“Lurid and overwritten—

—and defensive to boot.” That’s how Kip described his re-writing of my jumbled thoughts into a comprehensive statement for the upcoming group gallery show of Portland cartoonists at Pushdot Studio, a gallery which showcases digital artists.

I actually kinda like it, thought he did a great job, as did apparently the owners of Pushdot since they didn’t change a word for the Press Release:

The mystery of comics is a simple one: at its heart, it’s the use of space
to capture the flow of time. One picture after another to tell, in essence,
a story. It’s no wonder that so powerful and useful an idea has been with us
for centuries, eagerly adapting itself to new media as they appear: illuminated manuscripts, pen and ink, woodcuts and steel plates, photography, four-color printing, and now computers.

But it’s also a simple idea, one too easily dismissed and denigrated:
it’s for kids. It’s lurid. It’s pop-culture escapism. It’s trash. How can something so simple as placing one picture after another ever tell a story worth the time and trouble? No matter how many times it’s demonstrated that comics can do just that, as novel, as memoir, as poetry, as journalism, as sublime sketch, as pop-culture escapism, that question will always dog this art.

It’s appropriate then, to take a look here and now at what comics is
doing in the latest medium it’s colonized, the world of digital art. Like
comics, art done on and with computers is too easily dismissed and denigrated. How can something so ephemeral, so protean, so easily duplicated ever produce art of lasting worth?

We invite you to come see what seven Portland cartoonists are doing, with
comics and computers, and judge for yourself.

The official name for the show is “The Art of Storytelling: Comics in the Digital Age” and it will opening the first Thursday in July. The opening reception will be on July 3rd from 6:00pm to 9:00pm at Pusndot which is located at 830 NW 14th Avenue between NW Kearney and Johnson Streets, in Portland’s Pearl District.

What follows are the self written biographies of the cartoonists participating.
I always find in interesting what people say about themselves:

Christopher
Baldwin was born in Massachusetts and has been drawing cartoons since he was first given a crayon. He has drawn many, many comic books and comic strips since. This exhibit features pieces related to his daily comic strip Bruno which began its current run in 1996.

Barry Deutsch lives in Portland, Oregon with a number of housemates and cats and other wildlife. Barry’s political cartoon strip Ampersand has received two Oregon Newspaper Publishers awards and the national Charles M. Schulz award.

Indigo Kelleigh began drawing comics at a very young age, and has been self publishing his own comics since 1989. His latest series, The Circle Weave, is created digitally using Photoshop and a drawing tablet. In 2002, The Circle Weave became part of the vanguard subscription-based comic site www.moderntales.com. He continues work on this series, and recently finished production on the first collection of Circle Weave strips.

Jenn Manley Lee has spent a lifetime marrying images with words and has even made a career of it. Telling stories is her favorite way of combining the two. She has been publishing Dicebox on the internet since 2001. She has made Portland her home since 1995 along with her husband and assorted cohorts.

Robert Lewis is a flash animator and programmer living in Northwest Portland. He has designed games and animations for AT&T, MSN, Universal Studios, and most recently Dreamwork’s Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas. His cartoons are available online at www.fashionbuddha.com.
When he’s not pushing the boundaries of Flash he’s relaxing in his 30-gallon fish tank.

Linda Medley’s love of fairy tales as a child and mythology as an adult
led to her to reinterpreting their themes in her series Castle Waiting.
She says “I was always more interested in the background in the stories
than the Kings, Queens, Princes and Princesses. I wanted to know if the faithful servant and the dairymaid lived happily ever after too.” Castle Waiting has garnered critical acclaim and won numerous honors, including several Eisner Awards and a grant from the Xeric Foundation. Ms. Medley has illustrated books for Putnam Publishing, Grossett & Dunlap, Houghton-Mifflin, and Golden Books, and has done comics work for DC, Dark Horse, Fantagraphics, Image and Tundra.

Kevin Moore is a cartoonist and graphic designer living in Portland with his lovely wife and dogs. When he is not drawing angry cartoons castigating the wretched state of modern politics, he finds relief in the sweet, light adventures of a football shaped pig that lacks the good sense to stay home. (Good sense being highly overrated, of course.)

Humph

Kip’s comfy in bed on a properly chilly Portland summer eve reading the latest Harry Potter. Since he happened to be home when the postman delivered it, he got dibs. (Actually, since he can devour text at super human speed, there was little doubt he’d be reading it first.) As I ordered it to round out a free shipping order from Amazon.com, I’m surprised it’s already here. I was fully prepared not to be on the cutting edge of Harry.

I’ve been cheerfully amused by the whole Harry Potter phenonemon all week, from the midnight release parties to the various scandals around leaked copies. I find the excitement over a book and book series very pleasing. The only thing I regret with all the hoop-la is being reminded that one of the characters die.

You see, I like going into stories head first, armed only with a friend’s recommendation or a whim. Little fore knowledge as possible. I just know I won’t truly setle into the book until the poor slob bites it. But then, it won’t be as bad as The Italian Caper, who’s trailer is basically a video Cliff Notes version of the story.

But since I do know, I can’t help but wonder if the book’s release on the Summer Solctice is a mere coincidence. I’m wondering if the character who dies happens to make a perfect Oak King, who on this day in Celtic tradition is supposed to die/make way for/be reborn as the Holly.

And now, debate in the form of comics!

Technical difficulties overcomed, the next page of Barry’s Dicebox fill in story, the Argument, is up over at Girlamatic.com. Check it out.

Apples and Studebakers, I say!

Okay, I admit it, I totally set the wrong tone for the post below. There are thoughts I should have fleshed out more to have them better understood. But it was a journal post, not a polished essay.

As was Dylan’s, and I’m not trying to make out that Dylan is doing anything more than state her own experiences and opinions. Nor am I trying to make out that most, some, any cartoonists think “Boy! Those prose writers have it easy, the lucky bastards!”

Honestly, if I had gotten my usual traffic, about ten or twenty a day, most looking for “free sex comics”, I probably would have pulled down the post, done some re-adjustments and slapped it back up. Like include a statement that Dylan sees most definitely the difference between a story meant for prose and one meant for comics, something that thrills me no end. But I had also hoped you had read all that for yourselves.

The funny thing is, I was much more interested in the time equals value debate and how I’m annoyed that’s how the end result of comics vs. prose is compared. How the impact of each is different and is hard to compare fairly.

But I have enjoyed the totally unintentional debate it has started. Though I don’t agree with all that is being said, I find it interesting and stimulating and it’s helping me define my feelings on the matter.

Not that I totally disagree either, with both the statements and the emotion behind them. Like Scott’s example of how prose writers have certain minimizing options cartoonists don’t. Granted. And I am amused that he had thought up the most difficult thing to draw that he could: “The sun rose over Bombay, scattered by the chrome of ten thousand bicycles”.

But let’s be fair, comics has its own “minimizing options”. Like some of the panel to panel transitions I’ve seen, which can be so beautiful, meaningful and would take thousands of words to convey the same meaning, many pages in the gutter if you will.

Me, personally, not putting words into anyone’s mouth but my own? When I am tired, in pain in all ways possible still struggling with the same panel after 7 hours, near tears, cursing my stupidty and inadequacy, I don’t think “maybe I should just give up and become a prose writer”, (not saying anybody else does either) I usually think more along the lines of, say, forest ranger, traffic cop, electrician, anything where I am not trying to interpret parts of my mind, heart and soul for the world to see.

Because, for me, it�s all about where you hang your soul. What do you have your identity wrapped up in? I’m not interested in any other approach here than the one where you pour all your effort and heartache into, no matter what the artform.

One of these things is not like the other

So, as you most certainly have read Dylan
Meconis’ amazing journal entry about her uneasy relations with comics.
If not, go
read it, I can wait.

It’s a great, revelatory piece. It resonated very much with me and echoed
many of my thoughts. I made a point of dashing off emails to people I thought
would enjoy it. But there is one small point I want to quibble about.

From Dylan’s journal:

I was talking last summer to a well-known speculative fiction writer who happens
to be a patient of my mom’s (…no not that one, the other one). She had
been told that I was a writer and artist, and had a silly comic about vampires.
She asked me if I was working on anything at the moment.

“Well, I’ve got a story,” I replied. “It’s going
to be a big sucker, and it’s a comic, so I dont know if I’ll have
the skills to actually produce it once I finish the script.”

“Then turn it into a prose story!” she cheerfully retorted.

And, yeesh, in a way I wish I could: heaven knows it would be a lot easier.

Where on earth did cartoonists get the idea that writing prose was easier?

Okay, actually, I do know where they get the idea. It’s you, a pencil
and that damn blank piece of paper—traditional or digital or whatever. Or let’s
add an eraser and that hand that just wont come out right. Or that brow, the
cat in the background, or whatever. And it’s important, everything hinges
on it. And there are all those stages of frustration, as you have drawn this
thing a hundred times before, and so on. And the actual writing of a comic takes
so little time in comparison.

But having known, loved and lived with writers, I can attest that a page a day can be a monumental task for them as well. I mean, yes, the physical task of actually typing a page of prose can take only 15 to 45 minutes-so can scrawling out a page of comics. But would you want to show it to anyone? Or, for that matter, read it?

Ive seen writers bang their heads in frustration over a paragraph that they have been wrestling with for the past three hours. The words wont obey them any more. Then there are the rewrites, rewrites, rewrites. Never mind the reviews and feedback of friends and cohorts. Spouses who say, “I know what you are trying to do and it doesn’t work.”

I have heard that James Joyce once said in regards to his story Finnegan’s
Wake, “It took me 16 years to write the damn thing. It better take
you 16 years to read it.”

Which takes me to the other main aspect of prose vs. comics that most cartoonists get hung up on: it takes people longer to read a page of prose than a page of a comic.

This is true, but aren’t we over the whole longer is better mentality?
I mean, it’s really an apples and Studebakers type of comparison. Comics
tell their stories through a whole range of icons and hieroglyphics that can
be more efficient and evocative than the hundreds of words that would be needed
to describe them.

But, okay, let’s look at time sent processing the story. Lets say that
the average pamphlet size comic book takes 15-20 minutes to read. The average
chapter of a book, that would deliver the same amount of story, two hours. Lets
take that as a given.

Now, I’ll wager that the average comic book about the house gets read
3 to 5 times as much as the average book about the house by the same reader
of both. And this isn’t counting the re-perusal of a certain section (which
is often done with a prose book) or the quick re-read when you get the next
issue in the series. Why this is, I couldn’t say. It could be that comics
are more inviting because of the visuals or the fact that because it isn’t
a book, it’s not as daunting on whatever level.

Don’t get me wrong, I love prose, heck I love all forms of storytelling
from books to plays to TV to songs and so on. I wouldn’t chose one over
the other, they all fulfill a need, any can haunt me or skew my thoughts. But
I, like Dylan, have an obvious preference for my own storytelling: comics.

There are many reasons why I don’t think Dicebox would work as
a prose piece. Beyond the desire to play with colors, symbols and shapes, there
is the problem of describing details in an engaging yet unobtrusive way.

One of my main sticking points is Molly’s missing finger. I like the
fact it’s not noticeable to many people for a good long while—and
having known people with missing fingers, I can attest you wont necessarily
notice in real life either (okay both these people were missing pinkies and
had good surgeons, but still). But to do the same in prose would deny readers
a chance to discover it for themselves. I would want it out there at the get-go.
But to describe it right off would make it so important, much more significant
than I would want.

Then there’s Griffen. She’s a scrawny tall woman in her early 40s,
large nosed, flat-chested, with a sharp chin and odd, overly large eyes and
a constant bad hair day. Now, something that commonly happens when people become
enamored of a character in prose is to subtly and gradually make them more attractive
in their imaginations as time goes on. That’s normal, in real life friends
often become more attractive as they become more dear. But it is important that
Griffen is who she is, not grow younger, develop curves and the like. Constantly
reminding readers of a characters physical traits can be annoying and sometimes
down right cheesy. Moreso if you try to be clever about it.

Then there’s the setting. John Aegard, a prose writer of no small worth, commented
on how I was able to easily establish the character of a place in Dicebox,
and how neat it was I could do that without interrupting flow. As he pointed
out, in prose it sometimes takes pages of description that usually stops the
action dead and still doesn’t always get the feeling across. I actually
admire prose authors who can create a sense of place while continuing the story
immensely—even more when they avoid making any one thing very important.

Not that I am too worried about Dylan succumbing to the glamour of prose. As
she has already stated, she is thoroughly in the thrall of her comics muse.
I just hope she doesn’t get too discouraged over the relative levels of
respect the two mediums command. Because I’ve often been told that Dicebox
is a good enough story that it could be a real book.

Update: This entry has under gone some edits. And this is actually just my own ramblings on comics vs. prose, not a manifesto, nor really a direct response to Dylan, just some thoughts sparked from reading her entry.