Do the Batusi

Blogging's still sparse 'cause I'm still working hard, especially on Mystery Project X. Thanks for your indulgence.

Cartoonist Jesse Lonergan (whom I don't know and, honestly, hadn't heard of before today and I'm sorry about that) has drawn a batch of Star Wars and superhero characters in silly dance poses. Comics Reporter Tom Spurgeon, whose link sent me there, dismissed it as "that kind of cute superhero thing (that) really does it for some people, and doesn't do a thing for others," and it certainly is that, but I got a little more out of it.

First, they're neat examples of cartooning in their own right. Each figure shows maximum expression with minimal details. Their anatomy is very stylized but solid. They reminded me of "gesture drawings" in art classes, in which you have only a few seconds to capture the essence of a figure in motion. Some of Lonergan's characters are little more than sillhouettes, yet they're full of life and movement. Even attitude and emotion! That's hard to do.

The second thing I noticed is that a full page of these figures has a sort of cumulative effect of suggesting movement that approaches animation. That's especially apparent in this bunch of Spider-Men:


Cartoonist Jules Feiffer mastered that effect with his dancers pirouetting existentially through life, and I was also reminded of one of the most enduring sequences from Bill Watterson's "Calvin and Hobbes":


It's interesting that all three examples lack the traditional comic panel borders, encouraging the eye to flow uninterrupted from one image to the next. I think that's important.

Even if Lonergan's dance drawings are too cute for your taste, there's some cartooning wisdom to be had there.
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Chicago in June

That's where I'll be; how about you?

Registration is now open for “Comics & Medicine: The Sequential Art of Illness,” an international conference I'm helping organize that'll be held June 9–11, 2011 at Northwestern University. Also, just a last-minute reminder that proposals for conference lectures, panel discussions, workshops and poster presentations addressing comics in the context of healthcare are still being accepted until February 28.

Registration for the two-day event, which will be preceded by a reception the evening of Thursday, June 9, costs $80 for general admission and $30 for students with a valid student ID. Scheduled keynote speakers are Scott McCloud, Phoebe Gloeckner, and David Small, so that right there should be worth the price of admission. A full schedule of panels and workshops is planned for Friday and Saturday, along with opportunities for informal networking. It'll be quite an intimate affair (we're aiming for about 100 participants, we'll see how it goes). We should have information about hotels with decent conference rates soon.

In addition, anyone interested in presenting or speaking at the conference is encouraged to download the Call for Papers and submit an idea by February 28.

Honestly, I think the price tag is a bargain for all the activities and information we're planning. Northwestern University is very generously providing facilities and a lot of support, which keeps the cost low. No one involved is making a penny on this. I had a terrific time at the first Graphic Medicine conference in London last June, which was only a one-day event. As great as that was, I'm expecting this one to be twice as good. At least!

Visit http://www.graphicmedicine.org/ for more details.
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Mark Twain Insult of the Day #6

Mr. Clemens and his family frequently traveled overseas and lived for two brief stretches in Florence, Italy. In 1904, in a futile attempt to restore his wife Olivia's failing health via rest in a temperate climate (I'm constantly struck by how tremendously medical science has progressed in the past century), Clemens leased the Villa di Quarto in Florence for several months. Once a modest palace, the villa had gone to seed and was then owned by an American who'd tried to marry her way into money and high society, both unsuccessfully. She was the Countess Massiglia, and Clemens genuinely despised her.

She is excitable, malicious, malignant, vengeful, unforgiving, selfish, stingy, avaricious, coarse, vulgar, profane, obscene, a furious blusterer on the outside and at heart a coward. Her lips are as familiar with lies, deceptions, swindles and treacheries as are her nostrils with breath . . .

The Countess boasted to me that nothing American is still left in her, and that she is wholly Italian now. She plainly regards this as a humiliation for America, and she as plainly believed she was gracing Italy with a compliment of a high and precious order. America still stands. Italy may survive the benefaction of the Countess's approval, we cannot tell . . .

. . . I should wish the Countess to move out of Italy; out of Europe; out of the planet. I should want her bonded to retire to her place in the next world and inform me which of the two it was, so that I could arrange for my own hereafter.

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Let me pass on some advice to anyone reading the Autobiography of Mark Twain beside or behind me: don't ignore the notes in the back. I read a couple hundred pages under the assumption that the endnotes comprised academic trivia that I could skip. Then I took a closer look. They're actually a very nice companion that provides information, context and corrections to the body of the text. For example, Clemens might mention a person, place or incident; the endnotes offer additional details that enhance the tale. Importantly, they provide an interesting fact-check on Clemens, verifying his stories to the extent possible and pointing out where they conflict with other sources or historical fact. Clemens's memory wasn't always sharp and he plainly stated he wouldn't let accuracy stand in the way of a good yarn, even in his autobiography; the endnotes do a nice job of calling him out in a way that does nothing to diminish the author's reputation or charm.

The notes are organized by chapter and listed by page number, so it's easy to read a few pages then flip to the back to get the bigger picture. I recommend it.

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I'm afraid my blogging will remain haphazard for a while. Still working hard on other projects that lay claim to any spare moments, particularly my next (I hope) book, Mystery Project X. I need to thumbnail faster; I'm not really sure how to do that without getting too sloppy, but at the rate I'm sketching it'll take me months to get through the story. One expected benefit of the process has already emerged: sixty pages in, I decided the design of one of my characters wasn't functioning like I wanted it to and I reworked her. She's better now. This is right in line with the character design process I described back in November. Nice to see I can take my own advice.
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Tapas

Bite-sized morsels which, today, won't even add up to a light meal . . .

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Yesterday I saw a TV commercial that struck me as the strangest thing. It was advertising Valentine's Day apps for the iPhone (I think) that allow you to send greetings, animations, tunes, and I don't even know what-all to your sweetheart. Tell me if I'm off-base here, but I started yelling at my TV screen: "You have a phone in your hand! Call them up and tell them you love them yourself!"

I dunno. Sometimes I don't understand the 21st century.

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My presence here and on Facebook has been light lately, and will probably continue that way for a while. It's for a good cause. I am putting as much time and energy as I can into doing "thumbnails" for Mystery Project X, which I hope will be my next graphic novel, and whenever I have 20 minutes to spare they go toward that.

Thumbnailing is an interesting process of basically sketching the entire book showing the placement of panels, figures and dialog to give a very rough idea how it might look. I'd post an example but at this point I'm not sure I could even show you a page without giving away more than I want to. Later, for sure. Anyway, thumbnailing is harder than it looks. The layout of panels and words determines how the story flows and pulls the reader's eye through the pages. It's like the foundation and framing of a house: no one will see it later but everything is shaped by it. You'd think dashing off a sketch would go quickly, and maybe it does for some people, but it can take me an hour just to figure out whether a bit of story requires four or five or six or seven or eight panels and how they ought to be arranged. Plus I'm trying some layouts that are modestly innovative (or at least unusual) yet must still be clear enough for readers to follow effortlessly. Plus I'm researching some "special effects" that of course turn out to be more complex than I expected. Plus I discovered I don't know how to draw chickens.

It's fun but it hurts my brain.

With luck, the work I'm putting in now will make my job simpler and faster later, and not be entirely in vain. As I've paraphrased before: if it were easy, everybody would do it.

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I think I mentioned a while ago that I'd drawn a couple of sample pages for a friend putting together an anthology of short comics on a common theme so brilliant I can't believe no one's done it before. It's one of those ideas where I shouted "Yes, I'm in!" one sentence into the pitch. Last I heard, that project is still alive. I hope so. It'd be nice to have something in print in the relatively near future (even if Mystery Project X goes full steam ahead, I wouldn't expect it to drop before 2013) and an honor to be part of. The second I can tell you all about it, assuming it flies at all, you won't be able to shut me up.

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Happy Valentine's Day! Do something nice for somebody. Remember, nothing says "I love you" more than pushing a button on an iPhone.
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Video Stew

Here's a compilation of a few videos I've come across recently that I enjoyed and thought you might, too.

A tour of Pixar Studios, courtesy of the New York Times. This'd be a lot of people's dream job (though not necessarily mine . . . Oh, I wouldn't turn it down, but I'm more of a "better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven" kinda guy). A lot of animation is drudgery, but what a nice place to drudge.



An old educational film mashed up with "Star Trek." The audio is authentic, from an actual film shown to captive school children; the video is what it is. Courtesy of the talented Mike Lynch.



I thought the piece below was a nice companion to the Kepler mission that recently found evidence for 1200 (!) planets orbiting other stars. Extrapolating from those discoveries suggests that our galaxy might have a million Earth-scale planets in "Goldilocks" orbits neither too hot nor too cold for life as we know it. That doesn't mean a million Earths--for example, Venus and Mars are "Earth-scale" planets that are lifeless as far as we know. But take any fraction of a million you want and it's still a big number. And I miss Carl Sagan.



Oh, and FYI, the red giant star Betelgeuse isn't ready to supernova at any moment and even if it did it's too far away to hurt us or look like anything more than a really bright star in the sky (not a "second sun"); and the odds of asteroid Apophis hitting Earth in 2036 are about 200,000 to 1 and continue to grow longer as astronomers nail down its orbit. So stop forwarding me those e-mails.

I shave tomorrow. It's the right thing to do.

The Manly, Scruffy Arts

Karen's away on a business trip most of this week, leaving me to make my usual mischief while she's gone: eat garbage, trash the kitchen, stay up all night drawing, and not shave.

Immodestly, the list of things I do passably well is long; growing facial hair is not on that list. That's on the other, longer list of things I am embarrassingly pitifully bad at. Happily, as I age, I find that my face follicles have filled in some spots that couldn't sprout an hour's worth of peach mold when I was younger. Unhappily, it's mostly gray now. Here's a photo of how I look after a few days' growth:

Just kidding! That's way too lush and dark and ruggedly handsome. In all honestly, here's how I really look:

Just kidding again! I wish I could grow a beard so luxuriant and macho. Sadly, I think I could quit shaving for years and not end up looking one-twelfth that manly. This is how I truly look, for real this time:


No kidding, that's really me. Took that picture just this morning.

I'll be waiting for you when you get home, honey!

Mark Twain Insult of the Day #5

In 1899, a London acquaintance named T. Douglas Murray asked Mr. Clemens to write the Introduction for an English translation of the trial records of Joan of Arc, which Murray was editing. Clemens submitted his draft and was dismayed to get it back with heavy, ham-handed edits.

In reply, Clemens prepared a point-by-point refutation of the revisions, along the way calling Murray an "unteachable ass" and acknowledging a rare good edit by writing, "But you are not playing fair; you are getting some sane person to help you." In one passage, Murray rewrote Clemens to say that Joan of Arc's genius was "created" through "steady and congenial growth." Clemens replied: "Genius is not 'created' by any farming process--it is born. You are thinking of potatoes." Another group of edits he simply summed up as: "Third Paragraph. Drunk."

Clemens thought better of it and never sent the letter. Fortunately, he saved it for every writer who's suffered a bad edit to treasure for centuries to come. I wish I could post the entire thing. Here's a taste:

It is discouraging to try to penetrate a mind like yours. You ought to get it out and dance on it. That would take some of the rigidity out of it. And you ought to use it sometimes; that would help. If you had done this every now and then along through life, it would not have petrified.
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Scobee Smith Resnik McNair Onizuka Jarvis McAuliffe

I hadn't planned on writing anything about the 25th anniversary of the Challenger disaster. I didn't think I had anything new or interesting to say except that it was one of the big kick-in-the-guts moments of my life. The above picture of Challenger, which I consider a Top-Ten man-in-space photo, still hangs in my office. 'Nuf said. But some other people's remembrances got me thinking about it, and then a couple of hours ago I got a Facebook-friend request from someone I worked with that day who was prodded by the date to look me up 24½ years after we last spoke.

My old co-worker/new Facebook friend and I were reporters at a small newspaper in central California. It was an afternoon paper with a morning deadline (9 o'clock as I recall), and we had just sent that day's issue to press and were heading out the door to work on the next day's stories when the receptionist called out, "Hey, did you hear the space shuttle blew up?" I chuckled that a shuttle was scheduled to go up, and surely she'd heard wrong and gotten confused. But we turned around and went back to the newsroom just in case, and then I don't remember what happened. There was no Internet; we were getting live text dispatches from the Associated Press reporter on the scene. Very brief at first, just a couple of sentences. The reporter was rattled; they weren't well written. Then, gradually, more detail. Early photos. Someone found a TV that stayed on the rest of the day.

I don't think anyone literally yelled "Stop the presses!" but they were nonetheless stopped. We had a paper to deliver in a few hours, very few actual facts to report, and virtually no local angle to cover. Since I had a physics major and wrote a weekly astronomy column for the paper I was the de facto "science guy," and I called some former professors of mine for comment, mostly so we'd have something to print. We filled the top half of the front page with an AP photo, patched together what little we had, and put it to bed. The next day I wrote a first-person column for the editorial page trying to put the disaster in perspective. At the time I thought it was the best thing I'd ever written, although I was also a 25-year-old goober so in retrospect it probably wasn't. I'm afraid to look.

Working frantically at my little desk in a little newsroom for a little newspaper in a little city, I'd witnessed--and helped report--history. One of my great moments in journalism. Big whoop.

I can't believe it's been 25 years, and I still can't watch footage of the explosion without welling up a bit. It was a devastating blow.

That's my Challenger story. Just one of millions.
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Mark Twain Insult of the Day #4

Today's insult is more of a back-handed compliment. While living briefly in Vienna, the Clemens family hired a maid who stuck her nose in everybody's business and never shut up. Mr. Clemens nicknamed her Wuthering Heights, no doubt for her melodramatic flair, and she entertained him greatly:

. . . I find myself diffident about finding fault. Not so the family. It gravels the family. I like that. Not maliciously, but because it spices the monotony to see the family graveled. Sometimes they are driven to a point where they are sure they cannot endure her any longer, and they rise in revolt; but I stand between her and harm, for I adore Wuthering Heights . . . She is not monotonous, she does not stale, she is fruitful of surprises, she is always breaking out in a new place. The family are always training her, always caulking her, but it does not make me uneasy any more, now, for I know that as fast as they stop one leak she will spring another. Her talk is my circus, my menagerie, my fireworks, my spiritual refreshment. When she is at it I would rather be there than at a fire.

I really love "gravel," which I don't think I've ever heard used like that but is perfect. Also the caulking metaphor; again, quirky but perfect. I'm starting to think the old guy knew what he was doing.
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Mark Twain Insult of the Day #3

Today's subject is a London book reviewer who, Mr. Clemens felt, prized proper grammar at the expense of clarity and style.

I suppose we all have our foibles. I like the exact word, and clarity of statement, and here and there a touch of good grammar for picturesqueness; but that reviewer cares for only the last-mentioned of these things. His grammar is foolishly correct, offensively precise. It flaunts itself in the reader's face all along, and struts and smirks and shows off, and is in a dozen ways irritating and disagreeable . . . I do not like that kind of persons. I never knew one of them that came to any good . . . I would never hesitate to injure that kind of man if I could.
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Mark Twain Insult of the Day #2

Today's subject is Clemens's attorney William Hamersly, who advised him poorly in several matters, including contracts with the aforementioned Paige:

I have no feeling about him, I have no harsh words to say about him. He is a great fat good-natured, kind-hearted, chicken-livered slave; with no more pride than a tramp, no more sand than a rabbit, no more moral sense than a wax figure, and no more sex than a tape-worm. He sincerely thinks he is honest, he sincerely thinks he is honorable. It is my daily prayer to God that he be permitted to live and die in those superstitions.
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Mark Twain Insult of the Day #1

As mentioned, I'm reading the massive first volume of the thrice-massiver Autobiography of Mark Twain, and about a hundred pages in find that I'm getting to the good stuff. For example, he wrote a couple of pages about his experience navigating the London Underground that had me literally laughing out loud. I'm also rediscovering (I think I knew it but forgot) that Mr. Clemens was particularly adept at insults. From time to time, I'll share some good ones here.

Today's subject is James W. Paige, a self-styled Edison without Edison's cleverness or business sense, who talked Clemens out of hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop a typesetting machine with little to show for it. Clemens wrote:

Paige and I always meet on effusively affectionate terms; and yet he knows perfectly well that if I had his nuts in a steel-trap I would shut out all human succor and watch that trap till he died.

I invite you to borrow that quote and apply it to someone in your own life today.

Envious? You Should Be.

Once in a while, my wife Karen and I like to pick some nearby small town to explore. Some are so close we simply take them for granted; others are enough off the beaten path that we never quite have an excuse to get to them. Last weekend's gorgeous weather set us off to a hamlet less than an hour from home that, despite living here for decades, neither of us remembered visiting before.

The pictures above and below show the road to Point Reyes Station, Marin County, Calif.: green oak-studded hills undulating to the horizon with morning fog still clinging to their crests. It's wine and cattle country (those are vineyards above), an appealing mix of working farmers and artsy bohemians. We've driven through Point Reyes Station to get to the national parkland beyond, but couldn't recall ever stopping in the town itself.

Point Reyes Station lies at the foot of Tomales Bay, which fills the enormous cleft left by the San Andreas Fault as it veers from land into the sea. Highway 1 along the coast is dotted with piers and shacks selling oysters raised in the bay and Dungeness crab fresh off the boat.

Where we went. The long, narrow body of water is Tomales Bay, with Point Reyes Station at its terminus (lower right). The red line marks the San Andreas Fault; millions of years from now, everything to the left of that line will be in the vicinity of Alaska. Glad I got to it while I had the chance.

Enjoying the banks of the Nicasio Reservoir.

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We had a beautiful drive, a great al fresco lunch, and a swell couple of hours poking through the four or five square blocks of downtown Point Reyes Station. A neat cap to the afternoon was walking into the town's little bookstore to find a copy of Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow on a table by the door. Of course, it was there because it was marked 40% off, but still . . . ! The proprietor was kind enough to let me sign it, and even promised to peel off the sale sticker and try to get full price for it. Good luck with that.

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WHTTWOT "In the Wild" at Point Reyes Books.

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There's no real point or message to this post, just an appreciation of some nice places in my neighborhood and one of the best afternoons Karen and I have spent doing anything in a while. Wherever you live, I'm sure there are some little overlooked towns nearby that are worth a visit (once your snow melts, heh!). It's a cool way to spend a day.

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