Hi-ho, hi-ho

So, if you have seen Talent Not Guaranteed or followed my "art" Instagram, you know that I have been ramping up my cartooning practice as I settle into semi-retirement. Well, we're about to accelerate the ride just a bit.

I have been participating in a number of online activities sponsored by the Sequential Artists Workshop (SAW) out of Gainesville, Florida. Joining a community of folks interested in comics and cartooning as been a great help in establishing a consistent practice, and I have benefited from several specific instances of sharing in a very tangible way.

Some members of SAW have spearheaded a project called SAWgust. It is essentially a comics version of NaNoWriMo - participants take one month to complete a project that stretches them. The prose "novel"that is the goal of NaNoWriMo is pretty clear - 50,000 words in a row. This definition also makes it easy to track daily progress, individually and communally.

SAWgust is a little different. Since comics, cartoons, and graphic novels/memoirs/whatevers can take many different forms, and since creators work in many different modes (pencil the whole thing/ink the whole thing vs. pencil a page/ink a page and digital vs. analog, for example) it's a little more complicated. So all the players are identifying their goals pretty explicitly and tracking progress (or not) however they like. After all, the goal is not to build metrics, but to do the art.

My own goal is pretty ambitious: I want to create a 24-page (printable/publishable) zine about Selkie, the cat who has shared our lives for the past 16 years. I have the whole thing scripted out and thumbnailed...

...and I have been working on some of the trickier bits and identifying which panels will need to be lightboxed for consistency.

I am anticipating that the project will require a solid six to seven hours a day at the drawing table. Luckily, Coco has two all-day weekend workshops,which will give me some nice chunks of uninterrupted time to plaster over any cracks.

Hopefully, we'll have a nice product at the end of it all.

It all starts tomorrow morning - wish me luck!

Solitiare Book Club: Cuban Quartermoon

Cuban Quartermoon by Ann Putnam. There's something about tropical climes that invites drama; in the background, beyond the poolside cocktails and seaside views, the sultry heat arouses long-denied passions and the glistening sun illuminates feelings better kept hidden. In Putnam's story of Laura, a Hemingway scholar visiting an embargoed Cuba for an academic conference, the protagonist finds herself ill-prepared for the poverty and struggles the locals face on a daily basis, and her attempts to help her new maybe-friends result in the collision of memories and desires stemming from the loss of parents to children, of children to parents, and lovers to each other. By turns lyrically magical and brutally real, we cannot help but be swept along in Laura's journey, from touring Papa's house to visiting a santería priest to confronting the darkness within herself. Putnam has been to Cuba several times and creates a sense of place that is as palpable as the narrative is emotional.

(Full disclosure: Ann is my much-beloved mother-in-law.)

Solitaire Book Club: Meet Me by the Fountain

Meet Me by the Fountain by Alexandra Lange. So, I heard Lange on two different podcasts talking about the history and significance of shopping malls and was immediately captivated by her take on the subject, which deftly combines some shared nostalgia, clear explanations of design features and trends, social analysis, and a critique of capitalism. Her book covers the territory in great detail; her exuberant energy gets lost in a few litanies of which malls were built in which years by which design firms, but when she is talking about the capitalist idealism of the fifties, the racism embedded in suburban development, the attempts to recreate the organic energy of real downtown, or the mall as both a reflection and shaper of cultural trends, she provides thorough, thoughtful, and cogent critique. Love 'em or hate 'em, malls have been and continue to be a big part of the American lifescape, and Lange helps us to understand the hows and whys.

Solitaire Book Club: Secret Identity (+ recap)

 Previously on Solitaire Book Club:

One of the great things about borrowing books from the library is the freedom to not read something you have borrowed. There's no specific investment in a particular volume, so a reader is free to follow Nancy Pearl's Rule of 50 (Amended) totally guilt-free. And I have done, to wit:

Overdue by Amanda Oliver: I am a sucker for deep-dive non-fiction and have a special affinity for libraries, but this memoir-cum-history just couldn't grab me.

These Truths by Jill Lepore: I was totally engaged by her chronicle of Wonder Woman, but this overarching history of the U.S. was a little too stilted.

Thrust by Lidia Yuknavitch: I love the concepts but I guess I am just not post-modern enough for the prose.

The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt: Ditto. Plus, I am not a big fan of writers who eschew quotation marks in any case.

Sunshine by Robin McKinley: If I am still reading exposition at page 50, I am going to stop reading (unless the author is Nicholson Baker).

Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao: I think I have read one fantasy novel in the past few years that seemed to have an original voice. Unfortunately, this one was did not join that club.

Now, to the present:

Secret Identity by Alex Segura. So, I have to admit a strong bias toward this book from the get-go, because (a) its context is the world of comic book publishing and (b) it is set in the bleak and desperate New York City of 1975, the time and place of my coming of age, as it were. Segura accurately captures the essence of both the world I have read so much about and the world that I inhabited as a young man, and does so in a classic style that is not so much a  murder mystery as a noir adventure. Even if you have never read a comic book or set foot in the five boroughs, it is well worth the read for the compelling characters and complex plot.

Three more for the road

So, this likely could have gone on He is a Thark, especially considering this prior post, but given the uncertain nature of the Walakanet Blogging Empire, I thought I'd throw it up here.

In any case, it's just a short video of cool three-wheeled vehicle I saw here yesterday; I am not sure, but I am wondering if it might be an old Morgan.

Of course, it's being driven an old hippie, because Fairhaven.

Solitaire Book Club: Dress Code

Dress Code by Veronique Hyland. So, who knew I would find one of the smartest writers I have ever read in a book about fashion? 

To be fair, the book really isn't about fashion. Instead, Hyland, an Elle editor, uses fashion as a lens to reflect on important aspects of our culture - generational perspectives, gender politics, police militarization, classism, and the patriarchy, just to name a few. She does so in a series of clear and cogent essays, supporting her arguments with citations from Michel Foucault to Tina Fey, and peppering her analyses with both thoughtful insights into social issues and incredibly delightful turns of phrase about every other page. Hyland is no lightweight - fashion journalism may be her vocation but she could easily sit at the table with any public intellectual you could name.

Blogging about blogging is still a sin...

... but I am going to do it anyway.

We used to have a whole personal blog ecology. And by "we" I mean all of us native or immigrant digital citizens, as well as the nerds in the comicsweblogosphere, and even more specifically my own personal community of peeps, to wit:

That ain't even all of them - it seemed like everyone blogged, at least for a while. And each blog was different, presenting not only its creator's experiences and opinions in its content, but also manifesting their cultural touchstones and artistic taste and design sensibility in its very layout. Every morning we could cycle through our bookmarks and see who had posted, moving from one unique voice/experience/preoccupation/obsession to another.

We all know what happened -- Bookface, Tweetybird, and the almighty Insta have taken over the social media landscape, and even setting aside the ads and sponsored posts and robots and endlessly reposted memes, we are all squeezed into little homogenized boxes, with only a banner and icon and maybe a screen name to represent our quirkiness, if anyone ever even goes to our actual "home page", which they usually don't. We're all just mircobloggers on an endless feed, popping up and being swept away by the current, like rubber ducks in the rapids.The heyday of the great, idiosyncratic personal blog was over.

I still blog; that is self-evident; but my posts are announced on Twitter by a robot and I manually cross-post to Instagram to make sure my legions dozens of followers get the message, because no one is cycling though blog bookmarks each morning anymore. Sometimes it feels like shouting down a well, but I persist.

And instead of just wailing and gnashing about all this, I'd like to point to two stalwart bogs that have roots back in the glory days and still continue on, their continued existence defying the conventional wisdom I just put forth.

The Luna Park Gazette: The personal log of Rob Lenihan, a pal since sixth grade, which has been published pretty much once a week since January 2005. In his trademark telegraph style, Rob explores current events, pop culture, and politics, but mostly his own inner struggles, challenges, and successes. Relentlessly honest, sometimes painful, and always witty.

Blogging by Cinema Light:  Jim Wilson, who I just realized has been a friend for two-thirds of my life, has been running this blog since January 2014, but it is the follow-up to his Let's Not Talk about Movies blog, which I know was running in early 2008, at least. If you just want a "two-thumbs-up" movie review, this is not the blog for you; but if you want critical film analysis, deep dives into cinema theory, and explications of classic movie scenes, there's no better place. No extra charge for the clever wordplay.

So, they may be two of the few stars remaining in the previously bright constellation of blogs, but they shine no less bright for that, and you should check them out.

And think about (re)starting your own!

Solitaire Book Club times two

So, we should all know the drill by now, so let's get right into it.

Made to Kill by Adam Christopher. The trouble with writing an hommage to Raymond Chandler is that it is too easy to slip into a bad parody of Raymond Chandler - it is a very delicate balance to capture Chandler's voice without going over the top, and I have to say that Christopher's prose misfires once in a while, especially at the beginning of the novel. But the world he creates - an indeterminate-era alternate Hollywood seen from the perspective of the last robot on earth - was so engaging that I stayed with it, despite a bit more amorality in the protagonists than I would have preferred. The mystery and adventure click along to a satisfying climax, the Right Things are done, and there is the hint of Things to Come. Christopher has given us two more books in this series, and I will be continuing.

 

The Apocalypse Seven by Gene Doucette. Eight years ago (!!) I wrote about the challenge of creating a sense of wonder and freshness in a genre that has seen so many treatments: can characters in a zombie story respond as if they haven't seen a dozen zombie movies? And more to the immediate point, can characters in a post-apocalypse novel act as if they have never seen an apocalypse movie?  Doucette leans right into that challenge and shows us how it's done. His story of seven survivors of a mysterious cataclysm is grounded in the different responses each one has to their circumstance, creating a richness that is cliche-free - on top of which, his apocalypse is sufficiently complex in nature to avoid the standard tropes. I guess the best recommendation I can give is that I picked this book up at the library yesterday and I finished it the same day - it is a ripping (and gripping) yarn.

Independence

So, that was the holiday weekend, eh? Problematic to begin with and this one was even tragic. I wish I could say something besides 'so it goes', but really, does anyone expect anything to change?  I do notice fewer instances if politicians using the rightly and resoundingly mocked "thoughts and prayers" phrase, although it hasn't been replaced by anything more substantive.

Bleak as it was, I was using this holiday as landmark on life's journey. You see, June 30 was the expiration of my contract as Interim President at BTC, and the time beyond that was always indeterminate. Continue in the role? Return to my old Veep position? Retire?

Well, there was a curve in the road, as there sometimes is, and it led to door number three, ish, just a couple months early. Although I have taken a detour not on the map, life beyond the threshold has settled into a good rhythm, one that is both satisfying in the present and leading toward some specific things in the future (ah, there's that roadmap again). There are enough irons in the fire to keep things interesting, but I have to say I have enjoyed shedding the cloak of leadership and thinking more about cartoon panels and less about college budgets.

Speaking of iron and fires, here's a little thing that's going on now - I think the current term is "side hustle". This is an enterprise that Coco and I have talked about ever since her massage practice days in Seattle. Just a toe in the water...

Sidecar Business Services

https://tinyurl.com/sidecarservices

Still a little bit of work to be done, but I think it will keep me out of trouble as I continue down the road.

 

No party this year

 

So, some years you have a great big birthday bash, maybe even get a surprise party thrown for you. Some years, depending on what life is like at the the time, you have a quiet, intimate celebration. And some years you may have to skip the celebration altogether, because life has given you other pressing concerns.

America doesn't get a birthday party this year.

For a good litany of the recent monstrousness that has plagued our country, here's a holiday post from my oldest friend still standing.

For a historical perspective, here's a speech by Eugene Debs from 121 years ago.

I ain't giving up yet, but I'm not celebrating, either.

Addendum: I started early today,and missed including this pulls-no-punches essay from Women Write About Comics.

Solitaire Book Club: Artemis

So, last time I talked about Andy Weir's The Hail Mary Project under the misapprehension it was his second book; it is actually his third. Once I realized/remembered this, I corrected by oversight, so here goes:

Artemis by Andy Weir. The best this I compliment I can pay this book that Weir's work compares favorably to that of Arthur C. Clarke when it comes to making the the fantastic quotidian and commonplace fantastical. This is essentially a caper story, but since it is set on a lunar colony, the everyday elements of life - shopping, communication, the internet, law enforcement, and so on - have to be explained so that when all the pieces of the plans (there's more than one escapade) start falling into place, it makes sense. Weir pulls this off well, making Artemis, the lunar city, have as real a sense of place as, say, A Fall of Moondust. (His lunar justice system owes more to Heinlein, but I tried to overlook that.)

Perhaps the best part of the book is that the protagonist is young woman (nice change) who, while still an engineering genius (of course), actually doesn't realize how smart and talented she is (nice touch). There's a nice cast of quirky supporting characters (Weir does a great job of exclusivity and representation) and even if the ending is a little too pat,well, the rire getting was a lot of fun.