FIREMOUTH AND MOONFACE
My mouth always puts me in a predicament. It is my toxic trait and my favorite flaw. I fall out with people, say cutthroat things, then act like I never said them. But words have meaning. They sit in the gut. They mark us more than we admit. Somewhere between that truth and the scars I have collected, I ended up diving into the esoteric side of the world. Tarot, astrology, numerology, all of it. Not for prediction but for patterns that explain why some people carry volcano energy and others carry moonlight. Firemouth and Moonface started there, as two sides of me wrestling with power, grief and the strange language of symbols.
Wednesday’s Hero
Comics North was a refuge for me in a small northern Michigan town that did not always know what to do with someone who looked like me. On Wednesdays I would slip out on my lunch break, cross the street from the Kingston Theater, and step into a narrow shop that smelled like a worn library and felt like a spaceship.
Years later, after the store burned and I had moved across the world, I kept thinking about Dave on his vintage bike, the red carpets, the variant covers, and how that little comic shop made me feel less alone in a place that often treated people like me as a threat.