Notes on writing and drawing

R. CRUMB ON COLLECTING AND DAVID KUNZLE’S THE EARLY COMIC STRIP

Friday, March 2, 2007

R. Crumb talks about David Kunzle’s The Early Comic Strip in Todd Hignite’s excellent In The Studio: Visits With Contemporary Cartoonists:

My awareness of this whole history was something that happened gradually, since that stuff is not available. Where are you going to see it? You’d have to go to some library that specializes in that and ask to look at it. It’s not reprinted anywhere, so it’s not known. So when I got that big book by Kunzle, it was a total surprise, how much material there was, and I’m sure that’s still just a drop in the bucket, you know, what survived, what he could get his hands on, and what he could actually show — I’m sure he could have done twice as much. So much of them are so crude, those little, postage stamp-sized panels of, like, husband-and-wife squabbles done in Russia or Germany or Czechoslovakia. Incredible stuff, but totally obscure. If you try to inform people in the art world of this history, they know nothing about it. A complete underground, unknown, history of popular art that the general art world knows nothing about. When Alfred Fischer, the curator of my show in Germany [at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne] came, I showed him this book and some other things and he was just speechless; it was all completely new to him. The crude, lowest level of popular arts.

What I love about Hignite’s book is that it focuses most of its attention on the cartoonists’ influences, personal libraries, and thoughts about the history of the form. As Hignite comments, “To varying degrees, these artists are collectors themselves, so the process of creating is interwined with other art: the working studio is also library archive, and museum.” Later in his interview, Crumb goes on to lament the difference between this kind of collecting versus “academic” interests:

It’s just that academia’s interest in this stuff is so lame….There’s a big difference between a collector-archivist and people in academia….In academia they get locked into this thing of having to narrow it down and narrow it down to this very particular specialty that they focus on, and they’re very proprietary about it, so that it scares them to actually scan the culture at large as we do and just pick out, “Oh, this is interesting,” o, “That’s interesting from this whole different area,” and then look into it; that’s a waste of their time. There are probably exceptions, but it gets narrower and narrower as there get to be more academic specialists and specialties. You have to be so specific about “you” things, and if someone else who’s not the expert volunteers some information, then it’s almost a threat.

More and more, my vision of comics as a type of collage — a spattering of pictures, words, influences, events, personal histories, books, whatever…go read the Lethem article, where he says, “In fact, collage…might be called the art form of the twentieth century, never mind the twenty-first.” — synched together in a unity of style, grows and strengthens in my head. Which is why reading — ammassing influence — is such an important part of the gig…

HOW-TO

Friday, February 23, 2007

This comic is by Ellen Forney. It’s part of her excellent collection, I Love Led Zeppelin, which you should read.

At the moment I’m really interested in comics’ potential for integrating fictional and non-fictional elements into one narrative. For example, if you were writing a short story about a hand surgeon, it’s hard to imagine reading paragraphs about the intricacies and fine points of reattaching digits without falling asleep. But with comics, it seems totally reasonable that something like the above might be part of a larger story, seemlessly integrated, and really engaging. (I should note that this is a standalone page, and NOT part of a larger narrative. But if COULD be.)

More on this later, maybe. In the meantime, check out Ellen’s blog.

KUNZLE’S HISTORY OF THE COMIC STRIP, VOLS. 1 & 2

Friday, February 9, 2007

“Kunzle’s book…has gone virtually unnoticed by the comics community but is an enormously important work, covering nearly 400 years of forgotten European comics. Check it out!”

—Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics

Unfortunately, the two volumes of David Kunzle’s mammoth study are long out of print, and the used copies are selling on Amazon for hundreds of dollars. I e-mailed Professor Kunzle (he’s part of the Art History Department at UCLA) to see if there was any chance of seeing it back in print. He said no, but that he has two books on Rodolphe Topffer, a facsimile of his eight comic strips, and a monograph, coming out from University Press of Mississippi in April.

If you’re a comics geek and you’re ready to go back further than Little Nemo and The Yellow Kid, it’s really worth it to track down copies of these books. I got mine through interlibrary loan. Here are links to find the books in a library near you:

The History of the Comic Strip, Vol. I: Picture Stories and Narrative Strips in the European Broadsheet from c.1450 to 1825

The History of the Comic Strip, Vol. II: The Nineteenth Century

MCLUHAN ON WOODCUTS

Monday, February 5, 2007

My favorite chapter so far in Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media is called “The Print: How to Dig It.” Not sure how legal it is, but you can read the chapter online, as well as the whole book. Here are some choice excerpts which really hit me:

It is relevant to consider that the old prints and woodcuts, like the modern comic strip and comic book, provide very little data about any particular moment in time, or aspect in space, of an object. The viewer, or reader, is compelled to participate in completing and interpreting the few hints provided by the bounding lines.

AND:

In the low definition world of the medieval woodcut, each object created its own space, and there was no rational connected space into which it must fit. As the retinal impression is intensified, objects cease to cohere in a space of their own making, and, instead, become “contained” in a uniform, continuous, and “rational” space. Relativity theory in 1905 announced the dissolution of uniform Newtonian space as an illusion or fiction, however useful. Einstein pronounced the doom of continuous or “rational” space, and the way was made clear for Picasso and the Marx brothers and MAD.

I’m plowing through this book the way I plowed through Ulysses back in the day: full steam ahead, take what you can where you can.

LETTERS

Friday, February 2, 2007

Ever think about how weird it is that we use the phrase “keep in touch” when “keeping in touch” never really means touching?

When I spent six months in England without Meg, we spent a lot of time “keeping in touch.” Lots of e-mail and instant messenger. But the best thing we did was write letters. Real letters, handwritten, with ink and fancy stationary. Envelopes and stamps and waiting. Waiting was what the whole period was about. Waiting.

Nobody waits anymore. It’s the electric age. It can be some comfort, I suppose, not having to wait for word from your loved one, but it takes a lot of the poetry out of it, for sure.

Those letters we wrote to each other would make you bawl. But think back: any letter written to you can make you bawl. Because every letter sent is a little organic piece of the person who wrote it. You can pick up the paper and smell the person. Maybe they smudged the ink and you can see a fingerprint.

And the greatest part is that you can keep them around. You can hang them on your wall, or put them under your pillow. You can hold them in your fingers. Touch them.

We have our old letters in a box in the closet. Many of them have little doodles of the parks in which we wrote them. Many of them became quite elaborate in design. With each one, we would try to trump the other, to see just how beautiful we could make them.

I have typed maybe one or two beautiful e-mails in my life. But every letter I took the time to write was beautiful.

So the other day I was playing with my watercolors and decided to write a letter in comics/watercolor. It was beautiful, spontaneous, and straightforward. I was so pleased with myself that I wanted to hang it on the wall.

But I didn’t. I scanned it in Photoshop (better than carbon copy paper), put it in an envelope, and sent it into the world.