“I remember great pleasure in cutting out Andy Cap and Flo with manicure scissors, and then cutting little slits in a magazine picture of a big bowl of Beef-a-Roni, and fitting Andy and Flo into them so it looked like they were rising out of the Beef-a-Roni. I remember laughing my head off at that one. I still love collage and I’ve always turned to it when I get stuck writing or drawing.”
—Lynda Barry
Today, obviously, I got stuck.
R. Crumb talks about David Kunzle’s The Early Comic Strip in Todd Hignite’s excellent In The Studio: Visits With Contemporary Cartoonists:
My awareness of this whole history was something that happened gradually, since that stuff is not available. Where are you going to see it? You’d have to go to some library that specializes in that and ask to look at it. It’s not reprinted anywhere, so it’s not known. So when I got that big book by Kunzle, it was a total surprise, how much material there was, and I’m sure that’s still just a drop in the bucket, you know, what survived, what he could get his hands on, and what he could actually show — I’m sure he could have done twice as much. So much of them are so crude, those little, postage stamp-sized panels of, like, husband-and-wife squabbles done in Russia or Germany or Czechoslovakia. Incredible stuff, but totally obscure. If you try to inform people in the art world of this history, they know nothing about it. A complete underground, unknown, history of popular art that the general art world knows nothing about. When Alfred Fischer, the curator of my show in Germany [at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne] came, I showed him this book and some other things and he was just speechless; it was all completely new to him. The crude, lowest level of popular arts.
What I love about Hignite’s book is that it focuses most of its attention on the cartoonists’ influences, personal libraries, and thoughts about the history of the form. As Hignite comments, “To varying degrees, these artists are collectors themselves, so the process of creating is interwined with other art: the working studio is also library archive, and museum.” Later in his interview, Crumb goes on to lament the difference between this kind of collecting versus “academic” interests:
It’s just that academia’s interest in this stuff is so lame….There’s a big difference between a collector-archivist and people in academia….In academia they get locked into this thing of having to narrow it down and narrow it down to this very particular specialty that they focus on, and they’re very proprietary about it, so that it scares them to actually scan the culture at large as we do and just pick out, “Oh, this is interesting,” o, “That’s interesting from this whole different area,” and then look into it; that’s a waste of their time. There are probably exceptions, but it gets narrower and narrower as there get to be more academic specialists and specialties. You have to be so specific about “you” things, and if someone else who’s not the expert volunteers some information, then it’s almost a threat.
More and more, my vision of comics as a type of collage — a spattering of pictures, words, influences, events, personal histories, books, whatever…go read the Lethem article, where he says, “In fact, collage…might be called the art form of the twentieth century, never mind the twenty-first.” — synched together in a unity of style, grows and strengthens in my head. Which is why reading — ammassing influence — is such an important part of the gig…
Last January, after seeing a couple of my newspaper blackout poems, Winston Smith e-mailed and recommended to me a book called “A Humument” by an artist named Tom Phillips. In the mid-sixties, Phillips took an old Victorian novel by W.H. Mallock called “A Human Document” and started blacking out the pages to make a new book, ” A Humument.” Well, I thought this sounded pretty interesting, but was too lazy to look it up, or even Google it, and pretty soon I’d forgotten all about it.
A year later, Drew Dernavich e-mails me a link to Humument.com, the official site of the book! Little did I know that you can see every page from the book online. (There’s also a new edition you can buy online from Amazon.)
Too cool.
I see no necessity to apologize for the imperfections of this or of any similar imagery. Analogies of this kind are only intended to assist us in our attempt to make the complications of mental functioning intelligible.—Sigmund Freud, talking about his dream diagrams
* * *
I think I might use this someday as the epigraph for one of my comics. I collaged it onto the front of my sketchbook, with a few changes:
Clive Thompson made the great point, “your tools help determine how you think. So long as Freud used realistic modes of drawing, he was hemmed in by the dictates of straightforward physiology. To ponder the abstracts of human behavior, he needed to turn to abstract comix.”
Read some more about Freud’s drawings.
Thinking lately about workspaces, about how working with the computer affords the sketchbook greater authority, because tiny scribbles can be scanned and blown up to gigantic proportions, mistakes can be erased, materials of all shapes and kinds and sizes can be formed into one thing–one computer file…and how, there is no original, only a digital collage.
Along the same lines, here’s Jonathan Safran Foer describing Art Spiegelman‘s studio in his essay “Breakdownable,” from the great read, MASTERS OF AMERICAN COMICS:
“At the center of the office was an enviable Captain Kirk-like raised computer station: a pretty serious screen, two scanners, a pad on which to draw straight onto the computer, a side area for sketching, bottles of inks, a can of writing implements, shelves of cds, a stereo console, and various unidentifiable miscellany…
“Beside this setup was a very cool light table, on which rested a drawing-in-progress. Across from that, against the window, was an old-fashioned drafting table. If memory serves, there was a scratched-up desk across from that. There must have been half a dozen desks thoughout the office. How could one person, I wondered, need so many surfaces? Where is the army of Art Spiegelmans?
“We talked about the originals of his drawings. I wanted to use the excuse of this short essay to see them. Art explained that given the way he works, moving freely between paper and the computer, pen, pencil, and ink, no such things exist. There are sketches. And there are drawings done directly on the computer. And there are more fleshed-out drawings. And there are altered, cobbled-together images on the computer. But if one’s dream were to hang In the Shadow of No Towers, from beginning to end, one would be disappointed.”
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