The SVA And Review Of Rabid Rabbit #9

While in New York I stopped by the School of Visual Arts to learn a little more about their Illustration as Visual Essay MFA program. I was met with by department head Marshall Arisman, who was incredibly friendly and enthusiastic and made me feel much less nervous about what was basically an informal interview. Unfortunately I think I may have gotten too comfortable and said a few things I probably shouldn’t have (I think I used the word “shit” once, called the art world pretentious, and I even used air quotes once – what the hell is wrong with me?!). At any rate at least they can’t say I wasn’t being genuine and hopefully enough of the good parts of my personality were apparent so as to outshine the awkward parts of my personality. Their facilities were very nice. Exactly forty studios (twenty for first year students, twenty for second year students) were arranged cubicle style in a room with a gorgeous view of the city. It is only the beginning of their school year but already there was some pretty impressive art up on the walls, I have to admit I felt a little bit intimidated. What I got out of my visit was a more defined idea of what the program was all about: a community of artists who are interested in storytelling. I like the idea of being surrounded, not just by cartoonists but also painters and illustrators working using different techniques, but confronting similar narrative issues and dealing with similar concepts. I also liked that graduate students at the SVA can audit undergrad classes in several different departments, which sounds like it could be a lot of fun at a school that teaches such a wide variety of disciplines.

I left the SVA excited at the prospect of going to art school in New York City and with tons of free crap they gave me. I received a 40+ minute DVD on the program, introducing faculty members and outlining the program, a copy of a student-run art magazine and issues #4, #8, #9 and #10 of Rabid Rabbit, a non-profit comics anthology showcasing several New York artists. Each issue has a theme, and my favorite was #9, “The Horror of Rabid Rabbit.”

Back cover of Rabid Rabbit #9

This issue’s theme is “horror” which is interpreted in different ways by the artists. The content of the pieces range from cheesy horror films, to killer lawn gnomes to shark attacks…others involve day-to-day horrors (such as using the toilet only to find there is no toilet paper left). There’s also a particularly horrifying piece about rape, so the issue really covers the entire spectrum from silly to serious. I was pleased to find work by Adam Kidder, whom I have mentioned before on this blog. By far my favorite story in the issue (and also possibly the most horrifying) was “The Horror Within” by Rabid Rabbit’s Editor-In-Chief, C. M. Butzer. The story is about scientists in the antarctic who discover an ancient parasite that burrows deep within their colleague’s body and basically takes control of him. It’s creepy and disgusting and absolutely horrifying. Butzer also contributed to a gorgeous and horrifying center-spread of zombies and demons and all things horror. You can check out his portfolio on his website, Butzer’s a really talented artists and I was happy to discover him through this small collection.

Flipping through Rabid Rabbit also gave me a better idea of what kind of standard the students of the SVA are being held to, and whether or not I could raise my work to that level of quality. I think that I could, or at least I hope so. Step #1 is to apply.

Review: Pope Hats

So I’m here in Brooklyn visiting my sister Sadie. She happens to live down the street from one of the coolest indie-friendly comic book shops in New York, Desert Island. This place reminds me a bit of Quimby’s in Chicago, with a good mix of DIY-type zines, original art and more popular “graphic novels.” So I strolled on over there this afternoon while Sadie was in class to chat with them about selling my own minis there on consignment. While there I picked up Smoke Signal #2, an all-comics newspaper put out every few months by the owner of Desert Island, Gabe Fowler. It seems like a pretty cool mix of up-and-coming artists and other lesser-known local artists. This issue has a cover by Dash Shaw (Bottomless Bellybutton, BodyWorld). I also picked up a copy of Ethan Rilly‘s Pope Hats.

Frances battles demons in Pope Hats

Pope Hats is a short story about Frances Scarland, a seemingly aimless young girl working as a law clerk. She shares an apartment with an alcoholic actress, Vickie, in a Canadian city (perhaps Toronto where Rilly himself lives, or maybe Montreal – Frances mentions at one point that she just dropped out of McGill). Franny appears to be plagued by a lot of things. She has trouble sleeping at night and might have a little bit of social anxiety. She’s also being haunted by an “obsessive phantom” named Scarsgaard. He’s not very good at haunting though, and is more of an annoyance to Franny than anything else. The second half of this comic is tightly focused on Franny as she tells two ghost stories, so perhaps run-ins with the supernatural have become sort of old hat for her. I’m not sure, but I’m hoping to learn more about her in the second issue.

The art in Pope Hats is fantastic, very fluid and natural. Rilly makes this shit look easy. His dialogue also has a very natural feel to it. Franny and Vickie almost seem real, like people I might have met someplace. It’s a shame this first issue is so short, I’d really like to get to know these girls a little better. I’m very curious about all of the characters in this story and would like to know some other things about this book as well (like why the hell it’s called Pope Hats). All around this is a very promising debut comic for Rilly. Part of the story was published as a minicomic in 2007 but it’s most recent run happened earlier this year with much help from the 2008 Xeric grant Rilly received. Here are some things other people said about it:

“Pope Hats has some of the most interesting and funny characters I’ve seen this side of Scott Pilgrim, but they’re much more realistic.” — Box Brown

“Pope Hats by Ethan Rilly is the most impressive debut comic I’ve seen in years. The work has that deceptive quality of ease about it—the characters breeze across the page with sparkling dialogue and wonderfully observed gestures.” –Seth (Wimbeldon Green, It’s A Good Life If You Don’t Weaken)

Review: Fun Home

You might know Alison Bechdel from her long-syndicated strip, Dykes To Watch Out For, recently concluded and collected into a book, The Essential Dykes To Watch Out For. I just finished reading her memoir and first extended work, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, named Time Magazine‘s #1 Book of the Year. I really enjoyed it. Admittedly, I have read very little of Dykes, but reading this piece motivated me to do so in the future, and also has me looking forward to her upcoming collection of autobiographical relationship stories, Love Life: A Case Study.

The story in Fun Home is complex and deeply personal. Bechdel outlines a particularly eye-opening period of her life: she moves away to college, realizes she’s a lesbian, and her father dies in a tragic suicide masked as an accident. Just before this death, Bechdel’s mother had revealed something to her in a phone call; her father had been having affairs with other men. Fun Home documents Bechdel’s subsequent reevaluation of her childhood and relationship with her father, a high school English teacher and director of their small Vermont town’s funeral home, referred to by Bechdel and her family as the “Fun Home.”

Alison Bechdel tries to strike up a conversation with her father in "Fun Home"

The book was incredibly honest, and because of that it was necessarily incredibly biased. Bechdel writes her father’s history as a piece of her own history. As I read it I wondered what kind of story we might see if one of her brothers had written a memoir, or their mother. Bechdel discusses her anxiety in telling her mother about the project in this essay. She felt she had hurt her mother in writing the book, even though she had portrayed her in a strictly positive manner. Bechdel tells Emma Brockes in an interview for The Guardian that having reviewers discuss her family members by name was (understandably) upsetting for her mother. I imagine this is fairly common when an artist uses their own life as source material. Whatever feelings of mortification Bechdel’s mother felt at a book publicizing their family’s intimate secrets were clearly put aside, however. At several points in the book we see relics of Helen Bechdel’s life: love letters from her husband, old photographs, a passport expired years ago but held on to… I was moved by the generosity of Bechdel’s mother in sharing with her daughter these windows into her side of the story. These components add to the complexity of an already layered story, and hint towards another narrative – between mother and daughter – that we do not see.

Just as the story is layered and complex, so is Bechdel’s process. I found this video detailing the steps the Bechdel took to create Fun Home through the Drawn! blog and it’s really interesting. She talks a bit about using visual references while drawing, by talking photographs or relying on Google image search. I myself would be lost without Google image search and it’s good to know I’m not the only one.

After I finished Fun Home I decided to finally watch the DVDs I’d borrowed from my roommate ages ago, and I sat down to watch Six Feet Under. The pilot episode shows a family who runs a funeral home having a funeral for their own father, whodied in an automobile accident. The parallel to Bechdel’s story struck me as odd and amusing, but later that day I found yet another strangely similar story. A Pocket History of Sex in the Twentieth Century, a memoir by Jane Vandenburgh, describes the author’s family’s deterioration when her closeted gay father commits suicide and her mother descends into insanity. I suppose the point of writing a memoir is to establish a connection with the reader through a common experience, but these experiences, to me at least, seem so extraodrinary…perhaps they are not so unusual after all. At any rate, someone else must have noticed the similarity because Bechdel was asked to write a review of the book for the New York Times – a graphic book review! What an interesting concept! Writing a review and writing a story are very different, and I’m pretty interested at the idea of trying to review something in that format. Bechdel talks a little bit about her process in writing the review here.

Anyway, Alison Bechdel is absolutely fascination and I really enjoyed Fun Home. If you’d like a bit more information about her, read this recent interview at Comic Book Resources. I really like reading interviews with Bechdel because she’s just so intelligent and articulates herself very well (I actually found a blog post in which Josh Blair writes a list of all the words he did not recognize used in Fun Home…long list!). Bechdel occasionally travels around giving lectures on writing and her work, and if you’ve ever got a chance to hear her speak, definitely go check her out.

Review: What It Is

I met Lynda Barry last summer. Ivan Brunetti told me to take her Writing The Unthinkable class, and he’s a pretty smart guy so I figured what the hell. At the time I was taking one of his classes at the University of Chicago in which we had done some writing exercises. About twenty minutes into the first day of Barry’s two-day workshop, I realized that the writing exercises Brunetti had done with us were exercises he had learned from Barry. After class people were lined up outside getting autographs and I got in line and asked her to draw a picture for me to send to a friend. While she was drawing I told her that she really must have influenced Brunetti, because he’d been so enthusiastic about her course. She said, “I have a cat named Ivan Brunetti,” and I believe her.

A page from Lynda Barry's "What It Is"

Part of What It Is is essentially the textbook of the Writing The Unthinkable course. All the things she said to us, and all the exercises we did, are all written down in this book. It isn’t a class about writing so much as it is a class meant to stimulate creativity through writing. I had kind of resolved to sit in the back someplace and write and listen, but not read anything out loud because generally that makes me uncomfortable. But once I started writing, I found that I did want to read for the class. So I raised my hand and she called on me and ran over to crouch in front of me and put her head down on my desk while I read. When I was finished, she looked up again and shouted, “GOOD! GOOD!” and even though she does this to all of her students I somehow got the feeling that she really meant it. Lynda Barry is an incredibly genuine person.

This quality of honesty makes itself apparent in Barry’s work, and What It Is is no exception. While it is part writing tutorial, it is also part journal, part scrapbook, and in certain places, part fiction. Like the rest of Barry’s work, this book is full of colorful and imaginative images and well as deeply personal truths. The focus of her Writing The Unthinkable course is to access the details of old memories, and to make them come to life. She told us to always be doodling, or just drawing spirals, that if we keep our pen moving very slowly but constantly, the writing will eventually flow out of us. Many of Barry’s own childhood memories are in this book, surrounded by her own doodles, spirals and designs.

I recently read a beautifully written Chicago Tribune article that gives a bit of a window into Barry’s rollercoaster of a career (although it focuses mostly on her close friendship with cartoonist-and-household-name Matt Groening). The picture of Lynda Barry attached to this article was taken outside of the Old Town School of Folk Music last summer, on the day that I met her. I found that odd – anyway, it’s a great article and if you have some extra time today, spend it reading that. If you have even more free time, check out the Writing The Unthinkable site and see if there is a course being offered near you anytime soon. If there is, take it! If you need more than one person’s opinion in order to convince you to take a creative writing class, read these two reviews of it. Or maybe you could just pick up a copy of What It Is and try to learn a bit about writing on your own.

Totally Unrelated: This weekend is the New England Webcomics Weekend! I wish I could go!

Review: Life Sucks

Last summer my dad was living in Stockholm and offered to fly me out to Sweden to visit him, so on my way to the airport I stopped into a Borders to grab some reading material for the long trip ahead of me. Two of the books I’d bought had been on my comics-to-read list for a while, but the third was something I just grabbed off the shelf and flipped though. “Hey,” I thought, “a comic book about vampires. Cool.” This is how I came across Life Sucks. I’d heard of Jessica Abel before, I had actually been assigned to read La Perdita for a class I’d taken a few years earlier at the University of Chicago, but I was not familiar with her collaborators, Gabe Soria and Warren Pleece. I figured it could be kind of cool so I brought it with me to the register.

I had pretty high hopes for this book, but unfortunately it was kind of a let down. This is really too bad, because the idea is nothing shy of genius: Dave is a vampire living in LA and working the night shift at a 24-hour convenience store run by his Vampire Master, a Romanian immigrant named Radu. As a human Dave was vegetarian so as a vampire he refuses to bite people and only drinks plasma from the local blood bank. He catches a lot of shit about this from his best friend Jerome, a frat-boy type who thinks mostly about Blood Brew (vampire beer) and the ladies. The majority of the story focuses on Dave’s attempts to win the heart of Rosa, a local goth chick who wishes she could be a vampire but has no idea that Dave actually is one. This is made even more difficult when a more powerful vampire, Wes, takes an interest in the same girl. Dave’s life, as the title would suggest, sucks.

Seriously. This story is a recipe for awesome.

For Dave, life really sucks.

I was really expecting this book to be great, and actually, it still was pretty great. I’m a sucker for vampire stories, no pun intended. But my issue with the book wasn’t with the story, it was with the artwork, and when you’re talking about comics that’s a pretty big deal. My best guess is that a great deal of these images were produced using a drawing tablet of some kind. If I’d encountered this piece as a serial online, maybe I would have felt differently, but the work had a very digital feel that I found off-putting in print. Now, I don’t have anything against digital work in general, I’ve seen plenty of awesome stuff that was made that way. But these particular drawings lacked an amount of detail and expressiveness; they looked flat to me. In another review, David Kopperman complains that Pleece’s limited repertoire of body-types and faces can lead to confusion as to which character is which at certain points in the story. More than anything else, I found the facial expressions of the characters to be the place where the artwork fell short. There were several instances of a character’s face just not quite matching up with the dialogue, and it didn’t help that the text was all typed, rather than handwritten. Hand-lettered text could have added some sort of clue to the tone of voice of a character, which would have helped set the overall mood of the piece. If the artwork in this piece was already lacking a quality of expression, the cold, emotionless text used was the nail in its coffin.

I would say that this book relied almost entirely on dialogue to move the story, but to be fair it was pretty great dialogue. Abel and Soria are clearly excellent writers, and Pleece has done a lot of work for DC that I thought was a lot better (you can read an interview with him here). I think it’s also necessary to say that the colorist, Hilary Sycamore, did some excellent work in this piece. She sticks to the darker tones of the goth underworld as well as rich reds and oranges that I thought complimented the story well. Overall, I’d say that if you like vampire stories, go ahead and check this one out. It might not be a stunning visual piece, but it’s an enjoyable read.

On an only tangentially related note: if you haven’t gotten the chance to check out Let The Right One In, definitely do it. It’s a Swedish language vampire fiction film that takes place in the dark winter of a Stockholm suburb. Oh, and it’s amazing.

Review: Too Cool To Be Forgotten

I picked up Too Cool To Be Forgotten over at Vigilante Press on Chicago Ave. It had been on a number of blogs’ Best of 2008 lists back in the beginning of January and thus had been put on my ‘to read’ list. The first thing I noticed was that the cover was awesome, made to look like a pack of KOOL cigarettes, complete with a “warning label” on the back. So, kudos to designer Matt Kindt for that:

On the back cover, I did find one thing distressing: a quote from Brian K. Vaughan boasting the book to be “one of the rare comics not written by Stan Lee to perfectly capture the tragedy and triumph of being a teenager.” Really? I mean, maybe this is just a difference of opinion between myself and ol’ Brian; he seems to be more focused on mainstream comics, which admittedly I am less interested in. And I am by no means discrediting Stan Lee; he’s done excellent work in the field of comics (and business!). But come on. There have been plenty of exceptional teenage comics sagas outside of the work of Stan Lee (Craig Thompson’s Blankets comes to mind). But the comment on the back cover really has very little to do with the content of the book, and I’ve always been told not to judge a book by its cover anyhow, so I digress.

Alex Robinson is generally known for writing pieces that follow a large, ensemble-type cast (Tricked, Box Office Poison) but in this book the focus remains solely on Andy Wicks, a married 40-something and father of two, who undergoes hypnosis in attempt to quit smoking. The result is that Andy finds himself being somehow transported back to high school, where he first started smoking, and spends the majority of the book as an adult trapped in an adolescent’s body. It wasn’t exactly clear if Andy ever actually traveled through time or if it was all in his head…one of the first things he thinks to himself once he realizes he’s in 1985 again is, “I’ve watched enough Star Trek to know that the first thing you do when you’re in the past is not mess up the timeline,” then almost immediately goes and asks out the girl he’d always had a crush on but never the guts to do anything about. Robinson doesn’t ever explain if these actions had any effect on the present day life of Andy Wicks, but my guess is that it wasn’t included because it just wasn’t all that important to the story.

I really enjoyed Robinson’s artwork in this piece. I’ve always been a huge fan of high-contrast line work like this: full of large blocks of saturated blacks against white space and very little in between, just plain ink on paper. The contrast makes the layouts really dynamic and the characters seem to pop out of the page at you. The majority of the book is designed very simply, with a few traditional, rectangular panels to a page, but in some places the artwork gets a little more complex than that, and we see Robinson truly shine as an artist. Most of the artwork in Chapter Eleven is very different from the rest of the book, opening with a two-page, eighteen-panel polyptych of sorts, with different images in each panel coming together to create larger images on the page. The rest of the chapter consists primarily of  black backgrounds with characters (for the most part, the same two characters) overlapping each other over and over without gutters of any kid. It changes the pace of the book dramatically, and we see an entire conversation depicted rapidly, in a very few large and emotional panels. I found the technique to be very effective and got a little emotional myself (I do that a lot though – I guess I’m pretty sensitive).

Chapter Eleven was very different from the rest of the book in terms of storyline as well, and in case you were planning on reading the book, I will tell you that I’m about to ruin the ending for you right here. While the bulk of Too Cool To Be Forgotten has Andy running around 1985 with old friends, reconnecting with his mother, and telling off high school bullies, this last chapter has him saying goodbye to his dying father out of freaking nowhere. There was a fair amount of foreshadowing pointing to this, well no, actually there was a GRATUITOUS amount of foreshadowing. The last page has a disclaimer reading, “page 84 has an error in which the protagonist, Mr. Wicks, thinks the word ‘Dad’ instead of ‘Did.’ This will not be corrected in future editions as it was intentional on the part of Mr. Robinson. The publishers and proofreaders wish to note their opposition to such grammatically awkward and painfully heavy-handed foreshadowing, but have let the issue rest out of respect for the author. We apologize if the author’s stubborn refusal to listen to reason, demands or threats diminishes your enjoyment of an otherwise entertaining Top Shelf product.” And you know what? That was distracting. Even though I read the disclaimer first and knew it was coming. But it wasn’t just that. On several occasions teachers at Andy’s high school confronted him about his behavior saying that they “understood he was having problems at home,” and Andy appeared to have no idea what they were talking about. Seriously?? You expect me believe that some dude travels through time, realizes he’s back in his sophomore year of high school and the first thing he thinks isn’t, “Oh man, this is the year my dad died of Lou Gehrig’s disease.” Really? I mean I understand that the entire premise of the book is unrealistic, but that just seems like such a huge continuity error. I thought the book was about his smoking habit. Wouldn’t it at least make more sense if his dad had lung cancer or something?

I certainly found it touching that Andy couldn’t return to the present day without saying goodbye to his father one last time, but I think it probably would have been pretty easy to string that storyline throughout the rest of the book – especially knowing that Robinson has already proved his ability to write books with several separate-but-related storylines happening simultaneously. I honestly got a lot of enjoyment out of reading Too Cool To Be Forgotten though, and the story was absolutely heartwarming and an interesting exercise in asking “What If?” I’d recommend it to a friend, or really anybody with an interest in comics, coming-of-age-stories, or time travel. Ultimately though, I would have to file this one under books-that-make-you-go-what?