My Panelists Archive: On Adventures in Cartooning, for First Second's Fifth

My final post for the now-defunct Panelists blog was for our series celebrating the fifth anniversary of First Second Books. Before I get to it, let me say that I am genuinely sad that I couldn't contribute more to The Panelists while it was alive. My paying work has made it impossible for me to write much at all lately, and although I had (and have!) ideas for short essays I wanted to write, I never got to them.

The thing that I liked best about The Panelists was the real feeling of camaraderie, of shared purpose, even among scholars and critics whose tastes don't perfectly agree. Probably if you placed all the comics in the world on the table between the six of us, there would be not a single book that we would all want to take home for the top shelf of our personal canon. Things that got Charles and me fired up would leave Derik cold. The Venn diagram of our tastes would be hard to draw. But we worked well as a team, making a whole that, when it was functioning, was greater than the sum of its parts.

Early in the team's history, my image for our collected powers was of a great Voltron of comics criticism. The sad thing was to watch that Voltron try to march into battle with both its legs and one arm totally asleep. (In this image, I would be one of the useless legs.)

I'll miss the Panelists, more for its potential than for its actuality; more for what it represented to me than for what it managed to become.

Our comics culture needs more places for careful and sustained snark-free criticism, where every claim is supported with thoughtful evidence and every quibble is launched in the spirit of arriving together at a better understanding of the medium's inner workings.

Anyway, here's the last squib I managed to scribble.




The first time I taught a course on making comics, the closest thing I had to a textbook or instruction guide for the students was Scott McCloud’s then-new Making Comics. I wound up using parts of the book, skipping other parts, and generally wishing I had something that I could use all the way through the semester.

Thanks to First Second, I now have a serious alternative, in Jessica Abel and Matt Madden’s Drawing Words & Writing Pictures. Organized around lessons and exercises, DWWP moves through a series of skills that build incrementally: composition and drawing basics are followed by more elaborate lessons and work on progressively larger units, from the panel to the strip, from the story to the zine. If I find myself teaching another class on making comics, I’m sure I’ll assign it. In fact, there are patient explanations of the use of things like Pro-White and the Ames Guide in DWWP that I should probably re-examine if I ever make comics seriously again myself: there’s a lot I could learn from this book.

For the moment, however, I want to consider the benefits of a competing textbook, also published by First Second. This other book covers less ground and isn’t as thick, but it also retails for less than half the price. There are reasons I probably shouldn’t assign it, including the fact that it offers no technical instruction at all—there’s not even a mention of inking, let alone brush technique or cross-hatching—but as instruction manuals go, it has definite strengths. In some ways, it might even be more appropriate for the kind of course or the kind of students I’d be likely to teach. (I'm in an English department, not an art department, so I teach comics-making as a kind of creative writing.)

I’m alluding to Adventures in Cartooning, the how-to-make-comics manual for kids that presents itself as a light fantasy romance with a knight, a missing princess, an elf, and a dragon. A collaboration between James Sturm and two Center for Cartoon Studies graduates (Andrew Arnold and Alexis Frederick-Frost), Adventures in Cartooning offers a series of lessons in comics practice while telling a suitably silly quest story with a couple of nice twists in its conclusion. It’s pitched, I think, at precisely that age range where kids either might get into drawing stories other people could read or, without a supportive environment, might give up drawing altogether. And yet I would like to consider, here, some lessons in Adventures that the blooming late-teen college-aged cartoonist would also do well to observe:

1. You don’t have to be able to “draw well” to make a good comic (or a fun one).
This point arises briefly in Drawing Words & Writing Pictures, but so much of that book gathers its examples and its exercises from superlatively competent work that it could still be daunting for a novice or a doodler. (If your handbook is going to have guidance on feathering or drybrush technique, it’s naturally going to move a long way beyond examples of what you can do if you “can’t draw.”)


("You don't have to be able to draw, but we'll assume that you want to learn how.")

The idea that simple drawings can still tell a story is front and center in Adventures in Cartooning, which begins with a princess complaining that she “just can’t draw well enough to make a comic”—and immediately contradicted by the Magic Cartooning Elf, who shows how a few basic shapes can be doodled into the main props and settings of the story that follows.


("Anyone can draw that stuff!")

The design of the characters in Adventures is inspired in part by Ed Emberley’s Make a World: each is built out of a few simple shapes that are easy to repeat. The difference between this simple drawing (which is possible for anyone who can write letters) and bad drawing turns out to be mainly about the difference between gesture and stiffness, not the ability to render a horse that looks like a horse. Here, Adventures in Cartooning teaches by example: little more than a stick figure, the knight is still full of lively and even exaggerated motion.

2. Since words and images can work complementarily in comics, you can use descriptive words to get you out of a drawing jam.
I don’t remember this coming up, at least not in quite this way, in Drawing Words & Writing Pictures, but it’s a great point for novice cartoonists who aren’t feeling secure in their drawing chops. Some things are hard to show, but there’s no reason a character can’t name a thing like that to make its identity clearer. A small closed squiggle can become a bubble-gum wrapper; a few rectangles in the background can become a mile-high stone wall. And let’s remember that even the most painstaking draftsman is still going to rely on language for invisible effects like smell and sound.

3. You don’t have to perform fancy tricks with layout in order to take advantage of “special effects” of panel height, width, and size.
Most of the page layouts in Adventures in Cartooning are straightforward variations on a grid, but each layout is deliberate and directed at a particular effect. (Again the book sets an example for the kid (or student) without much commentary.) A square panel has a different sort of action than a panel with horizontal aspect, because a horizontal panel is better at establishing setting or motion along a surface; a vertical panel is good for ascent, descent, or growth; a row or grid of similar-shaped panels is good for showing progression; and so forth.



4. Leave room at the top of your panel.
One of my favorite moments in the book, which happens before the Magical Cartooning Elf explains the virtues of different-shaped panels, shows the knight and his horse ascending a mountain and, because of the rising ground, seeming to bump against the top of the panel. Maybe this “lesson” isn’t what Sturm and his collaborators had in mind, but I have seen plenty of panels drawn without a thought about speech balloons, then having to crowd dialogue into a tiny attic over the characters’ heads.



5. Drawing is fun, and drawing together is fun.
This might be the most important lesson in Adventures in Cartooning, and again it comes through implicitly, both in the fun of the drawings themselves and in the solution to the knight’s ultimate crisis. (Having fallen in the ocean, several knights are drowning until, working together, they draw a pirate ship they can sail away on.)


("We call this a jam.")

Little kids mostly don’t need to be told this, but the fun of drawing would probably be the hardest of these five lessons for me to convey in a comics class. That’s because the college students who need this lesson aren’t likely to take a course that requires them to draw every week, and teenagers who think they can’t draw aren’t likely to have an Ed Emberley conversion moment when they’re being graded. By the time young people have passed from the Adventures in Cartooning target demographic to that of Drawing Words, they may have been discouraged out of telling stories with pictures. It’s a tragedy Adventures in Cartooning is trying to forestall. For those lost cartoonists, a healthy dose of Lynda Barry might jolt them back to a kid’s pleasure in making worlds and telling stories. Or maybe I should just casually scatter a half-dozen copies of Adventures in Cartooning in the library’s study area.

(This post just had a couple of comments, which I've allowed to evaporate into the ether. Perhaps you'd like to add your own now.)

My Panelists Archive: Comments on "The Playwright: the Page and the Stanza"

Imagine my surprise when, after I'd written about the latest Eddie Campbell collaboration, the authors of The Playwright stopped in to set the facts straight.



First off, my Panelists colleague Derik Badman said:

Great analysis, Isaac. I like the concept of enjambment applied to comics.

I wonder if we could say the same thing happens where someone like Hergé use the turn of the page to break the suspense/release of some action or event. The final panel of one page leaves the narrative flow up in the air, leading to the conclusion of the beat for the beginning of the next page.

To which I replied:

Oh, sure. That’s not just Hergé; I’d say it’s a sort of fundamental principle, especially for a story that’s serialized: the last panel offers at once a conclusion of what has come before and a promise of what’s yet to come. In an action story, that could be a cliffhanger; in different sorts of stories, different sorts of resolution and tension are important.

And another Panelist, Jared Gardner, said:

Great stuff, Isaac. I will never regret Campbell’s beautiful color work in this edition (indeed, his use of color has been the biggest revelation in his work in the last few years, after decades of admiring him as one of the great practitioners of b&w comics), but I would so love to see this in its original 9 panel form. I’ve bugged everyone I know to see if they have a copy, but no luck. Anyone out there in TV land have some pages to share?

And then Daren White, Campbell's coauthor, said:

There were only three chapters published in the 9 panel grid format (actually, most were 7 panels) and a further single chapter written before the change in format. Top Shelf still have DeeVee 2007 in stock, which contains one such chapter.

To which I could only reply:

I stand corrected!

I wonder — would it be unseemly for me to edit my essay (or whatever that was) in light of this new knowledge?

And are you saying that some of the chapters in the current edition were set up in a regular seven-panel grid? (If so, what was the layout of that grid? It’s hard to guess. And how were those chapters transformed for the current edition? I’m genuinely curious.)

White answered,

Oh no, definitely not. I’m enjoying these and hesitated about posting because I wouldn’t want to influence anyone.

There wasn’t a strict template, rather what seemed to fit the scene. In the earlier chapters we simply cut the pages into tiers. I don’t recall any panels moving between ties, hence the two and three panel pages in the final book. I think there is only a single splash (the Playwright looking at the movie poster on page 81) where the image was edited, marginally, to make it better fit the new format.

I did go into a bit of detail about the re-formatting in this interview at Comics Reporter.

And then Eddie Campbell added:

Isaac. I enjoyed your piece. I don’t want to get mixed up commenting on critical writings here, but I see where some clarification might be helpful. Daren’s ‘seven panels’ might be confusing. The seven were still on a ‘nine panel grid’ (as they say) with a couple of pairs joined, is what he was saying. With the later chapters I just drew them as single tiers but otherwise to the same size specs, which means if you see nine-panel divisions in the actor chapter, that’s a) coincidence b) me doing it subconsciously, or c) Daren still thinking that way in his script. All of those are possibilities, but the tiers were never arranged that way at any time even accidentally as far as i can recall. The artwork is in two piles in different formats. Half of the book as it currently stands was done in 9-panel format. The colouring was done on xeroxes soaked and stretched.
A little photoshopping was done at the 12th hour, but that was negligible to the overall finished thing, being confined to dropping in a few wallpaper effects, and one photographic face. I was trying out a few tricks for my next book, which is entirely done on the computer. as you were. :)

one other thing. I seem to recall that the actor chapter might have been the very last thing done and therefore the number of pages we had left to fill would have had a bearing on the final shape of that chapter. Coincidentally, at six pages, or tiers, it does fit the nine-panel set-up, but if you look at the final chapter, ten, you’ll see it comes to 16 tiers and doesn’t fit the ‘nine’. Similarly, chapter 8 comes in at 17 tiers. All of this sounds a bit statistical, but you know what I mean.
You were on the right track.

I replied:

I had noticed while I was re-reading the book for this piece that I had a hard time “figuring out” the original pages for a couple of the chapters — though even chapters eight and ten have a few three-page “beats” that I was able to imagine as three-tier pages. (I’m thinking p. 126-128, p. 153-155, p. 156-158.) Even if those never existed as three-tier pages, they seem to be working with that nine-panel rhythm. I’d be surprised if the nine-panel rhythm hadn’t become nearly an instinct for you by now; as I said, I consider you a real master of this form, so I mean that in a complimentary way. Maybe these “beats” are residual echoes of that familiar rhythm.

As for the actor chapter, I think you missed an opportunity if you never placed Bonaparte squarely in the center of a nine-panel grid. But there is always the next book …

Another Panelist, Charles Hatfield, added:

All of this has me thinking about Groensteen’s comments on the page as a hyperframe, and it occurs to me that that notional hyperframe may be something that comics artists carry around in their heads at all times: an internalized awareness of the book or page as an object, as literally the medium of delivery.

Often I see poems, short lyrics typically, printed on a page and then capped by an enormous amount of white space—the blankness that delimits the poem and establishes it as something complete and done. In contrast, I seldom see gridded comics in which the grid ends in mid-page and is capped by white space. Occasionally, yes, but not often. Of course I remember plenty of instances (usually in old comic books) where the grid is finished by some non-diegetic material, usually some kind of publisher hype, but even that becomes a way of filling out the hyperframe.

Maybe it’s just a commercial consideration: get some ads into those empty spaces! (Sometimes aesthetic preferences start as economic matters: dig the use of alternating color and B&W in some of the great Modernist picture books, for example.) But, for whatever reason, comics drawn in grids typically fill every page, top to bottom. The rare exception often comes on the last page, a kind of Finis gesture.

This is one of the reasons I found Chester Brown’s autobiographical books so interesting: they had no discernible grid. Rather, they insisted on isolating individual panels against lots of blank space, black or white. Of course, when Brown got to Louis Riel, he returned to the six-panel grid with a vengeance, but then there are a couple of highly fraught instances where that grid is left incomplete, or unfilled—which becomes so powerful when most of the work is relentlessly gridded.

The notional “page” that ends up being printed on real pages is a powerful idea in the minds of many comics artists, I’m guessing. Even an ideological thing.

Derik Badman pointed out:

“I seldom see gridded comics in which the grid ends in mid-page and is capped by white space.”

Dash Shaw does that in some of his books, he talks a bit about it in an interview he did on Ink Studs.

Brown’s idiosyncratic approach in some of his books came, I believe, from the way he was drawing the panels and then laying them out on the page as kind of a collage process. I suspect most cartoonists don’t work that way (though it would be easier now, if one worked digitally), so following the grid, or filling up the page becomes a kind of mathematical limitation… not mention economic, since all that empty space with no content starts ballooning the size of your comic and the cost of making it.

(Maybe that is all obvious.)

Charles replied,

Yeah, Brown shows himself (in the autobio metacomic “Showing Helder”) pasting or taping down individual panels. He would draw them one by one, cut them out, and lay them down on the board.

And I chimed in,

There’s an early Spiegelman strip (“As the Mind Reels”) that leaves its last tier blank, as a sort of indication that things have broken down and the transmission has stopped.

But I think in most cases the motive to fill the page has something to do with economics, as Derik hints. More blank space means more pages, which means a more expensive print run.

Finally, Sean Michael Robinson said:

Totally agree with this reading. I think that economics, and economic’s first cousin, expediency, are invoked much less often than they could be in critical discussions, so cheers to you and Derik for doing so. I was thinking about this just today reflecting on the density of some of the “Alec” comics- some discussion of that at HU in the comments section.

Oh, and enjoyed this whole post- and completely agree with you re: that page from King Canute Club- especially love the attitude in the middle tier far right panel. Some really muscular inking as well.

My Panelists Archive: The Playwright: the Page and the Stanza

The real highlight of my next piece for The Panelists wasn't so much the essay but the comments section, which will go live as an archive here on this blog in about twelve hours. We were doing a week on the work of Eddie Campbell, and I came out of semi-retirement as a comics critic to write this:



As part of our week devoted to the works of Eddie Campbell, I’d like to expand on something Charles noted about The Playwright yesterday, in a way that might help me understand why The Playwright doesn’t, at least to me, really feel like an Eddie Campbell book.

As Charles noted, the original black-and-white serialized version of The Playwright appeared in DeeVee in a different format, the layout of each page working from a three-by-three grid. In Top Shelf’s The Playwright, these nine-panel grids are reformatted one tier (usually three panels) to a page, which shouldn’t seem like a significant alteration. Having only reconstructed the original DeeVee pages in my head, except for the one that Charles posted, I can’t testify to the actual effects of the change. But I think it’s within my purview to offer some speculations.

Eddie Campbell is a master of the nine-panel grid, and his mastery comes chiefly in his sense of timing. The Alec books are full of single-page anecdotes that build to their punchlines with the timing of an expert pub-stool raconteur. Here, for example, Campbell the self-publisher tries to explain to his daughter where the money comes from.



Notice the way the first tier sets up the anecdote and delays its beginning, establishing a casual tone. (And yes, the title panel takes up one of the "beats" in this grid.) This same joke could have been told in four panels with a little condensing, but the newspaper strip isn’t Campbell’s native format, and that’s not his customary pacing.

One of my favorite Campbell nine-panel grids is from The King Canute Crowd, and it’s interesting to me partly because of the ambiguous relationship between its text (in part, an anecdote with a nice punchline) and its images (Alec cleans his glasses and gives a slight smile). But I’m also really interested in the rhythm of this page, the uneven movements of its notional “camera,” the blank panel accompanying the punchline, the way the images are a self-contained unit but the text carries over from the previous pages—all in all, it’s a fascinating little bit of comics timing.



Plus, you have to feel a little nostalgic about the way Campbell “paints” with Zipatone.

Just between the Alec omnibus and From Hell, Campbell has easily eleven hundred pages of nine-panel grids under his belt, and that’s not counting Bacchus or any of his other projects. It’s his favored format, and I’d imagine that by this point in his career, he could spin any event, from removing a splinter to the fall of Rome, into a well-paced page on that grid of regular intervals.

Granted, The Playwright is drawn from Daren White’s script, but I can’t help watching for Campbell’s storytelling rhythm in the book. And in fact I think it’s there, but the current edition obscures it, or overwrites it with another rhythm. In most of the chapters of The Playwright, it’s not hard to reconstruct the original pages as you read, and to see that each set of three tiers holds together in a way that those tiers don’t mesh with the ones before or after them.

The first chapter, for example, is built from two three-tier pages of voyeurism on the bus, a page on the girl with “ever-so-slightly crossed eyes” that our protagonist Mr. Benge once dated, a page of swipes from old erotica (mostly), a page on Uncle Ernie, and a page of Mr. Benge making and serving tea. Each original page has its own subject, and each would serve as what Will Eisner called a “metapanel,” containing its several discrete units in one larger unity. The new edition reconfigures the existing panels into smaller syntactical chunks, and it alters the rhythm of the story.

I know I’m not the first person to draw a comparison between the regular intervals of a comics grid and the regulated stresses and measures of metrical verse. Since I spend a lot of time in my day job thinking about the structures and rhythms of poetry, I tend to think of the comics page as analogous to the stanza in formal verse: a fixed space in which a large or small amount of action can take place, a measured unit against which a number of different rhythms can be deployed.

When the syntax of a poetic sentence runs over from one line to the next, the energy or tension that line break creates is called enjambment, and we could fruitfully think about the ways that comics scenes or story beats can be enjambed not only from tier to tier but from page to page, even when there’s no page turn involved. Many poets (and many cartoonists) will instead use the natural interruption provided by a stanza break (or a page break) to shift locations, conclude sentences, or otherwise divide one unit of meaning from another.

Thinking about it through this analogy to poetry, we could say that the original published version of The Playwright, constructed out of fairly unified pages that attach less strongly to each other, is not a heavily enjambed comic: the energy that pulls us from one page to the next is more a question of narrative than syntax. Creating more divisions within the pages, making each original tier its own new page, changes this somewhat: now, from page to page, we have a varying amount of “syntactical” pull. Sometimes the end of a page marks the end of a thought; sometimes it’s only part of an incomplete thought.

We also lose some effects of layout: the heroic genital endowment of “the actor,” for example, is squarely in the center of its original page (panel five of the nine-panel grid); its daunting omphalic (well, just phallic) centrality no longer dominates the tiers of images before and after it.

And we lose the force of nearly half of Campbell’s (or White’s) punchlines in this new format: if the first tier of what was a three-tier page is now on the left side of the book, its final tier will also be on the left, sharing visual space with the beginning of the next (original) page. That problem is a little difficult to describe, but it’s easy to show you. Here’s an imaginary or reconstructed version of that page of swiped erotica from the first chapter, laid out as I imagine it was in DeeVee:



And here’s the way it now appears in The Playwright.




The vulgar openness of the final panel is, in the original, set against a set of demure and old-fashioned concealments; full-body portraits are abruptly replaced with a close-cropped, partial, and fleshy torso. In the single-tier formatting, however, the punch of that final panel is somewhat diminished. I suppose we could argue that in its new position this panel draws a metaphor to the folds where the book’s two pages meet (an interesting reading that I don’t think I can entirely support). Or we might argue that there’s something gained by juxtaposing the more lurid moments of the playwright’s imaginings with poor domestic Uncle Ernie. In this case, however, I think I miss the set-up and release of the original, and something of its emphasis on the playwright’s chaste repulsion from the biological. In other words, I think the rhetoric of the original layout is stronger.

But that’s not to say that I would call The Playwright in its new edition crucially flawed. I haven’t said anything about the various benefits Campbell is able to wring from handling the story in color. (Robert Stanley Martin has written insightfully about the significance of particular colors; I am also interested in the way that hand-coloring the book’s repeated photocopied panels or enlargements undermines and revises its interest in stasis or repetition.) The new rhythm of the reformatted Playwright just strikes me, I suppose, as less poetic, and more like the prose of a novel or essay. We move from page to page in this book as we would from sentence to sentence in a paragraph. That’s appropriate enough to its subject matter: this is, after all, a sort of a biography, and those don’t generally come in stanzas anyway. I do wish I could read them both side by side to make my choice between them.

Stay tuned for that comments section!

My Panelists Archive: Comments on "A Mountain of Minicomics"

These are the comments produced back in January 2011, when I posted my article about minicomics storage to The Panelists.



On January 19, 2011, at 9:03 am, Shannon Smith said:

I use these little plastic crate things. They look like plastic milk crates but are half or a third of the size. They are the perfect size and you can usually get them for a dollar or less (two for a dollar) at your cheapo stores like Dollar Tree, Everythings a Dollar, Dollar General, Family Dollar, Dumbo Dollar, Holler Dollar, Lol’er Dollar, Lady Gaga’s Dollar Emporium etc. The positives of these little crates are that they are plastic so they hold up, they stack perfectly, they come in all kinds of colors, and best of all, they fit perfectly on a book shelf so you can still have your minicomics right next to your complete set of the the Left Behind series. Jesus approves of proper book case management.
Good luck.

My pal and colleague Charles Hatfield said:

"…first I’ll have to spend a few dozen hours alphabetizing the collection and centrifuging the dross away from the gold."

Oh, gee, such torture. :)

Seriously, I enjoyed this post so much, partly because it was a treat to be reminded of the CCS Library and to check out its blog once again, partly because, as my family can attest, I’m a Container Geek. For some reason I like containers even when, perhaps especially when, they’re empty and I can imagine various ways of using them.

We should try to get some banner ads from IKEA and The Container Store. :)

I don’t have as many minis as you do, Isaac, but I have given this matter some thought. Shannon’s suggestion reminds me that big box office supply stores often have stackable crates on the cheap.

In general, I find it difficult to cleave to pure alphabetization when shelving my comics–any comics, not just minis–because of the sheer daunting variety of sizes. I do end up sorting by size as well as alphabetically; it seems the only safe way to pack very big books on shelves (e.g., the Sunday Press Nemo that I have).

Then Jared Gardner said:

I know such considerations are probably wayyyyy too anal, exposing the not-so-hidden archivist in me, but isn’t there some concern about using those acid-rich packing boxes from Staples for long-term storage? Of course, it is not as if most minis are printed on acid-free paper…

To which I replied,

It’s not as if they’re in archival boxes right now, Jared. I think being able to sort and retrieve them will be a step up from the “archaeological strata” / trashpile mode of storage I currently have going on.

Let’s pretend that when I have more pocket change I will phase out my Staples boxes in favor of archival document boxes with the same dimensions.

And Ben Towle chimed in:

Mine are all in various-sized plastic boxes, but I too wish I had some better system. Those periodical boxes look perfect–if a bit pricey.

Caitlin McGurk checked in to say:

Wonderful post, Isaac! Thanks for the interview, any chance to rep CCS and my own over-saturated comics librarian brain is a good one.

Shannon- any chance you could post a link to the type of containers you’re talking about? I can’t quite visualize them, but it sounds like a great solution.

Jared- as I mentioned in my shpiel, Gaylord Industries does offer acid free boxes, but Isaac and I were going for the cheap and dirty method, just to get the storage set. If you’d like to read more about the acid-free end of treating/maintaining comics, check out the article I wrote for Diamond Comics about a year ago on the subject.

Rob Clough said:

Funny you should mention this. I’m in the process of reorganizing my minis as well, and in fact have just moved my main comics bookshelves into the living room of my small house. I’m just using a conventional bookshelf for my minis, and I’m alphabetizing them by creator. Then I have a separate section for my many, many mini anthologies. There is some question as to what’s a minicomic (Big Questions?), and I also have a few standard-sized comic books in this section as well. When I’m done, I’ll take a “shelf porn” photo of it.

And I replied:

One of the real disadvantages of the system I’m planning to use is that it’s much too blah for shelf porn. I wish I had room for the Alec Longstreth solution.

Shannon Smith replied (to Caitlin):

I tried to find some pics of the small plastic crates online but failed. I’ll have to take some shots of mine sometime. If you google plastic milk crates and look at images you’ll find lots of pics of standard size milk crates which people have been using to store records for ever. They are perfect size for records. Most stores also have the smaller ones which are perfect for minicomics (or 45s). Target or Wal-Mart are probably going to have them in their housewares sections but your cheaper stores should have them for a buck or less. They travel well too. I just them at conventions to both transport my stuff and display it.

Mike Rhode reminded me:

Don’t forget to send the dross to MSU, Isaac!

But I already had plans:

I’ve already promised the castoffs to my pals at the Schulz Library. (Vermont represent.)

Caitlin McGurk said:

Woot woot!!!

My Panelists Archive: Comments on "Porcellino Re-Inked"

These are the comments occasioned by my piece on Porcellino's line for the now-defunct Panelists blog.



My friend Ben Towle was the first to comment (on 
January 10, 2011 at 9:17 am):



Your changes also introduce an increased concern with mechanical reproduction: you’d have to worry about getting a photocopier with good, rich ink and you’d have to tinker with the contrast settings a bit to make sure the variations in the line quality are reproduced accurately. Porcellino’s style is married to its physical format in a way that few other artist’s are. It’s perfectly suited to mechanical reproduction on a black and white analog photocopier.





And I said:



What would really get me in trouble with a photocopier is if I re-inked his work with cross-hatching, or with (shudder) gray tones. I think you make a really good point, Ben—and it’s something I should have been thinking about.





(By which I meant, in part, that one has to think about Porcellino's awareness of his own means of publication, and the way that the xerox machine informs his choices in style.)

Sean Michael Robinson then said:


Benjamin- This depends on what type of copier he was using, how well it’s been maintained, how much toner it has etc. A decent copier from the mid eighties up until, say, 2003 would have been able to produce a perfect reproduction of Isaac’s panel without many problems, assuming it was well-maintained and had enough toner. Certainly copiers earlier than that had major problems with black areas, and more “modern” copiers can have problems, especially if you don’t make some adjustments to their settings. (more modern copiers have gotten better at reproducing greys, and thus have gotten worse for most of the tasks required for cartooning- i.e. crisp, black lines. Most, however can be put into a “text” mode that will reproduce crisp black okay). But I can see how Mr. P’s image would be pretty impervious to a bad photocopier. 
Anyway, I’m not lecturing you, I hope- just a public service announcement for anyone that might be reading :) I can’t tell you the amount of minis I’ve read from local cartoonists that have all types of grey variation in what should be crisp black lines…


 


To which Ben replied:



Exactly my point! 
And, yeah, for sure modern copiers aren’t exempt from those issues. I’ve made enough minis to know that first-hand.





Sean Michael Robinson also said:


Isaac-
This is a bizarre, and pretty inspired, idea, and I have to say that I prefer your version of the panel! (apologies to Mr. Porcellino if you are reading this.) Dead line weight really bothers me- you’ve separated foreground from background and added a hint of lighting implication with the variation you’ve placed here. 
That being said, if I may critique the newly created panel… you’ve added two things that I would consider undesirable- with the little bit of curve you’ve added to the drummer arm you’ve made what was already an uncomfortable joint look closer to a broken arm. Second, the proximity of the left drum stick to the cymbal has added a tangent to the picture that becomes a new focal point- meaning that they’re too close now, and that close proximity draws the eye.
Anyway, this is a great idea. I’m pretty stoked to see where you take this process.





And I said:


The thing with the drumstick was a mistake on my part, and if I could have fixed it easily in Photoshop before preparing the post, I would have. I’ll stand behind the weird anatomy on the drummer’s arm, though, because I really was trying to duplicate Porcellino’s forms, not to “correct” them.
I don’t think it’s such a “bizarre … idea”, really, to imitate or alter someone’s work in order to understand style and its implications. I encourage poetry students to do this sort of thing all the time. Cartoonists do it, too, when they’re learning their craft; why not add it to the critic’s toolkit as well?





And Sean Sean replied:


I meant that it’s bizarre for a critic to do so- I was just thinking recently about the overlap between critics and practicing artists in the cartooning field just recently, actually. I guess partially I’m drawn to the idea of a loop- that, after you’d posted your panel, others would critique your panel :) I don’t consider “bizarre” a bad thing, by the way… I’m intrigued.





Then he posted a link to the nib-pen re-inking of Porcellino that I posted as an update to my original post.



He said, of it:


Here’s a different take, done with a pen nib (Esterbrook 356 for those pen fetishists out there). Kinda reminds me of Gene Deitch with the extra bit of bounciness and variation combined with the simplified drawing.

And I said:


Now, see, that’s what I should have done. I took the easy way out, though: my nib pens are all packed up, and I had a brush pen right beside my keyboard.


Charles Hatfield said,



Dead line weight really bothers me…
It doesn’t bother me in Porcellino at all, for the reasons Isaac suggests. But uniformity of line can pose legibility problems for me in work that is denser, such as some of Ron Regé, Jr.’s stuff, or in certain early minicomics I’ve seen by Simon Gane. Both are very interesting cartoonists, mind you, but at times I have difficulty parsing what I see. Porcellino, I think, has an ideal style and sensibility for uniform line weight.





And Derik Badman replied:


I think this contributes to the tone of his work, since the distance between near and far, in autobiography, is often also the difference between self and other. To give the environment the same line-weight as the central character is to suggest something strong about the permeability of identity, or the influence of world on self (and vice versa).

I love this reading, very astute, Isaac.
 


Then Jason Overby dropped in to add:


I like John P’s original panel, and I think it’s because it’s devoid of stylization that gets in the way of the transparency between maker and consumer. Porcellino’s lack of “polish” could be read as a lack of trickery, getting away from slickness so that only the core, pure communication is left.
I don’t really like John’s drawings as drawing, but I think his comics are almost better than anyone’s. Similar to Daniel Johnston and others, they’re so immediate that you trust him. I think a lot (as a cartoonist) about how technique can get in the way of content. This is a central struggle for me in comics.



... 
but we have to be skeptical about romanticizing purity, I think, too.


My Panelists Archive: Porcellino Re-Inked

My next post at The Panelists was a reply, of sorts, to Derik Badman's take on one panel from John Porcellino's King-Cat #65.




I should begin by saying that I did not undertake this experiment with the idea that I would improve Porcellino; nor was it my intent to ruin him. My dabbling with comics craft has always been mainly an effort to figure out how comics work. I mean, I draw for fun, too, but mainly I draw in order to see better, so I can write with a more complete sense of a cartoonist’s range of potential decisions. I’ve approached this Porcellino panel in order to understand it better.

Since Derik has already written about the text in this panel, I thought it would make sense for me to focus on the image. And, in the spirit of the “Covered” and “Repaneled” blogs, I thought I’d try to zero in on Porcellino’s style by changing it. So I inked the panel with a brush.



(I am not trying to say my version is any good.)

This side-by-side comparison suggests a few things, even beyond the obvious and undisputed fact that I am clumsy with a brush.

For example, looking at this pair of panels, we might say that the change in drawing tools has less effect on the words than on the images—that my version’s words “mean” in much the same way, but the lines of the drawings start to work differently, even when the lines are “the same.” To an extent, this is surprising, because as Charles and Derik suggested last week, there are ways in which Porcellino’s diagrammatic drawing functions like language, or makes it easy to blur the boundary between text and image. Still, I seem to have altered the drawing more than the text, here.

Porcellino’s minimalism relies heavily on diagrammatic signification: rather than drawing what a drum kit looks like, he’ll draw what it is, leaving out the complicated superstructure in order to show two cymbals, two drumsticks, two drumheads, and the energy around them. A face is the four or five lines that create eyes, nose, mouth, and ears. For those lines to call attention to themselves as lines, rather than as marks in a diagram—for the variability of brush lines to add “life” to the contours—seems to contradict Porcellino’s method of seeing or parsing the world that he draws.

And there’s another important difference. Look at the thick solidity of the drummer’s arm. The brush lines do a lot more than Porcellino’s pen lines to discriminate between foreground and background. In this panel, Porcellino has done some of that work by removing detail from the figures in the background (they’re small, but there would be room for a pair of eyes, at least, on each of those distant faces). But in a lot of Porcellino’s work there’s not much graphic difference between near and far. I think this contributes to the tone of his work, since the distance between near and far, in autobiography, is often also the difference between self and other. To give the environment the same line-weight as the central character is to suggest something strong about the permeability of identity, or the influence of world on self (and vice versa).

This equanimity between subject and environment is, coincidentally, even evident in a small inking decision I had to make about the direction of the energy in the lines surrounding the drummer and his kit: do those lines come from the drummer or from the crowd? (I had done this inking even before the commenter “Nate” focused on the energy lines last Wednesday.)

In Porcellino’s impartial inking, those energy lines are almost like little equals signs, connecting crowd to music rather than directing energy from one place to another. I think this has a lot to do with the sentiment and sensitivity that permeates Porcellino’s stories: his lines imply that everything is interconnected, breathing the same air.

UPDATE: In the comments section, Sean Michael Robinson (of The Hooded Utilitarian) provided an improved re-inking of this Porcellino panel, done with a nib pen instead of a brush. (See the comments below for further details.)



I think this image actually makes my points just as well as my clumsier brush-inked one: that the change in line weight affects the meaning of the text less than that of the image; that the visual distinction between foreground and background seems to undermine something important about Porcellino's tone; and that the energy lines can't "connect" the different parts of the image as well if they reveal or imply the energy's direction.

My Panelists Archive: Comments on "Enid Coleslaw and the G.O.P."

My initial post on Ghost World piled up 51 comments over on The Panelists. Apparently people care about Enid Coleslaw!

I am going to try to "curate" the comments a little in this archive, since there was a lot of material there, and not all of it was constructive. I won't misquote anyone, but I will probably prune a few comments and expunge a few more, in the interest of brevity if nothing else.



On January 5, 2011 at 10:41 am, Craig Fischer said:

Neat analysis, Isaac, though I don’t find Enid “uninformed, immature, and a little lame.” To me, she’s a vibrant, intelligent person stuck in a banal environment, and she deals with crushing suburban boredom by wishing that the stuff around her was a lot weirder than it actually is.

Hubba Hubba is a sterile diner located in a strip mall, but Enid elevates it into “the Mona Lisa of the bad, fake diners.” She’s desperate to find the quirky elements (Allen’s hair!) that’ll make going to Hubba Hubba a kitchy, playful experience, even if those elements are actually more pathetic and dismissable than kitchy. Her “What does that even mean?” line is her attempt to make the environment around her strange and interesting—a mantra of sorts that she repeats a page later, while looking at the “Mind-Benders” on the menu.

Maybe part of the “emplotment”—the narrative trajectory—of GHOST WORLD is this: Enid begins as a character who mocks and “makes strange” the environment around her, but it’s not enough. Eventually, she needs a less stultifying, more intellectually stimulating world (not a ghost world, nyuk, nyuk), and even though she doesn’t get into college, she knows she has to leave home, to find people and a milieu worthy of her attention.

To which I replied:

That’s a very hopeful reading of what’s going on in Ghost World, but I really don’t share it. I don’t mean to say that I think Enid is out-and-out lame, but I think that realizing that under her “vibrant” exterior she’s naïve and crushingly insecure is a major part of the book’s trajectory.

I think Enid leaves town to get away from herself, or to get away from her memory and others’ memories of her, rather than to seek a “more intellectually stimulating world.” That’s more or less how she explains her “secret plan” (p. 74-75).

Then, on January 5, 2011 at 1:35 pm, Charles Hatfield said:

I had thought that Enid was commenting on the banality of the idiom in the newspaper headline: IN BED with the GOP. Which, I’ve got to say, is a type of banality--the would-be titillating come-on–-that journalism traffics in so much that sometimes we desperately need an Enid (or a Clowes) to point out how strange and interesting our reliance on such cliches is.

I do agree, though, with the larger pattern of Isaac’s interpretation, particularly with the idea that the prank played on “Bearded Windbreaker” is a turning point in terms of Enid’s understanding that her smartass rebellious hipster persona can actually be damaging, and suffocating. Isaac, it’s at precisely this period, isn’t it, that Clowes also does that great short story “Caricature,” which similarly questions the terms of hipster alienation that the earlier Eightballs insist on? I remember feeling that Clowes was gaining in subtlety and gravity during those issues.

I tend to prefer the Clowes stories that I think aspire to this same type of moral and emotional engagement (I find Ghost World quite moving) over those stories that seem merely icy, chill, and alienating to me, e.g., “Black Nylon” or “Gynecology.”

But I was hearing none of that:

Considering that two pages later Enid says that she used to think “DWF,” in a personals ad, stands for “dwarf,” I think it’s possible that she’s so disconnected from “grown-up”politics that she genuinely has no idea what the G.O.P. is.

Becky’s response is, basically, “Who even reads the articles in the front of the paper? Aren’t papers just about personals ads and stuff?” I’m paraphrasing, and maybe skewing her point a little bit, but I think both of them are genuinely ignorant here.

On January 5, 2011, at 10:44 am, patrick ford said:

Something I’ve noticed over the years is there are many people who want to like, or identify with characters in fiction.
That’s something which has never exclusively interested me, and much of the fiction I like doesn’t feature characters who are intended to be likable.
It’s certain (I think) that Clowes never intended Enid to be a role model.
She really isn’t any more likable than Wilson, less so really because given her shallow personal character if we were to revisit her years later she probably would be more irritating than Wilson.

To which Jared Gardner replied:

Good lord, MORE unlikable than Wilson? {shudder}

I am inclined to agree with Isaac here that we are meant to think of Enid as a little “lame” in precisely the same way we are all inclined to think of our younger selves as a little (or in my case, a lotta) lame. And I think Isaac has found a crucial moment where the change in perspective happens–signaled not only by her political naiveté but in this panel by a (to my memory: forgive me if I’m wrong) uncharacteristic perspective where “we” seem to be seated in the next booth, ourselves (and our freepaper) being judged (lamely) by Enid.

On January 5, 2011, at 1:38 pm, Gabe Roth said:

I read that moment differently. The headline “IN BED WITH THE GOP” is a classic instance of a particular type of insider-speak. The reader is presumed to know not only that GOP = G.O.P. = Grand Old Party = Republican Party, but also that “in bed with” in a political context means “engaged in an (implicitly shady) alliance with.” If you take away all that accreted code knowledge, the phrase starts to seem meaningless and absurd.

I think Enid knows exactly what the headline means. But knowing what it means implicates her in the whole conventional daily-newspaper-reading, political-scandal-following mainstream culture. She doesn’t want to be part of that culture. But to say “God, what a stupid insidery headline” is to say “I understand the discourse in which that headline exists, and therefore I’m a participant in it.” The only way out is incomprehension.

(There’s a similar moment in ‘Wig Wam Bam,’ when one of the pretentious NY art-punks refers to the Dead Boys and Hopey replies, “I hate that song ‘Truckin’.” Hopey knows the difference between the Dead Boys and the Grateful Dead, but, by pretending she’s never heard of the Dead Boys, she announces that she’s not going to participate in this pretentious NY art-punk conversation.)

To which Jared Gardner replied:

I like this way of thinking… but I’m not sure I can buy into (and believe me I wanna) the Enid=Hopey logic here. I mean, we have so many reasons to believe in Hopey’s critical distance from the mass mediated blabbage around here; but do we really for Enid?

And I piled on:

Plus, there’s a big difference between knowing the jargon of mainstream national news-media political-party coverage and knowing the name of a fairly obscure punk band that existed for three years.

And Gabe's answer was:

Enid definitely ≠ Hopey; I just think they’re making the same conversational move in those two panels.

Enid’s problem in Ghost World is the classic adolescent struggle to figure out where she fits in relation to ‘mainstream society’—inside or outside. Inside is for losers, but outside has been so thoroughly co-opted that there’s no real place to stand. ‘IN BED WITH THE GOP’ is just one little example of everything horrible and smug and insidery that she hates about inside. She escapes it by positioning herself (at that moment) as a person who’s not on the inside of political-journalism cliché-speak.

(It’s worth bearing in mind that GW was published in the ’90s, when a teenage outsider wannabe was much more likely to think of politics as a trivial sideshow.)

Then there's a minor bout of sniping from Noah Berlatsky that I won't bother repeating, but it motivated Charles Hatfield to observe this:

... the moral arguments in Ghost World are not reducible to who’s hip and who’s not. There are questions of empathy and responsibility there that exceed, I bet, even what Clowes expected from the work when he was midstream.

To which Noah, after some goading from Jeet Heer, replied:

Oh, all right. Sigh.

I don’t find the questions of empathy and moral responsibility Charles is talking about either engaging or enlightening. As I’ve written about the book elsewhere, what I mostly get from it is an older male creator acting out his attraction/repulsion for younger girls. I think that fits this panel quite well. The girls are looking off panel at the reader/author, whose paper it is. The paper is about the Grand Old Party (coded old and surely male) performing metaphorically sexual acts. Clowes has Enid ironically refusing to understand the headline — a sexual disavowal, which actually means she understands quite well this headline about perverse sex with grand old men. The knowledge/not knowledge binary is a tease and a provocation; the moral experience Isaac articulates in which we are able to feel superior (and/or possibly inferior) to Enid is part of the (sexualized) satisfaction we (the grand old party) get in pretending that Enid knows and does not know us.

... a couple more notes. First, I don’t think this is something Clowes is unaware of. He picks his details carefully; the Grand Old Party is really not just a random choice.

Second — in this reading, Clowes emphatically gets the laugh on Enid. Enid is saying she doesn’t understand the headline in order to show she understands it; she gets the stupid metaphor. But the trick is, that stupid metaphor isn’t just a random paper lying around; it’s a snide sexual remark implicating Enid which has been placed there by Clowes. Enid gets the diagetic point, but not the extra-diagetic point. She’s attempting to assert her control and wisdom, but Clowes shows us she’s just his cipher. In this way Isaac gets the details wrong but the essence right; this is a panel which sneers at Enid for her lack of sophistication. I don’t find that particularly morally insightful or uplifting though.

On January 6, 2011, at 7:46 am, Mike Hunter said:

... why should she not know what “GOP” stands for? Rather than truly not knowing what the headline stands for, or – as Gabe Roth suggested, pretending she doesn’t know, couldn’t she (not to give Enid too much credit, but she’s still no dummy) be making a comment that’s an equivalent of Magritte’s “This is not a pipe” painting? Pointing out that the headline not only cannot be taken for its literal meaning, but that it might not even come close to an accurate representation of the situation in the article?

For instance, it’d be as if Enid were to overhear someone saying “Have a nice day!” and comment, “What does that even mean?” Of course, understanding the intended meaning of the phrase, but raising questions such as, how many good things are necessary for making up a nice day? Does it mean, for some unfortunates, having a day in which far fewer lousy things happen? (I.e., as in “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”) And so on…

So, her comment is simply another manifestation of her “looking through/beyond surface manifestations and culturally-accepted meanings and facades” attitude. And finding them meaningless. (“There’s no there, there!”)

...And on January 6, 2011, at 7:46 am, Rob Clough said:

The key line in the book, to me, is when Enid realizes that she and Becky are going in two different directions as people because Becky doesn’t hate herself. It’s the point where Enid voices her depression, where she understands that things can’t continue how they’re going. She’s created a world where she’s an outsider no matter what else she does, and so has to leave that world. Her rift with Becky finished off the only connection she had left, and she realized that the rift was not Becky’s fault for better adjusting to society, but hers for being unable to. Leaving town–leaving the story, as it were–can be construed as much as a form of metaphorical suicide as it is metaphorical rebirth. She’s not smiling or happy when she leaves (anticipating a rebirth or a new life)–she’s just hoping the escape can ease her pain.

... I thought your point was quite astute about Clowes putting together a narrative on the back end, basing it on clues he laid in the early chapters.

Then the conversation gets tangled up. Here, Jeet Heer is replying to something Noah Berlatsky said a few comments ago:

@Noah. “what I mostly get from it is an older male creator acting out his attraction/repulsion for younger girls”: this is a pretty good example of “the intentional fallacy” in action. I don’t think its very fruitful to judge works of art by what the author’s presumed motives are. In fact, I don’t even think it’s possible for anyone (even Clowes) to know what the motives of his art art, or what the motives of any art are.

The issue of “moral questioning” that Charles raised have to do with the friendship between Enid and Becky, and also how the two girls treat other people. This is something that can be discussed by looking at what Clowes wrote and drew. It doesn’t really contribute to the conversation to speculate about Clowes motives, unless by chance you are a telepath. If you are a telepath, then tell us and continue to enlighten us about the secret, ulterior motive of artists. On the other hand, if you are a telepath, you could use your power in more frutiful ways, perhaps by uncovering government and corporate corruption.

And I said:

I’m not really interested in whether Clowes personally thinks Enid is hawt, but I find that I am interested in at least one aspect of an author’s perceivable psychology (intentional or not): as his interests and ideas shift, the themes of the works shift. If I find myself responding more to the ideas in David Boring than in Like a Velvet Glove, and I know they’re written by the same person, I want to see when those new ideas started to develop.

Noah seems to be caricaturing those ideas as merely an older (not yet middle aged) cartoonist pining for teenage indie tail and then rejecting the notion of jailbait.

For me, or at least in my reading of Ghost World, it’s about more than (or less than?) simple attraction to scornful ugly-cute teenage girls: instead, it’s about Clowes as a writer moving out of a period of personal grotesquerie and universal satire (as in “I Hate You Deeply”) and into a period of social observation, where he becomes interested in writing characters.

There might be a grain of truth in Noah’s lampooning—remember the way that Clowes has Enid show up admiringly at a zine-store signing in “Punk Day,” then draws himself looking like a seedy dork—but I think the real crux of the matter is artistic development beyond teenage scorn and hipster one-upmanship. This is a lot closer to Charles’s notion of ethical stakes than Noah is allowing. And I think Clowes makes that turn in “Hubba Hubba.”

Jeet's reply:

@Isaac. I find your reading of Ghost World as a liminal work in Clowes’ oeuvre to be compelling and persuasive. But seeing Ghost World as being thematically focused on Clowes’ own evolution as an artist is a bit different than the type of argument Noah is making, which is that we can divine Clowes’ motives for doing the type of art he does. Your reading of Clowes is based on looking at the trajectory of his career, on looking at the comics itself. I think Noah’s approach is based on some sort of pretense to telepathic powers.

And mine, to him:

Well, you could call that a pretense to telepathic powers, or you could call it Freudian criticism…

As I said, though, I don’t think that “Did the cartoonist want to jump these fictional characters?” is the most interesting question we could be asking about a text.

And Noah entered into a comment about as long as the original post. Some of it went like this:

... I don’t think Clowes wanted to jump the characters necessarily, or only, by the by. It’s about inhabiting them too. Sadism is not just lust; it’s control.

There are lots of older men in Ghost World, incidentally. Clowes himself shows up, but there are various other figures wandering around the edges. And of course Enid’s name is Clowes’ name. Seeing her as and Becky as doppelgangers (doppelmeyers?) is hardly a counter-intuitive reading.

... Isaac, in terms of what’s more interesting in the text, morality or jumping bones. Do you really see Clowes’ moral vision as especially serious or insightful compared to folks who actually care about that stuff — George Eliot, Tolstoy, Jane Austen, even Dickens? It all just seems pretty thin gruel by those standards to me — the characterization is thin, the “morals” such as they are boil down to “don’t be a prick” — I just don’t see it as an especially powerful or interesting moral vision. Do we really need someone to tell us that it’s cruel to prank call people? I mean, this isn’t Lydgate being tempted here. The moral questions aren’t what’s interesting; what’s interesting is watching Enid be taught A Lesson.

To me, that’s because the energy of the book is not invested in morality as morality; rather it’s invested in morality as a lever of desire and power, about the experience of condemnation and wanting to be condemned. That’s why you’re reading of this panel isn’t really about morality. It’s about knowledge, and it’s about contempt. And about Clowes, of course.

To which I replied:

I don’t think I’m trying to compare Clowes to Tolstoy here. I’m comparing “early Clowes” to “later Clowes”—and noticing a difference that has to do with the position (moral, ethical, social, whatever) of the satirist or the satirical impulse.

Early in Ghost World, as in the Lloyd Llewellyn shorts, the satirist is impervious; beginning in “Hubba Hubba,” making fun of people starts to seem like a sign of personal insecurity and even a certain sort of naïveté. I think that’s an interesting development.

Rob Clough added:

To tie Isaac’s claims back into what I said, Ghost World represents the turning point between unfettered, unimpeachable satirist and a more self-aware artist and person understanding what their constant sneering represents. I agree 100% that Enid is a Clowes stand-in, but the issue is not even controlling a young girl, but rather exploring and expressing the understanding of how much self-loathing she (and he) possess at that point in time. Clowes drawing himself in as a grotesque, pathetic toad isn’t just a good gag, I would argue, but an expression of his own self-loathing.

Enid being taught a lesson regarding pranks isn’t a simple control/corrective of a young female, it’s Clowes castigating himself for indulging in the pleasures of simple cruelty as a way of coping with alienation.

Lastly, while I agree with Isaac that Clowes’ character work became much sharper starting with Ghost World, I would argue that nearly every one of his characters represented some autobiographical aspect of his life, personality and/or desires. Even with all of the pomo deflections, Clowes’ work is deeply personal.

And Jeet chimed in:

I think Clough pretty much hits the nail on the head in sharpening the point Isaac originally made taht Enid is a way for Clowes to reexamine his earlier artistic practices. I’d go further and note that their is a contradiction between saying that Enid is Clowes’ alter-ego and saying that he’s using her as a punching bag to work out his revulsion/attraction to young women. Yet the same critic can hold these two positions simultaneously.

Then Ken Parille got into the discussion:

Rob Clough says: “To tie Isaac’s claims back into what I said, Ghost World represents the turning point between unfettered, unimpeachable satirist and a more self-aware artist and person understanding what their constant sneering represents…”

I see this kind of self-awareness in many earlier works by Clowes. It might be harder to perceive because the narrative is more surreal and less satirical, but the ways characters interact in Velvet Glove, especially Clay’s involvement with the grotesque Tina, shows someone conscious of these issues.

“Why I Hate Christians,” published in the same Eightball as the first chapter of GW, is perhaps the best example of story in which Clowes directs at himself the kind of criticism he directs at others; and he explores the personal impulses and social conditioning behind his parody. “The Party,” also in this issue, shows Clowes’s attentiveness as he critiques his own sneering at ‘hipsters’ and the objects they have on display in their apartments. Clowes often impeaches himself.

You also see in Pussey! (begun 1989) an identification with the satirical target . Clowes writes in the introduction to the 3rd edition:
“The initial spark for many of the Pussey stories came from some misplaced, low grade desire for ‘revenge.’ As time wore on I began to feel more and more sympathy for Mr. Pussey. I started to see him . . . as a variant of myself.”

Isaac says: “Early in Ghost World, as in the Lloyd Llewellyn shorts, the satirist is impervious; beginning in “Hubba Hubba,” making fun of people starts to seem like a sign of personal insecurity and even a certain sort of naïveté. I think that’s an interesting development.”

I think it’s there, though, in the third panel of the first chapter, in which Becky calls Enid out for her hypocritical attack on Sassy readers. Enid maybe impervious to this criticism, but Becky and Clowes understand what motives Enid’s hostility. Enid develops a self-awareness later in GW that has been present in Clowes’s work for a while.

To which "Caro" replied,

I agree with Ken: my experience of the panel Isaac describes wasn’t meaningfully different from my experience of the 3rd panel of the first chapter, even on my first read.

I think I’m hesitant in general about the “shift through time” linearity of your argument, Isaac. Ouevre questions aside, I didn’t find Ghost World to have nearly as linear a narrative trajectory as the shift you’re describing suggests — I read it in the Eightballs (long after their original publication) and it was very nested and recursive to me, with each episode covering very similar ground save very subtle, significant, changes as Enid matured. There were constant metaphorical returns as well — really a structural tour de force. (I was apathetic about it, actually, until I got deeply invested in disagreeing with Noah’s reading from our roundtable last year.)

I still disagree with Noah, but also with Jeet — there’s nothing contradictory about representing a character from both inside and outside. Although I don’t see the same objectification here that Noah does, I think the objectification that is there is of a piece with the identity crisis at the heart of the narrative — the blurring/confusion of self and other — “desire is the desire of the Other” — it is Freud playing the piano there on the back cover of Issue #17…

And Ken tied the whole long discussion up with a bow:

The Sassy scene is also complicated by the fact that Enid is attacking the magazine on Clowes’s behalf; the editors had stolen a panel from Eightball and used it to illustrate an article in 1990.

I promise my other Panelists posts won't need to be followed with such an extensive archive of comments.

My Panelists Archive: Enid Coleslaw and the G.O.P.

You may already know that The Panelists, a six-member blog that launched at the beginning of this year, is shutting its doors on January 1. As one of the contributors (if perhaps the least steadfast of them), I'm planning to transplant my smattering of posts from there to here, where they will at least still be available to internet searches (if in a more obscure or less trafficked corner of the web).

I'm going to try to reproduce or archive the comment threads for the articles, too, at least to some extent. They're a little messy, because of the nesting of replies, but I'll make what I can of the muddle and present them in separate posts after each article.

I'll start with my very first piece, from the first round of our two-week "one-panel critics" stunt. Here it is:



I’ve been teaching comics in university English departments for nine years now, and I think I’ve put Ghost World on every syllabus I’ve used. Assigning the book to a decade’s worth of college students means that I’ve watched Enid Coleslaw and Becky Doppelmeyer go from being hipster role models to historical specimens.

(Here’s a way to simulate that experience: imagine a book about two teenage girls in which every phone conversation is connected to the wall by a wire and every bit of recorded music comes from vinyl and a stylus.)

From the beginning, one of my preoccupations with Ghost World has been the way Clowes begins with three or four self-contained short comics that he initially has no intention of gathering together, then transforms them post-hoc into the first chapters of a longer narrative. He has to find clues of a nascent story in the material he has already written, because it’s already published and read, impervious now to editing.

So I’m interested in watching the later chapters develop conflicts from brief signs earlier in the book, then escalate those conflicts and resolve the tensions that Clowes has actually only recently introduced. The book is also clever in the way that it selectively returns to the sideshow characters of earlier episodes—John Ellis and Bob Skeetes, yes; but not Carrie Vandenburg or Johnny Apeshit—in order to create a sense of narrative symmetry. (David Boring also makes a remark about “narrative symmetry” as his plot is hurtling toward its climax, even though it’s a narrative he has supposedly constructed himself.)

I’ve also become interested in trying to pinpoint the moment when things change, in Ghost World, from satiric one-off observational strips to the “plot” or the sense of “emplotment” (a word academics actually use). The shift follows pretty closely on the moment when Enid and Becky go from being culturally savvy know-it-alls, ripping on Sassy magazine and assorted local weirdos, to vulnerable and somewhat naïve girls. Maybe if you scratch any rebellious indy teen façade, you’ll find self-image angst underneath, but the redefinition of Becky’s and Enid’s characters isn’t only a question of revealing their vulnerability. It’s also a question of redefining their interaction with the culture around them, since the characters began as spokesgirls for a certain stripe of indy scorn and satire.

This is why their two trips to the fake ’50s diner and the practical joke they play on “Bearded Windbreaker” are important enough to be the crux of the Ghost World movie. Watching “Bearded Windbreaker” suffer the heartbreak they invent for him, Enid and Becky get their first grownup sense that not every prank call is funny for the person who picks up the phone.

At the beginning of the chapter, Clowes reveals Enid to be deeply clueless about the outside world in a way that rewrites a lot of her seeming savvy in the previous chapters. Up to this point, Enid has been cool, positioning herself against the stupid, the pretentious, and the lame: “I just hate all these obnoxious, extroverted, pseudo-bohemian art-school losers!” (Is that Enid talking, or Lloyd Llewellyn?) But then the change-up:



Enid’s fun to hang out with, but how seriously can we take a high-school graduate who doesn’t know what the G.O.P. is, or what it would mean for a lobbyist to be in bed with them? Don’t we have to think of her as uninformed, immature, and a little lame? This is the panel that gets us ready to think badly of Enid’s prank on “Bearded Windbreaker.” It’s also the moment, at least in my reading experience, when we start looking at these girls from the outside, as characters, instead of seeing the semi-grotesque world through their eyes. In other words, this is the panel in which Clowes moves away from Lloyd Llewellyn and Like a Velvet Glove territory and starts to make David Boring and Ice Haven possible.

In the next post you can see the original comment flurry from this piece.

"Panelists": Not the Death of this Blog

I'm not intending to retire the Satisfactory Comics blog, which will still be our best forum for random doodles, dopey ruminations, and elaborate puns. And, you know, comics, when we draw some more. But let me also direct your attention to the group blog I have joined at tcj.com (that's short for The Comics Journal dot com): The Panelists.

This is sort of a big deal: I'm joining the guys from Thought Balloonists, Guttergeek, and Madinkbeard to form a sort of Voltron of comics criticism. I think it will be awesome.

My first post, a "one-panel critic" mini-essay about a turning point in Ghost World, is up now.



We're also running a contest (with a real prize) that involves identifying the images in our masthead / logo. Here's a hint: if you've seen the only piece of original comics art that I own, then you will be able to identify the image I contributed. Pop over and take a look at the logo, read our first week's posts, and join the discussion!