Spread of the Dead

Where did the Tarot of the Dead come from? You could trace two sources, really. If you want to go back the farthest, you could blame Ray Bradbury (my father fed me a steady diet of quality books by authors such as Lewis Carroll, Gahan Wilson and Charles Addams in line with his belief that a child of his should have imagination stretched at an early age). As a kid I devoured Bradbury’s books, and was introduced to and fascinated by the Mexican holiday in his prose poem “El dia de Muerte” that appeared in my dad’s copy of The Machineries of Joy. It didn’t stop there. With his curious and sumptuous metaphors, I could credit his writing for much of my inspiration to draw. Who wouldn’t be charmed by his description of desiccated Martian remains as “peppermint bones.”

The other inspiration would be long conversations with my friend Mike over books, films, music, plumbing … you name it, and we batted it around for a while. We were talking about themed Tarot decks and making some jokes about the level of specialization. How do you read a deck populated by puppies and tell someone bad news with a straight face? Mike and I had both recently read a comic book, Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children, about the Dead Johnson family. The family was your basic nuclear American family having a barbecue, except that the Dead Johnsons were all in fact corpses in the most extreme stage of rigor mortis. The conversational thread turned into Tarot of the Dead People — a zombie deck with plenty of George Romero jokes — followed by Steven Wright’s quip about playing poker with a Tarot deck, getting a full house and having three people die. Within about two seconds of feeling like a smug smart-aleck, however, I turned into a babbling idiot and started saying “No! I’m serious! I’ve got a real idea!” and the train was on the tracks.

In Skinny Legs and All, by Tom Robbins, a self-trained artist is asked how he got his ideas to create his art. The artist replied that when he felt himself missing something from the world, he made it. Tarot of the Dead was like that. I wanted to see a Dia de los Muertos deck — a deck of skeletons in bright colors acting out the images of the trumps. I wanted to see a deck that paid homage to all of the skeleton art I loved, from the woodcuts of Posada to Ub Iwerks and Walt Disney’s animated “Skeleton Dance.” And I wanted a deck that did not take itself too seriously. The pip cards were made reversible so that they could be used for card games — someone could get that full house Mr. Wright mentioned.

I took off running before I knew how commercial decks were produced. At the time I began, my pen-and-ink artwork was small scale, drawn with a technical pencil and inked with a rapidograph. Not knowing how things were reproduced for print, the card originals were drawn, inked and water-colored the same size I imagined the finished cards should be: the size of a standard poker card. At the time, my day job was jewelry fabrication, so I guess a part of me never thought to question doing everything on a microscopic scale. Today, I know about reduction for print, I’ve traded my rapidograph for a crow quill nib, and I think my glasses are thicker.

As I drew each card, the images began to be peopled with friends and heroes. Symbols mutated from anachronisms to everyday objects. It became a household deck, full of familiar objects that readers could immediately recognize and relate to. Thankfully, a computer made it in there, but I’m still sorry I couldn’t squeeze in a turntable or an espresso machine.

In a nutshell, that’s the deck’s origin. But a strange thing happened when I began to show the first cards at shows and to friends. The number of people that not only know about the holiday, but also set up shrines and offering tables at home or participate in parades or gatherings on November 2, surprised me. I should clarify — these are not folks of Mexican heritage for whom the holiday is part of a long family tradition, but people who’ve discovered it and adopted it. I don’t know what this adoption means. Have we always secretly held back the dire urge to chit-chat to our dead relatives, like the stereotypical widow with her dead husband’s picture on the mantle, and now at last we’ve found an excuse to let loose? I won’t go that far. But I think it suggests that today’s American culture and funeral traditions do not satisfy a spiritual human need. There’s a taste right now for black humor, as evidenced by the popularity of zombie video games and films like Dawn of the Dead. It seems that if we can’t talk about death, the subject spills out into our jokes like little kids testing out a new potty-mouth swear. I’m not saying these jokes are a negative byproduct, but I do think the fact that this deck sprung from gallows humor speaks volumes about how the subject of death and mortality are taboo in our culture, and that needs to change. I hope that the jokes are a beginning, and maybe my deck can also be part of that beginning.