PRINT OUT AND PRACTICE YOUR OWN:
TEACH YOURSELF TO DRAW
Scribbling in the notebook lately has felt a lot like curling up on Grandma’s kitchen floor with butcher paper and crayons: endless possibilities with limited tools. But, I’m schooling myself. Check out this treasure trove of comics syllabi and drawing lessons, including a great step-by-step how-to by Tom Hart of Hutch Owens fame. I’ve also been printing a few lessons out from The Scientific Artist, a great drawing and design blog run by a guy named Paul Rivoche.
Of course, no education is complete without the work of other artists. Somebody whose work lit a fire under my pants recently: R. Kikuo Johnson. NIGHT FISHER, his new graphic novel, is coming out from Fantagraphics Books and it looks amazing (excerpt above). And the Drawn!, Fantagraphics, and Scott McCloud blogs are all great for checking out new artists, too.
SOME NOTES ON NATHANIEL WEST
I’ve been splitting my reading between Chris Ware’s new one, and the Novels and Other Writings of Nathaniel West, starting with the short novel Miss Lonelyhearts. The connection? In his “Some Notes on Miss L.,” West says Miss Lonelyhearts started as “A novel in the form of a comic strip.”
The chapters to be squares in which many things happen through one action. The speeches contained in the conventional balloons. I abandoned this idea, but retained some of the comic strip technique: Each chapter instead of going forward in time, also goes backward, forward, up and down in space like a picture. Violent images are used to illustrate commonplace events. Violent acts are left almost bald.
In “Some Notes on Violence,” West hints at the relationship between violence and comedy:
In America violence is idiomatic. Read our newspapers. To make the front page a murderer has to use his imagination, he also has to use a particularly hideous instrument. Take this morning’s paper: FATHER CUTS SON’S THROAT IN BASEBALL ARGUMENT. It appears on an inside page. To make the first page, he should have killed three sons with a baseball bat instead of a knife. Only liberality and symmetry could have made this daily occurence interesting.
Not to mention, the number of 3 is funny. The “liberality” and “symmetry” of violence reminds me of Henri Bergson’s essay, “On Laughter,” in which he analyzes two clowns on stage beating the hell out of each other with baseball bats. If one clown just comes out and clobbers the other, that’s not so funny, that’s cold and violent. We feel for the clobbered clown. However, if the two clowns chase each other around the stage, trading blow for blow without death, there is a symmetry and repetition to the routine, and the clowns become an item of comedy. As Bergson says, “we laugh every time a person gives us the impression of being a thing.”
All three books, at least, worth a read.
COMICS WITHOUT PICTURES
“I learned so much using words and pictures and captions from some of the most concrete poets, because poetry is all about economy, and it’s about reducing things down, and you’re seeing how much freight you can actually give words. Plus, the great thing about comics which I miss when I’m writing prose, is knowing that I can pretty much guarantee that everybody will read every word. I can pace everything, every caption, every line of dialogue.”—Neil Gaiman on Studio 360
Kenneth Koch was a poet who loved comics. Backwards City Review just reprinted some of his comics in their second issue. I tried desperately to find Koch’s posthumous collection, Art of the Possible: Comics Mainly Without Pictures, in a Cleveland Public Library, and turned up nothing. Then, lo and behold, Google Print has the introduction and a few pages online.
In the introduction, David Lehman writes about Koch,
“letting comics into his literary imagination followed not only from his love of the humorous, the whimsical, and the witty, but from an aesthetic point of view that could be charactreized as defieantly antiacademic.”
Koch saw no reason why Popeye shouldn’t enter the same conversation as T.S. Eliot. In one of Koch’s courses on imaginative writing at Columbia, the assignment was to go out, buy a comic strip, and without reading it, paste white paper over the balloons, and write your own dialogue.
“In 1992, Kenneth decided that not only could he borrow subject matter or adapt a narrative technique from comics but it might be possible to write poetry in a new form based on them.”
Some examples:
Link:
SUBMISSION BLUES
Ah, the glamorous life of an unpublished short story writer:
1 Brother 2070 network laser printer…..$149
1 Wireless router………………………………$80
1 Apple Powerbook…………………………..$2000
1 box 100 ct 9 x 12 clasp envelopes……..$5
1 box 100 ct #10 white envelopes………..$3
1 box 2500 sheets Laser Paper……………$20
1 box 3000 ct return address labels………$20
1 box 1000 ct shipping labels………………..$20
Postage……………………………………………..$1.10/envelope
Total………………………………………………………..$2300+
Average payment upon publication: 4 contributors copies
Mags I sent stories to: Brain, Child, Mid-American Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Backwards City Review, Gettysburg Review, Black Warrior Review, One-Story, Post Road, The Cincinnati Review, and McSweeney’s.
At the Post Office, I got a dreadlocked clerk who looked like he just got done pulling an all-night gig with his reggae band. He weighed and posted my manilla envelopes, and then he asked, “fiction or poetry?” He gave me a smile and I said fiction. “I’m a poetry man, myself.” Then he listed off his publication history for me. When he was done, I thanked him and headed for the door. “Good luck with it,” he said.
We can only hope.