A Visit to the Center for Cartoon Studies

I'll get back to that pile of crappy comics soon, but I wanted to say a little bit about the visit I made last week to the Center for Cartoon Studies up in White River Junction, Vermont. Overall, I was impressed with the school and the students, and I think it's looking really nice for such a young operation in such a non-lucrative corner of the educational world.

I drove through some heavy snow the day before I went there, and the terrain beside the highways on the day I went to White River Junction was just gorgeous in a sort of gingerbread-house way. I just had to smile, looking out on all the fields covered in pristine snow, and the pine-trees crusted with snow (the spruces rough in the distant glitter, etc.). Because I was driving I didn't get any pictures of it, but here's a little snapshot from the town green in Burlington, the following day, to help you infer what the countryside and mountains looked like:


Anyway, I got off the freeway in White River Junction, drove a mile or so into downtown, turned a corner, and there it was:

The main space of the Center for Cartoon Studies is on the first floor of the old Colodny Surprise department store, and they've kept the awning out front, but the windows facing the street definitely declare cartoon allegiance:


Up until this point, the CCS had felt like sort of an imaginary place to me, like Oz or Avalon or Oxford: a place that I could read about, but probably wouldn't ever see. There was something a little giddy about seeing it in front of my eyes. Much about it seems mythical: a little school in a little post-industrial Vermont town, where each two-year cohort of twenty or so students gets instruction from top-notch literary cartoonists on the way to make a graphic novel. People like Chris Ware and Lynda Barry drop in. Students have their theses advised by Stan Sakai or Chester Brown. This unassuming building in this dingy, snowy town is one of the epicenters of the new movement in literary comics.

In fact, it's an ordinary building, not glamorously equipped or even eye-catching. But what goes on in there is really exciting. I like to imagine that the students at CCS are getting the equivalent of eight or ten years' worth of comics-making experience packed into their two-year sojourns in White River Junction. These folks will be equipped to write and draw some very smart stuff.

Anyway, I'd been invited to drop in by my friend Robyn Chapman...

...(who has a few really fine minicomics and who edits the zine Hey, Four-Eyes, in case you're inclined to do some shopping), and I called her cell phone so she could let me in to the building.

She was beaten to the door, though, by a cheerful Steve Bissette, who gave me a hearty handshake even though he doesn't know me from Adam. He was on his way out of the building as I was on my way in. I guess that's the sort of encounter one has at the epicenter.

Robyn showed me around the facility, including this attractive sign from the old Colodny Surprise store that hangs in the CCS lobby:


Down in the basement is the printing lab, which is open to the students around the clock. They've got a couple of computers, a couple of xerox machines, a wealth of long-arm staplers, a hydraulic paper-cutter, a screen-printing station, and a ping-pong table down there. Also some sofas, for when Steve Bissette hosts a movie night.

I was a little envious of all the printing equipment.

The real "purpose" of my trip to CCS, though, wasn't tourism. I was supposed to give a short talk to Jason Lutes's afternoon second-year workshop, so after lunch Robyn led me over to their studio space. I sat in on a couple of critiques, in which one of the students circulated copies of work in progress and got feedback from Jason and from his classmates. (I chimed in, too, here and there. My old poetry-workshop instincts resurfaced right away.)

...And then I talked for a few minutes about formal constraints and games. I tried to suggest that although there are plenty of constraints that only limit the things you can write or draw, there are also process-oriented "generative constraints," like the ones we used in some of that comic for Elfworld, or the constraint that propels the Mapjam project. These sorts of constraints can help you find your way to ideas you wouldn't otherwise have, and I think that having a few such constraints in your toolkit can help you get clear of any artistic stuck spot.

Anyway, then I taught them how to play Jesse Reklaw's game shuffleupagus. It's a hard game to explain, but we got three pages of shuffleupagus stuff turned out in about 45 minutes, with the second-year students working in three groups.

Here's a little picture of Jason Lutes in his group, with my lame attempt at explanatory doodles on the dry-erase board behind him:


... And here's a result from the session, not quite completely inked. (You can click to enlarge it.)

If any of the CCS students who drew this page happen to read this, please drop a note in the comments so I can give credit to the artists! I didn't get y'all's names while I was there.

All in all, it was a really pleasant day. I got to see a place that I've been wanting to see since before it even existed, and I got to meet a few people whom I'm sure I'll be glad to run into at MoCCA or SPX in the future. I got a really good feeling about CCS as a program of education and as an institution that's having a positive effect on the cartooning world. I hope I'll get to drop in there again some time.

Two New Shuffleupagus Pages

Mike was up in New Haven over the weekend, and on Monday we got together to do a little drawing. We made some big progress on a project for an anthology -- more about that in a week or so -- but we also did a little bit of jam cartooning with a guy I met at MoCCA, Jason Bitterman. (Jason is an undergrad at Wesleyan, and is around New Haven this summer. He tells me he hasn't updated that website in years, but I like to make links in these posts when I can...)

With Jason, we drew a couple more pages of shuffleupagus strips, of the sort that you can find in any issue of Elm City Jams. (If you don't know how this jam game works, I implore you to follow that first link, to a post from way back on July 28th.)

Anyway, here are the two new strips. As usual, you can click on each to bring it up to legible size.


For this one, we just happened to draw (from our deck of characters) the creepy, scared little girl with the huge eyes and the shark teeth that appeared in the post where I was describing how shuffleupagus is played. Her demise was, sadly, unavoidable.


In this one, the character and the setting had both been in our decks for ages. The little shirtless cowboy was designed by Tom Hart during one of the jam sessions for ECJ #2, and I think I drew up the dinosaur jungle when we were working on the first issue.

It's worth noting that, without conferring or even muttering anything about it, Mike and I managed to draw nearly the same image in the first round of this shuff: his is panel 6 and mine is panel 8. Apparently, addled minds think alike.

Shuffleupagus

Every issue of Elm City Jams has contained a few pages of Shuffleupagus, a cartooning game invented by our pal Jesse Reklaw. It's easier to play than to explain, but let me try:

Technically, you need five people to play, but we've done it with four and even as few as three. You'll also need your drawing gear and a supply of blank cards.

(I've heard of people playing with 3" x 5" index cards, but we use 2.5" x 4.125" pieces of bristol board, because those will compose into the right dimensions for a standard mini page at the end, and because bristol board is nice and sturdy.)

To get ready to play, each cartoonist should take two blank cards and draw one character and one setting. We tend to orient the characters vertically and the settings horizontally: that gives more room for details in the settings, and it gives room for a full-body sketch for the character.

Here's a bunch of settings from out of our deck, by me, Tom O'Donnell, Mike, and Tom Hart:

... And here's a batch of characters, by Mike, Tom O'Donnell, myself, and Mike again:

(It's important to draw all of the character, since you'll want details like the shoes or hooves to be consistent. It also helps if your drawing suggests a personality, either by appearance or gesture; you may also want to indicate scale, or to discuss it with your fellow cartoonists later, before you start drawing.)

Then you collect two stacks of cards and shuffle each. Now you're ready to play.

Four people draw in the first part:

1. Pick one character and one setting. (If you have five people, the person who designed the character can sit out for the first part.) So you might have something like this:

Or like this:


2. Each person then gets a blank card and draws the character doing something in the setting:


3. These four images, when they're inked, get shuffled into a "deck" of five, with a card that's marked "start / end." (Here's our battle-scarred start/end card:)


4. Now you need five people to play the second part of the game. Everyone gets another blank card.

5. If all five people can sit around the same table, then deal the five-card deck into the spaces between them. (This is the part that's easier to do than to explain.) Whoever has the "start/end" card on his left is going to draw the first panel of the strip, and the strip reads around to the right from there:


Another way to think of this is that the four cards you drew in the first round are getting placed into the even positions of your nine-panel grid, like this:


And the task of the second round is to connect these four panels into a story, or at least into a coherent sequence. In-betweening can be a challenge, especially if the characterization (or costume!) isn't consistent in all four panels, but that's part of the fun.

Here's a finished product, visible for the first time. This is the Shuffleupagus page that Mike and I did with Adam Rosenblatt and Ben Towle right before SPX in the fall of 2006. (This will appear in a fourth issue of Elm City Jams if there ever is one.) You can, as usual, click on this image to bring it up to legible size.


It's interesting to imagine what this little story would have looked like if the initial four panels had dealt out in a different order. (In-betweening from my panel 2 to Ben's panel 6, for example, would have been pretty easy, in a different story.)

If you found my explanation confusing, here's a link to another description of shuffleupagus by a different cartooning group. Ben Towle's "Three-Cent Pup" drawing group down in Winston-Salem seems to be having a good time with the game, too: here's a link to one of their shuffleupagus jams. You'll notice that the Three-Cent Pup folks don't limit themselves to nine panels.

It's a fun game, and if you know a few cartoonists, I suggest you try it out!

By the way, if you have fewer than five people, you can still play the game. If you have four people, just have the first person who finishes in the second round jump over into the "empty seat" you create when you deal out the cards. If you have three, let one person double up in the first round, then two people double up in the second one.

Elm City Jams #3 (May 2005)

In the third issue of Elm City Jams, apparently just to make things more difficult for ourselves, we added a new complication to each of our one-page jam strips: every page would begin with a title drawn at random, as before, and a formal constraint drawn at random from a different deck.

Some of these constraints were straightforward (if vexing), like a requirement that every panel run the full height of the page, or a requirement that the panels be shaped like something important in the panel. Some of the other constraints were more baroque, like the one we used in "Draculina vs. Wolf Lady," where each caption was written and obscured before the accompanying panel was drawn (without knowing what that panel said).

In "Kirby Speaks Through Ouija," the constraint was that we had to make use of Matt Madden's Exercises in Style, so the strip swipes each of his panels, though in the opposite order. Here's the middle tier:


Probably my favorite strip in this book is "Because of This, I Cannot Love," a sort of tribute to Lewis Trondheim's Mr. O. You'll certainly need to click on this in order to read it -- the panels are tiny -- but please come back when you're done.

The constraint, here, was that the comic had to be a thinly veiled advertisement for Doritos.

We seem, in this issue, to have added a liberal dose of blasphemy to our regular mix of profanity and scatology, so if you're offended by that sort of thing, you might want to steer clear of Elm City Jams #3. On the other hand, if you have room in your heart for jokes about crucifixion, click on this image to enlarge it. It's one of our best shuffleupagus pages, featuring a little fish-boy designed by Jon Lewis.


The whole book is full of our typical weirdness -- the sense of humor one reader has called "random and stupid" -- and in ECJ #3 you can find Egyptians fighting Hapsburgs, Death Metalca and the Apocalypse Peavey, a knight with a monkey on his arm, a monologue by Shakespeare's Iago, a nonchalant indy ninja turtle, Ape-Day, a strip about our ECJ hazing rituals, and the Venerable Bede in underoos (hello, search engines!).



The inside back cover offers a mock tutorial on building this sort of craziness, which resulted in three characters we love dearly but have yet to use in an actual comic:


Contributors to this issue inclue Tom O'Donnell, Jeff Seymour, Shana Mlawski, Harry Dozier, and Mike and myself. As usual, it's a 20-page, hand-stapled, digest-sized minicomic, and you can have it for $1.75 if you use Paypal, $1.50 if you use a check, and $1.00 if you get it from me in person. Here's that fancy Paypal button you've been waiting for:

Elm City Jams #2 (May 2004)

For our second issue of Elm City Jams, we pulled in a few ringers: we held one of our jam sessions in Brooklyn, and got Jon Lewis, Tom Hart, and Bill Kartalopoulos to add to the usual insanity provided by Tom O'Donnell, Jeff Seymour, Mike, and myself. Linnea Duvall joined us for a later jam back in New Haven.


If the first issue of Elm City Jams was a promising idea, this issue really delivers on that promise. I think it's the funniest single issue of any comic we've published. Even now, three years later, some of the strips still make me laugh, and as I was looking through this issue to try to summarize it, I was surprised at how many high-quality strips are packed into its twenty pages. When a customer at the MoCCA Festival asks for something humorous, this is the book I put into his or her hands -- unless the customer is a kid, because, like all issues of Elm City Jams, this one contains explicit language and images.


In lieu of trying to explain the contents, I have put together a little montage of panels, mostly taken out of context. Please click on this image to make it legible. It's worth a click.

You're looking at panels from "The Devil's Avocado," "Halliburt 'n' Ernie," "Damn Tree-Hugging Robots," "Don't Mess With Hexes," a shuffleupagus page featuring Skele-Tut, "Jared Fogle Kills a Prostitute," another shuffleupagus page, and Suge-Sodee, the Sugary Sodas Giant, in "A Man Who Needs No Introduction." (I'll write another post about shuffleupagus some time, though it was invented by Jesse Reklaw and we can't take the credit for the idea.)

The book also includes (not pictured) Alkibiades and his Randy Pals in "Bibulous Sophistry," the adventures of "Hezekiah Sugata, Hillbilly Shogun," some rapping by M.C. Baldeaglehead, parodies of Star Trek and Keiji Haino, and a strip so strange it could only be called "Penny Sandwiches."

If you have this comic, I think you will be impressed with the variety and peculiarity of the strips, and with their generally high level of success as jams. (It'll often be difficult to tell where one cartoonist stopped and another one picked up the page, which is part of what we aim for with our jams.)

As with all of our 20-page comics, this one costs $1.75 by Paypal, $1.50 by check, and $1.00 if you get it from me in person. Here's the button for Paypal: