I want to thank my new friend, Tim Walker, for his excellent Austinite advice and for clueing me in to LinkedIn, which seems like a pretty excellent professional social networking tool. (Dig my profile. Add me as a contact!)
I’d also like to note that I’ve been absolutely blown away by the hospitality and kindness of the Austinites that Meg and I have met so far. Y’all rock.
Extra credit if you can cite the quotation above. “It’s Miller time!”
Few people know this, but Flannery O’Connor, one of my favorite writers, was also a cartoonist. She started out publishing cartoons in her high school and college newspapers, then tried to publish some in the New Yorker as a way to make money so that she could write her fiction. (That didn’t quite work out.) A few folks have noted that cartooning probably had some effect on writing her style: dig her grotesque caricatures and gift for combining the comic and the serious.
Here’s some more background from Georgia College’s Library Special Collections page for their Flannery O’Connor collection:
Flannery O’Connor’s first published works were her cartoons published in the Peabody Palladium, the student newspaper at O’Connor’s high school. According to the Palladium, by the end of 1941, O’Connor had written and illustrated three books about geese: Mistaken Identity, Elmo, and Gertrude, which O’Connor was unable to publish. The same article mentions Mary Flannery O’Connor’s school notebook, which was painted with oils and covered with cellophane. Around this same time O’Connor was also designing handmade lapel pins which were for sale at a local store in Milledgeville.
O’Connor’s career as a cartoonist continued at Georgia State College for Women when her cartoons began appearing as early as October 1942 in the college newspaper, the Colonnade. O’Connor’s cartoons depict humorous views of life on campus including , school performances, social activities, studying, and life on campus with the WAVES.
During her years at GSCW her cartoons appeared in almost every publication the college produced including the alumni magazine, the literary magazine, and on a weekly basis in the newspaper, the Colonnade. In 1944 O’Connor was appointed Art Editor of the college yearbook, the Spectrum, and designed numerous cartoons for the 1944-1945 yearbook, including the inside covers depicting campus scenes. In 1944 O’Connor also submitted cartoons to The New Yorker, but the magazine was not interested in publishing them.
Many of O’Connor’s published cartoons were linoleum-block prints. Linoleum-block printing involves cutting or etching an image on to a linoleum sheet. In O’Connor’s case, she attached the linoleum to a piece of wood, applied a solid color of ink to the linoleum cutting, and printed the image on to a piece of paper. The image was then printed in black and white in the final publication.
O’Connor’s interest in creating cartoons continued as she left home in 1945 to pursue a graduate degree in writing at The University of Iowa. Among O’Connor’s first courses at The University of Iowa were two courses in advanced drawing. She hoped to be able to support her writing by selling cartoons to national publications. O’Connor, however, was unable to sell any of her cartoons, at which time she began devoting all of her energy to writing.
“I don’t enjoy looking at these old pictures either, but it doesn’t hurt my reputation for people to think I’m a lover of fine arts.”
A little bit more in depth, from Melissa Simpson’s Flannery O’Connor:
Her cartoons, which she did with a more conventional charcoal or ink and paper technique, instead of linocut, appeared in nearly every [Colonnade] issue while she was a student, beginning in October 1942, and were popular with students. They also frequently satirized the Women Accepted for Voluntary Service (WAVES), who were stationed at GSCW when the U.S. Navy designated the campus as a site for clerical training, for their nonconformity and their disruption of the male-female ratios in Milledgeville. O’Connor was also often critical of students and faculty for their apathy and of the educational establishment in general for its promulgation of weak-mindedness. O’Connor did not reserve her critical eye for everyone but herself, however. In several of her cartoons, she pokes fun at herself, as in the one which portrays a social situation in which everyone is dancing except for a “bespectacled wall flower who grins behind her hand and asserts that she can always pursue a Ph.D.”
Aspects of O’Connor’s personality and interests that find their way into her later writings are also evident in her early visual work. For example, her signature on the Colonnade cartoons consists of her initials, MFOC, formed into the shape of a bird, a childhood interest that she kept throughout her life. Like her fiction, her cartoons demonstrate her ability to illuminate the absurdities of social convention or of simple everyday life with a combination of seriousness and humor. While many of the instructors and administrators at GSCW appear to have looked at her cartooning with some disdain, O’Connor held a different opinion of the artistic medium. Even though she came from the area’s “aristocracy,” she despised pretentiousness and saw cartooning as just as valid as writing, charcoal sketching, or oil painting….Although several of her contemporaries expected her to find fame through her visual art, that focus eventually shifted to a near total focus on her written art; however, Robert Fitzgerald has noted that she admired the work of New Yorker cartoonist George Price a great deal, and of all the books in her personal library, only one is about art: a book on French artist Honore Daumier whose work helped shape the work of many cartoonists.
Jean W. Cash’s Flannery O’Connor: A Life goes into even more detail about her college days:
During her three years at GSCW O’Connor produced a linoleum block cartoon for each issue of the Colonnade….[asked] to describe how she “went about her work”…O’Connor explained that “first–she caught her ‘rabbit.’ In this case…the ‘rabbit’ was a good idea, which must tie up with some current event of a recent happening on campus…”
Unfortunately, the two images above are the only ones I could find on the net…if anybody has other links, I’d love to see them.
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.
Well, we tried to enjoy Free Comic Book day, and struck out miserably. More than anything, I just wanted to get my hands on Drawn + Quarterly’s offering, Lynda Barry’s Activity Book, and of course, it was nowhere to be found in the Cleveland city limits. Neither was First Second’s offering by Eddie Campbell. (Even Mr. Campbell’s own local comic shop didn’t get it. “Once again the world of comics has reduced me to a disappointed and despondent state,” he says.) I did, however, manage to pick up the Unseen Peanuts by Fantagraphics, which is great. I saw Johnny Ryan’s Comic book Holocaust, but when I went to pick it up, some crazy-looking hick in jean shorts spat, “That’s my pile!”
Here’s Douglas Wolk, to rub it in:
Activity Book (Drawn & Quarterly)
Lynda Barry, the cartoonist behind “Ernie Pook’s Comeek,” teaches an unusual sort of writing workshop. This excerpt from a forthcoming book is basically her introductory lesson, and it’s a joy in its own right, deliciously drawn (with fragments of collage worked into each page), insightful and bubbling with delight in the process of artistic creation. A+
There’s hope yet, though: order something from Drawn + Quarterly this month, and you get it with your order! Also, in addition to the pages I’ve already posted and the one above, there’s this PDF excerpt from the D+Q site.
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:
What we are NOT excited about:
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!
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