Search Results for: log book

A TIME MACHINE STUCK ON REPEAT

Tuesday, July 4, 2006

“Remembering…is mental time travel, a sort of reliving of something that happened in the past.” —Endel Tulving

my grandparents

my grandparents, in the foreground, at a party

* * *

We celebrated my grandmother’s 80th birthday this weekend, and as we drove into Salem, the open fields and tiny road-side diners took me back, as they always do, to a different time.

It’s my belief that our memories are inextricably linked to places, and that pulling up those memories requires travelling a landscape, rendering the world of that memory.

But I also believe that the human face is its own landscape (something Sergio Leone demonstrated in his films), and so, the sudden appearance of a loved one can also trigger a world of memories. It’s something I’m exploring in the new book, but experienced yesterday firsthand, with all my siblings in one place for the first time in years.

Not only did my old memories come back to me, new memories came back as well. Moments flickered on the edges of my sight that never happened. A life that was never lived. It was something like the opposite of deja vu: what I was seeing in front of me triggered memories that had never existed.

I first encountered this phenomenon in a similar situation: a few years ago my dad and I spent a week in Florida with my brother Nick. It was the most time we’d ever spent together, and as the week went on, like yesterday, I suddenly became aware of a life that could’ve been: a life where we all sat on a back porch after dinner, telling jokes and smoking cigars or something. Were these images uncovering this desire I’ve always had to be closer to my brothers? Or was the desire uncovering these images—this hidden world inside my head that never happened?

* * *

rough sketches of my great-grandfather Sponseller, done from slides

* * *

Chris Ware says of his drawing style:

I try to use the rules of typography to govern the way that I “draw,” which keeps me at a sensible distance from the story as well as being a visual analog to the way we remember and conceptualize the world….I see the black outlines of cartoons as visual approximations of the way we remember general ideas, and I try to use naturalistic color underneath them to simultaneously suggest a perceptual experience, which I think is more or less the way we actually experience the world as adults; we don’t really “see” anymore after a certain age, we spend our time naming and categorizing and identifying and figuring how everything all fits together.

Researchers suggest that we don’t experience déjà vu until the ages of 8 or 9, that up until that point, we simply don’t have the brain development to describe or experience it. But what if, up until that time, we are simply seeing the world for what it is? What if we have no coding or simplifying system or access to a back catalog of images to make the experience possible? As we become older and older, déjà vu experiences become increasingly more common, and especially when we are tired of stressed. When we’re not seeing.

In this article I was reading in the NYTimes yesterday, “Déjà Vu, Again and Again”, there were people who insisted that everything they were experiencing had already happened. Some wires in their brains went screwy, some circuits got crossed, and they stopped seeing new things. Everything had been done. And so they did wacky things like “the woman who turned in her library card because she felt she’d read everything on the shelves.”

My aunt found a bunch of shoeboxes full of beautiful old color slides, so she got a projector, and after the party we all sat in Grandma’s darkened living room, and images of our ancestors flashed on the wall. My dad pointed to faces with a yardstick and told all the stories he knew.

And as the slides passed, looking at these vivid projected colors, I felt the exact opposite of those old folks with the screwy wiring. I felt like nothing had been done. Everything was new. My youth was pulsing, and there were a million lives left to live. A million unknown memories waiting to be visited.

gun to her back

UNDER THE TREE

Wednesday, June 28, 2006

a new panel from A Terrible Calamity At Sea!

* * *

“I’ve always been interested in the problem of depicting sound in comics. I try to come up with a kind of expressionistic pattern or decorative line to represent the music, something that will spark the imagination of the reader. I was inspired years ago by a wonderful cartoon by Saul Steinberg that showed in graphic form the sounds emerging from different instruments. He drew the different sounds as solid, three-dimensional matter, which made so much sense to me as a strategy to draw sound.”

– Megan Kelso, interview with PW

* * *

“Serializing is an interesting problem….How and where to do it? In the old comics format? Online? Grouped in magazines? The serial offers another kind of freedom, and the added value for authors of ongoing contact with their readers. Creators don’t have to toil for a couple years on a project before it gets received. In the highly interactive age of the text message, the Weblog and Wikipedia, that seems a useful agency.”

– Mark Siegel, Editorial Director, First Second Books, in a PW roundtable

* * *

“I actually love drawing what my peers dismissively call ‘backgrounds’ but what I like to call environments. Just sidewalks and cityscapes and skies. Fields of grass and everything. Or ‘the rest the world’ is another way I like to refer to it. Because one of the problems with a lot of comics art today is that many comics artists learn how to draw people and they just stop there. And they become what Will Eisner called ‘slaves to the close-up.’ They try to close in on the characters as much as possible because they know if they keep their camera angles tight they can keep their backgrounds down to a few lines.”

– Scott McCloud, interview. Other interviews: here and here.

IT’S JUST A SERIES OF GAG STRIPS WRITTEN IN A SECRET CODE

Saturday, June 24, 2006

“To construct a picture-story does not mean you must set yourself up as a master craftsman, to draw out every potential from your material —often down to the dregs! It does not mean you just devise caricatures with a pencil naturally frivolous. Nor is it simply to dramatize a proverb or illustrate a pun. You must actually invent some kind of play, where the parts are arranged by plan and form a satisfactory whole. You do not merely pen a joke or put a refrain in couplets. You make a book: good or bad, sober or silly, crazy or sound in sense.”

—Rudolph Töpffer, Essay on Physiognomy, 1845

* * *

Anything new: you wonder what to call it. I’m calling mine a graphic novel for the marketers. But what it really is is a Cartoon Novel. Or a novel-in-cartoons. Or just a book.

Kurt Vonnegut said he wrote Cat’s Cradle as if each chapter were a joke. Nathaniel West said he originally pictured Miss Lonelyhearts as a novel in comic strips.

I’m trying to write mine as if each page is a gag strip. Only the gags build into a story. And lots of them aren’t funny at all.

Peter Orner’s excellent new book is kind of like that. Each part is a little episode. And the episodes build into something big.

Whatever it is, it’s a book. This, I think, is a revelation.

* * *

– James Kochalka, quoted in Dylan Horrocks’ “The Perfect Planet: Comics, Games, and World-Building.”

* * *

George Saunders says that as a young boy, he felt the language in Esther Forbes’ Johnny Tremain was a code he could break, “a code that turned out to be more accurate and expressive than the one we all use to slog through normal life.” And breaking this code suggested to him that he might be able to come up with his own code, “a premonition that my complicated feelings about life could be subjugated to that quest, which has turned out to be true.”

People talk about voice and style, and I have no clue what they’re talking about. “Find your voice!” they say.

Screw that. I’m working on my secret code.

USING POWERPOINT FOR GOOD AND NOT FOR EVIL

Tuesday, June 20, 2006

“Imagine a widely used and expensive prescription drug that promised to make us beautiful but didn’t. Instead the drug had frequent, serious side effects: It induced stupidity, turned everyone into bores, wasted time, and degraded the quality and credibility of communication. These side effects would rightly lead to a worldwide product recall.”

—Edward Tufte, “Powerpoint Is Evil.”

* * *

Nothing makes you want to off yourself like a chilly conference room and a dreadful Powerpoint presentation. Unfortunately, when I was in high school, nothing secured an easy A like a Powerpoint full of chartjunk. Tufte, again:

Particularly disturbing is the adoption of the PowerPoint cognitive style in our schools. Rather than learning to write a report using sentences, children are being taught how to formulate client pitches and infomercials. Elementary school PowerPoint exercises (as seen in teacher guides and in student work posted on the Internet) typically consist of 10 to 20 words and a piece of clip art on each slide in a presentation of three to six slides -a total of perhaps 80 words (15 seconds of silent reading) for a week of work. Students would be better off if the schools simply closed down on those days and everyone went to the Exploratorium or wrote an illustrated essay* explaining something.

In college, I smartened up, and realized that just because a Powerpoint was required, didn’t mean it needed to be bad. I began creating Powerpoints of pure images–no text at all. For my Summer Scholars project, I used scans from my rough drafts and sketchbooks as background while I spoke, and for my senior project fiction reading, I Powerpointed illustrations up on the screen while I read the story.

What I discovered, by my own observations, and then by reading Tufte’s devastating pamphlet, THE COGNITIVE STYLE OF POWERPOINT, was that certain information — statistics or charts or logical arguments or even prose stories — is all but ruined by the low-resolution, low-information output Powerpoint slide format, while visual images thrive (David Byrne took advantage of this in his book of Powerpoint art.)

Add to that, I’ve always wondered how you could do a cool author reading for a graphic novel. Turns out the answer is powerpoint. First, I saw the LOST BUILDINGS DVD project that Chris Ware and Ira Glass did for NPR. Ira read the story, while Ware’s images were projected on a giant screen. (See a preview.) Then I found out that for her readings, Alison Bechdel projects the comic panels from FUN HOME in Powerpoint, while reading aloud from the narration.

Comics + Powerpoint = Good?

*Bonus: Here’s Tufte on cartooning.

MAKING COMICS (ON MY BIRTHDAY)*

Friday, June 16, 2006

excerpt from MAKING COMICS

After seeing the preview, I’m really excited for Scott McCloud’s MAKING COMICS, the third book in his UNDERSTANDING COMICS and REINVENTING COMICS trilogy.

Along with Dylan Horrocks’ essay on world-building, I count UNDERSTANDING COMICS as one of the biggest influences on the way I now think about not only comics, but storytelling in general.

Here’s what McCloud has to say about his new book:

“The book starts with a radical new look at the process of comics. I just blow past the layout, penciling, inking thing (which I really think only applies some of the time nowadays, when we have all these new tools).”

To me, technique is the last thing to worry about when starting to think about making comics. Maybe that’s because I never learned how to draw comics “the Marvel Way,” with brush and ink, and like McCloud, I use a computer and Wacom drawing tablet to make mine.

It sounds like McCloud is structuring the book around the choices (shown above) that have to be made during the creative process. What I’ll be interested in is whether he assigns a particular chronological order to these choices: whether, say, choice of moment must always come before choice of flow. (For me, sometimes choice of flow comes before everything.)

Regardless, I think it’s going to be a great book, and I’m bummed out that we have to wait until September to read it. Hopefully he’ll hit NEO as part of his 50-state tour.

* 23 years on the planet. Not to be confused with Bloomsday. Maybe one of these days I’ll spend it in Dublin…