Black Phoenix at Comic Con: One Night Only @ the CBLDF Comic-Con Welcome Party!

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Join us after the ‘Con! Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab will be showcasing the CBLDF benefit blends at the CBLDF Comic-Con Welcome Party, starting at 8pm on Thursday July 12th at the Westgate Hotel! We will have all of the Neil Gaiman-inspired blends from the Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab catalogue, Black Phoenix Trading Post tees inspired by Neil Gaiman’s 15 Painted Cards From a Vampire Tarot, and a selection of discontinued CBLDF fragrances.

 

At this event, we will be debuting two scents from the upcoming Coraline line. Happy 10th Anniversary, Coraline!

 

BUTTERSCOTCH AND BLACKBEETLES

The other mother sat down on the big sofa. She picked up a shopping bag from beside the sofa and took out a white, rustling, paper bag from inside it.

 

She extended the hand with it to Coraline. “Would you like one?” she asked politely.

 

Expecting it to be a toffee or a butterscotch ball, Coraline looked down. The bag was half filled with large shiny blackbeetles, crawling over each other in their efforts to get out of the bag.

 

“No,” said Coraline. “I don’t want one.”

 

“Suit yourself,” said her other mother. She carefully picked out a particularly large and black beetle, pulled off its legs (which she dropped, neatly, into a big glass ashtray on the small table beside the sofa), and popped the beetle into her mouth. She crunched it happily.

 

“Yum,” she said, and took another.

 

“You’re sick,” said Coraline. “Sick and evil and weird.”

 

“Is that any way to talk to your mother?” her other mother asked, with her mouth full of blackbeetles.

 

Butterscotch candies flecked with dirt, encased in a shiny black shell of myrrh, patchouli, and anise seed.

 

 

MOUSE CIRCUS

In the flat above Coraline’s, under the roof, was a crazy old man with a big mustache. He told Coraline that he was training a mouse circus. He wouldn’t let anyone see it.

 

“One day, little Caroline, when they are all ready, everyone in the whole world will see the wonders of my mouse circus. You ask me why you cannot see it now. Is that what you asked me?”

 

“No,” said Coraline quietly, “I asked you not to call me Caroline. It’s Coraline.”

 

“The reason you cannot see the mouse circus,” said the man upstairs, “is that the mice are not yet ready and rehearsed. Also, they refuse to play the songs I have written for them. All the songs I have written for the mice to play go oompah oompah. But the white mice will only play toodle oodle, like that. I am thinking of trying them on different types of cheese.”

 

A toodle oodle of pink cotton candy noses, vanilla spun sugar fur, scattered kernels of popcorn, and a touch of polished golden wood.

 

Coraline label artwork by the inimitable Vera Brosgol!

 

 

Butterscotch and Blackbeetles is extremely limited: only 288 bottles were made, and when they’re gone, they’re gone. Mouse Circus will be available on the Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab website this summer, and Butterscotch and Blackbeetles will go online at the same time if any bottles remain.

 

 

SINGLE NOTE: INDIA INK

To celebrate the CBLDF’s event and celebrate our love of comics, we created an India Ink single note: a lot inky, a little papery, a little resinous, and strangely wearable. India Ink will only be available at the party, while supplies last.

 

 

In addition to our American Gods, Anansi Boys, Good Omens, Graveyard Book, Neverwhere, Stardust, and 15 Painted Cards From a Vampire Tarot, and Lemon Scented Sticky Bat perfumes, we will have very limited stock of the following discontinued scents on-hand:

 

 

LA MANO DEL DESTINO

Powerful Sumatran patchouli and enigmatic Brazilian copaiba with pao d’arco, cacao absolute, bourbon vanilla, Ceylon cinnamon, and tobacco.

 

EL NUEVO PURITANO

The wicked wrath of moral panic: unmoving, rigid oak, dry leather, tonka, gunpowder tea, and pious olibanum with a core of perverse and furtive vanilla bean, bay leaf, clove bud, and lime.

 

Artwork for La Mano del Destino and El Nuevo Puritano by J. Gonzo!

 

 

COHEN V. CALIFORNIA

In April of 1968, Paul Robert Cohen was arrested for wearing a jacket emblazoned with "Fuck the Draft" inside a Los Angeles County Courthouse. He was convicted of violating California Penal Code § 415, prohibiting "maliciously and willfully disturb[ing] the peace or quiet of any neighborhood or person [by] offensive conduct," and was sentenced to thirty days imprisonment.

 

The California Court of Appeal upheld the conviction, and the California Supreme Court denied review:

 

On April 26, 1968, the defendant was observed in the Los Angeles County Courthouse in the corridor outside of division 20 of the municipal court wearing a jacket bearing the words 'Fuck the Draft' which were plainly visible. There were women and children present in the corridor. The defendant was arrested. The defendant testified that he wore the jacket knowing that the words were on the jacket as a means of informing the public of the depth of his feelings against the Vietnam War and the draft.

 

In affirming the conviction, California's Court of Appeal held that offensive conduct translates to "behavior which has a tendency to provoke others to acts of violence or to in turn disturb the peace," and that "it was certainly reasonably foreseeable that such conduct might cause others to rise up to commit a violent act against the person of the defendant or attempt to forcibly remove his jacket."

 

However, the US Supreme Court granted a writ of certiorari, and the case went off to the highest court in the land. In essence, the Supreme Court had to decide whether or not Cohen's unseemly speech was punishable or protected under the auspices of the First Amendment. The Court held, by a vote of 5[en dash]4, that "Absent a more particularized and compelling reason for its actions, the State may not, consistently with the First and Fourteenth Amendments, make the simple public display of this single four-letter expletive a criminal offense." Cohen, by way of his "Fuck the Draft" jacket, was not tossing out "fighting words," and was not provoking violence through his jacket [sartorial display]. The Court denied the State the broad power to censor its citizens in the name of creating a clean, civil society through the censorship of public discourse: "[T]he issue flushed by this case stands out in bold relief. It is whether California can excise, as 'offensive conduct,' one particular scurrilous epithet from the public discourse, either upon the theory . . . that its use is inherently likely to cause violent reaction or upon a more general assertion that the States, acting as guardians of public morality, may properly remove this offensive word from the public vocabulary."

 

The whole of Justice John Marshall Harlan II's closing arguments were eloquent and compelling, but there is one phrase that strikes to the core of what I feel is the essence of the First Amendment:

 

"For, while the particular four-letter word being litigated here is perhaps more distasteful than most others of its genre, it is nevertheless true that one man's vulgarity is another's lyric."

 

One man's vulgarity is another's lyric: black tea, apricot, honey, saffron, apple blossom, tolu balsam, ginger grass, white ginger root, and vetiver.

 

 

LIBERTY

Liberty was created for the CBLDF, inspired by Eugene Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People: frankincense, beeswax, olive blossom, chamomile, sampaguita, magnolia, apple blossom, gunpowder, and smoke.

 

 

BANNED IN BOSTON

Banned in Boston was a phrase coined in the 19th century that was used to describe material, be it a motion picture, photograph, literary work, or other work of art, that contained objectionable or obscene content. Boston city officials and the Watch and Ward Society took their lead from the Comstock Law, which prohibited obscene materials from being distributed via the US Mail service, and formed their own strict censorship guidelines. Provocative or offensive material was prohibited from distribution or exhibition within Boston city limits.

 

The effect was much like that of the RIAA Parental Advisory tags: if something was Banned in Boston, it only served to pique interest and spike sales or attendance.

 

Obscene, lewd, lascivious, and decidedly objectionable. A filthy, post-coitus scent: sweaty and sweet, laced with laudanum, splashed with booze, and stained by tobacco.

 

 

SUNBIRD

Inspired by Neil Gaiman’s short story, Sunbird.

 

They were all so hungry the following morning. Zebediah T. Crawcrustle had a comedic apron on, with the words KISS THE COOK written upon it in violently green letters. He had already sprinkled the brandy-soaked raisins and grain beneath the stunted avocado tree behind the house, and he was arranging the scented woods, the herbs, and the spices on the bed of charcoal. Mustapha Stroheim and his family had gone to visit relatives on the other side of Cairo.

 

"Does anybody have a match?" Crawcrustle asked.

 

Jackie Newhouse pulled out a Zippo lighter, and passed it to Crawcrustle, who lit the dried cinnamon leaves and dried laurel leaves beneath the charcoal. The smoke drifted up into the noon air.

 

"The cinnamon and sandalwood smoke will bring the Sunbird," said Crawcrustle.

 

"Bring it from where?" asked Augustus TwoFeathers.

 

"Why, where it always is, third lane after the old market in the Suntown district, just before you reach the old drainage ditch that was once an irrigation canal, and if you find yourself outside One-eye Khayam's carpet shop you have gone too far, "began Crawcrustle. "But I see by the expressions of irritation upon your faces that you were expecting a less succinct, less accurate description. Very well. It is in Suntown, and Suntown is in Cairo, in Egypt, where it always is, or almost always."

 

Label illustrated by Julie Dillon. In Neil's words, "'Sunbird' smells like resin and deserts and the phoenix."

 

 

413 U.S. 15 / Miller Vs California

In 1974, a court ruling established a litmus test for obscenity in the United States. Does the First Amendment protect dirty birds? Yes, and no; it depends on where you are and what your neighbors perceive as naughty. The Court's majority opinion stated that material could only be defined as obscene if

 

"(a) the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest; [and] ( the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law; and © the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value"

 

If all three conditions are satisfied, voila - your work is obscene.

 

But is it art?

 

Although a work considered to have literary, artistic, political, or scientific value cannot, in theory, constitutionally be found to be obscene regardless of whether it appeals to prurient interest or is patently offensive, the question lies in how we can possibly determine with certainty whether or not a film, photograph, tale, or limerick has social value when philosophical and moral compasses vary so wildly from person to person and community to community.

 

Is a perfume inspired by an 18th Century painting of a dildo obscene?

 

What would your friends and neighbors say?

 

Leather, cognac, fig, ripe berry, and cream, stuffed into a plain brown paper bag.

 

 

SNOW GLASS APPLES

Inspired by Neil Gaiman’s short story, Snow, Glass, Apples.

 

In Neil's words, 'It smells like green apples and like sex and vampires, all at the same time. (Actually, it smells like sexy vampire apples.)'

 

Label artwork by Julie Dillon!

 

 

Proceeds from every single sale go to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund,

 

 

Don’t just come for the BPAL stuff! A bevy of Image Comics stars will be there! –

 

Ales Kot, Amanda Conner, Ben McCool, Ben Templesmith, Brandon Seifert, Charles Soule, Chris Giarrusso, Cory Walker, Dan Brereton, Darick Robertson, Deborah Vankin, Dexter Weeks, Dirk Manning, Edwin Huang,Eric Shanower, Eric Stephenson, Erik Larsen, Gerry Duggan, Glen Brunswick, Jim Mahfood, Jim McCann, Jim Valentino, Jim Zub, Jimmy Palmiotti, Joe Keatinge, John Layman, Joshua Hale Fialkov, Joshua Williamson, Kody Chamberlain, Kurtis Wiebe, Mark Poulton,Matt Hawkins, Michael Moreci, Moritat, Nate Bellegarde, Nathan Edmondson, Phil Noto, Richard Starkings, Ron Marz, S. Steven Struble, Scott Tuft, Sina Grace, Steve Seeley

 

There’s a Threadless fashion show! Badass gift bags! Auction items on display!

 

Come down, have a drink with us, and support free speech in the process!

 

The CBLDF Comic-Con Welcome Party

Thursday, July 12th

8pm – 11pm

 

The Westgate Hotel

1055 Second Avenue

San Diego, CA 92101

 

This party is FREE for CBLDF Members. Non-Members, suggested $10 - $20 donation at the door, please!