Austin Kleon – Page 568

BEAT THE HEAT, PT. 2

Thursday, August 3, 2006

This is kind of what my book looks like before the pages actually happen, which is fun, I think, because it looks nothing like the finished product…

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Meg was quoted big-time in a great PD article today about how sustainability doesn’t equal the hippie/granola scene or spending lots of money:

“There’s this preconceived notion that living green costs more, which isn’t necessarily true,” says Meghan Feran, architectural resource coordinator for the Cleveland Green Building Coalition. “The main things are that it’s healthier, more energy-efficient and better for the environment. It’s win-win across the board.”

AND:

Feran says the three fundamental principles of green-building — energy-efficiency, resource conservation and good health — address issues that help save the earth and the individual from illness and bankruptcy. She says many people inquire about green alternatives because of toxins in the home that put them or their children at risk. And although many people think that living green costs more, it actually aims to save you money.

“Look at what you’re paying at the pump,” Feran says. “Imagine what your utility bills are going to look like in six months.”

Meg’s ideas about bringing sustainability to the mainstream audience by appealing to the pocke book are really on target. We will be seeing lots more quotes from her in the future…mark my words!

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Two of my favorite writers were on NPR this week: David Milch and Etgar Keret. And Alison Bechdel returns with the NYTimes to setting of FUN HOME.

Yesterday I moved my whole rig to the bedroom and spent the day cowering in front of the air-conditioner with a pen. I guess we’ve got one more day of this inferno, then we’ll be out, for a little while…

Here’s a fun way to beat the heat, courtesy of Gerry: every episode so far of Bob Dylan’s XM radio show. Download ’em now, before they’re gone.

Here’s another option, which I saw on GERALDO yesterday. God help us.

Yet another option is to read Harvey Pekar’s introduction to the upcoming inaugural Best American Comics 2006 book. He basically summarizes every piece in the book, which is a nice preview. This book is going to be really good for comics in general, and fantastic for little-known artists who’ve been selected to be in it. One can only hope for that kind of exposure. (We live in Harvey’s neighborhood, and see him when we’re out walking sometimes, but I’ve still never met him.)

AND IT WILL BE STARRING MYSELF, A SNOWMAN, A ROBOT, AND A PIECE OF FRUIT

Monday, July 31, 2006

The Center For Cartoon Studies is having a scholarship competition. All you do is fill out the application and draw a “two page comic story starring yourself, a snowman, a robot, and a piece of fruit.”

I’ve been admiring the center for quite a while, but I’ve never considered it as a possibility, since they don’t have much funding and lack accreditation. (It’d be so great if they offered an MFA.) But what an incredible thing: to cartoon for a year with teachers like James Kochalka, and a slew of top-notch visiting artists. (Kevin Huizenga designed their brochure, and Alison Bechdel drew her visit.)

It’s really tempting…check out their summer programs.

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Speaking of Alison Bechdel, a little birdie told me that she’s going to appear at the Cleveland Joseph-Beth in October. She was just signed, so there’s no confirmation of it …yet.

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Also: as another great experiment in shameless self-promotion, I’ve started a Myspace account. If you read this and you’re on Myspace too, what the hell, let’s be friends.

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It was really hot this weekend, so we spent a lot of time at the movies. We saw the new Woody Allen with a 5 p.m. matinee/geriatric crowd, which was perfect, since the movie contains jokes about metamucil. The old lady sitting next to me had a husband who was hard of hearing, so after every joke she repeated the punchline for him.

While watching, it occured to me that I work on very small canvases: either an 8 x 11.5 inch sketchbook, or a 15 inch monitor. And the final form of my work, whether it’s a book, or zeros and ones on a computer monitor, is kind of intimate: it’s like something just you and I share. I draw it mostly in solitude, and you read it in solitude…

Film, on the other hand, is such a huge production, a collaboration between so many people, and I think it’s really only done justice by seeing it with other people, in a dark, cool theater, with the characters larger than life….

Okay, that is all for today. I wish you nothing but air-conditioning.

RENDEZVOUS

Thursday, July 27, 2006

Here’s a weird comic I did in response to the McSweeney’s contest inspired by Dan Wiencek‘s “13 Writing Prompts.”

Write a story that ends with the following sentence: Debra brushed the sand from her blouse, took a last, wistful look at the now putrefying horse, and stepped into the hot-air balloon.

Happily Ever After.

And in case you didn’t hear, ukuleles are all the rage.

“When you show up at a party with a guitar, it’s serious. People expect something!”

SOME THOUGHTS ON FUN HOME

Wednesday, July 26, 2006

Last night I finished Alison Bechdel’s excellent comics memoir, FUN HOME. I don’t have a whole lot to add to the raves (it’s been on on NPR, it’s gotten fabulous reviews, it’s selling like hotcakes all over), but it probably ranks up there with some of the best graphic novels I’ve ever read.

While it’s a genuinely enjoyable read, with a subject matter as engrossing and complex as any prose memoir, the carnivorous, thieving cartoonist in me solidified some of my feelings about the form, and found some good things to steal…

Disclaimer: Gerry over at Backwards City recently linked to this Wired article about academics at Comic-Con, so more than usual, I’m fully aware that writing about comics is pretty lame. “You have this dog and you love it, and you want to find out why you love it. You dissect it, and you’re left with this dead bloody dog on the table. That’s one of the things that academics do.” But I’m going to do it anyways, and haphazardly at that.

JUXTAPOSITION OF VOICEOVER NARRATION AND IMAGE/DIALOGUE

For me, the greatest technical accomplishment in FUN HOME is the juxtaposition of Bechdel’s written, first-person narrative with her panels and speech bubble dialogue. This might be a “duh” observation, as word/picture juxtapostion is something you might take for granted as a pre-requisite for comics, but that’s simply not the case. Take something like Brian K. Vaughn’s equally excellent Y: THE LAST MAN, for instance: it plays out like a really intricate movie: there is no narrator, only a camera’s eye. The same for most gag strips, like PEANUTS and KRAZY KAT: there is no narrator, only the characters and speech bubbles.

What voiceover narration (for lack of a better term) allows you to do in comics is make bigger jumps in between moments in time and images, thereby freeing you from the kind of static, talking head syndrome of plays or scenes in film. It also, through juxtaposition, allows you to cram a bunch of information into a tiny amount of space. My favorite folks who use the technique (and consequently, my favorite cartoonists) are Lynda Barry and James Kochalka. What it really is, I think, is the perfect integration of writing and art.**

Anyways, in creative writing classes, they’re always harping at you to show, not tell.*** Use concrete language verses abstract language. If you notice, much of the voiceover narration is ridiculously abstract, but combined with the concrete images and dialogue of the panels, you get this sweeping, novelistic effect…a soothing voice that takes your reader by the hand and leads them through the world, reflects on what is happening. Less voyeuristic, I guess, and more like a tour…

RECURSIVE NARRATIVE, ARCHIVAL ELEMENTS, AND THE UNITY OF STYLE

As Hillary Chute in her Village Voice review pointed out, “Fun Home ‘s narrative is recursive, not chronological—it returns again and again to central, traumatic events.” This is something that I think begs to be looked at in terms of world-building. FUN HOME isn’t so much a chronological retelling of events as much as it is a world.

Dylan Horrocks, once again:

…the panel is a unit not of time or space, but of meaning (a kind of sememe). And rather than being arranged in a sequence, Kochalka’s units are arranged in rhythmic patterns. The purpose of these patterns, he claims, isn’t merely to depict the flow of time, but to “create and activate a world inside us.”

Now, most discussion about comics (or fiction, for that matter) assumes that their main purpose is to tell a story – a narrative that moves through time; hence McCloud’s description of comics as a “temporal map.” But here, Kochalka seems to suggest something quite different: that comics create a world, a place. Instead of SPACE = TIME, this is SPACE = SPACE.

Bechdel returns again and again to maps and explaining events in geographical terms, and FUN HOME is like a map of Bechdel’s brain, and her archive: it contains “handwritten letters from [her] father, typewritten letters from both her parents, her father’s police record, dictionary entries, her own childhood and adolescent diaries, and many maps. Bechdel re-drew—re-created—everything in her own hand.”

That Bechdel chose to re-draw all these elements in her own hand is a trick to graphic novel writing: the style unifies the disparate elements, so you can turn to any page, and it looks like it comes from the same world, filtered from the same mind.

Okay, that was kind of a pantload. I promise tomorrow I’ll just post a pretty picture and call it a day.

**Dylan Horrocks recently said on his blog: “[Comics] allow you to be both an artist and a writer all at once. And many (James Kochalka is one example who comes to mind) seem to me to defy any attempt to place them in either of two such arbitrary ‘camps.’

***which makes me wonder, really, if there’s any hope for applying the MFA workshop format to making comics. Check out this great interview with Francine Prose about the sorry state of MFA programs.