I was relieved to hear Gabrielle Bell in the Fall 2005 issue of MOME (take a sneak peek at the new one) confess to Gary Groth, “I’m not so obsessive about comics, actually. I don’t really read that many comics as much as I would like to. I’ve often been really impatient with most comics….The stories, in most cases, even if they’re good, they’re still not as good as most books, most novels are. So it’s frustrating to read a comic when I could be reading some great literature.”

John Hodgman quoted her interview in his “Comics Chronicle” piece in the recent NYTimes Book Review, and added his own two cents: “I have not been as brave as she to admit even to myself (never mind to Gary Groth), that many of the alternative fine-art comics that cross my desk these days are kind of boring. I’ve been quiet on this point in part because I do believe comics are literature, and do not wish to undermine the cause…”

So much of the past year has been about me slowly coming around to the fact that comics — and the graphic novel form in particular — is what I’m meant to do, and that my frustration with the form (the thin plots, boring characters, mediocre artwork) is really just a big blinking neon sign pointing to the void which I hope that my own work will fill. As Dylan Horrocks points out in his Scott McCloud essay, “The problem with comics is that people associate them not with what they could be, but with what they have been.”

Yesterday I read some great workshop advice from Kelly Link (via). Essentially, the advice was: don’t play it safe. There are way too many people out there churning out competant, respectable work. The only way to rise above it all is to push yourself to your absolute limits. Take big risks.

For me, making comics is turning my back on playing it safe. It’s about pushing myself to that terrifying yet exhilarating place where I have no idea what I’m doing, but it’s so much fun, and I’m right on the edge of my skills.

My old friend Jeremy is doing it right now with his music. Two years ago he was writing competant, respectable pop songs. Then one day he sat down and realized that it all bored the hell out of him. He started from scratch, totally re-invented his sound. Now he’s on the verge of having his first album out, and it’s going to be really, really good — but only because he pushed himself. (Check out his new single, “I Promise,” over at his website or MySpace.)

I’m about to start out on my first graphic novel. I have no idea how I’m going to do it. It feels dangerous. It feels scary.

And it feels great.

“Leonardo, “an unlettered man,” as he described himself, had a difficult relationship with the written word. His knowledge was without equal in all the world, but his ignorance of Latin and grammar prevented him from communicating in writing with the learned men of his time. Certainly he thought he could set down much of his science more clearly in drawings than in words. “O writer, with what letters can you convey the entire figuration with such perfection as drawing gives us here?” he wrote in his notebooks on anatmony. And not just in science but also in philosophy, he was confident he could communicate better by means of painting and drawing. Still he also felt an incessant need to write, to use writing to investigate the world in all its polymorphous manifestations and secrets, and also to give shape to his fantasies, emotions, and rancors–as when he inveighs against men of letters, who were able only to repeat what they had read in the books of others, unlike those who were among the “inventors and interpreters between nature and men.” He therefore wrote more and more. With the passing of the years, he gave up painting and expressed himself through writing and drawing…”

—Italo Calvino on Leonardo da Vinci, “Exactitude,” SIX MEMOS FOR THE NEW MILLENIUM

Here’s a podcast featuring an interview with Ander Monson, in which he discusses Twin Peaks, book design, and Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves, among other things. Talking about the graphic elements of Other Electricities:

I had originally composed this book in Pagemaker….It’s really sad now that you don’t see more books with these visual elements. Now we have all the graphic novels happening, and I think that’s a good influence on the publishing world. But even when I was trying to sell this book, I was trying to find an agent for it, and I got letters back that said, “Dude, there’s graphics in here, there’s no way I’m going to be able to sell it,” and I wanted to respond, “Have you seen what people are buying? I mean, they’re buying Chris Ware!”

And about the lack of graphic elements in modern fiction:

My guess is that it has a lot to do with the workshop model in MFA programs. Which, pretty much forbids that you have any kind of graphical element, you have to turn your stories in, in double-spaced, regular type….But I think it also has to do with the production model of traditional publishing, where it has not been reasonable for most writers to include graphic elements. We’ve only had Pagemaker for 5-10 years. So, I’ve got this pet theory that writers, now that the technology is more and more transparent, we’re going to have writers who are able to actually do good things with visual elements in ways that they weren’t able to before.