sacrificial corn-queen that the villagers
ritually burn when the email goes down.
By nature and by temperament (as well
as by my profoundly useless art degree;
uselessness is next to ______), I am
an artist; visual and verbal. Succinct
insanity is my chosen territory; the irrational spoken rationally. When I was
twenty-four I wrote and drew a comic
book for a publisher in Seattle called
Fantagraphics, who also publish Eightball, Hate, Love & Rockets and Robert
Crumb. My book was called Nurture the
Devil, which wasnt necessarily the most
inviting title, as it failed spectacularly
to fly off the shelves. I spent seven years
and amassed several hundred pages of
labor-intensive and anti-lucrative artpoison (very dark stuff; disturbed the
sleep of many otherwise tranquil readers of alternative comics, Im pleased to
report) before burning out on the whole
thing. It became less fun; more pain
than pleasure, and not even pleasurable
pain, eventually. My muse is still in remission, but meanwhile Ive spent time
discovering myself and, more recently,
learning how to experience life properly.
Which is to say that for me, man was
quite literally that which needed to be
overcome in order to make way for my
own uberwoman. Now Im reaping the
benefits of that transition, enjoying the
fruition of my will to power and the
accompanying capacity to fully live in
the moment.
[written in 2001]

185

WHAT I do
Iandwrite
& draw
refine my brand in a black

swan song of my detained

multitudes. Each volume is a
cargo container of my trademark
mix of multi-undisciplinary
miscegenated-media mutterings
upon the nature of our bedevilment.
This is my dead drop to
the trap-house beyond

death, forged of flesh and

flame before I drop dead

into the refulgent quim of

post-procrastination tristesse.
Dont mind me. Dont deny
a dying man the blithering

morphia of his final fantasies. As

long as my deep cover of delusion

keeps me floating far above the

sordid mortal haggle, Ill append any

number of post-post-scripts, and without

apology Ill play it up like Chers newest
last campaign for souls. Please hold for

the patter of my holding patterns attitude

of pitch, drugs, sex and roll, yawl [sic]. Im

all like maudlin aplomb and somber pomp
until my last liber of life is imbibed,
the burning liquidity of which

wrings my guts into Play-Doh

worms of primal squirmy
Sephirot.

N e g at i v e S pa c e

Jeff Johnson

HTTP://TINYURL.COM/NQNOB9D $16.00

HTTP://TINYURL.COM/PY36SX2 $3.00

e g at i v e S pa c e
N

Jeff Johnson

$15.COM

HTTP://TINYURL.COM/NDANWN5

V. A d v e r t i s e m e n t s f o r M y s e l f

189

Rebuke the Mind & Debride the Flesh

HTTP://TINYURL.COM/NWEN8O5
e g at i v e S pa c e
N

Jeff Johnson

Inviolate :

OR, YOU NEVER KNOW, YOU

MAY BE SUFFERING NEEDLESSLY

$45.00; COLOR; 6 X 9

his book includes my 1996-7 color sketchbook titled I SUCK , a color issue of the
self-released N OSEBL EED subtitled Figure
It Out: Its the LAW, a self-collaged book called
VOLUPT UOUS D O G , and an indulgent
helping of my art and comics from the period
between 1995 and 1998. Also packaged within
these pages are a selection of color comics and
art, old and new. Most of its been virtually unseen by anyone outside of a twenty-person radius from your humble author, and all of it has
now been made available, as ever, only because
no one specifically asked me not to.

HTTP://TINYURL.COM/ODEY3VR

Nosebleed:

HTTP://TINYURL.COM/O6COX4B

OR, THE QUARTERPAGE BOOK

FREE PDF; B&W / COLOR; 4.25 X 5.5

his book contains every zine a quarter of an 8 x 11 page or smaller that

I made between 1990-2015. This includes:
CURIOUS YELLOW HAT, FEAR, UGLY
NAIL FUNGUS!, INSPIRE-0-MATIC,
DEPENDENCE, CITY, THE ONUS OF
THE NOUS, FUTURE SANGUINE SINGULAR, PUUPUU DANG, OROBOROS, NOSEBLEED, ALL I WANT FOR
CHRISTMAS IS A FORMAL APOLOGY,
THE OPPOSITE OF FOOD / THE OPPOSITE OF POO and only a few more things.

V. A d v e r t i s e m e n t s f o r M y s e l f

191

BECAUSE NO ONE
S P E C I F I CA L LY
ASKED ME NOT TO
I k n o w , I c a n t b e l i e v e i t e i t h e r no
ones come forward to lodge a complaint, no ones filed
an injunction against me, and apparently nothing in any
holy text proscribes such effrontery. So Ive organized
my life into books, because thats where the best part
of me comes from. Heres a list of volumes so far
(in chronological order of material):
1) Sad Brat, Bad Star: comics 1988-1992
2) Negative Space: comics 1992-1995
3) Inviolate: or, You Never Know, You
May Be Suffering Needlessly: sketchbook
& assorted material 1995-1998
4) Nosebleed: or, The Quarterpage Book:
zines & books 1990-2012
5) Auto-da-F I-IV: a sketchbook memoir
2003-2010
5.5) Auto-da-F: The Ouroboros Edition:
or, the ADF.pdf: Expanded and in color,
where applicable.
These arent available yet:
6) trannyjunkiewhore: comics 2006
7) Apeiron: twelve pdf books and one print
book 2012-2013
This ones a set of three cds and four
dvds, not available except online:
8) w/o [without]: audio & moving visuals
2010-2013
This ones available, for a price:
9) The Collected Tankoven: Too Much
& Too Little: Issues 0-III: A collection of
barely-extant zines from 2012
This ones available as pdfs or as zines:
10) Be Still. Keep Moving: essays in word
& picture 2014

HTTP://TINYURL.COM/NOE7BB7

h t t p : / / w w w . l u l u . c o m / s p o t l i g h t / j k j o h n s o n
e g at i v e S pa c e
N

Jeff Johnson

HTTP://TINYURL.COM/PMKVK2H

D uh : a book is an exquisite corpse. Its bloated head is a book of possible futures; this is stitched to a anorectic torso of thinly fictionalized memoir. The
legs which connect them to the ground are the essays which wander from the
personal to the universal in their restless quest to confess all the sins of mankind.
V. A d v e r t i s e m e n t s f o r M y s e l f

193

 e g at i v e S pa c e
N

HTTP://TINYURL.COM/P6958PJ
Jeff Johnson