Working on an artist’s statement for grad school… That seems to be the first step, even as a prerequisite for getting letters of recommendation. It’s very difficult to find any kind of unifying theme in what I’ve been working on. I suppose that in itself could be spun into some kind of coherent whole, but the phrasing - Aye, there’s the rub. In the mean time, brainstorming them on a sheet of paper will suffice. I have a few ideas, but I don’t want to spill the beans just yet for fear of seeming unforgivably haughty… But I suppose any artist’s statement worth the electrons expended to write it needs to exercise its creator’s command of culture to the utmost…
Working on a comic for some film producers in Australia at the moment, as well as illustrations for SparkNotes, and Ex Occultus for St. James. All in all, my time is well-occupied.
Been a little under the weather this past week, but it seems to have crested and I should be back to my regular ebullient self before too long.
Been almost a year since this site was put up; should probably find out how to rotate the graphics on the top banner to something else, and maybe the city background, too. Some of it seems a little niche and is probably putting some people off.
Gotta make appointments with grad school admissions people - Academic resume is starting to feel a little thin. But I suppose anyone interested in serious interdisciplinary learning feels embarrassed by whatever school they went to, either for too much pretentiousness or not enough. None of this would be a problem if “self-educated” weren’t a synonym for “crackpot.”
Just a blog sonar ping to confirm my existence. This blog has a deadman switch that will cause it to explode if I don’t post every so often (I’m guessing, I dunno how this works).
I had a great holiday season and 2010 is looking up both career and personal-wise. I’m very busy, and I hope I stay that way. Also thinking about giving up some different kind of vice or indulgence every month and then pitching a graphic novel about it at the end of the year.
I am also growing an enormous beard, because it is cold outside, and I want to see how big it gets by springtime. I have not shaved since November 1st, except for my neck and some trimming, and I will post pictures before I shave it off.
Just uploaded some of the pages I’ve been doing for Saint James Comics to the Comics (!) section, so go check them out to see a bit of a different style. I removed the dialog as a courtesy and so that you’ll go check out their site (it’s cool!)
Did a stand up comedy set at a nearby establishment last night, and someone was there taping it, so if I get ahold of that footage I’ll put it up here. I don’t know if I “killed,” but it was a low-energy night for everyone and I did pretty well, considering.
In other news, this is very impressive and you should watch it:
Switched my browser to Google Chrome because apparently my computer has contracted some sort of deadly Firefox Leprosy. I like it so far - The theme decor momentarily relieves the obscene banality of human life.
Finished all the layouts and designs for the “Tomb of Achilles” story for St. James Comics. Going to be gettin’ to those pencils, now. Might be getting a new round of comics and illustration work, too, but I don’t want to jinx it (These things have a tendency to fall through) so I’ll spare the details.
Had a crazy nightmare last night–almost more of a vision or a bad acid trip–and have been on kind of an adrenaline high all day, due to my relief that I was not tortured to death by monsters. There wasn’t even a plot, it was just those shapes we all see behind our eyelids continually morphing into a series of grotesque “ohmigod are those eyes on its teeth!?”-type creatures. Maybe I’ll get a painting or two out of it.
Going to a gallery opening tonight, too - Hopefully will make some connections.
Just got back from seeing a talk by Jules Pfeiffer, Matt Groening, Lynda Barry, and Chris Ware at a school here in Chicago. Fantastically interesting, especially in their encouragement of pursuing ones’ own artistic sensibilities in order to keep things genuine. I’ve got to get more portfolios out there, though, and make that count. So that’s what I’m going to do right now.
I survived Halloween, which was a lot of fun. I really could not have wished for it to go better. Waiting to get pictures, though.
Today is my birthday, but first, a little inking, and then off to see some friends and a comedy show. There will be a finished batch of inks this week, too, and possibly a new painting. I am pumped.
For some reason I’m really excited for Halloween this year. Perhaps it’s because Madison’s famously over-the-top celebration, which I’m most familiar with, was starting to crumble under the weight of concerns such as “safety” and “preventing property damage” (Truly, once tear gas is taken out of the equation, a street party loses its magic), or perhaps its because I had to skip it last year because I was moving and missed the one little public party in Helena, MT, and perhaps its because my birthday comes up two days afterward and this is kind of serving as a party for both. But whatever the reason, I am jazzed. This year is gonna be fun.
So I’m going to work hard the rest of this week to finish the inks and especially that promo image so I can enjoy spending time with my friends without suffering the guilt of the procrastinator.
But to return to the idea of somewhat seedy fun, I have to say “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” is quickly becoming one of the best things on TV. I have watched this episode three times and could probably watch it three more:
(In case it doesn’t play on this site: http://www.hulu.com/watch/101903/its-always-sunny-in-philadelphia-the-gang-gives-frank-an-intervention#s-p1-so-i0 )
It got me thinking, though, about comedy and personality types: When I had hurt myself the other day and was lying around with an icepack in an embarrassing place, I decided to watch some TV comedies on Hulu that are not, shall we say, targeted to my demographic, for the purposes of both research and so I had something to grumble about besides how much pain I was in.
Now, this is just some inchoate theorizing, some off-the-cuff reasoning that’s definitely not ready for peer review, but it’s been turning over in my mind and I thought I’d expose it to the light of day and see if it rots or cowers back into the shadows. When I was doing sketch comedy, the other group members and I had a theory that people who decide to write comedy fall into essentially two types, which we termed “Theater Kids” and “Assholes.” Both those designations are a little mean, but I think they paint a richer picture of the kind of people I’m talking about. These two kinds of people have, of course, very different senses of humor and approaches to writing and performing it. I would use examples from stand-up, but I think this dichotomy is much clearer in “narrative” comedy like sketch or film.
When I was in Madison, our sketch group looked down its nose at another group composed of Theater Kids (though no doubt they decried us as terrible human beings) and we found their “constructive” approach to humor to be anathema to anything we considered funny or interesting, which lead me to think that this fundamental division in comedy writing, and perhaps ultimately in art in general, comes down to the idea of “positive and negative space” — When these Theater Kids wanted to make a point, they would have a character who explicitly represents that point make various “common sense” assertions, and try to derive humor from those being shot down by the old Screwed Up World - I would term this “positive space.” On the other hand we (And I use this term loosely because it was mostly me pushing for this, resulting in many arguments during writing meetings) would try to write a character that embodied whatever foolishness we wanted to mock, and would make them out to be someone contemptible and not to be emulated - What I would term “negative space.” I prefer this almost exclusively - Things going well, and people behaving well, are not, to my mind, funny. And often times not even interesting (This is why I have trouble enjoying film dramas - They’re rarely long or dense enough for me to become invested in the plight of the characters, while a good farce simply invites you to laugh at them, and by extension the world that causes them to behave that way).
The other notion that laid eggs in my brain was the idea of “backing down.” This is ultimately related to the “show, don’t tell” adage that every creative writing professor likely has tattooed somewhere on his or her body, with good reason: Action is what brings fiction to life - Talk on its own is an essay. This notion of “backing down” brings me again to the other shows I mentioned earlier, and why I like “Always Sunny.” One of the shows I looked at was “Glee,” a perfect example of, in this case literal, Theater Kid sensibility. The story was explicit in its moral intentions, using those “positive space” brushstrokes to convey a tale about a nice kid worrying he’ll be rejected by his peers, and then pulling through in the end. But what struck me even more was the way the comedy would often “back down” from an unpleasant idea, raising only the specter of it for laughs (”The teacher thinks we should cane students!”), as opposed to actually having the threatened event occur. I suppose this can be attributed to the “hardness” of a given story’s comedic universe, but there’s something that rubs me the wrong way about posing a “threat” to the audience or characters as a comedic end in itself, as opposed to actually having the thing in question happen. It’s already fictional, so this is like making it fiction twice over… On the other hand, a show like “Always Sunny” will delve into a comedic action immediately, with the words and explanation always playing catch-up. Obviously, since these examples are TV shows, budget, network standards, and the like are important factors, but it’s still possible to have something occur off-screen or otherwise be implied to have actually happened as opposed to merely rolling them out as concepts. Next time you’re watching a show or reading a book, take note of the times something occurs as an attempt at humor versus how many times it’s merely threatened in order to get a laugh. Ultimately, what I mean by “backing down” in comedy writing is best expressed by some cliched jokes: Think of characters making a dead baby joke versus actually having a baby die, or someone saying “I banged your mom” versus actually having the character do it. I guess it comes down to the old postmodern saw about the contents of a story being a commentary on the story itself. Or something…
I’d go on, or at least re-re-rewrite until it’s clearer, but it’s only a foggy notion in my head as-is, and I don’t want to spend all my time writing and none of it drawing, so I’ll leave this off here. I don’t have any answers right now, but hopefully some lines of thought will take this post as a starting point.
I just finished my Halloween costume while watching the very seasonally-appropriate “Brazil,” which is still as amazing and disturbing as I remember it. Liberal Democracy always bills itself as rule by laws instead of men, but it’s nice to have a little piece of art like that to remind you that that can go too far and fall into tyranny as well - Gotta keep an element of humanism in there.
Now on to some more inking. Going to finish that promo image before this weekend, too - There’s a con it needs to be at, bein’ all promotional and such.
If anyone ever tells you that you can’t painfully injure yourself while pooping, they’re mistaken. Sorely mistaken. (Wordplay!)
I brought up Elvis, however, to also serve as a segue into another, very different blast from the past:
I was organizing my art files earlier, and found this old, old, old drawing I did in perhaps 5th grade, showing my drawing fixation from around the ages of 9 to 12, which was centered around massive cartoon battles between Gary Larson-style lemmings and incompetent little robots with laser guns for hands:
This was essentially all I drew between 3rd and 6th grades. I had an art teacher who loved the idea, though, calling me, in my report card, the “Heironymus Bosch of the 5th grade” and encouraged me do a massive poster in this style for the centerpiece of the Parents’ Night exhibit, which was a really great idea if you wanted my friends’ parents to forbid me to come over. Every once in a while, I look back fondly on these characters and think about using them again. There’s something refreshingly basic and silly and honest about them, a certain something that makes me think that Modern Me is occasionally trying too hard.
Then, a few months ago, I saw “Superjail!,” and it all came flooding back - This is exactly what my little friends and I used to sit around and draw on massive sheets of paper. We rarely achieved the levels of blood and gore that Superjail! casually enjoys, but the simple, zoomed-out “schematic” look full of incidental detail and improvisation hits all the same notes, and for me it was like hearing a once-favorite song I hadn’t thought about in years. As an example, here’s a compilation of the opening sequences, demonstrating that sensibility:
There is a certain type of kid who should see “Superjail!” Not that you should show it to them - you as a responsible adult would get in trouble - but they should find a way to watch it some late night after their parents have gone to bed and they’ve build a couch fort in the living room. There’s something childlike yet illicit about it: It’s the TV equivalent of the older boys asking you if you want to go see a dead body. It’s the kind of thing being talked about in this essay, or in this book.
Maybe that’s all self-justification for my liking something that’s ultimately frivolous, just because, somewhat worryingly, it makes me feel all nostalgic and gooey. But there’s something to be said for reconnecting with that little kid who was just drawing lemmings and robots without any thought of whether it was good or not - Just drawing for the sake of drawing - for “fun”, that unassailable fortress of sincerity - the very act lending it an authenticity that disintegrates into ash as soon as it becomes something calculated.
…The irony, of course, being that this entire post boils down to “don’t overthink things.” I’m going to take my own advice and get back to work, and draw with my gut instead of my head.
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