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I recently devoured two of the excellent collections of Milton Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates assembled by Dean Mullaney and Bruce Canwell for IDW. It seems appropriate to apply my feelings about Caniff’s narratives to a Wallace Stevens poem. The piece shows the difference between illustration and interpretive cartooning. Stevens’ work roils with imagery, but it is very easy to step on the words, so my incorporation of the text with the art in the form of a faux-Sunday comic strip balances between literality and a parallel path of my own. The finished strip gives me deja vu, as if somewhere in time I have seen something like it before, perhaps in an old National Lampoon, or maybe in a pop art collage of old Terrys.

Illustrated Wallace Stevens Index
James Romberger’s Website