black & white

An anonymous student left me a note asking for how one would find "a list of top black & white comics."

I have no idea.

But if I were making nominations for such a list, I'd include these:

Maus by Art Spiegelman
Epileptic by David B.
Blankets by Craig Thompson
Everything Doug TenNapel does, but especially Creature Tech
Tricked by Alex Robinson
Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
Jar of Fools by Jason Lutes

Comics / graphic novel artist wanted

I am seeking an artist to partner with on an original graphic novel suitable for periodical release.

Who I’m looking for: I know "ideal" may also mean "impossible." But to give you some idea of who I'm seeking, if you’re my ideal partner:
• You are skilled at drawing and at page layout. You understand how comics work because you’ve studied them. You’re passionate about this medium.
• You’re a responsible person who likes to finish projects. When you encounter difficulties, you communicate about them and address them rather than trying to cover them up.
• You like sci-fi and fantasy weirdness (see below for some examples of what I like) and are good at making up alien or fantastic creatures.
• You can draw convincing or appealing or cool looking scarecrows and dragons and robots and zombies and horses. (Actually, I don’t know if horses will be in the script, but if they are and you draw them poorly my wife will never forgive us.)
• You’re good at expressions.
• You want to be a collaborator rather than an employee. While I have a strong vision and strong opinions about stories in general and this one in particular, I want someone who will give me feedback and bring ideas to the table. I’m looking for someone who will enjoy building something together. (And someone who can afford to invest time into this knowing we don’t get paid until we sell the thing.)
• You’re cool with me exploring stuff about God and faith in the context of an adventure story. Whatever your personal beliefs, you don’t think it’s bad to ask serious questions and playful questions about metaphysical stuff, and you won’t be put off by working with a writer who’s a progressive Christian.
• You have a sense of humor that at least has some overlap with mine.

If you’re an “I can do it all” artist who inks and colors and everything, that’s great, but I’m perfectly willing to work with a skilled penciller who fits with me and the project. We can work together to find the rest of the team we need.

What you’re buying into: Here are the two pitches I’ve developed for this project at present. They may get refined as we work.
Short pitch: Chaos is a scifi/fantasy story of a group of misfits saving their strange home. It’s an adventure/comedy about accepting uncertainty and change. It’s conceived as a graphic novel but is suitable for single-issue release.

Longer pitch: Chaos is set in a strange world made up of a bunch of different, overlapping realities. Our heroes are a team called the “Salvage Squad,” a group of talented misfits gathered together to solve problems that the regular “Peace and Security Force” can’t handle. While their leader fights to get his team the support it needs to be able to operate, the squad stumbles across a plan to detonate a “reality bomb” that will keep the world from changing or, more likely, destroy it altogether. They overcome interpersonal conflict, departmental politics, a traitor in their midst, and zombies, robots, and various jerks to save the day.

At the moment I have about 40 pages scripted and a general idea of where the story goes. I’m working on a more detailed outline of the rest and will continue to produce script while I’m looking for a partner. I don’t think you’ll ever have to wait on me to catch up to you unless you’re some kind of superspeed artist.

Who I am: Here are a few relevant bits about me:
• I’ve always loved comics. I’ve been making a pretty serious study of them for about the past five years.
• I’m old enough to know better, which means I bring a certain maturity and stability to the table. On the other hand, it may mean I’m not fully in touch with the 16- to 24-year-old crowd.
• I’ve been teaching writing for over ten years and have written many things, including long projects. Although I don’t have any comics writing credits to offer you, I am convinced that I can do my part of this project, but I also realize that I will learn as I go. I want a collaborator, and I want to collaborate. And when I have someone waiting on me for something, I almost always beat the deadline.
• I’m going to list some things I like that each have at least one thing in common with this project. None of them are quite like what I’m trying to build here, and I’m not claiming that I’m near as good as any of these creators, but this list may give you some idea of my taste and my ambitions: Creature Tech by Doug TenNapel, The Order of the Stick by Rich Burlew, Firefly by Joss Whedon et al, Astro City by Kurt Busiek et al, Farscape, Mystery Men, Eureka. I have many, many other influences too, of course. But if you hate all of these, we may not be on the same page.
• I want to do something that’s cool and fun and funny and also serious and meaningful. I’d like to make writing comics my full-time job if I can because I think it’s exciting to create and because I’m increasingly convinced that real, powerful stories can do more good than most anything else I’m capable of.

Before I pick anyone I have to see not only sample drawings but at least 4 pages of sample comics work. Ideally these would be pages that you did from a script, so you can show me the script and the finished product. If you want to see something more from me, I understand and will try to comply.

If you’re excited about some of this but this particular project doesn’t appeal to you, I have a couple other ideas on the back burner that we could talk about.

Let's make some sense of this

Thanks to Brian Lewis, who loaned me his (autographed!) copy, I've just read Fun Home by Alison Blechdel. It's fantastic. Very carefully structured and complex memoir dealing with her father's death, his sexuality, hers, and the events surrounding all of that. It's very literate, both in the steady stream of explicit literary allusions and in her skillful writing, yet it's very much a comic grounded in the mechanisms of that medium.

Given the central place that homosexuality holds in the book, I've got to be prepared for resistance if I teach it. Not that this should dissuade me in any way--I just have to be savvy about planning for that and being ready to deal with it.

But I have to think about balance in the course, and that means I can't have too many memoir / autobiography / fictionalized autobiography pieces. That's an important genre within comics, but there's more than that out there.

That makes this a good time to jot down the list of Really Obvious Titles to maybe Include in the Course:

Maus
Jimmy Corrigan
It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken
Persepolis
Watchmen
Palestine (or something else by Sacco)
Blankets
Ghost World (though I think I'm more likely to do Ice Haven)
American Splendor

Combine that list with Understanding Comics, throw in some webcomics and any one of the titles I've been putting on the "short list" here and it's already a pretty full class. So obviously I've got a lot more than I can use. Now some things can go in my other classes. I want to avoid duplication in my own classes, although I can't avoid duplicating with some of the other people who are using comics. Well, I can, but I don't want to say that this class will never tackle Persepolis just because a few people may have read it in another class.

I need to look back at the documents from the last time I taught a full lit class and get to thinking about how the whole thing might look. I should hear next week if I got approved for my professional development money, and if so, I get to go on a comics shopping spree. Yay!

Flight Blues

Bluesman book one by Rob Vollmar & Pablo G. Callejo has a lot to recommend it. In art that reminds me somehow of woodcuts it tells a tale of two traveling blues musicians in the early 20th Century. It's a compelling story with interesting characters, a very real situation (grounded in research that is highlighted in the text: something that would be well worth discussing), and an intriguing structure ("a twelve bar graphic narrative in the key of life and death") also worth exploring. Its one significant drawback is that it's in three books (I think only two out so far). I should ask NBM if there is a plan for a collected edition. Otherwise it's buying three books for one text, or else trying to do something with an incomplete work, which students and I both hate.

Flight Volume 3 was everything I've come to expect, and I can readily make use of any of the Flight anthologies in almost any class. Especially in Comics as Lit, one of the Flight volumes is a great way to bring a lot of creators in for a relatively low cost. And these books continue to highlight the range of possibilities in comics. I notice that Volume 3, to some extent, moves from more conventional to more challenging stories, so when I use it, I should consider finding a break point somewhere in the middle so that we have a separate day to consider the more difficult stuff. Otherwise students may be tempted to focus solely on the more straightforward narratives.

Making Comics and more!

I've really fallen behind, here. But I have been reading:

Jeffrey Brown's Every Girl Is the End of the World for Me is an interesting little autobiographical piece. There's a lot to study for such a small book, especially in how it's drawn and laid out. Like a lot of contemporary stuff, and especially contemporary autobiographical stuff, it doesn't have much in terms of plot arc, and while it comes in as relatively cheap ($8.00), it may not add enough to justify raising the bookstore bill. But when I get to my shopping spree next month (I hope), I should pick up at least one of Brown's books to have on hand as an example, and I can still think about slipping it in.

McCloud's Making Comics deserves more than I'll have time to give it here. It's not on the list for the course--I'll use Understanding Comics at least for the first few semesters, but MC is more designed for a course in comics-creation than comics-reading. Still, there's useful stuff there, and I suspect that this volume will always be the other thing besides UC that McCloud is recognized for. (Reinventing Comics will always be the forgotten member of that trilogy, as McCloud seems to recognize.) I enjoyed reading it a lot. It's very "McCloud" in all kinds of ways, and packed with good stuff.

Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese has sprung right up to the "must use" list. If I don't put it on the syllabus in comics, I'll use it in one of my other classes. It's interesting structurally in the way three disparate stories are revealed to all be one story, it's very interesting to look at, and thematically it's timely and important. I've just got to figure out where I want to use it.

Sometime soon I should do a post in which I think through some of the "obvious choices" like Maus and Persepolis to see where I stand on them. There's only so much time in the semester, and more important, only so high I can drive the bookstore bill.

Some quick comments

Re-scanned Ancient Joe: el bizarron by C. Scott Morse. I love the mythic feel, the bold but simple lines, and the light touch. I find this book fascinating, and it's certainly a different kind of thing, but I wonder if students would be too perplexed. It's apparently intended to be a series, so there isn't complete closure, no answer to the questions posed in this first volume.

It's probably not a contender, but I read Gotham Central: Unresolved Targets (Ed Brubaker & Greg Rucka, et al). It's just ironic to me that as good as the Gotham Central books are, they're still in second place in the "police procedural comics set in worlds with super-heroes" category (behind Powers). Guess it's a little like playing in the AL Central division.

The Left Bank Gang by Jason is just...something completely different. Real-world writers (Hemingway, Pound, Fitzgerald, etc.) in Paris in the 20s are made into anthropomorphized animal versions of themselves who make comics instead of books. They can't make a living this way, so Hemingway suggests they stage a robbery, and the book turns into a plot-twisty thriller. I don't know if I could do something with this or not, but it's a different take on comics and literature, for sure. It might be a good thing to bring into class on a day when we talk about comics re-interperetations of lit, like Kuper's doing The Jungle.

With Alex by Mark Kalesniko, the question is weighing the strong thematic content, excellent craftsmanship, and rich source of discussable stuff against the offense that some students will take. That's not much on the latter side of the scale, but I do need to remember that this is a book with a lot of authentically crude language and behavior, and a protagonist who's very, very hard to like. Part of the issue is that while I admire the skill behind this book, I just don't personally like it very much. Too bleak for my taste, and coming from a worldview that doesn't fit with mine very well.

Don't have any specific comments on Ghost of Hoppers (Jaime Hernandez) except to jot a note reminding me that I have to decide what to do about the brothers Hernandez. Is Love & Rockets 1 still available? If not, can I throw people into the middle of that soap opera somewhere and have them get it? It's not like I can just rattle off the backstory all off the top of my head.

I need to read more

I've got a couple to jot notes about, but I need to get moving. Not completely sure why I've gotten stalled--I've got lots of books I'm interested in just lying around, but I haven't been turning the pages lately. I hope for more progress this week.

Kid Eternity is written by Grant Morrison and drawn (perhaps painted?) by Duncan...um...Fegredd, if I'm reading my scrawled note correctly. The artwork is rich and creepy, but the story, like many of Morrison's, isn't very satisfying to me. He avoids ending up in postmodern limbo and at least takes the story to a conclusion, which is something. But it's supposed to be a horror story, and horror stories kind of need the lines between good and bad to be clear. But here they seemed really arbitrary, and pretty suspicious: order is bad, chaos is good. Don't we need some of each? And shouldn't the good guys be the ones who don't kill people? Not sure if this is worth a mention on a bib or not. It's got a couple of interesting bits and good art, but so do a lot of other things.

Stassen's Deogratias: a Tale of Rwanda is clearly a short-list contender. The non-linear story will challenge some readers, but the pieces all fit together to show us just how bad it was, and to illustrate how some people who set out to do right end up giving in to the pressure and becoming part of the problem. This is an important book.