Leland Myrick’s MISSOURI BOY started out as a batch of poems that he put together and made into a graphic novel. He has a wonderful post about the process over at the First-Second blog:

…the poems that eventually became MISSOURI BOY were written over a span of almost ten years and were quite different in form, ranging from blank verse to haiku. When the idea finally gelled that I would take all these disparate poems and meld them into one coherent graphic novel, I began to think about the process of turning poetry into comics, and in thinking about the process, I began to feel my way toward the kind of book I wanted MISSOURI BOY to be when it was finished. What I did NOT want was a book of illustrated poems. What I wanted was a graphic novel that moved through time and in the end told one large story through a bunch of little moments strung together, the little moments fairly clear in themselves, but the larger story more indistinct as seen through the scattered lenses of the individual chapters.

One of the most important things that happened in the transformation from poem to comic was the loss of words. My editor, Mark Siegel used what became an important phrase for me in the early stages of the book when I was still struggling with keeping the language of the original poems intact—Let the words fall away. And so I did. In my head I saw the words falling away, floating leaves settling on the floor around my drawing table.

Meg and I stayed late after work/school and went to see Scott McCloud tonight at UT:

UPDATE: Here’s the Daily Texan on the talk.

Has anyone read Cathy Malkasian’s Percy Gloom? New York Magazine ran an excerpt, and I am intrigued:

Also, Chris Oliveros at D+Q posted another page of Lynda Barry’s upcoming “What It Is”:

Beautiful stuff!

Just in case anyone else is interested in my other favorite female cartoonists: Renee French, Julie Doucet, Hope Larson, Alison Bechdel, Roz Chast, Lilli Carré, and Jessica Abel. I probably left a ton out, but those are the ones I can think of.

Who are your favorites?

A comics page by Joe Lambert

Joe Lambert is a student at the Center for Cartoon Studies. I’ve been following Joe’s blog for a while, partly because he’s a great cartoonist, partly because he does such a great job of documenting his life as a student at the school. (I’ve found student blogs to be a fabulous resource for determining whether a program would be right for me. Dig also, Dan Saffer’s blog about his time at Carnegie Mellon’s Design school)

Joe recently did a long interview with CCS faculty member Steve Bissette. I was impressed by Joe’s knowledge, but also by his honesty:

“I love so many things about comics, but at the same time I get really tired of reading something that I don’t like and getting this nagging feeling in the back of my head telling me that I should like it because it is done well. I think this is part of the complacency we sometimes fall into when creating things: thinking that it’s okay to be passive about what we’re doing or what we’re reading. I don’t want to get into value judgments, because everything is great all of the time, right? But I get tired of liking things just because they’re not bad. I really want to hate everything that isn’t amazing. I don’t think too many comics are doing everything that comics can be doing. “

I also really dig Joe’s list of cartoonists he’s looking to for inspiration these days:

Lately I’ve been looking closely at guys like David B. and Lewis Trondheim. Both create pages that are visually appealing, often with consideration to the way a page reads – the flow, I guess. But they’re both great at symbolizing ideas and doing so in a way that doesn’t interrupt the reading….I like the way Craig Thompson effortlessly guides my eyes across pages. I like the way Chester Brown’s thin, delicate line makes me uncomfortable; or the way Chris Ware evokes the passage of time and establishes rhythm using any number of panels; the way Lilli Carre packs so much into her characters’ expressions; I’m excited by Jordan Crane’s audacity to leap from moment to moment without holding the reader’s hand too tightly. Kevin Huizenga takes his comics very seriously, but still is still playful too.

Yes, yes, yes. Go say hello to Joe.

This beautiful little book came out sometime around when Meg and I got married. It is a document of Anders Nilsen’s relationship with his fiance, Cheryl Weaver, who died of hodgkins lymphoma in 2005. It reads somewhat like a heartbreaking, full-color issue of FOUND magazine dedicated to a couple: there are scanned postcards, hand-written letters on notebook paper, ticket stubs, photographs, and of course, Nilsen’s wonderful comics.

For obvious (or not so obvious?) reasons, I stayed far away from this book until a good time had passed since our wedding. (It was difficult — until now, I’ve read every work of Nilsen’s as soon as I could get my hands on it. He is one of my favorites.) About a month ago, I read THE END, which is actually something of a sequel to DON’T GO. DON’T GO finally came in the mail today (yes, it arrived with the steaks), and I read it tonight in one sitting.

What to say about this book? What you say about all great books: as little as possible.

Buy it. Read it. It does what great art does best: makes you stop and look around. Makes you want to keep on living.

All day I had been thinking about Kurt Vonnegut, and after reading this book, I thought of a little something he asked of all of us: “I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.’”

Supposedly, Chris Ware loved this particular Gasoline Alley strip by Frank King so much that he tore the page out of the Smithsonian Collection Of Newspaper Comics book and had it mounted on the wall of his studio. Given my fondness of the “style of the old woodcut pictures,” I had to rip it off, myself.

I got this great tear sheet scan from Roger Clark’s fantastic archive of annual Gasoline Alley “autumn walk” Sunday pages.

I don’t have too much more to say about David Kunzle’s long-out-of-print series, THE HISTORY OF THE COMIC STRIP, but I did want to post a couple of wacky examples from the book that caught my attention last week:

I plan on ripping these off as soon as I can.

On a side note, here’s what R. Crumb had to say about the book. Unbelievably, Professor Kunzle had never heard Crumb’s praise, so he was delighted when I forwarded him the quote from Hignite’s book. I still think that with a little editing, maybe whittling it down to a paperback format, this book could be re-released and sell quite well. Kunzle has two books on Rudolphe Topffer coming out soon: a collection of his strips, RUDOLPHE TOPFFER: THE COMPLETE COMIC STRIPS, and a monograph, RUDOLPHE TOPFFER: FATHER OF THE COMIC STRIP.

“…the more ethnic it is, the more universal it is….The whiter the Beach Boys are, the better they are. I know a lot of people don’t like the Beach Boys because they say they are too white. I say, that’s what’s good about them. That’s one of the main ingredients. Joni Mitchell, the Beach Boys, Buddy Holly are really great artists because they are as white as they can get.”

—Gilbert Hernandez, interview

I don’t know how, but I’ve so far ignored the Hernandez Brothers’ Love & Rockets. I read some of Jaime’s work when it ran in the Nytimes Funny Pages, but that was it. Now, I’m dipping into Gil Hernandez’s Palomar: The Heartbreak Soup Stories. I’m really intrigued by the idea of comic stories set in the same fictional town (very much like Marquez or Faulkner), and Gil’s crazy telescoping (?) in between panels: in some of the comics, he’ll tell a whole story within one panel, then move on to the next.

Anyways, it’s great to “discover” someone who already has such an output.

In case you haven’t already heard, my heroine and all-around-awesome-gal, Lynda Barry, has signed a publishing deal with Drawn + Quarterly. They’ll not only be putting out her collage/comics work-in-progress book, What It Is, they’ll also be putting out a FIVE VOLUME SET of Ernie Pook’s Comeek!

In the meantime, in case I haven’t already stressed/mentioned it, my favorite place to check up on Lynda on the WWW is her Shop Super Marlys Ebay Store , where she posts little “outtakes” for sale like the piece from ONE! HUNDRED! DEMONS! above, with super-fantastic, revealing commentary like this:

Hey before Lynda figured out exactly how to do the water color work for the One Hundred Demons strips, she messed around a lot! This is hand ground Chinese ink and water color on lightweight drawing paper size 8×10ish, the image size is 6×6ish. And! I called Lynda up and said “Tell me more about this art!” and she says there were a couple of versions of the comic strip Hate which is in 100 Demons and this is a panel from a version that didn’t make it into the book. It features Lynda at her Jr. High School talking to two girls she actually grew up with but now there was Black Power and Lynda had suddenly become “Whitey”. She says about that time “It was BAD time! I wanted to be a Black Panter! Even I hated Whitey back then” I said “Back when? She said “1968, darlin’, a longass time ago.” I said “Do you still hate Whitey?” she said, “Well, I certainly hate White House Whitey and his flunky imps” and then she starts to go on about, you know, Bush, Cheney, and how bad everything is right now so I say OK! I have to go!

I’d actually been wondering about the size of the ONE! HUNDRED! DEMONS! stuff for a while. Search around and you shall receive.