I have spent most of my day talking about comics and religion. It's been brilliant, and I am utterly exhausted.
I was invited last term by one of my professors to help him deliver a lecture on Islam and media, a lecture we both knew would need to touch on Islam and cartoons but the weight of which we couldn't fully anticipate prior to the Charlie Hebdo tragedy. The video I'm posting is the audio and slides from the lecture I delivered earlier today in the Theology & Religion Department of Durham University, and I have to say I'm rather proud of it. My ideas for this talk came together in all the right ways, and I was able to tie my portion of the lecture seamlessly into what Prof. Davies was talking about prior to me taking the podium. It went off without a hitch (except for some projector issues near the beginning, so I apologize for the slow start; it picks up around 1:20, I promise).
In this lecture I tackle first and foremost the matter of censorship, both in the lecture hall and as it pertains to depictions of Muhammad in modern media. I look at the prophet in animation and then in comics, before moving on to discuss some of the visual functions of the comics medium and connecting visual abstraction as presented by McCloud to identity as defined by religious symbols. After a brief comparison of the idea of bodily representation in Christianity and Islam I close with some thoughts on the human drive as meaning-making, cultural animals and the role of censorship as we create our history. I hope you enjoy it, hope the sound quality's alright, and I hope to hear your thoughts and questions about what I'm saying.
A couple of notes. First, I inadvertently flipped McCloud's "perceived" and "received" taxonomy. McCloud presents them as precisely the opposite of what I've presented. Something to keep in mind. Second, The 99 has nothing whatsoever to do with Marco Polo. My brain made that up and inserted it into my notes; my apologies to Dr. Naif. In the stories, the Noor Stones do indeed travel to the Far East by the Silk Road, but not by the person I have suggested.
We also had an excellent gathering of students at Josephine Butler College this evening for a "Global Voices" forum, at which I was asked to kickstart discussion around Charlie Hebdo and the matter of free speech. That conversation went in all kinds of interesting directions and I'm sorry to have not recorded it, but know that it happened, thatyoung minds are actively, that we're trying to make sense of what it means to speak freely in a modern, global context. This event was particularly encouraging for me after chatting earlier with a friend about The Free Speech University Rankings in the UK, in which Durham received an amber traffic light (middling grade) for a diversity and equality in which the "Definition of racial harassment includes the ‘display of offensive material’." We have a tendency, it seems, to be vague about what materials we consider offensive, while our Students' Union places no restrictions on speech. Thanks, guys. For more of my thoughts on encountering (almost) censorship of cartoons in my work at Durham, take a read of this post from January on the other blog.
I am, possibly, the slowest gamer I know. So when I say that I'm 6 hours into Stoic Studio's The Banner Saga it's implied that I've been taking my sweet time. Because this isn't a game you can rush through. This game is a tale, a myth, an epic in the truest sense of the word.
And above all else, it is beautiful.
There was a really excellent review written by Chris Suellentrop for the New York Times last week that drops names and gives production stat for this game. I recommend you read it. Chris sums up the game nicely when he says,
...the story is well plotted and set in an original world with a deep mythology and history, even if it approaches boilerplate high fantasy: The gods are dead. The sun is frozen. War has returned. The end of the world is nigh.
Why, Chris, you say "high fantasy" like it's a bad thing! That is precisely why I am going to gush all over this game; it feels like a true medieval epic brought to life. I've been looking for a game like this for some time. Way back in 2013 (practically ancient history), I played King Arthur: The Roleplaying Wargame for a couple months, and boy was it fun. For fans of Mary Stewart's Arthurian fiction, the game is full of pleasantly familiar places, people, and tropes. After a while, though, it felt a little forced. I lost interest in the story, because there wasn't really a story. I was undertaking a long series of disconnected quests with no real investment. I didn't know who my knights really were beyond their stat bonuses and magical powers; there was no real dialogue, very little you could say in character to change the story. So while the game was both challenging and very, very pretty I felt that it was squandering a lot of narrative potential. And I stopped playing.
The Banner Saga caught my eye on Steam the other day, as I perused lists of games that I really don't have time to be playing. It was the art that jumped out at me, not the glossy digital airbrushing makes up most video game art but crisp cartoon lines and vibrant colour, like the love child of Disney and Arthur Rackham. Actually, very similar to the work Fiona Staples is doing for (ironically) Saga with Brian K. Vaughan's. I was wonderstruck, and hesitant, fully prepared to be let down by shoddy game graphics and shallow gameplay after such a wondrous initial image. But it never happened.
Having only recently read Stephen R. Donaldson's essay on the nature of Epic Fantasy (recommended reading by Nobody Important), the sudden discovery of a story on this scale was a brilliant surprise. Donaldson writes of The Epic in the following manner:
...what makes something "epic?" Length, of course. But nothing in literature is that simple. An epic is not "epic" merely because it is longer than anything else. As Marx observed, "Differences in degree become differences in kind." An epic is "epic" because it deals explicitly with the largest and most important
questions of humankind: what is the meaning of life? why are we here? who is God and what is She doing? what is the religious and/or moral order of the universe? In fact, back in the days when epics were more commonly written, their acknowledged purpose was to tackle such questions. The "epic" was the highest form of literature, and was expected to say the highest things.
In effect, epics articulated the best religious and cultural, the best social and psychological self-perceptions of their times: they recorded the way humankind looked at itself.
It's interesting that throughout English literary history no writer has been able to write an enduring "epic" without using the metaphor of magic and the techniques of personification. Apparently, to be "epic" a work must not only be long and profound; it must almost be fantasy.
The reason for this is simple. Throughout English literary history, the writers of "epics" have wanted either to say something transcendent about what it means to be human, or to say something about the nature of transcendence itself. The tools and resources of fantasy were formed for just those subjects.
The game reads like it was plucked straight out of the pages of Heaney's Beowulf or the Volsungsaga. It is epic in the way The Lord of the Rings is epic, a story of warriors and kings and people fighting for survival in a world of truly mythic proportions. And yes, I say "reads" very deliberately; the voice acting is minimal and the script elaborate, leaving you to play out the dialogue in your head (or, in my case, in terrible Scandinavian accents when nobody else is home). You play through parallel stories in alternating chapters, as the leaders of two ragtag clans made up of Viking-like Humans and horned giants called Varl. The two races live under a tenuous alliance born of necessity in the forge of war, when the gods were killed, and the world was ravaged by the colossal and ferocious Dredge. That war ended years ago, but now a new crisis has arisen: the Sun is frozen. It hangs, motionless, in the sky, leaving the northern lands in a bleak perpetual daylight. Alliances must be maintained, but in this time of forced diplomacy the Dredge have returned. The clans find themselves on the move, though for different reasons. You must become a leader willing to make the hard choices to save your people...or you will die.
The creators of this game have created a living, breathing world with an elaborate history. From the beginning of the game you have access to the map of Ubin, the clan chronicler, depicting a vast world stretching hundreds of miles in all directions. Clicking place names brings up a window briefly detailing the role each landmark played in shaping the history of this brutal land. Now, this is no open-world RPG. Your movements are scripted, the path you must walk already planned for you. You're being railroaded, in short. Your input comes in the form of the decisions you must make along the way. Travel is no small matter; collect what resources you can, stay on the move, keep an eye on the size of your caravan as starvation threatens your clansmen and raiding monsters descend from the hills on the slow and weak. At one point I had to sacrifice a wagon full of treasure to save the life of one of my dearest warriors. It was costly, but Gunnulf is still with us. Thank the gods...no, wait, they're dead. Never mind.
The thing that jumps out of Donaldson's description (above) at me is the idea that "[Epics] recorded the way humankind looked at itself". In that regard, writing a fictional epic seems a little divorced from the whole concept, and I love the way The Banner Saga addresses that. The banners referenced in the title are long, trailing swathes of fabric that writhe in the wind as you watch your caravan trundle across the northern hills. Upon them are embroidered the running history of your people, with a section for each family's lineage. Members of the family (admittedly usually the women) learn to master the art of embroidery, for it is their responsibility to keep the story of their blood alive. There is talk of The Menders, arcane weavers of history, and an enchanted banner in the King's city that records events upon itself. This is a story about Stories of the most sacred kind, the stories that cultures tell of themselves, that form the foundations of their identity. The standard bearers in the armies of old were skilled warriors, tasked with defending the colours at all costs and until the bitter end. The 2011 film The Eagle expounded upon the weight of a soldier's honour tied to the symbol he fought for; the 2001 film The Last Castle with Robert Redford did much the same. The Banner Saga instills you with that respect for the symbol of your people. So I find myself fighting desperately to keep my clan alive, knowing that if they fall to the Dredge and the banner is lost it will mean the end of their history.
One last note on character development. I am impressed, because the women in this game are phenomenal. If there's one term I'm sick of hearing, it's "strong female character". Thankfully I'm not alone; this gem of an article was written back in August with the sub-header "Sherlock Holmes gets to be brilliant, solitary, abrasive, Bohemian, whimsical, brave, sad, manipulative, neurotic, vain, untidy, fastidious, artistic, courteous, rude, a polymath genius. Female characters get to be Strong." (Sophia McDougall). Damn right. So when I found myself in the middle of this conversation with Oddleif, the chieftain's wife, I literally fist-pumped and yelled for joy. We'd just come out the wrong end of a brutal skirmish to discover her husband lying dead in a cart, and this is what she had to say:
People tell me I'm a "strong woman". It's funny, my father named me Oddleif before I was even born. He wanted a boy so badly. Strong woman. What does that even mean? If I feel nothing about my husband dying people think I'm strong. If I cry because my insides feel life they're on fire I'm weak. Why does that feel so backwards?
To whoever scripted that bit of dialogue: someday I will find you, and I will hug you. I've also had a character refuse to auto-attack in combat because she decided through a conversation I had with her that she didn't want to kill Humans or Varl. It was a shock, and a welcome realization that this game means business when it come to knowing who your characters are.
Needless to say, The Banner Saga tells a beautiful tale. It's slow, quiet, contemplative at times and emotionally desperate at others. It's immersive in its scale and intricacy. Above all else, it is epic.
There's a lot of crap that pisses art students off. We're an angsty bunch, the whole lot of us, griping about professors giving us poor critiques and wine bottles that run dry too fast (not to perpetuate stereotypes, but...) Anyway, we like to complain. Some of us would even claim that such disenfranchisement with the world at large is what drives their artistic practice, that they're pouring their soul out onto their canvas, dripping long streams of oil paint as if it were the lifeblood of society being sacrificed in Art for the good of Humanity.
Thank goodness I'm only a humble cartoonist.
One of these complaints is significantly marginalized. It lacks, by and large, a voice, though there are certainly a number of us who sit around and whine about it. It's a line we are fed on a weekly if not daily basis:
"It'll be good exposure."
...which is the world's way of saying "Look here, I need something drawn, or painted on, or otherwise creatively endowed, and all I can do is stick figures. So, if you wouldn't mind pouring your heart and soul into this until it's up to my standards, I won't pay you per se, but I'm sure somebody will see it eventually and wonder who made that." Oh, thank you. Then I'll get another person asking me for free art. Wonderful.
It's not an uncommon problem. There's definitely a part of me that wishes society would develop an Italian Renaissance mentality toward artists and just view us as one more craftsman to be hired. Instead we get funny looks when we tell people we're artists, and lines like, "Yeah, I used to draw a lot in high school." There's this overwhelming assumption that what we do isn't actually work. We must love every second, and it must comes as naturally and easily to us as breathing, and therefore it's not worth paying for. So when Tom Spurgeon posted this earlier this month, it kinda clicked.
The article that Rachel Dukes (Mixtape Comics) wrote about uncredited work making its way across the vast reaches of the internet is pure gold. It picks out all the key points in detail, nails down exactly why artists are getting screwed online. You see, it's a little tricky to get "good exposure" if nobody knows who made the thing they're looking at. Just doesn't work.
Dukes' article is a little stats-heavy, but so very much worth reading. The numbers are the real one-two punch, an overwhelming bit of insight on just how much we don't care about stealing other folks' creative work. On the one hand, I can't even count the number of images I have saved on my computer that have no credit attached to them, and on the other, I'm paranoid about my own portfolio and whether or not you can copy/save my images from it. And I have to wonder, am I going about this all wrong? Art school does some strange things to you. It tells you that you have to sell your work if you're going to get out there, build a successful practice for yourself after graduation...and it tells you that work made in class that is commercially viable is a sell-out, not worth academic consideration, not worth making. It tells us that we should make money and protect our image rights, while offering us opportunities to donate work and volunteer our skills for exposure. We have the unique opportunity to get our education in a burbling melting-pot of mixed messages. Ain't we lucky?
So, I won't pretend to have the answers. This is more of a critique, which is to say I'm taking an issue and bitching about it, this is good, this is bad, this could use improvement, and I love what you did with the green in that corner, it adds a sense of life...yeah, don't mind me, just putting my degree to good use. But give it some thought. Think about what you can do in your online life to give true exposure to the multitude of artists and graphics people whose work we enjoy every day. If it means doing a little searching to figure where a cartoon originated, it's worth the time. For Art, yeah?
The money isn't’t the point. But this is a thing that’s happening. This isn't’t just happening to me. It’s actively happening to the greater art community as a whole. (Especially the comics community. Recent artists effected by altered artwork/theft off the top of my head: Liz Prince, Luke Healy, Nation of Amanda, Melanie Gillman, etc.) Our work is being stolen and profited off of. Right this second. I do my best to see the positive in these events but the very least I can do as a creator is stand up in this small moment and say “This is mine. I made this.”- Rachel Dukes
The way I see it, there are a lot of different ways to tell a story. But that's old news.
This goes beyond the statement, "There are a lot of stories to be told", which is equally true and an entirely different conundrum for the narrative artist, be they writer, sculptor, painter, or cartoonist. Picking which story to tell isn't even half the battle. It might be a third of the battle, potentially a quarter. The thing is, after you have your story chosen you have to decide how you're going to tell that story. This stage is half the battle, you know, give or take. For me, this half of the battle has been the focus of the past three months. I blame Art Spiegelman.
Seeing Spiegelman's retrospective at the Vancouver Art Gallery this past summer changed something in the way I think about the comics production process. His work filled an entire floor of the gallery gallery building with cut-and-pasted montages of wackily painted caricatures from his RAW days, sobering inked pages from Maus, and a few gorgeously composed pages that were more than a series of panels, they were a single, cohesive masterwork appearing as a sequence of images bleeding into, through, and over each other in flawless harmony. I wish I could remember where those were from.
It sparked a paradigm shift. Drawing has ceased to be the sole method; ink has ceased to be the sole medium. My brain has started to roam around an open realm of ideas and media searching for alternate ways to make a comic, picking through piles of previously discarded materials until finds something usable and then dropping it back into my consciousness, spawning spontaneous and unexpected project ideas. for example, waking up one morning to a thought: "I should make a comic set entirely on sofas.", accompanied by a fully formed plan of a photo collage process with figures drawn into the black & white photo settings with conte crayon and brush pens. Granted, these ideas are still taking baby steps. They may be innovative to me, but they are a far cry from being drastic leaps in progress for the medium. I'm not not pushing any boundaries when I write my text on card-stock and glue in over a drawing instead of drawing a speech bubble into the panel. All I'm doing is pushing myself a little further out of my box of naivety, and that's bloody good enough for me.
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.
Oi. It's early, I'm tired, and I should be reading Kandinsky for my art history class but I'd rather sit here and drink coffee and screendump at you.
Figured I'd write out a bunch of the stuff that's going on in my life as an art student right now, partly to inform you and mostly as an entirely self-serving way to organize my thoughts on everything I have to get done in the next couple weeks. I have my first Fourth-year midterm critique coming up a week from tomorrow, which is a tad intimidating. I get to sit down with the two profs coordinating the Fourth-year class and my personal advisor, the ever so lovely and intensely critical Dr. Jodey Castricano, and show them what I've produced this year thus far. Therein lies the rub: I don't think I've turned out nearly enough work to warrant, or at least support, a solid critique. So I'm cranking the throttle on production this week. I'm going to scribble like mad for a couple days, and then put down my pens and venture boldly into the metal shop where I shall make like a blacksmith and get dirty. I have significant amounts of welding to finish before Wednesday. Likely I'll work through the weekend, seeing as I've been put on political cartoon duty at the newspaper and assigned the task of doing next issue's cover (going to print on Sunday, so, there goes my weekend). Monday I must make a serious attempt to get some sleep, because Tuesday I will be...
I'll be starting at 1 PM on Tuesday and finishing at 1 PM on Wednesday. Which is when my midterm critique starts. Because you know going full-throttle at the drawing table with no sleep for 24 consecutive hours and ending with your first big critique of the year is going to result in some interesting feedback. I intend to have a book for them to read when they arrive for the critique. There's also a chance that I'll be a cantankerous shmo.
So, what're we at: 24-hour challenge, metal shop, newspaper cartoons, midterm critique...ah, term papers. Here. This is the library that is my studio right now:
Yeah. I'm turning this block of cellulose knowledge into two term papers. One will be looking at Jewish culture in America in the early years of the 20th century and trying to understand why the rapidly urbanizing world in that particular place at that particular time with those particular people was the perfect storm that created the Superhero. Why not Paris? Why not Russia? And by the end of the month I have to have an abstract written up so I can submit a proposal for that paper to the PCA. Keeping my digits crossed on that one. The other term paper is taking the form of a comic, because I've been lucky enough to work with academics who are open to me taking that road. I'll be tackling issues of gender and violence and the gaze in Islamic culture, which frankly unnerves me. It's not content that I'm comfortable with, and it's nothing I've ever approached in my art practice before now. But I'm here in this program to get myself out of my comfort zone, so ONWARD!! Into an ink spattered and sleepless unknown where stories crawl out of the realm of informed imagination and make their home in a sketchbook wilderness ruled by a woodland king named Coffee.
