For my buddy Brandon, who starts teaching his first creative writing class today, an excerpt of an old NYTimes article from 1971:
The class began in a surprising way. Vonnegut remarked that last time they had been talking about form, and he walked to the blackboard and drew there a question mark, an exclamation point and a period. He said these bits of punctuation were the outline of a three-act story.
On inspiration:
[M]yths, fairy-tales and religious stories like the Bible…They are endlessly interpretable and adaptable. A bottomless source. They’re the template for pretty much all storytelling in the Western world. Whether by design or by stumbling onto them I think there is much to be gained from brushing up against them, borrowing, stealing, rewriting and quoting from them, whether subtly…or overtly…”
On not-knowing:
…when making comics is working, it really doesn’t feel like you are the one telling the story, it feels like the story already exists and you are just doing your best to get it down on paper. It’s like a very carefully attentive manufacturing process. So for the story to change would be like for someone who assembles calculators to start changing the calculators. They probably wouldn’t work.”
On art and religion:
All art comes from religion. From trying to understand and contend with the world.”
On the artist disguising himself in his work:
I’m happy to be back to my usual practice of heavily disguising my life in the stories I tell. Generally speaking, it’s still me in my other work, it’s just that I’m disguised as a bunch of little birds.”
I keep thinking about Seth’s equation of poetry + graphic design = comics, and it keeps making more and more sense to me. In his recent Inkstuds interview, David Heatley talked a little bit about how getting into graphic design influenced his comics work:
Robin McConnell: You’re also a graphic designer, but you utilize your cartooning within your graphic design work.
David Heatley: I guess I’d say I’m mostly an illustrator…I’ve done graphic design work as my job for 7 or 8 years, but it’s always been sort of a day job. What I’ve learned their I’ve actually put more into my comics, rather than the other way around. I’ve learned what good clean design looks like, about the hierarchy of information, using symbols, typography…all those kinds of things I’ve put over into my comics toolbox….While in art school I worked in my first design shop, and probably learned as much there as I did in school. At the time I hated computers, I hated ads, I thought everything was corporate BS and I didn’t want anything to do with it., My boss really spun my head around. He showed me old logos from the fifties, and I would copy those in my sketchbook. He showed me the constructivist posters, and he opened this whole world of design up to me that I never really knew about. Most of the time I find myself in bookstores gravitating to the design section and graphic arts more than fine arts, so [working in that design shop] was pretty seminal.
Chris Ware’s Introduction to The Best American Comics 2007
…lately I find myself frequently torn between whether I’m really an artist or a writer. I was trained and educated as the former, encouraged into the world of paint-stained pants and a white-walled studio where wild, messy experiments precipitate the incubation of other visual ideas— though I’m just as happy to sit at a desk in clean trousers with a sharp pencil and work on a single story for four or five days in a quiet and deliberate manner. In short, I’m coming to believe that a cartoonist, unlike the general cliché, is almost—bear with me now—a sort of new species of creator, one who can lean just as easily toward a poetic, painterly, or writerly inclination, but one who thinks and expresses him- or herself primarily in pictures.
A lengthy interview with Anders Nilsen:
When I set out with a clear idea of what I want to do, it becomes super simplistic and neither illuminating to me nor the readers, so that doesn’t work. It sort of just happens by accident, really. I think it’s because I’m interested in these things, so when I draw the first panel, for me to draw the second panel it will have to have dealt with something. The biggest issue is how to get out of your own way, how to explore issues without forcing it, without forcing yourself to do it. If you do ten pages of comics that are just not interesting, you’ve just got to throw it away.
An old Russian Proverb on a Post-it i have above my desk at work.
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