13 October 26
Monochrome Memory
It was the winter of 1991, I think. I was living on Huron Avenue in Cambridge, Massachusetts. There was heavy snow at the time and I heard a commotion outside. A sharpie was dismembering a mourning dove. Black, gray, white. It was striking: the only color in the scene at all was the bloodied corpse.
Another mashup…
7 October 26
5 October 26
FOMO meets ADHD
It’s Inktober. It’s also Socktober, SAWtober, Birdtober… so many tobers.
I’m mostly doing mashups of Inktober, SAWtober, and Birdtober. They will appear sporadically over the course of the next few weeks…
3 October 26
Feeding Ghosts
Feeding Ghosts is a graphic memoir by Tessa Hulls. This was an assigned text for our Comix Coven conversation today. The first graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize since Maus, it is an intense journey into the first- and second-generation immigrant experience, the problem of communicating across cultures even with close family members. As Hulls writes, “It’s the great tragedy of immigrant parents — they open the door for us. And we betray them by walking through it and becoming children of a different world.” This book also gives a very intense account of mental illness brought on by trauma, and how that trauma is passed on generationally.
5 September 26
The Mary Thing: A Teeny-Weeny Somewhat Sheepish Memoir
I just submitted a comic to an anthology in which we were encouraged to imagine a new saint. Our Lady of the Take-Off is mine.
12 June 26
Mail Art -- For the Dead
This evening’s Friday Night Comics workshop was about mail art. Ron Regé has been sending art and zines through the mail for decades. We were encouraged to write or draw a letter to a specific person (it could even be yourself) and refrain from photographing it but rather putting it in an envelope and mailing it.
The Postal Service for the Dead is something I’ve encountered in my work with VEOLI (Visualizing End of Life Issues). A member of the comics community at SAW was recently diagnosed with leukemia and had a stroke before she’d even started chemo. She died shortly thereafter.
I didn’t know Kayte well but had interacted with her several times, always finding her a positive and inspiring presence. I made a zine this evening, filled it, and it will go in tomorrow’s mail to the Postal Service for the Dead. I like the idea of illustrating letters and think I’ll write more to those who have passed on…
4 June 26
Marjane Satrapi
In 1977 I travelled to Iran to visit a boyfriend whose father was an Australian geology professor at the University of Shiraz. This was before the Islamic Revolution, and Clint Eastwood was playing at the movie theater, bootleg tapes of rock music were for sale in the streets, and girls wore chadors over jeans and T-shirts.
The VW bus owned by Cameron’s family drove us around southern Iran, including a trip to Persepolis, the ancient capital of the Achaemenid empire. Processions of victorious warriors and their captives were carved in bas-relief on the walls of great buildings. The city was conquered and burned by Alexander the Great, so any remains are solid stone. I remember walking around the ruins above a copse where Cameron’s parents napped in the shade, among huge numbers of bee-eaters flying around. In the shade of massive blocks of stones, wild gerbils hopped about.
Since that time I’ve been particularly interested in Iran, in this great ancient civilization that has been through so much and which continues to do so. Today I learned that Marjane Satrapi, the author of a graphic memoir about her life in Tehran and France, had died at age 56. Her memoir, which was also turned into a film, was called Persepolis. It was only the second serious comic I ever read, after Art Spiegelman’s Maus. Satrapi lived in France for years and wrote her memoir in French. The style is bold black and white. Her family has said she died of a broken heart after the death of her husband. Whatever the official cause of death, I hope she is at peace now.
2 June 26
23 May 26
Getting Back to the Work
I’ve been stalled a bit on my project about my mother’s death, partly because I went away and partly because, well, it’s hard. Today in Comics Coven we worked a bit on containers, but all I could think about was how much my mother tried to disappear all her life, how little of a burden she wanted to be (even after her death, she didn’t want us to grieve, which isn’t really the dying person’s call: grief is part of life). I am thinking of her as a silhouette. A silhouette in a doorway.
