“I remember great pleasure in cutting out Andy Cap and Flo with manicure scissors, and then cutting little slits in a magazine picture of a big bowl of Beef-a-Roni, and fitting Andy and Flo into them so it looked like they were rising out of the Beef-a-Roni. I remember laughing my head off at that one. I still love collage and I’ve always turned to it when I get stuck writing or drawing.”

—Lynda Barry

Today, obviously, I got stuck.

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.

Our house is a mess of GRE books right now, so I really don’t have the time to post much anything of any substance.

But I did come across a really great paragraph from an interview with my hero, Lynda, about being married and artistic, and a setup that sounds like everything Meg and I one day hope for:

My husband is a really good painter and a really good sculptor, and the first floor of our big old funky house is his studio. I have the third floor. We mainly live an the second floor, but there isn’t a room in the house without some sort of project going on in it. He works during the day restoring prairies and oak savannas. So at the end of the day there is always a lot to talk about. He drives a tractor around and wears bib overalls and then comes home and we eat dinner and then we both make things in out studios and run up and down the stairs and look at what the other is doing. We work on the house together - we tiled the bathrooms and put up a ceiling in my studio and painted all the walls and do all the things hardcore do-it-yourself types do. We both love to build things and fix things, and we like to hang out together. He makes me laugh really really hard. I have a Casio keyboard I got at a garage sale, and I’ve taught the dogs how to “play” it. They can select rhythms and chords and then they do nose solos. We roll around on the couch laughing a lot at the dog music. It’s a happy active household with occasional explosive scream fights that are also kind of fun. I lucked out with my home life.

And she also talks about why she chooses to live in the rural Midwest:

Well, like Goldilocks, I was looking for the place that felt just right, and it certainly is the Midwest….my first sense experiences were here and whenever I came back to the Midwest, I felt a certain unnameable excitement. like I had found a world that was lost to me. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that I’m living now where the light is like it was when I was very young.

And though they have nothing to do with being married or living in the Midwest, I am really digging the work of two other female cartoonists, Hope Larson and Lilli Carre. There is an interesting blog called Comic Tools where Hope has disclosed her methods/tools.

Ok, back to the flaming inferno of GRE hell…

“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.

I really need to get an office.

Right now, our living room doubles as my workspace, and that’s bad, because when I step into the room in the morning, I don’t know whether to write, or take a nap on the couch.

It’s better today, because the radio’s on, and there’s actually SUNLIGHT coming in the front window.

Yesterday I got so stir-crazy I went to Barnes and Noble with my sketchbook to work. I ended up doing little work, and a lot of reading.

I spent the majority of the time reading Ivan Brunetti’s fantastic new anthology, GRAPHIC FICTION, CARTOONS, & TRUE STORIES. (Here is the table of contents.) If you’re a newcomer to comics, this is probably the new place to start. It’s pretty amazing. I especially like the 20-page section dedicated to Peanuts, which included Art Spiegelman’s New Yorker tribute piece, “Abstract Thought Is A Warm Puppy” and an essay by Schulz himself, “Developing A Comic Strip,” which Brunetti uses in all his classes. (WMFU had an interview with him about the book a few days ago, and here’s another with Mr. Skin.)

Yale University Press has a really outstanding line of comics-related books on the market right now. In The Studio: Visits With Contemporary Cartoonists is probably the most unique: it features monologues and skethbook work by folks like Crumb, Panter, and Brunetti, but it also includes personal artifacts from each cartoonists’ stash: old magazines and comics, toys, posters, etc. The best part is Crumb talking about his current project: he’s illustrating every story from Genesis, using three different translations, and “telling it straight.” I can’t wait to see this. It’s going to be 180 pages long, and supposedly, he’s 60 or so pages into it.

But the winner yesterday was the new “graphic” issue of TIN HOUSE. It has a ten page or so excerpt from Lynda Barry’s WHAT IT IS, a new collage/book/thingie about images in progress, and an interview with her, too, not to mention stuff from Stuart Dybek, Marjane Satrapi, and a childhood comic by Dan Chaon.

I love the fact that Lynda sells her stuff over Ebay. Even her “throwaway” sketchbook pages blow my mind:

Here’s a student summary of one of her workshops about “the image” and writing.

“I did a strip…once where Charlie Brown was wondering out loud. He was sitting on a bench with Linus. [They were discussing] War and Peace or Beethoven’s Ninth, or something like that. Then he gets up and strikes out. I think he sits down and says something like, ‘And I’ll probably never write War and Peace, either.’

“I always think about things like that. What is of importance? I suppose the most important thing is just to do what you can do best. You have no other choice, do you? You have a certain amount of ability. And do the best with your abilities.”

- Charles Schultz, in a massive interview with Gary Groth, 1997

mini-exercise ripping off Chris Ware from yesterday

* * *

I’m really disappointed that Art Spiegelman is withdrawing his work from the Jewish Museum’s Masters of American Comics exhibit, because it was going to be one of the places Meg and I visited on our honeymoon in NYC. The other bummer is that it’s a split show, so anything in the first half of the 20th century (including, gulp, Schultz, McCay and Herriman) is over at the Newark Museum, and we’re surely not taking the train over there on our limited stay. I guess we’ll have to settle (!!) for Crumb, Panter, and Ware.

Speaking of Ware, he was interviewed about the exihibit and asked, “Who was overlooked?” His response:

Lynda Barry. Her semiautobiographical experiments were pretty much responsible for the maturation comics experienced in the ’90s.

I thought that was pretty awesome of him to say, and come to think of it, I’m just amazed that Lynda isn’t better known than she is. What a genius. Meeting her and becoming exposed to her work (and this sounds overly-dramatic), in a lot of ways, changed my life, or at least my art, because I believe she’s the perfect model of the writer/artist — all her characters arise out of this wonderful world that is uniquely hers…

Anyways, speaking of heroes: George Saunders is coming to Oberlin in April.

For Monday, I’m trying to put together a post about musical notation, Schroeder, and sound effects in comics. Have a good weekend!

Somewhere in the past two months I’ve lost the joy of waking up in the morning, and, to paraphrase Donald Barthelme and Lynda Barry, not-knowing. Everything seems forced and planned, and spontaneity is dead, just like the work.

No more! I say. Time to get back to the good stuff. Time to play.

I pulled out my Good Books last night, my James Kochalka and my Lynda Barry, and afterwards just started doodling in my notebook, trying to get back to that state.

Then this morning, I was checking up on Lynda, and in addition to a new page from WHAT IT IS, I came across this magical artifact up for auction her ebay account:

That’s right! An original manuscript page of CRUDDY. As Lydna says, (and I know I’ve quoted this before):

I tried not to think about the book unless I was actually writing it and I tend to write in the first person, in the character of someone, and that someone was Roberta….My goal was to not think about things at all. To dream it out instead, trying very hard not to edit at all as I went. The first draft really took shape when I found that I needed to slow way down and distract myself at the same time so I used a paintbrush and Tuscan red watercolor and painted the manuscript on legal paper, trying to concentrate on the calligraphic aspect of writing rather than trying to craft beautiful sentences. I figured as long as the sentences looked beautiful, the rest would take care of itself. That draft was seven hundred pages long. I used a hairdryer when I got to the end of each page so I could stack them without smearing. I can do some pretty nice handwriting now. I tried to write it a word at a time like it was being dictated. Cruddy was the result.”

Genius. Check out her interview on Talk of the Nation.

Now back to work play!

deleted panels from Calamity

Looks different around here, huh?

It’s been years since I made up the old header, and I had some spare art from work on the book, so I decided it was time for a change. Let me know how you like it.

I remember Lynda Barry talking about major writer’s block and having the revelation, “How can you write a book when you don’t have the book to write it in?” So she went out, got a big notebook, made up the cover, and started making a book.

The package is important.

* * *

Here’s Lynda talking some more about making CRUDDY:

I tried not to think about the book unless I was actually writing it….My goal was to not think about things at all. To dream it out instead, trying very hard not to edit at all as I went. The first draft really took shape when I found that I needed to slow way down and distract myself at the same time so I used a paintbrush and Tuscan red watercolor and painted the manuscript on legal paper, trying to concentrate on the calligraphic aspect of writing rather than trying to craft beautiful sentences. I figured as long as the sentences looked beautiful, the rest would take care of itself. That draft was seven hundred pages long. I used a hairdryer when I got to the end of each page so I could stack them without smearing. I can do some pretty nice handwriting now. I tried to write it a word at a time like it was being dictated. Cruddy was the result.

If I am obsessed with Lynda’s advice, it’s only because it’s so good. You have to leave your book at the drawing board. Leave it, leave it, leave it. Make it play. Dream it.

This is tougher to do than it sounds.

What Lynda taps into though, is that you have to DISTRACT yourself somehow from what you are doing, you have to trick your brain into thinking you’re not working, and with me, I can’t distract myself in Microsoft Word. That stupid ass cursor blinks and blinks and all of the time I am thinking, my God, my God, I am wasting my life.

I’ve yet to get my sumi-e set, but I’m going to, SOON.

* * *

I don’t know about you, but around our place, we need a vacation. In a couple weeks we’ll be headed down to the beach with my mom, and I’m bringing absolutely nothing related to the book. For one week, I’m going to read whatever I want, eat a bunch of seafood, walk the beach with Meg and Mom, and swim in the ocean.

Fresh eyes is what I’m hoping for when I get back.

Here’s my reading list so far:

• CAT’S CRADLE, By Kurt Vonnegut (reread)
• CASH, By Johnny Cash
• CASE HISTORIES, By Kate Atkinson
• MOTHERS AND OTHER MONSTERS, By Maureen McHugh (paperback, re-read)
• Something by Elmore Leonard, probably GLITZ, RIO BRAVO, or THE HOT KID
• And something by Haruki Murakami, if I can get a cheapo paperback…
• And added thanks to Corey: CANDIDE, by Voltaire (preferably Chris Ware’s design)

I need just one or two more books to read, so if you’ve got any suggestions, send them my way. Nothing taxing, nothing thick. And NO graphic novels, because I’m trying to get back into reading prose.

We’re due for a Half Price run soon.

*Yes, that’s a Prince reference.

Got an e-mail from Lynda this morning. She had some advice for getting started with the method she used to write ONE! HUNDRED! DEMONS!

She said the Chinese and Japanese have completely different ideas about how to approach the brush, so the best idea is to hop over to the library and get different ideas:

The new project she’s working on is really interesting: it’s mixed media/collage, but it reads like a comic.

I was so glad to hear from her, because I’ve been so busy with the book, I’ve yet to hop over to acornplanet.com and buy a sumi-e set. And since I do so much work on the computer, I’ve been looking for something a bit more organic to do in the morning, something to get me loosened up for the book work. And I think the “mysterious horseback experience of riding a brush around a page” (Lynda’s words) is just what I need.

This is the first in what I hope to be several exercises hatched under the influence of Lynda Barry. See, Lynda keeps a stack of index cards with different words on them, and every morning she gets up very early, gets her ink ready, dips her brush, and pulls out a word, and whatever that word is, she uses the image it conjures to start up a piece of writing. Whenever she can’t think of how to start out, she uses the words, “It was a time when…” and goes from there. And because she’s using the top of her brain to make the letters look neat with the brush, the bottom of her brain can work on the good stuff. Oh, and she can’t erase what she’s written. She wrote all of CRUDDY this way.

To try it out, I opened the dictionary, and the first word I looked at was “juice.” I started out with a big rectangular block of black, and started erasing…

…death to Microsoft Word!