To break up the mind numbing tedium of tweaking panels and word balloons I gave my synapses a break and devoured Art Spiegelman's memoir of how he created the Pulitzer prizewinning graphic novel, Maus.
Here are comments I found most stimulating.
“…in making this kind of work, one has to inhabit and
identify with each character. You have to act out their poses, you have to
think them through…it is true that there is a kind of gestalting necessary just
to be able to inhabit each character.” P. 35
I've written elsewhere about sub-personalities but this was a nice reminder that I am in my creation.
“I’d conceived of making some long comic book that needed a
bookmark…and had to find something actually worth doing. I didn't have the
stamina to devote myself to a one-hundred, two-hundred, three-hundred-page book
just to serve up a lot of yucks or escapist melodrama.” P. 42
I relate. My work includes humor because "the sweetness of lips increases learning," (Proverbs). But humor isn't the point. My pictures and text will serve a greater purpose, simplifying one of history's most under appreciated existential texts.
“I guess I've always preferred research to writing or
drawing.” P. 43
I'm doing hardly any research (other than arranging with a college professor friend of mine permission to take reference photos inside a large classroom). I'm making no trips to Poland or the New York Public library.
“I remember a line from Shoah. A Jewish commander of
the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising says, ‘If you could lick my heart it would
poison you.’ It indicates just how complete the absence of sunlight can be. To
find a tone that could be informed by that bleakness and not be an inevitable
prescription for suicide was difficult…To avoid that and still allow for the
small moments that are what make a life worth living demanded a tone that I
needed to find in Maus: how to avoid despair or cynicism without
becoming fatuous. And Pavel’s discussion of what it means to soberly take stock
of just how fucking meaningless everything is and what one nevertheless does
from moment to moment was very useful for me—not just as a cartoonist, but as a
model to aspire to.” P. 70
Dr. Q's bleak pessimism could inspire suicidal thoughts in the vulnerable, so my purpose is to validate his pessimism (if world affairs don't make you depressed you're not paying attention) while hoping to call attention to as Art says, what one nevertheless does from moment to moment. This is the existentialist challenge.
“In 2007 the Anne Frank House published a fictionalized
color series of graphic novels specifically for an international teaching aid
about the Holocaust. They’re very earnest and drawn in a pleasant Tin Tin
style.” P. 127
“During that period of groping for a style, I also thought about cutting between the present and the past by having black and white line
drawings intercut with gray wash drawings, or using full-color, which would
have been way too decorative….” P. 145
And EU will be drawn in a decorative style! If the medium is the message, and the medium is pleasant and decorative, how will that "carry" the angst? The in-congruent juxtaposition may serve me well: an absurd linkage of pleasant decoration with philosophical nihilism may just be the absurd boost I'll need to pull this off.
More musings later.
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