Well, it’s a quiet Saturday night—that’s how it gets, eventually—and I found this scan of a dusty slide of one of my old acrylic paintings. I wanted to see how it looks on a web page, so… Huh. Interesting. The image has meaning for me, and it works as a symbol. It’s based on a photo I took of a carp carcass that someone had impaled on a fence post at Betterton Beach, about a mile and a half from our old house. Yup. We used to live that close to the water. Sometimes we’d hear foghorns from ships on the Bay.
Same thing as sketched at the beach, different angle
One of my many unfinished ventures was a comic strip based on the dead carp in this picture. I called it “The Adventures of Corpy the Carp: He’s Good and Dead!” The idea was that all kinds of things would happen to this dead carp without his having to do anything, of course, because he was dead. Most of the time a mangy kitty-cat sidekick would drag him around. Just what the world needed, another comic strip cat! But the dead fish is golden, too bad.
From a page in my old sketchbook
I could never decide whether Corpy would “speak” (with thought balloons), because, you know, the dead thing. There’s a lot more comedy available that way, but I have to say that pure sight gags are killer. Gilbert Shelton is a master of that, you know.
Eventually I made a welded steel sculpture based on that carp, one of the most striking things I ever produced. A dentist in Galena bought it from a gallery show of mine for $1,200, woo-hoo! I remember I delivered it myself; the thing nearly fell apart in my truck, but man, was it gorgeous. When I unearth more slides, we can all have a look.
John Hamilton Farr lives at 7,000 feet in Ranchos de Taos, New Mexico, U.S.A. As New York Times best-selling author James C. Moore tells it, John is “a man attuned to the world who sees it differently than you and I and writes about it with a language and a vision of life that is impossible to ignore.” This JHFARR.COM site is the master writing archive. To email John, please see CONTACT INFO on .png)
Corpy could have photos taken of him all over the world like the garden gnome! I think he should make comments.
Another bit o’ the old sketchbook:
I can’t speak with any authority on this subject since I have not met any dead carp thus far in my travels. However, I have indeed met a couple of dead trout , whom I suspect share many things character traits with Carpy.
Thus said, I am in favour of the idea of a dead carp communicating without the need for any comment or thought balloons. After all, a dead carp could muster at least two or three dozen facial expressions or even the judicious use of body language, to express his thoughts. Of course the latter would by necessity have to be rather subtle since he is after all deceased. Or is he?
Oh, he’s dead, all right. And I lean toward the sight gag configuration with no thoughts at all.
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