The Sellout, Paul Beatty
Treehouse of Horror #15, ed. Sammy Harkham
Endless Monsoon 1-2, Sarah Welch – Really good, highly recommended. One of a few sight-unseen RIPE discoveries. Finding new work in that way is a very singular pleasure.
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Some thoughts, after a period of reflection, on things I read this year:
Uptight 5 and Blammo 9 – These represent two approaches to the one-person anthology comic, both appealing. Blammo 9 is a curated experience, with specific stories created and sequenced to present the themes, ideas, and visual approaches of greatest interest to the artist at that time. A way for readers, and perhaps even the artist themselves, to “check in.” Lose is another good example of this model. Uptight 5 is, as best I can tell, “here’s everything I’ve made over the last few years.” It fits together because it is well-designed and because any work by a good cartoonist will fit together to some degree, but it’s not as self-consciously curated as a Blammo or a Lose. So stories in Uptight like The Dark Nothing and Keeping Two either show a greater range or create a more disjointed reading experience, depending on your perspective, than any pair of stories in Blammo.
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage – I rarely read books that I just didn’t like (I don’t finish them, plus try to select carefully) but this didn’t do it for me even though I like Murakami a lot. Off the top of my head, Kafka on the Shore, 1Q84 (read in 3 volumes if possible), and When I Talk About Running are my favorites. Maybe I just need a Murakami break, or to return those books, because he’s definitely writing the same 2-3 books again and again. 1Q84 was interesting because it said at a few points early on, “Here’s what I’m going to tell you, here are the themes of the book,” but I found those more useful signposts than pedantic annoyances. Tazaki did the same thing in a much more cloying way and also handled some difficult subject matter poorly.
Lydia Davis – I first read her last year, and she continued to be a big inspiration this year. Right now she and Calvino are my favorite prose authors: complex ideas presented in simple language. Plus, they can be funny! Which so far my work mostly is not. My two favorite types of Davis stories are 1. very short stories and 2. lists. The latter includes stories with a significant motif of listing or repetition, though one of my favorites is literally just a list. Cartoonists who I know are Davis fans: Eleanor Davis, Roman Muradov, I’m sure others. Cartoonist who is the best equivalent to Davis’ 1-5 sentence stories: Schulz? Pablo Holmberg? Maré Odomo?
Late Bloomer – On that note, I just wanted to mention again now much I enjoyed this book. The individual pages and the overall sequencing are in dialogue, pushing and pulling as you move through the work. As an object it feels soft and fragile, a good match for the soft pencil hues. Someone – maybe me, I’d like to – should write a long piece comparing Internet Comics to Late Bloomer. There are similarities, of course, but also interesting and important divergences.
Gertrude Stein – It’s nice to have delved into Stein so deeply several months ago and now have aspects of her work readily available in my mind without returning to the books themselves. It allows me to mentally focus on the aspects of the work that have meaning for me without getting dragged down by prose that really is challenging to wade through at times. I expect I won’t (re)read any Stein for several years now, but I look forward to continue thinking about her.
Sec – No one understands better than Sarah Ferrick how text can be an active, essential, billowing visual element in a comic.
The Being Being – I think about this book all the time. It’s been on my nightstand for months. When will I reread it? Hopefully soon.
How to Make Comics – Builds up an idiosyncratic visual vocabulary, slowly teaches you that language, and then applies it to a careful examination of complex ideas. Asks you peel back layers.
Resistance Rhode Island and Time Capsule – Despite some hesitation, I’m thinking carefully about ways to talk more directly about the contemporary world and politics in my comics going forward. Of the things I read in 2016, these two works offered the best guidance on how to approach that challenging task while still retaining deep emotional resonance and artistic focus.
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Some thoughts, after a period of reflection, on my notes about my work throughout the year:
After several moments of deep anxiety in the past few months about not producing much work, I finished 15 pages in two weeks of very focused activity. Still have to color them. I’m hoping to finish another 30 pages for the same project in January, before other obligations likely consume me for at least a month or two.
I see looking back that I had anxiety about not being productive a few times earlier in the year as well. I made around 200 pages of new work this year, so feel free to scoff, though you probably haven’t seen most of it. One challenge is that I’m producing pages fairly quickly, which is great when I’m making work, but more frustrating when it leads me to be comfortable with a period of writing/thinking/otherwise not making final pages or with throwing away subpar work. Those are both good things in the long run but difficult things in the moment. Another challenge is valuing other aspects of my life in terms of Getting Things Done just as much as comics, even when they aren’t as quantifiably measurable.
I was also going to link to any work I had shared online this year, but I went back to find I hadn’t actually posted anything. Muscle Memory, Read & Erase, Some Comics came out in print, and I posted two old anthology contributions, but nothing new online. I’m surprised! More next year, I think. My goal is one new story each month. Nothing self-published in print from me in 2017 either. These monthly posts will continue, and be longer rather than shorter as often as I can manage. I hope they’re fun to read.
Another goal is trying to cautiously venture outside the comics world a little more. For instance I hope to visit galleries a little more often. A relevant excerpt from an email to a friend, from early November: “I certainly feel constrained by the world of comics as well, but I think I remain tied to it because I know its contours, its hidden corners so well at this point. I understand at this point how to sell a small handful of my comics and how to have a nice time at SPX. It’s comfortable. I feel like I know the lay of the land, for better and for worse. How to avoid the parts of the world that don’t interest me. But to speak more about the art than the commerce/context, I continue to hope my most fertile ground is in trying to bridge the gap between my interest in Comics and Not-Comics.”
I don’t think Worst Year Ever is a useful idea but I’ve always found the end of the calendar a valuable time to reflect and set goals. I hope that’s true for you as well.