Tom Kaczynski and I Talk Comics Education

This is sort of appropriate material for my first day back in the classroom after the summer "vacation":

Over on his Transatlantis blog, my friend Tom Kaczynski has been posting an interesting series of short essays about the history and condition of comics education in America.



In today's entry in this series, I join Tom for a conversation about comics instruction in English departments. I guess I get to be an authority on this because I've been teaching comics in English departments since 2001, though really I don't know much beyond my own experience.



Still, I think the "interview" will be interesting to some of our regular readers. If nothing else, I've tried to raise a few questions of my own while answering Tom's. Click on over and check it out. Drop a comment onto Tom's blog if I've managed to get anything wrong.

(I should also mention that there are plenty of resources for comics education over at the website of NACAE, the National Association of Comics Art Educators. Why, some of those resources were even contributed by yours truly.)

Daniel Clowes: Conversations Is Here!

I think I've only hinted about it on the blog so far, but this week I am excited to say that I have in my hands a copy of the University Press of Mississippi's new book Daniel Clowes: Conversations.



It's great to see this in print. It collects a number of extensive and obscure interviews with Dan Clowes, reaching back to his first interview ever to see print (conducted back in 1988). A couple of these pieces have never been published in the United States before, and a couple of others appeared in small-press zines that not many people have seen.



The collection isn't copiously illustrated, but this is the sort of rare comics-related artifact where the text is really the selling point. Clowes is an articulate and interesting person, with a sharp wit and broad interests in pop (and high) culture. Looking through this book's index gives you a sense of how broadly the conversations in the collection can range: Thor, thought balloons, Howlin' Thurston, Adrian Tomine, John Travolta...



The collection concludes with a 24-page interview conducted by Ken Parille, one of the editors, that Clowes gave specifically for the book. This is the place where Clowes basically says that Eightball is finished, and that complete works like Wilson are going to be his main format henceforth. He also has the chance to reflect on (and amend) points raised in the earlier interviews.

If you're interested in Clowes's work, or if you're a student of the "alternative" comics scene, this is a good book to have on your shelf, and a nice collection to read gradually over a span of a couple of weeks.



And I should know, because I'm the other editor of the book.

Why don't you pop on over to Amazon and order up a copy of Daniel Clowes: Conversations?

We're guest artists at PARTYKA this month

We are honored to be this month's guest artists for the Daily Drawings feature at the website of the Partyka collective, a group of talented and award-winning young artists whose numbers include one of Isaac's former students, Shawn Cheng (The Would-Be Bridegrooms; The Monkey & The Crab), and Shawn's college pal Matt Wiegle (Seven More Days of Not Getting Eaten; Is It Bacon?). You may have seen their drawings of Isaac himself for the postcard announcing his 2008 move to Vermont, but you are hereby urged to see some of their other drawings as well, as featured on the Partyka website or in some of their beautifully rendered comics.

The Partyka site doesn't just showcase the work of its members; for years, now, it has also featured the work of guest artists, fellow travelers in the worlds of comics and drawing. Our contributions this month feature a typically collaborative approach with material that is somewhat more haphazard than usual. Our series of images, called Satisfactory Lecture Doodles, began with a selection of doodles that we absent-mindedly sketched into our various notebooks during classes, conferences, and meetings during grad school and after (which of course meant we had YEARS of material to draw from). Please note that none of these images was intended for later viewing, not even by each other; indeed, I think some of them predate not just our collaborative interest in comics but our very acquaintance. Each of us then sent his own favorite doodles to the other guy to color digitally. The titles of the finished color images reflect the original circumstance of the particular doodle; thus yesterday's drawing, which you might think is called "Terrible Threat!", would appear in the catalogue as "Plenary Lecture."

Keep checking in on the PARTYKA website later this month for further thrilling images such as "Driving Directions" and "Modern American Literature." And for your convenience, here's a glimpse of the first image, the unforgettable "Faculty Meeting":
(You can also check out some later images in the series by clicking the first link in this post, but where's the fun of that?)

PS: And while you're here, don't forget our BIG SUMMER SALE, featuring both comics work and sketchbook projects by this month's Guest Artists at PARTYKA.

A Link or Two to Click

Well, check this out: one of my poems that got published in the latest Hayden's Ferry Review is available online. Enjoy.

Also, my review of an excellent book of poems by one of my favorite living poets, Maurice Manning.

Unsplendid News, Everyone

I'm still pretty ridiculously busy, though apparently not as busy as Mike...

... but I have a little news, completely unrelated to Leap Day: I've got a couple of poems in the new issue of Unsplendid, which also has audio of me reading the pieces. Here's to the internet.

I'm sharing virtual page space with my friend Juliana Gray as well as with the poet Charles Martin (who gave a reading at LIU last semester), so I feel like I'm in good company.

And now, please, you may continue your celebrations of the life and accomplishments of Georges Batroc.

The Power of the Daily Routine

I'm working on a post about Tales from the Classroom, a comic that Mike and I produced back in 2003 for the Graduate Teaching Center at Yale, but a shiny thing drifted into my view, and it got me thinking about something else.

Some of you reading this will already know that I send a lot of postcards. In fact, I send five postcards a day, and have been doing so since the summer of 1998. (If you get a numbered postcard from me, that's what the number is for: I'm counting them. Later today, I will write postcard #16,615.)

You may not know that I was once interviewed on the radio program Weekend America about my postcard regimen. (You'll have to scroll about halfway down that page and have RealOne Player or something like that to listen to the four-minute interview.)

I've never done this calculation before, but if you collected them all up into one stack, it would be at least seventeen feet high. Maybe more like twenty.

Why do I send five postcards a day? I don't know. I've been doing it for a long time now, and some of my original motivations have been lost or modified, but now it's a large part of how I process my day. It's a way for me to keep in touch with my friends about the small stuff of my life.

But that's not what this post is about. I wanted to talk about the power of a daily routine. You can accomplish a lot in small bits, day by day.

When Mike and I were working on our Demonstration project, I really did draw one demon a day for a hundred days straight. After only a couple of weeks, the sketchbook was taking on a nice heft: it took a little while to look at it. By the end of the project, it was more than you could really take in at once. Since you've been so patient, and since I've been going on for so long without a picture, here's a demon that didn't make it into our booklet.

That's a to-do list and, under it, a not-yet-written postcard that he's urging me to rock.

Around the same time, I think, and unbeknownst to us then, our pal Ben Towle had undertaken a similar project, doing a demon a day for (almost) 100 days. All of his demons are online, but you can also get them in a handsome minicomic for only $3.50 direct from Ben's website store, where there are lots of nice goodies to choose from. (I recommend his cartoon alphabets.) Ben's demons really showcase his awesome inking and his sense of light and shadow -- here are a couple of examples I nabbed from his site:


The Partyka comics collective has a daily drawing feature on their website -- it ought to be the first thing you see when you click over there. I don't think that requires a drawing a day from each of their members, but it's definitely in the same spirit.

I'm not sure whether he's got a daily drawing routine, but the inimitable Eddie Campbell, author of some of my favorite graphic novels, has been blogging daily for quite a while now. (In his blog, he proves himself not only an excellent raconteur, but a whip-smart theoretician and a voracious reader.)

Some of my other favorite comics bloggers also work on a daily routine. Mike Sterling, a comics store owner in southern California, has been posting every day since I started reading his blog, and I think it's because he posts daily that his ruminations on the comics industry have become so interesting to me: I've gotten to know his personality, his store's history, and even some of his employees and regular customers through those daily updates. Chris Sims not only posts every day, but has regular weekly features, chief among them a Thursday-night roundup of his week's comics purchases. It's because of Chris that I now usually go to my local comics store on Fridays and not on Wednesdays (when each week's new comics arrive). Finally, Bully, the Little Stuffed Bull, who seems to post at least daily, has several terrific weekly features, including a "Separated at Birth" post comparing comics swipes (though this week's is a little dubious, as a swipe), his really fun "Ten of a Kind" comics-cover posts, and, recently, a review of one P. G. Wodehouse novel per week. And yes, he at least pretends that he's a little stuffed bull.

That's him in San Diego last month, about to triple his weight with a plate of fish tacos.

And then there's the daily comic strip. I don't think anyone can doubt that working on The Sketchbook Diaries every day for years has helped James Kochalka hone his craft, even though he used to say that craft is the enemy. Drawing the syndicated Zippy every day has certainly made Bill Griffith an incredible draftsman. There are more daily webcomics than I could even try to list. Probably you already have a favorite.

But none of these is the new shiny thing that distracted me from the post I was planning. I also found out, this week, about an artist (in the DC area, I think), who is making a skull a day, for a year, each of them out of a different material: scratchboard, wire-frame, linocut print, chalk on a sidewalk, watercolor, carved watermelon (worth looking for)... One of my favorites is the one made from soy sauce on a plate:

Some of these images are really gorgeous, and the project as a whole is super impressive. When it's all finished, what an awesome coffee-table book (or set of postcards) it would all make.

Which brings me back to what I wanted to discuss: the power of the daily routine. Setting a small artistic task for yourself once a day -- some discrete thing you can finish, or some quota you need to hit in a larger project -- is a wonderful way to make the steady advance of days amount to something.

(I have always been a big procrastinator, and the moment I started really making progress on my dissertation was the point when I set a daily quota for myself. First, it was just twenty minutes of free-writing. Then, when I started drafting chapters, it was a thousand words a day. That's not so much, but it quickly adds up.)

Maybe once a week would work for you better than once a day. Maybe you need to focus on the large chunks; maybe it can be something small that you finish in twenty minutes or an hour. But if you've looked around, with summer waning, and been amazed at how much time has passed without much to show for it, stop thinking (for a minute) about how many months it will take you to realize your long-term goals. Instead, think about how much you can accomplish in a day. Then do it every day.