keep the hills to your right and your back; keep the waters to the front or at your left
It has been that kind of week. Sun Tzu's Art of War was mandatory reading. Apparently there is no proven attribution of 'keep your friends close but your enemies closer' to anyone other than Don Corleone in the Godfather. People assume Petrarch, Machiavelli or Sun Tzu but nope....
I finally loaded up the rest of the mini comics from last Summer including the two painfully ripped out of my subconscious at The Omega Institute in Rhinebeck NY. I'm longing for a period of time off with nowhere to go and nothing to do but draw and organize my thoughts. February vacation - I am looking at you! Got my first real look at Building Stories, by the legendary Chris Ware.
I read a great interview in the Paris Review with him recently where he said some key things about the essence of drawing the figure in comics.
INTERVIEWER Unlike pretty much every other male cartoonist of your generation, you never seem to refer to the superhero comics of the sixties and seventies. How did you extirpate that influence from your work?
WARE Pretty easily, actually. The rhythms and visual patterns in 1960s superhero comics are false and histrionic, especially when applied to what it really feels like to be alive, so I avoided using them. As far as that sort of adolescent, adventurey stuff goes, I came to prefer the earlier, more ideogrammatic cartooning of the thirties and forties, like Joe Shuster, Roy Crane, Ray Gotto, Dick Calkins. Their simplicity and awkwardness seemed more human and adaptable somehow. Not that I don’t really admire Jack Kirby’s powerful and almost transcendental slow-motion, heavier-than-a-neutron-star way of drawing the human figure—I think he was a genius—but it doesn’t sync up with the way I’ve actually experienced life, or with my own aims as a writer.
Incidentally, this brings up an aspect of comics someone should really try to figure out—that sensation of weight and movement that every cartoonist brings to the human form via a strange and indescribable connection between rhythm and gesture. Charlie Brown “feels” solid on the page compared, say, to the nearly weightless early Krazy Kat, despite the bold strokes and heavy shadows of Herriman’s pen. Frank King’s balloony figures almost lean into their futures, while Chester Gould’s immobile statues seem cast in some infinite past. Dan Clowes’s have a weird, balsa-wood quality that exacerbates his Nabokovian disposition as the master clockmaker.
In short, I think cartooning gets at, and re-creates on the page, some sixth sense—of space and of being in a body—in a way no other medium can quite so easily, or at least so naturally.
The Art of Comics / The Paris Review / Interviewer :Jeet Heer
My quest to collect original Palookaville's by Seth is ongoing. I'm dropping birthday present hints as heavily as horseshoes....meanwhile i'm reading the volumes i got for Christmas. I really like the idea of physically building the environment that you are drawing and writing about. That seems right to me. Seth did it with Dominion City. Something to ponder.
