March

This month I posted a comic I made last year called Seeking Joy. I wanted to share it because the goal stated in the title is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.

Extended Play, Jake Terrell

Perfect Hair, Tommi Parrish

Altcomics Magazine #5, ed. Blaise Larmee

Drone, Simon Hanselmann

Secure Connect, Carta Monir

Comix School USA #1-5, Kevin Huizenga – I meant to ration these for myself over the course of a few months, but they’re too good and I couldn’t help but read them all. Three threads intermingle here: straightforward, helpful, and motivating comics advice, on everything from productivity (long a KH preoccupation) to lettering; a look into the sketchbook of an artist inching towards the end of his masterwork to date, Ganges; and an undercurrent of autobiography as you watch Huizenga try to codify and articulate his approach to comics but also deal with the practicalities of being an educator, from navigating bureaucracy to interacting with students. Highly recommended. I hope he keeps producing these as the accumulation and repetition of themes across issues is definitely part of the effect.

Applebroog, Ida Applebroog (1987) – The most affordable publication from an artist to whom I’ve really connected since coming across a piece of her work recently. The book includes a number of asinine text pieces that remind me why fine art can be a stupid world. In these texts comics are mentioned just once, in passing, in a body of work that has obvious connections of comics even if that medium was not an active influence. Much of Applebroog’s images feature multiple representative figures that, while not explicitly implying sequence, are very clearly in dialogue with each other. Even more compelling are short comics like this one, where the image is usually held constant and short bursts of text are carefully deployed to create an effect of bubbling tension and restrained hesitance. Also, this and this are easily some of my all-time favorite one page comics. Motion only in the evidence of the artist’s hand, in the implied passage of time as a image repeats.

Smithsonian Book of Newspaper Comics, ed. Bill Blackbeard and Martin Williams – I’ve read this once before, though not cover-to-cover, and I thought it was time I own a copy. Classic newspaper strips largely haven’t clicked for me yet, and I’m skeptical as a cartoonist of drawing from a well that has already been so successfully exploited by many modern Western cartoonists. The same feeling explains my relative lack of engagement with Jack Kirby. If I’m going to engage with work that doesn’t appeal to me naturally, shouldn’t it be stuff (like Applebroog above) that points me towards paths less well-trodden? So I went into this reading with the primary goal of enjoying these strips as a reader and not as a creator. I was moderately successful.

The Little Man, Chester Brown – I grabbed this off the shelf one night when looking for a quick read. Recent Brown work doesn’t do much for me for many reasons, but I like the earlier stuff. The best work in here is the one-two combo of Helder/Showing Helder and ‘Call of the Spirit.’ I wonder why more people didn’t pick up on the compositional approach of Showing Helder, which works really well. I might steal it…

I finished a draft of a longish comic this month in a bout of iterative, compulsive drawing – 50 pages drawn in a few weeks. They’re fairly simple pages, and the book is meant to be read quickly, but I’m still pleased with that level of output. Now I’m scanning and finalizing text. Still a few holes to fill in the coming months. In part due to reading Applebroog, but also due to related and longstanding interests, I found myself focused on describing action and movement with this project. Characters slowly moving through space or even not moving at all.

Finally, I’ve been bad in the past few months about drawing while traveling and about maintaining a daily drawing practice. The Comix School books were a helpful reminder that daily drawing is important. So I’ve dug out some pocket-sized sketchbooks and I’m trying to do a drawing a day, generating images in a way that will hopefully start to suggest a story. Let’s see how long it lasts.