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There’s one of those weird gutter connections on the Apple Movie Trailers site right now. Watch two advertisements make love through time and space. It’s an animation so it’s not always there.

There should be a blog documenting this stuff. Get to it, bloggers!

Aw, probably one already exists.

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In Starting Point: 1979-1996, Miyazaki talks about how influential the gekiga movement was, and how he moved away from drawing gekiga. It’s interesting if you’re a fan of Miyazaki and gekiga, or just Miyazaki’s mangaka years.

These gekiga presented the message that things don’t go well in this world. Drawn by manga artists who had suffered through misfortune — in particular those who hung out around Osaka (though I must apologize to people in Osaka for saying this) — gekiga were filled with their grudges and feelings of spite, so there were no happy endings. The artists made every effort to provide cynical endings. For a student in examination hell, this disillusioned perspective seemed totally refreshing.

I had already decided to spend my future drawing pictures, so I was trying to draw ones filled with grudges and spite. Yet, as I didn’t have a concrete blueprint for my future I was filled with anxiety.

As we grow from childhood into youth, this anxiety grows exponentially, and we worry about how on earth we should live our lives. Our anxiety forces us to look for an antidote that will rid us of this feeling as quickly as possible. We want to find that something will help us grab our own chair in this world and sit in it.

I chose manga as a weapon to fight against anxiety, and, as I mentioned, at first I drew gekiga, story-oriented manga. Just about that time I saw Hakujaden (The Tale of the White Serpent.) For me, it was a kind of culture shock. I began to have doubts about gekiga…

From a section titled “Manga-style thought is dramatically influencing Japanese culture:”

So why are manga now influencing so many areas of culture? I would say one of the biggest reasons is because with manga it’s not necessary to read what you don’t want to read…

People take a completely different approach with other forms of entertainment. I really don’t think, for example, that many people would leave a theater after watching only five minutes of a boring film. And it’s probably why people have such strong opinions about films. They often sit through films even while feeling angry and wondering why the heck anyone made the thing in the first place. People don’t get angry about manga because if they don’t like the stories they won’t finish reading them. I think we can say this is one of the biggest cultural characteristics of manga. It’s no wonder that manga criticism is such a barren field.

Another hallmark of manga is that an almost limitless deformation is possible. To give a somewhat dated example, in Kyojin no hoshi (Star of the Giants), an entire episode concludes while the character Hyuma is throwing a pitch. Everything about life is encapsulated in that one pitch, and the artist depicts a whirl of recollections in the time it takes for the ball to travel. It’s hard to imagine anyone other than the Japanese pulling off something like this.

(skipping ahead…)

When works created in this fashion are taken to places like Europe, where people have no exposure to what I have been discussing, they tend to go crazy over it. It was true of the Japanese manga and anime Candy Candy, which really took off in West Germany, Italy, and even France. Of course, now it’s Sailor Moon, and they say that in Spain everyone is nuts about the work, with even adults watching the show, enthralled. [laughter] This sort of thing is actually happening.

There’s a reason shojo are interesting. They depict the inner workings of the mind, so no one draws anything they don’t want to see. And in the images depicted, what we see is not the character, but what the character is looking at. And the stories become interesting because they deform thoughts and psychological states in a more pure fashion.

Anyway, it’s hard to slice out passages like this. Check out the book if you’re interested.

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Robin at Inkstuds was kind enough to have the TCAF panel Frank, Robin, Robert Dayton, Dustin Harbin and I participated in transcribed by Squally Showers. He sent me the transcription a few weeks ago and I finally got around to reading it.

Frankly, I thought this panel sucked, due to nobody in particular’s fault. But I think most panels are meandering and boring despite having intelligent moderators and participants. Maybe I have unrealistic expectations. Anyway, I’m just going to excerpt sections of it here and intersperse it with some new commentary.

I wasn’t sure what the point of the panel was and, reading the transcription now, I don’t think anybody knew what the point was. If the point was to hear Frank speak enthusiastically about Kirby and Steranko, it succeeded and that’s definitely an enjoyable, worthy reason to attend a panel. No joke.

But I fear that the panel was interpreted as a statement that “alternative” cartoonists having affection for “mainstream” comics is noteworthy or unusual or “new” somehow. It’s not. “Alternative” cartoonists bemoaning the abundance of boring, mundane mostly-autobio work is a false feeling to me. There are a lot of autobio “real life” stories, but they’ve always been dwarfed by the pseudo-“mainstream” genre work, even outside of Marvel and DC. Look at Oni Press and Slave Labor Graphics and Antarctic Press and Caliber Comics and Tundra and on and on. Look at the Hernandez Brothers. Look at the wave of alternative comics in the nineties… Zot (which somehow looks both really dated and also pre-Tezuka reprint boom ahead-of-its-time), Bone, Kabuki (don’t forget that Scarab spin-off series!), Madman, THB (fucking Escapo! still lookin good a decade later,) etc.

When I was a student at SVA in the early ’00s I was mostly hanging out with the Meathaus guys and almost all of them were doing “alternative” sci-fi/fantasy/horror/whatever genre comics. Some later did more “alternative”-leaning books for DC or Vertigo. Tomer Hanuka did Bipolar (the last issue of which was essentially a Bizzaro World Aquaman story) and later did the Midnight Mass covers for Vertigo. And, of course, Farel Dalrymple did the great Omega Man the Unknown series after doing his solo, surreal Pop Gun War series that, aesthetically, is in the post-Marvel House Style world similar to Jim Rugg (Street Angel from Slave Labor). Even Thomas Herpich’s (who I adore) second book was mostly science fiction short stories. Meanwhile the amerimanga artists at Tokyopop and Oni were doing sci-fi/romance/fantasy comics.

There’s been wave after wave of “alternative” comics with ties to “mainstream” comics from the ’80s to today, unaffected by some horrible glut of boring real-life comics that people complain about. I’m not saying that those books don’t exist (they do). I’m saying that I don’t think there’s been a point where one genre was threatening to extinguish the other.

Frank Santoro: Is everyone … I’m going to talk as if everybody knows what I‘m talking about. If you don’t know what I‘m talking about, please interject at any time. But basically, it’s like Kirby of course created Captain America, the Fantastic Four, but then in the ‘70s, when he went back to Marvel, he was doing these really crazy books like 2001, which was essentially based on the movie. But by issue 5 it had nothing to do with the movie. [laughter] What’s really interesting about this comic is … can you scroll ahead a couple of things … it starts off as this crazy battle and—couple of more?—and he goes to The Source which is, if you remember 2001, the black monolith. I call it The Source. [Robin laughs] Can you scroll ahead one more time? He’s coming out of this battle—one more, one more—and then it’s just like it’s all—keep going one more, a little more, a little more. [murmurs of dissent.] Where’s the locker room?

Robin McConnell: Oh, it didn’t make it in.

Frank: Oh bummer. Well, anyway, it’s like a game. It’s basically like, was it Heroesville?

Dash Shaw: Comicsville.

Frank: Comicsville. So it’s like a game. It’s like a virtual reality game. So this whole episode in the beginning is just this game but it’s like to me, it was this treatise on Kirby’s idea of what being a hero is or was. It’s a game. It’s like a sport. I think it was transparent about what all his comics are about. To me, this particular comic wraps it all up, I horde this comic whenever I see it in the bargain bins. A lot of people don’t like this late style, but I think this is the kind of style that I think is carrying on. It’s still, I think, very fresh. It’s not like his old stuff. It’s really different. I think it’s really ahead of the curve and I’m running out of steam.

Robin: When did this come out in comparison to the New Gods stuff?

Frank: This was after the New Gods stuff. So this is post-DC. He got canned from DC. All of his DC books got canceled. Then he went back to Marvel. This was around the time he was doing The Eternals, Devil Dinosaur, the Captain America/Black Panther stuff. Anybody who read that Captain America—Madbomb, those issues. Those are really great. Anybody else want to riff on [inaudible, 2:47]

Robert Dayton: You know what I find really interesting about his 2001 stuff is it’s almost like a mantra. You buy every issue and as a kid you probably feel ripped off, because every issue goes exactly the same. At the end of the issue, a caveman or someone back in time, meets the monolith. The End. Next issue: Same thing. It’s almost like reading Gerald Jablonski’s comics. It becomes like a mantra. It’s just repetition. It’s kind of fascinating reading each and every issue, because even the series, like basically he did a Treasury edition of 2001.

Dash: Yeah, it’s insane.

Robert: Which is insane. It’s massive. It’s huge. It’s gorgeous.

Frank: It’s beautiful. You know those oversized treasuries? Remember those things from the ‘70s? It’s an adaptation of the movie, right?

Robert: Yeah.

Frank: But it’s totally different. It’s Kirby-style. It makes no sense.

Dash: He got some production stills from the movie that you can see that he directly swiped from.

Frank: Yeah!

Dash: And then he just connected it with like just Kirby stuff.

Frank: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Robert: And Kirby was such a collage artist, too. So in the Treasury edition, there’s all these crazy collages.

Dash: The sequence right after this where it moves into the reality is really nice, too, because the reality turns out to not … I don’t know if …

Frank: Yeah, well see, he’s playing this game.

Dash: This isn’t real. Like sometimes when I …

Frank: Like self-heat chicken dinner? He lives in this giant apartment complex and then it’s just this thing. It’s Mountain Air.

Dash: But that beach scene isn’t real.

Frank: So it’s all Matrix! It’s like Matrix. It’s all … but like pre- … whatever, go ahead. [laughter] Go ahead. Go ahead.

Dash: I was going to say when you flip through a lot of these comics, my first reaction is these are way too wordy. I don’t know. Do you have that feeling?

Robin: They’re wordy, but …

Dash: But then in this sequence, you flip through it and you think that “This is actually real,” but all of the text is about how none of this, “This isn’t a real seascape” and everything like that. It’s a juxtaposition.

Robin: Do you find this is one of the more Kirby doing a better job of mixing the two.

Dash: Well, he wrote these, too.

Robin: Yeah, but that’s what I’m saying. Sometimes the story isn’t as strong as the art.

Frank: Well, I think the story is equally as strong as the art. I mean … go ahead.

Dash: Well, I don’t think he would do this the Marvel style if he was doing it for himself. Right?

Frank: Right.

Dustin Harbin: I would have thought with the wordiness that this was in the Marvel style. Because the story looks so clear with that page layout and then all these words were kind of scotch taped on top of it. Which is kind of the Marvel style …

Frank: Well, he wrote, all of Kirby’s stuff, you look at the originals in like the Kirby Collector or whatever, all of his stuff, he has all of the dialogue written in the sides or the back and then Stan or whomever just kind of cleaned it up a little bit. So I think that he’s still doing it in that style, in that way, because I think Mike Royer edited these also, so he helped clean them up. But for me, this was a real gateway comic—just to go back to the main thrust of the panel. It’s like, I was really into Kirby but this was way out there. I didn’t like his ‘70s style. I thought it was really wack and I hated it for a long time. It took me a long time to get into it. But to me, this starts heading into this alternate world. I don’t want to say alternative comics, but it’s just so different from what he had been doing for the 20 years previous that, like I feel like this is what ends up influencing the current generation. So …

It’s hard to read this and not think of Mazzucchelli, both since Asterios Polyp came out recently and he’s one of the kings of the “mainstream”/”alternative” fusion artists. Polyp has some stellar examples of this. My favorite sequence in the book is when Polyp, the “paper architect,” builds a tree house. I told Mazz I loved this scene and he said: “Kirby.”

Or how about this Steranko-esque film still-like panel of Asterios and Hana at the beach, pausing in silhouette, below. I like the melodrama of it. It’s ballsy.

Frank: The Escape Artist. Yeah, so Steranko, after Kirby—Kirby was a big deal in the ’60s, but then in the late ‘60s, there was this guy who was really kind of like the new regime was Jim Steranko, James Steranko. He took Kirby’s style and made it really design-y and really modern.

Robin: Deco pop, almost.

Frank: Deco pop is a good way of describing it. This particular story on the right, this is Bernie Krigstein from the late ‘50s and this is a Steranko story from the early ‘70s and a horror comic from Marvel. Can we click ahead one? And you can see he’s doing all these really wacky layouts and stuff like that. It’s not very … like this face is very Kirby to me and a lot of the figures are very Kirby, but as Dash likes to point out if you think Kirby’s anatomy is messed up, Steranko’s is even more messed up. He’s just doing it. So a lot of these figures are really cut-out figures and stuff. But he’s doing a lot of things with time that hearken back to what Krigstein was doing in the ‘50s.

Dash: The Krigstein comic is “The Master Race,” that Spiegelman likes so much to talk about. He did an article in The New Yorker about it.

Robin: Yeah. I think he first did an essay back in [inaudible, 11:14]

Frank: See, this is the subway going by and all the figures going by fast. He’s breaking up the time like way differently. I mean, this is ’59 …

Robin: This is earlier than that.

Frank: Really?

Dash: I want to hear Frank … you called this cinematic before, those panels. I’ve heard that used a lot. I don’t know if you used it.

Frank: Did I say that?

Dash: Why do you think people call those kind of panels, tall …

Frank: Oh, the tall panels. Because it breaks up the time differently. I think it’s a way of like Kirby is all about it’s not instantaneous moment to moment. It’s more like every ten seconds or something. You see the punch, then you see the reaction. But he’s doing every … this is like five seconds or whatever. This is like an instantaneous thing. Cinematic … I think so, but it’s just more like … Steranko’s cinematic in the sense of his framing, I think. His framing is way more …

Dash: If you scrolled, those long horizontal things like this.

Frank: Oh this. Yeah. Well, I think that’s cinematic because in the late ‘60s, everybody went panorama in the ‘60s, so it’s like your eye, I think, is going across these panels.

Robin: It’s kind of like the whole Orson Welles …

Frank: Deep focus.

Robin: That long …

Robert: The pan. You know what I was thinking? I was looking at these and speaking of cinematic, I was really thinking that Steranko’s a lot like Brian De Palma. That’s because both De Palma and both Steranko, for a lot of reasons, actually, they both use a lot of genre tropes. Like this is an old dark house kind of story. Also, De Palma would always make you conscious that you were watching a film and I think Steranko makes you really conscious that you were reading a comic. That’s what the framing—I mean, De Palma would use a lot of split screen and you see the way things are divided up here. Also, the way that they acknowledged the old masters: Steranko acknowledging Krigstein and Kirby and De Palma acknowledging Hitchcock, most especially.

Something that Jeet Heer touched on previously on CC, and was also asked at the TCAF panel, was how necessary it is for readers to track or be interested in artist’s influences.

Audience member: [inaudible, 45:45-] I mean, there is value to knowing stuff. It’s okay, but if you just want pleasure and it doesn’t matter to you and you’re getting the pleasure and something’s hitting the pleasure button and you don’t know that it’s just a third generation knockoff, then it’s okay. At the same time, if you want to be an informed reader … [continues]

Dash: I think if you’re coming to this panel, you want to be an informed reader.

Audience member: … reading the best work …

Robin: The main thing is you enjoy comics. Let’s see what that person enjoyed.

Robert: If you like this, you might like this.

Robin: That’s exactly it. Without being commercial thing like DC’s, “You like Watchmen, here’s the next thing to read.” You like Brandon Graham? Read Moebius, you’ll love it if you haven’t read Moebius. That’s kind of the conduct of people who love this stuff and reading it is rather important. There are so many comics to read, and people don’t really know that. And good luck at finding this stuff for an affordable except for the horrible Incal reprints that are re-colored.

Personally, I don’t think it’s necessary for readers to be informed about this stuff. It’s only of interest to people who care. But, I think the big “trickle down” effect IS interesting. I care. Not for an “I know who’s ripping off of who! Ha ha!” annoying reason, but because it’s telling a wider story about the psychology of artists. If you’re someone who’s interested in that, it’s worth tracking what was coming out when, or who was reading what when, because the “trickle down” effect over time is more exciting, to me, than holding a romantic belief that everyone’s working in a vacuum devoid of influences. All of the artists struggling to reach that “vacuum”/influence-less state are revealing in their own way.

Obviously, I don’t think people should feel that artists are handed a menu of what came before them and starting ordering things (“I’ll have a little bit of Kirby sprinkled with Sol Lewitt, please”), and I don’t think people should feel artists are necessarily having a conversation with other artists exclusively (“Ware did this, so I went the other way.”) The motivations are a tangled web encompassing a million things. It’s the whole psychology of the person. If you’re happy never reaching a conclusion, just bouncing around reading comics history or whatever, then it’s a journey worth making. Or at least a panel worth attending.

Huge thanks to Robin again and Squally Showers, Robert Dayton, Dustin Harbin and Frank.

Here’s a random Gray Morrow Edge of Chaos spread, because it rules. Show n tell.

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I’m going to make this quick and comics-related. Everyone at the fair, Companhia, and the US Consulate was nice and treated me much better than I deserve to be treated. I can’t figure out a good USA reference for this book fair. It’s sort of like the San Diego Comic-Con, only all books and “normal” people (lots of families.) It took place in three large boxes. This first photo of the exterior looks like a Tom K panel:

The standard comic size in Brazil is smaller and a slightly different ratio.

Andre told me you can chart the Brazilian economy of the 80s and 90s by looking at the cover price fluctuations of Akira, since it was being serialized through that time.
Andre’s father edits this magazine, Piaui , and in the latest issue they ran an excerpt of Crumb’s Genesis. The magazine is huge (about 11 by 14 inches) and on great paper and the excerpt looks totally amazing in it. I’m psyched for that book.

I was on a panel with the twins Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba where I was asked how to increase literacy among Brazilian youth.

Later that day the fair threw a party and I was told it was taking place in a park so I just wore a t-shirt. It turned out it was in a mansion in a park. Snoop Dogg filmed this music video (3:53) there. I told a prose novelist I was feeling underdressed and he said: “Don’t worry. You’re a graphic novelist. It works.” Ha! True story.

Okay, here are some more scans of things I acquired. This first artist, Lourenco Mutarelli, I hung out with a little bit. He does great sketchbooks filled with gorgeous, raunchy drawings. I hope that those are eventually published or put online or become available somehow.

These are random other things:

I went to Rafael Grampa’s studio in an ex-beauty salon in Sao Paulo but I don’t have any good photos of it. Rafael’s working on a series that Dark Horse is publishing in 2010 titled Furry Water and I flipped through some originals and it’s crazy. His personality can be felt in his drawings. They’re aggressive, funny and full of life. Dude can draw.

Now Comics Comics may return to more thoughtful posting.

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This cover is a special delivery to my Fanta Friends:

The first story would interest the new Marvel Friends:

I got this at a comic shop called H Q Mix in Sao Paulo. It’s open 24 hours (!) on a block of mostly theaters and actor’s bars. There is a famous whore house around the corner.

Andre Conte is the editor of the Companhia das Letras comic division. I spent most of my trip hanging out with him and Juliana Vettore, a publicist at Companhia, and David Grann, since his The Lost City of Z book was published in Portuguese by Companhia. Grann’s latest New Yorker piece, “Trial by Fire”, came out right before we left NY for Rio.

Andre and I had a lot to talk about since we’re about the same age so we read all of the same comics growing up. It’s nice that Joe Madureira and Wildstorm are at least conversation possibilities. Here’s Andre:

I’m pretty sure that the store owner (above corner) edited this anthology, Capa. He didn’t speak any English and I don’t speak any Portuguese, but I think that’s what he was communicating to me.

Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon came with us to the store since we went right after a joint discussion/signing at a mall bookstore.

More Brazil stuff later.

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Frank’s post about editing reminded me that Hope Larson once told me she likes working with an editor. I used the CC blog as an excuse to ask her some questions about this.

If you’re unfamiliar with her work, Larson is the cartoonist of Salamander Dream, originally serialized online and later published in book form by AdHouse Books, Gray Horses from Oni Press, and Chiggers from Ginee Seo Books, a division of Simon & Schuster. Her next book is Mercury which arrives from Ginee Seo Books in 2010.

She was very generous with her responses and, I think, this is an interesting (brief) view of a cartoonist working with editors in the book industry, something becoming increasingly common.

Shaw: How did the editing process differ between Gray Horses at Oni Press and Chiggers at Ginee Seo Books?

Larson: When I submitted the Gray Horses script–beginning with Salamander Dream, I’ve always worked from scripts, even for short comics–I all but begged for editorial feedback. I’d always considered myself a bit of a writer, but doing it professionally was new. I’d barely written fiction since high school, and I knew I was probably doing a ton of things wrong. I wanted someone to tell me what those things were so I could fix them before the book was drawn and winging off to the presses.

I never got any feedback for Gray Horses. Oni Press was in an, um, transitional place at the time, and my book slipped through the cracks. I sent the script to a few friends, but they weren’t much help, either. That was when I realized that if I wanted a real editor, I’d better jump to a book publisher.

This probably makes it sound like the editorial relationship, for me, is all about my insecurities as a writer, but it isn’t. It’s about making the best books I can, and pushing my stories further. Some editors are able to look at a story and see what you’re trying to say when you can’t articulate it yourself. Some editors are more literary, while others are hyperaware of what the market wants. Some editors pursue structure, structure, structure above all else.

Starting with Chiggers, the editorial process has gone something like this:

1) The overhaul. I send in the troubled first draft of my script, and my editor (and her editorial assistant, if she has one) sends me reams of notes that address the themes of the book and problems with structure and character, plus a few niggly little notes. This batch of notes always starts with a paragraph or two telling me how great I am, how much they like the script, and how I don’t have to make any changes I don’t want to make. (Usually the notes are spot-on, but there have been times when I’ve refused to change a line, or omit a swear, or disagreed about the direction a scene should go.)

Notes do sting, but they leave me invigorated, ready to dive back into the story with greater awareness of both its weaknesses and its strengths. Many–or most–of my writing epiphanies are the result of an editor saying, “This doesn’t work. You need to rethink this.”

2) The fine-tune. More of the same, but not as extensive, and with more line edits.

After the second draft is locked in, I go ahead and draw the book. After that, I send over a PDF of the book and we move on to

3) The polish. Art editing and more line edits. Occasionally pages are redrawn and scenes are rewritten at this stage, but I do so much work before ever putting brush to bristol that changes tend to be minor: “What is her expression expressing, here? This panel doesn’t read.” Etc.

4) Copyediting. Also minor. Copyeditors catch all kinds of interesting stuff, including continuity. There’s a lot more to their job than commas and semicolons. They’re minor heroes.

And that’s it!

Working with my Ginee Seo and her assistant (now an editor himself) Jordan Brown, and with my current editor, Namrata Triphathi, has been an invaluable experience. Their guidance has helped me become more critical of and less attached to my work, and to write with greater awareness of my strengths and weaknesses, and of my audience.

Due to restructuring at S&S, Ginee, Jordan and Nami all worked on my new book, Mercury, and at different stages of the process. That was a frustrating experience for everyone, I think–and especially for Nami, who came in at the 11th hour when the book was all but complete–but it was fascinating to see how three people can read the same story and see it three different ways, and want different things from it. All editors are different, and even a very good editor isn’t a magic bullet, because writing always comes down to you and your book. A good editor knows when to intercede and when to get out of the way.

Shaw: This might be a dumb question, but did the editors/publisher approve anything before the first draft? Did you submit to them X # of completed pages, or does it all start with words- a paragraph summary of the project? And, for the draft that you’re talking about in the first stage, is that all in words or does it have drawings too? Could you describe what that draft/script is like? This is interesting because your publisher/editor is accustomed to working on all-word books, so they probably had to invent a model for doing this that isn’t like the Marvel Method.

Larson: It’s not a dumb question. I know people sell stuff off outlines all the time, and I think at this point I could, too… But I have a really hard time with outlines. I’ve tried outlining before, and I just get stuck. My writing process is fairly intuitive–I figure out what I’m writing as I write it–so it’s usually best for me to just sit down and write a script. The worst that can happen if I write a script the publisher doesn’t want is that I’ll take it somewhere else.

Everything I’ve sold has been off a complete first draft of a script. Gray Horses was a complete script and some sample comic pages. Same for Chiggers. Mercury I sold just off the script and a couple character sketches.

A script for me is all words. I do think about layout, or how things will look on the page, but that isn’t usually reflected in the script. My scripts look more like screenplays–and they basically are screenplays now that I’ve starting writing everything in Final Draft. I don’t even break down my scripts into comic pages until it’s been edited and locked in, although I usually have a rough idea of how many pages I’ll need. And I don’t break a page down into panels until I sit down to draw that page.

As for my editors being used to working on all-word books, most of them have been comics fans, and most of them have worked on picture books. It hasn’t been a completely new language to them, for which I’m grateful. There still isn’t a standard model for comic scripts in the publishing industry; at least not one I’m aware of. I just do what works for me.

Shaw: When you get notes from your editor, do they lean toward a specific goal? Like, it makes sense to cut curse words out because it’s a YA book and that’s probably a decision that they’ve made beforehand: no curse words. But if they’re talking about the structure of the book, does it lean toward a three-act Robert McKee framework? Does the publisher have an idea of how a book is supposed to unfold? And: What’s an example of a “literary” edit or a “structure” edit?

Larson: I want to talk about cursing specifically for a second. I’ve never been told I MUST remove swearing. It’s often suggested that I tone the swearing down, which is hard to argue with in a YA book, and a lot of the time I write curse words in because I’m being a lazy writer. The one word that can cause real trouble in YA books, unsurprisingly, is “fuck.” The original manuscript of Mercury included fuck, and Ginee told me that I could leave it in if I felt strongly about it, but that I was preemptively banning myself from most libraries. I took it out.

When I made the comment about structure I was actually thinking about the screenplay I wrote this year (for fun; it hasn’t been optioned or anything), and the notes I got from a friend who studied screenwriting at AFI. She isn’t a professional editor, but she gave me 11 pages of editorial-quality notes that look at the story in terms of a McKee-esque three-act structure. My notes from Ginee or Nami focus more on the characters and the relationships between them, and on stuff like symbolism (“What does _____ represent?”), than on plot, which I would say is a more literary view of the thing.

Having the book unfold according to act structure isn’t important to them as long as the book works.

Shaw: Let’s talk about the covers. You had a sensibility present in the covers for Salamander Dream and Gray Horses that didn’t continue into Chiggers. Were there meetings about the cover? What are those meetings like?

Larson: Yeah, that cover was not my doing. I pitched a few covers that didn’t fly (and in retrospect, I see why), and the publisher wanted a cover that said “BUY ME, MIDDLE-GRADE TARGET AUDIENCE” and “HELLO THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT SUMMER CAMP”. They specifically requested that image, that design, and I capitulated because I was sick of the back and forth and I didn’t have cover approval in my contract, so there wasn’t much point in kicking up a fuss. I don’t care for it. I feel it cheapens and does disservice to the book, but I also understand why marketing was gung-ho about it. It is what it is.

On the other hand, for Mercury, marketing didn’t know how to sell the book. Nami, art director Sonia Chaghatzbanian, and I went around in circles a couple of times, trying to find a concept that would work. Marketing was down on everything. Their ideas, my ideas… At one point I thought we’d hit on the winning concept, and I did a whole sketch, and I was sitting in an airport on the way home from someplace when I got an e-mail saying it was a no-go, and did I have any other ideas? And all I could think was, “Fuck. I don’t know what they want. They don’t know what they want. How on earth can I give them what they want?”

So I was sitting on the plane, and it was the middle of the night, and all of a sudden I figured it out. I got home, did the concept sketch that night, I think, and within a few days it had been approved, and everyone was happy: Nami, Sonia, marketing, and me. Sometimes it just works out.

Shaw: Do you wish you had an editor for your earlier mini-comics? Is there a distinction, to you, between your earlier mini-comics and your work for Ginee Seo?

Larson: I don’t wish I had an editor for any of the early stuff. I was playing, screwing around. I needed to figure some stuff out on my own before I was ready to work with an editor. My early work is a string of incomplete ideas, which is what early work should be like, I think. They were pounded out in a couple of weeks, a couple of months. My books–Chiggers and Mercury, anyway, and my screenplay, which is called Heavens–are ideas fully explored. I lived inside them for months. Years. They’re part of me.

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Warning: This is a light post. I just thought it’d be a good time to appreciate Tim Hensley’s Wally Gropius saga since it’s now completed serialization in vol. 15 of Mome and Frank recently posted an appreciation of Tom K’s stories, which appear in the same anthology. (Disclosure: I’m a contributor to Mome too, so it’s possible I’m biased, although that has never prevented me from disliking work in Mome so if I am biased I’m not consciously aware of it.)

Tim Hensley’s a hard cartoonist to write about. He’s divisive. The two camps are: (1) he’s not funny and (2) he’s funny. I’m in the latter camp, since I think he’s fucking funny as shit. In the climactic episode, Wally is caught in an R.D. Laing Knot as he prepares to marry The Saddest Girl in the World. This monologue is especially moving if you’ve ever been in a long relationship with a clinically depressed person.

If you don’t think his idiosyncratic dialogue and melodramatic “cartoony” performances are funny, you probably think the writing is overdone and the drawing is just a throw-back to some Archie/teen comic house style. But teen comics never looked like this:

The characters move through minimal rooms with immaculately placed objects. It’s like what he chooses to draw in the environment (and what he chooses not to draw) is determined by some graphic Feng Shui.

When his comics are at their most beautiful, these environments function both as the story’s world and abstractly.

His writing is a continuation of his earlier mini-comics (Ticket Stub) that were collage-like transcriptions of movie summaries and dialogue. If you get an opportunity to look at any of these, don’t miss it. They contain some of his best work, and it’s interesting to see the wide range of graphic languages he employed with his writing. He’s one of the few cartoonists who arrived with a writing language before a drawing one. He did these while working as a closed-captioning editor. In his Mome interview with Gary Groth, he talks a bit about how this job improved his comics formally:

I think in a way the experience of that job really improved my comics, because it’s almost like captioning is comics but they’re upside down, because you’re sort of taking an image and you’re putting a balloon underneath, and you have to position it. So you’re constantly, over the course of 10 years, making these immediate decisions like, you find a shot change in a movie, and you have to say, OK, this person’s on the left, or this person’s walking through a crowd of people, how do I make sure that you can assign the words to the person.

I think it intuitively made me think more about how the eye moves through an image in time and space.

At the same time, this probably contributed to his language sensibilities, as well as…

(from a totally random interview on an amazon.com message board🙂

Maybe growing up in a family with a sibling who is learning disabled and sometimes mentally ill internalized a general scrambling of language in me or at least an interest in that direction.

These are hints at what’s behind this dialogue, but it doesn’t matter how he arrived at this. It’s clearly completely logical in its own way. They reward repeated readings. With his best dialogue, a line that you first read as being surreally disconnected on a second reading is funny and on a third reading reveals a wider scope of the story.

It’s incredible that he can pull this off in such a seemingly intuitive way. It feels like this dialogue, and these comics, just pour out of him. It’s like you’re reading a complete personality on a page. All of the characters speak in the same “voice” because there’s really only one character: the comic.

On top of all this, it’s worth noting that this highly evolved, specific personality exists inside of the guise of a personality-less “house style.” It’s a balancing act between the generic and the specific.

Now that Wally is done, I’m curious to see where he goes next. Ticket Stub sketched out many unexplored directions. It’s possible that Wally Gropius wasn’t an arrival to his final resting place, but just one path from his previous work; he could pick up where some of his past work left off and spin in a new graphic direction. Whatever happens, I can’t wait to see.

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Probably like many CC readers, I read a lot of scans of comics on the internet. Unlike webcomics, where the cartoonist is conscious of the fact that people will read it online, these poor, often dead cartoonists have been hijacked (stolen, really) and forced into a formatting that they didn’t intend, and often didn’t know would ever exist. Their labored-over page turns and splash pages have been forced into click-throughs and scroll-downs. They’ve been completely screwed. Still, I’m sitting there waiting for my scanner to finish doing its thing, a stack of unread “real” books weighing the scanner bed down, and I’ll click over to thehorrorsofitall.blogspot.com to read some Bernie Wrightson. While I’m waiting for music to illegally download, I’ll go illegally read a manga scanlation. It’s too easy.

Obviously, I prefer reading these comics in their original, intended, print versions. But, again, it’s right there. Free. And I don’t think that’s going to change anytime soon.

I’m going to write about this experience a little. Just three random topics.

1. Large Documents
You click on a link expecting a small, web-friendly jpg image and the browser window slowly (“uh-oh”) loads, opens, and you find yourself staring at a quarter-inch of yellowed paper texture enlarged over your entire monitor. You scroll down and to the right, seeing a single brushstroke—what is that? The top of someone’s head? A branch? Or you’re looking at a couple of letters of each word as you read (“nu”…”ff”…”sa”…). Or you think you’re looking at the main character of a panel until you scroll around to discover that the person was actually in the far background and the central character can only be seen one facial feature at a time.

This reminds me of how little the human eye actually sees in focus at any moment. In middle school a teacher illustrated this fact by writing a word on the chalkboard. He told everyone to stare only at this one word. Then he wrote another word six inches above the first word. Nobody could see the second word if their eyes remained fixed on the first word. Like, try reading something at the top of this post while staring at this word. Maybe in seeing these comic scans enlarged, this is like seeing what the inside of my eye is seeing at a single moment as it darts around a comic page.

What comic pages work well in this unnatural view? Dense splash pages. Decorative design elements. Landscapes. I briefly looked around for something to scan that would look interesting this way and picked up a Blueberry book. This is actually only half of a printed page, so it doesn’t take long to load.

Holy crap—it looks great this way. In print, this page feels really dense and claustrophobic. Here, it’s a more spacious, but active, environment. The splattering of colors translates really well too. And, somehow, I think it captures the adventurousness of the Blueberry story. Click on the image and scroll around inside the page. It’s fun!

2. Bad scanning/pixelation

I spent a few years doing illustrations for a health services website where I’d have to (quickly) integrate drawings and photos in one piece. I’d use the “eyedropper” Photoshop tool to pick up colors from the photos that I would then use in the drawings so that the colors matched. The eyedropper tool could never find the right color. Is that guy’s shirt really so dark? Is that kid’s blonde hair so grey? The eyedropper was only picking up a single solid pixel color. It’d be as if you eyedropper-tooled a scan of a comic and were shocked that someone’s skin tone was either bright red or solid white.

Comics have moved from one format with famously awkward small units of color that optically combine to a new version of the same thing.

There are probably a lot of comparisons that could be made between this either/or visual information and other mediums. I was struck by how much a detail of a tapestry looks like a low-resolution jpg:
http://aulas.pro.br/blog4/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/morris_woodpecker_tapestry_detail.jpg

Also, there are wide variations of scanner qualities and preferences. I wanted to send an image of a “Classics Illustrated” page to a friend and I didn’t feel like scanning it myself so I found it online:
http://www.tkinter.smig.net/ClassicsIllustrated/PrisonerOfZenda/37.htm

But this page looked nothing like the comic I owned. The colors are so washed out. Is this how this person scanned it? Or did their copy actually look this way? Maybe it looked correct on their computer and my computer was calibrated differently. Here’s my scan of the same page:

It’s possible that lots of scans I’ve read online look nothing like what the original reproductions (ha ha) do.

3. Coincidental Marriages
Most comic pages are hard to read on the computer. You scroll across and then down and realize you missed half of a conversation that was in word balloons hugging the bottom of the panels. You were just zipping away on the top 2/3rds of the panel. Or you have to laboriously scroll up and down to figure out how you’re supposed to read a page. Or you can only understand a spread by clicking back and forth to try and imagine what two pages look like next to each-other. But sometimes a page, coincidentally, feels really intuitive on the web.

Here’s just one example, a BWS Uncanny X-men page hosted by grantbridgestreet.blogspot.com (a site that provides a radio soundtrack for your comic reading!):
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Rf9S3GkkeyI/Si-iyG_JIaI/AAAAAAAARvA/MA49cpKBewE/s1600-h/barry+windsor+smith+and+chris+claremont.+x-men.+lifedeath+2.+page.+021.jpg

This page reads great on the web. I love how, as you scroll down, the hands become bigger and then it moves back to a wide view. The floating colors seem to drift around on the screen as you scroll.

Television’s changed the way movies are made. Generations of filmmakers raised on watching television now favor TV-informed traits. A close-up natural for the small screen has led to billboard-sized close-ups in the theater. It isn’t unusual to be sitting in the movie theater examining the enormous pores on Brad Pitt’s nose.

Maybe in the future, generations of cartoonists raised on reading comics on the internet will change the way they make print comics, unconsciously favoring stand-alone pages, long horizontal panels and “scroll-down” style vertical reveals.

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This is my first post here. I’ve never regularly written about comics, or anything else, before so please “go easy” on me and forgive my poor word-writing ability. Thanks to the CC crew for inviting me to participate. I will try to post once a month, unless my previous posts become too embarrassing.
Groundwork of Evangelion: 1.0 (2008) is a collection of preparatory drawings and pencil tests for the (forthcoming to the USA) animated movie. The pencil test drawings usually follow a grid but occasionally a single frame is enlarged to cover two tiers. It reminds me of how sometimes when a newspaper strip was collected into a book format the publisher would print a single panel larger than the others. Since everything was originally drawn to the same scale, a single panel would have larger text and the ben-day dots would be bigger, oppressive. It’d give it a Pop art aesthetic for just one panel. Or the old Crockett Johnson Barnaby reprints where the publisher stacked the panels Yummy Fur style. My favorite example of this is a Little Orphan Annie reprint where all of the panels were spaced out strangely, still following a grid but with unusually large gutters. Each panel was orphaned from the others. I wonder if the cartoonists themselves approved any of these decisions.

Anyway, this book isn’t really a comic book or an ani-manga (stills from a movie arranged as a comic for no good reason- see the Pantheon Scanner Darkly release) although you could read it as a confusing one. And it doesn’t have the fanboy nerd-fest feel of one of those “concept art” books, where you can see endless drawings of how a mecha looks and what all of the parts supposedly do.

This is a book of ephemeral, notational drawings for a movie that I haven’t seen yet. Large portions of it look like if Cy Twombly drew a comic.

Other parts look like portraits of character scenes where the “performance” in the drawings are still being worked out. Since it’s all light-boxed from previous drawings, it has a thin-line traced drawing look like Warhol line drawings.
They’re marked with little notes that I don’t understand. All of the Japanese I once knew is gone, and I don’t know filmmaking vocabulary anyway. Unlike comics, which have a widely-known “insider” language (“these bubbly shaped frames around the words mean the character is thinking- is that cool with everybody?” “yeah, okay”) this is a totally foreign “insider” language used by the people at the studio to communicate to each-other. They weren’t drawn to be published for a wide audience; but here they are, published, and I could go into Kinokuniya in NYC and buy a copy. Awesome.

It seems like “cinematic” is used as a derogatory word for a comic because it suggests that the comic was designed for the reader to use it as a springboard to imagine something that it’s not. Obviously, most cartoonists would like to think that they’re making comics as opposed to imaginary movies awaiting a budget.

Since this is published and I could get a copy before I could see the movie, I’m left with a book that stands on its own in my mind. I know the characters from the animated series, but these drawings are too abstract for me to connect it to a specific scene. It’s too incomplete for me to use the drawings to imagine what the movie will be like.

Chris Ware and other cartoonists have frequently dissed the idea of “cinematic” comics in a variety of ways:

http://writing.umn.edu/docs/speakerseries_pubs/Glass_Ware.pdf

“Some of the best comics, I think, are still from the turn of the century, when the medium was still being developed as a language. And each particular artist developed that language to suit his or her own particular vision, which I don’t think has happened since the 1940s, where it’s just absorbed- this sort of ready made language of, sort of cinematic close-ups and dissolves and long-shots and that sort of stuff.”

I just googled “Chris Ware cinematic interview” and pulled this up. He’s said similar things in interviews I remember reading. I think Ware’s the greatest living cartoonist, but what’s strange about this argument to me is that:

(a) So many of the early newspaper comics that Ware and other cartoonists love and appropriate from have a language based in theater (like Thimble Theater). There’s a lot of theatrical staging in contemporary cartooning. Why is theater somehow more akin to comics than movies? When these early cartoonists were drawing comics, it made sense to be influenced by theater because it was an extremely popular medium, like movies are today. In fact, I think movies are a little tiny bit closer to comics (as a medium) because film is on a 2-dimensional plane while theater is 3-dimensional.

(b) What’s wrong with drawing from a “cinematic” language?

Here’s another Chris Ware quote from http://archives.cnn.com/2000/books/news/10/03/chris.ware.qanda/index.html

“I don’t like to think of my work as ‘cinematic.’ A movie is passive — you’re watching it, taking it in. Where a comic strip, it’s completely active: you have to read it, search it for meaning, for the connection with your entire experience and your memory. Yes, you do have the illusion of watching something happen in a comic strip — but if it’s done well, it comes alive on the page like a novel. A novel is the most interactive thing ever created.”

I don’t think Ware is creating an either/or argument here. I don’t think he dislikes ALL movies, or feels that ALL movies are “passive.” I don’t know him, but I’d be surprised if that was the case.

This Evangelion book makes me think of “cinematic” comics in a positive way; not passive; one of many modern languages that comics can react to.