HOME | DD

Marley's Ghost — Description

Marley was dead: to begin with. It's the coldest open in all of fiction. It's all you need to know. What he died of all those seven years ago is as irrelevant as it is for any of us. He simply is dead, there is no doubt whatever about that. The one and only friend Ebenezer Scrooge was ever able to cling onto was blown away in the wind as equally as the lowest worm or the highest king. Old Marley was dead as a door-nail, and as his business partner, as his friend, it fell to Scrooge to sign the paper to confirm that he'd never see him again, never laugh again over a pint, never crack a smile with the one man who would've understood his grief. Marley died on an unapologetically dreary Christmas Eve just like the one Scrooge now scraped home across. Scrooge lived in Marley's old chambers, a building remarkably tall amongst the skyline for being such a forgotten, lonely landmark. Every apartment in this high rise was rented out for business, not leisure, and so Scrooge, once again, found himself abysmally alone as he retired to his room. It's no small shock, then, when he reaches his door, and in place of that same old generic brass knocker, there was Old Marley's face, the shrinkwrapped visage of a corpse staring directly into Scrooge's garlic soul.
Scrooge blinked, curious to say the least, and startled out of his frostbitten skin, yet as soon as he took double, it was a shapeless brass bauble once again. Huh… he must be more tired than he thought. Maybe he ate some bad beef, or that blot of mustard had disagreed with him, or maybe it was all this wretched Christmas nonsense making him puke. There was more gravy than grave about it, whatever it was. He pushed inside and slammed the door behind him, checking every nook and hidden cranny for any further intrusions of something he couldn't explain. As most of us do when the monkey in us spots eyeshine in the dark, Scrooge retreats to the oasis of light beside his fireplace well before the rational mind can cull primal anxieties. Yet the all-clear does not signal, the hairs behind his neck do not loose their tension. There is a presence here, an aspect of the natural order which evolution has only deigned us as recognizable, just not comprehensible. Scrooge is afraid, very afraid, and he should be.
It starts with the ting of brass, a barely-perceptible breeze gently rocking a little servant bell until its chime is transformed into a crescendo. The noise is raucous, intolerable, as the building's entire network of strings and whistles begin to screech a cacophonous choir. Scrooge joins his scream to the song, and then all at once, the bells choke out. Yet, still there is a ringing, a clanking, a metallic dragging which starts somewhere in the cellar and hauls itself up the stairs to Scrooge's room. Scrooge is quaking in his slippers, his arm chair the only shelter he has when the rattling snakes convene at his bedroom door. Then, unabated by the double-bolted locks Scrooge had thrust the entrance shut with, there appeared Old Marley, wailing his eternal agonies.
The sight of Marley, transparent and intangible as the crystalline fog of winter, yet constrained in every movement by the wrought-iron chains that bound him to perdition, is one Scrooge can hardly believe. It's only when Marley removes the bandage around his head that the horror is solidified as real. Before modern embalming techniques, rigor mortis had an unflattering habit of seizing a corpse's jaw muscles open in an unyielding scream of silence, and traditional practice was to tie the jaw closed with linens to prevent this from disturbing the grieving. So it is that when Marley unwinds his head, his bottom jaw completely falls out, and the ghost gives his sermon to a Scrooge who is now at full attention.
This had been Marley's damnation for seven years, he moans to Scrooge. Every man alive who wastes their precious time as sentient meat on Spaceship Earth being a greedy asshole to their fellow humans forges a chain for themselves, its length determined, of the sinner's own volition, by every single time a man chooses to profit himself over others. Such spirits are doomed to wander the Earth for all eternity, unable to be seen or touched by the living, unable now to perform the selfless good deeds that would rescue them from this torment, all the wealth they acquired locked up in steel boxes they will never see the interiors of again. These ghosts are the wasted potential of the human spirit, the parasites who worshipped power and capitalism under the foolish belief that these things ordain any loyalty onto their devotees. Marley has come before Scrooge to warn him that he's spent the last seven years making his chain even heavier than the one eating into Marley's ectoplasm. He's running out of time.
Scrooge begs his oldest friend for the answer to his salvation, hoping that he might do it, get it over with and never think of this nightmare again, but Marley knows damn well that no lesson is taught so emotionlessly. Scrooge will be haunted by three spirits this Christmas Eve, Marley foretells, and no Scrooge you can't just have them all at once. They will come to you, at the stroke of their respective hours, and you will listen to what they have to say, or you may as well slit your throat now and take your chain as you have forged it. If you do it right, you'll never see Marley again. You shouldn't want to. With this warning delivered, Marley clicks his jaw back into place, and rejoins the Dantean fog of tortured tears, pitiful politicians, and corporate incorporeals reduced to chainlinked street beggars, imperceptible even to the lowest urchins freezing to death in the arms of their God. All goes so silent that Scrooge cannot even summon another “humbug” from his rattled lungs. He goes to bed wondering if any of that was real, and if it even mattered if it was…
Design notes, ah see, drawing a generic Halloween ghost to gauge how it can be flavored with different characters was a smart move afterall huh? I'm so happy my scanner cooperated with me on this one, because on paper it's a little messy, in no small part due to all those overlapping lines of the same color. I had to convince myself to be a little lax on his actual outfit so that the chains could take center stage, and though minimalism and I go together like oil and water, I think we reached a kickin’ compromise. The chains themselves were inspired by the get ups Harry Houdini got himself locked into, with a touch of Victorian straight jackets to make this whole thing seem as heavy and cumbersome as possible. Really the hard part was the face, but I knew that'd be the case going into this drawing, so I gave it extra clean up. I'm really happy with how this piece came out, and now I have to figure out how to give form to the Ghost of Christmas Past. Minerva guide my pencils…