Notes on writing and drawing

LYNDA SIGNS WITH D + Q

Friday, January 12, 2007

In case you haven’t already heard, my heroine and all-around-awesome-gal, Lynda Barry, has signed a publishing deal with Drawn + Quarterly. They’ll not only be putting out her collage/comics work-in-progress book, What It Is, they’ll also be putting out a FIVE VOLUME SET of Ernie Pook’s Comeek!

In the meantime, in case I haven’t already stressed/mentioned it, my favorite place to check up on Lynda on the WWW is her Shop Super Marlys Ebay Store , where she posts little “outtakes” for sale like the piece from ONE! HUNDRED! DEMONS! above, with super-fantastic, revealing commentary like this:

Hey before Lynda figured out exactly how to do the water color work for the One Hundred Demons strips, she messed around a lot! This is hand ground Chinese ink and water color on lightweight drawing paper size 8x10ish, the image size is 6x6ish. And! I called Lynda up and said “Tell me more about this art!” and she says there were a couple of versions of the comic strip Hate which is in 100 Demons and this is a panel from a version that didn’t make it into the book. It features Lynda at her Jr. High School talking to two girls she actually grew up with but now there was Black Power and Lynda had suddenly become “Whitey”. She says about that time “It was BAD time! I wanted to be a Black Panter! Even I hated Whitey back then” I said “Back when? She said “1968, darlin’, a longass time ago.” I said “Do you still hate Whitey?” she said, “Well, I certainly hate White House Whitey and his flunky imps” and then she starts to go on about, you know, Bush, Cheney, and how bad everything is right now so I say OK! I have to go!

I’d actually been wondering about the size of the ONE! HUNDRED! DEMONS! stuff for a while. Search around and you shall receive.

“A HUMUMENT”, BY TOM PHILLIPS

Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Last January, after seeing a couple of my newspaper blackout poems, Winston Smith e-mailed and recommended to me a book called “A Humument” by an artist named Tom Phillips. In the mid-sixties, Phillips took an old Victorian novel by W.H. Mallock called “A Human Document” and started blacking out the pages to make a new book, ” A Humument.” Well, I thought this sounded pretty interesting, but was too lazy to look it up, or even Google it, and pretty soon I’d forgotten all about it.

A year later, Drew Dernavich e-mails me a link to Humument.com, the official site of the book! Little did I know that you can see every page from the book online. (There’s also a new edition you can buy online from Amazon.)

Too cool.

“THE BEST PEOPLE IN THE WORLD ARE INVOLVED IN MAKING THINGS”

Tuesday, January 9, 2007

I was Google Image Searching the I [heart] NY logo, and came across this great 2003 interview between Milton Glaser and Chip Kidd published in The Believer. Hard to believe Glaser never made a penny off the design, which he basically donated to the city in the mid-seventies in hopes of boosting the city’s morale (and cleaning the dog crap off the street).

I found nearly every bit of the interview fascinating, especially his thoughts about developing ideas with sketching versus computers, but the story about his mother and father really hit home:

In my parents I had the perfect combination—a resistant father and an encouraging mother. My mother convinced me I could do anything. And my father said, “Prove it.” He didn’t think I could make a living. Resistance produces muscularity. And it was the perfect combination because I could use my mother’s belief to overcome my father’s resistance. My father was a kind of a metaphor for the world, because if you can’t overcome a father’s resistance you’re never going to be able to overcome the world’s resistance. It’s much better than having completely supportive parents or completely resistant parents.

Best of all? When he was a kid, he wanted to be a cartoonist.

A WRITER WHO DRAWS

Thursday, December 28, 2006

“I like to think of myself as a writer who draws.”
—Saul Steinberg

Next week we’re going to see the Saul Steinberg show at the Pierpont-Morgan Library in New York. I’m really pumped for it. Steinberg (who was also Romanian, like the Kleons) called himself “a writer who draws,” which led the curator of the show to call his drawings “illuminations,” since they combine word and image in much the same way as illuminated manuscripts. The NYTimes covered the show a while back, David Byrne wrote about it in his journal, and Derik Badman just put scans up from the catalog book, along with some comics-related commentary.

If anybody else has tips for stuff to see in New York next week, leave them in the comments, please!

THESE CODED DRAWINGS ARE REALLY MY JOURNALS

Sunday, December 24, 2006

I have a confession to make. I haven’t been Working. I haven’t been Working, and I won’t be Working until sometime next year, when all this wedding craziness ends.

Does this bother me? Not as much as it should.

Actually, things have been quite pleasant. Minus the wedding anxiety dreams. Last night I had a dream that I overslept until five minutes before the ceremony, and my shirt wasn’t ironed, and I tripped over the power cord and severely burned my forearm, but instead of calling 9-11, I called my mom to make sure she stalled everybody until I could get there…

Now, I should be drawing this. I should be making cartoons of this.

But I don’t have a deadline to make. Thank you, baby Jesus.

There is an excellent Washington Post article today about the editorial process of selecting cartoons for the New Yorker and the new book, Rejection Collection: Cartoons You Never Saw and Will Never See In The New Yorker. In case you didn’t already now, even if you get a contract as a New Yorker cartoonist, your rejection rate on a good week is 80 or 90 percent — every week, New Yorker cartoonists send in 10 or more drawings, and at the very best, the editors pick one or two, at the very worst, they reject them all.

It’s tough being a cartoonist.

But there are a few perks. This is from the introduction to Bruce Eric Kaplan’s collection, This Is A Bad Time:

…these drawings are really my journals. I use them to explore whatever I find interesting, confusing, or upsetting on any given day. But here’s the beauty part—these private thoughts are filtered through the prism of moody children and blasé pets, disillusioned middle-aged men and weary matrons, among others. And so I get to work through whatever I am thinking about in a coded way. No one but me will ever know what the real seed of each image and caption was. So I can be as free as I want to say whatever I want, and no one can catch me. It’s great.

A secret code!