I Saw You...: A List of the Lovelorn

Big news for us here at Satisfactory Comics headquarters this week: our work appears in a newly-published book. We have a couple of pages in a new collection edited by Julia Wertz and published by Three Rivers (an imprint of Random House) called I Saw You...: Comics Inspired by Real-Life Missed Connections.



The anthology collects about a hundred short comics by about a hundred cartoonist contributors, each responding to the request to tell a story based on a "Missed Connection" Craigslist posting. It's a fun book to read, an excellent late Valentine's Day gift, and a fascinating sample of the strange and diverse world of alternative / minicomics cartoonists.



There are some big names in the book—Mike and I are thrilled to be between two covers with Peter Bagge, for example—


... but for me, to tell the truth, the greater pleasure is to be in a book with so many of our cartoonist friends: it's great to see Damien Jay, Tom Hart, and Jesse Reklaw in the book, along with people I know less well but really like, like Cathy Leamy, Alec Longstreth, and Sarah Glidden.

(Here are a couple of panels from Sarah Glidden's contribution to the book, featuring a couple that fails to meet at a Dada / Duchamp museum exhibit.)



As I said, it's a lot of fun just to read I Saw You..., but for some reason I have also been thinking about the book in terms of its possible classroom uses, even though I know I'm not likely to be teaching "Creative Writing: Comics" any time in the immediate future. Maybe this is because the conceit of the book is almost like a creative-writing exercise: "Find a Craigslist 'Missed Connections' post and make it into a story."

And in fact, one of the most interesting things about the book, for me, is the number of ways that the contributing cartoonists have responded to this prompt. There are several straightforward or not-so-straightforward illustrations of the scene of meeting (or not-quite-meeting), like the Sarah Glidden story I just quoted. But there are also a number of other takes. Several of the pieces show the ad in the process of being written, often by a grotesque mass of lusting flesh, as epitomized in this drawing by Ken Dahl:

Humor can come from deliberately misreading or exaggerating some part of the original posting—"I'm sorry I didn't react better" is illustrated with the poster delivering an uppercut to an unsuspecting young man in The Ink Lab's contribution; and Kenny Keil's simple five-panel joke offers a positively Wenthean take on "exchanging smiles." There's plenty of fun to be had, too, in simply playing up the ridiculous strangeness that anonymous posting can allow.

A more poetic take on the recurring lonely monologues of the Craigslist board can be seen in Damien Jay's contribution.

Two of my favorite pieces in the book, the ones by Gabrielle Bell and Aaron Renier, don't quite follow the formula but instead tell autobiographical stories about undocumented missed connections and other uses for the missed-connections column, respectively. Both of those stories manage to pack a lot of complicated emotion into just a few pages, and they do a lot to extend the range of the book. Here are a couple of panels from Aaron's story:



But by and large I Saw You... is a really interesting casebook in transforming found materials into narrative. I imagine assigning it to a group of student cartoonists, then asking them to scour Craigslist and draw comics based on the postings without using any of the same strategies. It'd be a really hard assignment, though.

The other thing that I found fascinating about the book—and to tell the truth, even a little disorienting—was the way that it serves as an anthology of cartooning styles. There are no rules or house styles for drawing in the world of minicomics, and I Saw You... contains a really broad range of drawing styles, as you can already see from the images I've posted. The cartoons range from gawky naïve simplicity to photo-referenced hyperdetail, from clear-line elegance to exuberant brushwork, and from crude and sketchy to careful and tidy.

The best thing this book could do in a classroom for cartoonists, really, would be to liberate their sense of what good cartooning can look like. Would that sequence by Sarah Glidden be more effective if it were drawn more like this sequence by Kaz Strzepek?

Certainly not, but both of the stories work very well in the styles they're drawn in, and young cartoonists could easily learn a lot from both of these cartoonists.

There are even, necessarily, a few cartoonists that (for me, at least) would serve as negative examples. I'm not a fan of the stiff, photo-referenced, Photoshop-toned "good drawing" visible in the piece by Dan Henrick, for example ...

... though I do recognize that, as one of the book's reviewers pointed out, there's a clever detail in it: the book that the man's holding in this image should have told the woman that her chances were slim.

In fact, thinking about appealing cartooning styles reminds me that I Saw You... has tipped me off to a few cartoonists I'm going to have to watch—people whose work I don't remember seeing before, who seem to be really capable and interesting. These would include, for example ...



Indigo Kelleigh, whose cross-hatching is some of the most attractive in the book, and ...




Jonathan Hill, who has a really appealing brush line.

In short (as if that were still possible), I strongly recommend I Saw You..., and not only for Satisfactory Comics completists. It's a small book that packs a big punch. Just remember, in the words of Jeffrey Brown,

A Bit of Good News

Why so broken up, little guy?

Haven't you heard the good news, that our story that features you was accepted for the I Saw You anthology today? That's the story based on two real "Missed Connections" posts from Craigslist -- the story in which you fantasize about writing an ad to attract the attention of a beautiful barista, then realize that posting an ad like that would be really creepy. It's great news that the piece has been accepted -- lots of people will read it!

Oh, I see. You're sad because your humiliating thoughts will be exposed in front of all those readers, aren't you?

Well, I tell you what -- we'll fictionalize you, okay?

(The image above was one of Mike's preliminary doodles for the strip -- supposedly those are the panels that happen right after the ending of our second page.)

One panel from a new story

Last week, during the same session that produced those new shuffleupagus pages, Mike pencilled a new story, which we're going to be submitting to an anthology called I Saw You. The anthology is a bunch of short comics based on "Missed Connection" posts to Craigslist and other similar classifieds.

Anyway, earlier today I finished inking the piece, and although I'm going to hold off on posting the whole thing for a while, this panel more or less captures the spirit of the story:


Are you tantalized? (Y/N)

_______ Are Always Fun to Draw (Sept. 2005)

Some time a couple years ago Mike and I were talking about doing a series of drawings of things that we simply found fun to draw. I think the initial idea was that we'd each do a page from some sort of master list, then put the results in a new Satisfactory Comics in the unspecified future. Then it started to seem reasonable to invite a few other cartoonists in on the project. And before long this little thing had ballooned into a book in its own right.

Here's what went into it: I polled twenty-two cartoonists (including Mike and myself), asking for lists of forty things that each given cartoonist considered to be "always fun to draw." As these came in, I collated them into one big list, putting things closer to the top if they got named by multiple cartoonists. Eventually, I had a "master list" of the thirty most popular items (each of which had been nominated several times), plus a long addendum with interesting things that had been named less frequently.

Each of the twenty-two participating cartoonists then had to draw, on a single page, the thirty most popular items, plus at least ten items from the rest of the list. Just to give you a taste of this, the top ten items were as follows: skulls or skeletons, dinosaurs, robots, octopi or squid, space aliens, cats, monkeys or apes, rockets or spaceships, demons, and fish (especially in goldfish bowls) -- so you'll see those things, plus at least thirty more, on every page.

A couple of people -- most notably Sam Henderson -- tried to include every (or nearly every) item on the list. Others, like Bill Kartalopoulos and Ben Towle, drew up a grid and filled precisely forty boxes. Some people let the cartoons sprawl over an empty space (like Scott C. did), and some put all the elements in a single scene: Karen Sneider's epic battle is hilarious, and Avi Spivak's midnight monster mash is full of crazy energy. Tom Motley turned his list into a hidden-pictures image, with some things literally in the scene and other things hiding in its negative space.

I made mine into a poem, a little primer verse about the Fun-To-Draw alphabet.

That's probably too small to read, even when you click on it, because it's a pretty detailed page. (I like to work at a pretty minute level of detail.) Here are a few of my favorite couplets, presented a little closer to ths size at which they were drawn:





Mike's page in _________ Are Always Fun to Draw is a complete scene, also full of fun details. His self-portrait (one of the required items) drifts downstream in an overturned umbrella (another required item), looking out warily over a crazy variety of other things:


For my money, a big part of the fun in this image is in the details -- things that are too small to show up well in that jpeg. Off in the distance, an angel whistles while a demon burns up a zeppelin:

...and just below that, two flying reptiles (one historical, the other mythical) confront each other with alarm and consternation:

I'm telling you, the book is at least as much fun to look at as it was to draw.

You can see a few of the other pages in Shawn Hoke's review of the book, but let me also bring in a few of my favorite samples or selections. Lindsay Nordell outlined her page as a series of "inconclusive battles" -- like Abraham Lincoln vs. Sherlock Holmes, or like these two:


Some of the pages are just beautiful, like the one provided by Bishakh Som. (This small sample doesn't quite include the monkey DJ that might be my favorite part of the whole image.)


And what could be more fun than the doodly spread contributed by Scott C. of Doublefine Action Comics? I've moved a couple of items around, here, to make it fit more neatly in a rectangle, but this is less than a quarter of his page. You're looking at a gun, an umbrella, a turtle, a demon, an eyeball, a bat, a viking, a car crash, a drunk cowboy, a sperm whale, Hunter S. Thompson, a self-portrait, and a volcano.


See what I mean? Fun.

Contributors to this book are Scott C., Shawn Cheng, Carlos Commander, Jacob Edwards, Avery Foster, Sam Henderson, C Hill, Damien Jay, Bill Kartalopoulos, Shana Mlawski, T. Motley, Lindsay Nordell, Adam Rosenblatt, Joe Sayers, Katie Skelly, Karen Sneider, Bishakh Som, Avi Spivak, Ben Towle, Tim Winkelman, and Mike and myself.

If you'd like to own this little book of fun, you can order it from our Storenvy shoppe.

Desert Island Paradise (Jan. 2006)

Desert Island Paradise is an anthology for which we were invited to contribute a few single-panel cartoons. The whole 40-page booklet consists of single-panel desert-island cartoons (you know, a castaway in tattered clothes, a single palm tree, an island the size of an area rug -- like the ones in the New Yorker) drawn by minicomics cartoonists -- mostly folks from the West Coast. I think it's really neat to see people like Lark Pien and Jesse Reklaw, whom I've seen working in much longer formats, take a crack at this old chestnut of a genre.

Although our cartoons were drawn up separately, Mike and I did manage to collaborate on our pieces for this book, in a three-stage process: first, we drew up short lists of constraints or prompts for each other -- ways that the joke could be made to work. (For instance, one of them was "many separate desert islands.") Then we submitted proposals to each other for possible jokes, and let the other guy decide which piece we should draw. Or at least that's how I remember it.

I remember, for example, that Mike suggested I should do a joke on the topic of "Desert Island Discs," so I came up with this:

(The joke, at least as I understand it, is that even though it's a great album, some of the songs on Blonde on Blonde get old even before they're finished. I mean, "Visions of Johanna" is more than seven minutes long, and so are two other tracks on the album. So, you know, a Dylan fan might pick that album for a "desert island disk" and then regret the choice on the very first listen. For this guy, it has lasted unreasonably long, and he still eventually got sick of it. Also, it's sort of funny to see a big stereo on such a tiny island, I guess. There: I have explained my joke, so it will never be funny no more.)

One of the prompts I sent to Mike was that the joke should involve anachronism. This is his entry for the book:


So you see: we've done our duty, and drawn our castaways. There are thirty-eight more cartoons like this, including one more by me, in Desert Island Paradise, and a few of them are bound to make you laugh.

It's a really well-edited and interesting anthology, and we're happy to be a part of it. It'll also probably make for the linkiest post on our entire website, because the contributors to this anthology include (take a deep breath...): Alixopulos, Rina Ayuyang, Gabe Crate, Vanessa Davis, Josh Frankel (who co-edited the book), Fredo, Sam Henderson, Hob, Matt Leunig, Melanie Lewis, Erik Nebel (I think that's the right link), Tom Neely, Onsmith, Lark Pien, Jesse Reklaw, Joe Sayers (the other co-editor), Geoff Vasile, and of course Mike and myself.

I no longer have any spare copies of this book, so I guess it's not for sale here. You can get a copy from Joey Sayers.

What is a Mapjam?

The Mapjam is a collaborative, serialized experiment in worldbuilding. That clears up all your questions, right?

It's actually sort of hard to explain, though I think it's easy to understand once you have the project in your hands. There's a map, which a group of cartoonists created in advance, and it's divided into nine sectors. In each "round" of the mapjam, each of us gets assigned to one sector of the map and tells a story set there. When those are done, each cartoonist is shuffled into a sector where he or she hasn't set a story before, and the process is repeated. Gradually, longer stories evolve out of the connections and continuations from one story to another.

For example: in the first round, our pal Adam Rosenblatt had the central sector, which features Pumpkin Jack's house. He drew Pumpkin Jack as a bear with wings:


I wound up with that sector in the second round, and started a continuation of Pumpkin Jack's story that explains why he has that name: he can make plants grow, flower, and fruit. (Clicking this picture will make it a little bigger.)

By the end of my story, Pumpkin Jack was sending a couple of other characters off on a quest that resembles something out of the Oz books, trying to find someone to patch up the calendar so that Jack (and everyone else) will stop losing a month's worth of days every year.

Part of the fun of the mapjam is watching different people pick up characters and situations that you've developed. Inevitably, your collaborators take your ideas in a direction you might not have considered. Your characters look different in another cartoonist's hands, but if the cartoonist is reading you carefully, they won't behave too differently. Here's a snippet from Mike's first mapjam story:


And here's the way these two musicians look in the hands of our friend Damien Jay:


Another big part of the fun for this project is that it has so many different imaginations running in it at the same time. New characters appear in nearly every story, and the minor details in one person's tale can become central in another one. It's hard to predict where the stories will go next. In the upcoming round, will Tom K do more with Tom Motley's "Conan Doyle, Barbarian Detective?" Will he set his story in Harm's Way, on the Random Isthmus, or elsewhere?


Only Tom K knows the answer to those questions, though I'm pretty sure that in my next piece I'm going to use these four "locals" from his terrific second-round story -- incidental characters who only appear in one panel apiece:


If you want to see more of the Mapjam, Damien's story and Tom Motley's story for the first round are both online at their own websites.

The first two rounds of the Mapjam were available in a forty-page (!) minicomic, but it's out of stock. I'll reprint all the stories when we complete the next round of the jam.

Contributors for the mapjam include Adam Rosenblatt, Tom Motley, Tom K, Damien Jay, Isaac Cates, and Mike Wenthe. The next round will also feature Cathy Leamy, and I've been talking with a couple of other cartoonists about filling the last two spots in the roster.