February 8, 2008
As promised, here's the page of sketches where I was trying to learn from the master Gus Arriola, of Gordo fame, who died last weekend:



His line is so clean and cocksure. He was truly ahead of his time.

Speaking of time and being out of it, I had a spirited discussion with a certain writer last November regarding minorities and their portrayal in the Wild West. The writer assured me that he planned on infusing his script with plenty of minstrel singing Buffalo Soldiers and Chinese cooks. Aghast, I then forced the writer, who can be rather secretive, to watch the Brit flic Snatch by director Guy Ritchie (Madonna's husband) wherein we meet an ethnic stew of crime characters, including Russians, Jewish gangsters from New York, Blacks (with thick Brit accents) and a mumbling Brad Pitt as a Gypsy fighter. I was trying to expose this writer to the polyglot nature of the new world, but alas, he seems, to me, to be gleefully mired in the John Ford version of the past.

His Chinese cook comment has been bothering me ever since and last night I whipped out my version of the kind of Chinese cooks Mickey Free runs into in the graphic novel:



Sympathy cards may be sent to:

Paul Andrew Hutton
Department of History
University of New Mexico
Mesa Vista 1080
Albuquerque, NM 87131

"Do not trust your memory, it is a net full of holes; the most beautiful prizes slip through it."
—Georges Duhamel