In the fall of 2011 we did a comics reading series at the Brooklyn Public Library. The third book we read and discussed was Lucille by Ludovic Debeurme. Here is a slightly edited transcript of our discussion that Sunday afternoon.

Previous transcripts:

Meeting 1: Fun Home by Alison Bechdel
Meeting 2: Ice Haven By Daniel Clowes (to come)  (We did these a bit out of order, but what the heck, this thing is ready!)
Meeting 4: Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli (to come)

NOTE: there are quite a few spoilers so make sure you’ve read the book first!

Saturday, Nov 19, 2011 at 4:00 pm, at the Brooklyn Public Library

Lucille by Ludovic Debeurme

topic: drawing style, open page layouts

Traditional comics page layouts

Matt: We talked earlier about different drawing styles and formats, and how those can have historical associations and can be used, particularly in Ice Haven, to create part of the subjectivity of the different characters.  Today I want to talk about the page and the layout of the page.

The vast majority of comics are arrayed on the page in a series of panels, usually boxes. Sometimes, they can be structured in a grid; nine panels, six panels, or eight panels being the most common arrangements. This dates back to the beginning of the form, really, and even into the prehistory of it. …Here’s an old Popeye comic from the ’20′s or so.

a Thimble Theatre page by E.C. Segar

The page layout is very simple. It’s almost like a regular grid of little windows or stages. A lot of the early comics were heavily influenced by vaudeville. Popeye was originally titled “Thimble Theater”.

This is an old “Tintin” page out of the traditional French and European comics tradition, and it has a similar layout of pictures and boxes arrayed in a grid across the page. You can see here it’s not necessarily like a symmetrical grid. There are different sized panels, the arrangement varies, but it’s still pretty straightforward. And there’s a real reason for that. If it’s not broken, don’t fix it, that sort of thing. You put stuff in boxes in a series in a row, and it gives you a really pleasing visual effect.

There’s a nice symmetry and asymmetry going on in this Jack Kirby “Captain America” page. It gives you a really strong underlying rhythm… like a backbeat to your storytelling that’s very powerful.

an old Captain America page drawn by Jack Kirby

Jessica: I want to add to that there’s a lot of new kinds of approaches to designing pages and laying out panels, but the traditional grid-based system that we’re looking at here is nearly invisible. I don’t know how many of you guys last time when reading Ice Haven were going “Wow, what a grid!”, you know? “He’s using those rectangles! Why?” It’s kind of this unquestioned background of comics, and they really become invisible. They just disappear.

a page from the Mr. & Mrs. Ames sequence of Daniel Clowes’ Ice Haven (Random House)

M: Except that I would say in Ice Haven that grid, that meeting and the change of styles has an immediate effect, like in the Random Wilder sequences, you have a kind of fairly organic division of the panels, whereas a lot of the Charles segments with the child are in these smaller, more tightly gridded kind of pages.

J: It’s not that it doesn’t have some kind of aesthetic effect, but it’s not something that springs to the forefront.

M: Right, you don’t question that it’s there. Two or three times, Clowes uses circular panels, which is one variation you see sometimes. So in other words Superhero comics, newspaper comics, European comics, and most contemporary comics, you still basically see panels on a page. All along though, there have been some variations, some exceptions, most notably George Herriman, who did a comic strip called “Krazy Kat”, which ran from the late ’20′s to the early ’40′s. It’s one of the great masterworks of comics, and you can see here in this page, which is from the ’20′s,  he’s dispensing with a lot of the panel borders, or in the middle he’s using a very thick black border.

It really changes the immediate effect when you see this page along with the Popeye page where it’s a regular grid of little panels, it’s kind of shocking.

J: And these comics were coming out at the same time.

M: Yeah, these pages would have been all coming out together, and that’s what comics looked like then. Even weird, psychedelic strips like “Polly and Her Pals” and other works like that. So Herriman was really one of the only people who started to play around with the basic page and how that could be divided or less divided up. He would get rid of panel borders altogether to make transitions more fluid. That said—and I think this is generally true with what we’re talking about here—a comic might use less panels or borders or use canted angles like in this one and it can feel a little bit more random.

But often when you analyze it, like the Krazy Kat page, you can see that there is a very strong underlying structure.  And that’s very important because that’s how we know which direction to read and how to process the narrative in the right order.

So there are tons of possibilities for laying out pages using panels. Sometimes they can be purely decorative, sometimes they inform the narrative, like in this bottom middle row there’s the page full of polaroids. You could make that work as a comic, but it could also be a series of snapshots that are part of a story about someone remembering lost love, or a family vacation.

So it’s pretty rare to find people who very self- consciously reject that tradition, because it is a very sound basis for making comics. One notable variation is Chester Brown, who was doing autobiographical comics in the early ’90′s. He was very influential, and was actually one of the people who made me want to start doing comics. He started with a pretty traditional grid structure, but at a certain point he started drawing his panels—partly because he was living in a little rooming house in Toronto and drawing on his lap—he started drawing panels individually on index cards, and pasting them up on a big sheet  before bringing it to the publisher or the printer.

from Chester Brown’s I Never Liked You (Drawn & Quarterly)

So that allowed him to play with a much more intuitive layout, but there’s still a clear reading order. The actual placement is much more variable, so you get more interesting, different shapes of panels, interesting negative space around the panels that create a very different mood. Of course the fact that it’s on a black background adds to that as well.

There are cartoonists who are really pushing the limits of storytelling and moving in the direction of visual poetry. This is a page from a comic by a guy named Warren Craghead, and he comes from more of a fine arts and poetry background. His work, you can barely recognize it as comics. He’s got sound effects, word balloons, and a kind of movement across the page that’s similar to comics, but it’s really pushing it into another organic and fluid visual form. And that brings us back to Ludovic Debeurme’s Lucille.

Lucille’s visual storytelling

Debeurme’s first comic wasn’t published until 2001, and these are two pages from it. The drawing is much more heavily rendered, and if any of you did any research on him online he does oil painting, and he’s a very accomplished illustrator.

He’s using a very strict, four panel per-page grid for this story. So from that, and this was back in 2001. He started working on this book, Lucille, that we’re talking about today. This simple style that he’s adopted for Lucille is a very deliberate choice, as is the page layout. These are some pages from that, and you can see they have a very different visual effect.

Certainly that’s part of this more simple drawing style, and especially I think this lack of panel borders and a more fluid layout. I think a good starting question, and I’ll open this up to the floor here, is why did he do this? And what kind of effect does this have on your reading experience of the work?

Audience member (AM): One thing that struck me was I thought about a sort of lightness of the page as opposed to the darkness of the story. Thinking about it now, the way that a lack of order kind of pulls you along produces an effect of space so that you have a lot of very still moments. Such as the parts with Lucille by herself brooding. And the duration of the time is very clear in the way that the images are laid out. But at the same time, it’s not an agonizing process reading through her depression.

M: Right. That kind of economy of drawing, where there are scenes that are just heads floating in the air talking, or Lucille writing in her diary, you get that sense of intimacy and time passing, but a a reading experience it’s also very fast. There’s no extraneous detail.

J: I feel like that maybe the lack of word balloons contributes to that. There’s a page like this one, for example, I just flipped this open…there’s a ton of text on this page. But if you were to surround everything with panel borders and word balloons, it might look like there’s more text, or you’d notice how much text there is in a way that you might not. Speaking as a cartoonist who uses a lot of text, people can sometimes look at your pages and go “I don’t know if I’m up for that right now”. So perhaps this is something that was a conscious strategy. I’m not sure how much of this book was a conscious strategy, that’s another question. But certainly it is a strategy that seems to work.

AM: For me it was a very cinematic reading experience. I felt going from the wide, medium, and close-up shots was very fluid. There was a creative sense of tempo, that may not have happened with panel borders. I think by not having borders it drew you in much more easily. It wasn’t a story that was being presented, it was just the characters coming off the page. The sense of a narrator was less present.

AM: I find that just looking at it just held my attention more than a regular comic strip. I feel like the fluidity of the characters with no borders, it all fell in with one another.

J: So are we sort of saying that panels and word balloons can be a distancing mechanism? The same way we were talking about panels as a window between you and the world, in this space there is no window, you’re just in the world and in the space with them.

M: In illustration, a drawing with no border is called a vignette. So these are all vignettes. And that’s something you see individually in a lot of comics with panels, but sometimes the panels will fall away leaving a vignette moment. it’s often used precisely for that effect of immediacy, or it’ll be used for a flashback or a dream or something.

J: Frequently also for a sense of eternity. Like, if a character walks out of a building into a post-apocalyptic situation, and everything’s dead, there’ll be no panel borders so it seems like it goes on forever. It keeps running because there’s not an edge. And that’s a silly example, but you can obviously do that very seriously as well.

M: I think you’re observation that it’s very cinematic is interesting. I wouldn’t have thought of that, but I think you’re right, actually. It’s very non-cinematic in the sense that there are no panel borders, and those act like windows the same way a movie screen does. By getting rid of that, and by varying the size and shape of all the drawings he does, and the way he crops them, it makes it feel in one way very native to drawing…like sketchbook drawing than something we watch on the screen. But you’re right that he does use a lot of cinematic language in his storytelling. There’s close-ups, there’s medium shots; he uses tracking and moving shots in a way that’s very cinematic.

J: I also think that when you watch a film in a theater, I, at least, am not that cognizant or sensitive to the edges of the film or the screen. I feel that when you’re in a situation that’s being projected really large you’re more “in” it, more inside it. So maybe thats a cinematic thing as well.

AM: That goes along with the idea of the vignette if you think of the iris as the window. All of Debeurme’s drawings have a very central focus, so they get fuzzy or less specific towards the edges.

J: It mimics the way we focus.

AM: Yeah. We know what the clear focus of the vignette is.

AM: I also agree. It was very cinematic for me, but not because it looked like a storyboard, but because the flow worked for me as a viewer. No panel borders also allowed him to play with sound, like there’s one particular scene where in the hospital Lucille goes into the bathroom and we can hear the conversation with the daughter… and that really only works because of the lack of borders as opposed to having the different dialogue in different panels. There’s just one big image of her listening to all this, and it’s visually crowding her. That creates the sensation of all this happening at once as opposed to something more linear. So yeah, that added to the cinematic experience for me.

J: That spread stands out a bit because theres a lot of text on it. I get what you’re saying, but I sort of disagree because there’s too much that happens in that moment of time where she’s in that position. They need to be broken up a little bit more to feel it…maybe not tiny bits, but a little speech and a little speech and she moves a bit or something. I think it would work better for me that way.

AM: Do you know why there are no page numbers?

M: If I were to guess, it would probably be that he’s trying to get rid of all extraneous detail, in keeping with the rest of the work. I’m not sure I think that’s a good idea. I’m a real stickler for keeping pagination.

AM: Two things struck me in terms of the lack of borders…it seemed to me that the character’s lives also had problems with borders and with loss, so I think they lend themselves to that.

M: If you looked around online, there’s a short documentary on youtube that the American publisher put together when it came out, and Debeurme mentions that it’s not autobiographical but he did have a girlfriend who had anorexia. And that was the parting point of this book. To try to get into her head and understand what that feels like. I think that’s why he chose the specific art style he did for this book, this kind of very simple, sparse style in a way of expressing that.

J: They talk about how she’s sort of diaphanous and delicate, and if you can say one thing about this art, it’s that it’s delicate. It has this very fine line, and it feels like tracery in a way. And that reflects her state.

AM: And even though she is the title of the book, there’s really two protagonists. I wonder if the delicacy reflects in both of them?

J: That’s a good question. He presents himself as not delicate, but I think the whole reason she appeals to him is because he’s fragile in a different way. That may be pushing the analogy a little far.

AM: Is the gentleman in the story supposed to be the writer?

M: I don’t think so in any direct way. One clue I’ve figured out is to look at the title of the book and his first name. Ludovic, Lucille. And also Ludovic is a Polish or Slavic name, and Arthur/Vladimir is from a Polish family living in Britanny.

J: And Ludovic is from Britanny.

M: Right. There’s clearly a lot of personal experience, as well as a knowledge of the landscape and towns and the channel.

J: When he did this book he was probably around thirty, and he was dealing with the anorexic girlfriend at that time. He was not a teenager who ran away. This is not an autobiographical book, but he is using elements from his life to build the characters.

AM: I think that’s evidenced in how the character doesn’t really know where he ends and his father begins, but he does, but he doesn’t…I think those boundaries and borders are very fluid in him as well. As a character he starts in the first section where he’s…

M: …Where he’s a pretend satanist?

AM: Yeah, and that never comes back.

J: That bit is strange. He’s made out to be a pretend bully, but it all gets tossed out. I mean, I get that in the macho culture he’s in he might get some sort of posturing in various contexts and wouldn’t be delicate until he’s with Lucille, but the whole “I was a teenage satanist and then I wasn’t and I don’t ever mention it again” is kind of weird.

AM: But for me the idea of the borders and boundaries is more resonant than the delicacy even though that’s very strong, too. Because neither really seems able to say no to the other, and at the very end she goes with that guy…I couldn’t tell if she was slightly interested in him or just couldn’t say no. So again, it’s the boundaries and the inability to kind of make a decision. She just does these actions regardless.

M: Well if you remember before the attempted rape, at the end when Lucille and Vladimir make love, it’s not clear if it’s in a dream or fantasy, but he turns into the Italian guy while they’re having sex, suggesting that on some level that she is attracted to him. Whether it’s just physically, or whether she’s attracted to the fact that he’s attracted to her. But I think that’s a key thing. The borders and boundaries, I mean. Because Lucille doesn’t have any social contact, she’s kind of a shut-in that lives with her mom. And maybe the thing about the satanist and the bully is there to show that Arthur’s involved in so many people’s lives but not able to find his own place.

J: And just being a sailor in this town, he’s intricately involved with all these people. The kid he bullies at the beginning is the son of the man who dies, so it weaves together in that sense. It doesn’t get brought up though. That’s another thing about this book that according to Debeurme, it’s improvised. The story itself is improvisational. I think about the way I did my big graphic novel which wasn’t improvised, but wasn’t finished [being written] before I started [drawing]. There’s all this stuff at the beginning that I thought I was gonna use and never did. So they never paid off, and it might be one of those things where he was trying to build this character, and had an idea of the character, but it didn’t play out that way.

M: In that video he talked about his compositional style, it’s to just start drawing. If you look at the first drawing on the first page of the book, it’s Lucille walking. He says that that’s how he often likes to start a story out. Drawing characters just walking, and sort of following them to see where they’re going. I think it’s sort of a metaphor for how he’s creating.

AM: I was going to say that an interesting part of this that he begins and ends with the same thing, which is Lucille’s glasses. And we’re reading what the glasses mean to her.

J: That’s really interesting, yeah.  Because that’s her interface with the world, it’s where she sees things clearly.

AM: But at the beginning she’s not wearing them, and it can make her appearance discomforting.

AM: She says she can see fine, but I got the feeling that was a lie.

M: Yeah, I think the implication is that it’s a lie. He draws her with her eyes tightly shut at the beginning, so I think she’s actually pretty blind, and does need the glasses, but she’s so determined to not show any signs of being unattractive that she takes them off whenever she’s out of the house.

J: It seems like the way they’re drawn at the beginning…it looks like they’re bifocals? And you don’t see it after a while.

M: That might be the drawing style evolving, and the way he’s drawing her lids and her eyes.

AM: That’s something she shares with her brother, the enormous, strange glasses. They’re so giant they’re like a mask.

Lack of Narration

M: Someone mentioned that there’s no narration which is pretty different from the last two books we’ve read. Fun Home and Ice Haven rely heavily on narration by multiple different characters. How did that change your experience of reading this book?

AM: It makes it so it’s the kids’ stories. There is no authority except for authority as they see it. They’re antagonists during the course of the books. If there was a narrator they would have to be judged in a certain sense just by the word choice.

M: There’s no omniscient point of view. Maybe that comes back to the drawing and the drawing style, the fading and the “camera lens”, or the mind’s eye. It’s like things fade out around the edges, and although I can see it I don’t focus on the details around me. It creates a very subjective, kind of optical experience.

AM: Recollections of your childhood then, it’s more…for his recollections he’s telling the story from the point of “I was a boy…”. He actually recalls his childhood and there’s some narration in there.

J: When he’s telling her?

AM: No, when he’s not talking to her. That’s the whole point. I was kind of thrown by that at first. Later you hear them say “Hey do you remember when we met that guy” and that kind of stuff, but there’s a moment where he says “When i was a little boy my Dad…” later he mentions when his father gave him the toy, and it’s him recollecting.

M: And he’s just saying it?

AM: Yeah, he’s just speaking to us. Whereas Lucille…

M: Lucille either tells Arthur or we learn it through her diary entries. All three of these books have featured female characters writing in diaries as a literary device. I’m not really sure what that implies.

AM: She is narrating here, but there’s one later on where there’s this little girl…this one is a personal experience identifying with being overweight, but there’s another where she’s in this field with her father…

AM: But there’s also an episode much later on where there’s a flashback that’s told about his life, but it’s not narrated from his perspective. His father is saying : “See those cliffs? They’re gonna go. The sea will wash them away.”

J: It’s just a flashback, but with no distinction?

AM: It’s a two page spread, but it’s not framed by Vladimir saying that. I think the way we feel the artistic choices here are most in the colors. Specifically the use of the gold and the black, and when they put human heads on the insects. And there are places where they appear in succession, like where she discovers him having slit his wrist there’s a black page, but right before that there’s a gold color.

M: Like a fade to black in film.

AM:[Speaking of the] colored pages, the “Sailor meets a sailor” [sequence], all in gold, which is the one place where the drawing style entirely changes, it’s not a dream sequence, it’s a sort of a flashback vision in Vladimir’s head as he’s running to rescue Lucille.

AM: Going on to the next page I figured it was sort of a play for the toy…

AM: Yeah, it’s his childhood place, so the subjective shift of the drawing style to match this memory is weird, but it’s the only place it happens.

M: It’s the only place in the entire book, so what’s so important about that scene? Maybe it’s the improvisatory thing where he said “Oh, maybe I’ll do some color here”, or there’s something else going on.

AM: Does it connect to the severed doll?

M: I think it is the same doll that gets beheaded, and the Dad puts a nail in there to fix it, and it’s what he (somewhat improbably) slits his wrist with.

AM: Is the sailor theme a Popeye and Brutus nod?

J: I think in terms of the design there’s a nod to Popeye, but I think it’s about him and his father. It starts with the two sailors talking to each other and who’re both the same age essentially, and it says “What are they talking about?” and then they have a fight and one says “You bastard, you fucked up my head, I dream about you every night?”, I think it’s clear that it’s his father, and that he’s dreaming about being hit and beat up over things.

M: And that’s what the guy says when young Arthur cuts his face open in the bar fight. He says ” Oh shit, you fucked up my face”. It’s slightly different but it’s using the same quote, and the same trauma. That implies a childhood memory that is also being contaminated by recent events.

J: Also where he says “Hey your wife is looking for you”, it harkens back to his job being to go get his Dad from the bar and drag him home. Instead of “Hey your wife”, it’s “Mom is looking for you”. It feels like some kind of fever dream or something. I don’t think that he’s even directly thinking it, but it’s a visual analogy to the multiple layers of meaning that go with this little sailor doll.

AM: Well why there? Why put it in the middle of the rape scene?

M: Does that actually happen in the middle of the rape?

AM: Yeah, it does.

J: But as soon as you get out of that scene there’s the flashback to explain what this doll is, and you see him appear. Again, I think it’s an analogy to show what this means to him, at a guess, to give the background to this thing. You don’t know why you need to know about the nail yet, because he doesn’t use it when he beats the guy up. It’s just background.

M: I agree with you. The placement right in the middle of the rape scene is a bit of a weird one. It doesn’t really follow from where he gets left off with the jealous sister who says “You’re girlfriend is off with my brother. If you don’t believe me check the overlook.” And he says “What? Bastard!” and runs off. To put the comic in there implies…associating running out the door with running to the bar to get his Dad when he’s drunk but that doesn’t really match particularly.

AM: Another possibility is that it could’ve just been a childhood play thing. You know how you play with your toys? Maybe that’s what he was doing with that toy.

M: …Play acting.

AM: Maybe he was acting out with it and then right after when he says “Dad, I broke it”, maybe that was him acting as a child.

J: There’s an element of that but putting it right in that scene is a little bit strange. I would read it more clear at the end of the scene. Then it’d click into place, but he doesn’t put it there.

AM: One thing is to consider is what the doll means to him…it’s his father’s caring. It’s one of very few moments of tenderness and protection from his father towards him. And the scene of the sailors beating each other up and the scene were getting to of Arthur beating this guy up both go back to the scene in the bar of Arthur jumping in to protect his father.

M: And not being able to control his rage, in some sense. I don’t think he expects to cut that guy’s face open so severely, but he’s got that in him. So you’re right, that kind of foreshadows a bit that he might kill this guy.

AM: I think it’s sort of there to justify or put in context Arthur’s violence, so we see him as both someone who can be dangerously violent, but he’s only seriously violent in the story when he’s trying to protect someone.

AM: As opposed to the advice his father gave him…

Improv

J: Did anybody find his sort of vague and improvisational nature of the story problematic at all? Was it a struggle? It seems like most of you guys got totally gung-ho about it and just got into it.

AM: It kind of struck me…not so much the vagueness of it but the fact that there aren’t many tonal shifts except for that two-page sailor cartoon. The same goes for the pacing of the story. You have this long, slow, character-driven first half of this book that discusses you know…who is Lucille? Who is Arthur? And then the two of them meet up and suddenly there’s a plot.

J: I think that’s a really good observation, because for me that’s the point where I think “Woah, we’re going!” And they’re on the road, and there’s the murder mystery…

AM: I think that’s where the emotional power comes from, you know? We’ve been allowed to slowly take in these characters without a very clear narrative that’s step by step, where we see them in a day to day manner, so then when they meet up and they reveal parts of their natures and their traits, that’s when I realized I was becoming more emotionally invested. Whether it was conscious or not, the effect helped to make it a more powerful experience for me.

M: That’s definitely one advantage to this kind of free-flowing narrative structure. You can really take the time to observe the characters interacting, or linger on some of the side characters. One of my favorite parts is towards the end, those short, sad, drunken conversations with the family patriarch complaining about his son and his acting classes… and their employee who’s practically their servant, who’s father and father’s father all worked for this same family. And he’s got his little plot of pine trees, and he doesn’t even know what to do with them, but there it is. Those are really moving and wonderful parts that don’t have much to do with the story, but he went with it, and there’s value in that visual meandering.

AM:  That’s kind of how I felt about the scene where you first meet Arthur. I actually didn’t like it because in context with the rest of the story it doesn’t really fit in but when i first saw it I thought it was an interesting little study on how cruel children can be…you don’t see moments like that with children very often. And then later on nothing was done with that, so maybe it was him trying to be controlling, or it’s an extension of his own OCD, but it really didn’t work for me in that particular part. When he’s introduced you don’t just think he’s  a bully but also maybe even a villain, especially from the way he draws his eyes.

M: Again that’s kind of an artifact of him making it up as he goes, because Arthur changes a lot in his basic character design.

J: Although any book this length that’s worked on chronologically, you’ll see changes in the way characters are depicted. It’s not something you pay a lot of attention to, but take a look at the first few pages of Lucille, with her weird hair kind of standing out in this pyramid shape around her head, and then at the end, she’s really graceful. And it’s partly that his drawing gets more graceful as he’s going, but it’s probably also a choice.

AM: I thought of that while I was reading. I was wondering if it was her self-esteem growing so we’re seeing her as a more beautiful girl now?

M: Although the exposition is a bit fuzzy, at some point she resists taking her medicine, and then she’s getting better so her body starts to look more healthy, but she backslides pretty quickly. There’s the part where she’s hiding the croissant in the hotel pillow.

AM: I also read the difference between how they look at the beginning of the book and how they look later on as being about the passage of time. That’s left a little ambiguous, so I’m not sure if that’s correct, but I see Arthur at the beginning almost looking several years younger than when he meets Lucille. It’s not clear how much time passes between the first image of Lucille we see and when Lucille ends up in the hospital.

J: Clearly there are years passing and I think that plays a part, but I also think if you draw 400 pages or so of something, you get better at it. The fluidity of the poses increases. At the beginning it’s not bad by any means, but it doesn’t have the same kind of motion and sensuousness that it has later. I don’t think that relates to their ages, but instead of getting to know the characters, the drawing style, and getting better at drawing from doing it so much.

M: I was thinking style more than the drawing itself. The boat scene is beautiful, and it’s amazingly done, but it’s a rougher kind of  rendition. Towards the end of the book, there are some incredibly lovely drawings and this sort of gracefulness that sets in, especially as you get to know the characters. but the power of the boating accident…

J: When he was doing this book he was in his early thirties, basically, and although that’s not that young for a filmmaker or musician, that’s really young for a cartoonist in terms of development. You keep changing for so long. Most cartoonists don’t really stop developing, but they settle into a style that they can snap to. Especially adopting a new style as he did for this book, there’s some serious fluidity there.

M: I do think that some of it is intentional. In this one scene here…it’s past the middle of the book. It feels like he’s drawing them both much more childlike. The style is more playful, because they’re happy and swimming in the pond, and this is where Lucille is the most healthy. She’s out of the hospital and she’s eating and taking her medication…speaking of which, was the anorexia or the OCD was that distracting to you guys, or did you  feel like it was an issue book? He set out to write a book about anorexia, so…Did it feel like a real teenage girls’ diary? Like she was expressing herself or interacting with the world? I know he was very concerned with that. Whenever you’re writing someone who’s another gender or another race you have to take that into account.

AM: The diaristic stuff at the beginning when she talked about going to the mall…that didn’t ring true. I wondered if maybe that was a translation problem?

J: That could be the case. Translation is a difficult task.

AM: But that bad voice in her head, and how she heard it in her head…from people I know who’ve suffered from anorexia, that seemed right on. It echoed some of the things they would say about how they were feeling.

J: I think it took him a little while to hit his stride with her, but he did. What I liked was that there wasn’t a lot of diaristic stuff. If there had been a lot, I think I would’ve been very unwilling to go there with him. Mostly she simply acts; eats, doesn’t eat, puts herself in difficult situations with people. That seemed very right to me, the way she was behaving.

AM: It seemed right, especially the bits with her mother. Her sort of  compassion and her issues with her mother… that seemed very true and sweet, and I was glad he put it in there.

M: It’s a very complex relationship. We’re never really sure why the father left, or if he’s still alive…I’m pretty sure it says they got divorced in there, but he’s never around in the whole book. Lucille clearly feels bad about that, but she also sort of resents her mother. When she’s watching the TV talk show, and there’s the obese woman on it who’s confronting her mother on air, and she kind of identifies with it. That whole issue was very complicated in the book, whereas I thought that the OCD was underplayed. It felt like part of Arthur’s character, but…

J: …I kept forgetting about it.

M: Right.

J: The issue with the numbers would come up and It’d take me a minute to remember exactly what that was about.

AM: One thing I liked was the part where she hides the croissant. I know people with eating disorders, and that’s what they do. It seems so obvious,  but they really try to hide it even though they’re so skinny.

M: Arthur’s understanding of that, and maybe even his acceptance of her disorder is another thing that doesn’t really get resolved. We’re never sure how much he knows that she’s anorexic, even though he clearly wants her to eat and recognizes that there’s something going on. There’s some instances where he actually does think that she’s eating, but she’s not. And it’s sort of left up to us, because the story goes in a different direction.

J: There are moments where it feels like he’s actually starting to turn into her mother a bit. He’s trying to get her to eat, and she’s pushing back. There’s a little twinge of where that could go.

AM: On the flip-side there’s the connection between her anorexia and her sexuality. There’s that scene where she’s touching herself, and she’s kind of embarrassed but she’s hiding her own shame. I saw a similarity between the two situations.

J: I was looking at the scene where she’s dreaming or fantasizing about the Italian guy, and her mother comes out of his mouth. And it’s possible that’s she’s masturbating here, because her arms are under the sheet in that same way, and she looks very tense.

AM: Kind of going back to what we talked about early, with the lack of panels, what Jessica was saying was that it made it seem lighter, but my feeling was the heaviness of it because they’re carrying around their entire past. There wasn’t a division between then and now, and the whole story seemed weighty because of the continuous burden.

J: Especially with the flashbacks. Usually there’s some sort of division between past and present sequences in comics, but there isn’t any in the book.

AM: What about these two birds? They remind me of the two old guys from the Muppets. They fly together and chit-chat, and then they disappear, but then they come back.

M: That’s possibly my favorite sequence in the book, where they’re talking about  flying and they see that little figure on the cliff. And he jumps off the cliff and he’s flapping his arms. That comes back later, it’s all part of Arthur’s imagination…wanting to fly and escape. It’s one of those changes of register, like the sailor sequence. And you’re right, they are sort of these crotchety, complaining birds. And he explains later that he’s always wanted to fly…depending on the mood it might be something he improvised or just kind of put in and didn’t develop carefully into the narrative.

J: And what about these various title pages with characters—many of whom I don’t recognize—on bee bodies. Is there anything in the story that that relates to? Looking through, several of these bees I don’t recognize. I was looking for them but never found them. Mostly it’s Lucille and Arthur in the second half of the book, but there’s this one page where Lucille is a flower and Arthur is a bee. The last one is Arthur the bee flying away by himself.

Postscript: digital comics

AM: What do you think about web comics and digital comics?

M: I’m all for digital format. In fact, Top Shelf just announced that they’re making all their work available on multiple platforms. I hope and believe we’ll still have comics available as books, but I think that digital formats are very useful and easy ways to get things out there.

AM: Do you think it alters the way you read comic books?

M: Yeah, it’s different.

J: Totally different. There are a lot of disadvantages artistically speaking. When you look at the book of Lucille, you’re seeing these two pages juxtaposed, and this image you’re looking forward to reading. On an iPad or something similar, you’re going to see one page at a time, but you won’t see spreads. You won’t be able to see where you are in the book. There’s a kind of tactile quality that you don’t get on a website or webpage. There’s an abstract, digital structure instead of something you can hold.

M: You savor that moment when you’ve gotten really far through a book like Lucille. You get to breathe and realize you made it through the whole thing, and that’s why there are a lot of great things about physical books.

J: There are nice formats available, and if you have Lucille and Big Questions and Asterios Polyp to read, those are really large books. You don’t want to carry them around with you everywhere. So there are some advantages to digital formats.

(All Lucille images taken from the Top Shelf edition.)

Over the five volumes we’ve been edited (in progress on the sixth), we’ve tried to shine a spotlight on this list. As most guest editors point out in their introductions, the selection process, when it gets down to which stories make the cutoff for the volume and which don’t, can be alarmingly arbitrary. Often, we and the guest editors would love to include 50 stories in the published volume, but there just isn’t room. But when you combine the notable list with the stories that are printed, it might be a little more possible to talk about representing what’s we actually think is best in a given year. Also, when looking for good comics to read, why limit yourself? We’ve always hoped readers will delve a bit into the list to find more great stories once they finish reading BAC.

Below, we’ve reprinted the full list of the Notables from the 2012 volume, which was guest-edited by Françoise Mouly. We’ve also added extensive links and images of the covers to intrigue you and  to help you track the works down.

And for two lucky readers: a head start on collecting all 100!

WE WILL GIVE AWAY two sets of  about 10 mincomics and self-published books from this list. Which ones they are will be a surprise! Comment on this post between now and Friday October 12 at 12 pm EST, and you will be entered in a drawing to win one of the two piles. Note: In order to be able to offer this prize to all readers internationally, the winners must pay postage for the package via Paypal. Please enter only if you’re willing to do so. 

Note: we do moderate comments, so if you haven’t commented here before, your comment won’t show up immediately, but it is in the queue! Also, make sure you use a good email address to log in to comment so we can contact you if you win. It won’t show up publicly.

Just to be extra clear, these are not sets of every book on the list, they are sub-sets of several of the minis and self-pubbed books. Good luck!

–Jessica and Matt

Derik A. Badman, Badman’s Cave

Lynda Barry, Picture This: The Near-sighted Monkey Book

Josh Bayer, ROM

Kate Beaton, “1980s Businesswoman Comics,” “Dracula.”  Hark! A Vagrant

Gabrielle Bell, “Sa Vie.” Lucky

.

Nick Bertozzi, Lewis & Clark

Patricio Betteo, Mundo Invisible

Vera Brosgol, Anya’s Ghost

Box Brown, Ben Died of a Train

Ed Brubaker & Sean Philips, Incognito, Vol. 2: Bad Influences

Jan Martijn Burger, Earth and Sky

Mike Carey & Peter Gross, The Unwritten Vol. 3: Dead Man’s Knock

Emily Carroll, His Face All Red

Stephen Destefano & George Chieffet, Lucky in Love: A Poor Man’s History (Vol. 1)

Brian Chippendale, If ‘n Oof

Daniel Clowes, Mister Wonderful: A Love Story

Philippe R. Girard, Killing Velazquez

Marek Colek, Baba Yaga and the Wolf

Stephanie Cragg, Midcentury Modern

Warren Craghead, “A Sound of the World. A Thing.”  www.craghead.com

Travis Edward Dandro, Journal #3

Mike Dawson, Troop 142

Michael Deforge,  Spotting Deer

Michael Deforge,  “S M”

Mickey Duzyj, Miss Chris

Joshua Dysart, Alberto Ponticelli & Rick Veitch, Unknown Soldier Vol. 4: Beautiful World, “Kalashnikov”

CF, Powr Mastrs #3

Edie Fake, Gaylord Phoenix

Ray Fawkes, One Soul

Glynnis Fawkes, The Terrible Story of Kinyras and Myrrha

Michel Fiffe, Zegas #1

Maria Forde, Marlon Brando, Volume 2

Bernardo Fernández (BEF), Espiral

Rick Geary, The Lives of Sacco & Vanzetti (A Treasury of Victorian Murder)

Julia Gfrörer, Too Dark to See

Pascal Girard, Bigfoot

Brooke Gladstone & Josh Neufeld, The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone on the Media

Charles Glaubitz, “Crystal Sigil.” Panel to Panel #1

Lisa Hanawalt, “Worst Sandwiches,” “How to get a Haircut.” I Want You #2

Tom Hart, The Dodgers. Suspect Device #1

Jennifer Hayden, S’crapbook, the First Album

Adam Hines, Duncan the Wonder Dog

Jay Hosler, Zander Cannon & Kevin Cannon, Evolution: The Story of Life on Earth

Ari Huff, The Magnificent Osterman Brothers

Kevin Huizenga, “Rumbling“, What Things Do

David Iseri & David Lau, Summer Oddity

Sam Ita, Frankenstein: A Pop-Up Book

Dunja Jankovic, Habitat # 2

Tom Kaczynski, Trans Utopia.

Tom Kaczynski,”The Cozy Apocalypse”. Mome #21

Ben Katchor, The Cardboard Valise

Kazu Kibuishi, Amulet #4: The Last Council

Alex Kim, “Night Machine“

David King, Lemon Styles

Aidan Koch, The Whale

Blaise Larmee, “2001“

Sharon Lintz  & Nicholas Breutzman, “Photo Meetings”. Porn Hounds 2

Sharon Lintz   & Nathan Schreiber, “Cancer”. Porn Hounds 2

Jason Little, Motel Art Improvement Service

Jonas Madden-Connor, “The Most Gripping Mind-Exploding Triumphantly Electric of our Time”. Papercutter #15

Benjamin Marra, The Incredibly Fantastic Adventures of Maureen Dowd

Jed McGowan, Lone Pine

Kagan McLeod, Infinite Kung Fu

Carla Speed McNeil, Finder: Voice

Max Mose, All Aboard

Annie Murphy, Truth: Stranger than Fiction. Gay Genius

Nate Neal, The Sanctuary

Tom Neely, The Wolf

Audrey Niffinegger, The Night Bookmobile

David Ortega, Abuela y los Dead Mexicans

Jim Ottaviani &Leland Myrick, Feynman

Jason Overby, “2101“

 Pat Palermo, Live / Work #1

Nate Powell, Any Empire

Lauren Redniss. Radioactive

Jesse Reklaw, N.Y.D.I. #1 (No, You Do It)

James Romberger & Wallace Stevens, “Madame La Fleurie,” Hooded Utilitarian

Simon Roy, Shipwrecked with Dan the Gorilla

Greg Rucka and JH Williams III, Batwoman: Elegy

Yumi Sakugawa, Mundane Fortunes for the Next Ten Billion Years

Seth, Palookaville #20

Matt Sheean & Malachi Ward, Expansion #1 & #2

Mahendra Singh & Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark

Jeff Smith, RASL #11

Grant Snider, Incidental Comics

Bishakh Som, ”Untitled,” Pood #2

Leslie Stein, Eye of the Majestic Creature #6

Karl Stevens, The Lodger

Matt Sundstrom,  Second Chances

Matthew Thurber, 1-800-Mice #5

Mark Todd & Esther Watson, Nubbin & Nutz

GB Tran, Vietnamerica: A Family’s Journey

Noah Van Sciver, Blammo #7

Connor Wilumsen, “Rich Richmond,”  Pood #2

Brian Wood & Becky Cloonan, ”The Waking Life of Angels.”  Demo #2

Zach Worton, The Klondike

J.T. Yost, Losers Weepers #3

Dan Zettwoch, “Motor Lodge,” Root Rot

Shujaaz is a monthly comics magazine plus radio show that launched in Kenya in February 2010, and won an International Digital Emmy Award just this April.  Shujaaz (which means “heroes” in Kiswahili) involves print, radio, and sms media to get educational and empowering messages out to the youth of Kenya. Rob Burnet, the social entrepreneur of Shujaaz, says, “We use multiple-media communications to inspire and motivate an audience of some 5 million young Kenyans to take action to improve their lives and engage with urgent issues that shape their future. This is done through stories following the lives of four fictional young Kenyans.”

The lead character is Boyie, a 19 year old who finished secondary school but couldn’t find a job (neither could any of his friends) and is left wondering what to do.  Boyie has a secret, and that’s the fact that he has an FM radio station in his bedroom, where he hacks into the frequencies of other radio stations and broadcasts his show, Shujaaz FM, as DJ B.  His radio show is all about what it means to be a hero, encouraging people to step up and think about what they can do.  The other characters in the Shujaaz comic are listeners of his show.

What I love about this project is how 4th-wall-breaking it is: the radio show in the comic exists in real life. Shujaaz FM is syndicated across 25 FM stations across Kenya, and very often, people call into the stations and ask for DJ B, who is a fictional character.  DJ B has thousands of fans on various social media, who communicate with DJ B and each other about their lives and what’s happening in Kenya. There’s something really interesting about a comic that crosses the line into readers’ real lives in some way, and, possibly because of that crossover, the positive messages in the comics seem to have a lot of concrete impact. I’d also be interested to find out how much greater reach the project has because it’s not dependent on access to print magazines, or, for that matter, a computer for internet access. The radio is pretty democratizing. In fact, in trying to put this post together I kept getting stuck on what this thing is: is it a comic? A show? A movement? An online community? Still don’t know. I’d love to see this kind of thing being done elsewhere.

Shujaaz started because the creators felt that there was a lack of positive, youth-focused media or a platform for young people to share their ideas with each other. They wanted to create a world that was very much like the real world, a place that the readers could identify and connect with.

Here’s a snippet of a recent article written by Rob Burnet for The Kernel about the project:

By partnering with experts and researchers, scientists and innovators, we make sure Shujaaz delivers proven and practical ideas that can really make a difference to our audience. In this way, Shujaaz is working constantly to nudge a vast and vital community towards new ways of working, thinking and acting.

But do the Shujaaz stories deliver real change to the audience? In a recent independent Kenya-wide survey of secondary school students, 62 per cent said they follow Shujaaz every month. We have an audited regular audience of over more than five million.  More than 30 per cent of the audience report having taken action based on stories they found in Shujaaz. A similar number talked about Shujaaz ideas with friends—further widening and deepening the reach.

You can learn more about the project by watching this video: Shujaaz: Empowering Kenyan Youth

We’ll be doing some drawings at our table. But in order to qualify, you need to do some drawing too!

To enter, you’ve got to make a doodle comic (see below) and either upload it or bring us a printout.

Online option: For the online contest, upload your comic to Flickr or any other image-sharing site, and post a link to it in comments here. Deadline: April 27 at noon. We’ll do the drawing for the two winners that afternoon.

MoCCA Fest option: To enter to win at MoCCA Fest, just hand us a photocopy or printout of the comic on Saturday with your contact info (cell number and email) on the back. We’ll draw two winners at random on Sunday afternoon. We will  call the winners to pick up (If you can’t pick up within an hour, we’ll pick new winners).

This activity is, incidentally, the “extra credit” assignment from the first chapter of Mastering Comics. There, it has the more sober name of “Drawing Prompts Comic”. But a more appropriate name might be:

Doodle Comic

Som of the kinds of doodles you could develop into a comic

Timed, spontaneous doodling may seem pretty far from serious cartooning, but all drawing exists on a continuum. In this activity we’re going to doodle some more, but then we’ll introduce a sequence to the drawing and improvise a short comic strip from scratch…almost.

Materials

• office paper
• brush and india ink (or a brush pen)
• penciling and inking tools

Instructions

Draw a six-panel grid on your piece of paper (or download the nine-panel grid PDF here and print it out).
Get out your brush, ink it up, and, without thinking too hard or planning in advance, quickly make a single mark in each panel—a line, a squiggle, a blot—in different sizes and densities. Rinse out your brush and let your marks dry.
Look at each panel and try to see shapes or parts of outlines in the marks you’ve made: the curve of a nose, for example, or the drape of a coat, a tree, whatever. Take a pencil (or inking tool) and add to the marks, drawing what you see in your mind’s eye. Do this for each panel.
Now hold the page back and read the six panels in sequence. Is a story implied there? Look for the suggestion of a narrative thread and tease it out by adding to each panel: backgrounds, new figures, dialogue, sound effects. One of your marks may lead to the creation of a character who becomes your protagonist. In that case, you may choose to redraw him in other panels to give the story better continuity and flow.

you can print this grid out and use it for your comic if you like

Matt came up with this activity in his sketchbook a few years ago. He posted an example of his own as well as several variations by other artists here.

a doodle comic of Matt's

Pre-order Mastering Comics now!

Back in the fall, Matt and I ran a graphic novel book club at the Brooklyn Public Library. These were really great discussions, and lots of people asked at the time if we would post video. That wasn’t possible, but we’re going to try to post complete transcripts instead.

The following is a transcription from our book group meeting on “Fun Home”, by Alison Bechdel.

Saturday, Oct 15, 2011 at 4:00 PM
 Fun home by Alison Bechdel

topic: word + image

Matt: We posted this page up on our blog this morning—This is page 153 from the book, and it comes at the point where, unbeknownst to us, Bruce, the father, has been arrested for trying to pick up two teenage boys and buying them beer. And she, Alison, doesn’t know about this yet; she’s thirteen. So let’s read through this whole page and look at the way she uses text in not just the narration, but also dialogue and writing and images, and crucially, this is another element of comics that I’ll talk a lot about in this meeting, the way everything is laid out on the page. You’ve got a horizontal panel at the top, and four smaller panels.

“The summer I was thirteen, my father’s secret almost surfaced.” And then we see her diary, “July 1st, Monday: Mom went to state college. Dad’s gonna go to a-” and then it’s crossed out, trying to spell it, “-psychiatrist. He says it’s because he does dumb dangerous things and because he’s bad and wants to be good… or something.

“At breakfast that morning he’d been in a jacket and tie, not his usual vacation dishabille of cut-off jeans.” Then we see Allison in the kitchen and she asks him, “Where are you going?”

“The import of what he said was remarkable, but less so than the fact that he was saying it to me.” Now notice that we don’t actually see him saying it right here. There’s a gap there, an ellipsis, and we just get her reaction, her jaw dropping and the Life cereal box hanging limp. “Why?!”

“The sudden approximation of my dull, provincial life to a New Yorker cartoon was exhilarating.” And we see her, this kind of awkward silence as her mind generates this image of a generic New Yorker cartoon of a psychiatrist with a patient on the sofa. “But my father’s abject and shameful mien quickly sobered me up. I’m bad. Not good like you.”

So we learn about this new event in her life, which we’re going to learn a lot more about in this chapter, in this kind of herky-jerky way. There’s narration explaining, we see a bit of her diary, we see this fragment of the dialogue where we’re missing big parts of it. It’s interjected by this bubble, like a cartoon inside a bubble balloon, that sorta sends us off of our track, and then the father doesn’t speak until the very last panel of the page. And he just says, “I’m bad. Not good like you.” And if you read it then as a page, almost ignoring the writing, we just get this long sequence of tension, of the father standing there quietly, holding his coffee, until the last minute.

Jess: We sort of wait for him to actually say it—we know what’s going on here because we read it in the journal. What’s he going to say about this? How’s he gonna interact with Allison about it, because he’s just so bad about interacting in all ways at all times. How’s he going to explain this one?

Matt: Did anyone think it significant that it’s Life cereal that she’s holding and not Raisin Bran?
[group laughs]

Matt: Her life is thrown out of balance in that moment. The use of the product placement is very ironic in this book, I think.

Jess: Also, there’s something interesting about, and I’ve just been thinking about this, New York is a thread that runs throughout the book: her visits to New York, and the Village, and so on. And it’s sort of this proximity of sophistication, and this life where they  could actually be true to themselves in some way or another. And then you get this New Yorker cartoon as yet another reference to this high life she thinks of being centered in New York. What’s funny to me is that, while the father would probably be the one to enjoy life in New York the most, in the sense that he could come out and be himself, he’s the one who decides to not go, he’s the one who keeps them where they are, and then invents the life that is a picture of something else.

Matt: For me it’s one of the fundamental mysteries of his character. Yes, there is the story that he and the wife were in Europe when his father, her grandfather, died, and he had to go home and take care of the funeral home. Yes, that’s a problem, but you’d think if you really—

Jess: He probably could have sold that funeral home.

Matt: Yeah, sell the funeral home. The thing is, it talks about how his whole extended family is right there. There’s almost a perverse, masochistic need to stay in this little town. Any thoughts on that?

Speaker: [inaudible]

Jess: Yeah, there are several maps. There’s a map with all the relatives, a map with the places he lived and died, there’s also the mention of his accent—you don’t hear his voice in this.

Speaker: It’s later in the book, where she’s talking about- [inaudible]

Jess: But I also feel the pretending was so essential to his character. Could he fake a life like this if he were in New York?

Matt: He’d have to be honest. He had to lie because he doesn’t know anything else, maybe.

So, there are a lot of his maps. This is the last time we see one of them, of how conscripted his life was. Where he was born, his grave, where he was killed, where he raised a family… And notice it’s inscribed by a circle, which is also entrapped and almost squashed by this square panel. It reinforces this almost closed-in circle of his life. I think it’s significant that she keeps on going back to maps in general, and these very closed-in ones.

Speaker: Another thing about this page that’s very characteristic of this is that she does her own pagination as well.

Matt: It’s actually a font made from her own handwriting.

Jess: Isn’t it ironic, though, that she’s done all this hand-lettering and lettered everybody else’s stuff, but her own lettering is a font. I know it’s not intentional; she would have rather used her own lettering, but she was willing to sacrifice her own writing but not everybody else’s.

Speaker: The point I want to make is the fact that it’s kind of multi-textual, with multiple references, because the way she describes  herself as kind of an amateur archivist—the reason she was able to do the work and detail in this is because she kept all of her journals and writing as a kid and all these photographs. Part of it feels to me like she wants to provide a an incontestable narrative in a way, that’s not just her story, but that it’s documented, that it did happen. Although in her writing, she clearly says that “this is my perspective” and “this is my interpretation of my father’s life,” etcetera, etcetera.  But really, as I flip through it, almost every page has either a copied photograph or one of these other things; even on this page we have a facsimile of her own childhood journal and this classic New Yorker comic, I’m guessing she referenced a very specific one. I think it’s a very cool element of her process.

Jess: But isn’t it ironic that the central event of this book, the thing on which everything else turns, is the one thing that she actually can’t document? She wasn’t there, there are no notes, there’s no way to know whether he really saw a snake or whether he did this on purpose. And it suits her purposes to believe the he did it on purpose. But she’ll never know.

Matt: So, in this scene, we have this missing moment where we never actually see him tell her that he’s going to the shrink. On page 162, we revisit this scene (at the bottom of this page) and we rewind. In other words, it’s gone back and is explaining what happened in the previous days. The whole family went over to a sleepover at a friend’s house because her mother was finishing her Master’s degree, and it jumps around time. What we learn later is that her father had gone off cruising with these teenagers when they were in town, and then we return to that opening question, “Where are you going?” And we get the answer that we didn’t get the first time around: “To Danville.”

Jess: While she takes her Life out of the closet.

Matt: This is filling in what happened between those previous panels. “To the mental hospital?” she jokes. “I… I have to see a psychiatrist.” You can almost cut-and-paste and rearrange it to get a longer strip of the actual sequence. But she presents it to you out of order, and I think that gets at what’s so interesting and rich about this book, that she’s told it in this chopped up and rearranged kind of way. And it feels so organic, it’s hard to tell how she made these decisions, like, “I know, I’ll cut this out here and bring it back later.” But it really feels like a way to use the form of comics, in a way where you do divide exchanges in dialogue, exchanges in glances, and you can remove stuff to express the unknowability of a situation. One of the themes of this chapter is ellipses, and in her diary at one point she starts putting in a lot of “dot dot dots” and leaving things out.

Jess: Actually, right above is where she mentions them, the ellipses, and then we see a three-panel ellipsis that was removed from a previous section.

Matt: And that makes me think that’s a very explicit connection she is making here between the ellipses in her diary and the fact that she used that as a storytelling technique a few pages later on.

Jess: Notice: three panels, three dots.

Matt: Did anyone notice other interesting examples of ellipses or things like that where bits of information are left out and then come back later?

In some ways it marks so much of the whole book, even the way it’s dropped casually at first that her father is dead in the opening pages and also that he had this thing for teenage boys. It’s almost like a throwaway thing the first time you see it on page 17, where she’s talking about how he seemed like the perfect family man, all the details were controlled. At the top of page 17, “He appeared to be an ideal husband and father,” for example, “but would an ideal husband and father have sex with teenage boys? It’s tempting to suggest, in retrospect, that our family is a sham” and it goes on. It just has this one shot; we don’t get any details by this point, we just see a reference to it as we see him looking at the choir boys walking by, in church of all places. And that’s a little bomb that’s dropped in the middle of the story, and it’s not till much later where you get into a little bit more detail about how that happened. I feel the same way with his death; you learn a bit more detail each time it comes back to it, how it happened or how it might not’ve happened.

Jess: I’m looking at page 16 and 17 now and there’s something else I wanted to bring up, somewhat unrelated, and that is her really frequent use of silhouettes. On page 16, in the top-right panel of the top tier, you see her father appear in the background. He’s a hovering presence while she’s doing her chores. And on the next page, you have the moment when the kids are scolded for moving the vase a little too close to the edge of the table. Again, you can’t see the expressions, you just see the edge of the body, as a way of projecting that meaning. And that’s something she does throughout. Page 21 is the next time you see it, and it’s a very benign moment.

Matt: I think there’s a kind of irony there with the narration and the visuals because she’s talking about this rare moment, “his bursts of kindness were as incandescent as his tantrums were dark,” and we see him singing to her as she’s lying down in her bed. It is a sweet scene, and yet he’s this dark silhouette and his glasses are glowing like a monster’s eyes; the monster is still there lurking.

Jess: I agree with that. And also, it talks about how his tantrums are dark and he is dark in this panel. One of the other things I noticed on this page is that in the top panel, when he is freaking out about something ridiculous, this lamp cuts his face off.

Matt: The details of the house are always kind of interweaving. On page 31, in the middle of the page on the right, it’s talking about the house and how popular and perfectly designed it was, and in this scene, Bruce’s sister is showing the house off. She’s saying, “Helen? Don’t stop, I’m just showing off your house to some friends.” The narration says, “And why my cultured mother, who had studied acting in New York City, would live there cheek by jowl with his family is more puzzling still.” You get the sense with the narration of constant interruptions taking over her life. Jess pointed out last night that the word balloons and even the box labeling Aunt Sue, who’s off-panel, are literally covering her head. Behind her is very prominently this little floral hold-back that’s pulling back the curtain, that’s like: Bruce has been here and everything here is designed and controlled. She’s playing piano with this kind of studied nonchalance. There’s a metronome sitting on the piano that’s in action, which implies the motion of it going tik, tik, tik. She’s sitting in the corner with the piano, and her creativity’s an act, trying to shut off the rest of the house to put some small measure of control in her life. The metronome appears several times later in the book as this kind of leitmotif.

Speaker: Back on page 18, with that silhouette that you mentioned of the vase, notice the unbalanced tablecloth, which I didn’t see until just today. You know that he left it balanced, so obviously one of the kids had pulled the cloth.

Jess: Something happened, probably not something important, but it’s not okay, he can’t let it go.

Matt: It didn’t break, but just the fact that it came close to where it might break is enough to throw him into a rage.

Speaker: And it’s obvious because the tablecloth is touching the ground.

Jess: This vase is something that appears over and over again. It’s just a creepy shape. I’m sure it’d be very lovely if you saw it in person, but it’s this weird, scifi—

Matt: Well, it’s kind of sexual in a sort of vague way too, along with a lot of other, especially phallic, symbols. She talks specifically about all the [unclear] his gravestone.

Jess: This whole opening section here, from 14 to 25 or so, is so interesting, so dense with information about their relationship. Page 20 is one that I bookmarked because it’s one of the only times she uses three-point perspective. I think it’s a really great illustration. The choice of how an image is drawn can have a really strong emotional effect. Because you see that and you’re looking down on her, and she’s very small and kind of alone in this space.

Speaker: Even the bottom panel, the visitors getting lost upstairs; it’s like they’re about to be swallowed up. Just the precariousness of the stairs…

Matt: I love that drawing too, it’s very funny. But this page is very emblematic of how the role the house plays in this story. It made me think, “Well, the book’s called Fun Home because it’s a funeral home, but most of the book, it’s really the house more than the “fun home”.

Jess: It’s a funhouse.

Matt: It’s like a funhouse, like a funhouse mirror.

Speaker: It’s got a carnival sense of “scary”.

Jess: Exactly. It’s a scary maze. I mean, look at these panels: there’re doors behind doors… weaving through here, even without the mirror to really drive it home, this looks like a funhouse.

Matt: And also the idea of the house designed to deceive, like a funhouse ride you would walk through.

Jess: So then also the top tier on 21, the panel we were talking about before with the lamp, that’s also three-point perspective, looking down on the children. The father ends up being much higher in the panel than he’d end up looking otherwise.

Speaker: I’m really new to graphic novels, so I’m just wondering about the process; I don’t know if you know about her process specifically, but just the idea of drafting a panel. How many drafts do you go through?

Jess: We actually know a lot about Alison’s process. It’s really interesting and not necessarily like a lot of graphic novelists’. She actually invented this process, and I wrote about it in our new textbook coming out in June, using a program called Illustrator, she would create panels and draft the writing and describe what was going to happen in words in these panels. Instead of writing a script and then trying to translate it into a visual mode, she writes directly in a visual mode but without pictures. So she’s always thinking about what the images are going to be and how it’s going to break. So a page like this one, she would have a big panel and two little panels and she’d describe what’s going on in there, and she would know that the rhythm is going to be big and then smaller, and also that these panels are going to be bigger than most of the panels in the book. She tends to have a three-tier structure; continue on from there and you’ll see. There tends to be a three-tier structure on most pages, but in moments with a dramatic action or a thing she needs to show, where it’s a lot more about the image and visual material, she’s gonna go to a two-tier design. So she knew all that before she started to draw. She has all kinds of reference material and she actually shoots photographs of herself in the position of every character in every scene. She would take digital photos of herself from all of these spots and use those as drawing reference. It’s a little bananas, and most cartoonists don’t do this.

Matt: It’s the more healthy, present day manifestation of her obsessive-compulsive nature. She’s channeling it through her art. She photographs everything with a digital camera and she views it on the camera screen. It would be even crazier if she printed it out and traced it, but it’s more like a quick reference that she can then use to copy from.

Jess: We don’t know how many times she’ll work over an individual panel. She does a lot of YouTube videos, and there are a few videos about this that you could look at. For something like this, if you’re asking about the drafting of the perspective and stuff, obviously she doesn’t have this photographed. She has photos and maps of the house, she knows how it’s laid out, but then you can go in and use the rules of perspective to draft how the lines are going to work and you can lay in vanishing points and you just draw it. It’s a skill that’s difficult to master, but once you’re there, you’re there. It’s pretty technical, but very straightforward. The point is that she’s not tracing a photo here; she’s making this up. Which means she’s not just saying, “This photo’s three-point so I’m doing three-point,” she’s saying, “This should be three-point, and the reason it should be three-point is to give it this feeling of weakness and being in power of the house, being overwhelmed by the house.” And she had to have done that very intentionally, especially since if you flip through the book, you hardly every see three-point perspective. You almost never see this kind of “zooming from above” perspective. It’s almost always two-point perspective, which means there are two vanishing points and all the lines that are vertical are parallel to each other, and you have very much of a sense of being in the room with the people, kind of at the same eye-level with everybody else.

Matt: Like this page is rather typical, every panel is kind of a straight-on shot on the same level as the characters.

Jess: In the bottom tier, you’ll see that the eye-level is a little elevated; it’s a bit higher than the kids’, like an adult eye-level. See how you’re looking down slightly? She could tilt the angle to make it three-point, but she doesn’t. So you’re an adult, standing in this room, but you’re not elevated and gazing down on it like they’re little ants down in your power. I think that this is a fairly deep way of looking at how people are composing panels, but especially when you have this situation like this, and it’s so striking that that all of a sudden she uses a different method of perspective, there’s a lot to interpret from that.

Speaker: I think that’s part of what makes this drawing different from, say, a superhero comic.

Jess: Yeah, most superhero comics will use three-point perspective frequently; not all the time, since it’s a lot of work, but whenever you’re outside, zooming around in a spaceship, you’re using three-point perspective. But in this, you never would.

Speaker: I read some time ago that, at least in older movies of the ’50s and ’60s, they would frequently scale down the furniture to make the heroes appear larger. The idea that he or she would be dominant, and the perspective she uses in the hallways is the opposite.

Matt: And the opposite angle, a low angle, which you see a lot in film as well, is traditionally also used to make a hero look strong or menacing from below.

Jess: But even without scaling furniture, if you shoot from a low angle and put the person in the foreground, they will look very large in comparison to other stuff around. Even a really slightly low angle can have that effect.

Matt: [Another example on page 97]  Right, there’s this view, “My earliest memory of my dad…”

Jess: It’s the point of view of a three-year-old.

Matt: It can connote different things.

Jess: It can be comforting…

Matt: It can be frigid. Or it can also be a powerful, strong rock.

Speaker: I’m fascinated by the top tier on page 52, especially in terms of what she doesn’t show. It’s the same image split, and on the right hand side, she talks about how she doesn’t really believe it’s her dad until she sees this mark on his hand. But it stays there; she doesn’t show you the mark on his hand.

Matt: In terms of emotion, I felt very strongly about that. It’s two panels, but it’s a single image; it’s a fairly common tactic that you can use on multiple levels in comics, unlike in film or tv where you’re always moving from one image to the next. As an artist, you can design a reading experience in certain ways to have these multiple readings. And in this case we have two panels and one image behind them, and it’s composed in a way that he’s cut in half, her father’s head and body on either side of the border.

Jess: Although, if you look at it, the head and the body don’t line up. There’s too much space there. So maybe she’s moved.

Speaker: There’s also this sense that she’s getting confronted by her dead father, and so I think that image, having it as a single large image, gives you an impact that she must’ve felt when she said that, but she couldn’t take it in all at once. She started with the left frame, taking in the face, and moved on. That could also be why the body is separate, because then she turned and looked at the hands, and so we’re kinda being given that whole time frame in almost one picture.

Jess: Well, standing there too in the next panel afterward, how long did this take? As long as was appropriate.

Speaker: Let’s talk about the perspective used in pages 123 and 124. It’s kind of striking.

Matt: This would be another instance of three-point perspective, except when you’re in nature, you can fudge it much more easily. But the fact that all the trees seem to converge toward a single point in the sky gives the sense that you’re downhill, and also the way that the diagonal is compositionally the slope of the line from the left up to the right, with the sun shining up there… it’s a lovely panel.

Jess: But it does look surreal, and I think that is because of the perspective. The perspective would be three-point perspective if you were standing there, looking up the hill, but this isn’t quite accurate. It’s a little bit warped, and if she made it really accurate, it would just look like looking up the hill, but instead it gives this slightly warped sensation because I don’t believe she has one vanishing point for the trees, which is what you would need: one vanishing point up above for all the trees to point toward. Instead there seems to be multiple vanishing points for all the trees, which makes them look kind of spread apart, and then it goes back to a regular two-point in the next couple of panels.

Speaker: I was thinking that of those four panels in the dream sequence, the first one is the most striking, but it keeps changing subtly between the four panels.

Jess: The second panel seems very naturalistic to me, like it really feels like she could be in the woods, and then the third panel, there’s no perspective at all, so you’re in this non-space.

Speaker: And another example, on the next page, there are the silhouettes again.

Speaker: It looks to me like they’re all in the same perspective, two-point. In the first panel, you’re looking straight on, but you’re suspended in air, as though the hill goes down and slopes back up, and you’re standing where it slopes upward again. In all the panels, you look at her directly, so they appear to be in two-point.

Jess: Well, she appears to be in two-point, because you’re not looking up at her, but you are looking up at the trees, so she’s done a dual thing in that panel. It looks like you’re looking straight into her eyes, but the trees, because they start pulling together like this at the top, indicate three-point perspective, making it appear like you’re looking up at them. But it may add to this warping sensation. She looks like she’s straight on to us while the trees are receding away in a different direction.

Matt: She looks almost superimposed in that drawing.

Speaker: Is this an autobiographical novel?

Matt: Yeah, this is all true to the best that she can present all of her documents.

Speaker: I will assume that the pictures are more important than what is said, because there are more pictures than words.

Jess: What does everyone think about that?

Speaker: If you took all the words out, I don’t think you would get her questioning and confusion about her father’s identity. I think you might get a sense about what it was like living in that very turbulent home, because it’s really quite annoying as a kid growing up, and I think you might get a sense of how the house and her life and her family’s run parallel to the fictional sequences, but I’m not sure you would get a sense of her very layered connection to her father.

Speaker: Is Bechdel the illustrator or did she get someone else?

Jess: She did everything.

Matt: She wrote it, she drew it, she did the color…

Speaker: To go back to the perspective issue, the two-point perspective, this goes back to what was said earlier about the accumulation of all the documents she did show that this was a documented truth, the two-point perspective is more factual. She uses the three-point perspective in places like in the dream or when there’s very strong emotion, where emotion overwhelms and is more important than the fact. But the rest of it is so well paced and it appears that there’s this factual presentation without any of the emotional impact of the three-point perspective.

Matt: In fact, I just thought of this while we were talking about the film setups, Yasuhiro Ozu is a Japanese filmmaker who had a system where he would set the camera in a certain way, kneeling at a low-angle but straight on, very stage-like, so you feel like you’re sitting in the room with these characters. And I think she’s doing something similar. It’s not that rigorous, but she’s generally right in the room, looking at people straight on.

But I want to go back to the thoughts regarding the drawings versus the text. Let’s look at this sequence and see how these things play together. On page 10, at the bottom, there’s this nicely done sequence about Christmas. So let’s look at these three pages together.  At the bottom of page ten, the narration says, “It could have been a romantic story, like in It’s A Wonderful Life, when Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed fix up that big old house and raise their family there,” talking about her house, and we see the movie. “Hello, darling!! Hello, Daddy!” And we see Alison in the picture, holding a tray full of glass and crystal, by the way, from which she is later taking sips from when she’s a teenager. On the next page, 11, “But in the movie, when Jimmy Stewart comes home one night and starts yelling at everyone,” and you see that scene playing out in the movie, “Tony, stop that! Janie, haven’t you learned that silly tune yet,” and you see the father helping with the sons putting up the Christmas tree, and again this is Alison doing chores in the foreground. “It’s out of the ordinary. He’s not yelling at anyone.” The tree starts to arrive in the picture here, and her brother says, “The needles are sharp!” Dad says, “Goddamn it!” Then Jimmy Stewart says, “You play it over and over—now stop it! Stop it!” And so the anger is blurring with the TV, the visuals, and the narration. “Daedalus, too, was indifferent to the human cost of his projects.” So again here, like the gentlemen in the red shirt was saying, there’s a level of allusion and reference in the narration that you’re not going to pick up any idea of Greek mythology just from the pictures at this point. “Daedalus, too, was indifferent to the human cost of his projects.” We’ve already established this picture of him as a “mad inventor.”  The tree falls over, and then the son cowers and says, “Don’t hit me,” as Alison looks on. The narration continues, “He blithely betrayed the king, for example, when the queen asked him to build her a cow disguise so she could seduce the white bull,” and then there’s a two-panel sequence where the mother speaks up in the movie now, not in real life; she’s not actually there. “George, why must you torture the children?” And then, again, in the movie there’s this cute scene, sort of like a moment of friction before it turns back toward Jimmy Stewart. But here it’s like a really menacing admonition.

Jess: And notice too while we’re on this page that there are silhouettes being used on this page, but the silhouettes are of the room, so the room that Allison’s in is essentially silhouetted, and that functions to put her on a separate plane of action, a separate space from the brother, so she and Jimmy Stewart are in one room while her father and brother are in the other.

Matt: And she’s watching Jimmy Stewart on TV while she’s watching her father and brother in the next room, on two different screens or two different windows. The kid runs out, she drops the crystal, and then the scene ends on the next page, page 12, again with the silhouette of the father. “Indeed, the result of that scheme—a half-bull, half-man monster—inspired Daedalus’s greatest creation yet.” And then we see Alison holding the broken crystal vase and we get this very visual sequence of her running out of the house and returning after the Christmas tree is up, whereas the narration continues talking about the comparisons to Daedalus and Icarus.

Jess: This is where Daedalus is introduced, I think? No, he’s introduced on the first page, but this is where the Minotaur is introduced, and then the fact that Daedalus designed the labyrinth and is responsible for the existence of the minotaur. She’s constantly reaching and searching for literary comparisons for her father, trying to figure out how, “If I understand him via The Great Gatsby, is that enough? Or do I also need to make him Daedalus? Is he also Icarus? Is he also the Minotaur?” And I think in this scene she makes a very strong case that he is the Minotaur but he’s also Daedalus; he designs the labyrinth from which they can’t escape, which is the house, and he is the beast who’s there,  as well as having designed the thing. And this is only a few pages before the sequence we were just talking about, how we see the house become the labyrinth. Ten pages later, on page 20, when we get these images we were just talking about of the labyrinthine house and the mirrors, and the funhouse aspect of the home.

Matt: What I like about that sequence, and a lot of the sequences like that in the book where she’s describing her father’s personality and the way the family functioned, it’s imbedded in a narrative sequence. You can take away the narration and this would still work. You can see a family putting up some Christmas decorations, the tree falls down, and the dad gets angry and chases the kids out. That works as a kind of silent sequence. But when you add on, first the dialogue happening on the TV, and then the narration kinda reflecting on all of this, the combination of all of these things is I think quite powerful. And it would be very hard to take any one of those elements out and still have the same book.

Jess: It’s interesting, then, that you should raise this idea that “Are the pictures more important because there are a lot of pictures,” because people who read comics a lot would look at this and say, “Well, there’s so many words.” So, there are so many more words than there are in most comics, it must be that the words are more important than the pictures, which is actually why we started with this book, because we wanted to address that idea right up front. In comics that are good, you can’t decide what’s more important. One day, you think the pictures are what really makes it, and the next day, you think it’s the words. And if you pick one or the other, you’re gonna lose out. It’s the interplay of the two that really makes the work what it is.

Speaker: I wonder what the format is for doing a book like this. I mean, does she make the pictures first?

Jess: No, as I was saying, she works on the words first, but she makes ideas for the pictures at the same time. There’s a simultaneity even while she’s building the thing from the beginning.

Matt: Different artists do it different ways. Some artists write a screenplay-like script, or like a play, and then illustrate it. But in her case, she’s doing it on the computer. She’s thinking about the drawings that are going to interact with the text that she’s writing.

Speaker: It talks about on page 10, middle tier, left panel, there’s this depiction of time—the shadow is like a second or two before the foreground.

Matt: Right, it’s not like a typical—usually you’d see motion lines there, or a more narrowly-spaced repeating motion. But yeah, that’s a weird one. And the silhouette doesn’t seem to match; it almost seems like a different person working.

Jess: I wonder if it’s one of the boys.

Matt: It could be. It does seem like another person.

Speaker: The text seems to imply that he’s doing it himself.

Matt: Right. “He would manipulate flagstones that weighed half a ton.”

Jess: But the silhouette looks like it’s wearing pants, while he’s wearing shorts. But yeah, I think it’s an interesting—I’m not sure if it’s an entirely successful attempt to depict motion, but it’s certainly something I’ve never seen before.

Speaker: Maybe she just decided that the page needed more visual [inaudible]

Matt: Yeah, you’re right. Sometimes there’s a purely compositional reason to add some black in.

Speaker: Or it could be the idea of his shadow identity, kind of.

Matt: Being out-of-synch with his—

Speaker: Or a dual personality, that of the light and that of the dark.

Speaker: One of the things, in the case of the use of words here in the book, is that it’s very nuanced. Words are sometimes used  to block communication, she explores the irony… There’s an incredible number of literary references in here that it’s just mind-boggling. And then she’ll periodically go to Webster’s and give you the definition of the word, and then she will draw the irony out of that to great effect. And then, I can’t put my finger on it, but it seems like there’s sometimes an irony between… something, an interesting disconnect between visual and the written word that appears as well, that plays with your mind and plays with your perspective.

Matt: Sure, yeah, and I think that irony is very key to this whole book, the way that she kind of juxtaposes what’s happening—well, in this scene, with Jimmy Stewart playing on the TV, this sort of benign scene of family strife, and then this very scary actual strife happening at the same time, and the way they interact is very ironic, a kind of dark humor runs through it.

Jess: Well yeah, the ironic juxtaposition of all the literary figures with her father, who is a small town funeral home director… That alone, his own attempt to elevate himself just by making it look right, but then adding in all of his sort of self-aggrandizing feelings, and his favorite works. I think that’s all very much there. And the densely layered references to literary works and characters is, I think, one of the things that sets this book apart from almost all of the comics. There’s nothing like it out there. Even in prose books, you don’t usually get this kind of dense web of “Isn’t this like that?” and “Look how this is like that,” and your head’s constantly spinning with all these things. And while we were working on preparing this, as I was saying, trying to figure out who she thinks her father’s like, and I thought, “Well, she kind of thinks her father’s like all of these guys.” Not just Daedalus, but Steven Daedalus.

Speaker: And Zelda Fitzgerald.

Speaker: Yeah, it’s interesting, because on page 60 she did this drawing of the library, which is again from above, this three-point perspective, and it’s all about his pretensions, and she lists two sculptures that are lamps, Don Quixote and Mephistopheles. But the picture of her dad underneath is again two-point perspective…

Jess: It’s like she’s sitting right next to him.

Speaker: …it’s like this perfect contrast of the two perspectives and their impact.

Matt: There’s a line about it on the next page that I think says something about the book and his life as a whole. It says, “The library was a fantasy, but a fully operational one. And he so fervently believes this thing that he creates that it becomes…

Jess: And what is it that he’s doing in this scene?

Speaker: He’s writing… no, he’s doing his taxes. Yes, and it becomes for all purposes practical. You know, practical vs real.

Jess: Right. What’s the most mundane thing you can do at your desk?

Matt: Although, on this page, we see that it’s also his web for luring in boys.

Jess: Well again, three-point perspective. We’re looking down on him hitting on Roy.

Speaker: What should we think about, again since I’m new to graphic novels, what can I think about from this book as I start to transition to other comics?

Matt: Our next book is Ice Haven by Daniel Clowes, and there are a few copies here if you don’t have one yet, library copies. It’s a  very different book from Fun Home: it’s fiction, not a memoir, so you’ll get a break from the heaviness. So everything we’ve talked about, all this stuff about the way the text and the image have ironic interrelations, one thing to look at is to see how that plays out the same or differently in Ice Haven. One thing that will strike you about Ice Haven is that the drawing style changes almost every… they’re almost like short stories. When you first read it, you might think that it’s an unrelated collection of short comics, but as you read, you’ll find that they’re all connected to form a longer work.

Jess: It has some of the same kind of “weaving” characteristics that Fun Home has; stories come back and you suddenly realize that this thing your learned earlier is actually relevant to what you’re reading now. But yeah, I think this thing of different drawings styles is… think about what these different styles remind you of, if it calls anything to mind, and is there a reason why you think Dan Clowes picked this style to draw as opposed to a different style for this segment of the story. But he is a writer who uses irony very heavily, so there will be a lot of that kind of stuff to think about. Different characters speak different ways, the different segments of the story are told in different ways, as well as just having different characters in them.

Matt: The colors are different, the mood, the kinds of registers are different. He references… there are comics that look like children’s comics, that look very much like Dennis the Menace or Peanuts or something, but they’re talking about very adult things, and not in the sense that children’s comics do, either. So the way that he changes the register visually and narratively is very different from Fun Home.

It’s been a long time coming, but our second textbook is finally finished, and nearly ready for bookstores! We are excited to announce that Mastering Comics will go on sale May 8th, 2012. We just heard from the printer that pages are printed and they’re giving them a nice long dry before binding so that they stay nice for all you lovely people. Watch this space for news and details about the new book as well as our appearances this spring and summer.

We can’t wait to share this new work with you.

So now that we’ve given away a multi-pack from the 2011 Notables, it’s time to do the same for 2010, which was edited by Neil Gaiman. For this volume, we actually ran individual reviews on each Notable, but they can be hard to get a handle on as a group, so we compiled here links to each review.

WE WILL GIVE AWAY a pack of about 10 of the Notables, this time mostly NOT minis, but published books and graphic novels. Which ones they are will be a surprise! Comment on this post between now and Tuesday December 13 at 5 pm, and you will be entered in a drawing to win the pile. This prize is available only to US readers (sorry!).

Watch for a third and final giveaway on jessicaabel.com and mattmadden.com in the next week or two. 

Note: we do moderate comments, so if you haven’t commented here before, your comment won’t show up immediately, but it is in the queue!

–Jessica (and Matt)

Derik Badman’s Flying Chief

Nick Bertozzi’s How and Why to Bale Hay

Ray Bradbury and Tim Hamilton’s Fahrenheit 451

Nicholas Breutzman’s “My Town” and Yearbooks

Mat Brinkman’s Multiforce

Kevin Cannon’s Far Arden

C.F.’s Powr Mastrs

Mark Chiarello, et al. - Wednesday Comics

Becky Cloonan’s I See the Devil in My Sleep

Becky Cloonan, Jim Rugg, and Steven T. Seagle’s American Virgin

JP Coovert, Stephen Floyd, James Hindle, Alexis Frederick-Frost, and Joseph Lambert’s Sword

Warren Craghead III’s Un Caligramme & This is a Ghost

Darwyn Cooke and Richard Stark’s Parker: The Hunted

Jordan Crane’s Vissisitude

Jonathon Dalton’s Lil’ Ulysses in Chicago

Ezra Claytan Daniels’ A Circuit Closed

Travis Dandro’s Journal

Mike Dawson’s Troop 142

Will Dinski’s Errand Service

Josh Dysart and Ron Wimberly’s The Stain

Theo Ellsworth’s Capacity

Jess Fink’s We Can Fix It

Hilary Florido’s Prescription Strength

John Hankiewicz’s The Offering

Faith Erin Hicks’ War at Ellsmere

Alex Holden’s West Side Improvement District

Paul Hoppe’s The Horror

Damien Jay’s Willy

Hellen Jo’s Jin and Jam

Aya Kakeda’s Delicious Soup of Horror

Joe Kelly and JM Ken Niimura’s I Kill Giants

Victor Kerlow’s The Lumberjack and Falling Sky

Neil Kleid and Nicholas Cinquegrani’s The Big Kahn

Keith Knight’s The K Chronicles

Joseph Lambert’s Food/Fall

David Lapham’s Young Liars

Miriam Libicki’s Jobnik!

Ellen Lindner’s Shams, Scams and Blind Faith

Adam Meuse’s Social Insect

Mike Mignola and Ben Stenbeck’s Witchfinder

Maggie McKnight’s Swingin’

Andrei Molotiu’s Otherwise Untitled

Tom Motley et al.’s Made Out of “Mac” (True Fiction #8)

Jesse Moynihan’s Follow Me

Corinne Mucha’s Growing Up Haunted

Nate Neal’s Delia’s Love

Anders Nilsen’s Monologues for Calculating the Density of Black Holes, Big Questions

Danica Novgorodoff’s Slow Storm

Sarah Oleksyk’s Previously Possessed

Chris Onstad’s The Great Outdoor Fight

Jason Overby’s Exploding Head Man

Laura Park’s Sleep is for Suckers, Office 32f

John Porcellino’s Silent Birds

Nate Powell’s Swallow Me Whole

Henrik Rehr’s Reykjavik

Jesse Reklaw’s Ten Thousand Things to Do

Simon Roy’s Jan’s Atomic Heart

Stan Sakai’s Traitors of the Earth

Dash Shaw’s Satellite CMYK

Anuj Shrestha’s American Cat

Josh Simmons’ Jesus Christ

Jeff Smith’s RASL

Alexey Sokolin’s Life, Interwoven

Gary Sullivan’s Am I Emo

Adam Suerte’s Aprendíz

Jeremy Tinder’s Pete at Night

Jonathan Vankin and Seth Fisher’s Tokyo Days

Rick Veitch’s Army@Love: Generation Pwned

Brian Wood and Nathan Fox’s “Random Fire”, DMZ: The Hidden War

Jason Viola’s Sunward

J.T. Yost’s Losers Weepers

This Saturday, December 17, we’ll be hosting a final live book club meeting in the Dweck Center at the central branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. This time we’ll be discussing Asterios Polyp, by David Mazzucchelli.

As we did last time, we’re planning to start by showing some slides to introduce a topic of cartooning that is related to Mazzucchelli’s book. For our first meeting, discussing Fun Home, we talked a bit about the use of text in comics and how it interacts with images. For our Ice Haven meeting, we talked about how cartoonists can use drawing and storytelling styles associated with different genres and formats as part of their storytelling toolkit. A striking aspect of Lucille when you open it is that it uses no panel borders. Asterios Polyp explores all of these techniques and, perhaps most strikingly, makes very distinctive use of color. We’ll talk a bit about his coloring method and show some other examples of the narrative use of color in comics.

Here are a few general questions/topics that will likely come up in Saturday’s conversation

• There are of course images of twins/doubling/reflections throughout the book
• How much of the books opinions or viewpoint(s) should be attributed to the author vs. Asterios—or Ignazio? (Or Hana.)
• there are some deliberately wonky perspectives, esp. when Ursula Major is involved…
• DM employs different lettering styles for characters’ dialogue. What other uses does he  make of lettering?
• Repeat views of Asterios’ apartment and other domestic spaces over time
• How is color used in different ways throughout the book?
• How would you describe DM’s page layouts? Is there an underlying grid or a more organic use of design?
• It appears that no detail in this book is accidental: In addition to numerous winks to famous cartoonists, notice how brand names and background art often comments on the story.
• There’s quite a bit of corny and/or bawdy humor in this book (even in the title) even if the overall tone is more somber and reflective. How essential is humor to the work as a whole?

And here are references to a few specific sequences, and panels that struck us for one reason or another (aargh! another book with no pagination!):

• The visual essay near the beginning about perception of reality as an extension of the self (after the grid of apples drawn in different styles)
• Ursula Major’s page-spinning defense of the zodiac
• Visual polyphony in the visit to Kalvin Kohoutek’s studio
• the flashback sparked by the blister in AP’s foot
• The Orpheus dream/fantasy sequence (compare to AP’s subway ride at the beginning of the book, among other echoes)
• We’ll leave you with an image by an artist that DM makes more than one reference to in the book, Saul Steinberg:

Saul Steinberg Techniques at a Party 1953 ink, colored pencil, and watercolor on paper, 14-1/2 x 23 inches. The Saul Steinberg Foundation, New York

Among the numerous hats Matt and I wear, we are the series editors for the Best American Comics (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). That means that, every year, we try to get our hands on every comic published by a North American cartoonist (which is the USA, Canada, and Mexico), or anyone who makes his or her home here, and then read them all to sort out the best 100 or so comics of the year. Of course, we can’t possibly see everything, but we try. These best 100-120, we then hand on to the year’s guest editor, who picks his or her favorite 25-30, which go into that year’s volume. Then, Matt and I get to make our list of everything else we think comics readers should have read that year. It’s called the Notable Comics list, and it comprises virtually all the comics we sent to the guest editor that weren’t picked, as well as a number of others that we think are noteworthy for various reasons, but that we didn’t send to the guest editor.

Over the now-four volumes we’ve been involved with (we’ve just wrapped selections for the fifth, but they’re still top-secret), we’ve tried to shine a spotlight on this list. As most guest editors point out in their introductions, the selection process, when it gets down to which stories make the cutoff for the volume and which don’t, can be alarmingly arbitrary. Often, we and the guest editors would love to include 50 stories, but there just isn’t room. But when you combine the notable list with the stories in the volume, it might be a little more possible to talk about representing what’s we actually think is best in a given year. Also, when looking for good comics to read, why limit yourself? We’ve always hoped readers will delve a bit into the list to find more great stories once they finish reading BAC.

Below, we’ve reprinted the full list of the Notables from the 2011 volume, which was edited by Alison Bechdel. We’ve also added extensive links and images of the covers to intrigue you and  to help you track the works down. And for a lucky reader: a head start on collecting all 100!

WE WILL GIVE AWAY a set of  about 25 mincomics and self-published books from this list. Which ones they are will be a surprise! Comment on this post between now and Friday December 9 at 5 pm, and you will be entered in a drawing to win the pile. This prize is available only to US readers (sorry!). Watch for a second giveaway this coming Monday, Dec 12.

Note: we do moderate comments, so if you haven’t commented here before, your comment won’t show up immediately, but it is in the queue!

Edit: just to be extra clear, this is not a set of every book on the list, it’s a sub-set of a number of the minis and self-pubbed books. Still, it’s a lot of great!

–Jessica and Matt

Jason Aaron, R.M. Guéra, Davide Furno, and Francesco Francavilla, Scalped: High Lonesome 

William Ayers and Ryan Alexander-Tanner, To Teach: The Journey, in Comcs 

Darryl Ayo, “Enemies with Benefits,” anyANYway #1

Rina Ayuyang, “Arroz Caldo,” Whirlwind Wonderland

Derik Badman, 20 out of 30 days (from the 30 day project)

Liz Baillie, Freewheel vol. 1

Alison Bechdel, “A Story About Life”, McSweeney’s Issue 33

Nick Bertozzi, Persimmon Cup, The Act-i-vate Primer

Joe Boruchow, Stuffed Animals: A Story in Paper Cutouts

Adam Bourret, I’m Crazy 

Nicholas Breutzman, You Can’t Be Here

Box Brown, Everything Dies #1 & #2, “Alpha” and “Omega”

Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips, Criminal: The Sinners

Mike Carey and Peter Gross, The Unwritten vols. 1 & 2

Martin Cendreda, “Copy”, Stories vol. 2

Sean Christensen and Amy Kuttab, Labanotation: The Center of Weight

Marian Churchland, Beast

Seymour Chwast, Dante’s Divine Comedy

Daniel Clowes, Wilson

C.C. Colbert and Tanitoc, Booth

Al Columbia, Pim & Francie: The Golden Bear Days {Artifacts and Bone Fragments}

Josh Cotter, “Migraneur”, Driven by Lemons

Evan Dahm, Rice Boy (buy)

Mike Dawson, Troop 142, nos. 1-3

Michael Deforge, Peter’s Muscle

Evan Dorkin and Jill Thompson, Beasts of Burden: Animal Rites

Joshua Dysart , Alberto Ponticelli, and Pat Masioni, Unknown Soldier: Easy Kill

Glenn Eichler and Nick Bertozzi, Stuffed!

Chuck Forsman, Wolf

Alexis Frederick-Frost, Courtship of Ms. Smith

Alexis Frederick-Frost, Voyage

Neil Gaiman and P. Craig Russell, The Sandman: The Dream Hunters

Rick Geary, The Terrible Axe-man of New Orleans

Robert Goodin, “The Spiritual Crisis of Carl Jung”, Mome Volume 19

Brandon Graham, King City, vol. 2

C. Geoff Grogan, Fandancer

Gilbert Hernandez, The Troublemakers

James Hindle, Unsettled

James Hindle, Little Wolves (buy)

Ursula Murray Husted, Drawing on Yourself

Christopher Hutsul, A Very Kraftwerk Summer

Kathryn Immonen and Stuart Immonen, Moving Pictures

Alex Jansen, Jason Gilmore, and Nick Marinkovich, Kenk

Mat Johnson and Simon Gane, Dark Rain: A New Orleans Story

Ben Jones, “Chocolate Gun”, Mome, vol. 16

Tom Kaczynski and Dash Shaw, “Resolution”, Mome, vol. 17

Megan Kelso, Artichoke Tales

Victor Kerlow, “This is the Story of a Man Who Could Not Die”, Rabid Rabbit’s Tall Tales and Magnanimous Myths

Victor Kerlow, Big Empty Space

Matt Kindt, 3 Story: The Secret History of the Giant Man

Matt Kindt, Revolver

Michael Kupperman, “All About Drainage” and “Books Are Stupid,” Tales Designed to Thrizzle #6

Joseph Lambert, “Tantrum”

Tim Lane, “Spike”, Hotwire Comics, vol. 3

Hope Larson, Mercury 

Brendan Leach, “Summer Internship”, Four Comics

Bryan Lee O’Malley, Scott Pilgrim, vol. 6: Scott Pilgrim’s Finest Hour

Jason Little, “Bee in… the Ramble”, MySpace DarkHorse Presents #36

Stuart Livingston, “7:42 a.m.”, Popgun vol. 4

Jesse Lonergan, Joe and Azat 

Cathy Malkasian, Temperance

James McShane, Archaeology

Lane Milburn, Death Trap 

Tony Millionaire, Billy Hazelnuts and the Crazy Bird

Corinne Mucha, “Future Dreams”, Is It the Future Yet?

Pranas T. Naujokaitis, Beard

Sarah Oleksyk, Ivy (chapters 5 and 6)

Onsmith, “Dispossession by Tornado”, Hotwire Comics, vol. 3

Jason Overby, “Untitled”, Shitbeams on the Loose #2

Jesse Reklaw, “Toys I Loved”, Dope Flounder

Grant Reynolds, “Where the River Meets the Sea”, Comic Diorama

Hans Rickheit, The Squirrel Machine

Sean Micheal Robinson, “Much of What We Said Wasn’t Anything at All”, The Art of Lying

Jim Rugg, Rambo 3.5

Johnny Ryan, Prison Pit, Book One

Joe Sacco, “The Unwanted” parts 1-2, VQR

Sam Sharpe, “Change Your Name”, Pinstriped Bloodbath

Dash Shaw, “Blind Date”, Mome, vol. 16

Jason Shiga, Meanwhile

Anuj Shrestha, “True Tales of Kitchkanni” vol. 1, Rabid Rabbit’s Tall Tales and Magnanimous Myths

David Small, Stitches

Andrew Smith, Sausage Hand

Nick St. John, How I Came to Work at the Wendy’s

Conor Stechschulte, The Spirit World

Conor Stechschulte, Held Sinister

Aron Nels Steinke, Neptune

James Sturm, Market Day

Sully (Sherwin Tjia), The Hipless Boy

Raina Telgemeier, Smile

C. Tyler, You’ll Never Know, Book 2: Collateral Damage

Chris Ware, “Putty Gray”, McSweeney’s Issue 33

Tracy White, How I Made It to Eighteen

Mack White, “Roadside Hell”, Hotwire Comics, vol. 3

Chadwick Whitehead, “The Myth of Ice Cream and Race Cars”, Rabid Rabbit’s Tall Tales and Magnanimous Myths

Matt Wiegle, “The Orphan Baiter”, Papercutter #13

Jim Woodring, Weathercraft: A Frank Comic

Belle Yang, Forget Sorrow: An Ancestral Tale

J.T. Yost, Losers Weepers

Jeff Zwirek, “The Chicago Typewriter”, Pinstriped Bloodbath