I finally re-uploaded an old but very significant comic to me on this website! This comic, “Daikon Day,” was inspired by a silly picture I saw on tumblr ages ago that positioned a big daikon with a face standing ominously over a little daikon being cut with a knife. I thought it kind of reminded me of the binding of Isaac in the Bible, so I decided to make it into a little comic, inspired also by the song “Dyin’ Day” by Anaïs Mitchell, which also retells the story. I had been listening to her music since her early Hadestown days (before it was the Broadway hit!), and her album “Young Man in America” still is one of my favorites—I love the storytelling in it, and how it’s very much about various tensions and relationships between parents and children. The comic may have intended to be a little silly, kind of like a “Veggietales” vibe, but it ended up being a lot more serious in tone.
I was also inspired at the time by the art history class I was taking, which was about art of the Spanish Baroque era. There were a lot of images of still lives of vegetables and other common objects that were painted in a very ominous and heavy fashion—painting common, mundane objects with a kind of heaviness of lighting that we associate with maybe more staged religious works. Some of the commentary was that for some still lives, they were intended to be religious metaphors, like this painting by Juan Sanches Cotán that places three carrots like the three nails of the crucifixion.
Whether or not that is true, it does always seem to me that the vegetables in his works feel like they are posed on a solemn stage. The vegetables have a sense of solidity to them, frozen in time by the act of painting, and separate from the contexts of eating or growing. The stark black background both flattens the images, but also gives to the modern viewer a sense of unease as to what may be lurking in the background.
In a way, the works of Cotán and Veggietales are not all that dissimilar in that respect! As even the hosts of the Veggietales cartoons, while of course in a more whimsical and friendly presentation, constantly bring attention to the fact that they are actors, rather than agents—metaphors representing Biblical stories, rather than the subjects themselves. We are not asked to know what goes on outside the tiled stage that Bob and Larry frequent, that involves a sink and computer (?). Like Cotán’s dangled vegetables, they aren’t food to be eaten, but players in types of modern mystery plays for the modern child.
In a way, “Daikon Day” was kind of a forerunner to the turn my work would make in the upcoming years during my last year in college—a lot of Biblical-inspired work, that was also a little goofy and weird in concept, but taken very seriously. I also made the whole comic in a little sketchbook, with micron ink pens, and colored it in photoshop. It’s still a little rough, but I think that was part of its charm. Unlike the original goofy photo that inspired the project in the first place, I opted not to give the Daikons any facial features, which I think ended up being more successful.
I first posted the comic on tumblr like most of my works, and unfortunately because of last year’s deletion I no longer have access to the many insightful and thoughtful comments people left on it in the years since I first posted it. The story of Abraham and Isaac is a fraught and disturbing one, and there are many different interpretations about what it means both on its own, both historically, and personally. For me, I mostly tried to run with the emotions from Mitchell’s song, and from relaying the events straightforwardly, to let people feel how they wish to feel about it either way.
Tomatobird Art 