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 8x10ish, the image size is 6x6ish. 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.

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.