The Midnight Wanderer

Over the past several weeks, much like Mojo above, I find myself wandering and awake in the wee hours. This happens to me every year. Daylight savings times arrives and then suddenly I’m falling asleep at seven pm, and waking up at three in the morning. It’s not ideal. My hair falls out, my skin gets papery, and I lose access to important grade-school era knowledge—what makes a verb, how to read a clock, how to survive a game of red butt.1

As the years have gone by, I’ve learned that humans aren’t necessarily meant to sleep through the entire night. Especially in winter—I mean, between dusk and dawn is like fourteen hours! So for centuries, humans practiced second sleep—you’d go to bed, wake up in the middle of the night and hang out for a bit, then go back to sleep for a second time. What folks did in the middle of the night was up to them. They might go check on the livestock, or visit a friend. Perhaps a couple might make more children, or sit around the fire and tell stories to the ones they haven’t yet abandoned to witches in forests.

So lately I’ve come to embrace my sleep cycle as natural, and I don’t fight it. I wake up, stretch my tight neck and shoulders, loosen my jaw, and noodle about on something until I feel tired enough to go back to sleep. What I love about working at three o’clock in the morning is that I have a sort of headstart on the day. I can try new things, explore alternative techniques, and if they don’t pan out, no harm done, because it’s essentially time-out. Sometimes I even save specific pieces for this midnight shift—usually drawings I’m too intimidated to work on during the day. These last few weeks I’ve used the time to slowly push forward my next Mojo book.

Mojo, if you’re not a student of history, is a sock monkey. My sock monkey, in fact. When Kim and I were fresh-faced kids out of college, a very talented school chum of ours made sock monkeys for several of her friends. I named mine Mojo after the monkey in the classic Simpsons episode where Homer gets a helper monkey. Kim named her monkey Lewis. Sometime in the early 2000’s I started drawing comics about the two of them, because it seemed less crazy than the tiny plays I was acting out on the living room couch.

Back in the wild west times of the internet, when I was running Bearskinrug, I’d pump out Mojo comics on a pretty regular basis. Here’s one of my favorites. It really encapsulates our household dynamic…

I made a lot of mojo-themed products over the years too…

There was these motivational posters, then postcard-sized prints, window decals, buttons, stickers. One year I sold Christmas Cards, and for a long stretch of years, you had your choice of Mojo t-shirts: There was Mojo, and Lewis, And who can forget the complex eroticism of this classic tee?

Anyway, though I normally hesitate to show work not yet fully cooked, I think this book is far enough along it’s pretty much finished. Here’s a sequence that feels particularly relevant of late…

It’s good to be working with Mojo again, despite it being on this weird nocturnal schedule. This book is actually quite more ambitious than the previous two books2, and I’m getting to stretch my illustration legs to their fullest. In fact, I’m enjoying it so much I’m actually kind of screwing myself. Moving to a “second sleep” schedule only really works if you actually go back to sleep. But there’s always one more line to add, one more shadow to tweak. Sure, I’m shortening my lifespan by five or so years with every page—but wait until you see this motorcycle I’ve drawn!

Okay, well… the clock is nearing four in the morning, and it’s time for me to try and sleep again. I have a brief window before Sadie excitedly jams her face in mine and forces me to pet her. I call it “Party Snout”. Good night, dear prowlers who invade my intimate personal journal on a regular basis. If, like me, you find yourself rattling around in the middle of the night, I hope you find yourself haunted by one of the more benevolent ghosts. Like that one that just stands in the corner playing a Nintendo Switch. Or that silent fellow with the voluminous hood who shows you the future, but only repeats this hilarious moment when you super-soaker your brother while he’s eating chili.