secret code

I have a confession to make. I haven’t been Working. I haven’t been Working, and I won’t be Working until sometime next year, when all this wedding craziness ends.

Does this bother me? Not as much as it should.

Actually, things have been quite pleasant. Minus the wedding anxiety dreams. Last night I had a dream that I overslept until five minutes before the ceremony, and my shirt wasn’t ironed, and I tripped over the power cord and severely burned my forearm, but instead of calling 9-11, I called my mom to make sure she stalled everybody until I could get there…

Now, I should be drawing this. I should be making cartoons of this.

But I don’t have a deadline to make. Thank you, baby Jesus.

There is an excellent Washington Post article today about the editorial process of selecting cartoons for the New Yorker and the new book, Rejection Collection: Cartoons You Never Saw and Will Never See In The New Yorker. In case you didn’t already now, even if you get a contract as a New Yorker cartoonist, your rejection rate on a good week is 80 or 90 percent — every week, New Yorker cartoonists send in 10 or more drawings, and at the very best, the editors pick one or two, at the very worst, they reject them all.

It’s tough being a cartoonist.

But there are a few perks. This is from the introduction to Bruce Eric Kaplan’s collection, This Is A Bad Time:

…these drawings are really my journals. I use them to explore whatever I find interesting, confusing, or upsetting on any given day. But here’s the beauty part—these private thoughts are filtered through the prism of moody children and blasé pets, disillusioned middle-aged men and weary matrons, among others. And so I get to work through whatever I am thinking about in a coded way. No one but me will ever know what the real seed of each image and caption was. So I can be as free as I want to say whatever I want, and no one can catch me. It’s great.

A secret code!

“To construct a picture-story does not mean you must set yourself up as a master craftsman, to draw out every potential from your material —often down to the dregs! It does not mean you just devise caricatures with a pencil naturally frivolous. Nor is it simply to dramatize a proverb or illustrate a pun. You must actually invent some kind of play, where the parts are arranged by plan and form a satisfactory whole. You do not merely pen a joke or put a refrain in couplets. You make a book: good or bad, sober or silly, crazy or sound in sense.”

—Rudolph Töpffer, Essay on Physiognomy, 1845

* * *

Anything new: you wonder what to call it. I’m calling mine a graphic novel for the marketers. But what it really is is a Cartoon Novel. Or a novel-in-cartoons. Or just a book.

Kurt Vonnegut said he wrote Cat’s Cradle as if each chapter were a joke. Nathaniel West said he originally pictured Miss Lonelyhearts as a novel in comic strips.

I’m trying to write mine as if each page is a gag strip. Only the gags build into a story. And lots of them aren’t funny at all.

Peter Orner’s excellent new book is kind of like that. Each part is a little episode. And the episodes build into something big.

Whatever it is, it’s a book. This, I think, is a revelation.

* * *

– James Kochalka, quoted in Dylan Horrocks’ “The Perfect Planet: Comics, Games, and World-Building.”

* * *

George Saunders says that as a young boy, he felt the language in Esther Forbes’ Johnny Tremain was a code he could break, “a code that turned out to be more accurate and expressive than the one we all use to slog through normal life.” And breaking this code suggested to him that he might be able to come up with his own code, “a premonition that my complicated feelings about life could be subjugated to that quest, which has turned out to be true.”

People talk about voice and style, and I have no clue what they’re talking about. “Find your voice!” they say.

Screw that. I’m working on my secret code.