In this conclusion of the Four-Colour Words interview with What It Is author Lynda Barry, the novelist/cartoonist/teacher/guru talks about the ins and outs of her writing classes, worries about the editing process, wonders about where characters and creepy pictures come from, and gushes about how awesome comics are.

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Have you thought of doing drawing classes the same way that you do your writing classes?
I have, if I could find a way to do it. I said to the audience [at her book festival talk], “Think of your first phone number,” and for most people it’ll come spontaneously and then they have a feeling about it. That’s what I’m trying to have happen when you write—unexpected memory. The memory is so strong that you write about it without thinking about your writing, just like people said their numbers out loud but nobody was going, “Now, did I use the right voice when I said that?” You know what I mean? It just happened. So with writing, I can demonstrate much more easily and privately that state of mind that I’m talking about. What I do in my class is, I have them start with unexpected memories and then by the end of the two days we’re writing fiction. Once they’re used to how that feels I pass out envelopes that have pictures in them, like from National Geographic, and they’ll be somebody in a flood, or somebody running from a house on fire, or somebody just sitting there smoking a cigarette. But the students are so used to it that I can say, “All I can tell you about this picture is either you’re in it, or this is what you’re seeing,” and I ask them to go through the exact same exercise we do when we’re writing from actual memories. What’s amazing is how seamlessly they’re able to get into it. With drawing, I haven’t yet quite figured out how to do that same thing—to make people able to instantly make spontaneous images. (more…)

Sanpei Shirato’s Ninja Bugeicho, one of the foundational texts in Japanese comics history (or so we’re told), is available to English-speaking audiences only in a rarely screened film version directed by Nagisa Oshima. The movie approximates the books fairly closely—each shot is a panel from the original art, with actors reading the dialogue—but the experience is still kind of like what would happen if, say, we were only able to know about Peanuts by listening to Vince Guaraldi’s Christmas album. Yeah, it’s a great record, and this is a fine film, but the gaping absence of that original material can’t help but leave me a little bit flummoxed.

Part of my bewilderment probably results from the movie not making much sense in the first place, though to its credit it’s often that brand of not-making-sense that is, at times, euphoric, or at least wtf-rrific. It tells the story of Jutaro, a young samurai who vows to avenge his slain father, a lord during Japan’s “age of turbulence” in the 16th century. He meets Kagemura, a mysterious ninja who leads a clan of other mysterious ninja whom he’s encountered in dire straits, much as he’s done Jutaro. These include the tortoise man, the triplets, and the electric man, “who kills people through the intermediation of water.” (more…)

Lynda Barry visited Toronto recently to speak at a book festival, and to teach her class on creative writing, “Writing the Unthinkable.” In her lively festival talks — which felt more like happenings than your typical button-down, staid author’s reading — she presented excerpts from her latest book, What It Is, asked the audience to shout their first phone numbers out loud, and sang “You Are My Sunshine” with her mouth closed. She also bemoaned her sometime status as a publishing industry “gateway chick” — she says she’s like the last girl guys go out with before they realise they’re gay, only in her case it’s publishers realising they want to “date” something completely different than Lynda Barry books.

That’s changing now that she’s settled with Drawn and Quarterly, who plan to collect all of Barry’s longrunning, seminal alternative comic strip, Ernie Pook’s Comeek, and who recently published What It Is to tremendous acclaim. A memoir-cum-workbook, What It Is incorporates collage, cartooning, and longhand writing in an effort to explain and disseminate the author’s creative process—which, loosely, focuses on one word, image, or memory to begin with, then spirals out from there. Lynda Barry was gracious enough to browse through a copy of What It Is with me, all the while speaking about her craft, about the creative state of mind, and about the collage material she used from her neighbour’s mother, Doris Mitchell—as well as a little bit about Family Circus. This is the first part of that conversation.

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What It Is goes back to all the different modes you’ve worked in, in terms of the different techniques like pen and ink and watercolour and so on, but to me it feels connected to One Hundred Demons.

Oh, it absolutely is. It’s the sister book.

There’s that autobiographical aspect, and in the prologue to that book you actually talk about the process of putting those demons to paper.

The method that I used to write One Hundred Demons was to put a bunch of nouns and -ing words, gerunds, in a paper bag and pull them out. It was all based on that method I learned from my teacher, Marilyn Frasca. Right after One Hundred Demons came out my next plan was to do this book, but the publisher came out and admitted he was gay and he didn’t want to do another book with me [laughs]. But my plan all along was to do this, to try to do an instruction book, because it really is like following a donut recipe, and it was really fun. In What It Is I have a word list that I encourage people to just xerox and cut up. So that’s how I did One Hundred Demons. It wasn’t anything that I sat around and went, “I should think about smell, and come up with a story about smell.” No, I happened to pull that word out. Sometimes you pull a word out and you’ll just go, Nooooo! but I really stuck to my vow that I would do it no matter what. (more…)

To celebrate the second-best holiday (Thanksgiving’s got it beat), Four-Colour Words presents to you a lazy post full of, uh, singular images from horror manga! This one’s from Yusaku Hanakuma’s Tokyo Zombie! Don’t click for more if you hate fun or are easily grossed out or something! (more…)

Every fall the various colleges at the University of Toronto hold massive, weekend-long book sales, letting donated books go at bargain prices, with proceeds supporting the college libraries. In the prologue to Seth’s book-nerd pamphlet, 40 Cartoon Books of Interest, he celebrates these sales as one of the vanishing IRL treasure-hunting experiences that eBay et al. have since supplanted. I can only agree with his fondness for them. I go to each sale every year and, while the pickings do seem to get slimmer each time, my personal library is still the richer for the books which I’ve managed to dig out of overstuffed and unorganised cardboard boxes, or for which I’ve fought off the elbows and grabby greedy hands of so many book dealers and other lame-o enthusiasts like myself. With the last of the major annual book sales upon us, I thought I’d take the time to reflect upon some of my prized purchases. To facilitate matters, I’ve limited my purview here to books I’ve paid $1 for—not to brag or anything. (more…)

Shary Boyle isn’t a comics artist, though comics readers are happy to claim her as one of their own. I first started paying attention to her work when it appeared in the 2006 volume of Kramers Ergot, a comics anthology that scrambles divisions between comics and other visual arts. Boyle’s airy, neon-coloured drawings of uncanny creatures strewn amid grasses and drizzled with bodily fluids numbered among the strongest inclusions in those pages—which, when it comes to the generally high quality of work in Kramers, is saying something.

Some more of those drawings turn up in the new Boyle retrospective, Otherworld Uprising, where we learn that they’re part of her “Porcelain Fantasy” series, mock-ups for impossible-to-realise porcelain figurines, and we begin to understand why they’re so easily acceptable as part of a continuum of cartooning. Fantastic and figurative, depicted in line art conducted in pencil or ink, Boyle’s drawings suggest narrative possibilities and freeze motion in ways particular to comics. But unlike similar near-cartooning by BC resident Julie Morstad or Québec native Geneviève Castrée, both of whom share Boyle’s concern with the fantastic and feminine and grotesque, Boyle’s works remain defiant and unruly, however suggestive. They defy fantasy, for one, and refuse to coalesce into any discernible “world,” instead remaining disarmingly ungoverned. For another, they defy figuration, preferring rather to cut the figure apart, obscure it, distort it, or at most make it more of a figurine than a figure. Most of all, though, they defy narrative, confronting us simply with the unsettling facts of existence—this woman has no head, or the universe has exploded, or yes this creature is looking at you—without explaining them away, without providing them with a comforting sense of before and after.

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I hate zombies. I loathe the marketing of “culture.” But I admire Chester Brown. And I think I love Chester Brown’s comic strip about zombies attending cultural events.

For those of you who don’t live in Toronto (and, believe it or not Torontonians, these people do exist), for the past several years the city’s streets, newspapers, etc. have been plagued with an ad campaign called Live with Culture that features happy people doing artsy things, like painting! or dancing!, their grinning mugs plastered with slogans like “TO LIVE with art” or “TO LIVE with dance” (note how TO is also short for Toronto—clever, no? no). From October 4 to November 8 2007, I briefly found myself no longer resenting this campaign’s intrusion into my eyeball space when a Live with Culture comic strip by future MP Chester Brown appeared in six weekly instalments in NOW magazine. The strip tells the story of an undead zombie guy and a living human girl who notice each other at the theatre, at a concert, at a gallery, and who finally arrange a date to see the long-in-limbo movie version of Brown’s Ed the Happy Clown. As is typical of Brown’s work, which has dealt with such other mile-a-minute thrill rides as 19th century Canadian history and word-by-word adaptations of the Gospels, it sounds boring. And it kind of is. But, again like his other work, it’s boring in a way that’s surprisingly funny and involving.

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A survey of Stephen King’s brief (and grisly) foray into horror comic books

The end days are upon us—Marvel Comics will begin serializing an adaptation of Stephen King’s The Stand beginning this Wednesday. Jared Bland and I intend to weigh in regularly on this, but for now, a quick look back at Uncle Stevie’s previous forays into the medium, or at least the ones I care about. Unlike Clive Barker’s works, which have inspired countless comics of iffy quality, King’s stories and characters have not made firm inroads into the comics world until recently (he’s probably charier about licensing than Barker, though King’s slew of terrible movies contradicts me on that score). In 2007 Marvel began adapting bits of King’s Dark Tower books into comics in The Dark Tower: Gunslinger Born, which met with enough success that we’ll soon have seen two Dark Tower follow-up series (none of which I’ve read), as well as The Stand, with an exclusive online comic, N, soon to be collected in print.

The story of King and comics begins, of course, farther back than this.

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I’ll leave the Doug Wright Awards alone soon enough, I promise, but first I wanted to briefly consider each of this year’s winners, since winning an award is supposed to heighten a book’s profile, right? And I try to play into people’s expectations whenever possible. Today we’ll look at Southern Cross and The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam, the Best Book category’s honourable mention recipient, and winner, respectively. (more…)

Seth draws back the curtain on the “solitary pursuit” that is cartooning
In the September issue of The Walrus, Seth draws back the curtain on the “solitary pursuit” that is cartooning. In the process, he also manages to speak to how we experience our own daily routines, and what it’s like to be alone with ourselves. He was kind enough to respond by email to questions about memory, time, and, of course, cartooning. The second part to this Q&A will follow in a couple days.

Q: In your article “The Quiet Art of Cartooning,” you mention that when you’re drawing and inking your mind is often visiting the past in some manner, and that these reveries often find their way into your work. Do you think that all cartooning might somehow relate back to this sense of memory, or to the act of looking back? Is memory somehow connected with cartooning in a way that isn’t true of other art forms?

A: It is hard for me to generalize on other mediums but I do feel a unique connection between memory and cartooning.I started to formalize some thoughts about this when I was studying the life of Thoreau MacDonald (the son of Canadian painter J.E.H. MacDonald). Thoreau mentioned in an interview that he never drew his pen and ink drawings of the rural landscape while actually out in the field. Instead he would go for a walk and look about and then, when he came home later, he would sit down and draw the scenes from memory. Thoreau understood that he couldn’t capture the reality of the natural world in black and white ink drawings but he could replicate the memory of being there. This struck me. (more…)

Last Friday, I attended the Doug Wright Awards for Canadian cartooning at the Toronto Reference Library. Rather than inaugurating this blog with a post detailing a vague statement of intent I probably won’t stick to, I figure dishing about the Wright Awards will serve that introductory purpose just as well. This year, the Wrights helped spotlight everything from long-form comics created over half a century ago, to one of the last good strips in your daily paper, to a burgeoning avant-garde, with many other bright points in between. In other words, the awards share with my plans for this blog a similarly catholic interest in comics — mindful of history, with an eye to the future — as well as a preoccupation with trends and traditions in Canadian cartooning. Well, that’s vague enough, anyway—on with the awards… (more…)