Where does THE CLIFF come from?

The Cliff is old. 

Nobody knows how old.

But bits and pieces of THE CLIFF come from...


a) Children's literature and movies such as

Lewis Carroll and John Tenniel's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and "Alice Through the Looking-Glass" ... Surreal encounters and baffling characters by the dozen...

C.S. Lewis' "Chronicles of Narnia"... The evocatived titles say it all... "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," "Voyage of the Dawntreader,"  "The Magician's Nephew," "The Silver Chair," "A Horse and his Boy," "The Last Battle"...

Norton Juster and Jules Feiffer's "The Phantom Tollbooth"... A child's adventure through alternate dimensions and states of mind, where the depressing world of some adults is not hidden.

Harry Nilsson's "The Point"... Amazing animated movie and record album about how conformity sucks, narrated by Ringo Starr...



Miyazaki's "Spirited Away"... A world within a world within a world, where the building itself is a character (the Bath House for the Spirits, depicted below...)

b) The Lower Don River in Toronto, Canada

Back when I drew THE CLIFF-Book One: My Helicopter, I used to go for walks south of Dundas St. West, past Queen St. West and down to the lake in this beautiful post-industrial wasteland where nature lies panting under a highway overpass...

c) An 18th Century Collection of Maps of the Travels of Vietamese Officials in China...

(From Caroline and Martine Laffon's Mapping the World: Stories of Geography, Firefly Books, 2009, pgs. 30-31)



d) The Tower of Babel ...

The Tower of Babel
by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1563)

"The story explains the confusion of tongues: variation in human language. The story's theme of competition between the Lord and humans appears elsewhere in Genesis, in the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The first century Jewish interpretation found in Flavius Josephus explains the construction of the tower as a hubristic act of defiance against God ordered by the arrogant tyrant Nimrod. There have, however, been some contemporary challenges to this classical interpretation, with emphasis placed on the explicit motive of cultural and linguistic homogeneity mentioned in the narrative (v. 1, 4, 6). This reading of the text sees God's actions as not a punishment for pride but as an etiology of cultural differences, presenting Babel as the cradle of civilization (in contrast to the alternative Priestly traditions in Genesis 10)."

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babel

e) The Blue Cliff Record ...

I stole the name from this book.

The Blue Cliff Record is a collection of Chán (Zen) Buddhist koans originally compiled in China during the Song dynasty in 1125 and then expanded into its present form by the Chán (Zen) master Yuanwu Keqin.