Arts Institute Blog

Many alternative comics are created by a single artist: the same person writes the story, draws the illustrations, and puts in the text (captions and dialogue). When you have complete creative control over all stages of your work, it can be a little easier to ensure that the final product is exactly what you envisioned. Chris Ware and Daniel Clowes are just two examples of this kind of one-man-show comic artist.

Most comics, however—especially mainstream comics—are much more collaborative in nature. Putting together these books is more akin to making a move. Instead of writers, directors, and actors having to share a vision and work together to make a cohesive whole you have writers, pencilers, inkers, and letterers. It all starts with the writer’s script but then each of these artists (pencilers, inkers, and letterers) must interpret that script—the penciler draws the characters and the landscapes, the inkers add the shadows and contrasts, and the letterer choose the fonts and lays out the dialogue and captions. If the writer imagines his story to be a light-hearted romp then he better hope his penciler gets that and doesn’t draw the characters to all look like Bela Lugosi after an especially hard break-up. And it will be hard to pick up on the story’s comical tone if the inker uses heavy lines and dark, dramatic shadows. And, really, that is an oversimplification of all the issues that must be considered and the ways the various artists must come together and share a vision. It really is like putting together a film—only doing it one still frame at a time.

Fortunately, while there are times when styles and ideas clash, most comic artists are professional, masters of their craft who put out polished products in record time.

Here is a link to a panel from HeroesCon where several such professionals talk about the highs and lows of collaboration.   

I’ve just finished my third full day here in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire where I will be studying piano and performance techniques at the Heifetz International Music Institute. It is one of the most beautiful and pristine places I have ever seen in my entire life. The institute takes place on the campus of a boarding school in town which overlooks Lake Winnepesaukee and a small range of the White Mountains far in the distance. The town claims to be the oldest resort town in the country, and I believe it. If there is anyplace I would like to one day build a second home, it would be here. And the town itself looks like one of those collections Department 56 comes out with around the Holiday season. Alas, I digress.

Out of only 78 musicians, I am one of six pianists chosen from around the world to study with some of the best-known music pedagogues in the business. I’ll study with Barry Snyder, Andre-Michel Schub, Jeffrey Sharkey, and Andre Watts over the course of the summer- all of whom are internationally acclaimed performers, pedagogues, and musical leaders. It’s thrilling. I will be playing chamber music, attending classes targeting the different aspects of performance issues, and performing about once per week. It is a tad strict when it comes to obligations, though, as we’re told to practice 5 hours per day, have 6 hours of chamber music rehearsal per week, 2 one-hour piano lessons per week, 5 hours of class per week, and still have time to eat and sleep. It may not sound like a lot to someone who is not accustomed to this lifestyle, but the energy and focus required to complete everything at 100% is almost mind-boggling.

In the end I know I will leave here a new person and a new musician, but it looks like it’s going to be a hard road getting there. I will have updates about how things are shaping up. Cheers!

I just returned from a wonderful visit to the HeroesCon comics convention. I went for the first time last year and had a blast, and was equally pleased this year. I am not big on the comics convention circuit, but from what I understand this is a fairly small gathering compared to others like the one held every year in San Diego. This convention had an excellent book fair, at which I spent a lot of money, and offered several interesting hour-long panel discussions. Every hour there were about three panels to choose from. On Saturday, I attended a panel discussion on the experience of collaboration (something that happens a lot in mainstream comics), a panel discussion with several contributing artist to the upcoming anthology of visual interpretations of the lyrics of Tori Amos, and finally a panel that hosted a conversation between indie comic greats Mark Dorkin and Jaime Hernandez.

The Savannah College of Art and Design had a significant presence at both this year’s and last’s years convention, though they hosted more panels last year. Last year seemed more devoted to the craft of comics while this year seemed to focus on the industry itself. In either case, I learned a lot—especially at the collaboration panel, but that is for another blog.

This convention appeals to me because it offers a great selection of books from indie or alternative comics publishers like Ad House Books and Top Shelf Productions. Last year I bought several books from both vendors—including a sweet anthology of love stories from Ad House and a gorgeous, hard-bound book called The Ticking by Renee French from Top Shelf. The Ticking is all done in delicate pencil sketches and tells the story of a disfigured boy trying to find his place in the world. It is grotesque and beautiful, funny and heartbreaking. This year I bought Super Spy by Matt Kindt from Top Shelf. This is a collection of short stories about the lives of spies. Again, beautiful and tragic. What I love about these publishers is that they are putting out works of art—the stories are artful, literary and moving, the images that convey the story are arresting and surprising, and even the binding is finely crafted and makes the book a delight to read and to display.

I bought a lot more, but I’ll leave it at that. All in all, the convention was a big success. I bought a lot of good books, learned some valuable lessons (and not just “maybe it’s not such a good idea to tattoo Hello Kitty’s face on your own forehead,” a lesson at least one convention goer would do well to learn), and enjoyed myself immensely. I’ll share more from the panel discussion nest time and also talk more about why I love literary comics and who some of my favorite writers and artists are.

Today I leave for Charlotte, NC to attend HeoresCon, a small comic book convention. I went for the first time last year and had an excellent time. This convention, while offering the usual superhero fare, also has an excellent selection of alternative and literary comics. Here is a link to the convention:

http://www.heroesonline.com/con-indie.html

I’ll offer a full report when I return.

I have been writing my prior posts about working on the Japanese myth poetry project, and I will continue to write about my process with that, but I also want to write about my teaching experience at the Governor’s School of the Arts. I am helping teach the creative writing classes in two two-week summer programs. I am doing a prompts class in the morning, where I will get the students generating ideas and images; then in the afternoon, I will be leading a  reading discussion in the afternoon, where we will look at the craft elements in a variety of poems.

 Tomorrow is the first day of the first session, and I have picked out prompts and readings that deal with images and paying attention to our senses when describing a scene. One of the exercises I am doing is one that I have modified from an exercise that I saw Ed Madden do with a group of high school students in Columbia. The exercise looks at Li-Young Lee’s “The Weight of Sweetness;” first we’ll read the poem and then look at how Lee calls attention to different senses throughout the poem. Then, I ask the students to see how Lee used a concrete image (in this case, the peach) to write about an abstraction (sweetness). This exercise is a good initial one because it gets us talking about “show not tell,” and concrete images. Another reason that I like this exercise is because it gives me a good example to show how writers use their own lives and memories in the poems they write; that doesn’t mean that everthing is true, but things usually are better and more in-depth when we “write what we know.”

Something I’ve been thinking about, in my writing and the poets I read, is the subject of inspiration. What are the topics that poems are written about? What makes them important to anyone else? The great poets are able to take something mundane, and sometimes ugly, and transform it into a moment of wonder. Who would have thought William Carlos Williams could do anything with a red wheelbarrow, or Mark Doty with a display of frozen mackerel? 

I’ve been traveling the country for a few weeks now, Florida to Michigan with plenty of stops along the way, and everywhere I ended up, I found something to write about. Yet, each object/moment ended up being completely different. On a beach in Florida, I went on a two hour walk to find sand-dollars, and I ended up with a burn to show the journey and a poem about sand-dollars. Somewhere on the drive northward, I wrote a poem in my head about vultures and mortality that ended up on paper some time later. And in Michigan I wrote a poem about ants; I’d seen ants plenty of times, but I guess it’s a combination of factors that allow us to see more than is actually there, the biggest of which is our mental state (influenced heavily by anything we’ve been reading/watching at the time). 

My mother and I have a long history of collaboration. Science fair projects, art projects, and the like. Well, actually, in the past our collaboration has been more along the lines of my mother does all the work and I take all the credit. For example, we “collaborated” and made this awesome pop-up book of the history of Florida for my sixth grade Social Studies Fair project, which only earned an honorable mention ribbon because my mother tried to make the drawings look like an actual sixth grader could have made the project while none of the other parents tried to hide their involvement including the master carpenter who built a working reproduction of a Viking ship and tried to pass the work off as his son’s but practically knocked his son over running to the stage to collect the blue ribbon for himself.

This is often the kind of “collaboration” you get from group projects: one person does all the work and the rest contribute little. Sometimes this is because of the laziness of the group; sometimes it is because one person can’t relinquish control. Fortunately, I can say without reservation that my mother’s and my new projects are 100% a joint effort: we contribute equally and we each offer feedback that enhances the work of the other for a better sum total effect.

Our comics projects start with my script. I write a script with the characters’ dialogue and captions. I also include a description of how I imagine the drawings will look in each comic panel. My mother takes the script and works up some sketches, how she envisions the characters, how she interprets my image descriptions. She then sends me the sketches and I give feedback—if it’s not quite what I had in mind, I’ll tell her. For example, for our story “Natural Disasters,” here was her first character sketch:

After some feedback from me (she looks too young) my mother revised the sketch and here is the final character we used:

My mother will sometimes also offer suggestions about the story—like, I think we need another page or another panel to give more insight into the conflict—or add details to the images that give subtle clues to the story’s subtext. In my next post, I’ll show a little more how we both offer feedback that takes a piece from script to finished page.  

I’ve included another poem here, and I want to talk about the process for writing this one. This one is in response to another story about a man who falls in love with a geisha girl and after she dies fairly young, he cannot seem to get over her. He dreams of her, and one night after having a dream of her, he paints her portrait on a silk panel (hence the title of this poem). 

After reading the outline of this story, several things came to mind; I thought about how the arts are a way of voicing something that we cannot voice in everyday speech; I have not experienced the same feeling of loss that this story describes, as it refers to losing someone to death, but I thought about what images can be used to describe losing love. I have been starting several poems recently with a sort of broad statement; for this poem, that’s “Art bares the beauty that we cannot speak.” I wanted to bring in the word ‘bare’ because of the play on ‘bear,’ and to show that this lost love and the feeling of losing a loved one is made apparent in this silk portrait in the story. So, the beauty that the speaker in the poem cannot bear is the loss of this young lover, who is the story is a geisha. I wanted to play around with this idea of painting because I thought it was interesting that the young geisha paints her face, and it is also through painting that this man deals with the loss of this woman. This portrait both connects him to this woman and helps her get over her, which is what I am trying to convey in the last few lines of this poem.

I am also working with a variation of the sonnet here, which I felt was appropriate given the subject matter.

Painting on Silk

            after “The Ghost of Oyuki”

Art bares the beauty that we cannot speak.

The losing you young, my painted woman.

I wake mornings, your face still there from dreams

left undone by the waking without you.

I paint what I remember to forget

the way you brushed your face with white, careful

with the curved lines at the nape of your neck.

To paint is to know the layers up-close,

the brushstrokes of brown that shadow your hair

against your brow; the curve of your lips, down.

I stand back to make sense of the lines there

on the silk. To understand your body

from a distance never practiced before.

The distance between bare brushstrokes and form.

When I was in high school we were required to study a foreign language. Living in South Florida, the prudent choice would have been to take Spanish and to actually pay attention in class but I chose to do neither. I chose to take the class that had the highest percentage of boys with long hair and black turtleneck sweaters: Mrs. Murray’s French class. I also chose to spend the majority of the semester looking over the shoulder of one Aaron Schantz, who had neither long hair nor a black turtleneck sweater, but who had something I found—to my surprise—much more interesting. No, it was not the secret to conjugating verbs in the past perfect tense. No, what Aaron had was a bag full of comic books and he would hide them in his French textbook and read them all period. And I would crane my neck to read over his shoulder until he got sick of me breathing down his neck and he gave me a stack to hide in my own textbook. And that is why I can’t speak French.

Though an avid reader, I had never before considered comic books as a valid literary option. They always just seemed like the hyper-active second-cousin to the Sunday funnies: all flash and tight pants and no substance. But boy was I wrong. Comics are visually compelling with complicated story-lines and intriguing characters—and they are not limited to adventure stories or superheroes. The medium is changing and evolving. Some of the most innovative story-telling and visual artistry is happening in comics. I’ve loved watching the form grow and discovering for myself artists and writers like Lynda Barry, Daniel Clowes, and Chris Ware.

With literary magazines publishing them, respected authors like Sherman Alexie and Mat Johnson (of the University of Houston) creating them, and awards like the Pulitzer and the National Book Award honoring them, comics are definitely not just for French class anymore.   I have recently decided to get off the sidelines and into the comics game myself—working in collaboration with my extremely talented artist mother, I have written and had accepted for publication my first literary comic. We are working on several more and in this blog I will talk about the collaboration process and the art of literary comics.

Who knows, maybe I’ll make a few comics fans along the way—though don’t follow my lead on the French thing. If you are in a French class, you should pay attention and save the comics for later. Because then you can read comics in English and French. Très awesome!  

Well, the ideas have been flowing better, and I’ve been doing some more free writing throughout the process of drafting these poems. I have been working on a poem for the project that includes aspects of the sonnet form. I am following the ababcdcdefefgg rhyme scheme and using a ten syllable count per line. It, again, has been interesting responding to these Japanese tales and using specific forms.  

I thought I’d include a draft of one of the villanelles that I’ve been working on for the project.  

The Change of Falling 

            after the Japanese tale “Kume and the Washerwoman” 

What makes us love what we cannot hold,

that which forces us to fall into the water

where women wash their dirty clothes?

Wasn’t I a god before I saw her, bold

and robed in clouds? I knew the thoughts

that make mortals love what they cannot hold.

A pattern of wanting things forbidden,

fruit, and places touched that must be bought

with blame and cleaned like dirty clothes.

They say it was her thigh where I lost my hold

on everything above, on knowing like a father

what makes children love what they cannot hold.

But it was her dark eyes that found me, showed

me what it was to be born out of the water,

the river where the women wash their clothes.

Loving her meant knowing what was old;

for time became something that mattered.

And what makes fools love what they cannot hold,

I found in that woman washing clothes.