Master Class in Comics Narrative

Wouldn't it be great to put everything else aside and only work on your comics for a few days? Do you have the beginnings of a graphic novel but need some help getting it off the ground? Is your cartooning stuck in a rut, ready to move up to another level?

Those might be reasons for you to consider taking my course this summer: The Master Class in Comics Narrative at the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, August 20-24.

Here are some of the reasons that I am looking forward to the class: 

1. I like to teach.

At the moment I am wrapping up a spring semester at RISD and it is thrilling to come in weekly to see what my students have wrought on so little sleep.

2. Fresh donuts.

Baked daily at the Polka Dot Diner two blocks from The Center for Cartoon Studies.

3. Intensive.

The group will be doing nothing but discussing, reading, and making comics except for when we are eating fresh donuts at the Polka Dot Diner.

4. The Jump-Start approach

Students will be developing work for a long project. If you have been waiting for the opportunity to start or finish that graphic novel project, this is it!

5. The Long Haul

But the fun does not end after five days: we continue to work as a group on-line for another two months, refining and improving work.

6. Guest star cameos by some of today’s most fascinating talents of Comicdom!!!

I am hoping that we will have visits and lectures from the likes of cartoonists Steve Bissette,  Jason Lutes, and James Sturm because while they yap I can run down to the Polka Dot Diner for a fresh you-know-what.

If you take this class, I can pretty much guarantee that you will be a better cartoonist leaving my class than when you begin.

Plus: it will be lots of fun.

Any level of cartoonist may apply, but bear in mind, this is a MASTER Class. Unpublished cartoonists should have solid drawing and humility skills. Published cartoonists may just need their asses kicked for which I will be only too happy to oblige. Comics boot camp!

The only real requirement is that you come to class willing to work very hard...and like donuts.

If you want more info, go here:

http://www.cartoonstudies.org/index.php/programs/summer-workshops/

If you want less info, go here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chopped_liver

If you want a donut go here:

 http://maps.google.com/maps/place?tbnh=142&tbnw=128&hl=en&gbv=2&sig=108190513580811159403&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.,cf.osb&biw=1152&bih=1167&um=1&ie=UTF-8&q=polka+dot+diner&fb=1&gl=us&hq=polka+dot+diner&cid=2413879144687920606

Graphic Novel Realism: Backstage at the Comics

I have just returned from DeKalb, Illinois, the home Northern Illinois University. It is also the home of barbed wire and there is a Barbed Wire Museum in town. Need I say more? No. Go.

There are several Antique Stores in town. Mostly they are the kind that smell like candles scented with a secret recipe combining lavender and stomach acid. Handsome overpriced vintage ceramic bowls and lard tins mingle with folksy hand made 100% American knick-knacks that keep factories in China churning out bolts of calico.

But there is one true junk store in town that really has junk. The front of the store is chock-a-block with hand tools, some of which might have actually worked 30 years ago. I really liked this store and wish that I had the time to go through the box of vacuum hose attachments I saw in a corner.

There were lots of LPs in and out of their sleeves, pre-scratched to save you the trouble. I was very impressed to find a coagulation of five copies of Vaughn Meader’s “The First Family”. Actually, there was a sixth copy, too, but it was out of its sleeve moonlighting in a box of Frisbees.

Several times a day, a train rolls through town and the mournful whistle blows to remind you that you are in the heartland of America, though you could remind yourself easily by a glance down Main Street at the empty storefronts since all the commercial action is at the mall just outside of town.

I gave three lectures in two days at NIU and spent a third day critiquing 15 graduate painting students of my pal, Katie Kahn. I saw some very good painting by these hard working young people and I feel privileged that I had the chance to encourage them. I was also thrilled as hell to get paid to tell other people what to do with their work. Ooo-whee, doggie! Ain’t that a kick!

The Museum at the University asked me to curate an exhibition that I had originally titled, “Hey, Stoopid! Comix R Cool!”, but which is now called, “Graphic Novel Realism: Backstage at the Comics” (whatever that means!).

Josephine Burke, the Director of the Museum and her crew magically transformed my exacting and intricate floor plan written in crayon on the back of a cocktail napkin, into a very handsome exhibit that I encourage you to go see before the end of May, 2012 featuring the work of Joyce Farmer, Jaime Hernandez, Jason Lutes, Mark Newgarden & Megan Montague Cash, Seth, James Sturm and myself. For those looking for something a bit more lowbrow, there is an exhibit across the hall of Goya’s Los Caprichos.

Here is a link to entire NIU Comics “Suite”, including an upcoming lecture on Rudolphe Toppfer by French Language professor, Philippe Willems:

http://www.niu.edu/artmuseum/exhibitions/upcoming.shtml

And here's a video tour of the exhibit:

Angouleme 2012

Angoulême Report 2012

The poster by Art Spiegelman was hung everywhere...
and I mean EVERYwhere.

Located as it is in France, Angoulême is nothing like any American town. For instance, unlike, say, Philadelphia, Angoulême has no nickname for outsiders to rattle off under the mistaken impression that this makes them seem like insiders. One does not travel to “Anggie”. Hmm… Do any European cities even have nicknames? How sad? Without nicknames how can any European town ever achieve the excellence of something like the Philly Cheese Steak.

I began my two-week stay there teaching a group of bright, skillful students at the EESI Masters Program. Yes, a MASTERS Program in CARTOONING! I know that this may seem an alien concept to many of you who think of Masters Programs in terms of Law, Medicine, and Pink Floyd studies.

Each year the Festival committee chooses some famous cartoonist to be President of the Festival. They make their choice based on the systematic American Electoral College model meaning that systematically nobody understands how it is done. This year Art Spiegelman was chosen to be Grand Pooh-Bah.

To appropriate W.C. Fields’ epitaph, on the whole, Art Spiegelman, from the moment he was selected, claimed that he would rather be in Philadelphia. In the first sign of cultural rift, he referred to it as Philly.

Art said that after a day of being hounded by paparazzi he, "understood why Jim Morrison killed himself".

Too bad for him. For a guy who professes to not wanting to be part of a club that would have him for a member, my chum, Art, has a lot of membership cards. This is good for me, ‘cause when it came time for him to get a very private showing in the very private museum archives with his own very private film crew, I was invited to tag along as long as I behaved myself and did not drool all over the original artwork (too much).

Hillary Chute, Art Spiegelman and I enjoy the original art of Calvo.
(keep your eyes peeled for my upcoming ebay auctions)

It’s a good thing that the Angoulême Comics Festival is an annual event. If it occurred only once you would not know if it was worse than the years before…and hence you would not have anything to reference for complaining. And complain-we-must at the Angoulême Comics Festival because mixing equal parts of “Cartoonists” with “France” creates the perfect Kvetch Cocktail. I had many conversations this past weekend with people trying to find things to complain about, including the usual subjects:

• The Crowds?  

Maybe the price of gas lowered the number of school groups in attendance, but in past years the sheer number of jeunne filles and garçons made even slogging through the streets impossible. The best you could do was stand still and hope that the human tide would carry you downstream to an exhibit that you wanted to see or maybe to a bakery. I suspect that teachers finally wised-up to the fact that a comics festival makes a lousy field trip. I, for one, would prefer to take a field trip with my class to the beach where if mon petit Jacques is being eaten by a shark at least I can see him disappear.

Inside those white tents thousands of comics await purchasing.
Outside, the locals curse the extra five minutes it takes to cross the damn street.
Above, a gargoyle finds it all amusing (look closely).

• The Weather?  

Who doesn’t like to bitch about the weather? In Italy, university courses are given on Weather Critique, yet even my ol’ Italian amici, with whom I had dinner with on Friday night, could find nothing to criticize about the Angoulême weather. This led to a very dull table conversation. They perked up, though, when the French-style coffee was plunked down and they finally REALLY had something to complain about.

There was a very cool show of cartoonists' paintings. Here is Cowboy Henk in oils by Herr Seele

.

My favorite exhibit of new work was by Vincente Perriot
in part because to get there you had to climb a tight 300 year-old stone staircase.

• The Exhibitions?  

You may not give a damn about the work of Art Spiegelman but you would be in the minority at Angoulême last week judging by the throngs at the Musée de Cite. Like it or not, you cannot find fault in the installation of this massive display of his work. Last year’s Baru exhibit (see previous blog below) left people with plenty to complain about from their hospital beds while recovering from fractures received stumbling around in the darkness. Much of Art’s work works well on a wall due to its graphic appeal, confrontational content, and the fact that scientific studies have proven that people really, really like art that has plenty of cats and mice.

But his secret weapon in this case was that all the framing and hanging had been supervised by Rina Mattotti who hangs comic art for fun and profit at the Gallerie Martel in Paris. Rina is a genius when it comes to this sort of thing. She is also very nice, smart, and, being the wife of Italy’s greatest arbiter of female beauty, Lorenzo Mattotti, she is also beautiful. Many women want to kill her. (But oddly, no men do, for some reason that my wife will not allow me to understand.)

Rina is also a very good person to sit next to during a Festival Official Opening Ceremony because she has a nice fluffy coat that doubles as a pillow. You do not want to ever miss the Festival Official Opening Ceremony if you happen to be a 2 X 4 block of wood. All others should head to the bar. Let’s put it this way, if you were to take a vote as to what the high point of this ceremony was, the audience favorite would surely be the elderly Taiwanese man in a crisp grey suit who performed a brisk incomprehensible show with two traditionally dressed hand puppets that would not be out of place at a birthday party for six year-olds.

Across the river from the Spiegelman retrospective, is another Musée de Bande Designee (which roughly translates as the “Museum of Band Aids”) that housed the “Musée Privé de Art Spiegelman”, Art’s hand-picked version of the best and most important comics culled from museums, collectors, and dumpsters from all over the world. Rather than describe the show, I’ll just offer up a few pix of what you missed so that at least YOU will have something to complain about.

Chester Gould 

Harold Gray

Kurtzman and Elder

Preliminary sketch by Caran D'ache

Milt Gross 

Opper

• The Programming?

What follows is my in depth coverage of several excellent panels:

• Whatever Eddie Campbell says is wonderful because he has got the coolest accent of anyone in comics. He comes from the Sean Connery neighborhood of Scotland.

• Lorenzo Mattotti and Jacques de Loustal like to work for the New Yorker because they can make jokes with their editor, Françoise Mouly, in French about the editorial policy without anyone understanding what they are saying.

• After books detailing the Bosnian war and the Palestinian conflict, Joe Sacco’s next book will be about Pink Floyd, or maybe it was the history of the Philly Cheese Steak. Sorry, Joe, these panels began to kinda run together.

• Hillary Chute’s in depth interview with Art Spiegleman revealed that as a youth Art had learned about Elliot Alfred Caplin changing his Jewish-sounding name to Al Capp and so Art tried out several nom-de-plumes before settling on art spiegelman. His real name is Reginald Potterby.

Angoulême may be small but it appears impossible to start from any given point and actually arrive in time for any given event. However I did manage to arrive 20 minutes early to a RAW magazine panel. The place was packed so I sat in the only remaining available chair which happened to be on Charles Burns’ lap...not so good since he was one of the speakers.

Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Françoise Mouly, Charles Burns
(not shown 257 audience members in a room meant for 35)

It was the Year of the Spiegelman, right? So it might be expected that many Festival attendees might be interested in a RAW panel with Charles, Françoise Mouly, and Aline Kominsky-Crumb. The organizers’ brilliant strategy was to stage the panel in the Hotel du Palais. Sounds like it must be a grande palace with a ballroom, right? Nope. Hotel de Sardine Can had a lobby that sat about 35 people uncomfortably. This way everyone turned away would have to…go out and spend more money on comics! Formidable, oui?

O.K., so let’s see where was I on the complaint list?

Crowds? NO.

Weather? NO.

Exhibits? NO.

Programming? NO (sort of).

That leaves the Food and the Company (highly subjective subjects) to complain about. I know that many of my cartoonist pals do not really care much about food since they live on coffee and twigs, so they can skip this part and go out to forage but be sure to come back in a few paragraphs.

Centuries ahead of America, the French have discovered a way
to make a grilled cheese sandwich with the cheese in side AND outside!

I made it a point to eat duck at least once a day, a feat impossible in the U.S…especially if your goal is to eat duck prepared a DIFERENT WAY at least once a day. I had breast of duck with green pepper cream sauce, grilled duck, duck Pate de Grandmere (basically ground-up duck and ground-up grandmother mixed-together), duck with orange sauce, braised duck with rosemary drizzled with fig sauce, duck crepes, and duck tartar (duck mixed with tar, twice). I also had a sandwich on fresh baguette with spinach, goat cheese and honey. I though that I was ordering a duck sandwich but this actually turned out to be delicious and I recommend it. Much better than the Anggie Cheese Steak.

And as for the company? Well, take away everything to complain about and cartoonists are kind of somewhat nice people. Here are pix of me with cool cartoonists that I shamelessly display in the vain hope that you will think that I, too, am really cool, and will invite me to your birthday party. I’ll even bring the traditionally dressed hand puppets.

Kriota Willberg, Bill Kartalopoulos, Bob Sikoryak and I
built our own table at Le Chat Noir out of popsicle sticks and pipe cleaners

Kai Pfeiffer and Ulli Lust are three sets of twins.
There can be no other explanation for the fact that every time I turned around: there they were.

Philippe Dupuy, Theirry Smolderen and I
 "coincidently" meet on this  bridge every year to have our picture taken.
(I am not supposed to know that Philippe actually lives on the bridge)

If you want to learn how to make comics and you are Italian get in touch with
Marco Bianchini and Graziela Santinelli of the Scuola Internazionale di Comics.

Bill Kartalopoulos left his hat at home. And what is Art doing?! Smoking?!?!

The Angoulême police are after Igort for breaking the law; Cartoonists are not allowed to look like movie stars.

Dang! Missed this!

Angouleme 2011

Many of those who annually attend have told me that this year’s comics festival in Angouleme was not a particularly memorable event. For me, however, Angouleme 2011 was a banner year.

It all began when I got off the plane at Airport Charles De Gaulle.

In an effort to shake off the global misconception that the French are a bunch of xenophobic snobs, the French government has arranged it so that all travelers arriving at DeGaulle airport are welcomed by their own personal café. The name of mine is, simply, “Paul.” This fine establishment offered a swell foie gras and smoked duck sandwich on decent baguette for under 4 euros, no kidding. Oddly, although I showed them my name on my passport, they still made me pay up. Those inscrutable French!



I arrived a week before the actual Festival began to teach at the Masters in Comics program at the European School of Visual Arts. As evidenced from the photo here, my personally suave brand of bon vivant American-style fit right in with my students’ continental hipness. You can see here in their eyes the deep respect and admiration which they held their remarkably hip teacher.



And look what they produced in four days: a 24-page mini-comic! This group really worked hard, even if they did not understand a word of what I was saying:


The teacher, writer, historian, and comics theorist, Thierry Smolderen, generously coordinated my schedule and I am deeply grateful to this scholar for introducing me to his talented students and for introducing me to his theory regarding Rudolph Töpffer (the creator of the modern comic form) as literary critic. Mostly, though, I am grateful to Thierry Smolderen for introducing me to the best restaurant in Angouleme for duck breast in a green pepper cream sauce.

The profane marriage of “Commerce” and “Art” at Angouleme is not what you would call an egalitarian relationship. A good marriage counselor could make a quick euro here.

“Commerce” dominates. Huge tents are filled with vendors pushing product. Most of it is crap (stuff I do not like), though some of it is good (stuff I like). In any case, thousands of products and euros exchange hands during the three days of this Festival. Owing to the peculiar geography of the hilltop town, this hailstorm of commercial activity actually creates a swirling vortex that magically sucks bills and credit cards out of wallets as it brainwashes otherwise sane men into thinking that Tintin is one of the crowning accomplishments of human endeavor.

Meanwhile the neglected spouse, “Art”, in the form of artists’ exhibitions, events, interviews, and roundtable discussions appear randomly around town wherever they can find a space. The free map supposedly directing you to your destination is absolutely worthless (it was designed this year by Gracie Allen and Associates). Hence, you kind of stumble upon these little Art happenings if you’re lucky. Actual comic art, with no place in the center of the festival, displaces the ordinary living spaces of the local residents. I saw two elderly Angoulinians storming away from a church, murmuring and twiddling their rosaries in a panic because nobody had told them that twelve o’clock Mass had been preempted by a live Comic Art event: a Ninja draw-off between two manga cartoonists.


(Ha! And you thought I was making this shit up!)

Despite an acute lack of publicity, and a program that listed me as Paul Karazik some people whom I did not (exactly) bribe showed up for my event. The large sign outside the auditorium with “APPEARING TODAY: TINTIN!!!” written by me in crayon may have helped. I rolled up my trouser cuffs, applied an entire tube of gel to my hair to fashion a single spike, and tried to act as asexual as possible. This actually fooled a few near-sighted middle aged men who came up to me after my presentation, asked for my autograph and whether Hergé really was a bastard to work for.

Each year a select committee of comics insiders carefully throw darts at a wall covered with Post-Its bearing cartoonists’ names to choose the big-name cartoonist who will set the tone for following year’s festival. Baru was chosen last year so this year he got to set the tone and he probably also got to have a coronary from organizing the enormous retrospective of his work on display.

I loved the exhibition of his work, but not because of all the art on display. The room was dark and scary. Makes sense; lurking menace is a theme in Baru’s work filled with slightly grotesque and tortured souls fighting to survive and often just plain fighting. But too much work hanging in one room makes me queasy….my eyes begin to spin. One two-sided wall-hanging separating two sections of the hanger-like gallery displayed over 200 original pages. Impressive…but illegible as they stretched upwards into the darkness.


(A wall of Baru.)

So why did I love the exhibit? Well, to evoke the semi-urban youth of Baru and the hoodlum pals he is so keen on depicting, they kindly set up an old pinball machine for heathens such as myself. Hoo-ha! I scored 2300 points on ol’ “Jack In The Box”! I went back for a second go at it the next day but the clanging bells drove serious gallery worshippers nutty so they unplugged it. Sad.


(Here is Baru hard at work. Sometimes he would actually let others play "Jack in the Box!")

Part of setting the tone for the Festival is actually setting the tone. Thanks to Baru, the soundtrack for Angouleme 2011 was, and I am not making this up, Rockabilly.

Baru’s work tends towards the nostalgic and he grew up at a time in France when Rockabilly was making a big impact on the culture, shattering eardrums and domestic bliss, alike, as teenagers turned to black leather, slicked hair, and Coca-Cola.

Several days before the festival, small speakers began to appear on telephone poles throughout town so that during the festival, the tinny twang of Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins floated above the din of the comics-drunk attendees. It was weird to walk across the footbridge to the Musée de Bande Dessinée as Elvis wailed “Mystery Train”, but somehow entirely appropriate. Surrealism began in la belle France, oui?

I arrived at the Musée (what we in the U.S. call a “Bookstore and Café”) just as the dapper French cartoonist, Lewis Trondheim and his wife, the extraordinary colorist, Brigitte Findakly, appeared. Monsieur Trondheim makes it a policy not to sell his original work but the Musée really likes to have examples of work by all of the major cartoonists, and Trondheim is major. So they have come up with a very clever solution.

Each year Trondheim appears at the Musée with 10 pieces of art that he exchanges for the 10 pieces of art that he left there the year before. The Musée is kept well stocked with Trondheim originals and Trondheim does not sacrifice his originals and is granted visiting privileges. As an American, I found all of this kind of shocking. I mean, what’s the point if no cold hard cash exchanges hands?!


(Lewis Trondheim, Jean-Pierre Mercier, Brigitte Trondheim, Joe Buttinski)


(Trondheim signs contract while Mercier looks on.)


It was really nothing for Jean-Pierre Mercier, the affable "Scientific Advisor" of the Musée de Bande Dessinée to invite me to view the extensive archives of the global collection of comic art throughout the ages. He, after all had the keys. For me, however, entering the triple-hermetically sealed vault required fingerprinting, a retinal scan, and the deposit of a vial of blood.

Unlike our primitive government, the French legislature actually supports and funds the arts including, evidently, this comic’s museum and the festival itself. They dump money at culture the way the United States government supports and funds the spawning of corn and weapons of mass destruction. Although the French have a couple of hundred years on us, there is still time to catch up…but first we must all start smoking again.

The Musée’s archive is lined with walls of flat files bulging with comic art originals and related ephemera.



I drew up a wish list of work I was interested in viewing and Jean-Pierre made good. He is genuinely knowledgeable and enthusiastic about the work. In addition to Americans, including Herriman, Opper, Bushmiller, Gould all the way up to Ware, I was treated to some fine selections from a collection that is naturally Franco-centric.


(Jean-Pierre flips through hundreds of Calvo originals)

(A cool li'l Calvo 'Exquisite Corpse' type booklet)


The museum has a staggering collection by Calvo whose career only spanned 20 serious years during which he produced an astonishing amount of very detailed work and at least one masterpiece, “The Beast Is Dead” (if you are unaware of Calvo, Google-image him right now, I’ll wait.) According to Jean-Pierre, before she died, Calvo’s daughter reported that she had only one clear memory of her father: hunched over the drawing board.

But the object that Jean-Pierre is most excited about these days is a new acquisition, a small hand-made journal by one of the most prolific of all French cartoonists; Cham (he completed over 18,000 pages in his lifetime). This booklet is the mythical travel journal of a mythical explorer. It is a beautiful object and it fits in the palm of one’s hand…I know.

Upon leaving, they gave me back my test-tube of blood, but stripped searched me anyway. Please address all correspondence to the Angouleme Penitentiary, cell #313.


(Evidence)