As a male teacher, affection in the classroom is a tricky thing. I cannot as easily show my affection for my students as some of my female counterparts seem to so easily do. I cannot engage in conversations about their personal lives without seeming creepy or invasive. I cannot really touch my students (only in particular contexts and only in particular ways). The fact that I teach in an education program where most of my students are female, makes this all the more a touchy subject (pun totally intended). The trouble is, I am a sucker for feelings. I want nothing more than to spend hours with my students talking about all the things that make them human: their hopes and fears and all that mushy, sappy stuff that makes up the bulk of really bad fiction (I sometimes secretly desire the kinds of contrived, overly-sentimental conversations the characters in Hemingway novels have). But when I teach comics, that resistance to affection comes down: at the end of the semester, I get a lot of hugs.

So, how can I build a classroom of love and intimacy, without crossing whatever cultural or social line has been deeply etched into classroom behavioral practices?

 Confianza

Confianza is a Spanish word for, roughly, trust. It brings with it connotations of intimacy, comfort, faith, and confidence. To have confianza (tener confianza) is to be at one with something: to have a deep, intimate and trusting relationship with something outside of yourself that makes it feel as though it is a part of you. As a teacher, having confianza with my students has always been of the utmost importance. In fact, it’s always been my main priority: I just figured the content-learning would come if I could get my students to trust me. Teaching, I think, is about managing human relationships.

James McShane’s Diary Comics

To prepare for our comics assignment, I brought my copies of James McShane’s comics. He makes these really lovely, chunky books that chronicle an entire day, a single drawing for every ten minutes.

In the back of these books, he gives instructions on how to make one:

What is so wonderful about McShane’s comics is that they lull you into his life with simple lines. They model the fact that a comic does not need to be drawn with great complexity to reach you. In fact, it is perhaps the simplicity of the cartoon that allows us to cast ourselves as these characters. More than that, writing students believe that the only things worth writing about are loud, violent, frightening, dangerous, or heartbreaking moments. McShane’s comics are not about spectacle, but the quotidian: how we make it through the day. What steps we take, what obstacles we face, and how we endure.  What does a life look like? I think part of my motivation was that   if we could really see one another for all our complexities, then perhaps we just might be kinder to one another. McShane’s comics have always made me feel as though I have been welcomed into his life, an implicit sense of trust. And by trusting me, he has elicited trust from me, as well. And this is what I hoped this assignment would do: provide a space where my students could welcome one another into their lives. Confianza.

A Day in the Life lesson

 A Day In the Life:

The Mostly True Story of a College Student

 Introduction: Comics are a great way to tell a story. The visual nature of the medium, makes it particularly adept at conveying large amounts of information in small panels (consider all the tiny details you can cram into one drawing). Cartoonists have used comics as a way to understand, organize, and represent the world: they consider a situation, reorganize it into sequential panels, and redraw it. This process means the cartoonist is in control of what is happening (even if she is telling a story that is true). Representing events is a way to make sense of them, and often, a way to feel better about them.

Prompt: No one knows what it’s like to be you. We haven’t walked in your shoes, traveled your paths, or any other cliché you’d like to use. But that doesn’t mean you can’t share your experience with the world. Take a day of your life as a college student, break it down into one hour or thirty-minute blocks, and then draw what you do at each time period. Be quick, but clean. Try to get as many details as possible, but don’t burden the panel or make it too messy. The purpose of this assignment is to give the reader a glimpse into the life of a college student. In this way, your reader might understand a little bit more about what it means to be you, and this understanding can lead to compassion and empathy.

 Dramatization: You might find that any particular day of your life doesn’t quite capture the essence of who you are and what your life is like. In nonfiction, writers create composites (or compilations) or events and even of people. Feel free to take three or four days (or even an entire week) and mash it into one day. It’s not lying. Remember, the purpose of this assignment to explain what it’s like to be you, and if you have to move things around so the reader betters understands, then you are using a lie that tells a truth, and that’s okay.

Here are excerpts from the comics we made:

All the mundane moments in life help me, as a teacher, to see my students as human beings. And hopefully it is a way for them to see themselves.

A comic chronicling a romantic outing to the woods. It's interesting to see what days students pick to represent who they are.

This comic showcased the stress and pressure our students are placed under to succeed.

The one exception: this student decided instead to draw an imagined, fantasy day. Not quite the assignment, but it gets at the same purpose.

The comics my students made were filled with all sorts of personal, intimate details: love affairs, strained relationships with parents and loved ones, hopes, fears, dreams for the future. I learned that many of students do not get along with their roommates. That they stay up way too late studying for tests and finishing homework (which means their morning sluggishness is not caused by late-night partying). I learned that they worry about their own futures: who they will be and what they will do. Many of them balance school, work, and family. I learned that my students are just like me.

Here’s the catch, though: not all trust leads to hugs. It isn’t just trust. It’s more than that. Confianza is about that moment when the barriers between yourself and the world outside of you have broken down, and who you are flows freely back and forth from another to you. An aesthetic experience, they call it. A connection. This is the domain of the intangible, the indescribable (yet another place where words are inadequate). And so, if you want hugs from your students, you’ll have to go a little farther: cartooning, maybe, is a puente, a bridge, that gets me from where I am, to where you are. But I don’t just cross the bridge, you cross it too. And it is in this crossing, I think, that we build a sense of confianza.

Why Comics?

I have taught writing for many years (creative writing and composition writing). Occasionally, I have had the student who feels an emotional connection to language and who can elicit an aesthetic experience from his peers and me, but it is always a difficult task—and maybe something that comes with enough time and practice. Words, I think, are just too abstract. They reside in some faraway, conceptual plane, that requires us to distance ourselves from our human body (and all those feelings and emotions associated with the body) to access them. And only if we are skilled enough readers (reading a skilled enough writer), can we bring these words back down to where we live and work and play and make them mean something. But comics doesn’t have to do all that: it invites a space in the classroom where power structures and societal norms are temporarily suspended. And in this suspension, things that seem as though they don’t belong, suddenly do: love and beauty and kindness can find a place in the classroom. A place for confianza. Cartooning, I think, provides an opening just large enough to fit them through.  And once they’re here, well, they are hard to get rid of.

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

Here’s a gift idea for you friends/relatives/encouragers/enablers out there: a beginning cartoonist’s starter kit!

To get your special person started in comics, just use the following checklist to buy him or her the basic tools of the trade:

Drawing Words & Writing Pictures will explain how to use all of this stuff! You can buy the book online or check your local bookseller.

Download your gift shopping checklist here and take it to your local art supply store (in fact, a well-stocked office supply store will carry a lot of this stuff). There are also plenty of places you can order these supplies on line, for example Pearl Paint or Dick Blick.

Last but not least, you’ll find details including illustrations and links about all of the above items in our new Supplies section under our Resources tab. Print it out as well and bring it along to the store if you like.

As we did last time, we’re planning to start by showing some slides to introduce a topic of cartooning that is related to Debeurme’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. One striking aspect of Lucille when you open it is that it uses no panel borders.

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

• simple drawing style
• open layouts
• improv writing method
• mixture of dream imagery and carefully observed realism
• use of diaries common to all three books so far
• no narration—how is exposition handled?
• role of nature, both visually and symbolically

And here are references to a few specific pages, sequences, and panels that struck us for one reason or another:

• the little figure jumping off the cliff (referred to by Arthur/Vladimir later in the book)
• the accident in the boat
• the vineyard owner and his assistant, their backstories

“Shu Fa” or The Way of the Brush, which is what we call Chinese calligraphy and painting (the two are inseparable), goes far, far back in time, and it really is a lifelong apprenticeship. Two of my favorite artists are Bada Shanren and Shi Tao.I don’t think in this lifetime I can be any more than a loving dilettante in the vast, vast ocean of Chinese Calligraphy, but here’s a little from having dipped my toes in it…

Chinese calligraphy and painting are inseparable from the unseen worlds of Ch’i or energy or as Yoda would call it, the Force.

The posture of the calligrapher, often standing up, but sometimes seated too, is designed for the force to travel up the calligrapher’s spine, down his right arm, and down the brush. Feet are wide apart and flat on the ground. The spine is erect.

The calligrapher holds the brush itself with a strong tension in the wrist—hand pulled back.

Then there is the life of the line itself. With years of practice and mastery of characters and brush, one develops all kinds of deep and subtle sensitivities. It can take several years of practice to make a straight line alone.

Within each stroke, there is the movement of force. For instance, a straight line doesn’t just ‘die’ at the end abruptly. If the stroke goes to the right, the stroke begins towards the left, first; then goes right, then finishes off going left again, inside itself—the idea being that even in this straight line, the Ch’i is still flowing, in movement.

It’s astonishing when you start feeling some of these things. Or when you meet a master who looks at someone’s line without having met them and says “This is someone with grand ambitions but who is very shy in public. They are slightly overweight and may have thyroid problems.” And it’s accurate.

This is one of the most fascinating things I’ve come across in Chinese painting, this notion that what matters, even more than the skill of an artist, is the quality of being in them, at the time they do their work. It’s just a different focus than the Western mind tends to bring to appreciating art. Why is it some works are warming, or endearing, regardless of subject matter? While others make you want to take a shower. There’s more to all this, of course.

Here are four Chinese characters that I asked a calligraphy teacher (Chris Tang, at the China Institute in NY) to write out so I could copy them some years ago. They are in three different calligraphic styles. In the middle column, the beautiful running style calligraphy. These are four deep concepts, or rather four essences of art, in Shu Fa thinking. Definitions below are from my brother Alexis.

These are really four separate meditations for anyone working in any medium. There’s more to say about each of these separately, on other occasions…

氣 (qì) : BREATH. This contains the character for rice (米, mǐ) surrounded by air (气, also qì). It’s air, or breath, that carries nourishment (rice is so essential to Chinese culture that the verb “to eat” is literally “eat rice” – with rice in its cooked form of 饭, fàn) – hence the extended meaning of life-force or spirit.

理 (lǐ) : REASON. Reason, logic, management. It’s the character for jade (玉, yù), a metaphor for all things precious and valuable, associated with the phonetic element 里, composed of a field (田) above earth or soil (土). It’s reasoning or management skills that allow you to transform a raw material (soil or other) into a field that then produces something valuable.

意 (yì): IDEA. This means thought or idea. The components of the character give the meaning of establishing something related to the sun in your heart.

神(shén) : SPIRIT. A god or supernatural being. It’s the radical for spirit, 示 (shì), combined with the phonetic 申, which means “to extend.” So it’s a spirit that extends beyond the confines of a human body

Interesting, isn’t it? Imagine having an art appreciation that relates to these four things, rather than, say, “I like it, or I don’t like it.”

I love this stuff.

——Mark Siegel

Phew. I didn’t get it either until I was actually there. But the long and the short of it is, I offered 6 identical 25-minute sessions to class-sized groups of middle- and high-school kids, all day. So I decided I should just draw a 6-panel comic for them, one panel at a time. It would be a chance to talk naturally about the order of work, the materials needed, and to show all the behind-the-scenes action.

I laid out and lightly sketched a comic in blue pencil, and brought that in to draw. Here was the setup.

Here’s what I used:

• Document projector
• bristol board
• mechanical pencil
• grid ruler
• Ames Lettering Guide
• T-square
• eraser
• nib pens
• brushes
• ink
• graphic white
• water
• I could very much have used a brush basin, but I forgot to bring mine.

Here’s what I did (with relevant chapters in DWWP indicated)

• (I had already prepped the page with very rough pencils and lettering in blue)
• I squared the paper to the table, using a T-square. (chapter 6)
• I laid out the panel borders in pencil (chapter 6)
• I used the Ames Guide to lay out lettering guidelines. (chapter 7)
• I penciled my lettering. (chapter 7)
• I penciled the image. (chapter 5)
• I inked the lettering and word balloons. (chapter 7 and 8)
• I inked the image using nib pens. (chapter 8)
• I added blacks with a brush (chapter 13)
• I inked panel borders (chapter 6 and 8)
• I erased, and corrected with white. (chapter 8)

This was a valuable demo, I thought, and brought up all kinds of good questions from how you dip a nib pen to how could students acquire these materials themselves, in a totally natural way. (For this latter question, see our new supplies list, with links to product pages. Use this info to buy them at your local art supply store with this info, or order straight from Amazon.)

In fact, drawing one relatively simple panel took me just about exactly 25 minutes, so I wound up with a complete page at the end of the day. Kind of a preview of my next book, Trish Trash: Rollergirl of Mars, in fact!

As we did last time, we’re planning to start by showing some slides to introduce a topic of cartooning that is related to Clowes’ book. In the case of Fun Home, we talked a bit about the use of text in comics and how it interacts with images. Ice Haven is striking for its use of a variety of drawing and storytelling styles associated with different genres and formats: kids comics, detective stories, “alternative” comics, and more. We’ll show some examples of the kinds of comics Clowes is referring to and talk about the way style and layout can be used as storytelling tools.

Vida Wentz approaches Random Wilder on the streets of Ice Haven

We’d like to remind you that we are posting this here for the use of anyone who wants to host a book club about Ice Haven. In fact, we already have someone looking into setting up a comics book club in Philadelphia—we’ll report back here if we get any news.

One way to approach talking about this book in a group or class setting is to assign or have participants choose a particular section of the book and describe it on its own terms and in relation to the overall narrative.

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

• characters talking to reader
• characters exhibiting self-delusion or concentrating on the wrong detail (dramatic irony)
• what are the narrative functions, if any, of the different art styles and page layouts used?
• unreliable narrators in comics and prose
• self-referentiality, calling attention to the fact that you’re reading a comic (or a book, more generally)
• black humor, misanthropy in Ice Haven, Daniel Clowes’ oeuvre, and underground/alternative comics in general
• The structure of Ice Haven is not linear. How would you describe it?
• Notice the titles of each section, their lettering styles, and their placement.

And here are references to a few specific sequences and panels that struck us for one reason or another:

• “Our Children and their Friends”: follow the bouncing ball (and the sweat beads!) on the second page especially.
• “Mr. & Mrs. Ames”: notice the use of cropped word balloons in these sequences.
• “Harry Naybors, Comic Book Critic”: what’s striking about the framed page of comic book art in the second to last panel?
• “Our Children, Revisited”: What is Charles doing in the last panel?
• “Violet, Alone Forever”: Violet failing to conjure Penrod’s face
• “Harry Naybors Explains Everything”: pure silliness or does he make some good points?