Real-life adventures

 

© Michael Chevy Castranova 2016

I’ve determined Bill Griffith’s graphic memoir that came out late last year, “Invisible Ink,” very well could be the ideal gateway gift book for people who’ve not read graphic novels before.

I picked up a copy at CXC in Columbus last autumn, where Griffith was one of the speakers. As with everything he does, this book is even smarter than it first seems. It’s revealing family history with a lot of talk about the business of cartooning and quite a bit of nostalgia.

Meanwhile, in chapter 366 of “Slipped,” the Scarlet Sparrow knew it was a trap … and walked right in anyway. And more surprises are around the corner.

Take a look.

Melancholoy in the comics

© Michael Chevy Castranova 2015

 
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I’ve always been struck by how sad — intentionally, I’ve assumed — the comics of Chris Ware, Bill Griffith and Art Spiegelman are. Or maybe it’s just me.

I remember not being able to finish Ware’s “Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth” because the main character was so grieved and depressed. There’s a segment in which Jimmy makes a model horse that the instructor praises but, later, the other boys mock for its true, crude appearance. Corrigan, angry and feeling betrayed, flings the horse away — into a pile snow, if I recall correctly.

But then, in anguished remorse, he jumps into the snow to retrieve the tiny model, crying, “I’m sorry.”

It’s just heart-breaking.

Griffith’s new memoir, “Invisible Ink,” about his parents, also has an underlying tone of melancholy. And Spiegelman’s masterpiece, “Maus,” isn’t exactly a barrel of monkeys, either.

And yet … and yet I’ve seen Spiegelman speak three or four times now, and on each occasion he has appeared chipper and, frankly, pretty darned happy. There’s probably some deep meaning here.

•••

Meanwhile, speaking of snow, chapter 354 of “Slipped” finds some of our resourceful protagonists in the far north, deep into a new adventure. Their goal is to make contact with an as-yet-unidentified group that supposedly will aid them in defeating les Rongeur.

That’s assuming, of course, Delacroix told them the truth.

Take a look at this link.

Inspiration and writer’s’s block

Slipped images and story © Michael Chevy Castranova 2015

Last weekend’s Cartoon Crossroads Columbus events were great fun. I bought lots of books, including Dylan Horrocks’s “Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen,” an entertaining graphic-novel adventure about writer’s block and creativity and originality, and had a good chat with Chris Schweizer while I picked up a couple of his excellent sketchbooks.

Also there was Bill Griffith, promoting “Invisible Ink,” his memoir about his mother and her affair with cartoonist Lawrence Lariar.

I didn’t think I’d ever heard of Lariar — until Griffith talked about Lariar’s mail-order cartooning lessons based on the notion that all characters should start in the shape of peanut. I recall even as a child thinking that was pretty ridiculous.

During his Friday afternoon presentation, Griffith talked about how he’s taken the advice of Ernie Bushmiller, of “Nancy” fame, when stuck for an idea: Griffith calls out all his characters, then asks, “OK, who has an idea today? And Mr. Toad raises his hand and says, ‘Me, I have an idea today.’”

Which reminded me of when I working through the two most-recent chapters of “Slipped,” 351 and 352. I couldn’t see a credible way to motivate Tyler and Mendacity to take up the adventure Delacroix had proposed. Then the characters just acted it out — the sisters would brave the wildebeest’s dubious plan, they said, to find their father.

And Cartier herself decided she should be part of Tyler’s quest.

Though, frankly, Tyler has never liked sharing, just as she makes it known if she thinks she hasn’t been the focus of a story for too long.

Whose comic strip is this, after all, she’s asked.

Take a look … .

© Michael Chevy Castranova 2015 From Slipped chapter 351

Starting this Thursday in Columbus will the first (or the trial run, I’m no longer sure which) CXC Cartoons Crossroads Columbus (or maybe that’s Columbus Crossroads Cartoons) festival.
Among the speakers and panelists will be Art Spiegelman, Bill Griffith, Kate Beaton, Jaime Hernandez and Jeff Smith.
Events for the four-day festival will be held all over the city — a town I lived in longer than I have anywhere else — and much of it in or near the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum.
I wrote one of the first magazine stories about the the library when it was getting started, and attended the first-ever conference held there on  Ohio State University campus way back when the library still was a tiny, young thing. And I’ve gone to a number of the cartoon conferences sponsored there over the years.
I mention these things not to brag but to convince you when I say that for those events, more cartoonists than the scheduled folk tend to show up.
So come along. Schmooze, network, pick up tips of the trade.

Meanwhile, back at “Slipped” … Delacroix begins to explain to Tyler, Mendacity, Cartier and Pip what he expects them to do. It is a complex web the creature is weaving.
And why should they do what he asks, Tyler demands to know. His answer will surprise you.
Take a look: Slipped chapter 351, right here — the three beauties and the beast.

Festival of Cartoon Art — Snippets, Part 1

This year’s sold-out Ohio State University event was very much as I recall the very first Festivals of Cartoon Art — lots of speakers and panelists covering comic strips, comic books, graphic novels, editorial cartoons and animation (plus, this year, much talk about online comics), as well as professionals who weren’t presenters but came anyway.

So along with the presenters such as Art Spiegelman (Maus), Matt Groening (Life in Hell and The Simpsons), Jen Sorensen (Slowpoke), Dan Piraro (Bizarro) and Bill Griffith (Zippy), also milling around between sessions was Lynn Johnston (For Better or For Worse), Jeff Smith (Bone), editorial cartoonist J.P. Trostle, New Yorker art editor Francoise Mouly and Jeff Keane (The Family Circus). And those are just the ones I happened to spot.

Here are some bits of wisdom I picked up during and between sessions:

• Comics, declared James Sturm (The Golem’s Mighty Swing), are not a combination of writing and drawing, but of poetry and graphic design. Nicely put, right? Read that again.

• Jan Eliot (Stone Soup) draws how people “feel, not how they look.” She added it’s hard to come up with kids-outdoors ideas — in the woods, playing in snow — not already done by Bill Watterson (Calvin and Hobbes).

• Roz Chast, one of The New Yorker’s 20 staff cartoonists, submits five cartoons a week for consideration.

She noted an idea evolves as she draws it. She confessed to resubmitting rejected ideas, months later and after “some reworking.” “Everybody does it,” she added.

• Gene Luen Yang, discussing his American-Born Chinese graphic novel, recalled his mother told him not to draw the Monkey King barefooted. The centuries-old character always wore shoes, she claimed, because he didn’t want “people to know he’s a monkey.” Which, of course, dovetails beautifully with Yang’s primary theme of cultural ambivalence.

• Dave Kellett, creator of Sheldon and one of the authors of the book How to Make Webcomics, discussed the benefits of disintermediation — how, for online comics, there is the artist and audience, and all the people in the middle of the traditional food chain are gone.

More to come on this year’s very worthwhile event ….

A link to the Festival’s site is here.

OSU Festival of Cartoon Art

Speakers have been announced for the 10th triennial Festival of Cartoon Art at Ohio State University. They will include Art Spiegelman (Maus), whom I saw give a lively albeit smoky lecture when he was in Michigan a few years ago touting In the Shadow of No Towers; Bill Griffith (Zippy the Pinhead); Patrick McDonnell (Mutts); Matt Groening (The Simpsons, Life in Hell); Roz Chast (lots of cartoons in The New Yorker and elsewhere); and Dan Piraro (Bizarro), among others.

Registration opens June 1, with events running Oct. 14 through 17 in Columbus. Attendance allegedly will be limited to 275.

Two additional highlights: an exhibit for the 100th birthday of Krazy Kat and a retrospective of Billy Ireland’s work. (Ireland was the editorial cartoonist at the Columbus Dispatch who mentored two of sequential art’s most influential cartoonists, Milton Caniff, creator of Terry and the Pirates, and Noel Sickles, who wrote and drew Scorchy Smith.)

I attended a few of the early Festivals and found them phenomenally informative and entertaining, and cock full of surprises. At one of the forums, an attendee in the audience got up during a Q&A session to ask the panel an involved question about contracts. A wave of amusement rolled through the auditorium as we realized the questioner was Berke Breathed, creator of the then-popular Bloom County, who wasn’t even on the agenda, if I recall correctly.

O, Nancy: An Anthology of Graphic Fiction

Oh, I get it now. After all this time, after reading how Robert Crumb claimed he had his daughter home-schooled in France with old Little Lulu comic books, and noting the frequent references by Bill Griffith and Patrick McDonnell to Nancy comic strips, I finally see what the attraction is, thanks to Ivan Brunetti’s book, An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons and True Stories.

I admit I never thought Nancy in particular was especially clever, even when I read them as a child. I mostly recall cartoonist Ernie Bushmiller’s drawings of “hippies” as wearing torn clothes and always possessing guitars with broken strings and lots of flies. He seemed to confuse free-spiritedness with sloth and dishonesty.

But in his anthology’s introduction, Brunetti uses a 1958 strip about Nancy dreaming she’s being boiled, steamed and baked to demonstrate “algebraically balanced composition,” rhythm and efficiency. The final panel shows the girl waking up in bed to discover she’s been buried under a mountain of winter coats and hats. Each garment is clearly distinguishable from the other, by checks, stripes or dots.

“… The graphic clarity of the pile of coats … in lesser hands could have been turned into a gray, undifferentiated mush. Clutter was never depicted so unclutteredly,” he writes.

See?

The anthology itself has a lot about Charles Schultz and nothing about Will Eisner, and with samples from Crumb, Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez (but not Mario), Charles Burns, Lynda Barry, Seth and Art Spiegelman, among the other usual suspects.

More later on this book.

Zippy on Vacation

Lots of illustrators carry around a sketch pad, even on vacation. Bill Griffith, creator of the comic strip Zippy the Pinhead, has for years, apparently, and by chance I happened to receive a copy of his “Get Me a Table Without Flies, Harry.” It’s a collection of his sketches of people caught unawares (often in ill-fitting swim suits), food (“Here today, gone tamale”) and places (such as Pepto-Bismoloya Beach), while in locales from Paris, Dublin, Naples, Amsterdam and Puerto Vallarta to less exotic spots that include Salinas, Dallas and Lake Tahoe.

Knowing the wonderfully cranky Zippy state of mind helps with the inside jokes — a youngster paddling in a Calistoga, California, pool yelling “Yow!!” is deemed “a kid after my own heart.” And polka dots — the primary design on Zippy’s muu-muu — always draw praise.

But really, no insider knowledge is necessary to enjoy the art of this book. The drawings — several sketch-book-sheets-worth to a page and drawn with a customized Pelikan 120 — come captioned with allegedly true-life dialog. “Would you like rice or chips with th’ sizzling shrimp?” in a Chinese restaurant in Cork, Ireland. As Griffith kisses the Blarney Stone, another man urges, “Don’t look down, lad, don’t look down.” And from one of a trio of men lazing poolside: “What are you, 60? 61? Guys our age are perfect for women her age. What is she — 36? They’re lucky to get us.”

And every so often someone — often his wife, Diane — asks, “Are you drawing me?”

Charming, absurdist stuff. As one middle-aged guy in Victoria says, “Ha, ha, ha, ha. How about those East German jails!”