Festival of Cartoon Art, Day 2: Some Abstract Rectilinear Landscapes of Columbus, Ohio

Here, without labels or other commentary, are some hard-to-draw interiors and exteriors from around Columbus. You can click each image to make it bigger.

Festival of Cartoon Art, Day 1

I'm in Columbus.



I'm attending the 2010 Festival of Cartoon Art at Ohio State University, where I gave a paper this afternoon on the backgrounds in Krazy Kat. There was an entire panel devoted to Krazy, in honor of the title character's 100th birthday.



And there was a cake at the reception.

I enjoyed the panels today, which taught me about a few comics I'd never heard of before (Scuola di Fumeto looks interesting; the post-Herriman Krazy comics from Dell and Gold Key look like a sacrilege), and I learned new things about comics I'd heard of. (Peter Sattler's presentation on Mutt and Jeff was really eye-opening, especially his description of the inset comic called "Bolsheviki," which seems both harrowing and hilarious. I was also really stunned at the research on display during Michael Tisserand's keynote talk. His forthcoming biography of Herriman is obviously going into my wish list.)

During the conference, as usual, I doodled. Here's a poor likeness of Damian Duffy, scrawled out during his talk on Moore and Gebbie's "This Is Information."



And here's a quick cartoon of one of the most memorable moments in the conference so far. After Toni Pape's interesting paper on Scuola di fumetti, which was sort of heavy with theory jargon but showed some "metaleptic" effects that really exploit the language of comics, there was a pause in the question-and-answer period. The established comics-scholar eminence R. C. Harvey raised his hand, and said, "I have a question for Toni."



"My question is: 'Are you serious?'"

It's hard to know how to answer a question like that. It was clear that Bob Harvey wasn't asking in a mean-spirited way. I think he was asking about the jargon, though the conversation turned to some claims about comics exceptionalism that Toni was more hesitant to endorse than Bob himself was.

And I should point out that the Festival's FAQ page does say that the academic presentations "will not necessarily be aimed at a general audience."

As it happens, a little bit of good-for-the-gander came around during the Krazy Kat panel. While I was giving my talk, Bob Harvey was doodling into his notebook.



(That's Jared Gardner below me.)

... and apparently I make an interesting subject for caricatures.



Later he told me he couldn't decide whether I have a round head or a long one.

Be advised: this is one of the dangers of presenting to a room full of comics scholars.

I'm hoping to have more to report before the weekend is over.

"Make Me a Bat": Pre-Orders

I'm pleased to announce that all the drawing for my Halloween micro-minicomic is finished.

Here's a glimpse of the cover of the "dummy" I printed here at home. The color is not final.



The comic features a little boy who wants to dress up as a bat for Halloween. Unfortunately, his parent (who is only ever an off-panel voice) seems to have a perverse sense of hearing:



Most of the comic consists of the boy finding himself in costumes that almost sound like "bat" costumes. I think the results are pretty cute.



And I don't think I'm spoiling much by telling you that the comic has a happy ending: the little boy gets a great bat costume on the last page, and a fold-out inside back cover lets him go out trick-or-treating in it.



The idea is that I'll hand these out to trick-or-treaters along with candy this year.

I'm planning to go down to Kinko's to print a bunch of these this weekend, so I can send them to the Trees & Hills Halloween Comic Swap with plenty of time to spare. UPDATE: I have taken the book to Kinko's, so I'm closing up the pre-orders for the time being. I'll make a new post when I get copies back.

The book has sixteen interior pages, and the vocabulary in it is deliberately pitched at kids who are still learning to read.

"Make Me a Bat": Teaser

This image does not appear in the comic I am making for Halloween.

Well, maybe on the back cover.

"Make Me a Bat": Outtakes

I'm almost done with the little comic that I'm making for the Trees & Hills Halloween Comic Swap. I ought to be able to take it to Kinko's on Tuesday.

While I work on the layout, here are a few outtakes — not exactly a "deleted scene," but some versions of a costume that I didn't wind up using.







I think this is going to be a fun little comic.

Advice on the 24-Hour Comic

You may know that today is 24-Hour Comic Day for 2010. And you may know that, while we are no experts in the 24-hour comic, Mike and I have made a few attempts at this challenge ourselves. Satisfactory #3 was going to be a 24-hour comic, and I think Mike drew the sixteen pages of that book in sixteen consecutive hours. Satisfactory #5 was a successful 24-hour comic, except for the inking of a last few pages that I had to finish over the following day or two.



And Satisfactory Comics #7 was in some ways the closest we've come: all of the new stories in that book were penciled and inked in a single sitting of about thirty hours. That was actually only 21 pages of new comics, but I got up the next morning and lettered three pages of supplemental text while Mike knocked out the cover. So I think it counts. It sure felt like an accomplishment.



By the end of that experience, we felt ready to offer a little advice about what worked for us and what was difficult in the process. The advice appeared in the last little bit of text in Satisfactory #7, and in honor of a 24-Hour Comics Day that we're not celebrating in any other way, I'll reproduce it here.



I'm surprised more people don't do this: if you're setting out to fill twenty-four pages, why not plan to fill them with an anthology of short pieces? I guess that requires more ideas, but it also means that you can bail from a bad idea quickly and move in a new direction. It even means that you can edit, if you want to, when you get ready to publish the comic as a mini.



The caffeine thing is obvious, but it's really worth thinking in advance about how to vary your drawing tools. Unless you have some perfect pen that I don't know about, your hands are going to get tired (and possibly painful) before the end of the day. Think about what you might be able to accomplish with tools you don't ordinarily use, or tools you hold in a different way. Bring a variety of drawing and inking tools—brushes, markers, construction paper and scissors, Q-Tips, whatever you think you might use in the sleep-deprived wee hours of your project. It's nice to be able to move forward while you give your hands some relief from the posture of pencilling.



And try to switch back and forth between pencilling and inking based not only on the needs of your hands but also on the needs of your inventive imagination. This was the thing about Satisfactory #7 that worked best for us, actually: up until the last few hours, there were always a few incomplete pages on the table, and each of us could always put down the page he was pencilling or scripting in order to get a brief break to think about something else. And, by the end of the day, I think we had honestly surprised ourselves with the number of things we'd come up with.

If you're out there making a 24-hour comic, I wish you fortitude, alacrity, and an unflagging imagination. Here's to many happy returns of the day.

Fun Home, Proximity, and Intimacy

I'm a little too fried from my long week of teaching, grading, and writing to offer any "new" insights tonight, but something interesting occurred to me yesterday when I was preparing for the graphic novel class.

It starts with a few very smart panels from Dylan Horrocks's Hicksville that I've been fascinated with ever since Jeff Seymour forced me to pay attention to them eight and a half years ago.



That's the great cartoonist Emil Kopen speaking in the first panel, explaining how comics can be thought of as maps. (Actually, Kopen asserts that maps and comics are the same thing.) Like maps, comics record or diagram things in space. Because each panel places characters in space, the comic is a record of spatial relationships over time. And aren't these changes in spatial relationships what stories are, to some extent, about?



There's more to narrative and to memory than the movement of people (and objects) relative to each other—biting is not kissing, even if they're both oral intimacies—but Kopen's assertions exaggerate something genuinely true about the way comics represent characters in the worlds they construct.

And this came back to me when I was looking over the middle of Fun Home yesterday.



I've thought a lot already about the way that the dot-for-a-mouth cartoon faces in Fun Home reveal mainly the characters' inexpressiveness—their unwillingness or inability to express openly the sorts of emotions that would broaden the mouth or open it. But until this semester's passage through the book I hadn't thought about the waxing and waning of bodily proximity among these characters.

The panel above depicts a moment of unusual intimacy between Bruce and Helen, and yet there's still enough space between their bodies for a coffee cup. If you click the image to enlarge it, you'll see that their lips aren't even in contact for the "chaste peck" the narration describes.

In the panels below, we see even more extreme interpersonal distance, this time between Bruce and Alison, who begin and end the book in moments of what Bechdel describes as "rare physical contact." Here, they're distant, against the deep perspectival recess of a European airport terminal.



Even their speech balloons are keeping them distant from each other.

There's so little intimacy in the family that Alison's bedroom scenes once she's away at college are really surprising—maybe more because of the sudden intertwining of forms than because of the characters' nudity, which is mostly pretty modest.



I really like the composition of this panel—the way that Joan's legs and feet fill the negative space of the curve of Alison's back as she slouches into her phone call. They're close enough that a single line defines the edge separating their bodies.

I think I first remembered Emil Kopen and his cartography, however, when I read the last page of Bechdel's chapter 3. It's the end of a scene in Bruce Bechdel's library: he's reading while Alison asks him to write a check so she can order some Mad magazine books. There's not a lot of action in the two panels on this page—they'd be easy to glance at briefly while the narration in the captions holds your attention. But they carry a lot of drama in the question of proximity or intimacy.

In the first panel, Alison and Bruce seem close, though they're both focused on their separate tasks. The lamp on the desk and the painting on the wall connect them and make them compositionally interconnected, as if they were touching or overlapping in the panel space.



But then, in the chapter's final panel, our view swings around ninety degrees, and from the perspective of the windows we can see that the proximity in the first panel was only an illusion: father and daughter are distant enough from each other to be framed by separate windows, as if by separate panels in a comic.



If I were going to make this a proper "one-panel critics" post, that might be the panel I'd pick.