Wear your Melt the Ice Red Hats Today

I have recounted my knitting several (by now six) red Melt the Ice Hats. Today commemorates the 1942 banning of red hats in occupied Norway by the Nazis. Seems apt.

My sister had a wretched time of it in the bank this morning. At least she was wearing her red hat!

On Story Arcs

A lot happened in yesterday’s Comix Coven… the session started out with different story arc possibilities. I added the Heroine’s Journey (I“m reading Mauren Murdock’s classic 1990 book of the same name) with what that arc might look like. It’s particularly appropriate to my own project.

Of course it’s important to understand your family of origin. And, at some point, you just have to take responsibility for your own life. I think this project around my mother’s journey is giving me permission to reconcile with her fully. I just wish she was still around to talk to about it. But that’s the point, isn’t it… If she was, we/I wouldn’t get here.

Update, 23 February: I should point out that Maureen Murdock’s own diagram of the heroine’s journey is a circle, with stops along the way that include a redefinition of self. But this seems to me to be more of an inward spiral than a circle. What I’ve drawn is more like an outward spiral ending in a line, like a snail. However we conceptualize these potential story arcs (and however much fun it is to do so), I’m guessing they look different for every individual, and might even look different for the same individual at different points in time.

When Grief Does the Buying

The day Mum died back in September we all sat around, more or less happy that she’d gone how she wanted, more or less numb. We all repaired back to my sister’s after a few hours and I took myself off up the hill to Sherman’s, her local independent bookstore.

There is something so comforting, so open yet enclosed, about a bookstore. Like a mother’s arms. I picked up a copy of Birds of Maine by Michael Deforge and Lynda Barry’s Syllabus from the graphic novel section. Not sure why these books — I just wanted to have something to mark the day, and to thank the bookstore for being there for me.

I’m only now getting to grips with the Deforge, and it is a tour de force. Silly, profound, mundane, bickeringly observed. Daft. I’m going to write a letter to him, it still being International Letter Writing Month, telling him I picked up his tome and thanking him for helping to make sense of a world that doesn’t have a lot of sense in it.

Hourly Comics

There is an annual challenge on February 1 to draw a comic for each hour you’re awake. I thought I’d give it a try. It’s hard work, and I didn’t exactly do the things depicted here exactly at the time depicted, but it does give a fairly good glimpse of my/our Sunday.

Young In Iran: A Comics Fundraiser

I am thrilled to report that the Sequential Artists Workshop opened a Kickstarter for young Iranian artists to tell the story of what it’s like to be young in Iran these days. It got fully funded in 3 days! They are now upping the goal to be able to print more copies and, if funds permit, to be able to pay the editors.

From the fundraising blurb:
WHY SWALLOWS?
“Why swallows?” you might ask.

When we asked our students to speak about their experience of being Iranian, we knew their works would end up being very different from one another. In fact, we had a kind of patchwork quilt in mind, one that could reflect the diversity of Iranian identity.

Yet, unexpectedly, a recurring theme kept appearing in the works: migration.
Even the students whose pieces were not directly about migration were, in different ways, still grappling with the concept.

Swallows in Iran are known for being migrants, for their freedom to travel across all lands.

Unlike us Iranians, swallows don’t need visas or security checks to make their journeys. They don’t have to struggle with travel bans.

This anthology is meant to travel, reaching different parts of the world. It is going to fly free!

That is why we chose the swallow: in its own way, this book, too, is a migrant.

Note from a birder: barn swallows, the species pictured in the book, are circumpolar, meaning they occur in all continents apart from Antarctica. They are famous long-distance migrants.

My New Favorite Thing is this Crosshatching

The next assigned text for the Comix Coven is My Favorite Thing is Monsters by Emil Ferris. Drawn on composition paper while she was recovering from West Nile Virus (a process that took seven years), the story enters the life of a young girl in 1960s Chicago, a girl who is fascinated by monsters. It has the feel of a noir detective story, a love poem to monster comics and film from that era, but what made me gasp when I first opened the book was the masterful hatching. I’m not sure what tool Ferris used (and in fact it looks like there are several different techniques in the book) but it looks like a crowquill — this must have taken thousands of hours to draw.

Also, and this is important to me — it looks as though ALL the lettering is hand-drawn. Hats. Off.

Fear of Getting it Wrong

I had the second workshop of my year-long Comix Coven today. We had half an hour to work with watercolor and ink on a two-page spread about where we are in our process with our projects.

I am working on a piece about my mother and her choices about end-of-life. I’m terrified I don’t have the chops to draw her, either as she appeared or as she was to me. I’m trying to jump in and have a go nonetheless.

Something that is so personal is challenging, but I think I have this fear with all projects. The way out of them is through, instead of putting them on the shelf and finding ways to justify abandoning them. But this one, even if only five people ever read it, is really worth doing, so I’m going to go ahead and keep working on it.

Busy Day Tomorrow

Our patterns of sleep seem to be shifting a bit now that Numenius is retired and we are sleeping much later into the morning than we used to. I can’t tomorrow, though, because I have a number of timed engagements, all of which are pleasurable but which mean I need to be up, dressed, and with my wits about me by 8 am. (I used to rise often before 5, so yes, this is a big change.)

The final of these engagements at 4 pm is a discussion about this recently published tome through the Sequential Artists Workshop. We are going to discuss a list of Rookie Mistakes contained in the book’s introduction, which include not thinking through the visual story, writing way too much, underestimating how long it takes to draw a comic, taking sloppy notes, and refusing to edit or cut anything. I’m afraid this last one is a big constraint for me — why draw it if it’s going to go? — but I hope to have enough of a thumbnail draft of one project to be able to share it next Saturday.

Unflattening

Numenius drew my attention last week to a book by Nick Sousanis entitled Unflattening. This was originally his doctoral dissertation (!) but written entirely as a comic, looking to explore new ways of seeing. When you only are given one path — one perspective — you are blind to the myriad other possibilities, other ways, other directions, other modes of thinking.

The book is very dense and I just picked it up this morning from our local indie bookstore, so I haven’t finished it yet, but this is one I’ll be returning to again and again. Douglas Wolk calls it a “genuine oddity, a philosophical treatise in comics form.” Imagine my delight when I learned that it was published by my former employer, Harvard University Press… the notes at the back are worth the price of admission on their own, illustrated as they are with thumbnails and drafts of his pages.

Sleepless Planet

I had the first of my four Comix Activism classes on Saturday. This class is being taught by Maureen Burdock, author of Sleepless Planet (and Queen of Snails) and this first session was on Health Justice and Graphic Medicine, a topic I’m particularly interested in since it intersects with my work on End-of-Life Issues.

Comics work well for activism: they are democratic, inexpensive, widely accessible, and can operate happily outside capitalist consumer culture. Maureen called the “portable empathy machines.”

I particularly like her take on insomnia since she’s suffered from it since she was a child and has tried just about everything to address it — and there’s no one quick fix, bur rather, it must be approached holistically. (It’s also very common for post-menopausal women to suffer from it, which has certainly been my experience.)

The comic at right was drawn during our initial warm-up exercise, whose prompt was “draw your day” — Maureen is in Europe so her day was coming to a close, but mine had just started!