Art & Comics by Katherine Roy

Welcome to my blog! The next few posts will be a little sporadic, as I’m in the midst of finals for graduate school. Keep checking in! Expect regular posts beginning in June.

About a week ago a group of us from the Center for Cartoon Studies had the chance to visit Mirage Studios in Amherst, MA, home of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles created by Peter Laird and Kevin Eastman. Peter was a gracious host, answering our questions and telling us stories before giving us great toys! We also got to tour Jim Lawson’s studio, who has been penciling and inking the Turtle comics since they began. We all had a fabulous time. He also posted an image of the mini comic I gave him on his blog– thanks Peter!

http://plairdblog.blogspot.com/2009_04_01_archive.html

Got up at 5:00 am to layout and color some drawing samples to send to Sorche Fairbank, a friend and talented agent working on a book for Ten Speed Press. It’s been fun to work on whether I am chosen for the project or not– it’s a great way to kick off the summer!

I’ve been thinking a lot about thesis projects for my second graduate year at the Center for Cartoon Studies, and continue to return to the idea of doing something that takes place during a wedding, basing some of the plot on our experiences during our engagement and big event. I just ran across this quote in Wedded Bliss:

“In Western Societies today, the white wedding prevails as the dominant form of this popular ritual, and is rapidly becoming the standard for weddings internationally. Although considered traditional, this type of wedding is anything but. The stereotypical, lavish white wedding that has become a highly prescribed spectacle featuring a bride in a formal white wedding gown, a formally dressed groom, some combination of attendants and witnesses, a religious ceremony, and an elaborate– and expensive– wedding reception is largely the product of a host of marketing campaigns. The white wedding has become so overdetermined in the popular imagination that to consider an alternative seems unthinkable.”

Surely there’s something that can be said about this through comics? While keeping the theme from being so heavy handed that it becomes unreadable?

It is somehow wildly exhilarating to read, devour really, the chronicled chapters of fiction recounting Sammy’s love for Tracy Bacon and the discovery of his own sexuality, the daring and passion of the love between Joe and Rosa, their art, their ****ing, never seen but smoldering and constant in the hinting in each chapter. Chabon has an amazing tale, and after eight months in cartooning school I am finally beginning to glimpse just how masterfully he has woven his fictional story into the real world of New York City in the late 30′s and early 40′s. It’s SO steamy. And the city vibrates with a life and color that is greater than life, it sings from the past, calling out to these two cousins and the world that somehow brought them together. I want to tell stories with this kind of depth, this kind of significance. I want to be able to absolutely capture my audience. And I have no idea where to find that kind of a story.

Michelangelo wrote of carving as if he must release the form inside the block of marble, as if the figure is already there, waiting, throbbing and tenacious to breathe and live. Is that what it is to write a thing? To create something new. Is the story, can the story, be told with meaning and depth through comics? 

I don’t know. I hope so. I do know that for the better part of two days I’ve done little else but read. This novel is just so damn good most of the time. It’s amazing.

Tim drove us home from New York after his three week internship at First Second followed by his birthday celebration. After so much rain, the clouds were incredible. I did this quick sketch in the car– I miss drawing and intend to do a lot more of it this summer.

I first met Jules Feiffer when he spoke at the Center for Cartoon Studies with Jeff Danzinger in April. He was charming, enthusiastic, and quite the ham in front of a crowd. He liked my sketchbook, which later resulted in the opportunity to be his teaching assistant for the summer during his Montgomery Fellowship at Dartmouth College, just a few miles away from White River Junction. He arrived yesterday. I’m already having a blast!

Drawing out on the balcony at the Montgomery House after labeling some PowerPoint slides for Jules Feiffer. And lookin’ cool. 

Jules Feiffer and I have spent a lot of time together over the last three days, scanning books, organizing slides, discussing possible class topics. It’s been enormously fun to work as his assistant, and I’ve had the chance to reexamine so many gorgeous drawings from the early 20th century. I’ve always loved Winsor McCay’s work, but god- the ingenuity! the draftsmanship! His weekly pace! They are just so beautiful. Here are some of my favorites:

Jules Feiffer has offered to looked through some of my past work this week to see what I’ve been doing during my time at the Center for Cartoon studies along with some sketchbooks from RISD. He has responded best to the drawings and stories I love while instinctively critical and unimpressed with the work that I, too, am unhappy with, or fought my way to complete. He can see the inspiration—or the lack thereof—however much I try to hide it. I never knew it was so transparent to the outside world. So where can that come out next year? How? How do you bring yourself to be inspired? Show up, do the work, commit to putting in the hours as your desk. We’ll see what happens in the fall.

Jules Feiffer’s pets Lily and Daisy are up here for the week while his daugther, Kate Feiffer, and his granddaughter Maddie stay as his guests in Hanover. Lily is “the dog that winks” in their book Which Puppy?. She was terrific fun to draw.

This week I had the privelege of attending the Politics of Cartooning panel discussion at Dartmouth College, with guests Jeff Danzinger, Jules Feiffer, Ed Koren and Ed Sorel. What a group! I loved them. But more fascinating than the work that they showed and their conversation was the audience’s attitude toward the future of cartooning—and publishing in general—as all but extinct. “You’re all of a certain age…” one woman began. “Just what the hell does that mean?!” came the response. But many audience members were nodding in agreement; are these cartoonists the last generation?

The Center for Cartoon Studies couldn’t exist without a new group of visual storytelling enthusiasts rising to the occasion to step into the giant shoes of past creators and continue forging new ground in the medium of comics. Graphic novels and comics format picture books are turning literary heads, snowballing onward as more titles are published every year. The new future in cartooning won’t rely on newspaper syndicates, but instead on book deals and digital media. Fingers crossed!

This weekend Jules Feiffer hosted his long-time friend Margie King Barab as his guest at the Montgomery House at Dartmouth College. Margie is the widow of Alexander King, author, memoirist, famous media personality of early television and editor of Americana Magazine, a Depression era humor publication. Margie visited Jules’ class “Graphic Humor in 20th Century America” and told the story of her move to New York City from Nebraska, and how she met and fell in love with Alex King, her super (and 33 years her senior), and of their marriage and his rise to fame. On Sunday night we watched the first of 13 episodes of Alex’s show called ”Alex in Wonderland,” in which he reflects on art, literature, humor, Africa, and love, among many other things. A young Margie King is seated next to her host and husband, offering prompts, laughter, encouragement, and an occasional song. Margie still sings around the house at 77 years old.

Last week I finished reading a copy of the novel Perfume by Patrick Suskind. I loved it! What a delicious sensory experience, fresh and engaging from beginning to end and a masterfully woven thrill. Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is born among fish guts and market refuse in the slums of 18th century France with one unlikely talent: a genius gift of scent. His miserable life unrolls before him, from foster home to foster home, from master to master, until at last his fate brings him to the door of a famous perfumer and he dares to prove his cursed gift.

Suskind’s writing breaths scent, a unique reading experience that titillates the senses while enfolding you in story. How often do you experience any work of art or literature that hooks you by the nose? An unforgettable ending, two thumbs way up for Perfume.

Our second year at the Center for Cartoon Studies kicks off today with Alec Longstreth’s Professional Practice class! Yahoo! I’m very excited about this year and all of the opportunities ahead, but also determined to make the most of my time and the work I have to do. David Macaulay has agreed to be my thesis advisor for the year, resuming his role as a mentor and editor from my days at RISD as a sophomore and junior. He is insightful, encouraging, and very critical; it’s all about the work to him, and I deeply appreciate his objectivity. I think it will be a great fall!

Chick Lit! The very first!

I have just finished reading Flaubert’s classic masterpiece for the first time and I am not at all ashamed to say that I truly enjoyed it. How can one resist such a ‘vulgar’ protagonist as Emma Bovary, who finally yields to her lover’s advances with the “real” (translation: “obscene”) scenario of an eight-hour ride in the back of a carriage?

“Without any fixed plan or direction, [the cab] wandered about at hazard… From time to time the coachman on his box cast despairing eyes at the public-houses. He could not understand what furious desire for locomotion urged these individuals never to wish to stop. He tried now and then, and at once exclamations of anger burst forth behind him. Then he lashed his perspiring jades afresh… demoralised, and almost weeping with thirst, fatigue, and depression” (227).

Scandal! Can you imagine?! That kind of flagrant sex scene in media today?!

Emma is a cross-dressed version of Flaubert himself who lusts for the romance of gods and fairy tales while bound to her adoring bovine husband. She writes letters to her lover “in virtue of the notion that a woman must write to her lover,” but meanwhile loses sight of the man himself beneath the abundance of his attributes (296). Flaubert has clearly used his own lust and Parisian lovers to navigate the events of his plot, and the novel is just as “real” today as it was in the 1850′s. Thank God for the censors and critics, and the trial that launched the book into fame and infamy.

Today, romance genre literature apparently make up fifty percent (50%!!!) of the publishing industry. What are we all doing in cartooning?!

Flaubert wrote to his lover in his second year of working on Madame Bovary that “everything one invents is true,” and that “poetry is just as precise as geometry. Induction is as valid as deduction, and after a certain point, one is never wrong about matters of the soul.”

Roald Hoffman, Nobel Prize winning chemist, finds that science has a great deal in common with poetry. “The language of science is a language under stress. Words are being made to describe things that seem indescribable in words– equations, chemical structures and so forth. Words do not, cannot mean all that they stand for, yet they are all we have to describe experience. By being a natural language under tension, the language of science is inherently poetic. There is metaphor aplenty in science. Emotions emerge shaped as states of matter and more interestingly, matter acts out what goes on in the soul. One thing is certainly not true: that scientists have some greater insight into the workings of nature than poets… Poetry soars, all around the tangible, in deep dark, through a world we reveal and make.”

Graphic designer turned rock star Chip Kidd states in an interview that books are very much theater of the mind, and that “writing is really designing with words, taking language to create a pure experience in the reader’s mind.”

I like all of these ideas.

They inspire me to be a better writer, a better designer, and a better visual storyteller.

Now back to work!

We’re back after a delicious whirlwind trip to New York City! I hope all of the SPXer’s had a great time; I’m sorry to have missed it.

It was a great honor to meet David Small and his wife Sarah Stewart on Tuesday night after David’s presentation on Stitches with his host Jules Feiffer. The book is his first graphic novel after a long career as a children’s book illustrator, and it looks to be a wildly successful addition to the canon of the genre. It is deeply powerful in its silence and masterfully drawn. I enjoyed hearing his thoughts on walking the line between absolute fidelity to Truth and telling a cohesive story. David’s and Sarah’s combined energy and shared passion as a powerhouse creative couple is very encouraging. Good luck on your tour!

"Cut the adjectives-- they tell you what to think."

Our booth before the show opened at 10:00am

We are back from Providence after a full day of selling cards, comics, and book jewelry at the RISD Alumni Fall Sale of 2009. It was a great success! We did very well this year and extend our great thanks to all of you who purchased our merchandise and shared your stories. If you are interested in any additional items from us please email me at katherine@katherineroy.com and we can easily get it to you right away. Our store is currently under construction; our sincere apologies. Happy Fall everyone!

This week I’ve been working on writing scenes for a graphic novel idea about a wedding. Writing is hard! But I’m learning so much by really trying to understand structure and character development, building moment after moment into a comprehensive story. I’ve had positive feedback on the project this week from an agent with Sanford J. Greenburger Associates and from Rich Johnson (Publishing & Graphic Novel Consultant, formerly with DC Comics) during their respective visits to the Center for Cartoon Studies. My hope is to have a full proposal and a rough dummy by the end of the semester!

We woke up this morning and came downstairs to subtle evidence from a mysterious guest. The mouse actually chewed through the towel to get to the cookies! They are that good!

This weekend I have the honor of doing a presentation on my first book, A Kid’s Guide to Boston’s Freedom Trail, published with the Freedom Trail Foundation in 2008, for the Boston Book Festival of 2009! I will be standing in the shadows of many creative greats, including Ken Burns, Chris Van Allsburg, John Hodgman (“I’m a PC!” and The Areas of My Expertise), Anita Diamant (The New Jewish Wedding, The Red Tent), and… Alicia Silverstone! with her new book The Kind Diet, just to name a few. Huzzah to my kid’s guide book! And for those of you who join me tomorrow at the library, I’m looking forward to it! See you at 1:00pm!

Thousands of readers gathered yesterday in the shelter of Boston’s Public Library to celebrate this year’s Book Festival with many great authors of New England, and the schedule was packed with discussions and signings. My presentation on drawing and cartooning happened in Story Place, where a variety of kid friendly performances engaged the youngest readers throughout the day. Thanks for your interest and enthusiasm, kids! I hope you enjoy your books!

Drawing the cartoon alphabet to make faces in a crowd.

Alec Longstreth just had us read a short interview with Hope Larson on writing graphic novel scripts and working with an editor for our Professional Practice class at CCS. I liked Larson’s approach and philosophy a lot. It’s nice to hear of creators who work from scripts, as I’m trying it out for the first time now. I’ve been putting in long hours writing out my wedding graphic novel idea, structuring the acts, working out scenes, and now finally flushing out more of the actual dialogue. Here’s what my “Board” looks like (an idea I got from Save the Cat, by Blake Snyder), with each card showing a scene, and each row is an act (Act 1, Act 2.1, Act 2.2, Act 3). It’s been a lot of fun!

This week I’ve been exploring the dream sequence in my graphic novel, trying out images and ideas that have been floating around in my head for some time. I’m sure very little of it will last to the final version, as I’ve jumped far ahead into my story to riff on scenes that have yet to be written, but I needed to shake things up a bit. It’s been lots of fun, even if I don’t keep my version of Cerberus in the story (the multi-headed hound that guards the gates to Hades in Greek and Roman mythology). Huzzah!

Last week I had a break through with my thesis project direction! My story isn’t a drama… it needs to be a satire! This realization changes everything, of course, and makes the vast majority of my writing and drawing thus far obsolete, but I no longer want to do the serious and personal rite-of-passage story about weddings and family relationships that I originally intended, because it wasn’t going to be a FUN story (and God knows there’s enough anxiety in comics, anyway). The story I’m now planning is TECHNICALLY still a rite-of-passage, but with all of the new wonkiness and antics and escalating chaos, it should be a blast to write and draw and still get my point across. I will still be thinking a great deal about scene writing, dialogue, and Blake Snyder’s advice (in Save the Cat, a fantastic book about story and screenwriting), but I feel much more satisfied with this new approach.

I thought this blog would be a good place to show (and, sniff, mourn) all of the work being laid to rest in pieces and temporarily shelved on it’s way to the garbage. It took this stack of writing and thumbnails, page break downs and drawings to get me moving forward and find what the story is really about, what amounts to one Binder Inch of work:

I’ve put in about 8 months off-and-on of thinking time and wheel turning, which isn’t much time at all in the big scheme of things, and I count myself lucky to have this break through in November (instead of March or April) for the sake of my thesis! I have a lot of months and weeks left to act on my new instincts and keep things at a draft level.

On Friday I met with my thesis advisor David Macaulay and showed him the chapter synopsis of the new draft. He said “This is good.” Which, coming from him, is more than enough outside validation to last me through the month, even if by December I’ve ruined the entire thing with my new ambition!

Mary Magoulick, folklorist and Associate Professor of English at Georgia College, posted a great description of what a fairy tale is. Let me just quote her here:

“Fairy tales, also known as wonder tales or märchen (from the German), are a sub-genre of folktales involving magical, fantastic or wonderful episodes, characters, events, or symbols. Like all folktales they are narratives that are not believed to be true (fictional stories), often in timeless settings (once upon a time) in generic, unspecified places (the woods), with one-dimensional characters (completely good or bad). They function to entertain, inspire, and enlighten us. In these episodic narratives the main characters are usually humans who often follow a typical pattern (as in a heroic quest) that is resolved partly by magic. The fact that these wonder tales still appeal to us attests to their richness and effectiveness as symbolic communication.”

This week I’ve been examining our personal library of films, comics and books for stories that have anything to do with fairy tales, and been surprised to find a plethora of works that easily fit into the above description. Characters that are opportunistic and hopeful, themes often dealing with socio-economic struggle and lower classes seeking power, and/or a transformation process, such as the frog to prince, or the rags to riches. Aside from Disney films and literary-based works like Oh Brother Where Art Thou?, there are an incredible number of stories that use magic to teach a lesson or help complete a quest. We love magic. Star Wars is 100% fairy tale, is it not?

The trick is to use fairy tale character archetypes while still keeping the character and the story interesting. We KNOW that innocent Luke Skywalker must SURELY triumph over the black hearted cloak wearing Darth Vader from the first moments of the trilogy, but we keep watching because he is an Everyman in peril, and the circumstances of his life interest us. Magic? Monsters? A “road movie” set in space?! Sign me up!! Today Star Wars is looking just a little bit hokey, but I love it just the same, and it grabs me every time. I know EXACTLY what happens in the films… but I want to watch it again and again. Fairy tales seem to scratch some deep-seated story itch for almost everyone.

When the cartoonist Seth visited the Center for Cartoon Studies two weeks ago, he said “The only chart you have for what is interesting is your own taste.” I am realizing that I have quite an appetite for fairy tales. My thesis already is a fairy tale of sorts, but this research may help me to turn up the volume and figure out the appropriate staging. I feel like I’m on a good track.

I ran across this today while doing an image search related to my project, and I just wanted to share it. This is the store window for a shop in London specializing in vintage dresses called “Fur Coat No Knickers,” and God do I love the way they’ve used this font!

Through a set of serendipitous circumstances I find myself committed to the terrific and terrifying prospect of spending sixteen days traveling abroad through Egypt in winter of 2010. I have no idea what to expect, but plan to keep a sketchbook and comic diary for the duration of the trip entitled The Purple Gorilla and Other Caterpillar Tales* that I may publish portions of upon my return. This collection of drawings and comics will comprise Volume Three in my ongoing series starring the Caterpillar (see my About Page for further explanation) and may inspire me to pursue other derivative works too.

I have traveled in 14 countries, but this will be my first trip to Africa, my first time in an Arabic speaking country (so there’s no hope of deciphering signage and conversation), and my first chance to turn down a camel ride. I’m just beginning my research on what we have in store for us, but already sense some strong story leads and adventure possibilities for my comics. Expect to see a lot more of Egypt in the upcoming months!!

*Note: In the early 1950’s, publishers accidentally discovered that sales went up when comic covers featured a purple gorilla, even if the interior content had nothing whatsoever to do with gorillas of any kind, purple or otherwise. No one knew why this worked, but it did. I have braced myself for the possibility that inspiration found in Egypt will completely thwart all current thesis plans and establish a whole new project direction, but whatever I may work on as a thesis, a cover with a purple gorilla will guarantee interest. If not, I will blame Steve Bissette for telling me about the marketing power of said species.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! There is so much to be thankful for as we look back on the year. 2009 has been full of opportunity, experience, frustration, doubt, and joy, and we are excited for what lies ahead in 2010. May the last few weeks of the season be just as fulfilling!

And in case anyone needed to see a giant, man eating bird before they begin their ardent feasting later today, check out this trailer– it’s fantastic! Gotta love the 50′s! Thanks for posting this on your website, Steve!