A Few Good Eggs: Crowdfunding 'The American Bystander'

I had one of those mornings today that felt like it had great narrative cohesion. You know the sort. In this instance, the feeling was brought about by an email I received from Mimi Pond at the precise moment that my order of coffee, hashbrowns, and eggs arrived.

Mimi was dropping me a line to alert me to the existence of a crowdfunding campaign for a new humour magazine, The American Bystander, being run on Kickstarter by Mike Gerber (The New Yorker, The New York Times, SNL). Quite frankly, it looks great. It helps that the project is being put together by a handful of old-guard humour writers who have seen print humour rise and fall over the years and taken a good long look at what works and what doesn't. They've put together a solid-looking editorial model: no advertising impinging on their editorial freedom, a diverse crowd of established and emerging writers, and fair compensation for their contributors (none of that "We'll pay you in Exposure!" bullshit). Mimi happens to be one of those contributors, and from what she tells me and what I'm reading this magazine will collect folks who have lent their voices to SNL, The Simpsons, Monty Python, National Lampoon, and some other chuckle-worthy corners of our culture. The campaign has 11 days left in it, and I'd love to see it hit a couple more stretch goals before it runs its course (particularly because that would include the chance to submit a cover illustration for the thing). I've pitched in a bit so that people can be funny in print; head on over there and do the same!

Why Make Prints?

Last week my printmaking instructor, the inimitable Briar Craig, assigned us a thinking project: namely, to come with an answer to why exactly are you doing this thing? As printmaking students, something we get from our friends a lot is, "So, what's the point of this...why don't you just print your art out digitally?"...which is a pretty good question. And I figured, since I'd left the blog dormant for so long (though many of you have continued to come back and read old pieces, which is really cool to see), that this was the perfect place to work out my thoughts on this and give you something new to chew on.

As artists each of us will be drawn towards specific imagery, ideas, and media for personal and specific reasons. Whether you intend to be a printmaker or not each of you have chosen to study printmaking at an advanced course level and perhaps it is time to start asking yourself why you make prints. Why not make paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, digital based works or use performance? What do the media of  printmaking offer you and your creative urges that the others may not? How do the media of printmaking supplement or add to whatyou may be working on in other media? How do the media of printmaking support the ideas that you have for imagery?

Bear with me while I think "aloud" here for a bit. My medium of choice is and has always been drawing. In the past few years, the drive to draw has solidified somewhat, found direction as an invested interest in the comics form, in its theory and history, and in my own production of comics as an art object. So when it comes to printmaking, I find it reasonably easy to identify what draws me to it. A significant part of what attracts me to comics is the material nature of the form. I have a deep and abiding love for printed material. It's the reason I have shoeboxes full of minis and zines and postcards, ephemera collected from
conventions and festivals. It's why I spend unreasonable amounts of money on limited edition print portfolios. It's what sends shivers down my spine when I finally hold my work in print, even if it's just a mini run off the printers in the school library.

I didn't really know where that love stemmed from until I dove into my research at Durham this past year, and realized that what draws me to print is the democratization of art and literature. There's an undeniable beauty in old manuscript illuminations, to be sure, and in print I am definitely drawn to the aesthetic of multiplicity that emerges as an edition of something is produced. But there's a restrained sort of power in producing an image or a body of text en masse, even on the cheapest pulp paper, and releasing it into the world in a form that a multitude of people can obtain and share, knowledge and thoughts in material form that will change hands and work its way into the strangest little corners of the world and stick there until someone else finds it, dislodges it, and sets it in motion once more.

There is, decidedly, a point where these ideas come up against the primary motivations of a Fine Arts education, a gallery artist's education. Most of us are shooting for a career in the White Cube, the sanctum sanctorum  of the art world. We're creating big, bold, well-crafted, generally expensive pieces of original art...except that I want to make small, sometimes bold, well-crafted, cheap pieces of original art. Not everyone out there can afford original work, and I think that's where the democratization aspect of printmaking has taken on new life in the digital age: where these processes used to be the only way to print, they now hold arcane status as Art. These are hand-operated processes, sometimes with mechanical elements, which produce some variation in the final product. Typeface wears over time. Ink transfers to textured paper a little differently every time. The colours we mix change a bit between editions. We don't produce copies; we produce multiple originals.

So when I pull a screenprint, and later this year when I start learning lithography, letterpress, and bookbinding processes, this is what drives me. I want to make small, affordable pieces of pleasing original art that people can pick up on a whim, read, lend to a friend, put in a library, art that can go out and
have a life of its own. It's the evolution of a drawing student into a cartoonist who wants people to read what he makes, and wants his touch visible in the object that the reader holds in their hands.

Or maybe I'm just a guy who's been reading too much Walter Benjamin.

Electricomics - Revelations From Thought Bubble

"Not so much pushing the envelope of comicbook storytelling as folding it up to make a nice hat."

If you've been following the Electricomics project at all, you've probably realized by now what a strange beast it is: hard research, solid comics theory, coding and programming, all addressing the public in the sultry and whimsical tones of every comics reader's favourite British warlock and mall santa, Alan Moore. I didn't know much of anything, really, about Electricomics until last weekend's Thought Bubble comic art festival in Leeds, where I was able to attend a panel hosted by five members of the Electricrew (not my word): Mitch Jenkins, Daniel Merlin Goodbrey, Leah Moore, John Reppion, and Pete Hogan. The infamous Mr. Moore himself wasn't there, as will surprise exactly none of his fans; a good portion of that infamy is the man's reputation as a recluse. What he did send along as a token of his involvement was 500 pre-signed "zines", stapled 14-page A5 booklets containing some gorgeous art by Colleen Doran, an exclusive interview with Moore, and a new comic about digital comics written and illustrated by Daniel Merlin Goodbrey.

Not a bad companion for my morning cuppa

The panel set out to answer some unresolved questions for those in attendance about what exactly it was that Electricomics is attempting to do. I suspect I was one of the least informed people in the hall, having only read (so far as I can recall) this article which seemed to revel in the ambiguity of the information available in the days immediately following the project's press release...

"almost all of the information is coming from a press release, which tells us Electricomics is “an app that is both a comic book and an easy-to-use open source toolkit,” before focusing on the app, then abruptly telling us “Electricomics will be a 32-page showcase with four very different original titles.” By the end of the press release, you can probably piece together that we’re talking about a self-published anthology that will be released on the app, also called Electricomics. Even then, we’re told that Leah Moore, Alan’s daughter, “will edit the project.” Presumably, this means the comic called Electricomics, not the app — which the previous paragraph was talking about."(Sequart)

So, yeah. That's what we had to work with.

The biggest bit of new information to come out of the panel at Thought Bubble, or at least what stuck with me the most, is that this is not a commercial venture. It's an academic one. All the money for Electricomics is coming from the Digital Research and Development Fund for the Arts (something I would have known if I'd read their website), and as the project's press release explains, "As a publicly funded research and development project, Electricomics will be free to explore the possibilities of the comic medium, without the constraints of the industry". Because I'm a nerd for this kind of thing, I was stoked about the scholarly possibilities for this platform when I still thought we were being told this is gonna be Alan Moore's Comixology knock-off. So I almost wept with joy when I realized that a) Daniel Merlin Goodbrey, an incredibly sharp theorist (and cartoonist) specializing in the mechanics of digital comics is part of their development team, and b) that because the project is grant-funded they will be producing detailed documentation of the entire process, success, problems, solutions, the whole shebang. It's going to make great reading someday.

Those of you picturing Alan Moore hunched over a computer workstation writing code with his beard nearly hiding the keyboard, stop it. Don't be ridiculous; that's what he has code demons for (No, seriously, a shed full of 'em. It's in the zine.). Mr. Moore may not be a wizard of the tech variety, but it seems his self-proclaimed alienation from modern forms of media has allowed to conceive this project relatively unpolluted by the endeavours that precede it. He doesn't know Comixology, Madefire, or Manga Studio. He knows comics. That's something that was made crystal clear through the course of this panel, the idea that, if you could distill from the form the Essence of Comics, then that would be the driving technology behind this project. That's what a couple top theorists, legendary writers (did I mention Garth Ennis?), and hotshot programmers are doing with a bundle of government money: not an exercise in visual FX, motion graphic, music, flashinglight and pretty colours, but attempting to take the narrative structural and spatial freedom of a digital workspace and make it understandable and accessible to you through...an app.

Which is going to come to you in two parts, apparently: Electricomics and Electricosmos. The former is a creative suite, a toolset with which you can make, well, comics. We're not entirely sure yet what all the tools are going to look like, what kind of canvas you'll have to work with, but the idea is (as I understand it) if you can conceive of the idea, and it can be done as a comic, then you can make that comic here. Which leaves rather a lot of possibilities. Some people are getting hung up on the "page" issue; namely, if this isn't just a scan-your-physical-comic-and-make-it-digital-here deal, but a born digital creation platform with infinite canvas, then why is Moore announcing a 32-page comic released along with the app? The only answer I've got is...it's not that simple. There's an excellent essay posted on the Electricomics site which I highly recommend reading, co-written by Daniel Merlin Goodbrey and Alison Gazzard, concerned with the concept of digital "pages":

A useful definition of the page comes from Charles Hatfield (2009), who observes that:
‘The “page” (or planche, as French scholars have it, a term detonating the total design unit rather than the physical page on which it is printed) functions both as sequence and as object, to be seen and read in both linear and nonlinear, holistic fashion.’ 

[...]In the early stages of the Electricomics project, we’re in the process of transitioning from traditional page to digital planche. In this transition we’ve observed a tension between the comics creators, who take a holistic view of the page, and the technology partners, who are keen to deconstruct the page into separate assets and mechanics that will need to be implemented in the toolset.

When it comes to comics theory, listen to the French.  And Charles Hatfield; he's a sharp dude. The gist of what's being said here is, let go of whatever you thought a page was, at least in a physical sense. There are going to people coming to this from webcomics backgrounds and from ink-and-paper background (like yours truly), and from what the team's saying the tools should feel natural to all of us. Knowing Daniel and the research I've seen from him in the last month, they're covering their bases over there, and we've got nothing to worry about.

Join the Electricrew; pick up some badges over at Orphans of the Storm

Now the second part of all this is Electricosmos, which is a little bit less defined even than Electricomics. It's the publication and social network platform into which the toolset feeds. You make comics in the app, and you share them out...here. In this space, which doesn't have any rules as yet, or an interface, or an idea of exactly how right to your intellectual property are going work. They're working on it, though; if there's one dude you can bet your soul on being picky about IP laws and comics, it's Moore. There's a lot of work being done, they said, around contracts, given the online collaborative nature of the space they're building. Someone asked a question about content vetting, and got a reply that said "we're working on it, we'll get back to you in seven years." Not in those exact words, but that's the sentiment: the team is treading on such unfamiliar terrain at this point that they simply can't answer questions regarding how their network of multiple millions of creator-owned online comics is going to work when they haven't put the first tool into beta yet. The release of Electricosmos to the general market is a long way down the road. And it may never happen. It's a research project, not a commercial enterprise; failure is an entirely viable option. As Moore states in the interview found in the zine:

We may end up creating something that isn't technically a comic at all but that's not a bad thing.

Dare I say...Nemo?

Visit the project at www.electricomics.net

Crossing the Pond: A Cartoonist Abroad

This blog is about to become, heaven forbid, exactly what it was created to be...

A travel blog.

As has been mentioned before, I started this blog anticipating a year-long trip to Scotland that never happened. During the summer of 2012, with my travel plans in limbo, the Aurora theatre shooting in Colorado happened, leading me to write my first post, and after that this blog became...something else. A comics, arts, and culture blog, I suppose. It did, however, retained the sappy, romanticized title given it by an art student fantasizing about watercolour sketching on the highlands. So, there's that.

Now I've come full-circle, and the year abroad is actually happening! I landed in Manchester on Sunday morning, and I've settled into the little northern town of Durham for a year studying medieval English literature and theology at Durham University. It's the perfect place to study, really. Not only is Durham home to a world-class literature program, but the town exudes an oldness, a tangible air of history I have never encountered before. The town is overlooked by two monolithic structures left behind by Norman builders of the 11th century: the famed Durham cathedral and castle, stone towers of rugged and imperious beauty. It's like nowhere I've ever lived before, and it's all kinds of inspiring.

Durham from the train station viewpoint

While I may be writing more on here about my travels than I normally would, by no means does that mean comics will be left out of the equation. For starters, I'll still be drawing. Durham University's student newspaper (or at least, one of them), The Palatinate, has hired me on as editorial cartoonist for the year, so as those pieces are finished and published you'll see them appearing on my other blog (the one with all the art) at www.ajkomics.ca. I finished my first cartoon for them Wednesday morning; you should be seeing updates shortly, and I'm pretty damn excited to see what the year holds in store, particularly for the political side of my work.

Life of a mobile cartoonist; given enough time, every hotel room becomes a studio

Also on the calendar are visits to the British Cartoon Archive housed at Canterbury's University of Kent, where I'll be interviewing head librarian Dr. Nicholas Hiley about his role in the archive's digitisation project, and to the Thought Bubble comic art festival in Leeds in November. So, there will be comic news, and reviews, and likely a bit of fangirling over people I meet and things I find. Stay tuned; more from Durham coming your way shortly.

Cheers!

Asher

My humble lodgings at Josephine Butler College. How I love it.

Dinner with Cartoonists

So here I am at TCAF, the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, utterly overwhelmed by this evening's experience. To be fair, I have myself to blame. I opened my big mouth on Twitter to promote the living heck out of the Doug Wright Awards kickstarter, which thankfully succeeded and will be holding it's 10th annual ceremony tomorrow evening. I went and picked the backer reward of dinner with Drawn & Quarterly and their cohort of cartoonist guests, because hell, you're only in this position once in maybe a lifetime; why not? Good food, good company, the chance to talk shop with industry greats...

...so it's my own damn fault that I ended up having dinner tonight with Seth, Kate Beaton, and Chester Brown, all wonderful, down-to-earth, easy people to talk to, and that I have to dump my starstruckedness all over this screen before I explode. Seth revealed that he has never used a microwave, and Chester (rightfully) chided me for having not yet read Chris Ware. It was quite a conversation (also, exquisite beer).

I was also introduced to Tom Spurgeon, of www.comicsreporter.com as well, to whom I owe a debt of gratitude for linking to my blog from his, on occasion. Again, thanks Tom. And a big thank you to Brad Mackay for being an excellent host, a good conversationalist, and an all-around gentleman. Cheers, Brad :)

It's been a helluva night. More news from TCAF to come, later.

Funnymen: My Reconciliation with Comedy

I've been listening to a lot of podcasts in the studio lately. Headphones in, I am insulated from the distractions of the outside word, focused on the details of my work, in the proverbial zone. Inkstuds is my go-to show, a brilliant series of interviews with cartoonists by the cheerfully sardonic Robin McConnell out of Vancouver, BC. I started going through the Inkstuds archives starting from the first episode in November 2005, and over the last couple weeks I've learned a metric crap-ton of stuff about comics from Robin and his guests. I also backed his recent Kickstarter campaign, a roadtrip that I am sure will yield a wealth of knowledge and inappropriate humour. There's still a week left. Get on it.

More recently, though, I've been listening to Marc Maron's comedy podcast WTF, which I stumbled across on YouTube entirely by accident while feeding my Dylan Moran addiction. I love his humour, and have for years. I had recently watched the incredibly dry and darkly funny A Film With Me In It, which I was delighted to discover because I was getting a little tired of watching Black Books on repeat. I found this interview with Moran and started listening to it, realizing more and more just how quintessentially little I really knew about this man's life. That realization led me on a brief search for more interviews with the man, culminating quickly in my discovery of WTF. 

I was hooked immediately. It was the comics that did it. I clicked play on this interview with my favourite comedian, and the first thing mentioned was comic books. It turns out Maron is a fairly avid comics reader, asking Dylan Moran what, if any, experiences he had had with comics as a child growing up in Ireland, and it segued perfectly into a discussion of Irish life, isolation, and Catholic religion and their influences on Moran's comedic career. And I realized, this man has had a hell of a life. He's been through a sort of emotional genocide, in a country that existed under oppressive theocracy in all but name, and he's managed to come out the other side with enough will and humour left in his command to say something about it. I began to see some common ground. Not with me, understand. I have lived an exceedingly safe and sheltered life without alcoholism, divorce, abuse, or religious oppression. I'm incredibly grateful for this, but at times I can't help but feel a little...boring. I'm talking about the comic greats. On a whim two days ago, I started reading this book, Comix: The Underground Revolution by Dez Skinn. I didn't know much before this week about the first comix artists, or even how to properly define "comix". I had no idea of the messy, hallucinogenic, violent, sexual, socially prophetic stew these books were birthed from.

Dez Skinn's cover

Reading cartoonist R. Crumb's self-appraisal gave me pause: "[I was] a painfully shy out-of-it nerd...a lonely maladjusted weirdo with heavy Catholic guilt.". I thought, Damn, but that's a lot of weight for a guy to carry. No wonder these guys  turned their baggage into humourous catharsis. I've read many interviews with Spiegelman. I know how much he loathes the survivor's guilt he inherited from his parents, the leftover weight from a human extermination experiment that occurred outside of his lifetime, yet influences every moment of it. He hates it so very, very much, and it drives a significant part of his work. I listened to Louis C.K. talk about the depression and shame that he builds on in his self-deprecating routines. Stewart Lee mentions the questions he has to ask himself about where to apply critical pressure as someone sitting in a privileged position at essentially the center of society. the motivations are varied, often tragic, and wholly fascinating to me. It's a world I simply didn't give enough credit.

Spiegelman, the Holocaust inheritance

I've had...issues with stand-up comedy the past couple years. I think it had something to do with not being able to stand being around the people I knew who were doing it. I just didn't like them, at all. I have a better idea of why that was now. I have no idea if they were good comics. I've been to live stand-up a handful of times, usually standing in the back drinking and chatting with someone else who happened to be as disinterested as I. Dylan Moran was the only stand-up comic I had any interest in watching. I never paid attention to the craft of it. Listening to these podcasts by Maron and McConnell, I think I get it at least a little. I hear them talk about things like comedic timing, in both a visual and a performative sense, and realize that these two traditions are more closely related than I ever gave them credit for. The people who are great comics and cartoonists are craftsmen of this thing called "humour" that maybe I've never really understood, and avoided in my writing because it weirded me out a bit. I don't want to generalize. I'm not prepared to say that you can only be properly funny as a career if you're a legitimately fucked up human being, but I see common ground in the guilt, shame, and loathing of great comic figures, and I have to wonder if I could ever pull that attitude off in my work. I don't think I want to, because I don't want to fake it. I'm not a Comix artist, and can't be, because I'm not experimenting with drugs and my sexuality in the late '60s. I'm in the wrong context.

My own recent work, doodling in the pub

So, this becomes a question for me to wrestle with in my own work: do I want to pursue humour in my comics, and if so, where is it going to come from? I've never even felt the White guilt that weighs down some of my friends. I've got no Russian Mennonite shame fuelling my art. It has to come from somewhere else. Maybe the solution is whimsy, or nostalgia. Maybe it's academia, a world in which I find myself more and more immersed. Maybe it's the world of comic fandom itself, self-referential mockery, but that feels a little overdone. Geek culture has already been making fun of itself for years (Penny Arcade, anybody?). I dunno. It's a fun question to have on my plate.

I drew the page posted above after a frustrated night in the studio were I threw down my pen and went to the pub. I ended up sitting at the bar, doodling about some guy struggling in a vaccuum with his tenuous, dysfunctionally intimate relationsip with the voice inside his head. It isn't self-referential, in case you were worried. But, maybe it is. Maybe it was me fretting about my block, that evening's lack of inspiration. The "voice" in my head had deserted me and I was feeling a little lost. And it sucked. I rather like this little comic, and while it's not funny, per-se, it's something. It's a hint of that place where good art has its roots, quite simply...self. I'm going to look at it as a starting point to answering my question about humour. When I'm studying in England next year I'm going to track down some comedy clubs and give stand-up a second chance. And for now, I'm going to keep listening to and learning from Marc Maron and his guests, because I like laughing in the studio, even if it makes it really bloody hard to draw a straight line.

Taking on Scott McCloud's 24-Hour Comic challenge: By the Numbers

24 Hours.
3 XL Tim Horton's coffees, black
3 pens killed in action
5 PB & J sandwiches
2 bottles of water
1 weird little vial of ginseng extract
1 severely cramped hand
1 couch that is too short to properly sleep on
Innumerable instances of asking Why the hell am I doing this...?

5 PAGES

Yup. That's it. I only produced five pages of work in a challenge to draw a twenty-four page book. Defeat? Perhaps. A learning process? Undoubtedly.

I don't think I ever actually thought I was capable of the 24-page goal. I have a pretty solid grasp of just how slow I work and just how motivated I am, generally speaking, at 4 o'cock in the morning. So I figured I might make it to fifteen pages, twenty if I was lucky, the full twenty-four if I drew like a god among cartoonists. I was so pumped to start this thing that I could barely sit still through Art History class on Tuesday. I bolted back to the studio, pulled out all my pens, got my music going, and by 1 PM I was going at it.

I burned out two pens on the first page.

Which, really, I should have taken as a hint that maybe I was using too much ink. A ludicrous amount of ink, even. But I didn't. Instead, I went SHIT I NEED MORE PENS, and promptly hopped a bus downtown to buy more pens than I actually knew what to do with. Back in my studio, having blown a solid hour and a half on my pen run, I put my nose back to the proverbial grindstone and started drawing once more.

And drawing.

And drawing.

Two-thirty AM rolled around. My hand was a cramping mess, vocally arguing with me that no, it didn't want to hold the pen, #*@$ you. My contacts had dried out and my vision was a blurred mess. I had three and a half pages done, and I was too tired to process what had gone wrong. I pulled the offending lenses out of my eyes, collapsed onto the old-as-the-hills studio couch, and fell asleep.

I woke up at five-thirty...and then I woke up at six-thirty. At seven-thirty I grabbed myself by the throat and dragged myself to the washroom, where I forced my contacts back into my eyes at gunpoint and staggered down to Tim's for another cup of black liquid life. And then I drew some more.

And that, really, is the whole story. I wrapped up page five a little early with a massively obese eldritch assassin in a bar, radiating Kirby Krackle from his cellulite-laden arms, and called it finished. I sat back at that point, looked at the pile of paper that I had intended to consume that night, and asked myself for the first time just where I had gone wrong. Well for starters, nobody (I specialize in sweeping and unfounded statements when I'm writing outside my academic practice) can fill twenty-four sheets of 11x14" paper with ink in a 24-hour cycle. First mistake: scale. Secondly, I should never have employed multiple shades of gray (distinctly fewer than fifty, for those who were about to ask) and a couple different greens in this project; black is, really, all you need for something of this nature. Second mistake: shading/colour. And lastly, I'm just too friggin meticulous. My profs have been on my case for years, and now dear Mr. McCloud's challenge has driven the point home. Final mistake: detail.

All told, this endeavour appeared at first to be a failure, but I am way too happy with what I produced to just write it off as such. I was pushed to redraw many times a character that I had only just created, something I don't do nearly often enough. I had to come up with page composition on the fly, and panel composition, and dialogue...and when I work fast and rough like that my language filter shuts down and I end up scrawling obscenity and violence onto the page out of instinct, which is rather a lot of fun. I learned a lot about my working process and my physical limits. I learned that having company in the studio while you work is a beautiful thing. I've been listening to a lot of radio interviews the last couple weeks on the CITR 101.9 station out of UBC Vancouver. Robin McConnell's show Inkstuds, where he interviews a new comics creator every week, is an excellent way to occupy the ears while drawing. What I hear a vast majority of these people say is that being a cartoonist is a lonely career. You work long hours, late at night, by yourself in the studio. I saw a lot of truth in that this week. I found myself questioning whether such a job is my cup of tea. I'd also read some blogs by people who have done the challenge, and found people calling it a rite of passage as a comics creator. Looking back, I suppose I would agree with that. It was a long, lonely night, but I came through the other side of the thing feeling like I could call myself a cartoonist in earnest, like I had just attempted the Mt. Everest of comic projects and, even though I didn't summit, I still climbed the damn thing. And frankly, I'm really stoked to do it again!! 

I will be kicking off next semester in the new year by tackling the challenge a second time, armed with nothing but a black brush pen and a simplistic drawing style. I'm debating working on my "comic scroll", and attempting twenty-four linear yards of narrative drawing instead of pages. We'll see. At any rate, the five pages I did are waiting to be scanned and in late November will be included in a short anthology of my comics work from this semester. Drop me a line if you're interested in buying a copy; prices at this point are negotiable, I think I'd ask for somewhere around $5-10. Anywho, cheers! I'm off to the books and the small mountain of research I have to do. Check out my Twitter feed @Vitaeleous for some snapshots of the comic to keep you entertained...until next time.