It's with much consideration and no small feeling of regret that I'm typing out the last post I'll publish on this blog. This thing started out as an idea to write a travel blog back in 2012 as I was preparing for a trip that never transpired, a year abroad studying illustration in Edinburgh. It leapt to life with the calamity of the Aurora Theatre shooting, and built some traction as a place for my thoughts on comics and cultural matters, as well as periodic art school updates. And it's fallen into disuse and disrepair in the past few years as other projects and undertaking have absorbed my time and energy. It's time to retire this writing space.
I thank all of you who have been regular or irregular readers over the years. Your visits to this site have registered as numbers in my analytics feed and have encouraged me in my writing with the knowledge that a few people out there care enough to check and see what I think about...stuff. It's been a great platform for a few serious rants. It's been an excellent place to pen replies to other posts I read and to engage friends of mine in discourse in a sort of internet-age analog to the Letters to the Editor pages that are disappearing with the newspaper industry. It's challenged me to research and build arguments and not fly off the cuff about things I could easily be reactionary about. I've had people let me know that things I've written here have challenged them, gotten them and people around them thinking and talking in directions they might not otherwise have taken. I think it's made me a better writer, but so far I'm the only one who's told me that.
By no means am I going to stop writing; I'm merely pulling the plug on this particular platform. Any new blog posts and artwork I produce will be published first and foremost on my professional site at www.ajkomics.ca. Selections of what's written there will make their way over to my Medium profile at www.medium.com/@ajkomics; I haven't done anything with that platform in years, and it's worth trying out again. This website will remain here, dormant, as a lingering archive of what I've written. I'll dust off a few pieces from this archive and re-post them to both the AJKomics.ca blog and to Medium as a way of introducing a ready body of content to these new platforms and hopefully sparking some interest in what I have, and have had, to say.
And that's that. I'm turning out the lights here. I bid you all a very fond farewell; I'll see ya out in the Grid.
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.
It's too damn easy to get caught up in routines of thought.
We as scholars have a job, don't we? We're meant to break new ground, come up with new ways of approaching problems, and come up with new problems where nobody had considered them before. If this is so, the biggest threat to our success is falling into routine and ceasing to revolutionize our thinking. "Ossifying" as I just heard it phrased at London's "Transitions" comics research symposium.
Comics refuse to settle. In every iteration of the form through history they've sought to outdo themselves, climbing over each other in a race to reach untouched conceptual and technical soil. This shouldn't be surprising; it's a statement that holds true for most if not all forms of art that developed through the 20th century, be they visual or written forms. Initially driven by the pure capitalist motivation to sell, innovation in comics took a turn for the radical when the Comics Code threatened the industry with stagnation and hasn't slowed down since. So why, then, am I hearing concern voiced in the halls of Birkbeck University of London, that the bones of our field are stiffening?
Great straight-up polemic from Ann D'Orazio on what comics scholars do and don't study. 1/2 #transitions5
— Jason Dittmer (@RealJDittmer) October 25, 2014
I can't say I necessarily agree with D'Orazio. After all, in the past 7 hours I've also been recipient to a wealth of theory and analysis that has jumpstarted my interest in new directions of study and renewed my faith in the field that I'm attempting to enter. Her polemic felt oddly incongruous, claiming disciplinary stagnation in the midst of a symposium entitled "new directions in comics studies". I do understand D'Orazio's concern. Studies of comics from a purely literary direction fall appallingly short in dealing with a text that is more than purely textual. Studies that corral comics within the traditions of Art History and expect it to play by the rules will almost inevitably end up struggling with matters of multiplex authorship and unconventional paths of influence, unless they stay strictly upon the beaten path of the accepted canon of Spiegelman and Satrapi, maybe dipping cautious toes into something like Herriman's Krazy Kat.
These disciplines have tools to offer Comics Studies, to be sure. Literary theory is, by nature, multidisciplinary. It deals with and is applied to the literary, but it often begins elsewhere: gender theory, sociology, philosophy, aesthetics, and so on. Comics can be literary, D'Orazio states, but they are not literature. Neither are they art, though they are undoubtedly an art form. Art History, a field that has developed to study the creation and impact of images in a canonized tradition, is not entirely equipped to deal with the network of image, text, book, labour, reproduction process, distribution, consumption, and criticism that makes up the scope of Comics Studies (I'm sure I missed some areas; please add them in the comments). I think what D'Orazio is saying is that we can apply literary theory and aesthetic theory to comics, but we must be careful not to stop there and get comfortable. I agree. But if she's worried that we've already stopped and settled into a holding pattern of platitudes on the form I'm afraid she's sorely mistaken.
We have the advantage not only of being a young and recently institutionalized field but also of being a field with a constantly and dynamically growing body of subject matter before us. We also have the advantage of being a field rife with creators, with figures like McCloud and Horrocks both working creatively as industry cartoonists and critically as key theorists in the field. Comics-specific theory is emerging to tackle the ways the changing industry is changing the form. We're standing with our feet planted firmly on either side of a historical transition as the Age of Mechanical Reproduction gives way to the Age of Digital Reproduction. The possibilities are endless, and if #Transitions5 has proven anything it's that if you fill a room with comics scholars they will all come to comics from a different direction. We're not exactly Shakespeare scholars here. There's no way we'll ever run out of material to study, unless your conception of the field begins and ends with McCay or Caniff, in which case I say to you WAKE UP! We live in an unfolding tapestry of webcomics, motion comics, hypercomics, comics that occupy whole galleries, hand-printed comics, comics dissertations, 3D comics, poetry comics, journalism comics, info comics, comics with stoner-hipster bears quoting Bukowski...
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.
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.
And that's that. I'm turning out the lights here. I bid you all a very fond farewell; I'll see ya out in the Grid.
