If I have some extra time during the day, I’ll collage comics or random images onto the next couple of blank pages in my diary, so I’m never stuck for something to write about in the morning. (I got the idea when reading Duncan Hannah’s diaries.) If I don’t have anything to say about the previous day’s events, I’ll start writing to the images, and that usually unloosens something in my mind. Anything to keep from staring at a blank page…
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.
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