| Fail Faster Forever |
[Oct. 1st, 2008|03:06 pm] |
That's my proof copy in the picture. It'll look a little different when done, but not much. The book is called "Fail Faster Forever."
I jotted possible titles in my journal and brainstormed them with Sara and friends all along. While many of the individual phrases or lines from the book lend themselves well to book titles ("Men of Common Awesome," "The Academy Fails," and "Pussy Custard" being some of my personal favorites), in the end I settled on "Fail Faster Forever" not because any character says those words, but because I repeated them to myself like a mantra while working since the conception of the project.
I tried to accept all my failures and to leave each page a record of mistakes and accidents. I got rid of penciling so I could work faster and experiment with trusting my drawing hand. I was forced to accept gross errors of anatomy and perspective. The lettering moves from illegible to sloppy at best, depending on my mood that day and whether I was lettering on public transit. I tried to never consult old pages -- characters change hair and drawing styles, props disappear, backgrounds mutate. Five hundred pages of this is a marathon. Failing over and over every day. Looking down and being able to place the mistakes of today in a kind of cosmology with the hundreds of pages of ugliness I created the weeks before. The story exploring and evolving in new tangents constantly, losing its place in any mental outline I kept and frequently getting bogged down in dozens of pages of argument while I chewed on an idea.
The drawings are a record of the hand and the eye as they moved over the page and the book itself is a record of my mind as I moved through the summer. The question this project begs is, "Why not work on the book for a year or more, work really hard and make something actually good?" The answer is I would have quit around page 30 for another seductive notion of a project. The answer is that I did work really hard, but I worked really hard now -- harder in many new and different ways than I've ever worked on something before. The answer is that it'll never be the summer of 2008 again and I'll never be 27 again, so the book would lose those peculiarities of this mind at this age in this time in this place. The answer is that I draw a 500 page graphic novel this summer so that the next one I draw won't be just good, but better for me having learned by failing.
After a while, failure starts to become a lot like play. I keep warning people that the end of the book fizzles, both to insulate myself from that criticism in advance and to acknowledge that by the last 50 pages or so, I was much more conscious of this being The Ending for The Book and it needed to be Good to justify the money I was going to ask people to pay for it. The sense of play was overtaken by a sense that I needed to salvage what appeared to be creative suicide. So the last 50 pages took the longest to draw, are the least playful, look the most polished but provide the least for me to be excited about (with a few exceptions). It seems fitting, though, that a project rooted in failure has some record of my failing to produce interesting failures, while at the same time succeeding in meeting the book's arbitrary 500 page cap.
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| The Only Rule is Work |
[Sep. 24th, 2008|11:07 am] |
| [ | Tags | | | comics, gbv | ] |
| [ | disposition |
| |  accomplished | ] |
I've got a post brewing of miscellaneous thoughts and lessons I got from drawing a 500 page graphic novel over the summer, but first I saw a quote by Robert Pollard this morning that pretty much says it all: Q. Speaking of Guided By Voices, what do you think the band’s legacy is?
A. Do it yourself, for yourself. Have fun. Make an impact. Inspire everyone to do it. Even if everyone can’t, don’t not do it because you can’t get a record contract. Do it for the sheer joy of making records. That’s what Guided by Voices did. Play live for three hours and drink a lot of beer while you do it. Or don’t. Whole thing here, but that was the best part. (how I got there)
The book spans 5 sketchbooks. I kept a blank page in the front of each one to jot quotes from artists and musicians that I felt expanded or justified the purpose of the mad endeavor. This would fit.
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| Book = Done |
[Sep. 23rd, 2008|11:37 pm] |
That's me just moments ago. I just finished drawing a 500-page graphic novel. Radio silence ends now.
I started May 4 and ended September 23. I drew every lunch break, on the bus, on the El, in front of the television, at restaurants and coffee shops, and on the kitchen floor.
Consider the bar raised, 24-hour Comic Day.
It was drawn straight to ink and written in a garbled blend of academic jargon and swears. No script, no outline. Not for everybody. Not for children.
Additional details including previews and ordering information will become available shortly.
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| I Can Support Myself and A Mustache |
[Apr. 4th, 2008|11:00 am] |
"...mustaches are highly underestimated..."
(from here)
And then: A Stripfight I drew (from 2004, the original with this character and still best)
or
(from 2005)
You know this has to be what Warren Ellis feels like every day.
Unrelated: All these years later and this might still be my high-water mark. |
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| What About Just Plucking That Eye Out |
[Mar. 26th, 2008|02:18 pm] |
Hey gang. I am home sick from work today. I'm reluctant to drop the M-word (migraine) but it sounds to most everybody like that's what I had. Anyway from like 2-4 a.m. I was resting my face on the (beautiful, cool) tile floor to hold my right eye in my face (where apparently it was being chewed on my a dog in my brain) and to give myself a convenient place to puke (it never came to that, somehow).
So I stayed home and wound up sleeping until almost 2 in the afternoon. I woke up and my guts still feel like a greasy paper bag.
My question for you all is what's your favorite comfort movie to watch on sick days? When I was a kid through my early teens it was most of the Star Trek movies, and then a little later it was Annie Hall and Manhattan. |
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| Some Shit I Did This One Time |
[Mar. 23rd, 2008|11:52 am] |
| [ | Tags | | | art, comics | ] |
| [ | Current Location |
| | home | ] |
| [ | disposition |
| | productive | ] |
| [ | noise |
| | none | ] |
On Friday, I had a half day of work, so I asked a bunch of people on The Crown Commission message board to suggest shit for me to draw. A couple days ago, Sara did this when her bosses weren't at work, and the results were delightful. So I stole the idea and wound up drawing 18 pictures by request, which I will reproduce here now.
I warn you that things turn at times a little inside-joke-y, but I can promise you an appearance by Depeche Mode and Paisley the Cat
( Lots more drawings. )
Anyway, after all that, my right arm hand and wrist were sore all day Saturday. I'm wondering how long it will take me to teach myself to write and draw left handed. |
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| A Shelf of (Nearly) All the Books I Read in 2007 |
[Jan. 14th, 2008|06:47 pm] |
2007 was the year I made a real concerted effort to not read so many books simultaneously. For much of my adult life I'd have at least 3 and sometimes as many as 6 books going at the same time. Turns out that sort of thing isn't good for your brain as a lifestyle choice. I took a little extra time at lunch on my commute and focused hard on reading each book cover to cover. It probably sounds silly, but it was better for my general level of anxiety and a refreshing change after so many years in grad school where I'd just read the first 50 pages of something and skim the rest so I could participate in class discussion and hand in passable papers.
2008 might well be the year I read a little slower, now that there's not a deadline every three weeks that forces me to hurry through some books on the way to others.
Also, this shelf includes no graphic novels. I read plenty, but they're shelved scattershot all over the apartment.
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| Adios, Packets. |
[Nov. 13th, 2007|02:04 am] |
| [ | Tags | | | done | ] |
| [ | Current Location |
| | done | ] |
| [ | noise |
| | done | ] |
Well, that about wraps all that nonsense up forever.
Goodnight, folks. |
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| Civil Ken's Burn Wars |
[Nov. 7th, 2007|07:03 pm] |
My friends, I possess perhaps the coolest new accidental art piece on my iPod. Yes, I'm talking about the Dadaist Civil War.
Some background:
As part of some research for the book, some nostalgia, and a lifelong general interest, I got my hands on Ken Burns' Civil War. In more ambitious moments, I even considered watching the Burns filmography in chronological order. But back to the Civil War and how I wound up with one of the more beautiful mistakes. I got the .avi files onto my computer and they were broken. They still played, but seeking didn't work and the first episode would crash VLC after 1 minute 20 seconds. The second episode would play, but at random intervals the picture would sort of melt and the time would advance to the near end of the file like a thing possessed.
So I thought about things some more and decided I'd try converting them to play on my iPod. I'd never converted a file to play on my iPod, and this way I could listen to the Civil War happen between my ears during my commute. I ran the converter, went to bed and in the morning -- presto -- iPod videos. I sampled the first episode and it passed the only test I cared about : it kept playing after 1 minute 20 seconds. I put in my headphones and headed to the bus unwittingly heading into a stranger alternative chapter of American History.
Civil Burns Ken War
Where before the second episode would skip unexpectedly to the end at random, this first episode (and possibly others) when compressed and encoded for iPod video took those random jumps and kept encoding. What emerges is sort of an organic cut-up of the original documentary. Sharp mid-sentence changes in speaker and music where sometimes Garrison Keillor's reading of a quotation is finished by Morgan Freeman. The first and still one of the most striking juxtapositions came during the description of the cotton gin's process of extracting the seeds from the cotton boll which suddenly jumped to the doctors struggling and failing to remove the bullet from Lincoln's brain. Uh, whoa. Normally, the charm of this sort of thing might wear off quickly but these cuts were so random and might dice up a sentence word by word, or run minutes without interruption. At times, sure, it was annoying, but mostly it was compelling. Like when the 14th Amendment was drafted to post armed sharpshooters on the roof of the White House. It's this sort of strange accident of technology that's only inspired more thought from me all day long and drawn strange new connections between concepts.
Anyway, it's entirely possible I have 8 more hours of this strange skipping through 1861-1865 and I am super excited to find out if Jefferson Davis' house full of concubines is able to successfully assassinate the vice president. |
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| Shitting Blood For You |
[Nov. 5th, 2007|03:38 pm] |
So one week from today, I'll probably be freaking out all kinds of shitting blood as I try to obsessively strip apart and put together my last Warren Wilson packet ever ever ever. It is so close that Sara and I can look at movie and concert listings and say to each other, "Thats the last ____ we'll ever have to skip because of grad school." Holy shit.
Not that there's not still plenty to do. For one thing, I'll want to spit and polish my entire manuscript front to back before I send it off at the end of November. And I have to write my class. Oh, and a bookshop annotation for Ernest Hemingway's In Our Time, a short-story collection I first read in my first really good college-level English class (*cough* Bob Lamb *cough*) which subsequently lead to me getting an English minor, which subsequently lead to me going to one grad school for English and then another for fiction. Maybe it's a stretch to you, but at the end of things like this you'll reach for any pattern you can find.
Guys, after January will come the first time in my life that I was not continuously in some school or another. We are in the time where that is almost happening shortly! |
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| King of the Table |
[Oct. 25th, 2007|04:28 pm] |
Here is a story in place of a card for Sara's birthday. It's an explanation why my card for her isn't done yet. The only backstory you might need is that I was going to work on the card during my lunch hour since it's hard to have secret projects around our apartment and there hasn't been any non-packet free time to work on one at home.
I had all my art supplies in my messenger bag and had planned to run out to Flat Sammie's -- this restaurant basically just across the street from my office. I even went closer to 1:15, so the initial 1 o'clock rush would be gone. But no luck: every table at Flat Sammies was filled and the line was pretty long. Remember, the two key considerations here are having the food time to be as short as possible, so I have as much time to draw as possible, having and ample table space to spread out my materials. This will be important later.
Now the next closest good/cheap/fast restaurant is probably Soupbox. It's a bit of a hike, but I hurried. But it's cold, so every table's taken and the line's out the door. Then I went next door to Jimmy John's. Somehow Jimmy John's had a line out the door, even though they're almost never that busy that late. Which left McDonalds.
Sara calls this McDonalds the Fancy McDonald's because it's been pretty recently remodeled on the inside. It is also lightning fast during a rush. I try to avoid McDonald's except when I'm desperate, but these were some pretty desperate times. Sure enough, the dining room was half-empty and my food was on the tray almost as soon as the receipt printed. Perfect.
So I grabbed little two-top, set my tray down and started to eat. Perfect, I thought, table and time.
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| Penultimate Packet |
[Oct. 23rd, 2007|03:45 pm] |
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Last night, I handed in my penultimate packet of homework for my MFA. Just one more (November 12). |
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| September 27 Sketchbook |
[Sep. 27th, 2007|11:16 pm] |
( Today's Sketchbook Page )
Here's today's sketchbook. Drawn at the coffeeshop again after I started the shaky beginnings of a new story and while Sara fretted over her poems. |
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| September 26 Sketchbook Page |
[Sep. 27th, 2007|12:04 am] |
( Today's Sketchbook Page )
Drawn after I'd written up some critical work and while Sara worked on her own stuff. |
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| Horseshit and Dragons |
[Sep. 26th, 2007|04:19 pm] |
I read this blog entry this morning. Basically it's an AV Club writer using the occasion of Robert Jordan's death and the aftermath to talk about his boyhood love of the fantasy genre and his eventual adult disaffection with the formulas, tropes and overall bad writing. I chaffed at some of it, but I was also struck by the parallels to my own reading experience: I got sucked in at 10 or 11 by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman's Dragonlance Chronicles. I even bought spinoff books in the same series. Swimming class at the high school pool in the summer before 6th grade and I can remember sitting there reading The Reign of Istar while waiting to get picked up. That's a collection of short stories, mind you. The first of a trilogy of short story collections. The second of such trilogies in the series.
Side note: A series, mind you, written to novelize the universe of a roleplaying game. The gross commercialism going on there that left a permanent mark on my tastes to this day makes my skin itch the same way when I think about my first comic book being issue 2 of the Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade movie adaptation.
All this is beside the point. I'm saying the last fantasy novel not about a boy wizard at a special boarding school I read was probably Michael Moorcock's The Bane of the Black Sword back when I worked at the library. A couple years back I picked up a collection of Robert E. Howard's original Conan stories. Fantasy as a genre is something I can't help but remain fascinated and repulsed by. I'm so picky about what I do and don't like and my tolerance for bad writing in begrudging pursuit of formula has gotten whisper-thin since I started growing stubble.
But to get back to my point for today. I read that AV Club blog entry. I liked some stuff, disagreed with some other stuff. Then I got to the last bit about George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones. I've never read this book, but I have since spent almost my entire workday reading the over 1,500 Amazon reviews of this book. I can't stop. And it's the same two reviews over and over again with slightly different wording.
Either it's some miracle book that pulls back people estranged from the genre like me or it's some boring bit of trash steeped in incest, beastiality, curse words and a War of the Roses roman a clef.
I'm coming around to this point about how maybe it's just all the literary fiction has burned me out on that particular genre or maybe how no matter my circumstances this fascination with genre never completely goes away.
Anybody I know actually read this book?
Not that I'm interested or anything. Certainly not. |
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| September 25 Sketchbook |
[Sep. 25th, 2007|11:27 pm] |
Well, I'm gonna try just a straight link to today's baby grind sketchbook page. Honestly, this isn't in this entry under an lj cut because I was too tired to figure out lj-cuts in the web client. Still, we'll see how this goes.
September 25 Sketchbook Page
We're watching Dr. Phil right now after a night of working at the coffee shop. Every now and then people get all worked up and hit perfect notes: "He don't have the right to judge me," for example, or "She looked just like a body you'd see on CSI: Miami." Not just a body on CSI, but CSI: Miami. |
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| Running Out of Packets |
[Sep. 25th, 2007|03:41 pm] |
Some Sketchbook Pages
Dilemma: I've been posting sketchbook pages over in the baby grind community, but there's no easy way to post them on this journal as well without double-posting for the poor bastards who friended both me and the baby grind. Should I just post them here, just post them there, or just double post and say screw it already?
That said, I've drawn a little every day for the past 6 days. I don't feel anywhere near back at fighting weight, but I've lost the anxiety of even getting back on the horse.
It's packet week this week. If I can keep up with the drawing with a packet deadline on Monday, I'll know I can keep it up through nearly anything. It's weird to think about the fact that there are only three packets left. Next Monday, October 22, and November 12. After that it's gravy. Well, mostly gravy. There's still a lecture to write and thesis interviews, but Warren Wilson's once-every-three-weeks anxiety attacks are almost at an end.
In fact, last night I had a dream Sara and I were in our last-ever Warren Wilson lecture and that it was exactly the same as the first Warren Wilson lecture we ever saw, in a 'see-how-much-you-learned-it-all-comes-full-circle' Eastern philosophy kind of way. I gleaned new insights from the same old words and wrote down something in the imaginary lecture, 'Treat every story like a masterpiece,' like it was something really profound, when it's some of the worst writing advice I can imagine. |
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| Coiled Tension |
[Sep. 20th, 2007|04:13 pm] |
So I finished the Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara the other day. Then I finished Barry Hannah's Airships and I've moved onto Leonard Michaels' Collected Stories. I had never heard of Leonard Michaels until just a couple months ago, but here's a thing he once said in a journal entry:
Writers die twice, first their bodies, then their works, but they produce book after book, like peacocks spreading their tails, a gorgeous flare of color soon schlepped through the dust.
How about that, eh? Anyway, as a writer he strips out all sorts of words you'd think belong in a sentence until the ones that remain are coiled with all the tension of a sentence that could probably be twice as long. Because I'm always fumbling into things backward and reading the leaves before getting to the roots, my first thought is that it reminds me a lot of James Ellroy's White Jazz, a book that I read a pile of years ago and, rumor has it, Ellroy tore through in revision scrapping all the verbs and adjectives.
I bring all this up because I keep thinking I've found the point where fiction has just frozen and died as a thing for me -- the place where it's just the same fucking trivial revelation about the cruelty of existence or the difficulty of living a moral life. Just when I'm sure realism is exhausted and the only thing left to keep the medium alive is dinosaurs and car crashes and unexpected interludes of comics, I'll stumble onto something like Michaels, who just writes these feverish sprints through life in New York City in the late 60s and early 70s. It's not easy to read because it's all tension and if you aren't careful you'll miss the point where it pops, or Michaels will throw a five dollar sentence into a handful of change paragraph and it's like being punched in the nose.
Otherwise...
This is the best thing I read online all day
Also, this is a thing I started doing that is sort of the fault of this old thing. |
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| Busted Lightbulb in My Desk Lamp |
[Sep. 18th, 2007|04:13 pm] |
Honestly, today I am feeling guilty for the first time in a long time for not drawing. Most days if I feel a pull of guilt about a lack of creative work, it's disappointment that I haven't done any writing. This weekend, though, I cleaned the office. Now I can sit in the chair and look at the Bristol board that has two pages blocked onto it in blue pencil. What was I going to draw on those two pages? I really don't know.
This greatness got me thinking about sketchbooks and all. This got me thinking about how crap many of my fundamentals were even when I was on my game.
I can keep a daily journal pretty easily, but it's a little harder to pass it off as work-related if it's covered in sketches. Still, I should try, I think. The fine motor control to work a pencil and brush is probably all rusted to shit. I think about that quote from Louis Armstrong (I think?) the one that goes something like if he didn't practice for a day, he knew it when he played; if he didn't practice for two days, critics knew; and if he didn't practice for three days then everyone knew. What about two or three months, Satchmo?
I'm sort of dreading getting back to it, the same way I dreaded getting back into blogging or even cleaning the office. You let something sit long enough and it just grows from an irritating amount of work to something that seems incomprehensibly heavy and complicated.
Maybe there should be a Daily Sketchbook Grind out there in the world. Nothing for quality's sake or demands of a comic, just you gotta fill a page in a sketchbook every day with doodles n' such or you have to face another creative existential crisis. Oh, and we cut off a finger. The winner who lasts longest gets a bucket of fingers for his trouble. |
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