Unflattening

Numenius drew my attention last week to a book by Nick Sousanis entitled Unflattening. This was originally his doctoral dissertation (!) but written entirely as a comic, looking to explore new ways of seeing. When you only are given one path — one perspective — you are blind to the myriad other possibilities, other ways, other directions, other modes of thinking.

The book is very dense and I just picked it up this morning from our local indie bookstore, so I haven’t finished it yet, but this is one I’ll be returning to again and again. Douglas Wolk calls it a “genuine oddity, a philosophical treatise in comics form.” Imagine my delight when I learned that it was published by my former employer, Harvard University Press… the notes at the back are worth the price of admission on their own, illustrated as they are with thumbnails and drafts of his pages.

Sleepless Planet

I had the first of my four Comix Activism classes on Saturday. This class is being taught by Maureen Burdock, author of Sleepless Planet (and Queen of Snails) and this first session was on Health Justice and Graphic Medicine, a topic I’m particularly interested in since it intersects with my work on End-of-Life Issues.

Comics work well for activism: they are democratic, inexpensive, widely accessible, and can operate happily outside capitalist consumer culture. Maureen called the “portable empathy machines.”

I particularly like her take on insomnia since she’s suffered from it since she was a child and has tried just about everything to address it — and there’s no one quick fix, bur rather, it must be approached holistically. (It’s also very common for post-menopausal women to suffer from it, which has certainly been my experience.)

The comic at right was drawn during our initial warm-up exercise, whose prompt was “draw your day” — Maureen is in Europe so her day was coming to a close, but mine had just started!

White Rose

I was curious to read about the white rose as a symbol of Russian feminist resistance this morning on the profile of a man in Germany to whom I was about to mail a postcard. Not knowing its history, I assumed it was a new Russian symbol. (I knew it as a symbol of Yorkshire vs. the red rose of Lancashire, from the Wars of the Roses, and of course as a symbol of the need for beauty in the lives of working people in the anthem Bread and Roses.) Imagine my surprise, though, at hearing the white rose mentioned again in my German class later on today by a Russian who now lives in Austria, talking about the resistance movement in Germany during World War II. One group of five dissidents in Munich called itself Weiße Rose and was captured in 1942 by the Gestapo, imprisoned, and executed. The anthem “Die Gedanken Sind Frei” was written a century earlier and was required to be invoked over the decades as repression and authoritarianism took their successive places in German history.

I am about to embark on a course tomorrow, Comix Activism, taught by an artist who was born to German parents and who has now moved back to Europe. The United States is no longer a safe place for her. It’s time to wield symbols and pens to resist oppression…

ETA Saturday morning: I forgot. I also caught a reference to the White Rose on Feli from Germany’s YouTube video from several years ago. Google is watching me… White roses to you, Google.

Zettelkastening Comics

I was interested to read Numenius’ blog post from yesterday. I am drawn to movable pieces, whether written or drawn, and wonder how this might help in construction of a comic.

An important feature of a comic is that there be sequential panels, whether or not anything is written on them. But the number of panels, their size relative to each other, and even where they appear (cliffhangers work better if positioned at the bottom right hand of a recto page, at least in Western traditions, for instance), can all be worked through if ideas and panels are assembled as movable pieces.

I have a lot of index cards and at least three projects currently in the works on cards, held together with rubber bands. None of them is very large which helps. But this is giving me a lot of ideas about how to work, specifically with how to structure thought.

From Guinea Pigs to Hummingbirds

Yesterday was the last day of August. I had promised myself to complete a (rough!) first draft of my Mister Ginger comic by the end of the day, and I more or less did.

I now have a new task, one whose deadline is September 24th. I’ve been invited to submit a 6-page comic for another SAW anthology entitled Field Notes. I’m going to take some of the hummingbird drawings I did and arrange them thematically on six pages. This book is going to be even smaller than the last one, so my plan is to have one large panel per page.

At left is some of the doodling I’ve been doing for the title page. I am toying with versals. Since I’m going to be working at least at 200% I was playing with larger paper, which is definitely a challenge.

Below are the postcards I painted last Birdtober from which I am drawing the material for this comic. Nice to have most of the research for this project done and dusted.

Sailor Fude

I’ve been working on the ancillary characters of the Mr. Ginger story. Slavic people tend to have round faces and large eyes. This is a gross oversimplification but I was looking for faces online that I could draw quickly to try and approximate this.

Because I’m going to be working at double size, I needed a thicker line than my Pilot Metropolitan could give me. My Sailor Fude pen has a bent nib which allows for four different line weights. Working on hot press watercolor paper is hard — the ink needed a bit of coaxing — but I like the effect. It’s sort of cartoony without my intending it to be so.

I will also be trying Bristol board but I’m thinking this might work well. Still unsure about whether to hand letter the text. (Or whether to hand letter it, digitize it, and set it that way…)

Flow

A prompt from SAWgust yesterday was to depict our Flow, our Process. This is my attempt to depict mine. It’s not very efficient.

I’m trying to get as much done as I can on Mister Ginger before Sunday night, and it’s slow. Paper is definitely faster, but if I do it digitally it’s a lot easier to edit. It doesn’t mean I don’t have bits of paper all over the house.

One thing is, my deadline is self-imposed. I have no idea what I’m doing with this thing other than giving a copy to Mister Ginger’s former owners. But I do have time to get this right, or as right as I can.

Material

The good folks at SAWgust have been providing prompts daily to get us thinking about our process. I’ve sometimes answered prompts but I’ve ALWAYS thought about them; they’re very interesting. Today’s was #material: what materials do we use and why? I decided to draw it on one of my materials that isn’t pictured here (Procreate on my iPad). And it’s all from memory, since Winston was sprawled across the kitchen table where these materials all are.

Last night I had a call with Mr. Ginger’s owner, and hoo boy there is a lot more to this story. Good and bad. The good: Mister Ginger is still alive and well and living in Kharkiv (and he has a girlfriend); the bad: this has been traumatic for him, retelling this story for me. But A. did say that he thought Mr. Ginger helped him through some very hard times, which is great to hear because it’s the actual punchline — simply giving comfort to people in a war zone is heroic enough.

Matching the Medium to the Message

On Saturday I attended the SAWgust halfway point call. I had a question about how others organized their composition process if the final was going to be analog; mostly I work on paper then go digital. But for this Ukraine project it seems analog is a good way to go.

I’d done some sketches with a fountain pen but it has a fine nib and when reduced down it maybe too fine a line. I looked for and found my Sailor Fude pen, a fountain pen with a bent nib that can give you at least three different thicknesses. I think I can get this to work. I still have some fine-tuning to do but am pretty set on this course.

Someone said they just redrew and redrew panels until they were right. Someone else said when using watercolor they used a camera rather than a scanner. Another helpful suggestion was to write the names of the materials, paints, brushes and pens on the back of the work so if you revisit it a year later you have some hope of matching it.

Meanwhile it’s looking like I might do the whole section before the invasion in full color, moving to monochrome afterwards except for the guinea pig… The paper is Deleter A Comic Book Paper size B5, which is not as thick as Bristol board, takes a good wash, and is very pen-friendly.

Almost a Real Guinea Pig

I’ve now completed a very incomplete first draft of the script for my Mister Ginger comic. There will need to be quite a bit of work on the script and also on the drawings… but to help with the latter, I ordered a plushie, pictured at left, and set about doing some sketches.

Drawing live guinea pigs is obviously better, but a) I don’t have one, b) if I did, the cats would kill it, c) if I go to the pet store, the animals are almost at ground level which makes it hard to get anything other than a bird’s eye view. So this plushie, while not perfect, at least allows me the luxury of placing at eye level and even higher, this way and that, 3/4 view and from behind. I am still drawing on reference photos but this will allow me to stage the drawings in my comic better.