Matthew Bogart

This Friday, May 2nd, I'll be at Eisner-winning comic shop Books With Pictures @bookswithpictures at 1401 SE Division, 4-6PM, giving professional feedback on your comics art.

You show me 6-8 pages of comics storytelling. I'll give you feedback based on my 30 years in comics. What works, what doesn't, how to tweak a panel for clarity or impact, tips for saving labor- the sort of advice your teacher at a comics class might offer.

I'm not there to hire you, or read your pitch, or introduce you to a publisher. I'm there to look at the pages you've drawn. (I restrict this to comics pages- storytelling- because that's what I know. Scripts, stand-alone illustrations, graphic design, posters? Sorry, those are out of my lane.)

It's fine if you work digitally, but BRING PRINTOUTS if you can. It's WAY easier to critique work on paper than on screen. I can scribble notes right on your panels, or lay tracing paper on top of them. And best of all, we won't have to deal with app glitches, battery problems, or tiny phone screens.

We do this the first Friday of every month, 4-6PM. In-person, not online. Also? It's 100% free. No charge. Free free free. Just bring your portfolio and your love of comic book storytelling! See you this Friday at Books With Pictures, 1401 SE Division. bookswithpictures.com

Print ready images get them here

We passed it a couple of days ago, but it has been 10 years since the strip "On Fire" which became the meme "This is Fine" was posted originally on my webcomic Gunshow.

My thoughts on the meme come and go, ebb and flow, and change on a dime depending on how annoyed I am that day. I should be so lucky to get to do all this for a living thanks to what it has become and helped me do, but it's hard to see the forest through the trees and it feels like I'm constantly lost in the woods anyway.

Still. It's relatable! You might use it in your office job if you have one! A lot of people do. It has kind of lost a bit of luster for me when I am still a working cartoonist trying to make something bigger and better and people just like this thing you dashed off for a comic on a Wednesday. Other artists might know that feeling. It's what we all as creators often deal with.

This strip has made me comprehend the idea of one's perception of art. I am bored more often than not, of my own art. I try to make something that excites me, makes me laugh, but sometimes you have a schedule and just need to pop something out now. That has helped me get quicker and let go of precious ideas, but it has also proven to be a double edged sword when the world at large has access to your work.

When a work gets as big as this has, is it still yours? Not talking about copyright and legal stuff. It says something larger that everyone can feel and relate to. I did not go through what Matt Furie has, but there is a similar level of control you just Don't Have anymore when your work becomes a meme on this level. I got lucky being able to ride it out a little. But it's not perfectly in my grasp. There's plenty of bootleggers and grifters who just use memes as freely as the air they breath.

But I've always tried to move forward. I rarely think about my older work or care if it's even easily available online. I'm no historian, I'm just the jester who's makin' up a story or tellin' a joke. But I've been forced time and time again with these 6 panels, to be the party pooper, gate-keeper, girlboss, etc and just to get people to recognize there are artists behind these drawings online. These memes we share.

And it feels like it's only getting harder. The best I can ask for is for people to simply forget, but the dog persists. So I do what I can and try to keep in good humor and be thankful that I can still do what I do for a living.

It's the lack of suspension of disbelief.

When you see something someone else has drawn or painted, you take in the content faster than you take in the technical aspects. You experience it as pseudo-real, the same way you stop perceiving animated characters as drawn or book characters as written as you get into the story.

On the other hand, when you yourself have made something, all you see is the machine behind the theater, so to speak. You're probably thinking about lines, shading, coloring in a "does this make sense? Is this the best decision I could have made?"-kind of way.

I think that's also why sometimes, pictures you haven't looked at for a long time starts looking nice to you again, à la: "Hey past-me was unto something! Why can't I replicate it nowadays?". It's probably specifically because you've forgotten the process of making it that you are now seeing it with fresh eyes.

Other publications: "Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples' "Saga" series defies expectations"

There's a lot of ink spent on the importance of creator-owned comics and new voices but comics news sites seem to go out of their way to bring comics publishers into conversations about the work itself.

The focus on corporate control of IP is something that really distinguishes American comics from European comics and from other literary mediums, generally. When I was checking out Tintin from the library growing up, I couldn't tell you who the publisher (Casterman) was but I sure knew who Hergé was. Likewise, you'd never see a feature about Cormac McCarthy's new novels mention Knopf. Could you imagine if the Guardian review read like this?

"As a Knopf-published novel, McCarthy’s grand attempt at cross-gender empathy is Alicia, a former child prodigy turned rogue mathematician."

I have a lot of respect for what publishers do - I've been in this business for fifteen years and I'm married to a senior editor so I know a fair bit of inside baseball - and their contribution is undoubtedly important, but it's frankly bizarre that the publisher's name so often finds its way into the headline and lede. e.g. Hellboy isn't Dark Horse's Spider-man, it's Mike Mignola's graphic novel. Saga isn't Image's Sandman, it's Vaughan's and Staples' most popular work.

Publishers and their colophons are markers of quality, so maybe this is actually A Good Thing for lesser-known works and I shouldn't complain...

We listened to a few cassettes over and over: Fishbone, Public Enemy, The Misfits. Scott painted vampires, quoting the dialogue at me in goofy voices as he worked his way through that giant stack of pages. I’d told all my commercial art clients I’d be unavailable, so I had no deadlines. I pencilled, inked, and lettered a comics story that my friend Jeff Lang had written. I read a translation of The Master and Margarita. And I made significant life-choices by flipping randomly through a dictionary of quotations I’d found on the sidewalk, interpreting the results like oracular prophecy. I was confused about almost everything and letting random wisdom leak out from the pages of a fifty year old book seemed like a good idea at the time.

At some point that summer, I did this oil sketch of my room there. This was all decades ago, and it still sort of feels like last week.