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Listening to music used to look as good as it sounded.

About ten years ago when I moved into my current home, I discovered a box full of unused sketchbooks. I decided rather than open a store or a museum for such items that I should either use them or lose them. The most satisfying answer was a bit of both. I’d use the ones I could and give away everything else. I’m in my tenth year of regularly creating comic book journals that are a personal joy. Around the same time, I had really wanted to volunteer some design time to organizations that I thought could use some help. The only problem with that was it meant that I started doing stuff in my spare time which was the same thing I did in my work time. The unintended consequence was adding about 25% more time in front of a computer, which in some small way (or big way?) was crushing my soul.

Spending more time in front of paper than screens is increasingly important for me. I sketch more, I read more and I cook more. The odd thing is how it actually takes a bit of effort to avoid watching television, listening to streaming music and audio or reading on your phone because it's so easy to do it. Try following the news with newspapers and magazines and I'm guessing you'll have trouble. Toronto at one time, not that long ago, had newspaper boxes everywhere. Three of the most-read papers in the country were found in this city, and one of them was in Chinese. When I first came to Toronto, there were three free papers: Now, Eye and Metro. The Toronto Star, Globe & Mail and National Post duked it out at the entrance and exit of every subway station. Now, I'm not even sure where to buy a paper. Shoppers pharmacies sometimes have a rack, but not all of them. Remember when you'd have a drawer or a stack on the fridge of take-out menus? It's so easy to order delivery, that you have to remind yourself you still have leftovers.

This holiday we spent time doing a puzzle while listening to music inspired by something we had just heard while watching a show. When I finally connected a turntable to some old speakers it was a real pleasure. I thought it would be mostly a buzz of nostalgia but the music sounded better and it was interesting to just take more time, be thoughtful about choosing what you wanted to hear and then simply listen to it.

Doing these analogue things like cooking, repairing my jeans with some visible mending, keeping notes in longhand, listening to a record, sketching or painting all take a bit more time and thought. There’s no “undo” shortcut in the real world. Even an eraser leaves a mark. You have to take a moment to thread a needle or drop one on a record and those moments aren't a waste of time but are the very point of time spent well. If schools have had to add a break in the morning for mindfulness maybe that’s a sign kids need a bit more time to get started in the morning (I know I do). We should all have the privilege to slow down a titch and maybe the easiest way to make more time is to take more time.

Life is short 

“Life is short,
and art long,
opportunity fleeting,
experimentations perilous,
and judgment difficult.”
– Hippocrates

It sounds a little cooler in Latin, “Ars longa, vita brevis”, the entire quote is considered to mean, “skillfulness takes time and life is short.” It can take a lifetime to acquire a skill or master a craft but a lifetime is too short of a time to put it to use fully. Two practitioners of such skill who are favourites of mine have died recently, Bruce McCall and John Romita Sr.
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It's About the Journey (or Journal) 

"Gramps" Memory Books

A few years ago, after moving into my new place I discovered a box of sketchbooks. Empty sketchbooks. I realized I'd moved with them at least twice. They were roughly A5 format, some were stitch bound, others were wire coil bound, some were 80 pages, some were almost 200 pages but all of them were blank, open white pages. I determined I should either use them or give them away. Giving away some were easy, but I couldn't give up others and I didn't know why. I decided I would have to start using them. For whatever reason it made natural sense to use them as they were intended, as journals. It seemed just as natural to use the comic book format - either four boxes or six or more to simply fill in what was going on during any given day. Plus, I felt I wanted to teach myself how to tell stories in that format. When I began I almost obsessively drew everyday. At some point that seemed too much and there was about a four month gap when I only drew three or four times. Since then I usually do two or three a week and they capture the most ridiculously mundane details of my life. Dentist visits, biking in the rain, baking bread, going for a run, or reading on the couch. I'm not sure you'd really learn anything about me from them other than I have terrible penmanship and the quality of the drawing has remained woefully poor, but I will say, occasionally, a page of wordless images are some of the best things I've ever done.

Seeing this short film on The Atlantic and hearing the narrator's father talk about his father's journals and how sometimes he would just grab a journal from the bookshelf and relive moments from the past resonated with me. I do the same thing even though I only have been doing it since 2015 and only have eight sketchbooks. Still, I can recall the week around Mom's heart surgery, or a summer trip or a weekend when something odd happened.

Curiously verbose. Absurdly quotidian.

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A post shared by Peter Rogers (@peterrogersesq) on Apr 8, 2019 at 11:01am PDT

Page from one of my own journals

Seen in… May 

Hey hey, the gang's all here. Image via The Movie DB

A month of crowd-pleasing blockbusters and one worthy Oscar winner. We’ve had such a warm (nay, hot) spring in Toronto that it feels like summer is already here. There’s ice cream to be had, air conditioned theatres to soak in and warm evening bike rides over wet streets to be enjoyed. There’s no denying good movies make summers better. Who am I kidding? Every summer needs some cheesy movies too.

Avengers: Infinity Wars
Almost a decade of Marvel films have alluded to or directly led to this film and its second half coming out next year and in a big way it feels like Marvel is still playing with us. These films have contributed to a culture of not being able to discuss a film without risk of spoilers. How can you talk about a movie when you don’t want to be the bad guy who ruins it for everyone else? Along with television series such as Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones, we’ve all participated in the oddest conspiracy of silence since JFK’s notorious philandering. Yet, I’ll try to give my two bits without giving anything away.

This film begins moments after the film Thor Ragnarok ended only to find Thor, his brother Loki and Hulk defeated by the purple-skinned evil lord of the Universe, Thanos. We then briefly see various members of Earth’s mightiest heroes living their lives; during a stroll in the park, on a school field trip, negotiating a lunch order, when the long missing Bruce Banner appears out of the sky to warn of the approach of Thanos. We learn of Thanos’ desire to complete his magic glove (or gauntlet if you prefer) empowered by the mystical and dangerous Infinity Stones and of his plan to use this power to correct the Universe’s overpopulation problem by simply eradicating half of all living things. This is probably the most radical act of environmental terrorism since Greenpeace scaled an oil rig to erect a flag. Thanos sends a trusted lieutenant, Ebony Maw, to take both the Time Stone and Mind Stones from the Avengers (I’m not going to get into what these stones do or how). Ebony Maw (these names, am I right?) is met with resistance from Iron Man, Spider-man, Dr. Strange, et al. Game on. Sort of. We still spend much of the movie re-assembling the team of supers called the Avengers from all corners of the Earth. From Scotland to Africa the band slowly gets back together for one last gig. Scarlet Witch, Vision, Captain America and Black Panther all team up for the mighty battle that we know is coming. Then it is over, seemingly with a snap of Thanos’ fingers. There are a lot of problems with this movie - mostly that you might pay $15 for yet another set-up to yet another movie. At this point we’ve all put so much in the franchise that we want a pay-off which we still don’t get. Worse yet, despite its own scattered, multi-plot, multi-threaded story line, this movie actually takes time to set up yet another franchise rather than just resolve the story we just watched. And, here’s the spoiler alert, a lot of crucial characters die, but we know they aren’t really gone, because they’ve all been given sequels that have yet to happen. Basically, this movie employs a “Time Stone” that feels like it will be kind of an “instant replay” stone or perhaps a magic Mulligan that will restore all of our heroes just in time to save everyone despite having already lost. What that effectively does is remove the stakes. An action or drama depends on high stakes. Will a couple stay together or ruin a family? Will the heist go off without a hitch or will the thieves go to jail? Will a pilot from a farm save the world or will everyone be killed? Marvel has essentially removed the biggest stake of all: death. When the film ended, the crowd I was with left quietly. Not a peep. No excited talk. No hollers of fun or joy. Just quiet. I don’t think it was the quiet of reverence (such as after the ending of Dunkirk) or of shock at what we just witnessed. It was the shock of a shrug and despite that, the knowledge that we would all plunk down another $15 in a year just to see how it all turned out.

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Five Months Thirteen Days 

“almost perversely dull and benign”

For the last couple of years, I’ve endeavoured to maintain a kind of journal, an illustrated one that I keep for myself. Because it takes anywhere from thirty minutes to two hours to sketch, I don’t do entries every day but try to do two or three a week. It’s not full of super-secret stuff or anything. In fact, it is insanely and almost perversely dull and benign. Occasionally I give in to some jealous or despicable thought but for the most part it is entirely quotidian full of everyday minor moments that stick in my head. My prime reason for not sharing it is the comics tend to be poorly drawn or even if they are well drawn there’s always one panel that is terrible and would be too embarrassing to show anyone. I’m about to finish a sketch book, the fourth one I’ve done and they usually cover six to eight months. This one will wind up covering just over six months so I thumbed through it to try and find any patterns.

Over a five month period:
1 in 3 entries depict cycling
1 in 5 entries depict work
1 in 5 entries depict lying on a couch or in bed
1 in 6 entries depict eating or drinking
1 in 9 entries depict running
1 in 16 entries depict a dentist, doctor or hospital visit
1 in 20 entries depict back pain
1 in 20 entries depict headaches
1 in 41 entries depict death

Footnotes from Innis Hall

image via Comic Book Resources

Joe Sacco spoke at length to an audience of over 200 at Innis Hall on U of T's campus Thursday night as part of a speaking series on the arts. His journalistic comic books focus on conflicts in places such as Gaza and Sarajevo. They tell of the impact of war on regular civilians. He brings an evocative eye to both the horrible conditions and everyday life of refugee camps such as Rafah. You hear a term like refugee camp and you're picturing some wind swept collection of tents, not a muddy city of thousands that's been there for 60 years. It's this unique blend of journalistic storytelling and comic book arts that set Sacco apart. While others have created autobiographical works of a more personal nature no one else really reports the way Sacco does.¹ Especially when you see his work together you can really see the importance of it.

It was a pleasure to hear him talk about how he works with reference photographs, recorded interviews and first hand experience. After his talk he took a lot of questions and it's a little unexpected just how congenial a guy Sacco is. I mean he takes in a lot of dire stories in some awful settings and situations. He did admit that his latest book about Gaza which took about 7 years to create was probably the last one he'll do about Palestine or Israel for awhile. Fair enough.

FN1: I sort of forgot that probably the only other person creating this kind of reportage comic is Guy Delisle, a Quebec cartoonist and animator who has written about his travels to Pyongyang, North Korea and Burma (aka Myanmar). Again, though, you'd probably categorize Delisle's work as a travelogue or autobiographical comic essay rather than journalistic like Sacco's. They probably would prefer not to be compared to each other anyway with each artist's work standing on its own merits. You can see a sample of from Pyongyang below.

Wilson 

Daniel Clowes' latest book, Wilson. Image via Drawn and Quarterly

I got this book for my birthday but just read it recently. I wouldn't call it classic Clowes as surprisingly it's his first complete "graphic novel", but more of an expansion of his Ouevre that he's been exploring for years. Despite his other books being compilations of individually printed comics, those books seemed to have a more clear narrative than this one which feels more like a serial comic that's been compiled. I assume that was in part due to the formal story structure Clowes has chosen. What Clowes does with these one-pagers is tell a very complete story with remarkably little. I suppose it's like a great piece of music where the spaces mean as much as the notes. Typical of a Clowes' character, Wilson is a deluded loser but his tale of woe (mostly brought upon himself) is not only sad but incredibly and wickedly funny. Dan Clowes' humour has always been present in his work but I don't know if I had ever laughed out loud as often as I did with this book. Even though there is a repeated form to every page and a formulaic construction of every joke, the last panel was always the dagger that drew laughter (and a little blood). Of course, the writing uses explicit language and humour so it's not exactly a Sunday School Special but fans of Clowes will appreciate both his writing, and seeing his full range and knowledge of the medium as he manipulates comic book clichés and styles in creating Wilson's story.

Yeesh, this post is written like a bad weekend review hacked together to meet a Friday night deadline. My most sincere apologies.

comic book confidential

comic book confidential

This is as much a reminder to myself as anything, but next Saturday, October 27, 3:00pm in the Studio Theatre at the Harbourfront Centre, Adrian Tomine will be interviewed by Sheila Heti. This is probably my 4th or 5th year attending the IFOA events and each one has been memorable. I've seen such luminaries as Harvey Pekar, Chris Ware, Charles Burns, Seth, Chester Brown, Chip Kidd and Jaime Hernandez and without fail, the conversations have been funny, illuminating and interesting. I'd even go so far as to say, "It's worth the drive to Acton!" (if in fact, it was in Acton). The tickets are still available and at about $17, it might seem expensive but it's worth it to hear a comic book artist have an intelligent conversation outside the circles of comic book shops or the folding tables of the "Fan" convention (that's right, they're treated like real live authors).