Austin Kleon – Page 603

THE SOUND OF RICHARD PRYOR

Friday, December 16, 2005

Pryor began to reconstruct himself first through the use of sound—imagining the sound of Frankenstein taking LSD, for example, or a baby “being birthed.” His routines from this time regularly involved gurgles, air blown through pursed lips, beeps. He also began playing with individual words. He would stand in front of an audience and say “God damn” in every way he could think to say it. Or he’d say, “I feel,” in a variety of ways that indicated the many different ways he could feel. And as he began to understand how he felt he began to see himself, to create his body before his audience. He talked about the way his breath and his farts smelled, what he wanted from love, where he had been, and what America thought he was.

– from Hilton Als’ profile of Richard Pryor, “A Pryor Love,” The New Yorker, Sept. 13, 1999 (collected in White Girls)

SEMINARS ARE A TIME FOR DOODLES

Thursday, December 15, 2005

seminar doodle

MEG VS. CHRIS WARE

Thursday, December 15, 2005

As if to counter Meg’s complaint (and mine, too) that so many graphic novels seem to be written by men “who are emotionally still teenagers”, Chris Ware chimes in:

You’re on a time delay as a cartoonist, I think. It takes so long to draw comics that you end up writing about things that happened maybe 15 years or so before. Charles Burns just finished, after 10 years, a book about his teenage years. And he just turned 50. So that’s about the relative spectral red-shift that we’re on as artists.

Well, that’s kind of depressing. Listen to the whole interview.

Charles Burns’ BLACK HOLE is a graphic novel set in a Seattle suburb during the 70s. It follows a group of horny teenagers who contract an STD that basically turns them into mutants: they grow tails, they shed skins, some even grow second mouths. I decided to pick it up after listening to a pretty good hour long interview with Burns and Chris Ware. Since 1995, BLACK HOLE has been serialized in 12 installments, but having read none of them, I came to Burns’ work with fresh eyes: I’d only seen a small clip of BLACK HOLE in McSweeney’s 13, and his cover art for THE BELIEVER.

Reading it, I was reminded of John Neborak’s senior project presentation, in which he talked about the unique verbal/visual blend of comics as a narrative. Burns’ artwork is admirable, no doubt about it: his masterly brushwork is intricate and meticulous, and his command of black and white is great. However, when it comes to storyline, BLACK HOLE really falls flat for me. Mostly what you get from reading it is a sustained, creepy mood. Because the sexual metaphors that evoke this mood are purely visual (the vaginal gashes, the hot dogs roasting over an open fire), I’m wondering what BLACK HOLE would read like without any words.

I’d go on, but Meg sent me an e-mail that really summed it all up:

Graphic novels aren’t art and they aren’t a novel – they’re both, and too few graphic novelists (even the so-called “pros”) seem to get that. If either the art or the story aren’t really up to par it ends up detracting from the whole thing. I feel like so many graphic novels are written by men who are emotionally still teenagers in high school who get a big charge out of drawing scantily-clad women. Sometimes I just want to tell the authors to grow up a little. That’s what made a novel like FROM HELL so good, it rose above all that to tell an interesting story.

Couldn’t have said it any better myself. (And didn’t.)