I’ve been on another obsessive Peanuts-reading tear. If you’re interested in listening in to the conversations of one of the greatest geniuses of the 20th century, I highly recommend Charles M. Schulz: Conversations. Particularly wonderful is the 100+ page interview with Gary Groth from 1997 that ran in the Comics Journal.

Two things that strike me right this second about the strip.

First, I’ve been thinking about the difference between reading comics in serialized form — in newspapers or seperately published editions over time — and reading them in book form. Schultz himself said that comics strips weren’t art because they were “too transient” to appeal to several generations. But the act of collecting Peanuts into books, or “treasuries,” basically has cemented their status as great art. Because the characters are so strong, and the world is so static over time, Peanuts is an epic of gag strips — in book form, it really does amount to what George Saunders called a “50-year novel.”

Second, I’ve been thinking about the way in which Schultz’s drawing led his ideas. His formal innovations with his drawing — dressing Snoopy up as a fighter pilot, for instance — led to his character and story development.

Take the character of Schroeder. Schultz said:

“I was looking through this book on music, and it showed a portion of Beethoven’s Ninth in it, so I drew a cartoon of Charlie Brown singing this. I thought it looked kind of neat, showing these complicated notes coming out of the mouth of this comic-strip character, and I thought about it some more, and then I thought, ‘Why not have one of the little kids play a toy piano?’” (*)

Schultz made sure to recreate exactly those Beethoven musical scores by hand, and it was the act of drawing — the simple aesthetic pleasure of musical notes in a comic strip — that led to Schroeder.
What this means to me is that drawing comics is its own particular brand of alchemy. You can’t just sit down and say, “I’m going to draw a character with a funny nose who has no father and always trips over his shoelaces.” The description means nothing. You have to draw that character into existance.

It’s the act, not the idea.

This is a couple-of-months-old page from the first draft of Calamity, when I really didn’t know where I was going (as opposed to now — HA!), and there were twin brothers in the story. I like the background a lot, but the layout is pretty boring: a lot of cut-and-paste and stage-like monologuing. The good news, as we all know, is that you learn just as much by failing as you do by succeeding, and considering that I’ve already thrown out a couple dozen finished pages of artwork, I’m learning a hell of a lot…

There’s something about this time of year, when that fall breeze starts creeping into the air, I immediately think: time to go back to school! But last September, after 17 years, that butterfly in my belly was pinched by the disappointing fact: you’re no longer a student.

Or at least a student who pays tuition.

So, today I’m going to post a couple of quotes by different comic artists about teaching yourself how to do this thing.

* * *

“A comics-art curriculum is interdisciplinary. As comics-art students learn to become literate and visually literate, they need to develop a vast array of skills. They need classes in drawing, writing, computer art, literature, storyboard, and character design. They need research skills, so they can make their stories convincing and make their characters behave and look real enough to come alive on the page or screen.”

- James Sturm, “Comics In The Classroom“

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“…[he] discovered Dickens and Lewis Carroll and Thackeray, superb story-tellers whose tales were often co-created with the most gifted comic artists of their time. Dickens would toil over the drawing board with cartooon illustrators like Cruikshank and Browne (Phiz) to get the graphic portrayal of a character like Sairey Gamp or Mr Pecksniff exactly right, considering his novel illustrations an integral part of his books. (In our desolate time, publishers have no knowledge of this and routinely repting Dickens sans the crucial cartoon art.) George reveled over these novel combinations of art and text and longed to tell stories involving his own comic characters developed in depth over time…”

- Bill Blackbeard on George Herriman, creator of Krazy Kat, in his introduction to Krazy & Ignatz 1931-1932: A Kat a’Lilt with Song

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“This book was created on a lark. Actually, it was never even intended to be a book at all — merely an exercise in one of my sketchbooks. Around the time I began doodling it out, I had been particularly interested in a certain kind of storytelling I had noticed several other cartoonists working with — specifically Dan Clowes, Chris Ware, and David Heatley. It’s an approach wherein you tell a longer story through a series of shorter, unconnected comic strips. Cumulatively they add up to a bigger picture….I went in knowing very little about where the story was going. I made it up page by page as I drew it out….The whole thing was just meant to be fun.”

- Seth, “The Origin of Wimbledon Green”

This is the first four panels of what I hope becomes a 10-page or so comic.

Last night before Project Runway (good riddance, Vincent) we caught this program about the The American Pie Council’s Crisco National Pie Championships–it was pure torture. All the pies looked amazing, and i guess if you win the thing, it could mean thousands and thousands of dollars worth of pie sales. So there were all these grandmotherly types divulging their secrets, and I got to thinking about my dad (who happens to be a great cook in his own right), and his love for pies, and how after my parents got divorced, he was always trying to get me to learn how to bake pies from grandma (Mom’s mom) so that I could teach him.

Then, after reading Maureen’s blog this morning, I started on this.

I’m still really obsessed with the idea of writing long comic stories as a sequence of serialized gag strips. Last week I read through Lynda Barry’s The Freddie Stories, and it really blew my mind the way that the individual pieces of Freddy’s story were contained in these four-panel comics, but by stringing them together (the book is laid out in a horizontal format, so the two-page spread contains the four panels of each of the original comics), Lynda built this moving narrative. (I’ve harped about this technique before.)

Anyways, with this comic I’m trying to do Lynda’s “auto-bifictional-ography.”

Oh, and another big inspiration these days is David Heatley. Check out the comic he’s currently working on, “Black History.“

“Comics get to the essence of something quickly and efficiently….They distill and refine, they don’t necessarily tell stories or have a message.”

—Mark Newgarden in an interview, and “The Little Nun” from We All Die Alone

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Of course, they can tell stories. The trick is just a million different combinations of words and images and panels.

I’m still a bit obsessed with this idea of a novel constructed out of gag strips. The gorgeous thing about a gag strip is that it doesn’t have to be funny, it just has to have a punchline. And the good news is that a decent novel chapter does the same thing: there’s a rise and fall and then a good punchline at the end to give you some kind of closure, but also get you to turn the page and read the next one. What happens next?

Here’s Kurt Vonnegut in A Man Without A Country:

It’s damned hard to make jokes work. In Cat’s Cradle, for instance, there are these very short chapters. Each one of them represents one day’s work, and each one is a joke. If I were writing about a tragic situation, it wouldn’t be necessary to time it to make sure the thing works. You can’t really misfire with a tragic scene. It’s bound to be moving if all the right elements are present. But a joke is like building a mousetrap from scratch. You have to work pretty hard to make the thing snap when it’s supposed to snap.

There’s a reason why Chris Ware’s Acme Novelty Library is way better than Jimmy Corrigan. Acme is still Ware’s melancholy world, but Rocket Sam and Big Tex have that snap—that punchline of a good gag strip. (Maybe this is because Ware’s art trumps his writing, and a good deal of the gag strip has to do with the visual tricks involved…)

Now: wouldn’t you love to read a graphic novel’s worth of Mark Newgarden’s “Little Nun” gag strips? (You can check out more of them in McSweeney’s 13 or We All Die Alone). All it would require is continuity. Some kind of journey or quest. The Little Nun could just take a trip across America. Maybe she could meet other nuns. Gather a crew. Fall in love or something. It could go on for something like 100 pages. It’d be so easy to draw, you could just churn out the pages. And think of the serializing potential! It’d be spectacular.

Eventually, I think The Complete Peanuts will read something like this. George Saunders wrote in his Shulz obit:

…try to imagine, say, three kids sitting against the side of a suburban house on a summer afternoon….If these characters are allowed to grow up and leave the suburban lawn and get jobs and fall in love, this is called a novel, and you, the creator, are called a novelist. If the imagined children are not allowed to grow up but are confined to the suburban lawn, where they continue for the next 50 years to be rich manifestations of their creator’s psyche, and if this creator’s imagination is supple and energetic enough never to tire of reimagining the children on the suburban lawn and never to make us tired of observing the children on the suburban lawn, this is called “Peanuts.”

But if you read them all together, doesn’t the collected work take some kind of shape, some rise and fall of action that resembles a narrative? Some continuity that resembles something the steps in a journey? Certainly it presents a world.

Or is it the ending that we demand, the closure, the change, the move to point B from point A?

a new panel from A Terrible Calamity At Sea!

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“I’ve always been interested in the problem of depicting sound in comics. I try to come up with a kind of expressionistic pattern or decorative line to represent the music, something that will spark the imagination of the reader. I was inspired years ago by a wonderful cartoon by Saul Steinberg that showed in graphic form the sounds emerging from different instruments. He drew the different sounds as solid, three-dimensional matter, which made so much sense to me as a strategy to draw sound.”

- Megan Kelso, interview with PW

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“Serializing is an interesting problem….How and where to do it? In the old comics format? Online? Grouped in magazines? The serial offers another kind of freedom, and the added value for authors of ongoing contact with their readers. Creators don’t have to toil for a couple years on a project before it gets received. In the highly interactive age of the text message, the Weblog and Wikipedia, that seems a useful agency.”

- Mark Siegel, Editorial Director, First Second Books, in a PW roundtable

* * *

- Scott McCloud, interview. Other interviews: here and here.

“To construct a picture-story does not mean you must set yourself up as a master craftsman, to draw out every potential from your material —often down to the dregs! It does not mean you just devise caricatures with a pencil naturally frivolous. Nor is it simply to dramatize a proverb or illustrate a pun. You must actually invent some kind of play, where the parts are arranged by plan and form a satisfactory whole. You do not merely pen a joke or put a refrain in couplets. You make a book: good or bad, sober or silly, crazy or sound in sense.”

—Rudolph Töpffer, Essay on Physiognomy, 1845

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Anything new: you wonder what to call it. I’m calling mine a graphic novel for the marketers. But what it really is is a Cartoon Novel. Or a novel-in-cartoons. Or just a book.

Kurt Vonnegut said he wrote Cat’s Cradle as if each chapter were a joke. Nathaniel West said he originally pictured Miss Lonelyhearts as a novel in comic strips.

I’m trying to write mine as if each page is a gag strip. Only the gags build into a story. And lots of them aren’t funny at all.

Peter Orner’s excellent new book is kind of like that. Each part is a little episode. And the episodes build into something big.

Whatever it is, it’s a book. This, I think, is a revelation.

* * *

- James Kochalka, quoted in Dylan Horrocks’ “The Perfect Planet: Comics, Games, and World-Building.”

* * *

George Saunders says that as a young boy, he felt the language in Esther Forbes’ Johnny Tremain was a code he could break, “a code that turned out to be more accurate and expressive than the one we all use to slog through normal life.” And breaking this code suggested to him that he might be able to come up with his own code, “a premonition that my complicated feelings about life could be subjugated to that quest, which has turned out to be true.”

People talk about voice and style, and I have no clue what they’re talking about. “Find your voice!” they say.

Screw that. I’m working on my secret code.