"Hidden Drive"

"Hidden Drive" was in the running as the name for my recent re-branding for the new gag feature here in Maine. It seems that around every corner on this island, and all up & down the coastal route these warning signs are posted everywhere. Given the crazy topography of Down East it's inevitable to have some of the potentially deadliest runways into traffic I've seen - Batman couldn't do better for a secret Batcave entrance.

I've been here just long enough now to somewhat relax in the semi-familiar surroundings while driving around to slip into that daydream state and rely on habituated cues for navigating. But it's still new enough of a place that sometimes when I snap out of it I don't have a clue where I am, and the commute becomes getting lost again another path of discovery. Mind you, this confession isn't cause for concern, unless you are a passenger who has to be somewhere by a particular time.

As an aside: the very same day I doodled this panel out while browsing at the public library I happened across an interview in a recent New York Times Magazine with Shaun Tan. One quote in particular caught my eye, as it sums up both the challenge and the continual attraction to the creative act of drawing:

"You discover how confounding the world is when you try to draw it. You look at a car, and you try to see its car-ness, and you're like an immigrant to your own world. You don't have to travel to encounter weirdness. You wake up to it." - NYT Magazine, April 24, 2011

One of the best things to happen after being involved with the Literacy Council of Alaska was the adoption of Tan's "The Arrival" - one of my favorite books of sequential art - into their ESL program. It's fantastical, wordless narrative tells the story of what it feels like to move to a strange, new world and experience scenes that are beautiful, bewildering and bizarre.