An antic disposition

Here's a comic that I did in 2004. Click to enlarge, and it will look less like a bunch of inkblots, and more like... oh, wait on - a bunch of inkblots.

Its title, which doesn't appear here, is "Rorschach", named - of course - after the completely discredited psychiatric diagnostic tool, the Rorschach (ink blot) Test. The comic appeared in an issue of literary journal Going Down Swinging a couple of years ago, in a slightly different format - I had to cut it up and rearrange the frames so that it fit nicely on their square pages.

I pulled this out of the vault today after a brief email conversation on the topic of madness with the Fabulous Sebastian - one who wisely defies anyone to call him "normal". This theme has been much on the mind lately in any case, what with my work on Hamlet and his antic disposition. And as it happens, my Hamlet character grew out of the strange ink-cat whose first appearance was in this Rorschach comic. So it seemed apt to revisit it.

Funnily enough, there is an exchange in Hamlet where our man is taunting Polonius, pointing out imagined animals in the clouds, and watching the old feller tie himself in knots to agree that the same cloud looks like a camel, a weasel and a whale. He would have made short work of an inkblot-wielding shrink, would Hamlet.