Experiment with Pano on iPhone + hand drawing — see it much bigger!

I doodled the most recent Teleportal Reading for the folks at Electric Literature.

Teleportal Readings is a multi-media reading series in Austin, TX, which really shakes up the reading. Their most recent event featured Jennifer Egan and Maira Kalman reading live, with a video reading by Doug Dorst, as well as an EL Single Sentence Animation by Joanna Neborsky, and synthy sounds from Silent Diane.

It was so great to meet Maira in person. Her work is amazing.

Funny note: it was so dark where I was drawing that I didn’t notice I was drawing with a red Sharpie! Had to fix in Photoshop after I scanned them.

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Mike Judge, creator of Beavis and Butthead, King of the Hill, Office Space, and Idiocracy, visited the University of Texas tonight for an RTF “Master Class” with John Pierson. I told John I was a huge fan, and he was nice enough to invite me. Of course, I brought my sketchbook.

Note: if you want to cartoon someone, don’t sit front row. Distance = better abstraction.

see it bigger

see it bigger

Mike lives right here in Austin, Texas, and came off as a really smart, down-to-earth and unpretentious guy. He was even nice enough to make a Sharpie doodle of Butthead in my sketchbook!

Last night there was a party in town to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Office Space (I missed it, but heard it was great.)

You can read some good quotes and watch some of my favorite clips by him over on my tumblelog.

Artist/cartoonist Gary Panter signed his new book and gave a slideshow presentation at Domy Books last night. My buddy Adam has the last word:

Here are some good pictures of the same event at the Houston store.

Jessica Abel and Matt Madden were in town this weekend to promote Jessica’s La Perdida and Life Sucks, and their brand-new comics textbook collaboration, Drawing Words and Writing Pictures (great title). Yesterday they talked about the books (in that order) at Austin Books and Comics. There was a small crowd, not much A/C, and a keg of beer!

The biggest treat was that we got to buy a copy of the new textbook, which doesn’t officially come out for a week or so:

Some things I took away from their talk:

• Jessica’s early stuff was drawn with a pen very realistically, with tons of detail, so for La Perdida, she went for a sketchy, brush drawn look, which she thought turned out to be more realistic, because readers could fill in the world around the significant, selected details. This came out as sort of an off-the-cuff remark, but as Meg pointed out to me, it’s one of the most important lessons of comics: less is sometimes more, and since every comic drawing is a visual metaphor, there’s a balancing act when it comes to the level of abstraction in your drawings (see McCloud).

After she said that, when I was flipping through the book I found this cool example:

• Meg mentioned how much the technical skills (pencilling, layout, inking) of comics resemble architecture. That got me thinking: someone who wanted to study comics in a traditional academic setting would likely first think to seek out say, life-drawing and creative writing classes, which are fine, but they might be better served by design (typography, page layout, the grid), screenwriting (dialogue, visual storytelling), or poetry (economy of words, laying them out in space).
• Their book is aimed at three different types of comics creators:
  1. Students in the classroom
  2. Ronin — lone warriors out on their own
  3. Nomads — small groups (i.e. a writing group that meets once a week at a coffee shop)

  The book is formatted so that each type of creator can benefit from the lessons.

• Men seem to like the idea of having a separate studio space away from the house, while women seem to prefer a room at home. (At least it’s the same for Meg and me. Discuss.)
• Matt and Jessica have a new baby, and Meg noted that people always seem to ask “male-oriented” questions at those events—she wanted to ask how you keep a house running and still find time to create (but didn’t…and it would’ve been a great question, too!)
• Comics is a language, people!
• Jessica’s #1 productivity tip: get a calendar, and stick to it! (More details)

Since both Matt and Jessica are teachers at SVA, I asked them if they saw any pitfalls, teaching comics in the academy. Is there a chance that comics programs could turn out like MFA writing programs, with students turning out uniform, quiet, lit’ry, “workshopped” New Yorker types of short stories?

They both agreed that “it all comes down to the teachers,” and “if comics can’t withstand being taught in the academy, what kind of medium is it?”

I mentioned Lynda Barry’s new book as a great antidote to the “bad” kind of creative writing teaching, and Matt had a great reply:

(He was referring to Lynda’s art teacher in college, Marilyn Frasca.)

Overall, I think this book is extremely well done and worth checking out by anyone who’s interested in making comics—it’s probably the first book I’ve ever seen that could actually serve as the lone textbook for a comics-making class. I think it will sell like hotcakes, and, as Jessica and Matt hinted, we’ll definitely see a sequel focusing on “advanced” topics such as coloring and webcomics.

My complete notes from the talk, if anyone’s interested:

Thanks to Matt and Jessica for swinging down to Austin!

My buddy Tim and I went to see writer Michael Chabon (“Shea as in stadium, Bon as in Jovi”) at Bookpeople last night. There were at least 100 people there. I picked up a copy of his beautiful new non-fiction collection with a Jordan Crane-designed cover.

During the Q&A, Chabon remarked of one of his characters, “He was too verbose and too Jewish.”

When he signed my book to “Meg + Austin,” I said, “Meg is my wife—she really likes your stuff.”

And Chabon (who seems like a really nice guy, by the way) joked, “Oh, and you don’t think it’s so hot?”

And I blushed and restrained myself from quoting his Q&A.

(Brilliant storyteller, but dang, he can be long-winded!)

Here’s Tim and I hanging out beforehand:

Good times!

PS. Wonder Boys is one of the greatest movies ever made. Not joking. And it has a kick-ass soundtrack. Go watch it.

PPS: The Amazing Adventures of Lethem and Chabon.