SPX Find #5: Laura Terry's Thousand Lies

Here's one of my favorite things from the SPX minicomics stack so far:



Laura Terry is a recent graduate from the Center for Cartoon Studies, and based on One Thousand Lies, I'd say I'm looking forward to seeing more comics from her.

One Thousand Lies is a story about a wanderer named Arnold, as he checks in with his godmother, a high-power lawyer named Victoria. Arnold convinced Victoria to take him out to lunch, and in return she asks him to tell stories from his travels.




(Let's hold on to that intersection between stories and lies until tomorrow. I have another post in mind.)

What Arnold comes up with are three odd vignettes, each of which takes place in a town with its own skewed logic: Sunderland, where philosophers congregate on the jungle gym and love waits in the morgue; Buffalo Gap, where half of the population is transient; and Enoch, which has been designed to capture and reflect the harmony of the universe.



There's a bit of The Thousand and One Nights in this premise, even if Arnold is singing for his supper instead of to save his head. (The connection is strong enough that I wondered why the lies in the title fall short by one.) There's also more than a little of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities in the imagination of each peculiar geographical vignette. It's not hard to imagine this book being extended into more chapters, each of which would have three or five stories of improbably towns with puzzling problems.

It's also really nice to sense so clearly that the cartoonist reads something other than comics. I mean, I know that comics are the best place to learn to make comics, but to extend the medium, or to stretch a genre, the cartoonist needs to know what's beyond his or her most immediate antecedents. Won't the best stories always come from people who read lots of kinds of stories?



I also feel a lot of influence from Matt Madden behind this book. I might just be imagining that because Victoria looks to me a little bit like Matt's character Lance (from Odds Off—you know, the guy whose writing catches "word lice"). But there's also something about the cheery, intellectual familiarity between Arnold and Victoria that reminds me of some of Matt's other characters. And of course the appeal to Calvino and, behind that, Scheherazade is something that would appeal to Matt.

Anyway, I liked this book a lot, partly for its promise, and partly for what it delivers. There's some nice, solid cartooning here, but the real interest is in the story, and in the process of storytelling.

If I had to mount a bit of conservative criticism, it'd be that the scenes between Arnold and Victoria seem to drag a little bit — I'm not sure whether they could be compacted from two six-panel pages each down to a single eight-panel page, for example, or if the splash-page transition could be turned into a half-page panel with some editing — but that's really a minor misgiving about what's otherwise a fun, interesting, smart, and attractive minicomic.

I'm hoping to see more from Laura Terry.

And lo, sure enough, here is more from her, courtesy of my robot doodle book:



Thanks, Laura! I hope you'll let me know when your next comic is ready!

Doodle Penance: "what do you think of center for cartoon studies"

As it happens, this week's "Doodle Penance" term is just as appropriate to the events of the week as last week's was. (I promise that I'm not making these up. But I do get to choose from more than a hundred search terms each week, so it's not hard to find something that seems like it'll work.)

As I mentioned in my last post, Mike and I met up on Friday in White River Junction, the home of the Center for Cartoon Studies, and Mike got his first tour of the Schulz Library,* the Colodny Building, and the other facilities of the school. (Thanks again to Robyn Chapman for showing us around!)

And, as it turns out, this week someone came to our blog in a search for "what do you think of center for cartoon studies."

Mike had a really amazing experience in the Schulz Library, which I hope he's planning to blog about when he gets home from vacation. (He took pictures of a rare illustrated book, and I'm going to say no more about that now, except to note that its title is an anagram for the blog.)

Anyway, he was impressed, all around. Mike's reaction to the school can be summed up thus:


(Click to enlarge and read.)

If you haven't read Hicksville, to which Mike is alluding here, it's not too hard to find a used copy, and I hear that Drawn & Quarterly is bringing it back into print (with a gorgeous new cover) next year.

Here's my response to the same Google prompt. (The coloring is a little haphazard, but I was in a hurry this morning.)



If you don't know why I'm being interviewed with a robot, a snowman, and a piece of fruit, then clearly you've never applied to be a student at CCS.

(Thanks in advance to Minty Lewis for not complaining when I totally poached her pineapple.)

*If you're interested, here's a video tour of the Schulz Library, recently uploaded by Chuck McBuck:



At about 2:19 you can see (in the center of the frame) a boxed collection of Tales from the Crypt that I donated to the library, and toward the end of the tour I can see (from the position of Jon Chad's Shortstack and the missing rubber band on Bizarre Love Triangle) that this tour as filmed after Mike and I were there on Friday.

Pogo at the Center for Cartoon Studies

One nice thing about being on spring break is that it frees me up to do some of the sorts of work I don't have time for during the regular workweek. For example, today I took a drive down to the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction to give a little guest lecture in Steve Bissette and Robyn Chapman's "Survey of the Drawn Story" course.

This week's class was on the subject of autobiographical comics, and I brought in a few images that I thought would helpfully complicate the easiest or most straightforward way of thinking about autobiography. (In essence, I was trying to suggest that although a lot of people think autobiography is about "expressing your true self" or "getting yourself onto the page," it's actually much more a question of telling interesting stories, just as fiction is, and that this requires a certain distance between the writer as narrator and the character or person being written about—a kind of retrospective awareness of the difference between present and past selves.) Here's a six-panel picture of that, from my lecture slides. Please click to enlarge this clever sequence from Eddie Campbell's After the Snooter:




(Those images really aren't formatted for the blog, are they? They looked better in Powerpoint. Really, please: click to enlarge.)

Anyway, the class was a lot of fun, and discussion after my talk got pretty interesting. It's always cool for me to go down to CCS And meet the new crop of cartoonists there, because I'm always sure some of them are going to draw great things in the next decade or so.

And look what smiling, happy, interesting students, even after three hours of lecture about comics arcana:



(Again, click to enlarge, so you can see Steve Bissette way back there in the back, on the left.)

But I wouldn't drive all the way to White River Junction without taking in the sights!

Actually, the drive was beautiful this morning: the trees and mountains were still frosted like a gingerbread house from a snow we got a couple of days ago. And to tell you the truth, I have so much fun when I'm at CCS that I probably would drive down for no reason other than dropping in on a class. But there were sights to see.

For example, no one should visit White River Junction without doing a status check on Alec Longstreth's Basewood Beard. Here's what Alec looked like at lunch today:



Alec gave me the new issue of Phase 7, which is a travelogue about his trip to Angoulême this year. I'm halfway through reading it, and it's good. If you're comics-curious, you owe it to yourself to check out a few of Alec's comics. He's for real.

But the thing that got me wanting to drive down to White River Junction in the first place was an exhibit at CCS (closed to the public now, but Robyn let me have a peek) of Walt Kelly Pogo strips from the collection of Garry Trudeau.

Prepare to be envious, Mike.

It's a nice exhibit, though sort of small one—there are less than thirty strips up, but I didn't count them. (Maybe it's more like twenty?) I learned a few things right away. For example, I never knew that this old joke, which I probably got from my wise-ass uncle, is originally a Pogo joke:



By the way, you can click any of these pictures to enlarge it, as usual, and in some cases that'll mean beautiful scrutiny of Walt Kelly's linework or lettering, so you may enjoy doing that.

I also enjoyed looking at Kelly's pencils. Since he penciled in non-photo blue, his pencils are still there on the board, under the ink, for anyone to see. It's interesting to see panels where he clearly reworked poses or action a fair amount before inking:



And it's also interesting to see how much more compact than his pencilled dialogue his finished lettering sometimes turned out to be:



It was also interesting to see the character designs in a strip from 1948, before Pogo and Albert and friends had settled into their more familiar appearances.



But mostly it was just nice to soak up a little of the master craftsmanship. I'll post a few images (mostly of Churchy) without further comment.










Thanks to Robyn Chapman, Steve Bissette, and the people at CCS for the invitation! I'm always glad to drop in down there.

Two Comics Collections

How have I spent my summer vacation? Well, I may still have a post or two in me about my comics "discoveries" in Wales, but mainly I've been busy with moving in to this new place. I did take a day off from unpacking this week, though, and that took me back down to White River Junction and the Center for Cartoon Studies, where I met up with a few other comics scholars for a nice lunch and a quick tour of the CCS facilities.

Something I hadn't seen before is their Schulz Library, which is just a single room lined with shelves in the same building as the Main Street Museum. It's an incredible repository of interesting comics, books, and minicomics.


From the expression on Gene Kannenberg's face, you can see that it's a sort of treasure trove—about as close to Mrs. Hicks's library as you're likely to get in this hemisphere. I was particularly impressed with the minicomics collection (as yet uncatalogued), which is in the central island between Ana Merino and Robyn Chapman. Those gray bins are full of minis, on shelves all the way down to the floor.

Part of the reason I found the space so impressive is that I've been working on my own accursed comics library, unpacking it from boxes and alphabetizing as I go. I think I've got it all unloaded now. For a while I was worried that the comics wouldn't all fit on these new (crappy) shelves. (I do not recommend IKEA's "Leksvik" shelves: they look nice, and they're fairly light, but both of mine are distinctly wobbly.)


I think it's going to work, though: ceiling-to-floor comics. The perspective shift in the middle is the result of stitching two photos together: even IKEA shelves aren't going to distort that much in their first week of use.

If you click on that image above, you'll see a fuzzy image that hints at my dedication to Krazy Kat, to Lewis Trondheim, to Mome, and to Alan Moore. (How did I wind up with three copies of Watchmen, and how have I not discarded at least one of them?)

I'm afraid that's about as much comics activity as I can report this week. I did catch up on the latest Fables paperback (and the last Y: the Last Man one), but I don't have much to say about those. (Well, except that I thought it was genuinely weird that Yorick shaved his head to look more like the writer of the series. I'm not sure what to do with that.)

Anyway, as long as I'm showing blurry photos of the shelves in my study, here's the bookshelf in our house with the most books on it. It's not especially wide or tall; it's just that most of the books are quite skinny.


That's poetry, twentieth and twenty-first century only. It's all alphabetical, but I defy you to read those spines.

A Visit to the Center for Cartoon Studies

I'll get back to that pile of crappy comics soon, but I wanted to say a little bit about the visit I made last week to the Center for Cartoon Studies up in White River Junction, Vermont. Overall, I was impressed with the school and the students, and I think it's looking really nice for such a young operation in such a non-lucrative corner of the educational world.

I drove through some heavy snow the day before I went there, and the terrain beside the highways on the day I went to White River Junction was just gorgeous in a sort of gingerbread-house way. I just had to smile, looking out on all the fields covered in pristine snow, and the pine-trees crusted with snow (the spruces rough in the distant glitter, etc.). Because I was driving I didn't get any pictures of it, but here's a little snapshot from the town green in Burlington, the following day, to help you infer what the countryside and mountains looked like:


Anyway, I got off the freeway in White River Junction, drove a mile or so into downtown, turned a corner, and there it was:

The main space of the Center for Cartoon Studies is on the first floor of the old Colodny Surprise department store, and they've kept the awning out front, but the windows facing the street definitely declare cartoon allegiance:


Up until this point, the CCS had felt like sort of an imaginary place to me, like Oz or Avalon or Oxford: a place that I could read about, but probably wouldn't ever see. There was something a little giddy about seeing it in front of my eyes. Much about it seems mythical: a little school in a little post-industrial Vermont town, where each two-year cohort of twenty or so students gets instruction from top-notch literary cartoonists on the way to make a graphic novel. People like Chris Ware and Lynda Barry drop in. Students have their theses advised by Stan Sakai or Chester Brown. This unassuming building in this dingy, snowy town is one of the epicenters of the new movement in literary comics.

In fact, it's an ordinary building, not glamorously equipped or even eye-catching. But what goes on in there is really exciting. I like to imagine that the students at CCS are getting the equivalent of eight or ten years' worth of comics-making experience packed into their two-year sojourns in White River Junction. These folks will be equipped to write and draw some very smart stuff.

Anyway, I'd been invited to drop in by my friend Robyn Chapman...

...(who has a few really fine minicomics and who edits the zine Hey, Four-Eyes, in case you're inclined to do some shopping), and I called her cell phone so she could let me in to the building.

She was beaten to the door, though, by a cheerful Steve Bissette, who gave me a hearty handshake even though he doesn't know me from Adam. He was on his way out of the building as I was on my way in. I guess that's the sort of encounter one has at the epicenter.

Robyn showed me around the facility, including this attractive sign from the old Colodny Surprise store that hangs in the CCS lobby:


Down in the basement is the printing lab, which is open to the students around the clock. They've got a couple of computers, a couple of xerox machines, a wealth of long-arm staplers, a hydraulic paper-cutter, a screen-printing station, and a ping-pong table down there. Also some sofas, for when Steve Bissette hosts a movie night.

I was a little envious of all the printing equipment.

The real "purpose" of my trip to CCS, though, wasn't tourism. I was supposed to give a short talk to Jason Lutes's afternoon second-year workshop, so after lunch Robyn led me over to their studio space. I sat in on a couple of critiques, in which one of the students circulated copies of work in progress and got feedback from Jason and from his classmates. (I chimed in, too, here and there. My old poetry-workshop instincts resurfaced right away.)

...And then I talked for a few minutes about formal constraints and games. I tried to suggest that although there are plenty of constraints that only limit the things you can write or draw, there are also process-oriented "generative constraints," like the ones we used in some of that comic for Elfworld, or the constraint that propels the Mapjam project. These sorts of constraints can help you find your way to ideas you wouldn't otherwise have, and I think that having a few such constraints in your toolkit can help you get clear of any artistic stuck spot.

Anyway, then I taught them how to play Jesse Reklaw's game shuffleupagus. It's a hard game to explain, but we got three pages of shuffleupagus stuff turned out in about 45 minutes, with the second-year students working in three groups.

Here's a little picture of Jason Lutes in his group, with my lame attempt at explanatory doodles on the dry-erase board behind him:


... And here's a result from the session, not quite completely inked. (You can click to enlarge it.)

If any of the CCS students who drew this page happen to read this, please drop a note in the comments so I can give credit to the artists! I didn't get y'all's names while I was there.

All in all, it was a really pleasant day. I got to see a place that I've been wanting to see since before it even existed, and I got to meet a few people whom I'm sure I'll be glad to run into at MoCCA or SPX in the future. I got a really good feeling about CCS as a program of education and as an institution that's having a positive effect on the cartooning world. I hope I'll get to drop in there again some time.