An (abandoned) graphic novel-in-progress:
COPYING
“I think copying someone’s work is the fastest way to learn certain things about drawing and line. It’s funny how there is such a taboo against it. I learned everything from just copying other people’s work.”
– Lynda Barry
This is my copy of some of the panels from a 1930s Gasoline Alley strip that Frank King drew in the style of a woodcut. I superimposed my own characters. Supposedly, Chris Ware loved this particular strip so much that he tore the page out of the Smithsonian Collection Of Newspaper Comics book and had it mounted on the wall of his studio.
Mine’s a library copy, so I can’t go that far.
SKULKING AROUND BARNES AND NOBLE
I really need to get an office.
Right now, our living room doubles as my workspace, and that’s bad, because when I step into the room in the morning, I don’t know whether to write, or take a nap on the couch.
It’s better today, because the radio’s on, and there’s actually SUNLIGHT coming in the front window.
Yesterday I got so stir-crazy I went to Barnes and Noble with my sketchbook to work. I ended up doing little work, and a lot of reading.
I spent the majority of the time reading Ivan Brunetti‘s fantastic new anthology, GRAPHIC FICTION, CARTOONS, & TRUE STORIES. (Here is the table of contents.) If you’re a newcomer to comics, this is probably the new place to start. It’s pretty amazing. I especially like the 20-page section dedicated to Peanuts, which included Art Spiegelman’s New Yorker tribute piece, “Abstract Thought Is A Warm Puppy” and an essay by Schulz himself, “Developing A Comic Strip,” which Brunetti uses in all his classes. (WMFU had an interview with him about the book a few days ago, and here’s another with Mr. Skin.)
Yale University Press has a really outstanding line of comics-related books on the market right now. In The Studio: Visits With Contemporary Cartoonists is probably the most unique: it features monologues and skethbook work by folks like Crumb, Panter, and Brunetti, but it also includes personal artifacts from each cartoonists’ stash: old magazines and comics, toys, posters, etc. The best part is Crumb talking about his current project: he’s illustrating every story from Genesis, using three different translations, and “telling it straight.” I can’t wait to see this. It’s going to be 180 pages long, and supposedly, he’s 60 or so pages into it.
But the winner yesterday was the new “graphic” issue of TIN HOUSE. It has a ten page or so excerpt from Lynda Barry’s WHAT IT IS, a new collage/book/thingie about images in progress, and an interview with her, too, not to mention stuff from Stuart Dybek, Marjane Satrapi, and a childhood comic by Dan Chaon.
I love the fact that Lynda sells her stuff over Ebay. Even her “throwaway” sketchbook pages blow my mind:
Here’s a student summary of one of her workshops about “the image” and writing.
WE ARE LADIES AND GENTLEMEN SERVING LADIES AND GENTLEMEN
This sketchbook page is what happens when you put me in customer service training for 4 1/2 hours.
The title of this post is the motto of the Ritz-Cartlon.
Here is my own definition of customer service: tricking people into thinking they’re #1.
Here is the secret to life: knowing that every person is the center of his or her own universe and using that knowledge to manipulate them.
Here’s a quote from Don Barthelme:
“The distinction between children and adults, while probably useful for some purposes, is at bottom a specious one, I feel. There are only individual egos, crazy for love.“
THE GHOST OUTLINE OF A FACE
Really awesome article this morning in the NY Times about artist William Utermohlen, who after being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease, began drawing/painting self-portraits. The self-portraits, viewed in chronological order, reveal the gradual deterioration of his mind and spirit.
Because Alzheimer affects the “right parietal lobe,” it gets harder and harder to visualize an image and be able to draw it. Art by Alzheimer’s patients becomes “more abstract, the images are blurrier and vague, more surrealistic” and “sometimes there’s use of beautiful, subtle color.”
Looking at these two pieces shoots cold lightning down my spine. It’s so hard to admit to yourself that something you think you do with your heart and soul is really just a bunch of wires connecting your hand to your brain. Maybe it’s for that reason that I find Alzheimer’s to be the most terrifying disease out there.
We’re machines, and machines break down.
I’m also wondering if this Chris Ware quote has any significance:
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.
And I hate to quote Franzen, but he what about this:
Scott McCloud, in his cartoon treatise “Understanding Comics,” argues that the image you have of yourself when you’re conversing is very different from your image of the person you’re conversing with. Your interlocutor may produce universal smiles and universal frowns, and they may help you to identify with him emotionally, but he also has a particular nose and particular skin and particular hair that continually remind you that he’s an Other. The image you have of your own face, by contrast, is highly cartoonish. When you feel yourself smile, you imagine a cartoon of smiling, not the complete skin-and-nose-and-hair package.
Even towards the end of his abilities, Utermohlen could still make a circle, two dots, and a horizontal line.
Even if it was the face of a ghost, it was still a face.
- ← Newer posts
- 1
- …
- 557
- 558
- 559
- 560
- 561
- …
- 618
- Older posts→