Quick Post: Chester Brown Monkey Doodle

I asked for this quick sketch at MoCCA in 2004.

I'm busy with other things at my desk, but I didn't want you to think the blog was going into silent mode. I'll be posting again once I hit a deadline for some writing that's a bit less ephemeral than the blog (knock wood).

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.)

MoCCA Report

As usual, the best word to describe MoCCA was overwhelming. There are so many interesting (and uninteresting) comics spread out in those four rooms of the Puck Building that the only way to navigate the show is to settle on some sort of plan or compromise from the beginning. Throwing yourself into the crowd and looking at everything seems sort of hopeless to me, because it doesn't take long for eyeball fatigue to set in.



The weather this weekend wasn't too cooperative, either: I think it's a lot easier to get tired of browsing when the room's just a little too humid or just a little too hot, and even before the fire alarm there was just no way the Puck Building's air conditioners could keep up with the heat and the sun. I wasn't on the seventh floor much, but I've heard that it was steamy up there.

Anyway, for me the show was mostly social: I wanted to pick up any exciting new books, sure, but mainly I wanted to catch up with my friends from Artists With Problems and a few other comics pals. Getting our new issue into a few hands was a secondary goal, I guess. I didn't spend a lot of time roving around the convention floor this year, and I probably missed a dozen or more really cool minicomics just because I never passed by the right tables.



That's what our table looked like. I think I managed to sell or trade or give away about a hundred copies of the latest issue, and a few less than that of our little ABC books. Those aren't terrific numbers, but it was still fun to show them around.

Here are five things that made this year's MoCCA memorable for me: one unpleasant thing and four really good ones.

1. The Fire Drill



Midway through the day on Sunday, someone or something tripped a fire alarm in the Puck Building. For a while, business went on as usual, but eventually the Fire Department arrived and the MoCCA volunteers opened all of the building's doors and started herding everyone outside into the humid Manhattan heat.



In a way, it was a kind of happy digression from the convention: everyone was packed together on the sidewalk, and because it was clear that there was no fire,* there was a good deal of sarcasm and levity in the crowd.



After a long ten minutes or so, the firefighters emerged from the building, and Alec Longstreth said, "Should we clap? We should clap, right?" There was a small ovation, after which Evan Dorkin quipped, "But they didn't buy any comics."

*Okay, actually, I just read Valerie D'Orazio saying that there was some sort of boiler fire in the basement. On the other hand, Evan Dorkin suggests that it was an overheated boiler but no actual fire. Anyway, there was definitely no sign of fire or smoke on the convention floor, and I think everyone assumed that it was a false alarm.

2. Catching Up



There's no sense going over this in a lot of detail, but I was really glad that MoCCA turned out to be such a nice aggregator for my friends in comics. I had a few conversations with my pals Damien Jay and Jon Lewis (pictured above), caught up with Tom K (pictured below) and met his fellow Minnesota cartoonist Will Dinski, caught up with Cathy Leamy and Robyn Chapman, bumped into Jason Lutes, had dinner with Bill Kartalopoulos, and shared a table with Tom Motley (who somehow managed to escape my camera completely.



It was also nice to see my former students Caitlin McGurk and John Hagan, who had a few minis to sell from our table. On Saturday, John showed up in a t-shirt that proclaimed his affection for his fictional comics doppelganger:



I also caught up with Shawn Cheng and Matt Wiegle of Partyka, whom I caught in action behind their table.



(That's Shawn on the left and Matt on the right, with Sean T. Collins in the middle.)



Finally, here's a shot of my friend Damien with his soon-to-be-bride Melanie "Minty" Lewis. Even in the midst of a heatwave fire alarm, they look like they're having a fine time.

3. The books I got

As I said, I didn't do a lot of shopping, but I still came home with more than a week's worth of reading. Here are some of the things I'm most excited about:



Spiraling in clockwise from the far left, there's:
Damien's new book The Natural World,
Tom Motley's new collection of True Fiction experiments,
a couple of recent issues of Alec Longstreth's Phase 7,
Motley's little Comic Book Artists I Have Known,
Jessica Abel's Trazo de Tina,
Matt Madden's Minnesota,
the latest chapter of Sarah Glidden's How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less,*
Aaron Reinier's new Uninoodle mini,
a beautiful little Ransom Strange mini from Tom K,
Matt Wiegle's hilarious Is It Bacon?, a new issue of Robyn Chapman's Sourpuss,
a little bitty mini by Joe Lambert (who just graduated from the Center for Cartoon Studies),
the fifth issue of Cathy Leamy's Geraniums and Bacon,
and a new issue of John Hagan's Lull.

And these are just the ones I got in trade for our new issue. I encourage you to seek these comics out. (See links above, if there's no link in this paragraph.) They're definitely some fine reading material.

*And hey! Check out my meaty paws setting up some comics in Sarah's photostream!




This is a selection of the minis I bought, followed by a selection of other minis I got in trade. I don't know what's inside most of these yet, but if something emerges as deserving special attention, I'll try to make a follow-up post later.



There were two larger books that I'm really excited to have brought home. One of these was Mike Dawson's Freddie & Me, which obviously deserves a longer review-style post after I read it. It looks great.

Mike was promoting the book at his table with a huge figure of Freddie Mercury. Here he is:



Mike's wife Aliza encouraged me to take another photo of the other side of the figure, which she assured me was remarkably detailed, but I declined.

The other book I'm really excited about is an old copy of the out-of-print Incredible Upside-Downs of Gustave Verbeek. You can now remove that book from my Christmas list. I've been looking for a copy for a long time, and before the show even started I found one at the table of the excellent Belgian publisher Bries.



4. Four Short, Validating Conversations

A. I had a chance to tell Scott C. how much I am enjoying the framed print of his Ninjas All Over the Place, which I received as an awesome Christmas present and now have up over my desk.

B. I had a brief chat with Zander Cannon about 24-hour comics and collaborative comics.

C. I gave a copy of the our new issue to Kazimir Strzepek and showed him the little swipe of his characters that appears on page ten of our story. He seemed really pleased to see his little guys there (and in full color).

D. In general, people seemed pretty impressed with the way the new issue turned out. Tom Hart said he had really enjoyed constraining us, and Brendan Burford said the new issue looked really great. (He also said "I love Satisfactory Comics," but I'm not going to hold him to that.)

4. An Awesome Minute or Two with Lynda Barry

Here comes the highlight of the show for me. Lynda Barry was at the Drawn & Quarterly table, signing copies of her awesome new book What It Is, which I recommend strenuously to anyone who wants to write, draw, or remember. (Seriously.) If she hasn't officially been designated a national treasure, I think Congress needs to get on that at top speed.



There was a super-long line for her signatures, and I hadn't even brought my copy of What It Is, so I tried not to take up too much of her time. But when she saw my nametag, she said, "Have we met?"

I told her we hadn't, but that she had met my collaborator Mike Wenthe, when she was in DC for the PEN/Faulkner Awards. She said, "Then I know your work! You guys draw kick-ass demons!"

There you have it: a five-word highlight of a busy, crazy, intense weekend:

"You guys draw kick-ass demons!"

And yes, hard-core fan that I am, I did ask her to draw a monkey in my monkey book.

Dupuy & Berberian at Housing Works Bookstore, Soho

You can't really tell from this blurry photo, but the sunset light on Manhattan was very pretty on Wednesday afternoon. (As always, I was surprised at how easy it was to drive right into Soho. I grew up thinking of New York as some impregnable fortress of ultradense population, but if anything it's easier to drive into Manhattan than the centers of more automotive cities.)

Anyway, I was in New York for a reading, at the Housing Works Bookstore Café, being given by this year's Angoulême Grand Prix awardees, Philippe Dupuy and Charles Berberian. If you're familiar with their work, you'll know right away that it's of special interest to Mike and me, because Dupuy & Berberian collaborate in the same way that we do:

Each cartoonist holds one part of a big pencil, and they steer it as a pair of people steers a canoe. Inking is done by the same method.

Actually, as Berberian noted during the presentation, their (and our) method of collaboration is "easy to explain, but difficult to understand: we just draw together." He said he knows that it's difficult to understand the process, because they still don't understand it completely after doing it for decades.

The discussion was moderated ably by Matt Madden. He's on the left below, and Berberian is on the right.


If this looks a little like any pictures that Matt posts, it's because I was also shooting pictures for him from the same seat.

Dupuy & Berberian were funny, and articulate, and really very charming. They read aloud from the English translation of Maybe Later, and talked through several of the Monsieur Jean stories that appear in Get a Life, too. The audience was packed -- there's a lot of room in Housing Works, and people were crowded almost all the way back to the cash register, or at least that's the way it looked from where I was sitting. A substantial chunk of New York's alternative / literary comics scene turned out for the event, but I'm not going to list the people I saw.

One thing you may not realize about Dupuy and Berberian is that Berberian's hands are superhumanly fast.


This accounts for their clean, graceful linework, obviously.

The highlights of the talk, for me, were pages from Dupuy's soon-to-be-released autobiographical meditation Haunted and from the pair's joint travel sketchbooks, which don't seem to be forthcoming in English. Here's an image of Berberian discussing a page from Dupuy's sketchbook that depicts a salon in a hotel in Tangiers.

I've only glanced at Haunted, but it seems like a fascinating departure from the Monsieur Jean books: dark, introspective, and surrealistic. Maybe I'll let you know when I get a chance to read it.

After the reading, I did ask Dupuy & Berberian to draw a couple of monkeys for me. I felt like a dork asking, as I always do, but I know that the result will put a smile on my face years from now.

And yes, Mike, I did give each of them a copy of the Treatise.

SPX Report / Owning Up to It

Things that a couple of my cartoonist friends said at different times this weekend at SPX have got me thinking. Here's a sort of disjointed essay about letting yourself enjoy things that aren't cool.

First, during the panel on “genre” in alternative comics, our pal Jon Lewis was talking about the period in one’s life when one powerfully wants to be taken seriously and therefore loudly denounces or eschews anything that’s not “serious.” Maybe this particular pupal stage is only experienced by a certain variety of nerd, but it’s definitely something I recognized in my own past personality.

At a certain point in your development, though, as Jon said, you start to feel secure enough in your own personality to allow yourself access to the unhip, the non-serious, the mainstream, and so forth. You can even enjoy some of it without irony.

I have a playlist on my iPod that I listen to sometimes on my way to work. This playlist is all ’80s pop songs that I thought were for idiots when I was in high school (and totally into the Talking Heads)—stuff like “Walking on Sunshine” or Wang Chung’s “Dance Hall Days.” They're actually really enjoyable songs. Now, my only embarrassment when I listen to them is that I was such a snob about them decades ago, when I was green in judgment. And there are certainly analogues from the world of comics.

Later, at the Ignatz afterparty, I was telling my friends from Partyka about the genre panel. There had been this moment on the panel when Gilbert Hernandez, talking about writing Birds of Prey for DC, was joking about how he’d been confused about Barbara Gordon being stuck in a wheelchair. (I’m paraphrasing here, but what he had said was something like, “You see, there was this issue of Superman where Lois Lane had a mermaid’s tail, and Superman learned how to be a surgeon so he could reattach her real legs; why can’t Superman just fix Batgirl’s legs?”) So, as I’m describing this and Shawn and Matt are chuckling, Sara Edward-Corbett goes, “You guys are such total nerds.” Or, anyway, words to that effect. I think she meant it kindly.

And I thought, you know, I’m okay with that. There are things about mainstream comics that don’t interest me one bit, and there’s a lot that I won’t bother reading, but I’m not going to deny that I have a segment of superhero “history” printed indelibly on my brain. (It’s a different segment than Gilbert Hernandez’s, I’m sure, but if anyone needs me to describe Kirby’s run on Kamandi or, God help me, the first dozen issues of Alpha Flight, I can probably do it.)

Come to think of it, I consider it kind of a compliment that one of my cartoonist friends asked me to remind him what Metron’s chair looks like, for a sketch he was doing this weekend.

I’m not even going to disallow the possibility that some unhip, mainstream stuff currently being printed would turn out to be enjoyable. I liked the first six issues of the Waid / Perez Brave and the Bold, for example. I can admit that.

Anyway, all of this has led me to think about why it is that I enjoyed this year’s SPX more than I did last year’s. I think it’s mostly because this year I took it a lot less seriously. I mean, I was a little nervous about the panel I moderated, and I was glad that it went well. I was honored to be the one to introduce Bill Griffith’s lecture. But on the show floor I was neither concerned about being cool nor worried at all about selling Satisfactory Comics. (I gave out a lot of postcards, and traded quite a few copies of #7, but I didn’t sell a single comic.) Basically, I was treating the convention floor as what it is, for me: a venue where I can pursue my minicomics hobby.



Also, I have a couple of notebooks that I’ve slowly been filling with sketches by other cartoonists, one book with monkeys and the other with robots. It’s a fanboy thing to do, and I recognize that; showing the books to someone always makes me feel uncomfortably geeky, and I feel like a dork when I ask someone to do a sketch for me. But I think I can admit to myself that the sketchbooks make me happy. The drawings (some by famous cartoonists and some by friends) are souvenirs, more than a collection, and a lot of them really do put a smile on my face.

Last year at SPX I asked Tony Millionaire to draw the frontispiece in my monkey sketchbook. This year, back toward the back of the book, Gilbert Hernandez:

I don’t think I should feel embarrassed to have asked for that.