At some point in the midst of the blur of the pandemic Long Story Short by Mr. Fish and Friends was released, and I was one of those friends! It is an unbelievable honor for my first published illustration to be the first plate in Long Story Short.
The story I summarized into one image is The Catcher in the Rye.
I first read The Catcher in the Rye in high school. It was assigned by a teacher whose teaching style was directly opposed to my learning style. I hated the book. Despised it with all my heart. There were several other books I was more interested in working on, but they had all been spoken for. Looking at the list of available titles, I figured out a way to get excited about attacking Catcher, so I took it.
I dived deep into research, no corner of the internet was too weird.
Did you know that Oona Chaplin had been J.D. Salinger’s girlfriend before Charlie Chaplin stole her away? He wrote Catcher after that happened. I bet he thought Chaplin was a hack and a phony.
Multiple murderers credit The Catcher in the Rye as their inspirational guiding light. John Lennon’s murderer reportedly sat reading Catcher while waiting for the police to come and arrest him. It seems to me a clearly premeditated performance for how he wanted to be regarded: Someone who took out a phony. (by being a phony himself in a staged scene… but I digress)
There are also, of course, multiple conspiracy theories surrounding the book. One theory implied that the book was Russian propaganda devised to warp the minds of American youth, and eventually destroy America from within. Working on this in 2019, the penultimate year of the Trump presidency, it was easy to see down into that particular rabbit hole.
I let the hate flow through me. The more I researched, the more motivated I became. The work was deliciously tedious. It ended up serving as a sort of mandala for all my hate.
Mr. Fish was an absolute pleasure to collaborate with, and I will forever be in his debt.
