Caterpillar Publishing

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?

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.

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!

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!

After a day or two of recovery, on January 25th, I sat down at my desk to begin composing a “long drawing” about Egypt, in the tradition of a 25 foot drawing that I did while living in Rome. I had anticipated that the project would be a few feet long and take about a week’s time, and I would then recommence the projects I had left in December when I went home to Christmas break. But Egypt had other ideas, and I immediately discovered that a long drawing was all wrong. ‘Longer!’ a voice demanded. ‘Panels!’ It said. ‘No!’ I cried, ‘I have to do a thesis project! I’m already behind! GO AWAY!’

But the voice just didn’t listen to me. ‘You have to draw it out! Think of what you saw, what you learned, what you thought about…’

Now, about three weeks later, I find myself closing in on finishing the thumbnailing for a graphic novel. Am I crazy? Probably. Yes. Most definitely. But tackling this isn’t nearly as hard as I thought it would be. I am leaning on our 4,200 photos and all of my notes and sketches to draw out the things I remember, impressions and thoughts, wisps of conversations and my experience in a new culture.

This is my first test drawing, seeing if I could steal some style from Baudoin of L’Association (“Steal from the best!!” Thanks Alec!) and approach this story in a whole new way. It’s just the beginning, a little scratch at what I want to do with it. How do you capture thoughts on paper? Sear a reader’s soul with ink? How do you convey the experience of the spirit on the desert edge of the world? I don’t know. But I am determined to finish a first draft of this story by February 23rd, one month after we returned, so that I can put it away for a time, that it may resurface with clarity later.

But I am filled with renewed hope in what the arts can do.

About two weeks ago I wrote about a potential project based on my travels in Egypt, and promised to finish thumbnailing the pages for a full length story by February 23rd. “Did she finish?” asks one. “Is it brilliant?” asks another. “Can I read it right now Katherine? When will it be available on Amazon? Will you be doing a promotional tour across America?” That last part, I am quite certain, no one is asking.

The answers are as follows: YES! February 17th (5 days EARLY!!) I finished, printed and bound a 186-page booklet of a thumbnailed graphic novel. NO! It is not brilliant. Not even close. I’m lucky if half of it is even legible to anyone but me. BUT! I think I know where it is going, and that was really the point of the journey: to see if anything was there underneath the mental snapshots of our two week trip, and I think I’m onto some good leads. Tim Stout (my wonderful, talented husband) sat down with me on Sunday and helped me to extract the POINT (theme) of my story from a certain thumbnailed sequence I’m rather attached to, and I’ve spent the week diving into the pencils based on what I’ve learned about that same scene. I am excited about the road ahead over the next two months as graduation closes in. By May I should have a solid idea of where this project can go, and some sample finish pages to show for it. And, in the meantime, I will continue to do shorts, to try out different styles and approaches to cartooning. I will post excerpts from the process as I go.

Here is a sample thumbnailed spread from the Midpoint. This was executed by drawing with a wacom tablet and using photos from our trip to create page layouts on my computer:

And here is a sample thumbnailed spread from the latter half of Act 2:

This method of working has treated me very well. Using photos feels a little like “cheating,” but, hey, I took them, right? They are placeholders for drawings until I get a little farther along, but when trying to get through 10 pages a day, it was one of the best ways I found to keep moving. “Hey, I already composed this image– in a photo!– so I’ll borrow from myself. Thanks self!”

Sorry I’ve been so delinquent about my blog in the last couple of weeks– it is crunch time at CCS, and there is much to be done yet on my thesis! I still need to design a cover and may attempt to submit a short piece to an anthology this week, but I’m finally in the homestretch for coloring my 19 page chapter and should be done by Friday. Thank goodness! It’s taking quite a while, but our movies are keeping me company. Tim and I own over 150 films, but every time one ends I wander over to our shelves and stare for several minutes, unable to comprehend how I can be looking at so many titles and still feel like we don’t have anything to watch. There’s only so many rounds of the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy that I can take, as much as I love it!

Here’s a visual of the hours logged this week!

After two years of labor and hundreds of pages, my time as a student at The Center for Cartoon Studies has drawn to a close. I can’t believe how fast it has gone! The transition into life as an alumni will be a little terrifying but very exciting, and I am looking forward to whatever lies ahead.

In the meantime I thought I would share with you my final thesis project, tentatively entitled Hieroglyph, a graphic novel about an American artist traveling through Egypt. Part travelogue and part creative non-fiction, the story is based on sketches, drawings, notes, and comics from my 16-day tour of Egypt in January 2010. As part of my graduate thesis at The Center for Cartoon Studies I wrote the skeleton for the full graphic novel (about 100 pages in length) and completed a 19-page sample chapter that falls in the middle of the book. I plan to spend the summer working on bringing the writing and drawings to a more finished level so that I can more seriously explore publishing options this Fall. I’m very excited about this direction for my work; the challenges of this project have already pushed me harder and faster than anything before it, and I am excited to continue this process of creative discovery!

These drawings were done in pencil with layered watercolor beneath the line work in Photoshop. It’s been a very satisfying way to work, allowing me to maintain the immediacy of the line and adjust/redo the color as necessary.

After taking a month off from writing and drawing to complete my MFA and a trip home to see family, getting back into my work groove has proved to be a lot more difficult than I expected. Chapter 1 of Hieroglyph had me stumped for several days, whispering convincing threats that the No Talent Police would be knocking on my door momentarily. Though that didn’t happen, I DID get pulled over for the first time for having an expired registration sticker. “Golly gee, officer! This is my first time being pulled over!” Imagine the doctor and Main Street from the film State and Main, add a police uniform and a little note pad, and you will have an image of the smiling gentleman who gave me a warning ticket. All he needed was a bow tie. Golly, it would have been great if he’d had a bow tie.

Things are finally moving on Hieroglyph, though I’m not convinced the momentum will last for long. Making a book is a puzzle that needs constant attention. It’s so satisfying when something works! and so crushing when a lead goes nowhere. But little by little I know I’ll figure it out. And if not, and the No Talent Police come to get me, my only wish is for them to be wearing bow ties.

A couple of days ago I decided to buy some valerian root extract for the first time. I’ve been having trouble sleeping lately, from the 4:30 sunrise and the stress of my to-do list, and I thought that making tea with valerian at night might help. The plant also grows naturally in our front yard, but after some internet research I wasn’t sure that it could be consumed raw.

So I went and asked at the Coop. “In herbalism, you’re supposed to ask the plant if it’s safe to eat,” said one of the natural medicine specialists. “Have you asked the plant?” I checked her expression and saw that she was being serious. “How does the plant answer?” I asked. “I guess you just get a feeling,” she said. Having never had a conversion with a plant before, I wasn’t sure that I was qualified to risk my digestive health on my cross-species linguistic skills, so I went ahead and bought the extract anyway.

But, as strange as it sounds to ask a plant a question, I think stories work in a similar way. My husband, Tim Stout, has been coaching me on stories and how they work, and there seems to be a parallel strategy: ask the story what it wants, and listen to its answer. And the story will start to talk to you. I’ve had several false starts with this next section of Hieroglyph, which has been very frustrating, but I know the solution isn’t too far away. It’s a matter of clearing my head enough to listen. And who knows! Maybe I’ll hear something new from my story today. And if not, there’s a plant in the front yard who’s probably feeling neglected. I should go out at chat at my next 4:30am wake-up.

Welcome to a brave new year! It’s a little late and it’s been a little while, but I feel great about the way the year has kicked off and there are promising horizons ahead. I’m reading some great books: Carolyn See’s Making a Literary Life (a MUST read for all of you creative types) and No More Dirty Looks: The Truth About Your Beauty Products and the Ultimate Guide to Safe and Clean Cosmetics (responsible for turning my bathroom into a salad bar), along with the incredible picture book blog Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast. I’ve also been doing a great deal of drawing and design, and this week, of all things, I am painting a temporary mural at Dartmouth College in the Class of 1953 Commons (Thayer Dining Hall) with the talented Laura Terry (CCS ’10), Jen Vaughn (CCS ’10), Jon Fine (CCS ’11), and several Dartmouth art students. Here’s a link to some photos at Jen’s flickr account.

We have less than 30 hours of working time this week to grid, draw, paint, and finish nearly 80 feet of wall! It’s going very well and has been exciting to watch as our cartoons become life-sized drawings. If you’re in the area please stop in to say hello and take a peek at the mural; it will be up for 3-6 months as the kitchen renovation is completed. More from me soon. Happy new year!

Last Saturday I volunteered for Somerville Up-Close, a community arts project for youth conceived of and directed by my friend Sara Argue (she strikes again!). The premise of the project she envisioned was simple: create a collaborative art project for kids who are interested in growing up to be artists, and get real artists to volunteer to help the project come to life! Sounds pretty cool, but the final product was incredible: a mosaic map of the town of Somerville made entirely by 5th and 6th graders in four short afternoons. Look at the line! the color! the energy!

I feel so excited when I look at this piece; there’s a freedom and intensity that’s so rare in work by grown-ups. And the scale of it, the hugeness of it, makes me want to do bigger work. The time has come to stretch my wings, and I give myself permission to jump!