Here’s an autobio strip about making comics. This started as my 30 Days Comic project last fall, but I found it wasn’t working and I stopped. This version is restructed and cut down, hopefully to make it a smoother read as well as less focused on me individually. I think comics-about-comics are extremely difficult to pull off so I’ve avoided making them but I think I avoided some of the pitfalls here.
I was also thinking about how to deploy density. I’m working on another story that uses 12-panel grids extensively, and I’m pulling actively from The Bungle Family and Ida Applebroog; repeated images that slowly build an energy through slight variations and tiny motions.
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Ganges #6, Kevin Huizenga – I didn’t love Ganges 5 although of course I still liked it a lot. But I really loved this one. I have a lot of thoughts on it, and I’ll offer you just one for now: this is a dense comic in terms of the amount of information presented per panel and per page. That density is meaningful on at least two levels: first, it reflect the way your (or at least my) mind sometime works in overdrive in that space between being sleep and being awake, free-associating in a way that makes perfect sense at the time. These thoughts seem essential in the moment, until you snap awake – and realize they’re essentially nonsense. Second, it gets at the way social media and the Internet can overwhelm the final hours of your day. “Don’t look at screens for an hour before bed!” Several pages of Ganges 6 formally speak to, without depicting, the feeling of looking at Twitter just one more time before you go to sleep.
Gloriana, Kevin Huizenga – Reread after Ganges 6, since both that and the Comix School minis have me thinking Huizenga’s publication history and artistic trajectory. The original version of Gloriana, Supermonster 14, came out in 2001- he was 21! I really do believe that great work finds a home – this comic has been published in three different formats simply because it deserves to stay in print.
Crickets #3-6, Sammy Harkham – Also reread, on the occasion of the new issue arriving. I’ve read each issue a dozen times at least, and I noticed two small but significant plot points this time around that I had missed or overlooked previously. As densely plotted as it is paneled. Harkham comics might be uniquely potent in their ability to convince me, if briefly, that I should devote myself to making poor imitations of Harkham comics.
Sprawling Heart, Sab Maynert
Varieties of Disturbance, Lydia Davis
Othello, William Shakespeare
Daily Rituals, Mason Currey – If you’re not familiar, this is brief accounts of creative people’s lives and schedules. It’s interesting, like a more immediate version of the feeling you get when reading a good biography or collection of letters. I first read this maybe 3 or 4 years ago, in part actively looking for a routine that I could adapt for my own use. With this reread, I had two thoughts: first, I’m no longer looking to appropriate someone else’s working methods in that way. I guess I’ve grown slightly more comfortable and confident in my own approach. Although I also find myself being especially productive in the weeks after finishing the book. Hm. Second, there really was a lot of Thoreau getting donuts and #ThanksForTyping here. Not that it’s a surprise per se, but just notable to have it so often on display in so many varieties and be largely unremarked upon in the text.
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As I had hoped, I managed to get drafts of some new projects out to trusted friend this month. So now I have an interesting challenge: a few important structural weaknesses have been pointed out, and now it’s up to me to find solutions to them. Where did I read that you know formal constraints are working when you’re forced at a certain point to abandon them? That might be where I find myself. This is a 48 page comic that I’ve been working on for over a year now – I need to buckle down and finish it. I’m getting close
I reread an old comic of mine recently because it has some thematic similarities to a project I’m working on now. I even imagined this old comic and the new one could be published in a single book. Maybe it’s not a good idea to say which old comic this was. (It’s After the Fire.) And…I really didn’t like it! Or at least it had some important weaknesses and even a few lazy mistakes that I hadn’t been aware of. In one sense this is good, because the threshold for work I see as “old and bad” is moving forward in time. Maybe that means I’m improving. In another sense it’s discouraging, because I did remember this comic as being good and I still think it could be good with a few changes that I really should have recognized at the time.
And then towards the end of the month I found myself with some extra free time and stumbling into a burst of productivity. I finished two stories and roughed out three others. The numbers shouldn’t be important, but I mention them in part for myself – hopefully I’ll come across this in the future when I’m feeling less motivated.