For someone who loves stories so much, I’m a terrible oral storyteller. I get the pacing wrong, bungle the chain of events, forget who said what when…. Oral storytelling is a performance, and I’ve always had a hard time with performance. It’s one of the reasons I knew I’d never be a real musician: I always preferred recording on a four-track to singing at the open mic night.

I spent a good hour yesterday in the barber’s chair, telling “The Ballad of Austin and Meghan” to the girl cutting my hair. Since getting engaged, I’ve told the story at least a dozen times, and each time I feel like I never do it justice. Maybe that’s why for our wedding favors, Meg and I want to make a mini-comic about our lives together up until this point. To tell the story and to get it right!

For months I’ve been thinking about what form it should take. At first I thought it should look like a Lynda Barry or a James Kochalka, with the narration covering large gaps of time, and the pictures singling out individual moments and bits of dialogue. (This might be a good place to point out that the usual adage in creative writing class, “show don’t tell,” is useless in the medium of comics — you can show and tell all you want.) But somehow, that idea just didn’t seem right, so I put off starting on it.

Then I started going through my old American Splendor anthology, and came across one of my favorite Crumb/Pekar collaborations:

(If you’ve seen the movie, this story was adapted into a great Paul Giamatti monologue.)

With background, facial expressions, hand gestures, pauses, and other visual cues, comics turns out to be a great way to approximate the experience of oral storytelling. Better yet, you’re not a passive listener — unlike the real-time experience of film or real life, you get to set the rate at which you receive the story. The only thing you don’t get is the sound of the storyteller’s voice.

So, for our mini-comic, it’ll essentially be Meg and I talking to our guests, telling them our story. Only afterwards, they can stick us in their pocket and take us home.

“I think copying someone’s work is the fastest way to learn certain things about drawing and line. It’s funny how there is such a taboo against it. I learned everything from just copying other people’s work.”

- Lynda Barry

This is my copy of some of the panels from a 1930s Gasoline Alley strip that Frank King drew in the style of a woodcut. I superimposed my own characters. Supposedly, Chris Ware loved this particular strip 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.

Mine’s a library copy, so I can’t go that far.

This is yet another page from CALAMITY and my own personal favorite so far.

* * *

It’s my day off. I’m hanging out, playing with my re-animated laptop, and listening to the soundtrack from Jackie Brown.

I saw the movie a year or two ago, but I got the DVD set out from library last week, and I’ve watched it three times since then. The acting is fantastic, the soundtrack kicks ass, the characters are warm and living and breathing. Quentin Tarantino’s best movie, hands down.

It’s based on Elmore Leonard’s Rum Punch, and just like any Elmore Leonard plot, as Martin Amis has noted, there’s a big bag full of money and everybody’s trying to get at it. Within this framework, the characters come alive. It’s a simple, genius formula.

Here’s a bit from Elmore Leonard’s website:

When Quentin Tarantino was a kid, he stole a copy of Elmore Leonard’s The Switch and got caught. Unrepentent, he later went back to the same store and stole the book again. Elmore Leonard was a beacon in the direction that he would soon head in his films. He wrote a movie directed by Tony Scott called True Romance which he said was “an Elmore Leonard novel that he didn’t write.” It certainly is an homage; it even opens in Detroit. After Reservoir Dogs came out, Elmore wrote Rum Punch which reprises the three main characters from The Switch. Tarantino read it and wanted to buy it but didn’t have the money. Elmore and his agent Michael Siegel offered to hold it for him. When he did acquire the book, Tarantino did not contact Elmore Leonard for a long time. When he did he said he was afraid to call. Elmore said, “Why because you changed the name of my book and cast Pam Greir in the lead? He said, “That’s Ok, just make a good movie.”

Dutch has said that he thought it was by far the best adaptation of his work. The DVD set includes some great interview with Leonard. (It also includes the hilarious, “Chicks Who Love Guns,” which QT wrote and directed specifically for the film.)

Anyways, if you haven’t seen Jackie Brown or read Leonard, you’re in for a treat.

“I’m interested in truth and beauty….If your words aren’t truthful, the finest optically letter spaced typography won’t help. And if your images aren’t on point, making them dance in color in three dimensions won’t help….If you look after truth and goodness, beauty looks after herself.”

- Edward Tufte, on NPR

According to his former sex slave, Osama Bin Laden is obsessed with Whitney Houston. “He would say how beautiful she is, what a nice smile she has, how truly
Islamic she is but is just brainwashed by American culture and by her husband, Bobby Brown, whom Osama talked about having killed.”

* * *

Two of the songs on this list are going to be played at our wedding. Can you guess which ones? (MP3s for all 200 songs.)

* * *

Lynda put a couple updates on her page, including an advertisement for the “Writing The Unthinkable” workshop she’s doing in Madison, and a preview of her work-in-progress, WHAT IT IS:

Lynda sent me two or three pages of this, and it is going to be sweet, lemme tell you.

“To construct a picture-story does not mean you must set yourself up as a master craftsman, to draw out every potential from your material —often down to the dregs! It does not mean you just devise caricatures with a pencil naturally frivolous. Nor is it simply to dramatize a proverb or illustrate a pun. You must actually invent some kind of play, where the parts are arranged by plan and form a satisfactory whole. You do not merely pen a joke or put a refrain in couplets. You make a book: good or bad, sober or silly, crazy or sound in sense.”

—Rudolph Töpffer, Essay on Physiognomy, 1845

* * *

Anything new: you wonder what to call it. I’m calling mine a graphic novel for the marketers. But what it really is is a Cartoon Novel. Or a novel-in-cartoons. Or just a book.

Kurt Vonnegut said he wrote Cat’s Cradle as if each chapter were a joke. Nathaniel West said he originally pictured Miss Lonelyhearts as a novel in comic strips.

I’m trying to write mine as if each page is a gag strip. Only the gags build into a story. And lots of them aren’t funny at all.

Peter Orner’s excellent new book is kind of like that. Each part is a little episode. And the episodes build into something big.

Whatever it is, it’s a book. This, I think, is a revelation.

* * *

- James Kochalka, quoted in Dylan Horrocks’ “The Perfect Planet: Comics, Games, and World-Building.”

* * *

George Saunders says that as a young boy, he felt the language in Esther Forbes’ Johnny Tremain was a code he could break, “a code that turned out to be more accurate and expressive than the one we all use to slog through normal life.” And breaking this code suggested to him that he might be able to come up with his own code, “a premonition that my complicated feelings about life could be subjugated to that quest, which has turned out to be true.”

People talk about voice and style, and I have no clue what they’re talking about. “Find your voice!” they say.

Screw that. I’m working on my secret code.

…from a gag comic I’m working on I just finished. My soundtrack: Little Steven’s Underground Garage.

• You can see a ton of that comics-only issue of Vice Magazine online. These reviews are hilarious! Anybody know where you can find this in Cleveland?
• A great post from Fantagraphics about all the comics-related videos you can find on YouTube.
• Chip Kidd guest blogs at Powells. It’s great to hear the king of book design bitch about idiotic marketing people testing book designs.
• Post on a Marjane Satrapi reading in Seattle. We’re going to do PERSEPOLIS as the first book in my new 20-30 something reading group at the library. (More about that later, but if you’re interested, please contact me!)
• Interviews: George Saunders and Kevin Huizenga.

Happy Weekend, all!

This is the first page of a new comic called “A Terrible Calamity at Sea.” I’ve had the idea kicking around for a while now. It’s about a boy who survives a shipwreck and becomes something of a celebrity. Adventures ensue.

A few links: an Eddie Campbell interview with the Q & A in the form of drawings, and some great in-studio performances archived on WOXY.com: The National, The Greenhornes, and Neko Case.

Happy Weekend to all…if you’re in Cleveland, maybe I’ll see you at the Tapes N Tapes show Saturday.