Animal Alphabet: D is for Dobsonfly

I could have predicted this would happen. I'm so swamped with grading this week that I pretty much have to punt on the Animal Alphabet. Before I could even properly decide between dung beetle and dobsonfly, the deadline is passing...

Fortunately, I have a preliminary sketch-doodle that I can post.



A dobsonfly, in case you don't know, is what a hellgrammite grows up into. The thing that's missing from the preliminary sketch is a sense of scale: for insects, dobsonflies are large, and those pincers the males have are pretty impressive.

And as I was scanning that doodle, I thought, "Where have I seen that before?"

It turns out that my notebook for Spring 1996, early in my grad-school days, is full of drawings of dobsonflies and hellgrammites.



I was working on a poem then, eventually drafted too much under the influence of Hart Crane I think, about water insects.



The diagram of the three arrows represented the three worlds I wanted to describe: the water-strider's transit across the surface of the pond, the metamorphosis of insects like the hellgrammite and the dragonfly, and the hand of the human collector passing down into the underwater world. Or at least that's how I read it now, fifteen years later.



Like most of my old creative efforts, it's a little embarrassing to look at: yet another old failure. But maybe there's something I could learn from those fifteen-year-old notebooks (scribbled by a twenty-four-year-old) if I had a little more tranquillity in which to recollect them. Today, however, I'm back to the grading piles. Poetry (and drawing) is for another day.

Animal Alphabet: C is for Coati

For this week's entry in the Animal Alphabet, I picked out a creature I knew by another name.

Did you know there's actually no such thing as a coatimundi? Apparently people at some stage were confused by the differing habits of the solitary male and the extremely social female, and construed them as belonging to separate species; really, they're all coatis.

I plan to take my correction in stride. In fact, I've been happy to discover that the gangs formed by mama coatis and their kits are super cute. You should see them in the BBC Life episode about mammals: super cute, I say. (And, like many social animals, they can apparently be raised by people as pets.)

Anyway, C is for COATI.



Do you recognize what I'm swiping there? Do you want a prize for recognizing it, or just bonus points?

And if I said coati, koala, coati, koala, coati, koala long enough, would I get one of those critters for my very own? (Alas, I'm sure neither would thrive in Vermont.)

Animal Alphabet: B is for Birds of Paradise

MY POKEMANS. LET ME SHOW YOU THEM.



For this week's letter in the Animal Alphabet, I give you five of the most peculiarly adorned creatures in the animal kingdom, all close relatives from the islands of New Guinea. From top to bottom, they are:

The King of Saxony Bird of Paradise

Wallace's Standardwing Bird of Paradise

The King Bird of Paradise

Wilson's Bird of Paradise

The Western Parotia

Although they are a trip to draw and a marvel of color, the best way to see the birds of paradise is in action, so I encourage you to check the video links I've put behind their names. If you've never seen them before, there's a decent chance your mind will be blown.

Animal Alphabet: A is for Anglerfish

Leave it to our cartoonist pal Ben Towle to light a fire under me and get me posting here on the blog again. Today he announced a new project that he and Rob Ullman are undertaking, to post weekly alphabetical animal cartoons. (Ben did an alpaca today, and Rob did an aardvark.)

I'm going to try to keep up. And since I know lots of peculiar creatures, I'm going to try to stick to the more bizarre corners of the bestiary.



Her tail's like a comb, and her teeth are a tangle;
She married a leech who does little but dangle;
She's a fish with a lure, and she'll teach you to angle.

If you don't know about the marital habits of the male anglerfish, you may not believe your eyes.

Here's to fifty-one twenty-five more weeks of weird animalia.

"Panelists": Not the Death of this Blog

I'm not intending to retire the Satisfactory Comics blog, which will still be our best forum for random doodles, dopey ruminations, and elaborate puns. And, you know, comics, when we draw some more. But let me also direct your attention to the group blog I have joined at tcj.com (that's short for The Comics Journal dot com): The Panelists.

This is sort of a big deal: I'm joining the guys from Thought Balloonists, Guttergeek, and Madinkbeard to form a sort of Voltron of comics criticism. I think it will be awesome.

My first post, a "one-panel critic" mini-essay about a turning point in Ghost World, is up now.



We're also running a contest (with a real prize) that involves identifying the images in our masthead / logo. Here's a hint: if you've seen the only piece of original comics art that I own, then you will be able to identify the image I contributed. Pop over and take a look at the logo, read our first week's posts, and join the discussion!

Where Have I Been?

Sorry for the long silence. Expect it to continue.



This is what I graded over the Thanksgiving break. A lot of that stuff is printed double-sided, and I wrote on every page.

I have a half again as much to do between now and the end of the semester. Then, I may breathe (and blog) again.

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.