Alphabooksbeasts Bonus: L is for Larry

As with last week, I find myself thinking that I should do a quick extra Alphabooks entry, so as to be sure I really have a complete and legal alphabet by my own self-imposed standards.

So, all right, here's a little lost dog from a book I bought a little less than a week ago: L is for Larry.

Larry is the star of the Larry Gets Lost series, from which I found Larry Gets Lost in Portland while I was browsing at Powell's. It's attractively cartooned in a sort of simplified retro style, and it actually turned out to have some good tourist information in it for a first-time visitor. Without Larry's help, I might not have noticed the Portlandia statue, and I might not have sought out the Portland Dog Bowl.

Larry does not, at least not in the book, visit Mill Ends Park, the smallest park in the world (at 24 inches in diameter). If you like, you can think of my drawing there as supplementary apocrypha. If you're heading to Portland, why miss Mill Ends Park?

Well, to tell the truth, I was never able to get into Mill Ends myself. If I'd tried to put one of my feet in it, I might have crushed a third of its foliage or warped its solitary sapling. It's designed for smaller folk, of course.

Give me a few minutes and I'll put up my "real" post.

A Few Notes on Dylan Horrocks at Librarie Drawn & Quarterly

I was partway to the Canada border when I realized I had forgotten my camera, so the best image of Dylan Horrocks's appearance at the Librarie Drawn & Quarterly in Montreal this week is a crummy cameraphone picture.



I'm a huge fan of Horrocks (both as a cartoonist and as a thinker about comics). I don't remember when I first read Hicksville, but it was probably back in 2001, when my student Jeff Seymour was writing a paper on it. I've taught it several times, and it's the only book from which I've bought a page of original art. When I found out that Horrocks was coming to North America, and reading just a couple of hours away, I couldn't miss it.

You can see the copies of the new edition of Hicksville in that image, and having read it I can say that the new introduction is a nice addition to the book. I'd say that if you are interested in comics at all, this book belongs on your shelf or your wish list.

Horrocks gave a really enjoyable and informative talk. I was surprised at how much time he spent talking about his days writing Batgirl for DC, but given that the problems of that job led to the opening of his current project, Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen, it makes sense for him to have dwelled on it. And in fact he made me curious to read his run on Batgirl, even while he was dismissing the comics as "terrible writing" for the most part.

The most exciting thing for me about the talk was his description of where The Magic Pen is going—that the book is going to try to discuss the value (and the perils) of daydreams and escapist genres. There's no one I'd rather see writing about that question than Horrocks.

The beginning of The Magic Pen is already online. Go take a look at it, if you haven't. It's good stuff: a smart story, and some of the sweetest cartooning that Horrocks has done yet.



Ah, also, he was kind enough to draw me this cute robot.

Festival of Cartoon Art, Final Report

The Festival of Cartoon Art at OSU was in some ways a bewildering experience. I think I'm still processing what I saw there, but I can at least post a few of my photos and a few things I remember. It looks like this is going to be a long post. I'll break it up into twelve items of interest.

I've already said a little bit about the opening day of the festival, which provided some of my favorite moments from the whole weekend. On Friday and Saturday, the festival shifted venues (to a movie-theater / lecture-hall space that could hold all the people in attendance) and transformed into a different sort of event: a series of slideshow presentations made by cartoonists with significant reputations, punctuated by coffee breaks, meals, and receptions.

The lighting in the venue was pretty difficult for my little camera, and Jared Gardner over at Guttergeek has already posted some good pictures from the talks, but I'll include my pictures that turned out okay below.

1.) Jen Sorensen is an underrated cartoonist, as far as I can tell.



On the one hand, she's quite successful — as she put it on Friday, she does make a living drawing talking condoms (among other things) — yet on the other hand because her work appears in alternative weekly papers she isn't as well known as hacks with syndicated dailies, nor does she get the sort of critical respect that comes with a "graphic novel."

What I think will stick with me most was the visual she showed to explain how much of her income derives from her website. The point she was making was that it was a small percentage — 2%? 6%? something like that — but she depicted this as a fraction of a bowl of kibble. First, a hundred kibble pellets to represent the whole income, then a handful of pellets to represent the portion that comes from the web.

Now I'm stuck thinking about a cartoonist's annual income as a bowl of dog food.

2.) Dave Kellett gave a talk in which he espoused Kevin Kelly's "Thousand True Fans" business model as it applies to web-cartoonists: give your strip away, and make your money on the profit margin of your merchandise, book collections, and original art sales to the small fraction of your readers for whom your strip is their favorite thing on the web.

In some ways, the "Thousand True Fans" model is really inspiring—it's nice to imagine that all the talented cartoonists (and other artists) out there could find an audience that would keep them at least moderately remunerated. But I wonder about the economics of it. I'm sure there's a way to make it work, but I wonder what it would take, really, to produce enough new sellable material every year for each of your Thousand Fans to spend, again, the hundred dollars that makes up his or her portion of your bowl of kibble.

On the other hand, I left the room feeling more hopeful than skeptical. It was a good talk in that regard, probably especially for the cartoonists in the audience.

3.) James Sturm gave a great quick overview of his career, culminating with a bunch of really beautiful images from Market Day and a description of the Center for Cartoon Studies and what it has achieved so far. It made me proud to have been affiliated with the enterprise of CCS, even if it's only been in the minor way that I have been.

It wasn't during his talk, but over the course of the weekend either Sturm or Charles Hatfield let it leak that next year's ICAF conference is planned to be in White River Junction (instead of in Chicago or DC). I'm excited about that, as well.

4.) Dan Piraro's talk was hilarious — hands down, the funniest presentation in a weekend full of humor. For someone who draws mainly single-panel gags that represent only a single moment in time, he sure has a knack for comedic timing.

5.) The Festival organized an impressive gathering of cartoonists to pay tribute to Jay Kennedy, the former editor of King Features Syndicate and expert on underground comics.



There's Matt Groening and Bill Griffith during the panel. My pictures of Patrick McDonnell and Brendan Burford, who were also on the panel, didn't turn out well. Each of these luminaries related a couple of personal reminiscences about Jay Kennedy, and a composite portrait emerged of a character who had a lot to do with the shape of American cartooning.

6.) Gene Yang gave an informative talk about the source materials for American Born Chinese and the ideas that inspired it.



I hadn't read Gene's account of how even an editorial cartoon by Pat Oliphant informed Cousin Chin-Kee, and I was impressed, both with the overt racism in Oliphant's cartoon and with the seriousness Gene brought to writing such a ridiculous character. I was hoping that this part of the presentation might stir up some conversation back and forth with the editorial cartoonists in the room about the question of stereotyping, but no one took it up.

7.) Roz Chast was totally charming and very funny.



Among other things, she talked about how much she enjoys drawing lamps, and she showed an image of the first cartoon she sold to The New Yorker, a diagram that labeled odd little doodles as "chent," "tiv," "redge," "hackeb," and so forth. I'm used to seeing Roz Chast's cartoons now, but that early image reminded me that in fact there's a deep vein of weirdness in her work.

The Roz Chast correlative to Jen Sorensen's bowl of kibble was a slide or two of her pile of rejected cartoon submissions. It occupies two filing cabinets and four foot-high stacks of paper on top of those cabinets. It's fascinating, really, to imagine how many of those gag comics are probably very funny, and at least at this point completely unknown to the public.

8.) And then there were the big public lectures. Lots and lots of people turned out for "An Evening with Matt Groening." This is just a part of the audience.



The most memorable thing about the Groening talk, for me, was the awkward string of questions he dealt with after the presentation — mostly people stating they were big Simpsons fans, asking him what his favorite "couch gag" or Itchy & Scratchy torture was, and then asking for his autograph. He must have declined to give autographs fifteen times. And for good reason: look at that audience.

One guy even asked if he could have a lock of Groening's hair. (He had scissors and a Ziploc bag all ready.) Failing that, the fan asked, could I tug on your beard for good luck? The whole spectacle made me a little queasy, in part because I sympathize with the cartoonists who can't be forthcoming to every fan request, and in part because I know I still want to ask some people for autographs, too.

If the crowds were a little thinner for Art Spiegelman's talk the following afternoon, it was probably only because he was competing with President Obama, who spoke at a rally about a block away right after Spiegelman's lecture ended.



One of the things that surprised me about Spiegelman's talk is that he still seems to object to the term graphic novel. I can understand why, but I also think that particular taxonomic battle may have been lost now. Do we have an alternative term? Spiegelman's choice, a comic long enough that it needs a bookmark, doesn't seem practical.

9.) Despite the high-power cartooning celebrity in place at the Festival — and I haven't mentioned all of the speakers, much less the cartoon celebrities who were in the audience (from Jeff Smith to Jeff Keane, from Lynn Johnston to Richard Thompson and others I didn't see) — I think the aspect of the event that had the biggest impact on me was the opportunity to connect and reconnect with some of my academic colleagues. It's always nice to come away from an event like this having met for the first time a few fellow travelers, or to have extended your friendships with people you already knew.

I snapped a couple of decent photos of my friends over at "Thought Balloonists," ...



Charles Hatfield (above) and Craig Fischer (below).



(These were taken while we were waiting for the Groening talk to start on Saturday evening.) I didn't get any pictures of Peter Sattler or Susan Kirtley or Jared Gardner or any of the other scholars I spent time with over the weekend, but I think that those connections and friendships are going to be the best thing to come out of my trip to OSU.

10.) By the time I got to the exhibit of Billy Ireland cartoons over at the library, I was pretty over-saturated with cartoon imagery, but I did manage to snap a few pictures, and looking at them now in retrospect I'm really bowled over by the level of craft evident in those pages. Here are some highlights:






On first glance at this image, I thought, "What an effective caricature of William Jennings Bryan." I have no idea why I was able to recognize Bryan — I couldn't have told you what he looked like, but I recognized him before I noticed his name down in the lower right corner. The mind works in weird ways.



(Ireland's The Passing Show often had little observations like this to mark the changing of the seasons.)



And look how well observed these wolves are! (If you're curious about why one wolf is labeled RUEFISM, here's an explanatory link.)

11.) I brought my robot sketchbook to Columbus, and though I didn't ask for a lock of his hair or any other DNA sample, I did have a short conversation with Matt Groening about the design of one of my favorite robots while he drew this quick doodle.



I got a few other robot doodles while I was in Columbus; perhaps I'll post them some time when I don't have other "content" to share.

12.) I think the Festival of Cartoon Art was an incredible success this year, and an incredible testament to the efforts of the researchers and organizers at OSU. I doubt I'll ever be in a crowd of cartooning luminaries with a friendlier atmosphere.

My only uneasiness or ambivalence about the event had to do with the category it occupied. I know I'd have felt more at home—felt more like a researcher doing his work and less like a fan appreciating things I already liked—if the cartoonists had more often presented ideas, arguments, and detailed accounts of their process. It's enjoyable to have a cartoonist reading his or her strips to you, but that sort of presentation doesn't usually provoke much conversation. Given the incredible collection of talent at the festival, it seems a shame that there weren't more challenging ideas about the direction of comics, or the possibilities of the medium, or the problems of cartooning, et cetera, circulating during and after the presentations. This strikes me as a sort of missed opportunity: why not have a gathering like this work as a think tank, as well as a celebration of the medium? Or maybe those impulses aren't entirely compatible.

Festival of Cartoon Art, Day 2: Some Abstract Rectilinear Landscapes of Columbus, Ohio

Here, without labels or other commentary, are some hard-to-draw interiors and exteriors from around Columbus. You can click each image to make it bigger.

Festival of Cartoon Art, Day 1

I'm in Columbus.



I'm attending the 2010 Festival of Cartoon Art at Ohio State University, where I gave a paper this afternoon on the backgrounds in Krazy Kat. There was an entire panel devoted to Krazy, in honor of the title character's 100th birthday.



And there was a cake at the reception.

I enjoyed the panels today, which taught me about a few comics I'd never heard of before (Scuola di Fumeto looks interesting; the post-Herriman Krazy comics from Dell and Gold Key look like a sacrilege), and I learned new things about comics I'd heard of. (Peter Sattler's presentation on Mutt and Jeff was really eye-opening, especially his description of the inset comic called "Bolsheviki," which seems both harrowing and hilarious. I was also really stunned at the research on display during Michael Tisserand's keynote talk. His forthcoming biography of Herriman is obviously going into my wish list.)

During the conference, as usual, I doodled. Here's a poor likeness of Damian Duffy, scrawled out during his talk on Moore and Gebbie's "This Is Information."



And here's a quick cartoon of one of the most memorable moments in the conference so far. After Toni Pape's interesting paper on Scuola di fumetti, which was sort of heavy with theory jargon but showed some "metaleptic" effects that really exploit the language of comics, there was a pause in the question-and-answer period. The established comics-scholar eminence R. C. Harvey raised his hand, and said, "I have a question for Toni."



"My question is: 'Are you serious?'"

It's hard to know how to answer a question like that. It was clear that Bob Harvey wasn't asking in a mean-spirited way. I think he was asking about the jargon, though the conversation turned to some claims about comics exceptionalism that Toni was more hesitant to endorse than Bob himself was.

And I should point out that the Festival's FAQ page does say that the academic presentations "will not necessarily be aimed at a general audience."

As it happens, a little bit of good-for-the-gander came around during the Krazy Kat panel. While I was giving my talk, Bob Harvey was doodling into his notebook.



(That's Jared Gardner below me.)

... and apparently I make an interesting subject for caricatures.



Later he told me he couldn't decide whether I have a round head or a long one.

Be advised: this is one of the dangers of presenting to a room full of comics scholars.

I'm hoping to have more to report before the weekend is over.

SPX 2010: Quick Sunday Report

I really had a lot of fun at this year's SPX. In fact, it might have been more fun than any other small-press show I've been to. As I said yesterday, I got to catch up with a few old friends, and I think I also met a few people who will turn out to be kindred spirits and fellow travelers. I'm planning to savor the books I bring home from Bethesda, and to write about them here on the blog gradually for a few weeks (or as long as it takes).



(That's just my haul from today; none of those books are in the picture from last night's report.)

Early this afternoon I was on a panel with Marc Singer and Bill Kartalopoulos that went really well, I think. I was interested to compare Marc's experiences teaching the graphic novel with my own. His class was obviously different from mine in some respects—he doesn't seem to share my misgivings about teaching Watchmen, for example, and maybe in the future I'll bring it back into the reading list—but I got the feeling that we have dealt with many similar troubles and rewards.

The panel I moderated—with Vanessa Davis, Jesse Reklaw, Gabrielle Belll, and Sarah Becan talking about different models of autobiographical writing and different variations on the "diary comic"—was really fun.



(Here we all are, laughing with Bill K. just before the panel started.)

I also think the panelists were able to say a few really insightful things about autobiographical writing, particularly about the way that a cartoonist (or any writer) has to structure his or her life in order to make it into a story—the necessary manipulations of a story that's emotionally "honest" even if it's not faithful to every concrete fact.

I remember Vanessa saying, for example, that she used to worry about making sure that she drew everyone in her autobio comics wearing the clothes they were actually wearing when the events happened, but that now she's willing to combine two different people into one character in order to make a scene work better.

(Here, I appear to be trying to make some point that Gabrielle and Sarah are skeptical about. Or it's possible that Jesse has just said something under his breath to make them laugh.)



Even more than it was insightful, however, the panel was a lot of fun. Jesse might have downed a snootful (at least) before the panel began, and he was a little rambunctious, but in a way that mostly kept the rest of us looking alive. We laughed a lot, and so did the audience, and I think each of the panelists made a few new fans that day.



(If you haven't seen Vanessa's latest book, Make Me a Woman, I can tell you it looks gorgeous and loaded with fun. Drawn & Quarterly had early copies of it at SPX.)

Thanks to my friend and colleague Glynnis Fawkes for taking pictures during the panel!

SPX 2010: Quick First-Day Report

The first day of SPX felt like a long day to me, but in a good way: I had several good conversations, mainly with cartoonist pals of yore like Jon Lewis, Ben Towle, and Tom Kaczynski; I also got to meet a few younger cartoonists whose work looks really interesting to me, and to touch base with a few friendly folks I've only seen a few times.

First, to answer the question that's surely on everyone's lips: here's an update on Alec Longstreth's Basewood beard:



Here's a shot of Jesse Reklaw entertaining Julia Wertz and Sarah Glidden with a puppet show at their table, toward the end of the day:



And here's a shot of Frank Santoro leaping into a serious-looking conversation between my co-editor Ken Parille and my friend Tom Kaczynski.



As you can see, the atmosphere toward the end of the day was celebratory to the point of being a little silly.

The panel discussion Ken and I had with Bill Kartalopoulos went well, though the room wasn't exactly packed with audience members. I think we managed to put forward some coherent generalizations about Wilson and about the direction of Clowes's work since David Boring. I imagine those ideas will filter into the writing Ken and I will be doing (separately) over the next few years.

(Frank Santoro has, by the way, an extended baseball-related metaphor for the way Wilson unfolds. But you'd have to ask him about it; by no means can I reproduce it here.)

I have bought (and traded for) a ton of new minicomics, which I will read and dutifully blog about in the weeks to come. There'll be more in this stack before the end of the day tomorrow.



As I write this, the Ignatz Awards ceremony is only just about to start, so I can't report on who won anything. I'm just tossing a few pictures online and checking in before I switch over to paper-grading for the night.

Siena Find #3: La Bambina Filosofica

I'm happy to report that during my expedition to locate some interesting Italian comics, I didn't wind up empty-handed. I found two volumes collecting comic strips and other drawings of La Bambina Filosofica ("The Philosophical Little Girl") by Vanna Vinci.



(Those titles are Anatomy of a Mess and Thoughts, Sayings, Works, and Omissions, respectively.)

Although I can't really read Italian, I am really enjoying these books: the cartooning is straightforward, expressive, and fun; the Bambina and her associates are interesting characters; and I'm able to half-translate enough of the text that I'm able to get most of the jokes in a squinty, half-heard sort of way.

It's really easy to like the Bambina. She starts the first book still in her mother's womb, refusing to be delivered — first claiming to be a political refugee, then shouting that she's busy on the internet. Once her mother bribes her by offering to buy her a scooter, she emerges and starts learning to walk, to speak ("Merda" is her first postpartum word), and to bite.



After her playmate's mother summons a child psychologist to deal with the Bambina, she is only sorry that her foxhole isn't equipped with the right weapons to fight him:


("Unfortunately, I only have smart bombs," she mutters.)

By the way, I encourage you to click-and-enlarge any and all of the strips in this post: Vinci has a really appealing line, and you'll be able to read the text and the facial expressions better at a larger size.

My favorite sequence that I've read so far has the Bambina's mother offering to buy her a birthday present. At first, the idea is that she'll get a Barbie doll ("Why? So I can play 'plastic surgeon'?" the Bambina asks). But once they're at the store, her mother changes her mind ...


... Barbie is "anti-educative" and gives a "distorted image of women." I mean, "Just look at those tits!")

The Bambina's mother tries out a baby doll ...


... and the Bambina rejects it as too cute, too mawkish, too saccharine. "Quick! Play me some Motorhead before it's too late!" she gasps.

And then she meets the toy that will be her constant companion for the rest of the strip: Lillo.



It melts my heart to see a cynical little girl fall in love with a stuffed gorilla. In the next strip, she says she has always wanted a stuffed gorilla. "Finally, a comprehensive hominid," she coos, "Who will listen to me without saying a word!"

One of the other things I like about the Bambina Filosofica books is that they are punctuated with recipes, questionnaires, illustrated quotations from philosophers, spot illustrations, and mock paper-doll costumes that put the Bambina into different contexts in the name of fun. Check out this adorable bestiary, in which she is transformed into a hoopoe, a vampire sparrow, a tyrannosaurus ...



... and a porcupine, ready to attack!



I'm not sure whether Vanna Vinci is making any attempt to find an English-language publisher or translator, and I don't know what her chances would be in the American comics market. I'm not sure to what extent her sense of humor would "translate." But I know that if I ever see more volumes of Bambina Filosofica, or if anyone brings them into English, I'll be buying them.

In fact, I'm so besotted with this comic strip that I've done some translations of my own. Click these to enlarge and read:






These last two are especially suitable for the advent of the new fall semester:




I can do a few more of those some time if you like. By the way, I had picked those to translate (and done the translating) before I realized the originals are on the Bambina Filosofica site. But now you can pop over there and check my translation if you like.