The Love Affair of Mel & Travis

I.

“I do believe he sees me.”

--”Rad Balls,” stories by Brian Canning, drawings by Mel Kadel

*

Once upon a time, comic book artist Travis Millard met love-of-his-life illustrator Mel Kadel in a ladies’ lavatory. Though it is to this day the subject of some debate, Travis wasn’t in the women’s bathroom of the Little Joy bar that night being a sicko pervert. He was, instead, drawing on the walls. He was a bartender then, a beer and cigarette and puke mopper-upper, and his boss had given him leave to make art there. In staggered Mel. “Oh, man,” Travis thought as they stared at each other, his stomach fluttering with that destiny changing eye-meets-eye, soul-meets-soul, lightning bolt flash of attraction, “I believe I’m going to have to ask this person out.” He took her to an empty warehouse on their first date. He began to paint a mural on the wall. She sat down to sketch on the floor. That was eons ago. But it’s been pretty much the same ever since.

At the moment, Mel is on the porch drawing a girl sitting in a tree. You cannot see the girl’s face, only a high limb and her feet (clad in dainty ballet slippers) dangling. Mel and Travis live in a cabin in the woods in Echo Park. It is a beautiful fairy-tale day in April, and time seems to stand still, marked only by the leaves falling across Mel’s paper as she works. A bird poops--splat!--on her drawing. “Whoops,” she says, smudging the poop away. Just like that, nature’s stain becomes part of the drawing’s texture.

A cabin in the woods is precisely the kind of place where, in your mind’s eye, you might see yourself living if you too were a starving young artist. That is, before the day-to-day realities sank in--the lack of air-conditioning in the summer, the lack of heat in the winter, the pitter-patter of mice scampering through gaps in the floorboards. Mel and Travis’ cabin lurches at the top of a hill overlooking the 5 Freeway, as if at any moment it could go barreling down into oblivion. There is one bedroom, one bathroom, a dining room, a den. It has all the accouterments of a cozy, bohemian, Edward Gorey life. In other words, it is small, drafty, looks to be held together with bits of string and glue, and if either of the occupants, in some fit of madness, decides to call the landlady to request a repair, she has already assured them that she most definitely will not come.

Still, the cabin and the history of its environs are a dreamy, darkly magical place. It is the silent third character in the freakish love story of Mel and Travis and their life of art. Local lore is that Ernest Hemingway once holed up in the cabin across the way to finish a novel. At the end of the street is the desolate spot where the Hillside Strangler dumped the bodies of his murder victims, a piece of trivia Mel discovered by chance one evening. She was out gathering firewood, flashlight beam bouncing along in the inky blackness, when she ran into two young men traipsing through the woods on a grisly sightseeing expedition.

Mel and Travis are the kind of people who can appreciate the discomfiting knowledge that sometime in the distant past, an inhabitant of their very cabin was shot in the head upon opening the front door. But on some nights, one might imagine, the darkness and the sound of leaves rustling--so lush and tranquil by sunlight--must fill the brain with spooky thoughts. Over their bed, there hangs a picture Travis drew called “Handsamwich.” One hand tightly grasps another.

II.

“Remember the pact.

The pact will keep you alive.”

--”Hello Again,” a mini-comic by Travis Millard

*

Mel and Travis draw while eating at restaurants, while doing errands, while waiting in line. One day at the laundromat, Mel, hypnotized by the spinning laundry, stared at a scrap of paper--a flower-patterned overleaf she’d ripped out of an old book. “I was looking at the weirdos sorting their clothes, and all of a sudden this little guy’s face jumped out at me from the flowers in the pattern,” she says. “‘Hello. Who are you?’” Images download straight from consciousness through hand onto paper. Doodles swirl on scraps all over the cabin, settling in corners. They draw until their hands hurt, until their fingers cramp. They draw outside, at the kitchen table, at the desk, while watching “Jeopardy.” At night they haul a lamp outside and draw, sometimes until dawn.

Mel often draws a girl with long, straight black hair. The girl, always in a tiny black dress, began to evolve when Mel was a teenager, working the ticket booth at her grandparents’ penny arcade in rural Pennsylvania. She looks nothing like Mel, who wears jeans and T-shirts and has short, wavy bobbed hair the color of honey. The girl rakes leaves (which are actually hearts) and walks through waist-high grass. She carries toy ponies. She rides swings or runs through forests in the night with a lamp strapped to her forehead. She turns somersaults down a hill. She fights epic battles--all in the backyard. On the Fourth of July, while Mel waited for Travis to finish getting a tattoo, the girl grew strong, flexed her tiny arm muscles and transformed into a gigantic insect creature, with powerful legs like roots. Sometimes a boy appears. He plays an accordion in the light, staving off a massive wave of dark. He walks a tightrope between two telephone poles. Other times he’s an old man slumped over a table, a flock of birds bursting from his head. Art gives the earthbound wings.

Travis, for his part, draws people fighting: a Hasid versus a Muslim, a skinny man versus a fat man. A man getting his face torn. A man being strangled, face turning blue.

“None of them have a winner or a loser,” says Mel. “They’ve reached that critical point where with each gesture, if they even move an arm or a leg, they won’t just hurt their opponent, they’ll hurt themselves.”

“I was thinking about that really funny moment of ultraviolence, when people are at their most vulnerable, brutal and sort of losing their gourd and tearing into each other,” Travis says.

There is an iterative, compulsive quality to his work, as if in drawing a thing, he might conquer it. It’s saws, saws, saws, saws, or bottles, bottles, bottles, bottles. Or skulls. Or minivans. Or ghosts, vampires, ninjas, thieves in masks, kids with hairy faces, one on top of the other, abrasive and raw. Though they both use .005 Pigma Micron pens, Travis’ is a thicker, bolder line than Mel’s relentlessly fine “tick-tacking.” At times the repetition compulsion seeps into Mel’s work. She draws a gigantic swath of vines on white paper, then spends an entire day cutting it out with an X-Acto knife--only to paste it down onto another piece of (slightly less white) paper.

“I can’t believe you spent all that time cutting it out just to achieve this minuscule difference in color,” Travis says.

They squint at the drawing. Mel giggles sheepishly.

It isn’t a life of the mind so much as of the psyche expressed through ink. These two can’t help but draw. “We don’t wake up and have breakfast,” says Travis. “We wake up and draw.”

One morning they awoke to a dead rat on the porch. Travis squealed and hopped up on the table.

“You’re gonna clean that rat,” said Travis.

“Aw, come on. No I’m not,” said Mel.

“Yes, you are.”

“No, I’m not.”

They argued for a long time about who would deal with the body. The rat, in the meantime, was just getting deader. “Well,” Travis said after a while, “you better go take care of that rat.” Mel sighed as Travis went out for a walk. When he returned, the rat was gone. “Huh. Cool,” he said, scratching his head, half surprised that Mel had actually removed the carcass. That afternoon, Mel drew a girl dragging a giant, ugly rat with its tail slung over her shoulder. “And the girl looked really ugly,” Travis says now, grinning, “or at least psychologically damaged.”

For weeks afterward, Mel drew rats. The rats have sleepy, funny expressions, pointy noses and pointy toes. Mel and Travis also collaborate with each other and with illustrator friends. One starts some drawings, another finishes them. They mail a postcard-size sketchbook back and forth with Travis’ brother Brett in a long-distance game of Exquisite Corpse. Round one: Mel draws a rat with delicate fur and cute feet. Round two: Brett slices the rat’s stomach open, spilling its innards with a rainbow flow of guts. “Mel,” he writes. “The rat was beautiful. I’m sorry I made it ugly.”

III.

“The hike is long over rugged terrain.”

--”Michael Jackson in Exile,” a mini-comic by Travis Millard

*

Rodents are not the only challenge.

Stuck in traffic, Mel imagines vines slowly curling around cars. Vines so thick they look like a mass of snakes. She draws the girl with the long black hair with her legs twisted round and round like rubber, like noodles. “It’s about struggle,” she says. A piece of hate mail arrives for Travis: “I’ve seen five year olds with better drawing skills . . . yours suck!” Mel’s girl with the long black hair--unbrushed and witchy for a change--squats on a rock, exhausted, frowning. Coiled in the tall grass nearby is a fat snake. “Ha,” Travis laughs when he sees the girl’s bare feet, “she’s funny.” Travis talks a mile a minute. He is gregarious and crude, a natural comedian. Mel is sensitive and melancholy, a natural empath. She scrawls a caption, quoting a friend: “I think I’m one bad idea away from failing completely.”

To make money, both of them hang their art in as many galleries, boutiques, diners and coffee shops as possible. They gang up with friends for small local group shows.

“Neither of us focus on how to get into the best galleries,” says Mel.

“Yeah, I’ve been shaken about how I’m going to make my next paycheck,” Travis admits, “but I’ve never considered quitting the art or thought I should stop drawing and get on with another career. I figure if it gets really bad, I’ll find a way through the muck.”

Travis accepts a hundred graphics projects at once--T-shirts, skateboard and snowboard decks, album covers, a line of shoe designs (skulls and bees) for Vans. He finds it difficult to turn down work. “If somebody is asking me, it means they must like me,” he says. “How can I say no?”

For the past five years, Mel has been hanging her art on a wall at the Mustard Seed Cafe in Los Feliz. Somebody like Raymond Pettibon--for whom Mel used to prep paintings, lightly penciling images on canvas that the artist would later render completely unrecognizable--might get thousands of dollars for a drawing. Mel has sold pieces for $100 to $300, to people like Jason Lee, Sheryl Crow and Naomi and Bob Odenkirk, who wander in not for the art but for the food. “It’s great to have work hanging where people can look at it if they want,” Mel says, “or they can just eat their breakfast burrito.”

It seems inconceivable that someone who has sold drawings to movie stars and famous rock musicians has no health insurance. But it simply costs too much. When she gets sick, Mel goes to the emergency room. She was sitting in Cedars-Sinai emergency room with a twisted ankle when, large and fussy and disheveled in a hospital gown, in walked actress Nell Carter. “What kind of place is this city?” Mel marveled.

Once, the money situation got so bad that she was on the verge of giving it all up, the drawing, the dream, the life of art. She walked to Echo Park Lake. “Why am I doing this?” she asked herself. “I should just go be a stockbroker.” She sat down on a bench. There were little boys playing around the lake. She drew the little boys. She drew the fountain in the lake. A homeless man commandeered an empty shopping cart. So she drew the shopping cart, but filled it with jewels--diamond necklaces, rubies, pearls, emeralds.

At 32 and 30 years old, respectively, Mel and Travis are not so old as to be bitter, yet not so young as to be unfamiliar with feelings of anxiety over how close they are to the edge. The jobs they’ve both had have been either degrading or glamorous--nothing in between. Travis has drawn for corporate heavyweights such as Reebok, Volcom and Capitol Records, but he has also worked “a landfill of various short-lived jobs,” including one ill-fated summer at a used-car lot, where the absence of a winning salesman charisma got him demoted to car washer.

Then again . . . . When Travis first arrived in Los Angeles by way of Brooklyn three years ago, his bank account had reached a new low. He got the job at the Little Joy on Sunset. Which led to meeting Mel.

IV.

“Find a job you love, and you’ll never have to work a day in your life.”

--As told to Mel Kadel by her dad

*

Travis’ grandfather died in April, and Travis flew back to Kansas, his childhood home. At the funeral he drew a picture of an older man in profile--neatly clipped hair, glasses, head bowed, black suit. “Portrait of my dad,” he scribbled, “at his dad’s funeral.” The man in the drawing bears no resemblance to Travis, who is lanky with soulful, sad-seeming eyes and unruly mahogany hair that wages a constant battle to overwhelm his face. On the flight back to Los Angeles, sandwiched between two women in coach, he sketched a long, skinny airplane on a downward path. Flames shoot from its sides. “Two ladies watching next to me who suspect I’m a terrorist,” explains one arrow. “Guy who I suspect might be a terrorist but is actually a dentist,” says another. “Me, in the center row, drawing this,” says the last. He sketched another tiny plane, one hand a clenched fist above it, about to crush it to the ground, another hand below, an open palm. “Hand of somebody’s god,” he labeled the rescuing palm. “Hand of somebody else’s god,” he labeled the crushing fist.

Meanwhile, back at the cabin in Echo Park, there were fists everywhere. Mel had been drawing fists like dandelion puffs shooting up through grass. Zombie fists, clawing for air. Tiny clenched fists, painstakingly razor-bladed out of card stock like paper dolls, littering the floor. Mel’s girl with the long, black hair pushing her way through a crowd of fists determined to hold her back.

When Travis returned from Kansas, it was pouring rain. They lugged his suitcase up the dirt pathway. Inside the cabin, he looked at Mel’s jumble of fists.

“Aha,” he said, as if he’d been expecting it all along. “It’s your fight scene.”

“I guess so,” said Mel, uncertainly.

Today Mel is on the porch again, sketching. Travis is at the computer, fussing with a drawing. They are working on their first solo show as a couple. It will be at the Richard Heller Gallery, which represents Marcel Dzama, Daniel Clowes and Brendan Monroe. That’s about as upper crust as it gets for the type of work they do, and they go on excitedly about having their “messy” art up in this spotless space.

As they work, Mel is playing Dylan. Travis is playing the thrash band High on Fire. Standing in the middle, roughly equidistant between the two stereos, the mash-up of contemplative and corrosive is a little crazy-making. But neither Mel nor Travis seems to mind.

They will draw for hours today, forgetting to eat. Forgetting to pee. The bathroom: tiny! Stretch your arms and you can brush your teeth in the sink while you bathe in the tub. One of Mel’s drawings is of a girl on a toilet, skirt bunched around her ankles, reaching for the toilet paper. She thinks of an American Indian teepee. Some drawings are short and funny dances. Others are elegiac symphonies, with complex, extended narratives that evolve over the course of years.

Friends often stop by the cabin--sketch pads and laptops in tow--to work on their own drawings, to write, or just to be in the woods, have beers and hang out. Getting drunk with Mel and his brother Brett the other day after an afternoon of painting backgrounds for the pilot episode of infamous transgressive comic strip artist Tony Millionaire’s “Drinky Crow Show,” Travis documented their increasingly crass tales with a quick storyboard: A guy downs a shot of tequila laced with “a cat butt worm.” The cat looks suspiciously like Mel and Travis’ cat Nern. The guy looks suspiciously like Travis.

V.

“I’m a very poor man but I have you, don’t I?”

--A collaboration by Brian Canning and Mel Kadel

*

So many drawings. Travis makes books out of his. He sells them for $10 a pop on his website, Fudge Factory Comics. For 10 years he’s been running the Factory. In certain circles, Travis is famous for mini-comics and zines like “Michael Jackson in Exile” and “Right Wing Conservatives Getting Racked” (based on the premise that certain people just need to be kicked in the nuts). He mails the books out in plain manila envelopes silk-screened with more drawings. He offers an envelope screened with a “Cross section of Los Angeles air out my kitchen window,” aka “some alveoli from my lung cavity.” Items found in Travis’ alveoli: taco-truck grease, dead skin cells, secondhand smoke, mucus, cologne, cocaine, anthrax, garbage medley, sand, ash from San Bernardino mountain fires and diamond dust.

If he likes you, Travis will probably make you a book, a recombinant mini-zine involving past drawings, new drawings, Xeroxed or silk-screened, hand-lettered and stapled--a mix-tape on paper. But his most precious book is the one he made for Mel. In it is a photograph of their hands, two clenched fists held side by side, both with a tiny heart-shaped scar. They carved the scars into each other’s skin one day with a hot fork held over the stove: a drawing in flesh.

*

“Comin’ Around,” a show of new work by Mel Kadel and Travis Millard, will be on view at the Richard Heller Gallery, Bergamot Station, Santa Monica, through July 1.