My sketchbooks ebb and flow. Whenever I’m working non-stop on a project, my sketchbook suffers. Whenever I’m meandering, reading a lot, wondering what to do next, my sketchbook flourishes. Is there a correlation to my mental health? Almost certainly. Were food and shelter provided for me, I could be content to spend the rest of my days reading and doodling in a sketchbook, finished product be damned.

This afternoon I read Ivan Brunetti‘s interview in Todd Hignite’s IN THE STUDIO. He was talking a lot about grids, and how if you put objects into a grid, they read as a system, or “pleasing geometry,” and viewers automatically start to structure them and find relationships between them. He pointed to this Kandinsky print as an inspiration:

He also related this “putting things into boxes” as part of his definition of cartooning:

The nature of cartooning seems inherently playful, having its roots in a playful kind of drawing, but because you’re putting things into boxes and organizing pages into panels and shapes of rectangles and circles, it automatically has an architectural quality, too.

I was talking to Dan Chaon a while back and he told me he uses an exercise with his students where he has them divide a piece of notebook paper into six “panels” and then instructs them to write scenes in each box. I really like this idea of looking at writing as merely a filling of black space. Lately, I’ve been playing with grids in my sketchbook pages:

(I’ve also been copying people’s work: the last five panels are ripped from the amazing Tom Gauld.)

I find that gridding gives way to lots of spontaneous doodling and gaglines…

I’ve also been trying to rip off Lynda Barry and treat my writing as calligraphically as possible–varying text sizes and styles within the same space. Brunetti had a great point in the interview when he said that cartooning wasn’t necessarily drawing, it was more like calligraphy or writing…writing with pictures, as Saul Steinberg would say.

Speaking of putting things into boxes, I can’t really keep a sketchbook at my desk at work, but we have all kinds of post-it notes around, so if there’s a bit of downtime and a flash of inspiration, I’ve been using the post-it as a panel, and doing a quick doodle. Jessica Hagy’s wonderful index cards have already captured the cartoon-on-mundane-office-supply market…but Meg thought these were pretty funny:

 

The most honest, funny, nitty-gritty, cutting-edge work happens in your sketchbook — you don’t have to worry about whether anything is good or bad, you just fart around. And when you’re just farting around, that’s when the good stuff happens.

For the past couple of months, I’d been so focused on what I thought was my “real” work that I wasn’t working in my sketchbook. And funny enough, even after working on several pages of “finished” comics, I still felt unfulfilled, like I didn’t get anything done: my sketchbook was blank, and that was failure. It seemed like my daily life, because it wasn’t chronicled, or at least eluded to, was lost.

So for the past week or so, I’ve been on a diary kick, filling something like five pages a night, right after Meg falls asleep, and before I do, too. There’s something about the twilight of consciousness — it’s kind of a magical time where you pull crazy things out of your ass. One of the things I’ve been doing is keeping my diary entries strictly comics-based: lots of pictures, speech bubbles, etc. Not like James Kochalka, I don’t try to make perfect comics from a moment that captures the day. Something more like Anders Nilsen (his whole book, Monologues for the Coming Plague, came straight out of sketchbooks), where I just try to empty the junk in my head onto the page — fast and dirty.

It’s been really wonderful.

Anyways, I had breakfast this morning with Dan (who also, it turns out, is a fan of Anders), and I wrote about it in my diary this afternoon using my new style. Here’s a couple pages from it:

For anybody who lives in Madison (this means you, Sean), check out Dan at the Wisconsin Book Festival next week, where Chris Ware and Marjane Satrapi will also be hanging out.

A cool reading in the hot basement at Mac’s Backs last night, with fiction writers Kelly Link, Dan Chaon, and Maureen McHugh. Link is the editor of the literary magazine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, put out by Small Beer Press, which, along with Link’s book of short stories, MAGIC FOR BEGINNERS, published Maureen McHugh’s new book of short stories, MOTHERS AND OTHER MONSTERS. Dan Chaon teaches at Oberlin and lives right here in Cleveland Heights–his most recent book is the novel, YOU REMIND ME OF ME. I heard one of the audience members say, “Oh, God, it’s like the royalty of Cleveland writing here tonight…”

KELLY LINK Link read the beginning of the title story from Magic for Beginners. She said the story was inspired from “watching a lot of Buffy reruns.” There was a lot of humor, and the world was engrossing, and the mother in the story was a librarian. Her book is good: “Stone Animals,” about a bunny invasion, really creeped me out. She brought along issue #17 of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, so I picked up a copy of that.

DAN CHAON “I heard Dave Eggers and Spike Jones are doing an adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are,” Chaon said. “So I called up Quentin Tarentino, and we’re going to collaborate on Goodnight, Moon.” Then Chaon read an unfinished story about a two-headed baby. My favorite line of the story was, “‘I think you’ve been blessed,’ the nurse said.”

After the reading, I was browsing the stacks, and Chaon pointed at me.

CHAON: You’re the Zagara’s guy.
ME: Uh, yeah, hi!
CHAON: It’s Austin, right? You’re a cartoonist?

And I’m thinking, how the hell does Dan Chaon know my name and that I draw cartoons? Turns out, someone pointed out this here blog, and one of the posts to him. (So, hi Dan, if you’re reading.) We talked about Zagaras being the true center of Cleveland literary activity, and I sheepishly tried to convince him that I was REALLY a short story writer, and he introduced me to one of his students who was doing a graphic novel in his workshop, which I thought was great: I wish I’d have done some comics in undergrad workshop.

MAUREEN McHUGH McHugh started out by saying, “I think Dan and I must watch the same TV.” To which Chaon responded, “Oprah?”

McHugh is currently writing for the gaming industry. “Art is a product of technology,” she said. “The novel only became an art form after the printing press made it cheap to make a book…we’re still figuring out the computer.” She read four stories she’s written for the website lastcallpoker.com, aimed at the site’s target demographic of males 18-34. The first story was about a lesbian ninja named spider. “That’s A Funny Place For A Canoe,” was about a serial killer who shoots a hispanic drug dealer in the head on a street corner. For the third story, McHugh “had to become Elmore Leonard.” “Grind Up Your Bones For Bread” was about a computer hacker named Matt whose plot resembled the life story of William Bonny (aka Billy the Kidd). McHugh had cool postcards with her story “Wicked” printed on the front–I’ve always wondered why more authors don’t do promotional postcards/samples, like visual artists. She ended by holding up her new book and saying, “And if you think the stories in here are going to be anything like what I just read, you’re in for a big surprise!”

And so, there you have it: best reading since McSweeney’s hit Joseph-Beth a couple months ago. Next week: Charles Baxter at Lakewood Public Library.