Search Results for: log book

CARTOONING WITH PROFESSOR BRUNETTI

Sunday, May 6, 2007

Ivan Brunetti recently visited the Center For Cartoon Studies, and one of the students blogged about some of his drawing exercises, which led me to start poking around the net looking for more Brunetti teaching materials…

Over at teachingcomics.org, Brunetti has posted a complete syllabus from his cartooning course at Columbia College and an in-class exercise, “Cartoon Characters Doodled from Memory.”

Brunetti is working on a full-length how-to booklet, Cartooning, which will be included with an upcoming issue of Comic Art Magazine. He’s been sharing excerpts from it with the Daily Cross Hatch blog in a feature called “Cartooning 101 with Prof. Brunetti.” [part one] [part two] [part three]

I highly recommend Brunetti’s An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories, and I’m looking forward to his new collection, Misery Loves Comedy.

THE SMALLER THE TRIANGLE, THE HAPPIER THE HUMAN

Friday, May 4, 2007

I don’t know if I’ve made this clear in other posts, but Meg and I are absolutely, positively, without-a-doubt moving to Austin, Texas around the beginning of August. Meg will be attending the University of Texas to get her Master of Science in Sustainable Design, and I will be working full-time (yikes!) somewhere to support us.

What we are excited about:

warm (hot) weather
the unbelievable music/arts scene
the abnormally large number of dachschund rescues in the area
tacos ‘n’ BBQ
cowboy boots

What we are NOT excited about:

the cheese factor of living in a city that shares my first name
getting a new job
moving
finding an apartment

As our move approaches, I’ve been thinking more an more about quality of life — how easy we have it here in Cleveland, and how we might make it even better in Texas. For us, anxiety is usually only the product of Unknown Factors, and our Unknown Factors are big ones: Where To Live and Where to Work.

There was a New Yorker article on commuting a week or so ago (it coincidentally had a cool illustration of Glenn Ganges in traffic by Kevin Huizenga) that had a very practical way of looking at the Where To Live, Where To Work question:

Putnam likes to imagine that there is a triangle, its points comprising where you sleep, where you work, and where you shop. In a canonical English village, or in a university town, the sides of that triangle are very short: a five-minute walk from one point to the next. In many American cities, you can spend an hour or two travelling each side. “You live in Pasadena, work in North Hollywood, shop in the Valley,” Putnam said. “Where is your community?” The smaller the triangle, the happier the human, as long as there is social interaction to be had. In that kind of life, you have a small refrigerator, because you can get to the store quickly and often. By this logic, the bigger the refrigerator, the lonelier the soul.

Our triangle here in Cleveland is pretty small: we can’t walk to work, but we can and do walk to the grocery store, to the Chipotle, to the book store. I’m hoping we can find a similar situation in Austin.

As for the job search, I have this Bruce Eric Kaplan cartoon posted to the fridge:

If you are an employer — or if you know of an employer — in Austin who is looking for a writer/designer with plenty o’ computer, web design, and customer service experience…please contact me!

KEVIN HUIZENGA ON DIAGRAMMING

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

There was this job I had where I was working at a place called XPLANE, which was an illustration company that did these visual explanation things, and a lot of times that amounted to these diagrammatic/comics illustrations. That really got me interested in diagrams. And after thinking for a while about diagrams, the stories that I did while I worked there have a lot of diagrams in them, and that carried on through. I started collecting old science textbooks and so forth that had these nice illustrated diagrams. It made me realize that since I was in high school and Understanding Comics came out, I’ve always thought about the comics form. And something I started realizing recently is that we talk about comics being a mixture of image and text, but it really seems to me that a part of the way comics works is in this sort of diagrammatic space. You have a pictorial space, which follows certain pictorial norms, and then you have the text part of comics, which follows the syntactical structure of text and language. What comics does is it has this particular way of diagramming those things together using the panel unit and the word balloon as symbols for certain things. I really realized that that was the part of comics that appealed to me the most. When I look at other cartoonists, I think that they’re real pictorial cartoonists. They’re really interested in the image part of comics. And there are other cartoonists who are really interested in stories and the subjects we associate with literary storytelling like character, plot and so on. I realized the thing that interested me in comics is the way all of that stuff is diagrammed on the page and the way that you read it.”

– Kevin Huizenga, interview

Links:

GEORGE SAUNDERS AT OBERLIN

Thursday, April 19, 2007

We drove out to Oberlin last night to see George Saunders read. I’d been looking forward to this for about a year, and I was praying to the weather gods that there wouldn’t be a giant snowstorm in Syracuse to keep him from getting to Cleveland. (He told us later that he was delayed, and missed a connecting flight, but it was an airline thing, not a weather thing.) Meg and I had a nice dinner at the Feve, and then we walked over to the Science Center. There weren’t any fun chemistry notes on the board in the lecture hall, but there was one of those little models with the wire and balls that you use to describe molecules…

Anyways. Big crowd. Lots of kiddies. First, he read the title story from In Persuasion Nation (here’s an MP3 from another reading). He said he wrote the story after watching a bunch of TV and realizing that a) advertising had began taking credit for everything good that happened in life (“Coke is Christ”) and b) that it had gotten really mean. Then he read from one of my favorites from Pastoralia, “The Barber’s Unhappiness” (here’s a hilarious MP3 of Tony Danza reading it). He said, “After you have daughters, you start realizing how misogynist the world is.” He wrote that story after watching a real old guy from the bus stop ogling women.

The readings were funny and warm and a little ornery. I think Meg laughed more than anybody, because up until that point, she’d only heard me read “Sea Oak” aloud to her in bed.

Then it was Q & A time. Somebody asked something about racial epithets. Somebody asked about motifs. He fielded questions like a patient, pro teacher, using them as springboards to talk about craft.

He joked that all the stories in CivilWarLand were the same: “Guy’s in a bad way. It gets worse.”

He joked about getting out from under the influence of Hemingway: “All my first stories went like this: Nick walked into the Wal-Mart.”

He did a hilarious high-voiced impression of Bill Buford’s method when he was fiction editor of the New Yorker: “Welll…I read a sentence…and then I like it…so I want to read another one!”

He said, “What you know is enough.”

He said good stories are “making language not suck.”

He plugged Don Barthelme’s great essay, “Not-Knowing.”

He described Joyce Carol Oates on her treadmill, thinking through her stories.

He recalled working in MS-DOS at his office, and using shift-F3 to avoid being caught writing on the job.

He outlined an editing method he uses with his students. First, he gives them 500 words of crap. Then they take a few minutes and cut 20 words. Then they take a few more minutes and cut 50 words. They do this a few more times until they have the crap whittled down to 200 words. The excercise is about finding voice in the appropriate “Prose Weight.”

Somebody asked, “What have you learned about the role of solitude in a writer’s life.” He said, “I never had any.”

Lucky me, I got the last question. I asked him, “What have you read lately that’s knocked you out?”

He said Susan Sontag and Joan Didion, two women he had never read before.

Then he started listing his old favorites. “Stuart Dybek?” I nodded. “Oh, you know him. How about Isaac Babel?” I nodded. “Stan Schwartz?” I shook my head. “Oh, no? That’s good, because I just made him up.” The room roared.

There was a long line outside to get books signed. We finally got to shake hands and say hello. “So, I take it you two are writers.” I said I was a cartoonist, and Meg was an architect. “Smart man!” he said. “You’re the guy who’s read everything.” I said, “No, only your reading list.”

Then we talked about Vonnegut. I mentioned the Amazon piece, and he said he’d re-worked the ending and that it would be in a new book soon. (I’m wondering if that new book is The Braindead Megaphone.) He said he just had a piece in the New York Observer proposing a National Vonnegut Day.

Then, we talked a little bit about Lynda Barry and how awesome she was. He said she came and taught at Syracuse and that she’d given him these really interesting articles on how the brain processes lyric poems, short stories, and jokes in the same way, as in, after you hear them, the brain runs back through them and gets its satisfaction from their shapeliness. She also told him about how they’d studied artists and creative people and figured out their patterns of childhood play. Next time I’m working, I’ll have to try to dig those up.

We said our goodbyes, and on the way home, Meg and I talked about how nice a guy he was, and how much we loved going to readings like this.

SAME OLD JUNKY IDEAS

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

I’ve been seriously slacking on the book, spending most of my Work time reading (today it was Vonnegut’s GOD BLESS YOU MR. ROSEWATER and a great article on commuting in the New Yorker with a great spot illustration by Kevin Huizenga) or messing around with the sumi-e brush. Yesterday I just entered random junk into Flickr and drew whoever looked interesting (except for the third drawing — that’s from a picture of my dad and my brother Nick).

I really love working with ink and brush — I can be fast and loose, and everything just kind of flows out. Working with the woodcut style, on the other hand, is a real pain in the ass, but I like the results a lot better.

Best of all, though, is free-associating with a regular old gel-ink pen:

(Meg is mortified that I would publish a nudie drawing on my blog.)

Nothing beats straight pen-to-sketchbook drawing. Check out these pop-up drawings by Jim Woodring.

I keep thinking about serializing the book as a way to keep up work on it. I was going to write today a bunch about the potential to make a long book out of a weekly strips, but depressingly, I wrote about that last summer. (Almost a year ago, and I’m still stuck on the same idea.) That post has a Vonnegut quote, a George Saunders quote, and a Mark Newgarden comic in it.

Why can’t I write posts like THAT anymore? Yeesh.