Chris Ware Talk and Workshop this Fri & Sat

I'm very excited to be participating in a talk and workshop with Chris Ware, a cartoonist who's coming to SNC as part of the "Writers in the Woods" series hosted by the Humanities department. Ware has been a real inspiration for me as an artist – I think he's one of a handful of graphic novelists who have not only produced interesting work, but actually moved the medium of comics forward – pushing the boundaries of what seems possible. I'll be talking with him in an interview format on Friday evening, and running the workshop with him on Saturday morning. The talk is free and open to the public; the workshop is free for faculty and students, $50 for everyone else.

Here's the "Writers in the Woods" blurb:

Please join us for the last Writers in the Woods events of the semester. Graphic novelist Chris Ware will give a talk Friday, November 4 at 7PM in TCES 139. Hot and cold appetizers and wine will be served. The event is free and open to the community.

Saturday, November 5, Ware will lead a workshop from 9AM-Noon in TCES 139. The workshop is free to students and faculty. $50 for community members. Students may take the workshop for credit. These events will be of special interest to students studying art, literature, creative writing, media studies, journalism, and popular culture.

CHRIS WARE is the author of Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth and the annual progenitor of the amateur periodical the ACME Novelty Library. An irregular contributor to The New Yorker and The Virginia Quarterly Review, Ware was the first cartoonist chosen to regularly serialize an ongoing story in The New York Times Magazine, in 2005-2006. He edited the thirteenth issue of McSweeney's Quarterly Concern in 2004 as well as Houghton Mifflin's Best American Comics for 2007, and his work was the focus of an exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 2006.

Workshop: Storytelling through Diagrams

A workshop with graphic novelist Chris Ware and and Sierra Nevada College Professor of Digital Art Chris Lanier

Chris Ware has often used diagrams as a storytelling device in his graphic novels – showing events taking place in a cutaway view of an apartment building, for instance, or using a medical diagram of a character as a jumping-off point to narrate her personal history. In this workshop, we'll look into Ware's techniques of "diagrammatic storytelling," and collaborate on a large scale narrative diagram, creating something that's partway story and partway map.

Since it's Halloween today, I thought it'd be appropriate to link a story Ware did for the New Yorker a couple years ago, which takes place on Halloween – click for larger versions of the pages:



Ware has also worked in other media – collaborating with animator John Kuramoto on some shorts for the "This American Life" TV show:



He's also created an interactive comics story for the McSweeney's app, called "Touch Sensitive" – more info on that here:

http://www.fastcodesign.com/1665117/chris-wares-ipad-only-comic-touch-sensitive-perfects-the-form

And if you still haven't gotten enough, here are links to a couple articles I've written about his work, for the Comics Journal and, many many moons ago, the San Francisco Chronicle Book Review:

http://classic.tcj.com/tcj-300/tcj-300-acme-novelty-library-19-reviewed-by-chris-lanier/

http://articles.sfgate.com/2000-11-26/books/17667810_1_panels-new-graphic-novel-jimmy-corrigan

Kirbrick

Not too long ago, I wrote a post mentioning a great pairing of a cartoonist and a filmmaker I both admire; today, on the culture site hilobrow.com ("Middlebrow is not the solution"), I have a short essay on another pairing of a great cartoonist and a great filmmaker, although the results from that one -- Jack Kirby's adaptation of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey -- are more decidedly mixed. Here's the link to the essay:

http://hilobrow.com/2011/03/11/kirby-vs-kubrick/

The essay is attached to a series hosted by hilobrow called Kirb Your Enthusiasm, in which several writers took on a panel from Jack Kirby's staggeringly prodigious oeuvre, meditating on his affects and effects. I highly recommend the series -- a great exegesis on a peculiar and influential artist, in bit-size increments. Each essay has a scan of the panel in question, which you can click on and blow up to pseudo-Lichtensteinian proportions:

Kirb Your Enthusiasm

Christchurch Coping

Victoria Buck, whose BFA show is coming up shortly, grew up in Christchurch. So of course the news of the earthquake has been weighing on her, and by extension, on all of us who know her. Via comicsreporter.com, I read a short comic strip on the quake by a New Zealand author and cartoonist, Sarah Laing. Click here to read the whole thing (the page includes links to relief organizations).


Victoria also sent along a link that's a fine example of using humor to cope with adversity -- some Christchurch residents who are selling "Rocky," the giant boulder that crashed into their home, on the NZ equivalent of ebay:

For sale 1 owner 25 - 30 tonne landscape feature (answers to the name Rocky) ...

He is in pristine condition (just a little bit of concrete dust). Suitable for garden feature, or as in our case a magnificent addition to your living area.

Rocky will enhance your "indoor outdoor" flow considerably, especially if you load him in through the garage roof like we did.

More pictures, and more on "Rocky" (including the opportunity to bid) can be found here. Proceeds go to earthquake relief for Christchurch.

R.I.P. Harvey Pekar

I'm slowly trying to get back into the blogging swing of things, and while about a month has passed since Harvey Pekar died, I didn't want to just let that go by unremarked here. My interest in comics came about partly because I started to forge my cultural identity in the 80s -- which seemed, to my teenaged jaded eyes, like a cultural wasteland. Movies and TV were generally abysmally stupid, the music that got played on the radio was usually godawful, the contemporary novel seemed to be in the doldrums, and the fine art world wasn't a huge part of my consciousness, outside of the NEA performance art kerfuffles. The place where interesting things seemed to be happening was comics. For a variety of reasons, in the 80s comics were detaching themselves from the juvenile subject matter that had long defined them in the U.S. -- a whole crowd of cartoonists were creating work outside of the superhero genre, and sometimes outside of anything that could comfortably be typified as a "genre" at all.


Pekar, whose work I discovered in the 80s, probably took comics further than anyone else beyond the zone of fantasy and escapism. His great subject was everyday life -- not romanticized or blown up to heroic proportions, but presented warts and all. You could say his work had an ethical relation to the warts. Neurosis, boredom, impotence -- it was all perfectly acceptable subject matter, and in fact it demanded to be subject matter, since so much art just sweeps that stuff under the rug. Pekar really opened my eyes to what comics were capable of, and for that I owe a debt of gratitude.

There have been several good obits posted on Pekar -- for some shorter appreciations, you could read Phil Nugent:

I remember reading an article about Pekar in 1983--in The Village Voice, as it happens--and sending away for copies of all the issues of American Splendor that were still available. They came a few weeks later and I read them all in one gulp, but I know that the "story" that made the biggest impact on me was the one that began with Harvey waking up on a cold morning, alone in bed between marriages, thinking about how much his life sucked, consoling himself a little by masturbating, picking out which of his worn-out, sorry-looking duds he was going to wear, getting dressed, and going to work, his actions accompanied by one pissed-off thought balloon after another. That was Pekar making, as bluntly as possible, the point that he was put on earth to make, the same point that Arthur Miller once managed to inflate to cosmic proportions by reducing it to four simple words: attention must be paid.

Or Jeet Heer:

Harvey was stubborn and willful, hard qualities to live with as at least two of his three wives would attest. Yet it was his very prickliness which made him a successful cultural revolutionary, a man who through sheer force of will helped transform a children’s medium, the comic book, and turn it into the graphic novel, a venue for literate, adult storytelling. As Harvey often noted, he was born in Cleveland in 1939, just a year after two other Cleveland Jewish boys launched Superman upon the world. Harvey saw his own intensely realistic stories as a response to the type of fantasies found in superhero comics: He liked to call himself Schlepperman, an ordinary Joe who struggled not to save the world but to get through the working day.

The most definitive obit I've read was by Tom Spurgeon, at the Comics Reporter.

And there's a nice selection of panels at John Glenn Taylor's blog.

Pekar had some minor celebrity as an oddball guest on David Letterman's show. He got himself booted from the guest list by refusing to be a performing monkey -- or at least by committing the cardinal sin of being a monkey with a political opinion. I don't think Letterman has ever looked like more of a shmuck; for my money, Pekar provided some of the most memorable moments of live television I've ever seen.



His work was also adapted into a film, "American Splendor," that to my mind lost a bit of the meandering, quotidian fundamentals of Pekar's comics -- though it featured a very good performance from Paul Giamatti, as Pekar. Here's a clip:

Silent Witness

This is the last month for a show I've been included in at The Collection, in Lincolnshire, England. It's the first time I've had art shown in England, and I'm very honored to be included in the exhibit, which features work by several artists I deeply admire -- artists whose work has served as inspiration and model for my own process. The exhibit, called Silent Witnesses: Graphic Novels Without Words , focuses on comics that tell their narratives in purely visual terms, without resort to word balloons or captions. My interest in the format (which arguably goes back into history far beyond the time people were thinking about "comics" as a medium) is an interest in a purely visual language: a language that stands apart from (while being related to) spoken and written language. The curator, Darren Diss, chose artwork from my wordless comic "Combustion," which tells the story of a soldier lost behind enemy lines.

Here is a sampling of the artists on display (not necessarily the work being shown at The Collection). Click on artist names to see more info or more work. Firstly, there are pioneers of the form:

Max Ernst, who I briefly blogged about last year.


Frans Masereel, whose masterpiece "Passionate Journey" directly lead me to "Combustion" (the ending of "Combustion" is actually a tip of the hat to, and a sort of inversion of, the end of "Passionate Journey").


Otto Nuckel


Lynd Ward


Laurence Hyde


There are several contemporary artists whose work I've avidly devoured:

Hendrik Dorgathen


Eric Drooker, who I worked with on the upcoming "Howl" movie:


Jason


Andrzej Klimowski


Peter Kuper


Shaun Tan


Jim Woodring



And several artists whose work I'm glad to have been introduced to, thanks to the show:

Lars Arrhenius, who had work at the NMA a few years ago:



Matt Forsythe


Alexandra Higlett


Zoe Taylor


Sara Varon



Here's the press release for the show (they used a panel of "Combustion" for it, which was nice):

Silent Witnesses: Graphic Novels Without Words
Curated by Darren Diss

Artists include: Lars Arrhenius, Hendrik Dorgathen, Eric Drooker, Max Ernst, Matt Forsythe, Alexandra Higlett, Laurence Hyde, Jason, Andrzej Klimowski, Peter Kuper, Chris Lanier, Frans Masereel, Otto Nuckel, Shaun Tan, Zoe Taylor, Lynd Ward, Sara Varon and Jim Woodring.

This exhibition brings together the work of internationally recognised artists and illustrators from around the world working in Graphic Novel form. Spanning publications from the early twentieth century to the present day, the works contained in the exhibition are distinct in that all use the capacity of images alone to communicate narrative, functioning entirely without the use of text.

The exhibition celebrates the book form and in particular the Graphic Novel as an increasingly popular medium for artists and explores its enduring appeal to readers of all ages. By focussing on works without text it examines the underlying structure and mechanics of developing a Graphic Novel, exposing it as a unique art form. It looks at the Novel in the true sense, as an extended sequence conveying a narrative. The show includes preparation and working drawings, writings, flat plans, sketch books and character studies and associated works alongside complete book-works to reveal the various developmental stages in creating a Graphic Novel.

The exhibition combines works from a wide range of cultural contexts, from modern popular Graphic Novels, with scratchboard images by Eric Drooker produced for his novel ‘Flood’, to woodcuts by Frans Masereel for his his 1925 work ‘Die Stadt’, to original drawings by Sara Varon for her well loved books, ‘Sweater Weather’, ‘Robo and Hund’ and ‘Chicken and Cat’. Also in the show will be a large scale flat-print version of ‘A-Z’ by Lars Arrhenius, a novel produced on the iconic A-Z map of London. Shown in print form it allows the viewer to scan the intersecting narratives sewn through the map in a single image, creating ever new readings.

Works for the exhibition have been loaned to The Collection from the British Museum, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Klinspor Museum, Offenbach, Scott Eder Gallery, New York, and from the exhibiting artists.

The show’s curator, Darren Diss, is an established illustrator and Senior Lecturer in Illustration at The University of Lincoln. He has a specialist academic research interest in Textless Narratives.

And here, lastly, are a few pictures taken at a preview of the show -- looks like they did a terrific job, it all seems very attractively laid out. Wish I could've hopped the pond to see it in person.

Wolverton's Apocalypse & Ware's Futurity

I've just had a couple pieces of writing published -- reviews of some interesting comics/books, by artists I admire. One is on a book of eccentric Bible Illustrations by Basil Wolverton, who made his name working on Mad Magazine and pulpy sci-fi and horror comics in the 40s and 50s.


It's up at The Comics Journal's new online site, here; The Comics Journal is moving into a much stronger online presence this month. They haven't had an "official launch" of the online version of their magazine yet, but there's already a good chunk of content up.

Here's a quote from the Wolverton article, describing his apocalyptic drawings, derived from the Book of Revelations:

Giant, luminous hailstones rain down to crush bloodied heads. Walking corpses with gaunt, ravaged faces stagger through rubbled wastelands. Mouths are reduced to organs fit only for yelling or screaming (oftentimes no teeth are shown, so the mouths are more like gaping wounds — some horrible hole driven into the face). The elements are in upheaval: flames leap higher than skyscrapers, the sea rises up in torsioned waterspouts, the sky ejects airplanes as though spitting watermelon seeds. There was always something toylike in Wolverton’s depiction of architecture, and in these vistas of destruction, the flimsiness of the skyline reads as a rebuke to man’s vanity. The listing skyscrapers look like shoeboxes, with equidistant little window-holes cut into them, being kicked over.

The other piece is appearing in issue #300 of the print version of The Comics Journal. It's a great issue: the bulk of it is taken up with interviews between younger and older generations of cartoonists. There's also some really sharp writing by R. Fiore and a great diagnosis of the ascendency of "Geek Culture" by Tom Crippen. I'm glad they were able to squeak in my review of Chris Ware's last book, Acme Novelty Library #19. Here's the first paragraph:

Part of the fun of Chris Ware’s Acme Novelty Library #19 is seeing him apply his style to a new mode. The first half is a science fiction adventure story, involving a desperate struggle for survival, a failed escape across inhospitable terrain, the murder of several dogs, and even a brief bout of auto-cannibalism. All this transpires on a faltering colony on Mars, and the arid setting allows Ware to maintain his usual formal distance without shortchanging the urgency of the plot. At its core, the story is one of abandonment – both intimate and infinite.

Issue #300 is currently only available in print, so to read the rest, you'll have to hit your local newsstand.

"Red Colored Elegy" Review in The Believer

The new issue of The Believer has my short review of Seiichi Hayashi's "Red Colored Elegy," an amazing comic first serialized in Japan in 1970-71, and receiving its first english translation late last year. Formally experimental and emotionally wise, it's easily one of the best comics I've read in the last few years.

The first two paragraphs of the review are posted online - for the whole thing you need to hit the magazine stands.

Topffer article in The Comics Journal

I have a longish essay in the latest Comics Journal, #294, which is now out. The essay is on Rodolphe Topffer, one of the early pioneers of the comic strip; his work has been collected in English translation only recently. He's one of my favorite artists, and in the article I try to get at some of his innovations -- to quote myself:

From a superficial glance, his work might seem to share much in common with his predecessors; for centuries artists had been creating images in sequence, using captions to explain the storyline. Töpffer didn't even push forward to adopt the last piece of the formal puzzle that would make his work unarguably "comics," the leap into speech balloons (or at least not in his published work -- he toyed with them in a notebook and then abandoned the approach). But there are two crucial differences in his method – differences that were in fact innovations – which keep his work feeling "modern," functioning as stories rather than specimens of graphic history.

The primal innovation was the injection of speed into the graphic narrative, both in the execution of the drawings themselves, and in the time that exists between the images. He's not drawing scenes, but moments. His images don’t languish in a buffer of time, adrift in temporality like islands at sea – they flow one after the other with a kind of ticking impatience. The sort of time he captures is unthinkable without the metronomic guillotine of the clock. There's a bit of a conundrum in this, in that each image seems to have a lesser duration (each panel sticks in the eye less than the framed quasi-theatrical dioramas of a typical broadsheet) – and yet more images are needed to elaborate the full circumference of an event, to feed the impatience of time.

Töpffer's other major innovation was his realization that the text and image need not support each other in a kind of explicatory unity (or redundancy), where one converges with the other toward a mutual vanishing point of agreed-upon meaning. Rather, text and image can exist on fundamentally parallel tracks, supporting each other in contradiction.

Text and image perform a dance of mutual commentary, not explanation. Two cohabitating modes of expression are yoked together in one singular medium, producing a habitat whose primary mode of meaning is divergence: in short, a universe defined by irony.

To find out why the rather pedestrian image below is one of my favorite panels in all of comics, you'll have to read the whole article.


The issue also has, among other things, interviews with the cartoonists Jason and Mark Tatulli, and an excellent article by R. Fiore, reviewing two books on the censorship of comics in the 50s, which is online in its entirety.

Keith Knight Interview in "The Believer"

The issue of "The Believer" that's currently on the stands has an interview I conducted with the cartoonist Keith Knight. A teaser/excerpt from the interview is online, but for the whole thing, you need to actually buy a copy.

If you have a strong need to get a taste of Keith's sensibility and his drawings right this very second, I interviewed him a while ago for the online magazine The High Hat, and the entirety of that exchange is still up on the internets.