Austin Kleon – Page 563

HEROES, ETC.

Friday, September 15, 2006

“I did a strip…once where Charlie Brown was wondering out loud. He was sitting on a bench with Linus. [They were discussing] War and Peace or Beethoven’s Ninth, or something like that. Then he gets up and strikes out. I think he sits down and says something like, ‘And I’ll probably never write War and Peace, either.’

“I always think about things like that. What is of importance? I suppose the most important thing is just to do what you can do best. You have no other choice, do you? You have a certain amount of ability. And do the best with your abilities.”

– Charles Schultz, in a massive interview with Gary Groth, 1997

mini-exercise ripping off Chris Ware from yesterday

* * *

I’m really disappointed that Art Spiegelman is withdrawing his work from the Jewish Museum’s Masters of American Comics exhibit, because it was going to be one of the places Meg and I visited on our honeymoon in NYC. The other bummer is that it’s a split show, so anything in the first half of the 20th century (including, gulp, Schultz, McCay and Herriman) is over at the Newark Museum, and we’re surely not taking the train over there on our limited stay. I guess we’ll have to settle (!!) for Crumb, Panter, and Ware.

Speaking of Ware, he was interviewed about the exihibit and asked, “Who was overlooked?” His response:

Lynda Barry. Her semiautobiographical experiments were pretty much responsible for the maturation comics experienced in the ’90s.

I thought that was pretty awesome of him to say, and come to think of it, I’m just amazed that Lynda isn’t better known than she is. What a genius. Meeting her and becoming exposed to her work (and this sounds overly-dramatic), in a lot of ways, changed my life, or at least my art, because I believe she’s the perfect model of the writer/artist — all her characters arise out of this wonderful world that is uniquely hers…

Anyways, speaking of heroes: George Saunders is coming to Oberlin in April.

For Monday, I’m trying to put together a post about musical notation, Schroeder, and sound effects in comics. Have a good weekend!

“…AND PRETTY SOON SHE’S COMPLAINING ABOUT THE G-DAMNED WASHING MACHINE!”

Wednesday, September 13, 2006

In this comic, Meg is reading The Five Love Languages (I, uh, skewed the text a bit), one of the books our minister is having us read. I was initially really skeptical of our assigned readings, but I’ve tried to keep an open mind, and I’ve found that the majority of the stuff is actually pretty good. (It’s marriage, man — you need all the help you can get!)

The Five Love Languages is pretty good because, like fiction writing, it’s all about getting inside the mind of a character (your partner) and figuring out what he/she wants/needs.

We just watched the last episode of Season Four of The Sopranos, where Tony moves out of the house after separating from Carmela, and I was having fun trying to decide which love language they both speak. (Tony thinks Carmela speaks the “receiving gifts” language, but what she really speaks is the “quality time” language!)

The good advice of all these books? Every marriage runs into the same basic problems — the mistake (most of the time) is in thinking that if you were married to someone else, you wouldn’t have them.

Here’s a story of some armchair psychology along those lines:

My dad, before getting married, went to one of my great uncles who’d been married for a bunch of years.

“You want my advice?” my great uncle said. “Never cheat. Never cheat because you’ll always get caught. You’ll get caught, and then you’ll have to get divorced. And THEN you’ll have to marry the one you were cheating with, and pretty soon, before you know it, SHE’S complaining about the goddamned washing machine!”

KEY TO A MAN’S HEART, PT. 3

Tuesday, September 12, 2006

“A man might go out and paint a beautiful landscape or a beautiful picture of the human figure, but he is copying nature. Men who paint or draw from life — roses, skies, objects of this and that, still life, etc. — are merely copying what they see. They are called artists. The cartoonist must create, he must see in his mind a situation, maybe full of life and comedy, maybe still of dramatic or tragic. He must draw it with all the feeling in him — without models or other aids that artists call to hand.”

– Winsor McCay, “On Being A Cartoonist,” reprinted in Daydreams and Nightmares

I wonder what McCay would’ve said about Google image search?

* * *

I’m getting back into work on Calamity, after a brief, stress-relieving hiatus. Working on “Key” has really made me realize how much I miss working with pen and paper — how essential rough sketches and ink on the fingers is to the whole project of making comics. Working on short, quickly-finished projects while working on a longer, drawn out project seems to be the way to go for me…I still say the best way to work with comics is to write short strips and storylines around the same characters/setting and then later weave them into a lengthier narrative for publication.

* * *

Part of my job at the library is teaching computer classes to (mostly) elderly patrons. Eventually, I want to write a long, lengthy post about this experience, but for now, I’m meditating on my own thoughts and feelings about old folks.

The good part of me wants to reach out to them, listen to their wisdom, and help them navigate the technology-obsessed terrain that is modern life. This part of me wonders why we don’t refer to them as “The Elders,” and seat them at the prime spot in front of the campfire to give advice to the tribe, instead of shuffling them away to nursing homes.

But then there is an ugly part of my being that wants to reject old folks — this is the part that doesn’t buy into the “Greatest Generation” Tom Brokaw crap, that blames the supposedly righteous and untouchable WWII generation for our current problems, that doesn’t respect the “I’ve been here longer than you so I have a right to be cranky” rule, and that wonders why those who can’t take care of themselves don’t say goodbye to their friends and family and walk out into the frozen wilderness.

Anyways, I guess what I’m thinking about is usefulness. People have to have a purpose. A place. An individuality, but also a role within a larger community. How do we accomplish this?

The singularity is near. What are we going to do with all these old people?

KEY TO A MAN’S HEART, PT. 2

Monday, September 11, 2006

“I want my stories to feel like memories in a certain way. The uniform panel size is a way of giving equal “emotional” space to each moment.”

– Sammy Harkham, interview

Yesterday I got really lucky at Half Price, and found a perfect copy of the massive 300+ page Kramer’s Ergot 4 selling for eight bucks! (Check out these really cool scans of the original artwork for David Heatley’s contribution, complete with no-repro blue pencilling.) When I took it up to the cashier, he looked at it and said, “So what is that, man? I had no idea where to shelve that thing.”

What is it about getting great deals that’s so damned satisfying? We’ve got some amazing bargains there over the years (best I think was a near-mint copy of Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psychocandy on LP for 98 cents–found by Meg, of course–she has the eagle eye).

So in between that, Kramer’s 6, and Scott McCloud’s (outstandingly good) Making Comics, I’m on comic candy overload.

If you’re like me, you’ve got a big week coming, but before you write that long To-Do list, check out our man Tufte on “Lists: Theory and Practice.”

IT’S EDUCATIONAL!

Friday, September 8, 2006

This is a couple-of-months-old page from the first draft of Calamity, when I really didn’t know where I was going (as opposed to now — HA!), and there were twin brothers in the story. I like the background a lot, but the layout is pretty boring: a lot of cut-and-paste and stage-like monologuing. The good news, as we all know, is that you learn just as much by failing as you do by succeeding, and considering that I’ve already thrown out a couple dozen finished pages of artwork, I’m learning a hell of a lot…

There’s something about this time of year, when that fall breeze starts creeping into the air, I immediately think: time to go back to school! But last September, after 17 years, that butterfly in my belly was pinched by the disappointing fact: you’re no longer a student.

Or at least a student who pays tuition.

So, today I’m going to post a couple of quotes by different comic artists about teaching yourself how to do this thing.

* * *

“A comics-art curriculum is interdisciplinary. As comics-art students learn to become literate and visually literate, they need to develop a vast array of skills. They need classes in drawing, writing, computer art, literature, storyboard, and character design. They need research skills, so they can make their stories convincing and make their characters behave and look real enough to come alive on the page or screen.”

– James Sturm, “Comics In The Classroom“

* * *

“…[he] discovered Dickens and Lewis Carroll and Thackeray, superb story-tellers whose tales were often co-created with the most gifted comic artists of their time. Dickens would toil over the drawing board with cartooon illustrators like Cruikshank and Browne (Phiz) to get the graphic portrayal of a character like Sairey Gamp or Mr Pecksniff exactly right, considering his novel illustrations an integral part of his books. (In our desolate time, publishers have no knowledge of this and routinely repting Dickens sans the crucial cartoon art.) George reveled over these novel combinations of art and text and longed to tell stories involving his own comic characters developed in depth over time…”

– Bill Blackbeard on George Herriman, creator of Krazy Kat, in his introduction to Krazy & Ignatz 1931-1932: A Kat a’Lilt with Song

* * *

“This book was created on a lark. Actually, it was never even intended to be a book at all — merely an exercise in one of my sketchbooks. Around the time I began doodling it out, I had been particularly interested in a certain kind of storytelling I had noticed several other cartoonists working with — specifically Dan Clowes, Chris Ware, and David Heatley. It’s an approach wherein you tell a longer story through a series of shorter, unconnected comic strips. Cumulatively they add up to a bigger picture….I went in knowing very little about where the story was going. I made it up page by page as I drew it out….The whole thing was just meant to be fun.”

– Seth, “The Origin of Wimbledon Green”