My Nerdy Sketchbook Collection

I haven't unpacked my SPX minicomics haul yet, so any reviews are going to have to wait at least a little while. But coming home from SPX means a little bit of reflection, for me, on one of my nerdier fan practices. I have a small collection of sketchbooks in which I ask people to draw. Most of them have themes: I ask people to draw something in particular. I know this is a thing that people do at these conventions, and maybe I shouldn't feel sheepish about it. I've seen some much more specific sketchbooks (Sean T. Collins's David Bowie sketchbook comes to mind), and I have tried to make my themes be things that will be fun to draw, but I still feel a little weird about the "collecting" aspect of these things.

Anyway, I'm hoping to add extra interest to some of my upcoming SPX minicomics reviews by showing images from these sketchbooks, and I thought I'd introduce the themes in this post so I could have a context ready for those images later.

The first sketchbook I took to a convention was for MoCCA in 2003, and it doesn't have a theme, but it does have a few treasures in it, like this lightning-quick sketch of Bacchus by Eddie Campbell.



For the next MoCCA I went to, in 2004, I got a new sketchbook and started asking for drawings on a theme. This was the monkey sketchbook that I've already mentioned a few times on the blog.



There's a monkey by Jeffrey Brown from that very MoCCA. The monkey sketchbook has become a real treasure for me. It's got work in it by some terrific cartoonists. It's also almost totally full.

In 2006 I attended ICAF and SPX and forgot my monkey sketchbook, so I ducked into a bookstore in DC and bought a blank book I could use for a new sketchbook. Since I also enjoy drawing robots, I settled on that for the next theme. This drawing by Matt Wiegle (who won an Ignatz this year) is from SPX 2007:



The robot book has many more pages in it than the monkey book, and I'm sure I'll keep toting it to small-press shows until it's full up. But for some reason, for this year's SPX, I decided to start another sketchbook. And because the first theme I thought of might not be fun for everyone, I decided to start two.

I know I've had a lot of fun drawing demons in the past, so I set one book up to be full of demons. Here's a fun one by Scott C.:



The other new book is harder to explain. I ask people to draw the character they usually draw, but dressed as some specific superhero, like they're dressed up for Halloween or a San-Diego-style nerd convention. I let the artists pick their superheroes: "Your favorite one," I say, if they ask. This is not a book that everyone would want to draw in, I think, but for some cartoonists it's going to be pretty fun.

In order to make the theme easier for me to explain, I asked Roger Langridge to draw Fred the Clown as The Mighty Thor to kick things off.



I'll share more images from these various sketchbooks in the weeks to come. (And now I have a surefire source for a quick post if I don't have time to think of anything elaborate.)

Do These Count as Steampunk?

After a couple of posts that nearly border on journalism, I want to indulge an almost pointless private impulse. Plus, I haven't unpacked from the SPX trip yet, so I don't have time to do more digging in the books I picked up while I was there.

I got to visit with Mike today before I left DC — the Mike who is the other half of the Satisfactory Comics enterprise — and we got to talking about some of our old projects, including one old, old thing from before even the first issue of Satisfactory Comics that thankfully never got past the drawing-board stages.

All that's left of this silly project is a handful of doodles, but I've saved them. And so please let me present to you a couple of pieces of nine-year-old ephemera:

Talus, the Iron Man:



The Ivory Tower:



As you might be able to tell, these were going to be the villains of the piece. I'm mainly posting them so Mike will be able to see them too, after all these years.

SPX 2010: Quick Sunday Report

I really had a lot of fun at this year's SPX. In fact, it might have been more fun than any other small-press show I've been to. As I said yesterday, I got to catch up with a few old friends, and I think I also met a few people who will turn out to be kindred spirits and fellow travelers. I'm planning to savor the books I bring home from Bethesda, and to write about them here on the blog gradually for a few weeks (or as long as it takes).



(That's just my haul from today; none of those books are in the picture from last night's report.)

Early this afternoon I was on a panel with Marc Singer and Bill Kartalopoulos that went really well, I think. I was interested to compare Marc's experiences teaching the graphic novel with my own. His class was obviously different from mine in some respects—he doesn't seem to share my misgivings about teaching Watchmen, for example, and maybe in the future I'll bring it back into the reading list—but I got the feeling that we have dealt with many similar troubles and rewards.

The panel I moderated—with Vanessa Davis, Jesse Reklaw, Gabrielle Belll, and Sarah Becan talking about different models of autobiographical writing and different variations on the "diary comic"—was really fun.



(Here we all are, laughing with Bill K. just before the panel started.)

I also think the panelists were able to say a few really insightful things about autobiographical writing, particularly about the way that a cartoonist (or any writer) has to structure his or her life in order to make it into a story—the necessary manipulations of a story that's emotionally "honest" even if it's not faithful to every concrete fact.

I remember Vanessa saying, for example, that she used to worry about making sure that she drew everyone in her autobio comics wearing the clothes they were actually wearing when the events happened, but that now she's willing to combine two different people into one character in order to make a scene work better.

(Here, I appear to be trying to make some point that Gabrielle and Sarah are skeptical about. Or it's possible that Jesse has just said something under his breath to make them laugh.)



Even more than it was insightful, however, the panel was a lot of fun. Jesse might have downed a snootful (at least) before the panel began, and he was a little rambunctious, but in a way that mostly kept the rest of us looking alive. We laughed a lot, and so did the audience, and I think each of the panelists made a few new fans that day.



(If you haven't seen Vanessa's latest book, Make Me a Woman, I can tell you it looks gorgeous and loaded with fun. Drawn & Quarterly had early copies of it at SPX.)

Thanks to my friend and colleague Glynnis Fawkes for taking pictures during the panel!

SPX 2010: Quick First-Day Report

The first day of SPX felt like a long day to me, but in a good way: I had several good conversations, mainly with cartoonist pals of yore like Jon Lewis, Ben Towle, and Tom Kaczynski; I also got to meet a few younger cartoonists whose work looks really interesting to me, and to touch base with a few friendly folks I've only seen a few times.

First, to answer the question that's surely on everyone's lips: here's an update on Alec Longstreth's Basewood beard:



Here's a shot of Jesse Reklaw entertaining Julia Wertz and Sarah Glidden with a puppet show at their table, toward the end of the day:



And here's a shot of Frank Santoro leaping into a serious-looking conversation between my co-editor Ken Parille and my friend Tom Kaczynski.



As you can see, the atmosphere toward the end of the day was celebratory to the point of being a little silly.

The panel discussion Ken and I had with Bill Kartalopoulos went well, though the room wasn't exactly packed with audience members. I think we managed to put forward some coherent generalizations about Wilson and about the direction of Clowes's work since David Boring. I imagine those ideas will filter into the writing Ken and I will be doing (separately) over the next few years.

(Frank Santoro has, by the way, an extended baseball-related metaphor for the way Wilson unfolds. But you'd have to ask him about it; by no means can I reproduce it here.)

I have bought (and traded for) a ton of new minicomics, which I will read and dutifully blog about in the weeks to come. There'll be more in this stack before the end of the day tomorrow.



As I write this, the Ignatz Awards ceremony is only just about to start, so I can't report on who won anything. I'm just tossing a few pictures online and checking in before I switch over to paper-grading for the night.

What Have We Been Reading? #3

It's been a while since I've done one of these "What Have We Been Reading?" posts.

How posts in this format work: I swipe a panel from a comic I've recently been reading.


You, the readers and commenters, tell me whether you recognize the panel, and where you think it's from. A few days later, I draw up a more extended consideration of the book in question. (I still owe you a review of Shiga's Meanwhile..., don't I?)

Here's a hint about this panel: it contains both of the title characters of the book.

Another note, not exactly a hint: the panel also contains two things I really didn't like about the book.

I'll be on my way down to SPX directly after teaching today. I imagine I'll be able to keep posting from Bethesda, but I'm not sure what form those posts will take.

The One-Panel Critics: Listening to McCloud?

Yesterday this semester's classes had our first discussion of Understanding Comics. It's a book I teach with reservations, since it seems to have at least as many problematic assumptions and faulty leaps of logic as it has cool and innovative ideas. It's great for getting students to start thinking about the formal aspects of comics, and about the decisions of technique that cartoonists have to make in setting up every single page. But it's also loaded with claims that seem more and more specious the more I read them.

Leaving aside the chapter in which McCloud tries to define art and the artistic process, the shakiest of these claims seems to be his argument about the power of "iconic" cartooning—or what Art Spiegelman would call "diagrammatic" cartooning: spare, undetailed, simple cartooning, where every line indicates a legible, significant aspect of what the thing is rather than what the thing looks like as such. You know the kind of cartooning I'm talking about: Ernie Bushmiller instead of Todd McFarlane; Kevin Huizenga instead of Burne Hogarth; Vanna Vinci instead of Drew Friedman.

McCloud claims that there's something in our psychological hard-wiring about the human face that makes us identify more easily with the spare, "iconic" cartoon face, that we can somehow project our identities or consciousnesses into an undetailed cartoon face.

He claims that's why he draws himself in such an "iconic" way as he presents his argument. After all...



Taking this panel in isolation, I can't help thinking Sure, why not? — I mean, I'd still read a book of interesting comics criticism, even if its narrator was drawn with more lines. I'd even listen to it if it were presented on film, with moving photographs of the author. Why, I'd even pay attention if the presenter were right there in front of me—the ultimate in realism.

Sure, it might take a little longer for the author to draw a more detailed version of the argument — I might have needed to wait until 1994 or 1995 for Understanding Comics. But is there anything less trustworthy about that face?

In its context, in the course of McCloud's argument, the more realized or realistic drawing is jarring, and I think many readers take that momentary disruption in their reading expectations as a confirmation of McCloud's argument: we are unsettled by the less diagrammatic version of our narrator, so we think that he's "wrong" for the project. But let's remember that we've had thirty-six pages to get used to the little icon-McCloud at this point. We've formed a relationship with the little sprite.

And that's really how readerly identification works, isn't it?

I'd argue that we don't actually identify with a character because we confuse him or her for ourselves, or because we project ourselves into his place. I'm not fighting Kraven the Hunter in Spider-Man's suit; I just want Spider-Man to win. The musings of Glenn Ganges might remind me of things I've thought before, but when he's in trouble, I'm worried for him, not in him.

I don't experience the little McCloud sprite as "a little piece of [myself]" or even merely as "a little voice inside my head ... a concept" (UC, p. 37). I experience him as a character. Characters are by definition outside of me, and if I'm incapable of identifying with a character who doesn't resemble me, then I have a psychological problem.

There's much more to say about this, and a lot of it is covered in an excellent essay by Jonathan Frome ("Identification in Comics") that appeared in the Comics Journal roundtable on Understanding Comics (in the April 1999 issue). I've summarized this and other problems with McCloud in an essay that appeared in IJOCA a couple of years ago. If you're keen to read that essay and can't put your hands on the relevant issue of IJOCA, drop me an email, and I can samizdat it to you. You might also want to see Marc Singer's ruminations on teaching with Understanding Comics and this same problem.

For the record, I do think there's a special power in iconic cartooning, but it's less about identification and more about legibility. When we look at the face of Sluggo or Charlie Brown or Glenn Ganges, those facial features tell us less about what the character looks like (or would look like, in the real world) and more about what they're feeling. The line under an eye for fatigue, or the line of an eyebrow indicating surprise or anger: these designate emotions in an almost symbol-like (semiotic? iconic? linguistic?) way. The only disadvantage of the cross-hatched, detailed, more "realist" version of McCloud is that we'd spend more time looking at him, and thinking about what the image looked like.

And, despite McCloud's consistent privileging of image over text in his definition of comics, it's the text that's important in Understanding Comics. He wants us to pay attention to the message, and not the messenger.

(To be fair: that last statement is a paraphrase of McCloud himself, but I think he's imagining that "the messenger" is only an external character if he's drawn realistically, and I'd argue that even the iconic sprite designates a character, just one that we can "read" more easily. He's still distracting sometimes.)

This Is Bugging Me (Eisner v. Swan)

I just finished grading a set of very short papers that contrast A Contract with God with an issue of Superman that was also published in 1978. A couple of my undergraduates' frequent generalizations are really sort of throwing me off.

When they talk about the books' different visual styles, they frequently say that Eisner's drawing ...



... is much more detailed than Curt Swan's.



(This panel is less than half the size of the Eisner panel above.)

I think what they're trying to say is that Eisner generally makes more marks per panel, because he's cross-hatching. But I think we have to agree that cross-hatching isn't the same thing as detail. A vast field of cross-hatching, by itself, reveals no details. And it's true that the background in Superman 331 drops out a lot in favor of a field of solid color, but I don't think the difference with Eisner is really all that distinct, once you account for the cross-hatching.

So, clearly, one of the things I'll have to talk with my students about, in the weeks to come, is the difference between shading and detail.

This other generalization really baffles me, though.

My students keep saying that Curt Swan's characters are much more cartoony...



... and Eisner's are drawn much more realistically.



What do you think they are talking about, here? The best guess I can come up with is that they mean the character designs represent a more realistic variety of body types—pretty much all of Swan's male figures have the same build in this comic, and Lois's face looks a lot like Lana's. But can that really be what they mean when they say Frimme Hersch looks less cartoony?

My other hypothesis is a bit dispiriting: the students had already decided what they thought a superhero comic looked like, or what a "sophisticated" comic would look like, and they didn't really look at what Swan and Eisner had drawn.

Any other theories?

They also keep saying that Eisner's writing is more sophisticated that Marty Pasko's—that it uses more advanced vocabulary (and, presumably, more complex sentence structures?). That's not a note about subject matter, as far as I can tell, but about diction and style. That claim really has me perplexed. Is it merely coming from Yiddishisms like "tsimmis" that the students probably had to look up? I don't think any of the students noticed that most of the individual panels in Superman have more words in them than most of Eisner's pages do.

Help me out here.