LookingLand

in trying to fulfill faynudibranch's request for jokes about Andrew Johnson, i started drawing a scene between James and "skin trader" MishMash. couldn't get the joke to work, but there is mention of the "fatuous sot, Andy", which i hope will do for now.

James's relationship with MishMash is an odd one (and definitely unexpected). it almost sorta makes sense why James's relationship with States Morse is so hostile when you see how he is with MishMash and the sort of resentment that gets built out from Mish's attitude and the way his rabid abolitionism colors his world. and Mish is such the sydney carter of this world. he pops in and out of people's lives somewhat bizarrely (and with none of them ever knowing about the others) and then it's to a far far better place that he goes in the end. Mish and the Tall Blond Soldier share a lot of qualities in that regard. they are probably the two characters i love most who don't have "books" of their own (and aren't getting any either, sorry guys).



in my bid to capture the family resemblance,
i made his hair too flat (it should be floofier and
less combed, i suppose), but all in all not bad
for a first attempt at a character.
working on this scene has been sorta fun. Mish's over-the-top fanaticism is refreshing in a world where everyone else seem so uncertain of what they are doing. and i forget how wonderfully nasty James can be if provoked. he definitely has his dark side. put the two together and they are a fun pair to create dialogue for. unfortunately, this scene and a scene in which ladies' underwear features prominently are the only two times we ever see them together, which is a shame.

i guess i oughta start posting these boogers instead of talking about them, huh?

: o p

i caught myself getting persnickety and perfectionist about what is essentially a throw away project and so i went and rented movies and bought groceries. manicotti tonight, anyone?

i rented Highlander because (gasp), i've never seen it. and scarlite's been going on about it and it seems like something that ought to appeal to me.

i've got five pages drawn. i'm wondering now: to ink or not to ink?

i thought i would be posting all day, but i guess now i have to modify my ambition ~ to post all night! mwhahahahaha!

(welcome to goofyland) ~

it's snowing!

: D

* warning: dunna click on the cuts if you are at all sensitive to seeing war injuries! these are not (in my estimation) overly gross, but i'm cutting them anyway (just in case), so use your own judgment.

i'm reading Kuz's other book, which is a substantial hunk of paper. it's half pictures, of course, but the text of the case histories is also fascinating (and sad! read the story, this morning of a very young man who lost both his arms, was living on the street begging, and was found dead a few years later). not all the case studies have sad endings, but a lot of them do.

anyway, trolling through the book i came across some important finds. discovered a head wound exactly like my andersonville one with a case history that matches Sarge's so completely that it's almost spooky (oh who am i kidding, it creeped me out momentarily). the book is chock-full of head wounds from which people recovered amazingly. gunshots to the face (horror!), sabre wounds, and blasts passing through the scalp and even penetrating the skull.

( two pictures of head wounds below this cut. )
i am not posting the ones of people who are missing their faces, though i did learn something fascinating that i feel like i should have known, but didn't make the connection until now:

my main character is a dentist. not a whiskey-dentist, but a full-fledged D.D.S. i've been trying to find a sensible place for him in my orthopedic asylum and it didn't occur to me until looking at numerous pictures of faceless men undergoing reconstructive surgery (primitive as it was then) and wearing facial prosthetics, that this is the work of an oral surgeon. a regular surgeon (like Bease) could try to reconstruct a jaw or create a nose or two, but why not leave that work to the dentist? it's not like Bease doesn't have other things to do.

can i get a "duh" here?

problem so easily solved as to be ridiculous. it means some adjustments to the arc of the storyline, but the possibilities are fun (if people with no faces can be considered "fun") and i'm looking forward to building from here.

two other things as they relate to After Shiloh which is what i am working on at the moment:

( first is a picture of a rather nasty wound of the pelvis and thigh. )
unfortunately there's no case history on this one, but i don't think this fellow survived (you never know though, another image showed the scars of a man who was shot 19 times and lived to recover his full health).

i'm very curious about the dressing on this one, but it's impossible to know what we're looking at here. i mostly saved the image because of the disposition of the wound and the manner in which the patient is propped, etc.

lastly, a picture that needs not be cut, a man who took a bullet through one elbow that then passed through his opposite wrist. it took two years for the wound in his elbow to close and he lost prehensile strength in both hands. with these splints he was able to write, etc.



elmer a. snow, 3rd cavalry, 22 years old
i'm kinda sickened from looking at these pictures all morning (the ones i've posted here are by no means the worst of the lot ~ not even close). i can't imagine the suffering some of these men endured. case after case talks about how many miles and how many hours after being wounded they were treated, how many subsequent operations it took to get them on their feet (if they had feet). the gallery of broken bones alone is testament to horrific destructive power of the weapons in this era. ah me.

one thing all of these men have in common is how wasted their flesh is. most of them are painfully thin-looking. even the fellow above was photographed in 1879, years after he had been shot and he looks like a stick. most of the men with leg injuries can't seem to stand without support and their legs are so scrawny you can scarcely imagine how they stand at all.

couple of years ago for NaNo, i wrote the first asylum story (from whence the now infamous line: "Geert understands" comes from (so here's the official record of its origin, babalueye). it's a silly story (about a devil incarnate, a man with a paralyzing spine injury, a puppet show, and a tapeworm). i'm convinced the story will work if actually written in a way that doesn't make you fall down laughing at how bad it is. but, barring the dreadful writing, it was a nice chance to explore some of the characters (Sally Salvador and Linwood Brown emerged as bright stars in this book ~ pretty good, especially for Brown, who's in a coma for the whole book), so i have a foundation to build on at least.

i guess it was inevitable, having doctors and dentists and priests for main characters that a hospital/asylum would be the setting that would make the most sense to bring them together.

much much better than the orphanage i had originally considered.

: D

off to take the dogs to the park, run errands, and ultimately write write write. happy saturday everyone!

another post about random 19th century american rubbish.

i know, you can scarcely contain yourself, but please try.

first up is a reference picture for corona women's college in corinth, mississipi, which was used as a hospital (by those nuns i was looking for) after the battle of shiloh in 1862. there's not much information about this college online (and only one very grainy, very obscured photograph). it was burned by the yankees in 1864 and took an archeological dig just to ascertain where it actually once stood (the site was apparently contested for years).

i was waffling between the tishomingo hotel and corona college for my hospital site and decided on the latter because it seems to me (haven't done the research yet, but...) that common soldiers would have ended up at the hotel and officers would have been farmed out to private homes or perhaps "better" rooms at the college. they're all being evacuated so it doesn't really matter too much. i just want a visual to work with and there's something appealing about "corona" and the nuns, so we're going with that for now.


corona women's college circa 1862
the other tidbit is also my first book of the 50bookchallenge:

no. 1 ~ Orthopaedic Injuries of the Civil War: An Atlas of Orthopaedic Injuries and Treatments During the Civil War by Julian E. Kuz and Bradley Bengtson. funny to make this my first book of the year after kvetching about it all december. it was almost everything i hoped for: great pictures, great case studies. it's amazing how much punishment the body can take and still recover. wounded soldiers often spent the remainders of their lives with chronic illness and depression. and then some got all shot up to hell and walked away in perfectly good health (albeit on prosthetic legs). short text and not nearly as graphic as i expected, though some good representational pictures overall. very interesting surgical procedure facts (with diagrams). overall, definitely something i want, but not worth spending a bazillion dollars on. if i can ever find a reasonable copy, i will get it.

learned a lot of interesting things from this book. like: knee injuries were some of the worst. surgeons didn't bother amputating at the knee because mortality was about 51%. so they usually chopped off at the thigh, where the odds were about 15-20% better (hip amputations were the most deadly with a scant 25% survial rate). i guess the knee thing surprises me, but also bolsters my excuse/justification for them not taking Lewis's leg off after Gettysburg (why bother? it's the worst kind of break and he's not going to live anyway).

i was also surprised at how technologically advanced the prosthetics industry got (and fast). most people could only afford a wooden leg or so, but there were some pretty fancy mechanical hands going around and a man who'd lost both legs could walk again if he had enough stump to stride. i was tempted, briefly, to go ahead and cut the leg off after all ~ but we'll keep it.

also, i got exactly the thing i was looking for, a picture of a leg brace from that era:



i think i just now realized that i may be a fetishist.

: o p

i was really looking for one of those flying nun types and got all excited when i found images of the Daughters of Charity from belgium with their space-ship hats, but in all practicality nuns in america did not wear those hats, especially not in the middle of a war. the american variety were much more along the lines of elizabeth ann seton.

i suppose i could make up some nuns with funny hats, but it would be pushing it. especially when i feel like i am making up so much else.

then again, why not?


cornetted nun: fly fly!