#ourcomicsourselves

Hi! My name’s Athena Naylor, and I’m a cartoonist and recent graduate of the George Washington University. I currently live in D.C., and I got involved with Our Comics Ourselves while the exhibit was at George Mason University this fall. I’m excited to contribute to the blog this week!

The first cartoonist I want to highlight this week is Carolyn Nowak, whose recent work has been on my mind ever since this year’s Small Press Expo. 

I first stumbled upon Nowak’s work here through tumblr, particularly when her comic “Rungs” achieved some notoriety through the reblogging circuit. But it’s really her mini-comics that stand out to me. I picked up “Girl Town” at Small Press Expo in 2015 and quickly fell in love with Nowak’s cartooning and storytelling style.

 Nowak’s characters, along with the world she pens in around them, are endearingly strange. In “Girl Town,” the main characters are women who were rejected as astronauts because they were considered to be “too distracting” for their male counterparts (too painfully typical and relevant), and now they live together in a grungy community of outcast women.

This soft sci-fi set up, however, is really a backdrop for the tale of a crush between our nameless narrator and the source of her romantic obsession, Betsy, her next-door neighbor.

Betsy is not a typical love-interest. She and her roommates are mocked as “lunch-ladies” for their looks, and besides her common-place appearance Betsy’s personality is hardly warm or welcoming. Unlike in many love stories where female romantic interests are portrayed as soft and vulnerable, the narrator of “Girl Town” is enamored most of Betsy’s bold and blatant rage. I don’t know if I’ve ever read another story quite like this where a woman’s anger is cast as her most attractive attribute, rather than a “bitchy” or “shrewish” personality trait. I kinda love it.

I think the sequence that really sold me on Nowak’s story was the one below: any cartoonist who incorporates a line like “her nipples rattled against the windowsill in an odious rhythm” has earned my upmost admiration and respect. How can anyone not pause and grin after this scene?

Nowak’s most recent mini-comic, “Diana’s Electric Tongue,” only shows how much her work has progressed.  “Diana’s Electric Tongue” won an Ignatz Award at this year’s SPX, and the initial plot seems fairly straightforward: a woman buys a robot boyfriend, shenanigans ensue. It sounds like a comedic premise, and Nowak’s work does always maintain an undercurrent of humor. But what I did not expect was how much heartache this comic made me feel.

 The real driving force behind “Diana’s Electric Tongue” isn’t how Diana navigates a relationship with a robot, though that is certainly explored. The focus is instead on the main character’s motivation for buying the robot. Diana is dealing with the aftermath of her previous relationship, which closely coincided with a disastrous motorcycle accident that caused her to lose her tongue (thus the title). The story becomes more a meditation on heartbreak and how the impact of relationships can be insidious and encompassing, all while suggesting parallels between emotional loss and physical injury. It’s the kind of story I would want to write—one that finds its narrative tension in well-timed disclosures of information and the accumulation of small details that snowball into a final emotional punch. Every time I pick up the book I find new layers to contemplate and I become engrossed, even though I know the story by heart.

Besides all this, Nowak’s artwork with all its organic, fluid linework and pastel candy colors (props to Nowak’s coloring assistant Lisa DuBois) is completely captivating.

I’ll leave it at that since I don’t want to spoil anything else. Know that these review blurbs I’m posting below are correct and that I highly recommend the book.

LINEWORK NW 2016 comix show May 21-22, portland, oregon!!!!

erik nebel, wally catton, ann matsusima chiu, theo ellsworth

amazing comics from http://neoglyphicmedia.tumblr.com

i have been guest curator for one week (5/16-5/22) for the site for this awesome exhibition.

here’s some text from their show in new york:

Do Anything (2010) by Warren Ellis

I’m going to set the stage for this week by talking about a book about comics.  Do Anything is an essay by Warren Ellis, originally serialized by bleedingcool.com in 2009.  It is a meditation on and an exploration of comics and connections as viewed through the head of Jack Kirby.  The burgled robot head of Jack Kirby - which is the reprogrammed robot head of Philip K. Dick - just in case you didn’t yet understand this to be a science fiction story.  It traces a specific spider-webbed history of comic books through the life and influence of Kirby, The King of Comics.  But, it is also about how comics are made - the daily nuts and bolts of the medium, yes, but also, and most importantly, the craft of comics.  

Warren Ellis is a favorite writer of mine for many reasons.  One of which is just how much he puts his interest in the craft of writing and story telling out into the world on a regular basis.  You should sign up for his newsletter, Orbital Operations, to read his weekly thoughts on what he’s working on, what he’s reading, what concepts and news he’s interested in, and what he wants to murder.  Morning, Computer is his blog where he types at briefly in the morning, I imagine, before he’s fully caffeinated and still toying around with what he wants his gears to be turning towards for the day.  He speaks regularly and makes his talks public and if you’re interested in creative people talking about the things they are interested in and why/how they work you owe it to yourself to download Cunning Plans, his e-book that collects his talks from the past couple years.  

One of the talks in Cunning Plans I heard him deliver in person, in a shitty barn in someone’s backyard in LA.  And his interest in place and space as inseparable with time (ghost roads) shines through the barn speech, and through much of his writing.  And through Do Anything as well.  Do Anything is a work that reveals itself in layers and I have made a point to re-read it annually.  A way to refresh the paintings on the cave-walls of my brain.  A ritual to recharge the series of connections that are comics and to think about the medium and creators that I love from a different angle.  

And if I haven’t sold this book to you enough, know that the climax of the essay is framed by Bowie singing “Heroes.”  And it makes my head buzz and my hands shake every time I read it.