It’s Friday! You know what that means: Cartoon History! As I said earlier, I think it’s an important, oft-neglected subject. It’s also a nice way to end the week, and provides a nice rhythm to the semester. And yes, history is fun.

Objective: Exploring the history of Cartooning

Do Now: Who do you think the FIRST famous cartoon character was? When do you think it was created?

Activities:

•  Brief discussion based on the Do Now

It’s always interesting to experience students’ gauge on history. A not infrequent answer is something along the lines of “Mickey Mouse in the 1960’s”.

• Teacher will introduce The Yellow Kid and Richard F. Outcault using hand-out accompanied by visual examples.

The Information Age is a wonderful thing. There are any number of terrific resources with which to gather material. Some of my favorites are listed below under Resources. (Old-fashioned as I am, many of them are books. Giant, musty books.)

I start with The Yellow Kid simply because most Cartooning Histories use him as a convenient starting point, coming as he does near the dawn of the 20^th century. This approach has merit, though it is certainly debatable (as we’ll see below). Your presentation method is up to you. As I’ve said before, I use Smartboard. Some major points you may want to address in your discussion:

• Outcault’s career took off when he was hired by Joseph Pulitzer to work on the New York World.  Teacher will elicit responses to gauge students’ prior knowledge. Who was Joseph Pulitzer? Where have you heard the name “Pulitzer” before?

• Outcault’s feature, titled Hogan’s Alley, took place in a crowded, urban slum. How does this reflect to the early twentieth century in America?

• The Yellow Kid’s name was Mickey Dugan. What is a stereotype? (Note some of the different portrayals of ethnicity.) Are images like this offensive?  Why were they acceptable back then? Are there stereotypes today?

• Readers recognized Mickey because he always wore the same yellow nightshirt. What other cartoon characters always dress the same way? Sets a precedent.

• What are the words on his shirt? His dialogue. Why are they there? This is before the invention of the word balloon.
• What else is odd about his dialogue? Outcault used the street slang of his era.
• Hogan’s Alley reflected its era, from the everyday (football game)-

• to major events like the Spanish-American War.

• Speaking of which, what helped to fuel U.S. involvement in the war? What is “yellow journalism”? The term was coined due to the immense popularity of The Yellow Kid. His presence drove up sales as readers would buy the New York World to see what he was up to.
• Outcault was eventually hired away by William Randolph Hearst. Who was he? Outcault began producing Hogan’s Alley for Hearst’s New York Journal. Pulitzer meanwhile hired another artist, George Luks, to continue drawing the feature for the New York World. There were no copyright laws regarding comics at the time.
• The Yellow Kid was so popular that he became the first comics character to be heavily merchandised, from toys:

• to sheet music (this was before radio):

• to advertising:

• Is Hogan’s Alley truly a comic strip? No word balloons, no panels, not sequential. It’s closer to our current project, Gag Cartoons, but it’s not quite that either.  Then why are we studying it? The Yellow Kid is the first character created by a cartoonist to appear regularly in a newspaper, become widely recognized by the public, and cross over into popular culture.

Exercise: The Yellow Kid achieved fame around the turn of the twentieth century. Students will create a Yellow Kid for the early twenty-first century. Here are some examples:

Here he is, flummoxed by modernity…          Here, all ‘gangsta’ as the kids say…  And here, with lobster claws for some reason.

Thanks Shannon, Nic and Reily!

Resources:

The Comics, Brian Walker. Abrams ComicArts

America’s Great Comic-Strip Artists, Richard Marschall. Stewart, Tabori & Chang 

100 Years of Newspaper Comics, Maurice Horn. Gramercy

Masters of American Comics, John Carlin, Paul Karasikand Brian Walker. Hammer, Moca, Yale

There was also Don Markstein’s excellent Toonopedia website, but I haven’t been able to access it since Mr. Markstein sadly passed last year. If anyone has any information on this, it would be greatly appreciated.

Self-Assessment:

So this week you:

• Introduced the concept of Gag Cartoons
• Helped students generate ideas through warm-up exercises
• Guided their ideas through individual discussion
• Expanded the possibilities of the subject with the concept of the Anti-gag cartoon
• Given students visual tools through the Drawing Lesson
• Provided related historical context

Next week we’ll develop this project in earnest. ‘Til then, Happy Friday!

Derek Mainhart is an art teacher at Deer Park High School and at the Usdan Center for the Creative and Performing Arts. He has taught widely at many institutions such as Molloy College, Boricua College and Hofstra, among others. He teaches cartooning workshops in the greater New York area. In addition, he was the first Vice President of the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (MoCCA) in Manhattan, and was instrumental in the formation of its annual MoCCA Art Festival. He has organized and participated in numerous gallery exhibits in and around NYC. His self-published works include The Iraqi Tinies and W. He is married to web-cartoonist and fellow art teacher Ali Solomon. They live with their daughter in Forest Hills (not far from the house where Peter Parker grew up.) 

Read Derek’s comic book reviews at: http://imagesandnerds.wordpress.com/

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.)

In a few short weeks (January 29-30) I’ll be hosting the annual 24-Hour Comics event held at the Maison des Auteurs in Angoulême, France (where Jessica and I are currently residents) and sponsored by La Cité Internationale de la Bande Dessinée et de l’Image. The 24-hour comic, invented by Scott McCloud, has become one of the most popular creative challenges going, inspiring imitations in other media. The basic idea is: write and draw a 24-page comic from scratch in 24 hours. To make it a bit more challenging, at the Maison des Auteurs I’ll be announcing a special constraint right before we start, both to give you a starting point to wrestle with and also to prevent you from taking the easy way out and showing up with a finished idea mapped out in your head, a temptation that undermines the most valuable aspect of this game: to produce a substantial work out of thin air in a highly restricted period of time. People who have done it—myself included—will often tell you that it is a confidence booster that can energize your cartooning for a long time afterwards. (Though I can’t commit 100% I have every intention of trying to do one myself). You don’t have to be in Angoulême to participate, there’s an on-line registration as well. Information here (in multiple languages).

Cartoonist, teacher, and fellow-traveler Dan Berry has put together an enlightening and practical post outlining how he prepared himself to do a 24-hour comic—in full color, no less! We thank him for allowing us to share it here.  –Matt

At all of the comics shows I’ve done in the last year, I get asked essentially the same question about Cat Island; it’s usually a variant of ‘how do you do that in a day?’ Well, here’s how.

This is a guide based on my experiences, my working method and the tools I use.

1. Know your process.

I can’t overstate this enough. The first 24h comic I did was also the first time I’d done anything substantial on a Cintiq, and the learning curve was steep for me. I wish I’d just stuck to my tools and worked in the way I usually did rather than complicating everything for myself by doing something new. That’s not to say that the Cintiq is a bad tool, but for me it was an unfamiliar tool. Multiply that unfamiliarity by the constraints of time and you’ve got a problem.

My 24h comics process is similar to my normal comics process; have an idea, capture it on paper before it disappears either as a script or outline and then start working on roughs, then when I’m happy (ish) with the roughs, draw them up on nice paper on the lightbox.

The way I draw means that I work quickly anyway, but it was important for me to make a plan and stick to it. When you are 12 hours into a 24h comic and the tiredness and doubt set in (they really do) the last thing you need is to start making decisions. You have to try and make all your choices early on before your judgement is impaired by fatigue. You can see above that my roughs really are very rough. I don’t do polished pencils anyway because I want to make sure the final page feels spontaneous and dynamic. When I draw up roughs, I want to get the idea of the page laid out, not all the detail. When I’ve done detailed pencils in the past, I’ve ended up tracing them on the lightbox and I absolutely kill any sense of spontaneity. This is the opposite of what I want. I want all my work to feel like it is the first time it has been drawn. That takes a lot of planning.

Part of my plan was to try and give myself breaks as I drew it, so I balanced the more complex pages out with relatively simple pages. I didn’t mind taking more time draw one or two pages if it set the scene well enough to justify a simple page. Other people work in different ways, but that’s my principle here. As long as I was setting and re-establishing the scene at the beginning and end, I could do something very simple in the middle without it feeling like I was ‘cheating’.

2. Know your tools

I’ve been drawing with my desk pen, the aqua pens with a pre-loaded ink wash and watercolours for some time now. There isn’t much that will surprise me with these tools now, so they don’t get in the way of telling the story. The start of a 24h comic is not the time to start experimenting with oh, say, a Cintiq or anything else you haven’t used before. With Cat Island, I tried to plan ahead as much as I could. The 24h BD that Lewis Trondheim runs in Angouleme has constraints set at the start so you can’t plan your story out ahead of time, but you can prepare your tools. I made sure that I had the following;

• Plain paper for planning
• Pencil and eraser, scalpel for sharpening
• Pre-printed out grid to make sure all my pages stay at a consistent format (important if you want to make it into a book afterwards)
• Four Platinum desk pens, each fully loaded with Platinum Carbon ink (I have four anyway that I frequently switch to so I wear them all down at a consistent rate so my quality of line doesn’t change drastically)
• Pentel Aqua Brushes, tubes of watercolour and mixing palette in colours that accommodate day and night scenes, skin tones, bright red trees etc.
• Nice brushes in a few sizes
• Lightbox
• More sheets of nice watercolour paper than I’d actually need to accommodate screw-ups/drink spills etc
• Scanner/computer.

That’s pretty much it for the art side of things. For the sanity/physical side of things I had

• Headphones and a lot of upbeat music to listen to
• Toothbrush and toothpaste for a 3am freshener
• A change of socks (because your feet feel weird after a bit and it’s nice to have a change of socks)
• Fresh fruit
• Orange juice
• Moderate amounts of coffee

I was tempted to really binge on coffee. This is a bad idea. You get the shakes, and any ‘up’ you get is followed by a ‘DOWN‘. Drinking orange juice was good, eating fresh fruit was good, eating bags and bags of sweets was bad. Caffeine and sugar are temporary fixes that leave you worse off at the end.

3. Know Stories

Rather than saying know your story, which is very difficult when you have constraints set to avoid pre-planning, I think it’s more fitting to say know how stories work. I read a lot of 24h comics in preparation, and I think that there are a lot of 24h comics that just end, rather than conclude. My approach was the problem-solving approach to stories. I gave a set of characters a set of problems and then tried to complicate and then resolve those problems in 24 pages. I started with the end in sight, which gave me something to aim for. I think that without the end to aim for, I would have flapped about in the dark and just finished my comic rather than concluded my story in 24 pages. The story is the reason for the comic, not the other way around.

4. Draw it

This bit sounds simple, and it was. Once I had planned everything out, drawing it was actually surprisingly easy. The hardest bit was trusting the decisions you had made earlier that night. You have to be strict with yourself, avoid Twitter and FaceBook, take regular exercise breaks and just get it drawn. I didn’t want to have to do any thinking while I was drawing it, so I did all my thinking early on in the night and then switched over to production mode when I started getting tired. I would ink two or three pages, then colour two or three pages to give myself a bit of a variety.

I honestly don’t really remember drawing any of this comic.

By the end, my drawing hand had swollen up like so;

That bit was painful. I couldn’t draw properly for a few days afterwards. I finished this in 20 and a half hours too, so I got to go home and take a nap. That was a great feeling.

That’s about it really. You have to remember that enthusiasm and depression come in waves and that you lose all passion for what you are doing, you get eaten up with self-doubt and you become your own worst critic. Those bits are awful. You also get huge upswings of confidence and energy. You know when people are freezing to death and they don’t feel cold any more? There are bits where you don’t feel tired any more and then you worry that you might be dying. Then, you’ve finished a whole book in one day and you get to go to sleep. In the cold light of day you show it to other people and decide whether or not to print it and post it online.

At this point your students’ minds should be buzzing with ideas. Now that they’re approaching the final version of their Gag Cartoon, it’s time for some more drawing lessons. Nothing terribly complex, but these simple concepts can make all the difference in the work of a neophyte cartoonist, both in visual appeal and readability.

Objective: Basic character design

Do Now: Try to draw a simple cartoon character

As always, circulate the room during the Do Now. Gauge the various skill levels of your students and use this as a guide in terms of how far to push this lesson (or indeed if you should skip it altogether and proceed to the next one—though in my experience, even slightly more advanced students like to see these simple approaches codified.)

Activities:

• Brief discussion based on the Do Now
• Teacher will demo, step-by-step, simple character design. Students will follow along.

Emphasize the utility of what you’re about to show them. At the same time remind them that this is only one approach. After today, they are free to use it or ignore it.

As with most representational drawing, we start with simple shapes, in this case an oval:

Followed by a trapezoid:

Then some half-circles:

And then these, um, things:

At this point, ask, “Who is this?” You will likely get the name of one of The Powerpuff Girls. Emphasize that is, in fact, all of them, because they all use the same formula. It just depends on what details you add.

(oh like Bubbles isn’t your favorite…)

I begin with this because it’s easy and gives everyone a chance at success. Next, a slightly more complicated character. Start with a circle:

Underneath that we’ll add a  neck:

Then, again, a trapezoid. Add a half-circle on either side for sleeves:

Next the arms. Now’s a good time to introduce the concepts of cylinders into the demo. When discussing the rendering of appendages (arms, legs, prehensile cybernetic tails, etc.) it is useful to think of them in terms of cylinders. It may not be readily apparent in this particular drawing, but it will be helpful later on. May as well get your students accustomed to it now.

Some fingers. (Don’t get too caught up in hands right now. Keep it simple. Students tend to find them incredibly frustrating.)

A rectangle, then two more cylinders:

Finally two half-ovals.

Who might this be? Some might say Charlie Brown:

The more attentive student may say it could be any of the Peanuts characters, depending on the details:

You may suggest that this basic formula extends beyond Peanuts. For example:

Now let’s add a wrinkle. What happens if we squash (term from the previous drawing lesson) this figure?

What if we stretch (also from previous lesson) the formula?

What if we do a little of both?

Without adding any details, which of these figures is younger? How can you tell? What makes the other one look older? What details could you add to emphasize this?

Exercise: Students will use the techniques learned today to create two unique characters.

Here are some student examples (Thanks Ashley, Joel and Paul!):

There will be a couple more drawing lessons before the students begin the final version of their Gag Cartoon. But tomorrow’s Friday, and that means: More Cartooning History!

Derek Mainhart is an art teacher at Deer Park High School and at the Usdan Center for the Creative and Performing Arts. He has taught widely at many institutions such as Molloy College, Boricua College and Hofstra, among others. He teaches cartooning workshops in the greater New York area. In addition, he was the first Vice President of the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (MoCCA) in Manhattan, and was instrumental in the formation of its annual MoCCA Art Festival. He has organized and participated in numerous gallery exhibits in and around NYC. His self-published works include The Iraqi Tinies and W. He is married to web-cartoonist and fellow art teacher Ali Solomon. They live with their daughter in Forest Hills (not far from the house where Peter Parker grew up.) 

Read Derek’s comic book reviews at: http://imagesandnerds.wordpress.com/ 

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

So after spending yesterday helping my students struggle with their nascent, shaky ideas, revising, reworking and shaping them according to the fundamentals that make gag cartoons work, what do I do? Introduce Anti-Gag Cartoons of course! Keep ‘em off balance, that’s what I say!

Objective: Sketching ideas for an Anti-Gag Cartoon

Do Now: How can a joke be ruined?

Activities:

• Class discussion based on the Do Now.

Elicit responses concerning what ruins a joke. Ask leading questions like, “Does anyone have a friend that can’t tell a joke?” Some responses might include, “They tell it wrong, they give away the punchline, there is no punchline, they have to explain it.” As we’ll see, Anti-Gag cartoons work along similar lines.

•  Teacher will introduce Anti-Gag cartoons using visual examples.

In DWWP, Abel and Madden discuss various types of image/text juxtapositions within the single panel format (traditional gag cartoons are just one approach). One of the more intriguing examples is from comics innovator David Mazzucchelli (Chapter 2, p. 18). Due to the mysterious nature of the drawing and the lack of a punchline, they refer to it as an “anti-cartoon”. For the purposes of this unit, I refer to such comics as “anti-gag cartoons” and turn to the master of such obfuscating doodles, Mark Newgarden.

Newgarden is an innovator whose pioneering work was featured in Art Spiegelman’s legendary anthology RAW in the 1980’s. You can check out his current work at his website.

However, the best way to introduce him to your students might be by invoking his best-known creation: “Have you guys heard of the Garbage Pail Kids?” (Amongst those who have, his work will attain immediate cache.)

The Anti-Gag examples below are all taken from the excellent collection of his work We All Die Alone (Fantgraphics). Sounds like a barrel of laughs right? Speaking of which:

•  Teacher will lead discussion in which class will analyze various examples

(Analyzing humor? Now there’s a way to kill it!)

Mark Newgarden

What’s funny about this cartoon? (The noses, the drawing) What’s not funny? (The depressing caption) Why is it not funny?

In this example, Newgarden plays with common gag clichés; the hobo on the corner, the drunk at the bar, the desert island. How does he subvert the humor here? (Among other things, the captions state the obvious.)

Who are the two men in the background? How is the joke ruined? (by needless additions brought about by  committee thinking. Or as they’re called in the entertainment industry, “notes”)

What’s ‘wrong’ here? (If brevity is the soul of wit, then this extended, cutting monologue is the soul of pathos.)

And here he channels his inner Magritte.

Are some of these cartoons funny in a way? Humor usually deals with the unexpected. These certainly qualify on that count. And humor is, of course, subjective. These are ironic, a tad morbid, and, by forcing us to look beyond the surface, perhaps even profound. Whether or not one finds them funny, they certainly provoke a reaction.

• Exercise: Students will attempt an anti-gag cartoon.

Make sure to circulate the room, gleefully exhorting them to not be funny!

Here’s a student example. Ironically deconstructing cliche? Well done! (thanks Andy!)

Tomorrow: Back to the Drawing Board!

Derek Mainhart is an art teacher at Deer Park High School and at the Usdan Center for the Creative and Performing Arts. He has taught widely at many institutions such as Molloy College, Boricua College and Hofstra, among others. He teaches cartooning workshops in the greater New York area. In addition, he was the first Vice President of the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (MoCCA) in Manhattan, and was instrumental in the formation of its annual MoCCA Art Festival. He has organized and participated in numerous gallery exhibits in and around NYC. His self-published works include The Iraqi Tinies and W. He is married to web-cartoonist and fellow art teacher Ali Solomon. They live with their daughter in Forest Hills (not far from the house where Peter Parker grew up.)

cover by Gary Panter

Every year, we get requests from teachers wanting to know what will be in the new Best American Comics before it comes out, so as to plan their classes. Herewith, therefore, is the table of contents of the new Best American Comics, edited by Françoise Mouly, and out in September of this year.

vii : Jessica Abel and Matt Madden, Foreword

xiii : Françoise Mouly, Introduction

2 : Charles Burns, X’ed Out
26 : Scott Chantler, The Battle of Buron from Two Generals
43 : Adrian Tomine, Scenes from an Impending Marriage (Excerpt)
54 : Gary Panter, Jimbo
64 : Michael Kupperman, Are Comics Moronic Dribble? from Up All Night
65 : Michael Kupperman, Skull Groin from Up All Night
66 : Nora Krug, Kamikaze
78 : Jonathan Bennett, Skyline
79 : Jonathan Bennett, Hot Stuff
80 : Anders Nilsen, The Pilot Learns to Fly from Big Questions
99 : Sarah Glidden, The Golan Heights from How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less
110 : Sammy Harkham, Blood of a Virgin (Excerpt) from Crickets
132 : Leanne Shapton, A Month Of . . .
140 : Joyce Farmer, Special Exits (Excerpt)
155 : Jim Woodring, Frank Among the Gut Worshippers from Congress of the Animals
170 : Chester Brown, Angelina from Paying for It
179 : Jonathan Bennett, Hibern-8
180 : Renée French, Stage 6 from H Day
214 : Michael Kupperman, Diner Food from Up All Night
215 : Jaime Hernandez, The Love Bunglers Part Four (Excerpt) from Love and Rockets
225 : Jonathan Bennett, Prophets
226 : Dakota McFadzean, Leave Luck to Heaven
244 : Christoph Niemann, Red Eye
259 : Jonathan Bennett, Dead Soles
260 : David Sandlin, House of Debt
271 : David Collier, The Irish Table from Chimo
284 : Michael Kupperman, House of Shouts from Up All Night
285 : Jesse Jacobs, Even the Giants Get the Blues (Excerpt) from Even the Giants
294 : Jordan Crane, Elsewheres from Keeping Two
311 : Jonathan Bennett, Haggling
312 : Chris Ware, Money

317 : Comics for Kids

318 : Sergio Aragonés, Doctor Costume and Vacation from Sergio Aragonés Funnies
321 : Frank Cammuso, Rock, Scissors, Paper from Knights of the Lunch Table
328 : Sara Varon, Baking Failure #1 from Bake Sale
333 : Michael J. Buckley, Draw Your Sister a Picture and Read a Book from 60 Ways to Leave Your Mother
338 : Geoffrey Hayes, Patrick and Big Bear from Patrick, A Teddy Bear’s Picnic and Other Stories
348 : Ben Hatke (aka Benjamin Philip), A Button in the Woods from Zita the Spacegirl

358 : Notable Comics from September 1, 2010, to August 31, 2011

Kriota Willberg is the partner of cartoonist Bob Sikoryak and thus knows first hand (well, second hand) what are all the ailments that come from making comics. She’s also a dancer, massage therapist, and teaches anatomy for Pilates teachers, yoga teachers, and cartoonists, and so has a good idea how to treat injury with posture and exercise. She’s pretty amazing. Last year, Bob and Kriota were a visiting teachers at the Center for Cartoon Studies. Seeing how many of the dozens of cartoonists around her were injured inspired Kriota to try her hand at cartooning while there. The result is a fat little tome that should have a place on every cartoonist’s shelf, (NO) PAIN! The mega-mini comic. 

In Kriota’s description: “(NO) PAIN! gives the basics of injury prevention targeted specifically to cartoonists. It explains how injuries happen and what injuries commonly affect drawing professionals.”

That’s it. Buy it from her website with Paypal, and be well.

(P.S. if you’re in New York, you can still probably get into her anatomy for cartoonists workshop at MoCCA, starting July 10.)

Yesterday we introduced gag cartoons, displayed visual examples and got students’ minds working. Now comes the hardest part:

Objective: Come up with at least two separate ideas for your Gag Cartoon.

Activities:

• Class will review the definition of a gag cartoon and key points from yesterday’s Class Discussion
• Students will draw at least two separate thumbnail sketches for their Gag Cartoon.

Early in Mastering Comics, Jessica Abel and Matt Madden discuss ‘the Horror of the Blank Page’ (Chapter 2). Every artist who has ever put pen to paper has felt it, and likely some of your students will be feeling it now. To be sure, some students will be bursting with so many ideas that their biggest struggle will be just getting them all down. That’s great. Let them run. But inevitably there will be those students with faces as blank as the page before them.

As a teacher, there are any number of strategies you can employ to encourage them. You could give them the handout you made of yesterday’s visual presentation (you made those, didn’t you?). You could point them to a particular tome of gag cartoons from your classroom library (you’re building one, aren’t you?). You could even let your 21^st century media sponges surf the internet for inspiration (just keep an eye on them). But perhaps the best advice you could give is the suggestion Abel and Madden give at the start of MC : “Just Start Drawing” (Chapter 1).

Again, I have them generate at least two thumbnail sketches so they’re not settling for their first idea. (Teenagers can be an unmotivated, lazy lot.) Walk around the class, gauging progress. When a student is ready, begin individual discussions.

• Teacher will individually discuss ideas with students. Together they will choose which sketch will be the basis for the student’s eventual finished project.

As a Cartooning teacher, one of the many hats you’ll be wearing, all year long, is that of Editor. As you review the two sketches (at least!) of your student, there will probably be one idea that is clearly better. More than likely, they will already have made this determination for themselves. However, if they have not, part of your job is to try and nudge the student in that direction. The trick is to try to have them arrive at that conclusion themselves. Ask leading questions:

• Which sketch functions the way a gag cartoon should?
• Is one idea more original than the other?
• Which is simply funnier?

In the end, however, it’s the student’s choice. If they prefer the “lesser” idea, so be it.

• Student will revise their chosen sketch based on individual discussion.

Once they’ve made their decision, their next step is to improve it. Help the student zero in on what makes the gag work and then suggest ways to emphasize it. Again, ask questions to help them arrive at the answers themselves. Some questions you might ask:

• What EXACTLY is the joke here?
• How is it being conveyed?
• How can we make it clearer?
• Does the caption help to make the point? Or does it need to be more concise?
• What part of the drawing should we emphasize? Are there distracting details?

(These last two questions will be reinforced in a drawing lesson in the very near future.)

Here’s an example of a thumbnail sketch after revision (courtesy of Matt Keegan):

The idea is clear, the text (this time included within the panel as opposed to a caption underneath) is concise and the background has just enough detail to give the viewer a sense of setting without being distracting.

Remember, you’re doing this with each student. The whole process, from choosing which idea to develop to suggesting possible revisions, should take 2-3 minutes tops. (Just remember to take the occasional lap around the room to make sure everyone’s on task.) Depending on the size of your class, you may not be able to discuss each student’s work in one class period. Don’t worry about it. You’ll have more time as they’re working tomorrow, especially after you’ve thrown a wrench into the works – Anti-Gag Cartoons!

Derek Mainhart is an art teacher at Deer Park High School and at the Usdan Center for the Creative and Performing Arts. He has taught widely at many institutions such as Molloy College, Boricua College and Hofstra, among others. He teaches cartooning workshops in the greater New York area. In addition, he was the first Vice President of the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (MoCCA) in Manhattan, and was instrumental in the formation of its annual MoCCA Art Festival. He has organized and participated in numerous gallery exhibits in and around NYC. His self-published works include The Iraqi Tinies and W. He is married to web-cartoonist and fellow art teacher Ali Solomon. They live with their daughter in Forest Hills (not far from the house where Peter Parker grew up.)

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