Dennis K. Draws

I keep forgetting you can pin posts on tumblr now.

Anywhoo, Dennis Kanenwisher here, writer, artist, dapper geek.

S.T.E.A.M.SHIP WILLIE #1

Art and Story by Dennis Kanenwisher

25 years (and four months) ago I started a webcomic about some Fanboy Otaku Gamers that a decent amount of people enjoyed during it's run. We honor those nerds today.

Let’s start out by defining terms.

Magick (with a k, to differentiate itself from illusionary stage magic) is the process of trying to affect reality by creating a model of reality, manipulating it, and then imbuing the model with energy to cause the desired change to occur. This was traditionally done through large elaborate acts of ceremony in which very specific and detailed actions were taken in order to evoke gods or other sources of reality changing energy.

Chaos Magick, based heavily on the works of Austin Osman Spare and popularized by Peter J. Carroll and Ray Sherwin, takes this idea and strips it down to it’s bare essentials. The idea of creating a “sigil”, an abstracted representation of your desire, and charging it by entering a state of “gnosis” or a brief state where your mind is focused only one the sigil and nothing else. Chaos Magick is also focused more on results than ceremony, the important thing isn’t how something works, just that it works. If you’re having a hard time communicating with the god of Hermes, try communicating with The Flash instead.

Turning to comics…

Grant Morrison has gone on record, at length, about their relationship with Chaos Magick and how it influenced their work. The most notable example being the comic book series The Invisibles which Morrison has described as a “hypersigil,” designed both to affect their own life and the world at large. Morrison created the character King Mob as what they called a “fiction suit,” a suit they could put on to visit the comic book universe they created. Morrison deepened this connection by shaving their head and dressing like the character in real life, and reportedly suffered the consequences. In one story, King Mob has been kidnapped by the enemy, and has scarring on his face from the torture. Shortly after writing this, Morrison succumbed to a staph infection and was hospitalized. Seeing the connection between the story they were writing and their real life, Morrison wrote King Mob out of his predicament (shortly afterwards overcoming their infection) and proceeded to write him having lots of sex with his love interest, Ragged Robin, among other fun antics.

It needs to be mentioned that The Invisibles, despite featuring fantastic ideas of demons, magick, time travel, aliens and voodoo among other concepts, was written to take place “in the real world” and purposefully referenced real life events and people. It was notoriously censored by DC for name dropping certain people (their names were blacked out) but one example that made it to publication was the notion that Princess Diana of Wales was killed because of her refusal to participate in the bad guy’s evil scheme. Morrison made a model of the real world, and manipulated said model to affect a change in the real world. How much effect The Invisibles had on the world at large remains largely up for debate, but Morrison will be the first to tell you it had an incredible impact on their own life.

And now we pivot to another comic book series, The Question by Denny O’Neil and Denys Cowan. In issue 27, published in 1989 (five years before The Invisibles) Aristotle Rodor’s “Cousin Alvin” comes for a visit. Alvin drew the comic “Captain Stars and Sergeant Stripes” during World War II and after apprenticing under a shaman in the Congo (hey kids, comics!) noticed that before a hunt, the shaman would draw a picture of a beast pierced by an arrow, and subsequently the animal the tribe killed would have been pierced in the exact same spot (Morrison has mentioned this idea in interviews as well, referring to them as prehistoric cave paintings depicting a hunt. I personally have not verified either of these concepts as actually having taken place, FYI). Alvin then concludes that he and the other comic artists at the time were the reason America won World War II. Because every month artists were cranking out pages of America beating the Axis powers, and the Axis powers weren’t doing the same in kind.

So with this idea in mind: of comic books either intentionally or unintentionally being massive hypersigils that can affect reality, I started looking at the stories mainstream comics were telling and it was kind of depressing...

In 2000’s President Lex, Lex Luthor became President of the United States.

In 2004’s Identity Crisis it was revealed that members of the Justice League re-wrote the villain Dr. Light’s brain after he committed rape.

In 2005’s The Omac Project and Infinite Crisis it’s revealed that Batman created a spy satellite and an army of cyborgs to police superheroes.

In 2006’s Civil War, The “Superhero Registration Act” passed in Marvel Comics, causing Captain America to become a fugitive from the law as Iron Man led the Marvel Universe into a surveillance state.

In 2009 this led to the Dark Reign storyline in Marvel where Norman Osborn became the head of S.H.I.E.L.D. and formed a Dark Avengers comprised of villains pretending to be various Avengers.

In 2008’s Final Crisis (written by Grant Morrison) the god Darkseid conquers Earth and kills Batman.

In 2015’s Secret Wars Dr. Doom creates a new multiverse where he is god.

In 2017’s Secret Empire Captain America is revealed to have -always- been an undercover Hydra Agent

In 2024’s Absolute Power Amanda Waller uses doctored footage showing the Justice League committing atrocities in order to justify forcibly removing the powers of all metahumans

In 2025’s One World Under Doom Dr. Doom becomes Sorcerer Supreme and conquers the entire planet.

In the currently running DC K.O. Darkseid has created an alternate universe centered around him, and is trying to conquer the main universe in which Earth is all ready being terraformed into a New Apokolips.

(Please excuse any storylines/events I have omitted. These are just ones I’m familiar with enough to cite).

Granted, in all of the stories above, the good guys eventually save the day.

And of course, fiction is always informed by the times in which it is written.

But what really stands out to me in the above mentioned stories is that more often than not, they start with the bad guys winning. The story isn’t the bad guy attempts something and is thwarted, it’s the bad guy has all ready won, how will the heroes turn this around?

And to momentarily pull back to fiction at large, it has often been observed that, at least in American fiction, stories have gone from imagining space fairing utopias to post-apocalyptic settings*

Fiction holds a mirror up to society, but by the same measure, we are the stories we tell ourselves, and as outlined above there might just be some magick power to be found in the format of comic books. In this current world where sociopath nihilistic billionaires seem to have taken over damn near everything, I’d argue it’s long past time to start telling stories where the bad guys get their ass kicked before they take over the planet, not after.

Kakizome, the Japanese term for the first calligraphy written at the beginning of the year, symbolizing your aspiration for that year.

My 2025 Holiday Card design, mailed to friends and family.

Cloud's Angels

Playing Final Fantasy 7 Remake and Rebirth made me really want to go back and play the original, which I did over the past two months.

Did my best to match the original's character designs and color palette.

F.O.G.Club - Pretend it's 1993