Todd McFarlane

Water takes four of his ten planets, with two apiece in fire, earth and air, and four of the ten are fixed. Four planets sit near a sign boundary: Mercury on the last degree and a half of Aquarius, Venus on the last degree and a quarter of Aries, Saturn on the last two and a half degrees of Capricorn, and Jupiter fifteen arcminutes into Aquarius. The record is short: Spawn, and a founder of Image Comics.

At noon the Sun and the Moon sit five arcminutes apart in Pisces, which would make this a new moon birth and would be the most interesting fact in the chart. It cannot be used. Without a birth time the Moon could be anywhere across thirteen degrees of that day, so a conjunction measured at five arcminutes is not established at all, and both contacts running to the Moon go out with it, including the tightest in the chart at three hundredths of a degree. This is as clear a case as the set has of an unknown hour costing far more than a sign. The loss matters more than usual here, because for a record as short as McFarlane's the chart was going to be the longer half of this entry.

What survives is the Sun at an awkward angle to Neptune at six hundredths of a degree, which is the self obscured: confusion about direction, a tendency to idealise people who do not deserve it, and vitality that comes and goes for no clear reason. For an artist the record gives McFarlane one character and one company founded, that reading is about the person rather than about the work, and there is nothing in six words to test it with. Mercury sits sixty degrees from Venus at fourteen hundredths of a degree, charm in communication.

Mars sits in mild friction with Uranus at thirteen hundredths of a degree, action without warning: recklessness, abrupt breaks, and a temper that arrives with no build-up at all. In a record whose second fact is founding a company, abrupt breaks is the contact a reader will connect to it, and founding a business is a deliberate act rather than a temper. Mercury also sits in quiet contact with Saturn at just over a degree, structured thinking without strain. Uranus, Neptune and Pluto were the three retrograde planets. Jupiter came back to its Aquarius birth degree on 20 December 2020, at fifty nine, and four laps precede it.