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I thought this might interest some people. While digging through boxes and boxes of papers at the office, I came a cross a little comic strip that Jonathan did in 1966, entitled “The Menace of Captain Cringe”. I remember reading about this specific comic in Jonathan’s other book “Scabvendor” (which is still in the works)- so I’ve paired them up accordingly.

Here is a segment from Jonathan’s life memoirs, Scabvendor: Confessions of a Tattoo Artist.

The comic you will find below it.

I remember sitting in my room, livid with frustration, anger. The Eucalyptus tree outside my window strangely still in the windless night. I was trapped in there, sensing the Jabberwock silently wiffling through the stillness. An indistinct stench of burning rubber in my nose, a smell of futility and death. My skin burned red with a desperate longing to escape and never come back. I looked around the room, the dark blue walls I’d painted, recalling my grandma’s voice. ‘Why ah ya paintin’ it such a dahk culla? Ya’ll go blind in heah, tryin’ ta see anything.” And thinking cuz the rest of this shitty place is white - stark, absent, sterile. Fuck that. Blue is the color - dark, shiny blue, the color of deep ocean dreams and fantasy and the sky at dusk, stretching far away from this place of stark terror and white empty void the color of washcloths stuffed down a child’s pink throat. Nah, blue was it, alive and shiny like a hard protecting armor. And I went to that dark blue place, where I was safe and inviolated, where they couldn’t reach in with their jabbering squaresville static…

I could hear voices downstairs, Doris raging, muffled shouts and conversation, the evil rise and fall of her voice, punctuated by the low steady serious hum of Len’s pathetic, ineffectual ‘reasoning’ tone, a steady cadence, like some foul, unwelcome tide. I switched on the little stereo, the one I’d smuggled upstairs when she replaced it with a newer, louder one for her drunken classical music sessions in the dreaded den… Was I turning into her, locked alone in a dark little room with solitary music? Fuck. If they would only just shut the fuck up… I pulled out a record by a band called The Rolling Stones, put it on the turntable, lowered the little metal arm onto the spinning disk. The speaker by my bed crackled and the music began to play. I can’t get no… Satisfaction. That was better. I liked the Rolling Stones, liked the way they looked, standing there on the album cover, tall and dark and tough looking, like a gang. Their hair was long and covered their foreheads and eyes, and just seemed to say FUCK YOU to all the Doris’s and Len’s and stark white walls and neighbors and police stations and schools and all the shit I hated. I rolled a joint and smoked. Better now, I got out my papers and colored pencils and started working on my comic book…

Here is a comic strip from then 13-year-old Jonathan. Just as a side note, I find it funny how a young boy could create such the perfect archetype of a classic raging alcoholic he himself would soon become…

captaincringepage1, originally uploaded by Scab Vendor.

captaincringepage2, originally uploaded by Scab Vendor.

captaincringepage3, originally uploaded by Scab Vendor.

captaincringepage4, originally uploaded by Scab Vendor.

And another little clip from “Scabvendor”…

Strong, pungent marijuana smoke fills your senses, the room… The narrating voice booms on as you find yourself drifting into the next panel. “And suddenly,” the voice says, “a chemical change occurs in Wilfred Wormus. His filthy, unwashed clothes and sweat mix with the stale beer, resulting in a strange and powerful supernatural reaction…”

You can feel your scrawny, undernourished body grow suddenly in size and mass, ripping through your clothes like the Incredible Hulk. Your bare torso is covered with exotic, abstract primal designs, tattooed all over. Similar to the style of the dark black, bladelike, spindly, clawlike tendrils that made up the word BEWARE a long time ago…

You hold up your huge, muscular, tattooed arms and hear your own voice roar triumphantly, “I have become MASSIVE!!”

You are now the great and powerful Captain Cringe. You tower menacingly over the cringing bullies, who cower in a corner, under your imposing shadow…

“Yes…” the radio announcer’s voice booms in your head. “Something in the booze CHANGED Wilfred. It made him POWERFUL. And something else, something more… They all CRINGED when they saw him. Besides his rippling muscles and hairy legs, what made them CRINGE before him? Could it be the strange markings that covered his body???”

You are the terrible, invincible Captain Cringe… running amok, tearing up the barroom. Destroying everything in your path. Slaughtering your foes, in a bloody, homicidal rampage. Then suddenly, the gory, heart-pounding action sequence FREEZES…

Gigantic long red fingernails come into vision, tearing the frozen animated panel in half. RRRIIPPPPPPPPP…. exposing a grim, unwelcome world…

Doris, in a rage, is tearing up Jonathan’s drawings and comic books. Len stands ineffectually in the doorway of Jonathan’s bedroom, holding the bag of weed between his fingers like a dead rat, a dower grey look on his face…

“I’VE HAD IT WITH YOU AND YOUR CRAP, BOY”, Doris screams, violently ripping another stack of comic books to shreds.

You stand helplessly, cursing her silently under your breath. “Fuckin’ bitch!”

“THESE DAMNED COMIC BOOKS ARE THE REASON YOU SIT IN HERE BROODING ALL DAY,” Doris raves on, “FILLING YOUR HEAD WITH THIS TRASH… AND NOW YOU’VE BECOME A THIEF, A DELINQUENT… AND A DRUG ADDICT…” she sobs with he trademark melodramatic stage tears. Phony bitch, who’s she think she’s fooling?

Jonathan looks at Len pleadingly. Make her stop, man. Len gives you his best “fatherly” look.

“Why were you shoplifting, when you have everything you need, Jono?”, he sputters, crinkling up his forehead. “Was it to pay for these drugs?”

Jonathan gives him a look of disgust. Clueless, pussy-whipped bastard. Dickless loser… You get up and bolt out the door, brushing past him, screaming ’til your voice box hurts, “I HATE YOU FUCKIN’ PEOPLE…”

Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2008. All Rights Reserved.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Does life resemble Art?
Nietzsche said that Art exists so that Reality won’t destroy us.
But what is Reality, If not an outpicturing of one’s own inner
psychic landscape, reflected from that Secret Place of ancient Mystics?
It has been suggested by The Great Minds through history that
the seemingly prosaic, often uncannily synchronistic procession of
people, places, things and events we experience and fervently cling to
as our reality is in fact nothing more than an amazing mental Matrix,
an infinitely complex and perplexing collective Hallucination. A
fabrication of our own innermost psychic patterns and those of the
Race mind that created and continues perpetuating them at the level of
Thought.
To quote Einstein, “Reality is an illusion, albeit a persistent one.”
If God is Love, how then does that healing state of Grace
manifest itself to us poor sinners? Does this God of Miracles only
enter our limited five-sense reality through our consciousness? Or, as
Carl Jung has suggested through our visions and dreams?
Or through our wounds?
Take your pick…
Can ancient traumas of harms and hurts ever be completely healed?
Can the Wounded rise like Lazarus from graves of pitiful,
incomprehensible moral degradation?
Can a Ghost be reborn to walk happily and usefully whole among
the living?
And what is Alchemy then, if not the process by which base
matter is converted into something of great value, something precious?
Treasure.
How do you relate to the World Unknown?
Questions. Many fucking questions…
For my money, Dylan came closest when he wrote, “The answer
is blowing in the wind.”
And I do believe in Miracles, the suspension of belief.
This book stormed into my life one day like an angry child.
Demanding to be written.
It’s protagonist, Narcisa, is not a person so much as a Principal.
An Experience. A Truth. A state of Mind.
A Demand.
A Trial. A Purification by Fire.
An Exterminating Angel.
A Holy, bloody, screaming Exorcism.
I didn’t write the book so much as submit to it.
Like a sort of spiritual surgery.
Documenting and recreating each demented, warped ‘experience’
from a maddening Web of shared hallucinations.
Like a soot-faced miner going back down, again and again into
the heart of a festering inflamed Wound.
That, I believe, is the magical key to Surviving one’s
‘reality’, as it unfolds again and
again in an endless recurring nightmare loop of Love and Terror. Hell
and Redemption.
Salvation.
NARCISA - OUR LADY OF ASHES, then, is completely a work of Fiction.
Seeded from the innermost depths of a tiny fragment of
eternal mind’s experience.
The characters in this book are not ‘real’ people.
Never were.
Not in the popular sense of the word.
Illusions. Albeit persistent ones.
I prefer to see them today simply as “Lessons”.

Jonathan Shaw
Rio de Janeiro

Today she’s in manic mode. Dancing her crazy sensual extraterrestrialDakini dances, hyperactive, tweaked, spun, musica musica, go go go!I love it and I hate it, like everything else about Narcisa, whenshe’s in go go mode.But, like everything else about Narcisa, I can’t change it and I can’t escape.I am in love with Narcisa, the good, the bad and the ugly.Shit.I’m sitting out on the balcony here in the big empty house, lookingout over my city, Rio de Janeiro, sky, sun, city, sea.It’s a beautiful day and I can feel the cool ocean breeze blowing inoff the expansive blue of the bay, caressing my tired flesh… Tiredfrom fucking Narcisa long and hard into the misty dawn this morning. OUR NEW FRIEND HERE AT THE HOUSE…

 Pet Buzzard, originally uploaded by Scab Vendor.

Sex with Narcisa is like smoking crack for me. Powerful, compelling,impossibly ecstatic, debilitating and raw. Compulsive. Addictive.The more I get, the more I want.Want want want. Go go go, till way past dawn this morning, before Ifinally limped home to my tiny dark apartment and closed the coffinand slept for a few hours of deep, silent rest.Now I’m awake again, back up at the house on the hill with Narcisa.I am tired, exhausted still from last nights endless fuck-a-thon.Narcisa hasn’t slept, of course. And Narcisa isn’t tiredOf course….I’m sitting up on the balcony looking out over the bay. A parrotflies by squawking overhead. Distant dogs bark and the wind isblowing, rustling through the clattering fronds of the coconut palmtrees up here on the hill. A ship blows its deep, soulful farawayhorn, heading out to sea…I enjoy the sleepy sights and sounds of afternoon. I want to lay inthe thick blue raw cotton comfort of my hammock and go back to sleephere now.There is no hammock now. Narcisa took it down last week to use tocover the windows, to block out the sun, the sea, the beautiful view of Rio de Janeiro.Before she set it on fire.Ashes.Narcisa doesn’t care about the view.Narcisa likes to smoke crack in the dark.Ashes.Now the dark of night has turned to day. Another day she hasn’teaten or slept and its daytime and the nighttime phantoms have fadedaway for now, blended into the daytime air and Narcisa is in manicmode again, dancing wildly, her perfect taut wiry young body gyratinglike a deranged marionette in the pink polka dot bikini she hasn’ttaken off for three days now, except to get fucked.

Now she’s on fire, twisting and turning and writhing and shimmyingthrough time and space, dancing wild and insane to the earsplittingnoise and frantic distortion of mindless monkey music on the infernallittle boom box I gave her to listen to after she sold my stereo up inthe favela to buy crack to smoke in the dark.The noise from the boom box invades my ears, makes me want to kill.I wonder if she knows I want to kill her.It doesn’t matter. I will not kill her.Just for today she will live and I will live and this is our life today, frantic, disturbed, compulsive, deranged. Passionate. Real.Insane.Finally she turns the radio off again, and again there is silence.But it isn’t the peaceful silence of before.This new silence is haunted by the creepy crack monster and all itsfrantic, manic insane demands for attention, movement, hyperactivity,action… Confusion.I can hear the sounds of her crashing and banging around the bigempty house now, desperately dragging furniture across the floor,building barricades to hide from the phantoms… breaking things.Clumsy violent banging noises coming from a disturbed mind…punctuated by the sound of her little red plastic Cricket lighterflicking flicking. Then silence.”Cigano…”"What?”"Cigano…”"What?”Silence.”Cigano…”This time I don’t answer. She’s tweaking. Spun. Crazy.”CIGANO!!!”"WHAT?”"Where are you?”"I’m right here.”"Where?”"On the balcony, Narcisa. Where I’ve been the whole time.”Silence.Crash!She’s banging around in the dark. Breaking shit.Silence.Flick. Flick.Her plastic lighter. Smoking another hit of crack.Silence.”Cigano…”Silence”Cigano…”Silence”CIGANO!!!”"Shut the fuck up!!!”She appears in the doorway, tweaking, demented, spun, grey, frightened.She creeps like a crippled spider over to where I’m sitting andstarts to examine my tattoos, carefully, one by one. Checking to seeif I’m not a clone.I sigh and roll my eyes in disgust.She picks up on it and sits at my feet, lowering her head like asick parakeet.

“You’re sick of me now, Cigano… I know.”"What makes you say that, baby?” I say as I run my hand through herdirty brown hair.My dick is already getting hard again, like a big fleshy compasshand pointing me south, right down the road to Hell…And, just for today, I don’t mind being on my way. Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2008. All Rights Reserved.NOTIFIÇAO: Os eventos neste site são contos de ficção - registrados na Biblioteca Nacional com todos os direitos autorais revertidos ao autor, Jonathan Shaw. Os personagens mencionados são interamente ficticios. Certos eventos, personagens, lugares e relatos foram baseados em fatos reais, porém qualquer semelhança a qualquer pessoa vivo ou morta se trata de pura coincidência.As vários fotografias apresentadas se encontram com o rosto distorcido para preservar o anonimato das modelos que representam personagens fictícios.

Jonathan has teamed up with our favorite Brazilian, Mayra Dias Gomes, to translate Narcisa- Our Lady of Ashes into Portuguese.

The first excerpt is up, and you can read it >>>HERE<<<.

Check for updates under "Scabvendor No Portugues" in the "Tira Gosto" section.

Jonathan Shaw has had his passport stamped in hell so many times he could get his mail there. Vile as junkie-cum, beautiful as a dead drunk’s bible, Scabvender will keep you clawing at the pages, wondering how one man can wreak so much havoc, suffer so much for Art, and still have enough brains left to put a sentence together, let alone the heart to create this unique, riveting, hyper-colorful and –scariest of all — brutally true adventure. Written in blood, Scabvender takes us places most people never come back from. This is gonna hurt, motherfucker, but the author is living proof that whatever doesn’t kill you can get you laid… What are we, in the end, but the sum of our scars?

– Jerry Stahl, author of Permanent Midnight, and Perv- A Love Story

ANOTHER EXCERPT FROM JONATHAN’S UPCOMING NOVEL Narcisa- Our Lady of Ashes TO BE RELEASED BY HEARTWORM PRESS THIS SUMMER.

In Tibetan myth and iconography, the Dakini superficially embodies the spirit of female wrath and fury.
Her image is depicted as a savage angry she-devil. She dances in a wild frenzy, seemingly bent on destruction, chaos and violent upheaval. She is naked but for a necklace of human skulls. In her right hand she holds a vajra or dagger. In the left she caries a skullcup filled with menstrual blood which she drinks. In most images of the Dakini she is seen dancing on the corpse of a man.
The Dakini may appear along the path of one treading the archetypal journey of trials and purifications. Her purpose is not to destroy the seeker himself, but to be a living manifestation of his own inner battles, a sort of Exterminating Angel who exposes and challenges that in his nature which is impure, weak. Only to his lower nature is she truly bent on annihilation, not on mindless destruction or chaos for its own sake. The wrath the Dakini embody is towards our own states of anger, greed and delusion, which they and their practitioners seek to cut out and transform.
Great energy and determination is needed to achieve this, and the violent imagery used represents the fervor necessary to vanquish the low natured roots of fear and ignorance and want. Just as St George cuts the head of the Dragon in icons throughout Christendom, so the Dakini severs the heads of beings who are none other than our own inner demons. Our attachments. Hers is not a glorification of anger and violence but an alchemical transformation of it.
—
Journal entry – 2 May 2007
It hasn’t rained in Rio in over 2 months, sixty days or more. Since before Carnival, not a drop of water from the skies. Sterile, cold, cloudless skies. Cold and barren as Lunar dreamscapes.
Two months into this cosmic indignity I sit by the shore of moonless night, scratching old mosquito scars on my sad cold feet, smoking a cigarette, tasting the bitter chemical burn on my tongue from desperately kissing Narcisa.
Narcisa, whose blistered pink lips suck on a Crack pipe all day and all fucking night.
The waves are cold, frigid as this shitty comatose April sky. They hold no answers for me tonight. So I sit here one more time, exposed to the ceiling of frozen, unblinking stars. Waiting for a shit storm of Mercy to rain a heavy hail of spirits, showing me the ways of Armageddon.

Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2008. All Rights Reserved.

NOTIFIÇAO: Os eventos neste site são contos de ficção - registrados na Biblioteca Nacional com todos os direitos autorais revertidos ao autor, Jonathan Shaw. Os personagens mencionados são interamente ficticios. Certos eventos, personagens, lugares e relatos foram baseados em fatos reais, porém qualquer semelhança a qualquer pessoa vivo ou morta se trata de pura coincidência.
As vários fotografias apresentadas se encontram com o rosto distorcido para preservar o anonimato das modelos que representam personagens fictícios.

you suck.

Anyway, I’m compiling a massive Q and A for JS, I should have all the questions together around the time I get back to LA.If anyone wants to participate, send me your questions, ANY questions, to oftheblessed@gmail.com..Check out the happy couple… They almost look normal, whatever that means.xx ANOTIFIÇAO: Os eventos neste site são contos de ficção - registrados na Biblioteca Nacional com todos os direitos autorais revertidos ao autor. Os personagens mencionados são interamente ficticios. Certos eventos, personagens, lugares e relatos foram baseados em fatos reais, porém qualquer semelhança a qualquer pessoa vivo ou morta se trata de pura coincidência.As vários fotografias apresentadas se encontram com o rosto distorcido para preservar o anonimato das modelos que representam personagens fictícios.

Now the time has come for the famous and tediously predictable ‘geographic cure’, a perverse phenomenon so familiar to those of us who have ever lived in the twisted world of an addict.
After a grueling week-long marathon of high-tension, dramatic death-defying wreckage and mind-warping acts of destruction, during which she nearly lost her life again and again, she finally awakened like the Loch Ness monster this morning, dredged up from a 2 day coma, blasting me right out of a sound sleep at 6am with her blaring fog horn voice, bellowing like a dying buffalo for food and attention and God knows what else.
Narcisa was awake.
Awake again to the multiple injuries, contusions and lacerations and hurts she’d mindlessly incurred from a series of falls and accidents and street fights and scuffles and skirmishes with other random lowlifes and complete strangers only too happy to help her end her miserable existence.
I once read somewhere that an angry person is ten times more likely to be randomly attacked by other angry people who are unconsciously attracted to their vibrational field of anger or suppresed rage than an average person or someone who has consciously faced and dealt with their issues.
Narcisa is living, walking proof of the validity of such statistics.
Before she finally kissed the pillow, she’d started a big fight with me on the last night of her run that had quickly degenerated into a full-scale street brawl involving the cops and everything but a complete bloodbath.
After the police finally sent her on her merry way, she’d gone on to get her ass kicked again and again as she weaved a trail of mayhem and destruction across the four corners of Rio de Janeiro, before finally showing up at my place after dawn, limping, beat down and still raving in self-pity and vowing violent retribution against humanity at large for all the slings and arrows she’d suffered, real and imagined.
After I slipped a micky in her Coca Cola, her rants soon turned to snores and it was lights out for Narcisa for the next 48 hours.
Now she was awake again. Moaning, groaning, complaining. Demanding.
I soon wanted to kill her myself..
I stumbled around for half an hour in a somnambulant stupor as the idiot chatter of TV cartoons melted my weary eardrums, trying to keep up with her incessant barrage of whining infantile whims and demands.
As she finished tearing through her breakfast - more of the food ending up on the floor or the sofa than in her bleating blowhole as I struggled desperately to keep clear of the furious flying shrapnel of her now-dwindling feeding frenzy - finally it came.

THE BOTECO WHERE I BUY FOOD TO FILL BABY’S TROUGH

boteco, originally uploaded by Scab Vendor.

“Everything on my body is hurting. Pain pain pain! I can’ to take it no more, Cigano! I can’ to go on living these shit life these way…”
I could hardly believe what my exhausted ears were hearing.
Was she finally done?
I stopped what I was doing and stared at her two blackened eyes and split lip like a gawking rube at a carnival, waiting for her to conclude her thought.
Could this be it? Was she finally throwing in the bloody towel? Had some miraculous angel of mercy come to her in her sleep and convinced her of the error of her shitty ways, showed her the futility of persuing her addiction to its inevitable tragic conclusion?
Had she finally decided to abort her one way journey along the road to insanity and a premature death?
Was she really about to ask for help?
I stood watching, waiting for her to say more, knowing full well it wouldn’t be worth a shit coming from me. The desire to change has to come from within.
Then she spoke.
“We need to travel, Cigano!!” She said decisively. “I gotta get away from these e’stiupid city an’ all the shit peoples. Gotta go far far ‘way from here an’ take the trip in the country. These place making me crazy!”
Ah. The good old ‘trip to the country’ trick…
Oh yeh. Right.
Of course. It was the PLACE that had been making her crazy now! Silly me! And all this time I had stupidly thought her problem had something to do with mental illness, unresolved traumas and dark emotional complexes, drug addiction…
How stupid of me, how shortsighted I’ve been not to have seen what was right in front of me all this time. It wasn’t any of that stuff that was the problem.
Now it was just the fucking PLACE that’s been making her crazy all along.
Of course!
I vaguely remembered a popular movie, some stupid Yankee comedy with a catchy title. “Blame it on Rio”. Something like that.
Must be a common theme…
Shit!

Why is it that addicts and alcoholics so often end up stumbling around the planet like wandering lost souls in search of some ever-illusive perfect fairy tale place or situation where all their problems will suddenly, miraculously disappear into thin air?
Poof! All better now.
Not!
It’s probably because the human mind is simply wired in its most primitive form to always look away from itself as the very source of and solution to all our human difficulties.
What a deadly trap that little default thought mode is for a long-suffering drug addict!
The dear old iron-clad, bullet-proof protective wall of the human ego, wildly inflamed by years of drug abuse and all the attendant delusional, warped rationale and knee-jerk self-justification that goes with it… Making it nearly impossible for an addict to ever make the dreaded admission of complete defeat and personal powerless by the unaided will that is so crucial and necessary to any real chance of recovery from that hopeless condition of mind and body.
Shit.
Poor Narcisa.

EVEN THE MONKEY’S BEATING IT THE FUCK OUT…

monkey, originally uploaded by Scab Vendor.

“I know a place in the mountains, Cigano, where everything it is perfect. Waterfalls… Clear water an’ clean air. All the natural food an’ the nature, away from all these pollution an’ all the bad influence an’ corruption!”
Wow. Paradise. Fucking Shangrila! Where do I sign?
Only one problem.
Narcisa.
I tried explaining to her the concept that, wherever you go, there you are… tried sharing with her the benefit of my own decades of hard-lived experience as a world-traveling fuck-up, scrambling around the planet in a desperate and futile three-ring circus of jumbled people, places, faces and events. Wreckage, failure, disappointment, frustration. Self delusion… Until I’d finally come in for a crash-and-burn landing that stopped me dead in my desperate little tracks.
It was no use, of course.
Narcisa had made up her mind.
“That’s YOU story, Cigano. You experience. I’m different…”
Of course you are, baby. Just like everybody else. Vive la difference!
Narcisa decided it was time to take her ratty, warped little mind-powered disease on a fucking road trip.
Fun fun fun!
Well, I didn’t say no.
I figure as long as you’re going to Hell, ya may as well shake hands with the Devil.
So I started packing my bags.
They say that more will be revealed.
I’m always down for whatever. No matter what you do, you’ll be sorry anyway…
Another adventure with Narcisa. What the fuck…

BYE BYE RIO

Rio from Balcony, originally uploaded by Scab Vendor.

Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2008. All Rights Reserved.

NOTIFIÇAO: Os eventos neste site são contos de ficção - registrados na Biblioteca Nacional com todos os direitos autorais revertidos ao autor, Jonathan Shaw. Os personagens mencionados são interamente ficticios. Certos eventos, personagens, lugares e relatos foram baseados em fatos reais, porém qualquer semelhança a qualquer pessoa vivo ou morta se trata de pura coincidência.
As vários fotografias apresentadas se encontram com o rosto distorcido para preservar o anonimato das modelos que representam personagens fictícios.