“Unfurling” is a graphic novel drawn on a scroll of paper by my daughter, Isabel Rucker, going on display from November 5-27, at the SOMArts gallery in San Francisco.

[Tuesday night: A weary Isabel finishes mounting the show. The scroll is in three 150 foot rolls, mounted one above the other, held in place by wood stripping and protected by Mylar plastic.]

“Unfurling” stretches over 400 feet long, is a foot high, and is drawn in black ink pen with watery washes. The comic panels vary in length (up to ten feet long) to mirror pauses, vast scenery, or thought patterns.

Most of the panels are too long to fit into the narrow column of this blog, so I’ll just post a few details clipped from the panels so you can at least have an idea of the art.

The seven-year project began in 2002, when Isabel decided to free herself from the size of regular pieces of paper, canvas or sketchpad. She was living in a warehouse full of artists near the intersection of Cesar Chavez Street and Third Street in San Francisco at the time.

She fell in love with a young man in Pinedale, Wyoming, and moved out there to live on a ranch with him—and a few years later they married. Pinedale is definitely off the grid, but filled with natural beauty.

“Every day there was something new to see,” as it says on the full-length version of the panel above. Briefly put, “Unfurling” describes Isabel’s journey from San Francisco to Wyoming.

Living in Wyoming seems to have brought her to a level of visionary peace.

The opening party for the Unfurling : This Land show is Thursday, November 5, 2009, 6 p.m.-11 p.m. at SOMArts, 934 Brannan Street, in San Francisco, CA 94103.

The show also includes new pencil drawings by cartoonist Mark Bode for the graphic novel Cobalt 60, and Mike Dingle’s I See the Future, a massive collage work consisting of found objects combined into the general shape of the United States. This opening should draw an interesting crowd.

Directions: SOMArts is near Eighth Street and Brannan, near Trader Joe’s, not far from the the Sixth Street exit from Route 80. Here’s a link to a map.

I hope to see some of you there!

Added November 8…

Here’s a pasted-together and way-too-small photo of the left end of Unfurling as it’s hung. You read the whole top row, then the next row, and then the third row. Awesome. Mabye later we’ll post a big image of the whole thing. Or make it into a book…

This is Isabel at the opening, in the center, with some friends and viewers, standing in front of some of Marc Bode’s comic art.

I’m celebrating Halloween at the World Fantasy Con in San Jose. It’s nice to see so many writer friends and to discuss our craft and biz. I talked about my paintings on a panel yesterday with some other writer-artists.

[See my previous post for info about the Japanese paintings.]

If you have too much fun, Emilio sent in a link to a “lifelogging” article about 22 “lifebox” tools, starting with the SenseCam, which takes a picture of just about every damned thing you see—it’s said to be “aimed at helping Alzheimer’s and dementia patients recall the events of their day.” Where did I put my glasses? Did a ghost take them?

Woooo!

In order to hook up Earth with my fictional land of Flimsy in my novel-in-progress Jim and the Flims, I’ve been thinking about using an STM (Scanning Tunneling Microscope) to poke a hole in an atom or, even better, into an electron. And this produces a tunnel to an alternate world. Simple!

Really you’d need some SFictional way to amp up the power of the thing—maybe I fall back on that hoary SF-movie expedient of a well-timed stroke of lightning on a nearby power pole. I see this happening on some slacker’s hobby porch, not in an intergovernmental lab. I gather that it’s possible to build your own STM at home.

Somehow he’s virtually riding on his picometer needle and … Zzzzzt!

There’s some nice STM pictures on the IBM Almaden Labs site. (The photo above shows the results, however, of San Francisco graffitti removal, not the machines at IBM.)

Photo by Kenneth Garrett, Copyright (C) 2008, National Geographic

We went to see the King Tut show at the De Young Museum in San Francisco this weekend. It was a good show, with some gorgeous things. I loved this “pectoral” or necklace.

[Photo from www.suite101.com, Credit: Credit: Egyptian Museum/Andreas F. Voegelin]

Even better was the gilded coffin of Tjuya, who may have been Tut’s mother-in-law. Ride the boat to heaven.

I pick up cultural associations of the 1920s and 1960s when I look at Egyptian art. Howard Carter discovered Tut’s tomb in the 1920s—I just read Carter’s fascinating account of it in a Dover reprint called The Discovery of the Tomb of Tutankhamen—this is a great little book. And in the 1920s there was a fad for Deco and Egyptian stuff.

[Art by Rick Griffin for Zap #3, (C) Rick Griffin]

The psychedelic rock posters and cartoons of the 1960s often used to feature flying scarabs—I think particularly of the work by Rick Griffin.

[Found on Wikimedia Commons.]

This pair of cartouches contains the hieroglyphic signs that render Tutankhamen’s name. I’ll give an explanation that’s partly or even largely wrong. (A cartoonist named Chris Cooper has posted a more accurate illustrated essay about Tut’s name.)

The cartouche on the left is his more informal name, Tut (chicken) + Ankh (hippie cross) + Amun (earth, air, and sea) and under that a Crook for Ruler, an On (butter churn?) for the city Heliopolis, and a Papyrus plant for Upper Egypt, or Thebes. The cartouche on the right represents his throne name, “Nebkheperura.” Here we have Ra=God (sun disk) + Khephri (Scarab) + Neb (Basket, stands for All).

Sylvia pointed out that one of the ankhs on display had a woman’s lower body sketched on it, right below a Nebkheperura cartouche. I’d never thought of the Ankh that way.

It felt so weird to come out of the tomb-like show into the museum shop, three thousand years later, and a half a world away from Tut’s tomb and everyone is imitating Tut and taking pictures.

[Sarcophagus-like Scanadavian pancake house on Telegraph Ave. in Berkeley, converted to a sushi resaurant.]

Certainly there should be some Egyptian stuff in my fictional land of Flimsy. A flying snake. A great scarab. But maybe in a diner.

This week I read he 1912 Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Bourroughs. The 1990 Penguin paperback edition has a great cover by Frank Frazetta.

[Copyright (C) Frank Frazetta]

I enjoyed the book a lot, and now I have to get hold of the first of the many sequels, the 1913 The Return of Tarzan , to see if Tarzan manages to hook up with Jane—who slips through his noble fingers in the final scene of Tarzan of the Apes.

I’m curious about Philp Jose Farmer’s Burroughs/Burroughs pastiche, “The Jungle Rot Kid on the Nod,” but I can’t find it online. Maybe I’ll have to buy a Farmer anthology for this one.

[Copyright (C) E. C. Publications, Inc.]

I also dug out my old Mad magazine parody, “Melvin of the Apes,” every frame of which is eiditcally etched into my brain tissues from my first exposure back in the early 1950s.

On an unrelated front, I’ve been thinking about biotech, genomics, bioengineering, bioinformation—whatever you want to call it. I’m thinking there’s a rich vein of SF story material here that’s ripe for more mining.

Of course Paul Di Filippo suggested this years ago in his Ribofunk Manifesto, and his story collection, Ribofunk. And we can’t forget Greg Bear’s classic Blood Music.

I’d be curious to hear suggestions about existing SF along these lines and, above all, I’d like some recommendations for readable popular science books on the subject. I’m not so interested in worries about new plagues, I’m more intrigued about how we might tweak living orgainsms.