When you have kids you always find all this weird half-finished stuff lying around the house. (Half-finished drawings, half-finished bananas, etc.) I found this comic on the kitchen table, drawn by Owen at age 5. (“Julese” is his 3-year-old brother, Jules.) Drawn in a comic book notebook by The Unemployed Philsopher’s Guild.
“Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see.”
—Arthur Schopenhauer
“Instead of shooting arrows at someone else’s target, which I’ve never been very good at, I make my own target around wherever my arrow happens to have landed. You shoot your arrow and then you paint your bulls eye around it, and therefore you have hit the target dead centre.”
—Brian Eno
“In the long run, men hit only what they aim at.”
—Henry David Thoreau
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PS. (2021/03/17):
I took archery in high school because it wasn’t a team sport. I liked some of the team sports, but No one else to blame. I wanted to see what I could do. I learned to aim high. Aim above the target. Aim just there! Relax. Let go. If you aimed right, you hit the bull’s-eye. I saw positive obsession as a way of aiming yourself, your life, at your chosen target. Decide what you want. Aim high. Go for it.
— Octavia Butler, “Positive Obsession,” Bloodchild and Other Stories
When I was reading Jan Swafford’s introduction to classical music, Language of the Spirit, I kept thinking about how some of the stories about Johannes Brahms would make perfect Kate Beaton comics (a la “Chopin and Liszt” or anything in Hark! A Vagrant or Step Aside, Pops). I doodled a few in my sketchbook:
I’m currently learning his Waltz in A Flat, which is just beautiful:
A fun fact: Brahms was Charles Schulz’s favorite composer, but he thought Beethoven was funnier for Schroeder’s obsession:
Next up: reading Swafford’s biography of Brahms…
5-year-old drew this comic in the Comic Note Book we picked up at the new Kinokuniya here in Austin, and I was reminded of the great anthology, Abstract Comics.
Another Peanuts remix. (More here.)
Just for fun, I drew James Tate’s “Teaching The Ape To Write Poems,” from his Selected Poems, as a comic.
Sometimes when the 5-year-old is being really annoying I’ll draw a comic of him to snap him out of it. Then sometimes he’ll ask to draw, too:
I often draw his one-liners as a little single panel comic in my diary:
Sometimes our conversations warrant multiple panels:
Some mornings he will hover over my diary and ask to read all of them. As Camus said, “One has to pass the time somehow…”
Cutting and pasting comic strips is one of my favorite ways to clear my brain. I especially like cutting up a whole page of the comics section and swapping dialogue from one strip to another. Here’s Blondie with dialogue from Garfield:
Then I love taking the scraps and making new one-panel cartoons:
Last night I finished From Lone Mountain, a book collecting John Porcellino’s King-Cat zine from 2003-2007. I think the world of John’s work. To me, he is one of the most unique contemporary American artists: independent, autonomous, and a model of the DIY ethic: Next year will be his 30th anniversary of self-publishing King-Cat.
Tom Devlin posted this lovely appreciation over on the D&Q blog:
One of the truly great things about comics is that John P is always working on a new issue of King-Cat Comics & Stories. It has been a constant in our weird maddening charming art form for nearly thirty years. This is a comfort. John began as punk upstart filled with passion and anger and a fool’s confidence and has mellowed, deepened into an engaged, patient, sympathetic artist-for-life. His life is right there on paper for us to see. There have been so many times when I found an anchor in King-Cat. Everything arounds us moves so fast. Time runs away. We make and lose friends and barely remember people who were once very important to us. In King-Cat, John is talking about seeing Frank Sinatra in concert or listening to Husker Du. Sometimes I didn’t care about something when he wrote about it but I care now. I caught up to John. Or we caught up to each other. This is just one of the great things about John’s work. He’ll wait for you to catch up. He’s always there. His comics exist in all times. Waiting.
I’m not sure what else there is to say.
I’ve been reading John since I was about 21 years old. I drew this sketch of him in 2010 when he came to Austin on tour. (You might see me wearing my now-ratty t-shirt around.) One thing that struck me reading the latest collection: King-Cat really is a zine. In my mind, I think of King-Cat as comics, but when you open an issue, there’s a ton of prose writing, and letters, and lists, etc.
Another thing that touched me was his description — typed out in simple Times New Roman — in issue #65 of living in DeKalb, Illinois in the early 90s, working a crummy job all day and making comics at night and on weekends:
I’d come home from work, park in the alley, and come up the back stairs to my apartment. The apartment was huge and cheap, windows everywhere and wide open dusty floors.
Cooking dinner meant opening a can of refried beans onto a tortilla and microwaving them one after the over. I put pre-shredded cheddar cheese on them and when I was fancy some lettuce. I ate them with tortilla chips and generic cola. They were damn good.
Once a week I’d pull out the little old 9” TV my parents had given me, balance it on the chair, and watch Roseanne in grainy black and white. When it was over I’d unplug it and put it back in the closet. I was in a weird state of mind. I’d listen to Brasil ‘66 records or the Tijuana Brass and draw comics all evening. The comics just came out of me. I’d stack them up and when I had enough pages I’d go down to the copy shop and put out a new issue of King-Cat.
That’s it, the whole thing, right there: Make comics, when enough pages stack up, you make a zine.
I heard Jessa Crispin say one time: “I’m very Midwestern in that I just do the work that’s in front of me” — that spirit is very much in John’s work. (Along with punk rock, Zen, and Thoreau.)
John is one of the few artists I happily support on Patreon — from how he tells it, crowdfunding has made a big difference in his life, allowing him to save a little bit for the first time. I hope you’ll buy his books and fall in love with King-Cat and become a subscriber. He’s an American original.
One of my favorite prompts inThe Steal Like An Artist Journal asks the reader to remix a comic strip:
My son got a daily Peanuts calendar for Christmas, so for fun I’ve been taking the old pages and making collages out of them:
I like to take two or three strips and mash them up: this one has a panel from January 16, 1968, text from Jan. 10 and 13, and most of the January 12th strip:
This one is made up of a bunch of extra leftovers:
I really love how surrealistic they get when you squeeze two images of the same character into one panel:
And how just swapping a few bits of text can change a strip’s meaning completely (and make it autobiographical — this was originally about Charlie Brown waiting for his dad to get off work):
This one starts with a piece of text from some litter I found on my walk:
It’s interesting how in the process of cutting it up, you really learn a lot about Schulz’s strip: how wordy the balloons are (something Nancy creator Ernie Bushmiller famously complained about), how everything belongs to one world and is easily re-arranged and re-combined. Heck, even the characters can be spliced into each other: here’s Charlie Brown with Linus’s hair:
It seems like this kind of thing would be a great exercise for the classroom. I’ve done a variation in workshops in which participants take single panel cartoons from the comics section and swap the captions, like this example in Gary Larson’s The Prehistory of the Far Side:
The Far Side and Dennis the Menace used to be side by side in the Dayton Daily News. One day, back in August of 1981, someone “accidentally” switched their captions. What’s most embarrassing about this is how immensely improved both cartoons turned out to be.
Here’s a Lynda Barry caption from One! Hundred! Demons! pasted on top of Charles Burns’ “The Smell of Shallow Graves” (both reprinted in this NYTimes article):
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