Dan Zettwoch and I, low on sleep and high on comics, missing the STL storms because we were at the San Diego Comic-Con. Behind us is the Buenaventura Press booth.
8/01/2006
STL at SD
Dan Zettwoch and I, low on sleep and high on comics, missing the STL storms because we were at the San Diego Comic-Con. Behind us is the Buenaventura Press booth.
Life and Its Marvels
-From Life and Its Marvels: Plant, Animal, Human.
By "The International Pictorial Treasury of Knowledge."
Published by the International Graphic Society, Englewood Cliffs, NJ (1960). Also listed as published by "Esco Publishing Co." That's all the info there is, other that the Introduction is by Joseph Lauwerys, D. Sc., D. Lit.
7/29/2006
Pre-Op and Post-Op
You are reading "the Balloonist" to find out more about balloons, so let's take a look at Thierry Smolderen's fascinating article in the wonderful new Comic Art Magazine, in which he makes some claims about the development of the word balloon.
He asks: why did it take so long for someone to put together a sequence of pictures that tell a story and word balloons that show what the characters are saying? It wasn't until Opper, Outcault, Swinnerton in the 1890s that the formal arrangement of elements that make up what we recognize as comics really caught on.
I remember back in college writing papers for my Aesthetics class about the formal elements of comics (boy, I was spending my money well! and come to think of it, I'm still paying off those loans), trying to puzzle out a definition of comics, which seemed important at the time, due to the influence of "Understanding Comics" on me in high school. What was so puzzling was that if I came up with a definition, say, something like "words and
pictures in sequence," I kept finding so many other things that fit the definition which were clearly not comics. It was absurd, I thought, to think a gallery exhibition, a magazine article, or a cereal box all fit the formal definition of comics. But then after reading Nelson Goodman (via WJT Mitchell) I came to see that what was important wasn't so much the marks on the paper, it was how you read them. It's embarrassing to admit, but I remember my mind being blown by the realization that what we call "comics" wasn't best defined as a form, but as part of an ongoing historical process, the messy forces of culture and commerce driving image-text combos to evolve into a particular species of art form, which is still evolving. At the time I knew very little about biology, but now I see how the development of comics resembles the inelegant trial and error and "act of God" forces at work in biological evolution. Or maybe comics is something more like the development of an ecosystem?
Anyways the reason I'm bringing this is because it relates to Smolderen's discussion of "A True Narrative of the Horrid Hellish Popish Plot."
Not a Chick tract, this is reprinted in David Kunzle's The Early Comic Strip (1973), which I was lucky to have in my college's library, along with Kunzle's other awesome "History of the Comic Strip: Vol. 1: The Early Comic Strip: Picture Stories & Narrative Strips in the European Broadsheet , ca.1450-1826". In the article, Smolderen takes issue with Kunzle calling this a proto-comic strip.
We want to avoid a creative anachronistic comics history, the kind that used to get Eddie Campbell so mad at Scott McCloud's indescretions, and the kind that puzzled me when I was trying to come up with a formal definition. The narrative sequencing of image units we read in modern comics is a relatively late development in cartooning. Before this, "proto-cartoonists" drew in a different context of reading and image-making, a tradition going back Baroque craze for making emblems or thematic drawings. The drawing-plus-text wasn't to be read as a narrative scene, but as a statement about the subject of the drawing. The "word balloons" that float alongside the figures like ribbons amplified the thematic reading -- the drawing "spoke" about itself for the reader. The character was not "speaking" in a narrative sequence. Smolderen shows that the content of the word balloons almost always should be read in this way.
The development of the modern word balloon, which is one of the main organs of what makes comics comics, developed in the 1890s. Opper started using word balloons in the late 1800s in the way we read them today -- as encircling words that represent speech by characters in an narrative space. Man, I'd love a big collection of Opper, wouldn't you? Smolderen in the essay traces how Opper eventually turned speech balloons into representations of "speech acts," as we read them today, by putting them in the context of slapstick action sequences. Hard to believe it took so long for this to get put together! Seems obvious to me.
I've only gone through some of the article here. There's also fascinating stuff about how Topffer's version of comics was different than what we have today, as well as a revelatory discussion where he traces the development of modern word balloons to the problem of how to represent parrots, Edison's phonograph, and cheap printing technology in cartoons, and more.
He asks: why did it take so long for someone to put together a sequence of pictures that tell a story and word balloons that show what the characters are saying? It wasn't until Opper, Outcault, Swinnerton in the 1890s that the formal arrangement of elements that make up what we recognize as comics really caught on.
I remember back in college writing papers for my Aesthetics class about the formal elements of comics (boy, I was spending my money well! and come to think of it, I'm still paying off those loans), trying to puzzle out a definition of comics, which seemed important at the time, due to the influence of "Understanding Comics" on me in high school. What was so puzzling was that if I came up with a definition, say, something like "words and
pictures in sequence," I kept finding so many other things that fit the definition which were clearly not comics. It was absurd, I thought, to think a gallery exhibition, a magazine article, or a cereal box all fit the formal definition of comics. But then after reading Nelson Goodman (via WJT Mitchell) I came to see that what was important wasn't so much the marks on the paper, it was how you read them. It's embarrassing to admit, but I remember my mind being blown by the realization that what we call "comics" wasn't best defined as a form, but as part of an ongoing historical process, the messy forces of culture and commerce driving image-text combos to evolve into a particular species of art form, which is still evolving. At the time I knew very little about biology, but now I see how the development of comics resembles the inelegant trial and error and "act of God" forces at work in biological evolution. Or maybe comics is something more like the development of an ecosystem?Anyways the reason I'm bringing this is because it relates to Smolderen's discussion of "A True Narrative of the Horrid Hellish Popish Plot."
Not a Chick tract, this is reprinted in David Kunzle's The Early Comic Strip (1973), which I was lucky to have in my college's library, along with Kunzle's other awesome "History of the Comic Strip: Vol. 1: The Early Comic Strip: Picture Stories & Narrative Strips in the European Broadsheet , ca.1450-1826". In the article, Smolderen takes issue with Kunzle calling this a proto-comic strip.
"[the print] does not imitate the continuous flow of topical events so much as it arrests the progress in a series of "stations" functioning as isolated, diagrammatic allegories...the labels [proto word balloons] inhabit an abstract hieroglyphic space generally incompatible with a dynamic narrative...the captions, not the labels, are leading the tale."
We want to avoid a creative anachronistic comics history, the kind that used to get Eddie Campbell so mad at Scott McCloud's indescretions, and the kind that puzzled me when I was trying to come up with a formal definition. The narrative sequencing of image units we read in modern comics is a relatively late development in cartooning. Before this, "proto-cartoonists" drew in a different context of reading and image-making, a tradition going back Baroque craze for making emblems or thematic drawings. The drawing-plus-text wasn't to be read as a narrative scene, but as a statement about the subject of the drawing. The "word balloons" that float alongside the figures like ribbons amplified the thematic reading -- the drawing "spoke" about itself for the reader. The character was not "speaking" in a narrative sequence. Smolderen shows that the content of the word balloons almost always should be read in this way.
The development of the modern word balloon, which is one of the main organs of what makes comics comics, developed in the 1890s. Opper started using word balloons in the late 1800s in the way we read them today -- as encircling words that represent speech by characters in an narrative space. Man, I'd love a big collection of Opper, wouldn't you? Smolderen in the essay traces how Opper eventually turned speech balloons into representations of "speech acts," as we read them today, by putting them in the context of slapstick action sequences. Hard to believe it took so long for this to get put together! Seems obvious to me.
I've only gone through some of the article here. There's also fascinating stuff about how Topffer's version of comics was different than what we have today, as well as a revelatory discussion where he traces the development of modern word balloons to the problem of how to represent parrots, Edison's phonograph, and cheap printing technology in cartoons, and more.
7/04/2006
Jokes and Contempt
PBS: Although for years comics have been denigrated as a so-called "low art" category, it appears they're becoming more widely accepted and perhaps even validated as a form of art and a long literary narrative. Would you agree with this? Is "form" the right word here? Do you think that this kind of validation is inhibiting in any way, that comics are in danger of becoming less rebellious or creatively free because they're more accepted and being published in the mainstream?
Chris: "Form" seems fine, and sometimes I use the word "language," and while I am genuinely happy that I don't have to explain that I'm not an animator anymore when someone asks me what it is I do, I do worry that beginning cartoonists could feel somewhat strangled by the increasing critical seriousness comics has received of late and feel, like younger writers, that they have to have something to "say" before they set pen to paper. Many cartoonists feel even more passionate about this idea than I do, vehemently insisting that comics are inherently "non-art" and poop humor or whatever it is they think it is, but that attitude is a little like insisting that all modern writing should always take the form of The Canterbury Tales.
I'm all for anything and everything in comics; I started drawing them with the specific goal of finding out whether or not they were capable of expressing things other than jokes and contempt. To me, Robert Crumb is a perfect artist because he's one of the most visually sensitive people alive yet he's widely also known as one of the world's great curmudgeons, simply because his emotional range is so wide and his ability to see the world so perspicacious; all artists should hope to be so pluralistic. I do worry that museum shows and literary magazine appearances might start to cloud the general readership's ability to see comics clearly, as anything that's presented as high art immediately blurs a viewer's perceptions with thinking and theory, but I think it also means that more talented and thoughtful people will be attracted to it as a medium.
-Chris Ware, interviewed at pbs.org
The above sentence in (my) italics says basically what I had been hoping for the last several months to say in an essay. I posted this quote from Seth to show how this attitude (somewhat caricatured by Ware) has been around for at least 10 years, but probably for a long time. Maybe Kurtzman's generation argued about it too. Maybe Topffer's. For sure it descends to us from Crumb, who contained it all within himself. He's like the Plato or the Shakespeare. I think Ware describes him very well as "pluralistic," though Crumb seems to be very uncomfortable with any critical seriousness applied to comics and would be the first to make fun of it all. It's in the nature of comics that makes it very difficult to take it all too seriously. It's a weakness and a strength.
What about Art Spiegelman’s work, which you’ve parodied several times?
RYAN: I do appreciate the comic magazine Raw that he put out in the ‘80s. I was a fan of that. Maus, I just thought was okay. Other than that, I guess, I kind of dislike the drive to make comics fine art and fine literature that he seems to promote.
What type of comics are you trying to promote?
RYAN: The other end of the spectrum. I’m doing trashy, weird, crazy, strange, bizarre, disgusting, filthy, horrible stuff that you wouldn’t see in a museum.
-Johnny Ryan interviewed at Wizard
6/30/2006
Curse of the Black Sun
During spring in Denmark, at approximately one half an hour before sunset, flocks of more than a million European starlings (sturnus vulgaris) gather from all corners to join in the incredible formations shown above. This phenomenon is called Black Sun (in Denmark), and can be witnessed in early spring throughout the marshlands of western Denmark, from March through to the middle of April. The starlings migrate from the south and spend the day in the meadows gathering food, sleeping in the reeds during the night. The best place to view this amazing aerial dance is in the place called "Tøndermarsken," where these pictures were taken (on April 5 from 19.30 to 20.30 local time).
-from Earth Science Pic of the Day
Click the image for a desktop sized pic.
If you'd like to read more about starlings, my book CURSES will be out in October.
6/27/2006
6/23/2006
Record Covers
1967
1969
1976
1978
Update: sent in by Dan Z.
Update 2:Thanks to the commenter who mentions Plastic Ono (1970).
Can't believe I forgot about that one. They aren't standing, though.
update 3 (2018)
6/16/2006
The Wonderful World
From The Wonderful World : The Adventure of the Earth We Live On. by James Fisher. Art Editor FHK Henrion. (1954, Hanover).
No artists listed in my copy, but it's missing some pages. I overlapped Man's and Nature's Worlds (fourth image above) in Photoshop.
UPDATE 8/8/08:
Here's the cover.
6/10/2006
6/09/2006
Bewildered Self-Promotion
I feel unsure about being too self-promotional with this blog. I haven't figured out what to do with this thing yet. Post links to things I think are interesting? Post new work? Post reviews, articles, short things? All of the above, I guess.
So there's an interview with me over at "Comic Foundry," which is one of those pan-comics enthusiast web-magazines. They describe themselves as the magazine that "checks fandom at the door and instead brings a respect for the industry and the readers." Fandom I don't mind if the writing's good. Caleb Crain makes a good case for the need for more fandom in serious criticism in the new n+1 (And Ray Davis makes good points here). Why "respect for the industry" is a positive thing for critics or journalists, especially in comics, I'm not sure. "Respect for readers" is at least something.
I feel something like Lucille 2 vertigo whenever I look at these sorts of sites, or comics blogs where people give short reviews of everything they "picked up." You get Green Lantern next to Buddha next to Crickets next to Young Avengers.
I'm not going to link to the interview because it's not supposed to even be there. I got pretty fed up with the guy during the interview "process," and finally I told him I no longer was interested in participating, and that I withdrew permission to use my words, but they put it up anyway. Why did I get fed up with the guy? Here's some questions that you won't find in the interview, because I didn't respond to them:
Part of me is just grateful that anyone is interested in my work enough to interview me, but still I'm sorry to see that they posted the interview, which I'm afraid is pretty dull due to my not being very interested (or is it "interesting"?). I've got nothing personal against the interviewer--he seemed like a decent enough guy.
In other news, Ganges #1 got itself reviewed in the New York Times Book Review. It's by John Hodgman and also addresses itself to Mome, Late Bloomer, and La Perdida. I've tried to stop reading any reviews after this nightmare review of Or Else #4 by someone curiously named "mattymatt" at the even more curiously named "SFist" blog.
Here's a video of Mr. Hodgman promoting his own book "The Areas of My Expertise" (which has a nicely designed cover) on "The Daily Show." And here's the video of Billy Ocean's "Loverboy."
So there's an interview with me over at "Comic Foundry," which is one of those pan-comics enthusiast web-magazines. They describe themselves as the magazine that "checks fandom at the door and instead brings a respect for the industry and the readers." Fandom I don't mind if the writing's good. Caleb Crain makes a good case for the need for more fandom in serious criticism in the new n+1 (And Ray Davis makes good points here). Why "respect for the industry" is a positive thing for critics or journalists, especially in comics, I'm not sure. "Respect for readers" is at least something.
I feel something like Lucille 2 vertigo whenever I look at these sorts of sites, or comics blogs where people give short reviews of everything they "picked up." You get Green Lantern next to Buddha next to Crickets next to Young Avengers.
I'm not going to link to the interview because it's not supposed to even be there. I got pretty fed up with the guy during the interview "process," and finally I told him I no longer was interested in participating, and that I withdrew permission to use my words, but they put it up anyway. Why did I get fed up with the guy? Here's some questions that you won't find in the interview, because I didn't respond to them:
"I confess to some dissatisfaction with the next two stories, the Glenn and Wendy story with the "Ten Little Indians" adaptation, and the adaptation of The Beatles' "She's Leaving Home." With the first, the adaptation seemed to be filler to add some zest to what was a perfectly fine little exchange with the couple. With the second, I think that most who know the song would recognize what you're doing as soon as the couple speaks, and once recognized, there's little of lasting interest in the exercise aside from the Glenn and Wendy stuff afterwards. What were you trying to do with these, and do you feel satisfied with them?"And there were more questions like those. It's not evident in what they posted because a lot of the questions have been edited or re-stated. Eventually I told him to forget about the whole thing. He then apologized for his "bluntness." "I didn't even consider that you might not have any interest in my personal feelings about your work" he wrote. Really I would be thrilled with any opinions of my work--negative, positive, blunt, or whatever--if they were also insightful, or even interesting. It wasn't because his questions were challenging my choices or even sometimes negative, but because I got impatient with his feeling that I have to defend myself against his own "dissatisfactions" and "disappointments" and ad hominem criticism, such as that I write a certain way "just to keep myself interested" or that something was "filler to add some zest" or that perhaps I padded out "Time Travelling" because I had extra space to fill. Also, he often gave away the plot of my stories in his questions! (He fixed that after I pointed it out.)
"I found the missing kids story terrific until Glenn and Wendy showed up, which threw me right out of it, despite me enjoying them every other time. It just felt like they didn’t belong in the same story. If you want to discuss why you felt the need to bring them in, I’d be interested."
"I also found Or Else #4 the most disappointing thing I’ve read from you. I’m perfectly willing to admit I just didn’t get what it was supposed to be about and I’d like to know; all I noticed were connections made to trivial things."
Part of me is just grateful that anyone is interested in my work enough to interview me, but still I'm sorry to see that they posted the interview, which I'm afraid is pretty dull due to my not being very interested (or is it "interesting"?). I've got nothing personal against the interviewer--he seemed like a decent enough guy.
In other news, Ganges #1 got itself reviewed in the New York Times Book Review. It's by John Hodgman and also addresses itself to Mome, Late Bloomer, and La Perdida. I've tried to stop reading any reviews after this nightmare review of Or Else #4 by someone curiously named "mattymatt" at the even more curiously named "SFist" blog.
"If you put your copy of Lost in Translation, your Death Cab for Cutie albums, and your hoodie collection into a comicbookization machine, this would the daydreamy, meandering, doe-eyed result."How did he know! That is exactly what I did. I guess he didn't read the second half of the book, the slow-zooming, emotive soul pop vibe, nuevo-retro professorial result of my copy of Ken Burns' The Civil War, my Billy Ocean albums, and my corduroy blazer collection? Anyways, Hodgman says some kind things about Ganges and even made me see things in the stories I hadn't seen before.
Here's a video of Mr. Hodgman promoting his own book "The Areas of My Expertise" (which has a nicely designed cover) on "The Daily Show." And here's the video of Billy Ocean's "Loverboy."
6/02/2006
New Nephew
Many congratulations and much love to my sister and brother-in-law on the birth of their new son, Jay Lewis Vander Molen.
Advanced Symbols
More from the CCS booklet. James Sturm came up with all of these (except the duck) and sent me a sketch, which I followed pretty closely.
This makes me think of a comic by Dash Shaw where he gets roccoco with cartoon symbols (though he follows Mort Walker's gross "plewd" vocabulary which unfortunately many people take seriously) which I mentioned to James, but he hadn't seen Shaw's comic before.
Odd Building
I got a request for a drawing of "an odd building, some foliage, a person and a mystery object." I forgot to scan the real drawing before it got mailed--this is a preliminary "study." I guess the building isn't very odd, is it. That sky is Peter Bagge style.
5/30/2006
5/27/2006
Meg
Katie and I like nothing more than a shark movie, or a good picture of a shark, and lo, there was much rejoicing when we saw this:
I guess this is the link for the movie, or at least for someone whose trying to sell the book, or something...I don't know, I'm no good at reading! But they don't have this image on that site, only some lame photoshopped ones.
We've seen tons of shark movies, the worser the better. Maybe we'll post some reviews someday. It would be tough to outdo this site:
Katie read the book "Meg" (of course) and the only thing I remember her saying about it was that the Megalodon survived for all those years in a deep sea volcanic trench, and it was able to climb out into colder water by staying warm in the blood of another Megalodon it was eating...or something!
Here's another picture I found on the World Wide Web.
We saw this movie a while back and enjoyed it a lot. It has bad special effects, story, acting, etc. but a shark eats an entire yacht in one gulp. I think it also eats a helicopter. Here it is eating a motorboat.
I guess this is the link for the movie, or at least for someone whose trying to sell the book, or something...I don't know, I'm no good at reading! But they don't have this image on that site, only some lame photoshopped ones.
We've seen tons of shark movies, the worser the better. Maybe we'll post some reviews someday. It would be tough to outdo this site:
"Through the poor filmmaking and ridiculous storyline, we are left with a pretty good shark performance. [?] This is based solely on the films complete use of real tiger sharks. There are no mechanical or computer generated fish to be seen. While this is intriguing, it in no way makes it a better film. I don't know if it scientifically accurate, but this shark rarely breaks water. We are never treated to a shark fin, a staple of the genre."
Katie read the book "Meg" (of course) and the only thing I remember her saying about it was that the Megalodon survived for all those years in a deep sea volcanic trench, and it was able to climb out into colder water by staying warm in the blood of another Megalodon it was eating...or something!
Here's another picture I found on the World Wide Web.
We saw this movie a while back and enjoyed it a lot. It has bad special effects, story, acting, etc. but a shark eats an entire yacht in one gulp. I think it also eats a helicopter. Here it is eating a motorboat.
5/24/2006
5/23/2006
Zadie Smith
The critic James Wood appeared in this paper last Saturday aiming a hefty, well-timed kick at what he called "hysterical realism". It is a painfully accurate term for the sort of overblown, manic prose to be found in novels like my own White Teeth and a few others he was sweet enough to mention. These are hysterical times; any novel that aims at hysteria will now be effortlessly outstripped - this was Wood's point, and I'm with him on it.-from here, way back in 2001.
[...]It's all laughter in the dark - the title of a Nabokov novel and still the best term for the kind of writing I aspire to: not a division of head and heart, but the useful employment of both. And I could mention dozens of novels (I haven't been writing, but boy, I've been reading) that create a light in my head in between the news bulletins. Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich - a miniaturist tale of a bourgeois man dying a bourgeois death - every time I read it, I find my world put under an intense, unforgiving microscope. But how does it work? I want to dismantle it as if it were a clock, as if it had parts, mechanisms. I wonder if Wood will take that question, then, as a replacement for my earlier one. Not: how does this world work? But: how is this book made? How can I do this?
But he might see even that question as too intellectual in approach. I think Wood is hinting at an older idea that runs from Plato to the boys booming a car stereo outside my freaking window: soul is soul. It cannot be manufactured or schematised. It cannot be dragged kicking and screaming through improbable plots. It cannot be summoned by a fact or dismissed by a cliché. These are the famous claims made for "soul" and they lead with specious directness to an ancient wrestling match, invoked by Wood: the inviolability of "soul" versus the evils of self-consciousness and wise-assery, otherwise known as sophism.
Well, it's a familiar opposition, but it's not very helpful (it's also a belief Oprah shares, and you want to be careful which beliefs you share with Oprah). I wonder sometimes whether critics shouldn't be more like teachers, giving a gold star or a black cross, but either way accompanied by some kind of useful advice. Be more human? I sit in front of my white screen and I'm not sure what to do with that one. Are jokes inhuman? Are footnotes? Long words? Technical terms? Intellectual allusions? If I put some kids in, will that help?
Catastrophe
So they decided to start enforcing the limits on how much space we can have over at USSCatastrophe, so all the Catastrophe sites are currently down. Should be back soon.
Meanwhile thanks for stopping by everyone who followed the link over at comicsreporter.com. Now go outside, take a walk or something, it's springtime!
Update: It's back up again.
Meanwhile thanks for stopping by everyone who followed the link over at comicsreporter.com. Now go outside, take a walk or something, it's springtime!
Update: It's back up again.
5/19/2006
Id, Ego, etc.
Seth: You had a period, like with the underground cartoonists, where they went through the whole taboo-breaking phase, and also attempting to show that comics could cover a wide range of material. But nobody really had any concrete literary aspirations. I think it took a little while, even in the the first part of the early '80s for cartoonists to come around to the idea that perhaps longer stories and more challenging content was acceptable. But it seems like it's the next step. As comics move forward, that's really the areas that can be pursued; not coming up with new gimmicks or clever characters, or not finding flashier ways to tell the story so much, as to try and actually infuse it with some content.
GG: That generally sounds like a pretty accurate historical assessment.
Seth: Although I'm a little worried at the moment. I really felt a couple of years ago that this was obvious to everyone working in the alternative market. But I've felt in the last couple of years that there's a bit of a swing back with the next generation of cartoonists toward this concept of "Fuck this boring shit! Comics are supposed to be fun!" Sort of a return to this idea that you don't want to get overly pretentious. Maybe it's a bit of a reaction to all of this autobiography.
-from an interview in the Comics Journal #193
Feb. 1997
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