^{[6/30/26 10:30pm: I’ve had a wonderful go of spending days, I’m not kidding- days writing, recounting, hypothesizing etc. I have pages and pages and pages of these ‘Newsletters’ written since the time I sent my last BCC to everyone in 2023. There is an 8-page document somewhere I began, around the time of New Years Eve. It was supposed to be ‘hope for the future’ which devolved into the CIA and American history. This is new again but I’m trying to move quickly… c’est la vie. -Luv, Kade]}

It is a super power how memory can illuminate vast quandaries of the mind with such agency. Is there a recitation from a professor or high school teacher that you’ve held on to? For me, unsurprisingly, I remember a painting teacher at SVA answering to my curiosity of when it’s okay to go have a cigarette.

He asked “Do you like Alan Ginsberg?”

“He’s alright” I said, still formidable, in regard to my thoughts about him.

He laughed, “Of course you think he’s only ‘alright’. You should read a poem by him. It’s called ‘Don’t Smoke”

Another memory I have is from being a freshman in high school. I went, abominably anxious, to the library to ask if they had Charles Baudelaire. The librarian pointed to a very tall man, with wire frame glasses, a “high and tight” haircut and the physique of a grizzly bear, who was talking to my english teacher (an ex-boxer who smashed a podium with fist while reading Shakespeare) This man was the twelfth-grade english teacher and when I said Baudelaire he let out a “HAH!” which wouldn’t have surprised me to shatter a window.

“Ahh, Baudelaire- Daisies, green pastures, bright blue skies and..A 2” X 4” TO THE BACK OF THE HEAD! Baudelaire! Go home and go on the internet- read Get Drunk by Baudelaire.”

In twelfth grade, I had this man as a teacher. I snuck that story into a writing assignment but could not find “Get Drunk” online or in any of my Baudelaire books. I found “Get High” somewhere online (maybe a bad translation from the 60’s?) I wrote “High” in place of “Drunk” to be confident. He corrected nothing on the assignment except for crossing out “High” and writing “DRUNK”. Looking it up now I could only find “Be Drunk”. In addition to that, Alan Ginsberg never wrote a poem called “Don’t Smoke”.

The Giorgio De Chirico quote I have inserted above is not a quote by him. I might have made it up. Though, for years I was quite certain a teacher in college once fed me that line. I looked at De Chirico paintings thinking ah, this painting is so much what the mind would fabricate upon anticipation of turning a corner. It looks like he painted a scene of distinction on-site, but also as if he only made observations with his peripheral vision. I believe either myself or the professor (maybe the kaleidoscope of memories, now in tandem) had mistaken a De Chirico quote for the writing of Louis Aragon about the mind ‘outpacing the eye’ in Paris Peasant.

A few years ago, on the first warm day of the year, a friend and I took the train out to Queens to buy LSD and some bright orange, counterfeit “adderall” pills. We took the LSD and split one pill in front of the dealers house, shrugged and walked back to Prospect Park (about 7 miles) By the time we approached the park, we had had a number of instances—laughable in hindsight, but then, strictly functional and somber. In the event one of us had to to piss, we might enter a Mexican restaurant —alone—while the other waited outside, one would return to the sidewalk without immediate notice of the other. One of us might’ve ended up at some unpredictable junction, barely in eyesight, upon returning and holding something like a Tamarind soda, beading with sweat. In the fleeting moment of realization that your friend is not in the same spot as when you left- there’s this synaptic event. (besides our vision being chemically altered to perceive the avenue as though it were a set of watercolors touched by a chainsaw) It is evocative of when you were a child at the grocery store and lost your parents. You go “huh? gone?” and your mind generates a narrative, or perhaps several, in consideration of what might have taken place in your absence. There doesn’t need to be drugs for this. Those rapidly generated possibilities often disappear once you notice everything is fine. Sometimes those possibilities don’t disappear; they just get distilled into the everyday: 'I thought you got kidnapped,' or 'I thought you got hit by a car.' Why do we say things like that that all the time? The mind reflexively jumps straight there as though it’s the nexus of all things unexpected. Some glimpses are so disconcerting that relief eclipses your memory of them entirely, once it’s over. I like to try and hold onto those things we consider, I find them to be creativity at its peak.

My friend and I talked about this as we got into the park. It became a violet sunset and the greenery seemed, still, to be a cold and damp color from the winter. I don’t want to advertise that I have a predilection towards neglecting locks. However, it was a commonly discussed subject at the time. My roommates and I did not close our front door. As the friend I was with laughed in mentioning that, I asked him what he imagines he is preventing when he locks his front door. Is it to protect your property from being stolen? When a person can’t sleep without the doors being locked, what do they imagine they are subject to? I mentioned how, while living with an ex, a meat tenderizer would appear at the bedside in the event I was not home and in bed at the same time. It became fun to visualize what idea was present in the preventative act of grabbing a meat tenderizer. What kept you up at night as a child? It was fun to try and conjure images for those things.

We ran into our friend Ethan. He sat with us in the grass as the sun sunk in a matter of seconds. Our talk became galvanized with what do you imagine when you get scared? Can you recall a very-specific image that would’ve caused you to faint one of those times you were in bed? or walking late at night? When your heart was racing and you just had a feeling that ‘tonight was the night’- your suspicions would become validated.

I went on telling some stories:

While I was six or seven years I was looking around the house for my uncle Danny. He often would wait behind a corner on all-fours and jump, ‘RAH!” scare you as you turned the corner (maybe this is where my fixation on turning a corner has come from) It was dark in his room and I went behind the bed. There was someone but it wasn’t him. It was a child my age in the fetal position. It cried and wore all black, I can still see it clearly in my head. Danny? The child was unmoved and I ran downstairs to find no prank was being pulled on me. Everything was normal downstairs and Jeopardy or Wheel of Fortune was on at full blast in the parlor. He stood in the kitchen putting a slice of American cheese on his sandwich, for work the next day.

Another time I remember lying down to go to sleep. I must’ve been around the same age. I had a little corduroy ottoman-like rectangle with aluminum fold-out legs that my mom had gotten for me. I had it next to my bed. It would end up collecting piles of books or the handheld radio I would listen to when I couldn’t sleep. Sleep hadn’t fully arrived yet this night. I must’ve been somewhere a little bit south of fully-awake. I saw a cat sitting on this odd little piece next to my bed. We weren’t allowed to have pets in this apartment (not to say that later on, I wouldn’t let in an all-white stray cat during the hours in which my mom was asleep) I saw an all-black cat, sitting comfortably, but with eyes of some anticipation. The moment I found most uncanny was when I felt its presence. As time elapsed it did not diminish. I felt as thought I kept eye contact with this creature. The dulled sound of my mother watching tv in the next room, the faint light of existence beyond, the street lamps outside my window, nothing real could metamorphose this figment into whatever it might be. It wasn’t obvious whether or not I should be afraid. Reaching toward it, I hooked my finger on the black mass with eyes (a balled-up t-shirt) and sent it towards the middle of the room. Turning away, to fall sleep- I did not feel convinced that the shirt would not return to its paws and gently hop back to my bedside.

As a child, I knew these apparitions weren’t meant to be confused with the corporeal world. My conjecture did not have words or complete thoughts, but an awareness of the fact that these symbols did not belong to the third dimension. Only that I saw them. I felt responsible for seeing them. But I was not in control of them. There was not a moment in which, in any way, I believed they were real. What scared me was that I saw them.

As a teenager, I became fascinated by the Ouija board. My experiences with the Ouija board were that no amount of skepticism could stop it from working. Thus, my candlelit basement became an attraction for friends of friends to come over and ask me to host a “seance”. The board had a sense of humor, often dark, but would not refrain from telling a group of 17 year olds something like “YOU SUCK”.

My girlfriend at the end of high-school, Katelyn, had her two friends visiting from out of town. Katelyn brought them to my house. One was a devout Christian, the other one didn’t talk much. Her name is lost on me.. let’s say it’s Tabitha. Two of my friends were there too. We sat around the Ouija board, assumed the position, and it immediately spelled “TABITHA”. Although we were by candlelight, we kept it debonair and joked, giving ooOoo’s and aaaAAAaaa’s along the way. We had just met Tabitha no more than an hour ago and we watched her go into a frenzy as the board went on “DIE TABITHA”, “I WILL KILL YOU”

Tabitha began to sob. She asked “who are you?”

“JUDAS PRIEST”

My friends and I roared with laughter. It piqued the interest of the devout Christian friend too. The name made Tabitha even more petrified.

My friends and I went outside to smoke cigarettes and I looked up the origin of the name Judas Priest. The first result that came up on Google, in 2013, Judas Priest consulted the Ouija Board for the name of their band.1 Katelyn and her friends stayed in the basement continuing with the Ouija board. They came out said goodbye with minor urgency and took off in Katelyn’s bright yellow Volkswagen. Tabitha had been crying hysterically. That night as I laid in bed, I can not remember a time I was more convinced that an unwanted thing was lurking in my basement. Despite the fact that I did not believe in ghosts or spirits, a burglar would’ve been relief in exchange for the feeling I was left with. No matter what I believed, that experience drew more awareness to what I don’t know.

Okay, besides being robbed, what do you think is the worst thing, y’know? Do you have a ‘worst’ thing that could ‘be downstairs’? My friend and I were still rambling on LSD as we walked with Ethan. Ethan mounted his bike and waved goodbye.

“Do ya think we scared him?”

“Yeah, we were talking about the design of fear itself! That’s not something people wanna hear on acid!”

“He isn’t on acid”

Continuing on about uncertainty in the mundane and our encounters with that I don’t know and fear. I quoted De Chirico “Surrealism is what the mind imagines in anticipation of turning a corner” ya know, The Mind involuntarily invents such weird things in the stead of knowledge. We walked to my apartment and through the wide-open door. By then we were on the subject of ghosts-

^{{This isn’t a joke, just now, while writing this, the lamp in the next room just turned on by itself. Thats’s new.}}

I asked my friend if he had ever used the Ouija board. He was very dismissive of it, without distaste but, just short.

“You got a Ouija tattoo, what about you? Those things don’t actually work, do they?”

Of course they do, how would they have sold millions of these things? It’s made by the same company as Monopoly! I told him how easy it was to make at home and recounted being eleven or twelve years old and asking a homemade Ouija board what my locker combination was. I genuinely could not remember the combination. The Ouija board gave it to me.

We made The Ouija board using a marker, a piece of tabloid sized paper and a shot-glass. We turned the lights off and I suggested he refrain from something corny like “Who’s there?” but to ask an arbitrary question, something that would be impossible for me to know.

“What was my grandpa’s dogs name?”

The shot glass moved across board, giving us three letters before he took his hands off.

“How the fuck do you know my grandpa’s dog’s name, man?”

I laughed. “I don’t! You were the only one that could’ve been pushing it.”

“Alright, what kind of car did my grandpa have?”

The board moved erratically across the numbers at the bottom of the board giving us a foreign numeric code: 0189190

We jumped about five feet in the air when we heard a voice laugh and go “Jesus christ”- it was my roommate who’d walked through the wide-open front door.

“We just ran into Ethan at Prospect Park”

My roommate said “Funny, Ethan just texted me a bunch of numbers- 0…1…8…9.. I don’t know, weird.”

After crucifying myself for years with my process, I have begun to make work at an infinitesimal increment closer to the rate in which I have ideas. That meant shedding my sable brushes, my french bristol board and cigarettes. Oh, wait, that was for cost efficiency… but hey I will live longer and not die a martyr. Also fuck scanning!

My “inks” consist of tracing a picture of my drawing held up to the laptop camera in Photobooth. Using Free-Transform and Skew tool in Photoshop, I line it up to my guides. Here is an 11”H X 17”W image that will be used for a two-page spread. There are .75” margins and I’ve marked the center to avoid adding any information that absolutely-can’t-be-lost to edges and areas with compromised visibility.

To “work” on my comic wherever I can bring a ballpoint pen feels miraculous. I have felt that the more I flush out an idea on the material page with a ballpoint, the less time I spend digitally. Thus I have folders and sketchbooks with loose sketches, my thumbnails, scripts etc.

While I’ve received many very nice compliments on my lettering in Prima Materia, I was disappointed in how it looked. I’ve made a few fonts of my hand-lettering to expedite my process. Last summer it felt like I spent as much time lettering that book as I did drawing it, in addition to re-doing things digitally to be more efficient. A distinguished touch I wonder if anyone’s noticed is that some comics utilize the serifs in an uppercase “I” when it’s used for the word “I” and often times I’s don’t have serifs otherwise. You might be a creator and not even realize you do this. My lettering in this book has no I’s with serifs, there are no seraphs in Hell.

For a while, after beginning this comic I was sleeping on couches (Thank you to Ashton my fuckin’ Angel Son, Eero, Zade and Lars for allowing my vagrancy to become so special and to Dave Huerta for allowing an opportunity to for pause) I bought a large sketchbook to make more involved drawings of each page, in order to save time (and pass time on couches) awaiting the day I could sit in front of my Cintiq again. The Photobooth-as-a-scanner has become a hilarious document of where I am while I work on this, what hour, what state of appearance.

Here I am at dawn after staying up all night.

In my next newsletter I will delve more deeply into the story in Wälp and my otherworldly experience of working on it so far.

In other NEWS:

KADEMCCLEMENTS.NET

I have a new website where you can learn more about my next book as well as more about old ones you might not have known about.

WORKING CARTOONIST

A large anthology called Working Cartoonist has been produced to raise funds for the Working Cartoonist Library, an effort to archive all of the bozo nonsense of unreadable underground comics as well as other hard-to-find and out-of-print comic resources. I can be seen above receiving the news from Gabe Fowler that these things cost money! Why would they let me sign these? Anyways, this anthology exists and it contains 12 pages I’ve written and drawn with my brother, Max Burlingame. I will share more about that comic in a future newsletter as well as details which are currently unbeknownst to me on where to find this book.

PRIMA MATERIA

C’mon NIGHTCREATURE PRESS called it their favorite indie comic of the year!
Click the image to go buy one from them, you can Klarna it for chrissakes!

Lastly:

“^{I can, however --- and do --- still give this comic one of those qualified recommendations I railed against at the outset for reasons already stated, but it’s SO CLOSE to having true greatness within its grasp that it’s downright frustrating to see it miss the mark by taking such a “cop-out” approach to something so absolutely crucial. I do think McClements has a masterwork in him waiting to be told, but this isn’t it. Not yet.}”

-from Four Color Apocalypse

Criticism is dying and I find less and less that people are willing to write something incendiary about any art-form. That is because they have never been so vulnerable. It is thankless to make art in so many circumstances and I see why people who write criticism would be prone to giving encouragement to what they like before dismantling it. To be criticized is to not appear vulnerable, I think. To have a masterwork in me waiting is even better than being told I’ve made my summit.