Siena Find #1: Chris Ware Cameo

In July I took a two-week trip to Tuscany, and spent most of it in Siena. I have a couple of things to report from that trip, and I'm hoping to get the other major one up on the blog before the Labor Day weekend is over. Here's the first: a surprising cameo from an easy-to-recognize character, in a place I'd never have expected to see him.

So: Siena has a very famous cathedral, covered inside and out with elaborate gothic ornament, not far from the center of town.

And around the back of the cathedral is the Baptistery.

Here's the door through which you enter the Baptistery:



Before you enter, however, you may notice that a mat is covering (and protecting) an elaborate inlay marble mosaic on the pavement outside the entrance.



If you look more closely at the mosaic figures there near the corner of the mat...



(No, better tug the mat aside so you can see them more clearly.)



I bet you'd wonder why Jimmy Corrigan, of all people, would be decorating a 14th-century Sienese cathedral!

Doodle Penance: "how to draw ware wolf"

This week's "Doodle Penance" is the product of a search for a fairly simple bit of information: "How to draw ware wolf."

I think I know what this Googler was looking for, and as usual I'm surprised we haven't talked about it yet. I mean, Doodle Penance has featured information about lycanthropy before, but we've never mentioned the most important connection between contemporary cartooning and the children of the night.

I refer, of course, to the fact that Chris Ware, author of ACME Novelty Library among other fine cartoon publications, undergoes an eerie transformation under the light of the full moon. Here's a little bit from his sketchbooks that describes the process:




I bet you didn't realize that several panels in "The Graveyard of Forking Paths" were swiped from Chris Ware, did you?

Mike? What have you got this week?

—Well, it so happens that Chris Ware has already drawn a wolf in his characteristic circular style, as seen in his Fairy Tale Road Rage contribution to Little Lit (click here to see it), so I thought I'd simply show how to draw that. That Ware wolf looks more or less like this:
Now, you can tell at a glance that most of this image is easily reproduced using the Ed Emberley inventory method. Almost every element can be found among the simple shapes below:

From left to right, that gives you the basic shape of the skull; the oval nose with its small circular highlight; the "therefore" symbol (three dots) for the wolf whiskers; the squashed C (or "Pogo nose") for the snout; the medium circle for the eye; and the leafless black tulip for the pupil.

However, these simple shapes will not suffice for the most complicated part of the Ware wolf: the black cap of the fur, ears, and cheek. Frankly, that shape is too hard to draw unless you are actually Chris Ware himself. Fortunately, there is a work-around. Simply capture a famous cartoon rodent and scalp him, then pluck off the ears to leave the roots of the ears to serve as convenient wolfish tufts, thus:

You can simply discard the remainder of the rodent in a convenient receptacle:
This method works well to provide the necessary impossible-to-draw shape, but it has its own "drawbacks" (if you'll, heh heh, pardon the pun!). As with any tissue graft, there is the risk of rejection by the host, so you'll need to administer a strict regimen of immunosuppressant drugs to avoid afflicting your drawing with the hellish outcome of a scalp-rejection:

And that's how to draw Ware wolf!

Doodle Penance: "jimmy corrigan in the classroom"

This week's "Doodle Penance" comes from a pretty reasonable request, posed by an anonymous Google searcher (as usual): "jimmy corrigan in the classroom."

I feel pretty well prepared to talk about lesson plans or whatever on Chris Ware's awesome Jimmy Corrigan.

I've read it carefully nearly a dozen times, and I've taught it to college students six or seven times at least. (I lose track. It hasn't been on all of my comics syllabi, but it has been on most of them.) I feel sort of like I'd be disappointing my colleagues at NACAE if I didn't approach this seriously. On the other hand, after last week's penance, I'm convinced none of our readers need me to take another of these prompts too seriously.

Perhaps our Google searcher was just a schoolteacher looking for a nice graphic to use for an upcoming snow day, in which case, let me recommend this:



Ah, carefree youth!

The nineteenth-century Jimmy (I guess we normally call him James or Granpa) doesn't spend a whole lot of the book in the classroom, but apparently he's a good student. Or maybe his teacher's just sympathetic because James's mother just died. But in this sequence, his teacher taps him to be one of four children participating in a parade-stand display connected to the World's Fair.





... But she might just have picked James because he's one of only a few children enrolled at the school. I mean, his classmates look amazingly middle-aged. The poor little runt really is a fish out of water.



I'd never noticed that before. It seems like I notice something new in this book every dang time I pick it up.

Where was I?

Oh, right. Doodle penance. I'm not supposed to be scanning Chris Ware's work and discussing its nuances. I'm supposed to be drawing something of my own, preferably something stupid, and posting that.

Well, having taught Jimmy Corrigan several times now, I can say that the first hurdle is just getting the students to read the whole thing. It's a "bold experiment in reader tolerance" in more ways than one. (Actually, that's how I often start my lessons on Ware: "In what various ways is this book a test of your tolerance? How is it difficult, and to what ends?")

... But at some point, there's inevitably another moment of awkwardness, when we start asking about the weird semi-Freudian, often-Oedipal imagery of Jimmy's dream sequences. What does the robot mean? Why is Superman acting like such a jerk? What's the allegedly symbolic fascination with peaches? And why is the book so interested in horses?

These questions really aren't difficult because they're obscure; they're difficult because I don't want to be too explicit about the answers.



Hm. That picture didn't turn out so well, though I think swiping some of Ware's colors helps it out a little bit. But using a Rapidograph really killed my pencils this time around: the lines of Jimmy's face need to be finer than I could make them with that pen.

Mike? What have you got?

—Hey, Isaac...Sorry for the slight delay, but I was at an Oscars party. Perhaps you'll accept that as an excuse if I tell you that I came home with a copy of Hellboy: Seed of Destruction AND a Hellboy figurine, thanks to the missus's winning of a prize for her Oscar prognostication?

Perhaps not. Regardless, here's what I got. First, Jimmy Corrigan in "the classroom," which is to say a drawing of young Jimmy made up of the letters in the words "the classroom" (the "E" is turned sideways):
I figured that I wouldn't try to compete with your account (and doodle) of teaching the graphic novel, since I've only done so once, myself. However, I can also fight back with a previously unpublished drawing by Chris Ware, which he sketched for me in November 2007 at the "Graphic Novels in the Classroom" event where I pontificated on a panel with some other DC comics scholar types:

Maybe that'll get me some points in this non-competition!

Something I Hadn't Noticed in Jimmy Corrigan (Until This Week)

This has to be another light post. I still haven't read everything from my last Swansea find (which was back in July!), so I can only present another trivium that has surfaced from my comics-reading this week.

I have been retooling that paper on Chris Ware's diagrams from last year's MLA, for a collection of essays that should be forthcoming from University Press of Mississippi. As I was writing about the last diagram in Jimmy Corrigan—the one that reveals Amy's ancestry, and shows that she's actually a close blood relation to all of the Corrigan men in the book—I noticed something about the diagram that I hadn't seen before. (This surprises me, because I've taught the book several times, and I'd already written about this diagram once.)

You'll remember, probably, the diagram I'm talking about. Toward the end of it it, it looks like this:



That little girl is the half-sister of James Corrigan, the little boy in the nineteenth-century parts of the book and the shriveled old "Granpa" in the twentieth-century parts of the book.

Those panels are all set against a background that shows the William Corrigan house in the foreground.



What I had never noticed is the tiny figure in the background of that background, under this last diagram panel with the little girl. Here's the last image in the diagram's "chain" again.



... and if you look really closely...



Not only is Amy related by blood to her adopted father and grandfather, but her great-grandmother grew up just a few hundred yards away from young James, or so it seems. I've always argued that this diagram is in the book to heighten our sense of the sadness of the failed connection between Jimmy and Amy; I hadn't really taken into account the way that it also adds sadness to the story of little James. (As if that story needed more sadness.)

That's it for now. Stay tuned for an announcement about this year's SPX.

New Clowes and Ware from Penguin: The Book of Other People

So: there are short stories by Dan Clowes and Chris Ware in the new collection called The Book of Other People, edited by Zadie Smith for the benefit of 826 New York and published by Penguin.

The Ware story ("Jordan Wellington Lint") is really surprising, because it uses a formal device I haven't seen Ware use before: each page is dated to a moment in the title character's childhood, with a drawing style meant to evoke the developing consciousness of the character, who ages from birth to age 13 over the course of the strip. One of my co-panelists from the Ware MLA thing called this device "Joycean," and I think it definitely stands up under that comparison.

Worth noticing, too, are a fun set of Posy Simmonds illustrations for a story by Nick Hornby. (Or, really, it's not quite a "story": it's a series of about-the-author blurbs that track the undistinguished literary career of James Johnson.) That's a light, funny piece, and Simmonds's illustrations do a lot to help it work.

But I should say something about the Dan Clowes story, since I've scanned a couple of panels from it. It's a study of a single evening in the life of an online "film critic" named Justin M. Damiano, who is on the verge of writing a scathing review of a new film by a director whose work he used to like. I imagine that in the context of this book, the story might seem kind of slight: it's just four pages long, and it rises and falls on a single decision.

But following Ice Haven's Harry Nabors and the ruminations about filmmaking in David Boring, this piece seems like an interesting addendum. Are critics really like horseflies? Damiano is. Like the girls in Ghost World, he aggressively espouses opinions that seem to have been crafted merely to be contrary; he seems to be driven by a combination of loneliness and narcissism. It's a compelling, even somewhat sympathetic portrait of an internet personality type that we're all familiar with.


So: it's a fun book, and it's for a good cause. I should point out, though, that I just got it a couple of busy days ago, and I haven't actually read the prose pieces yet. So this is not a review, really—just a recommendation that you seek this book out.

The Chicago MLA Roundtable on Chris Ware

Well, it looks like it has been a while since I posted to the old blog. I've got a good excuse, though, and it starts with the letters MLA. I think I have recovered from the trip now, but I tell you, it was exhausting.

On the Thursday night of the convention, though, I gave a short paper on a round-table panel on Chris Ware. I am not exaggerating when I say this was the best panel I've seen in four MLA conventions: the most tightly conceived, the most interesting, and the most provocative (of subsequent conversation). That has very little to do with my own paper, and lots to do with the other people on the panel, plus the excellent organizing of Dave Ball.

The paper I gave was called "Chris Ware and the Grammar of Diagrams," and it was mostly kind of inspired by some things that Kevin Huizenga said in the "How to Draw Thinking" panel at SPX a couple of years ago. I spent some time in the paper looking closely at the diagrams in Jimmy Corrigan, talking about the way that Ware hides interesting (and, in one case, important) details about the interconnection of the characters' lives in the inscrutable recesses of the diagrams. But the main thing I wanted to claim—and which I only had a couple of minutes to discuss—is the way that the basic reading method of comics seems to be related to the visual grammar of the informational diagram. (I can tell you more about this if you're interested.) Looking at diagrams, as I said toward the end of the paper, can give cartoonists a lot of ideas for innovative ways of connecting information on the comics page.

In case you need reminding, here's one of Ware's diagrams (but not one that has information about the characters: this one just tells you how to read a single-panel cartoon). You can click to enlarge it.


The other four papers on the panel were all really great. Our friend Martha Kuhlman gave a quick talk about Chris Ware's relation to the "Oubapo" movement, and she very generously included us in her list of American "oubapians," based on our interest in formal constraints. Matt Godbey talked about Building Stories and the way that gentrification has been hitting the neighborhood represented in that recent Ware story. Peter Sattler gave a really provocative (I thought) piece about the way that Ware depicts memory—and not only the memory of an event, but the memory of a feeling. (I really wish I could reproduce the Peter's whole argument, because I know there are parts of it that I found really persuasive, and there were other parts I wasn't sure about. I'd like to pick it apart with him.) The fifth paper on the panel was Benj Widiss's paper about Quimby the Mouse as autobiography, focusing in particular on the way that changes to Quimby's head (decapitation, mutation, removal, etc.) are a good symbol for the self-in-formation as Ware develops toward a mature sensibility.

I wish I could present more details about the papers, because they were all really stimulating. There were some really nice moments in the post-papers discussion, too—I remember a moment when one of Matt's slides from Building Stories turned out to be useful in making a point about one of Peter's claims because of the way the image could be read as a diagram. Or something like that. Anyway, the connections between the papers were really stimulating, and I'm hoping I'll get to keep in touch with all of these comics scholars. It's the best academic panel on comics I've been a part of that didn't also include Mike.

(That was another one of my slides.)

One non-comics-related thing about my trip to Chicago: I was totally charmed by the public sculpture named "Cloud Gate," which everyone calls "The Bean." It was just a couple of blocks south of our conference hotel, and on Sunday I developed a little bit of an obsession with it, I think. Here's a cell-phone photo:


It's highly reflective stainless steel. It's thirty-three feet tall. You can walk under it with plenty of headroom, and there are tons of weird reflections-of-reflections-of-reflections in the "omphalos" on its underside. It made me giggle like a four-year-old. I had to go back again and see it at night.

Anyway, it's good to be back. I'll try to post again in less than a week, maybe when I start working on my syllabus for this spring's course on the graphic novel.

Acme Novelty Datebook, vol. 2

I've finished the pencils for p. 10, and I want to post them tonight so I can get feedback before the inking starts, but the batteries in my camera are drained, and my scanner doesn't pick up pencils well. I'm recharging the camera batteries right now.

Meanwhile, let me note that in the past two days, I got a couple of books that promise to keep me busy in any spare minutes I might have between now and the spring semester. One is The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, which I got on Amazon for a ridiculously low price (something like $58 instead of its $150 cover price); the other is the new second volume of the Acme Novelty Datebook, which is a powerful reminder of the value of keeping a notebook. Chris Ware draws and thinks like an utter genius, even in his moments of self-loathing or idle time. It's hard to think of a more impressive record of a cartoonist's working process, or a more impressive book of incidental drawings.

Like the volume before it (and like the final paragraphs of Gulliver's Travels which I happened to re-read this morning), this installment of Acme Novelty Datebook is a stern rebuke against pride.

If Chris Ware tells himself, every day, many times a day, that he sucks, then what can the rest of us think of ourselves?