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Some notes doodled while watching the Chuck Jones documentary, Memories of Childhood.

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I asked my mother, what should I teach my kids? She said don’t teach them anything, just give them lots of supplies.

—Cartoonist Tony Millionaire

I have been thinking about art supplies and parenting.

Chuck Jones spoke fondly of his wonderful mother, and quoted Gertrude Stein, “Artists don’t need criticism, they need love.” Jones’ father was physically abusive, and yet “he served a purpose,” as Jones recounted in his autobiography, Chuck Amuck!:

But—now listen—every time Father started a new business, he did three things: 1. He bought a new suit. 2. He bought acres of the finest Hammermill bond stationery, complete with the company’s letterhead. 3. He bought hundreds of boxes of pencils, also complete with the company name.

EVERY TIME FATHER’S
BUSINESS FAILED, HIS CHILDREN INHERITED
A FRESH LEGACY OF THE FINEST DRAWING
MATERIALS IMAGINABLE.

[…]

NOT ONLY THAT!

We were forbidden—actually forbidden—to draw on both sides of the paper. Because, of course, Father wanted to get rid of the stationery from a defunct business as soon as possible, and he brought logic to bear in sustaining his viewpoint: “You never know when you’re going to make a good drawing,” he said.

[…]

We also had perhaps the most vital environmental rule of all: parents who gave us the opportunity to draw, free from excessive criticism, and free from excessive praise—Mother, because she felt that children in the exploration of life could do no wrong, and Father…because he only wanted to get rid of that paper as soon as possible.

Turns out, access to art supplies is a big factor in the life of a young artist. Here’s the cartoonist Lynda Barry:

My mother was actually upset by me reading, and she hated for me to use up paper. I got screamed at a lot for using up paper. The only blank paper in the house was hers, and if she found out I touched it she’d go crazy. I sometimes stole paper from school and even that made her mad. I think it’s why I hoard paper to this day. I have so much blank paper everywhere, in every drawer, on every shelf, and still when I need a sheet I look in the garbage first. I agonize over using a “good” sheet of paper for anything. I have good drawing paper I’ve been dragging around for twenty years because I’m not good enough to use it yet. Yes, I know this is insane.

There’s also a “good cop/bad cop” parenting element that seems to pop up. Here’s Milton Glaser:

In my parents I had the perfect combination—a resistant father and an encouraging mother. My mother convinced me I could do anything. And my father said, “Prove it.” He didn’t think I could make a living. Resistance produces muscularity. And it was the perfect combination because I could use my mother’s belief to overcome my father’s resistance. My father was a kind of a metaphor for the world, because if you can’t overcome a father’s resistance you’re never going to be able to overcome the world’s resistance. It’s much better than having completely supportive parents or completely resistant parents.

Ample supplies, a resistant father, and an encouraging mother. Sure, it’s Freudian, but I like it.

And God help the aspiring artists with perfect childhoods!

Alex Gregory for the New Yorker:

This was a weird one for me: I actually used a complete article (the NYtimes article on Tony Millionaire), and then pasted all the parts together to make one looong poem:

So…the 3-day weekend approaches. I think we’re going to sleep in a bunch, read, draw, maybe hit the art museum, walk the cemetery, then go see Harvey and Joyce at the Coventry Unitarian Church (Sat 8PM), and then celebrate Meg’s birthday on Monday.

Have a good one!

I was doing the job search thing all morning, doctor’s appointment this afternoon (My doctor was from San Antonio, and he assured me that we would have an excellent time in Austin–the signs continue…), and the reference desk this evening. I have nothing to new to post–only these nuggets of wisdom I’ve gleaned from the corners of the internet:

Maureen McHugh, Ohioan-turned-Austinite, on characterization & plot :

My working definition of plot is character in situation. That’s a dicey definition because I think ‘characterization’ can rest of the flimsiest of textual tricks. A lot of what we think of as characterization comes from what cognitive psychologists call Theory of Mind. (That’s part of what autistic people struggle with and to not have a Theory of Mind is to be Mindblind.) Humans are highly social creatures and we spend a lot of time assuming that other people are, in fact, other people. That they have intentionality, emotion, and that we have a sense of what they are about….

We are so hardwired to make assumptions about other people’s interior states, that we make assumptions about all sorts of interior states. We personify stuff. We describe houses as ‘happy’ or ‘gloomy’. We think that the grocery cart has it in for our car door. We think that characters in fiction are people. We can leap to rather complex assumptions about them on the basis of fairly flimsy details. The details that we find most telling tend to be their actions. So in fact, part of character is what I describe them doing, and if I think of situation and describe characters acting in the situation, I am in fact characterizing as much as I am generating plot.”

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More on plot, sent to me by Brandon, from John Fowles’, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, pg. 406:

The one want combats the other want, and fails or succeeds, as the actuality may be…the writer puts the conflicting wants in the ring and then describes the fight — but in fact fixes the fight, letting that want he himself favors win. And we judge writers of fiction both by the skill they show in fixing the fights (in other words, in persuading us that they were not fixed) andby the kind of fighter they fix in favor of: the good one, the tragic one, the evil one, the funny one, and so on.

“But the chief argument for fight-fixing is to show one’s readers that one thinks of the world around one — whether one is a pessimist, an optimist, what you will.”

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Jordan Crane on splash pages and uniform panel size in an interview with Tom Spurgeon:

I feel like having each panel the same size and the same number on the page, the same spacing and all that, kind of relegates the story to everything that happens inside the panels. The sensational things, the high points and the low points, and the extra dramatics rely on the narrative flow rather than drawing it bigger. So that’s what I tried to focus on: the content of the panels rather than drawing it really big, relying on that. That had always really bothered me in comics. Splash page: this means it matters. This part is important. It always really bugged me….

Oh, God, reading modern superhero comics, none of it makes any fucking sense. It’s not a language. It’s just a bunch of drawings where you can read the words and string it together narratively and get through it. But there’s no language, there’s no punctuation, there’s nothing that makes formal sense about it.

It’s worth noting that Sammy Harkham, Crane’s studio mate, makes similar arguments.

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Tony Millionaire on cartooning and deadlines, from a fantastic profile in the NYTimes

No matter what, I’ve got to get my weekly ‘Maakies’ out….That’s my soul. Without it I’d still be a bum, I’d still be drawing houses. I needed a deadline. That’s the code of the cartoonist: make the deadline.”

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And finally, be sure to check out Craig Thompson’s gorgeous sketchbook pages on his new blog. My favorite of his books, Carnet de Voyage, or Travel Journal, is this times two-hundred and twenty-four.

I had one [pitch] where Batman went completely broke. His corporation went completely broke. He was like, ‘should I throw this Batarang? These cost me $550 each. I’m not really sure I can afford to throw it. I should probably just run.’ And he had to sell all his cars and ride a bicycle around. If anyone sees him on a bicycle with his costume on, they’ll catch him, so he can’t even wear that anymore. He just has to wear a t-shirt and run around. They said, “no, we’re not going to do that” [laughs]. I’d like to do a story about the real Batman, what a real Batman would be like. Just some guy, who’s not really that rich. He’d just run around and try to figure out where the crime is. In my neighborhood, all he’d be doing is running up to cars where they’re selling drugs out the window.”

—Tony Millionaire, interview