"It really starts in geometry. It starts in understanding that as a painter, as a artist of any kind, a jeweler, a drawer, a printmaker, y'know, you're dealing with these proportions, and it's about, like, trying to find the proportions and how you work those proportions and move ideas in space through that - those harmonies, and it's just, that's rejected because there's this cult of, like, the genius artist, and you're supposed to intuitively figure out, well, the funny thing is that your intuitive guessing on a lot of those things matches up with a very specific metronome or color coding, harmony, and scales that are just there period whether you want to deal with them or not."
-Frank Santoro
I started thinking about the idea that my vomit wasn't inherently interesting while listening to Matt Seneca's podcast interview of Santoro.
I naturally tend toward disjunction when I'm making comics. It arises from an inability for me to get my story straight, to have a narrative or imagery to impart that I don't discover as I'm producing it. There might be a less obvious organizational strategy that forms a pattern from the chaotic elements, an overarching intentionality, but that generally reveals itself during the making, and doesn't presumably exist prior to that.
Here are notes for a strip I might soon make:
Anniversary
1. Get espresso - "oh this is actually good"
2. What are we going to do about Rita?
3. What do you mean (she wants me to take R to Omsi or something like that)
4. Well, she's gonna be restless and we shod wear her out befire Sierra watches her
5. We could go to omsi... Good idea.
6. Sm Latte!
7. How was the espresso[hands giving iffy symbol]? Great
8. Shoukd it have been bad? Fuck - my palette is no good.
9. Here you go pea
10. Tastes latte (makes face)
11. My palette does suck - M's is much better - latte art looks like crap
12. Would you be bummed if I took her to omsi?
13. That would be awesome.
14. Cool
15. Poppy - wash Rita's hands?
16. Sure monk - come on
17. Crazy walking
18. Wash hands & r almost opens door while i'm peeing
19. Look at the moths, monk
20. Let's go see mama
21. If you wanna just go now its cool
22. Ok. I need more coffee so i'll swing by Belmont
23. R & I walking
24. I shoukd get a cup at the annex
25. Rad - Liam
26. Waiting for a coupke panels while he talks to dudes
27. Hows it goin?
28. Do you have any Leka Wato?
29. Maybe
30. Can I get a cup?
31. I've got the day off - its my anniv. I'm taking this wild lady to omsi to say happy annuv
32. Whisper - i love omsi
33. Yeah its rad, awesome for kids in the winter
34. Rita throwing bottle And laughing
35. Well i sgould get going - shes getting restless
36. Walking, listening to ten cent plague
37. Augh - this is too much! Too sweet and maple-y
38. Chugging (i need the energy for omsi)
39. Ok, bug, lets change your diaper, then go
40. Change diaper & lose poop
41. Im gonna eat something firsr. Want some turkey?
42. Ooops we're out - want some roast beef?
43. Making sandwich - more roast beef?
44. Get in car to drive to omsi
45. Get there - R and I run thru parking lot to get there
46. Go in & do sci stuff
47. Thwn upstaits
The idea is to draw an autobiographical strip something like "Michelle" in Solipsist's Doodles where I'm trying to avoid interfering with what happened as much as possible, presenting unsculpted narrative information as much as the comics form will allow.
My wife and I saw the new Sofia Coppola movie "Somewhere" on our anniversary the other day. It's very slow, short on plot, has minimal dialog. My assumption is that Coppola wanted to avoid controlling to a degree how the viewer generated meaning from what they saw, to dodge fixed semiotic connections developing from the imagery. Somewhat. The movie wound up being kinda dumb, thwarting its sophistication by tacking on a couple of obvious scenes near the end that were more prescriptive. Regardless, it reminded me how it is not possible for comics to be "objective." The creator must make decisions about everything he does.
I really love Jonathan Bennett's strips in The Believer. There's a simplicity of design that functions elegantly to present the story/gag. The lettering is beautiful. The forms don't read as schematic - they're organic and subtle like Schulz's.
The spot color strip format he has developed is perfectly suited to his style. When not constrained by its restrictions, his work feels less alive, flatter.
Why do I like these strips so much? There's a heavy bias in alt (art, indy, post-art, whatevs) comics toward formalist strategies, theories of aesthetic propriety (even if these are admittedly only personal). I find myself drawn to this type of cartooning. I love Santoro's mystic comicscomics posts on systems, his rants about the golden ratio and the visual organization of classical painting. There is, apparently, a strong physiological basis for being attracted to this stuff. Is that objectivity?
I ran into Jesse McManus on my way out of my studio, and we talked about the additive nature of comics. He suggested that his process (blue pencils, scanning and repositioning, etc, i.e, the way a lot of cartoonists work) is subtractive in that images are compiled and refined to their essences. But we as cartoonists will always be builders more than editors. A good example of this is Sammy Harkham's newest Crickets:
The above image is a composite of two pages from that issue. It shows the same living room at two different points in the story. Blaise brought it to my attention as an example of a lack of continuity. Which I love. We don't have to be consistent. And I like that comic for the opposite reason that I enjoy Bennett's: it refuses to be aesthetically fussy. I'm not sucked into the diegetic space of Bennett's Believer strips, but I am totally immersed in Sammy's.
Jesse and I also discussed the irony that we are each making work that is the opposite of what we like reading. I love longer narratives I can get lost in, and he digs formal experimentation. There's something enigmatic about the contrast.
14 comments:
thanks for a good morning read
i ran outside when jesse came home and you'd disappeared
the problem posed by the crickets panels is interesting
in a way it seems like the reading experience of comics is additive but it's not totally 'spatially juxtaposed' - there's an aspect of layering as well, like layers in photoshop
i guess it seems odd to me, since i've been working mainly with transparencies for a couple weeks, to create new information when the old information is perfectly easy to copy (even from a different angle)
i feel the cartoonist ethos is to be a hardworker with no shortcuts, which is ironic in that cartooning seems to be all about shortcuts
also ironic is the faux pax of photocopying (via analogue or digital means) panels as a shortcut
for example copying a panel of a face and redrawing only the mouth
photocopying is a comics bedrock
i end up with a lot of tracing paper in which the 'original' is lost
i feel like the 'original' is really prized among cartoonists, even when it adds no information
for example, cartoonists will hand paint large sections of pure black instead of selecting the 'magic wand'
the additiveness of comics is fetishized, as is it's traditional craftsmanship
i'm not saying this is wrong, that anyone should change, just justifying/contextualizing my own recent endeavors
i guess i'm criticizing the 'critical atmosphere' of comics that would criticize chris ware if he decided to select and copy his panels on the computer
Jessica Abel: 'Some so-called cartoonists will try to create this sense of time by xeroxing or cutting-and-pasting images from one panel to another. But you can always tell, and always looks like two images of the same moment, not one moment and the next. And this counts'
Despite the poster, this is
not a boob film
but it
-thwarting narrative expectations
-testing patience
-against interpretation / and popcorn!
-exploiting old ladies and meat
also shout out to Haneke
these comments r in regards Sopia Croppola
"...it is not possible for comics to be 'objective.' The creator must make decisions about everything he does."
"Comics are an additive medium. Unlike film (not animation, of course), which captures information from the 'real world,' comics require the practitioner to work from scratch."
but you know film is just as real or unreal as comics, right?
i'm assuming you haven't made a film because you're assumptions about it's objectivity and what it captures are looney
at blaise,
"for example copying a panel of a face and redrawing only the mouth"
in an interview from way back, jeff "bone" smith talked about his process of copying or lightboxing backgrounds because by his claim the backgrounds aren't alive whereas the characters are!
"i feel like the 'original' is really prized among cartoonists, even when it adds no information"
"for example, cartoonists will hand paint large sections of pure black instead of selecting the 'magic wand'"
open your view and you'll find the contrary.
but one example: http://samkieth.blogspot.com/2010/01/bat-crap-is-out.html
another example: http://www.pauljholden.com/wordpress/?p=808
@anon
"i'm assuming you haven't made a film because you're assumptions about it's objectivity and what it captures are looney"
Film isn't objective at all. You're making decisions about every step of the process. It's a totally plastic medium. Buuuut - you are photographing (or digitally imaging) "reality," however mediated and, thus, allowing viewers to engage with imagery and sound that carries more information than you as director/cinematographer/editor are controlling. You are recording, documenting, subtracting, cropping bits of "reality" to form this composite you are, ostensibly, in control of.
@Blaise
I really like the idea of process as a way of being more efficient, finding tricks that allow you to be quicker while not sacrificing depth or aesthetics. I get what Abel is saying, but I heavily disagree. Photoshop is a very important tool to me. But I like starting with non-digital means to arrive at images (which will then be scanned or photographed) because, similar to what I was trying to get across about film (or photography) vs. comics, bits of the world that aren't "essential" leak through via the analog spectrum. This may be romantic of me, but there is, I think, a subtle depth and ambience they add. Let me put it this way: I haven't seen fully computer generated comics that strike me as beautiful.
Re Crickets: I like the crummy, handmade quality of this issue. It's as if Sammy (similar to Beto) decided to forgo all the unneccesary fussiness that got in the way of him making a long narrative and just made a comic. I wish more people took this approach. It's nice to have Clowes & Burns, but I enjoyed Crickets more (at least than Wilson - haven't read X'ed Out, but it's beautiful), maybe because it's not so precious. In music terms: I'd rather listen to Guided by Voices than Wilco.
open your view and you'll find the contrary."
While I totally agree with their methods, mainstream dudes who use computers profusely make work that looks terrible to me. That Keith drawing, pre- and post- computer tweaks looks butt ugly. Any current DC or Marvel comic looks so garish and inelegant compared with those of fifty years ago. A huge part of it is the infinite color palette computers afford. Restricting colors to a fairly manageable set of simple ratios works similar to limiting variation in line weight - it focuses the images.
@Blaise
I'm totally trying to disavow myself of the fetishization of the original drawing, but my computer monitor is small and I have no printer.
@jason
no?
local, too
@jason i feel like tracing would have been 'crummier' or something ...
@2:51pm Anon: i think this is relevant
@Blaise
Forgot about that post! Good one.
Tracing would've been crummy in an intentional way, or maybe "lame," but not as sloppy and quick-looking.
@Star Light
We'regoners
@Blaise
Abel is either overestimating her (and other so-called cartoonist's) ability to capture a specific moment in relation to other nearby moments, or undervaluing rhythm as an expression of time.
I've been thinking about Kabuki masks, and how they're designed/performed so that the single expression can be shift into others depending on the viewing angle.
And in relation to shooting from pencils and getting an angle where the body does what I want it to, but the facial expression doesn't match anymore. Using the same drawing from multiple angles to represent different states.
And stuff.
@lastworthy sounds cool re photos from different angles
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