Detail from Page 271 of Family Man.
Things are heating up a little in this scene! Settlement – forced or “chosen” – was tantamount to giving up Romani identity. Children were often forcibly taken away from their families and made to speak the local language exclusively – a cultural death sentence. Adults were often forced to live in conditions that went utterly against their strict purity laws. In many Rom cultures the lower half of the body is considered very impure – to the extent that living in the bottom floor of a house could be considered unclean because of the lower parts of the people walking above – thus the comment about “living on top of each other.” Ancient family trades dating back to life on the Indian subcontinent would have to be abandoned in favor of subsistence living.
Many families who did concede to settlement (rather than being forced by local law enforcement efforts) had virtually no choice in the matter; losing your horses or wagons or being cut off from a traditional trade route could be a crippling blow. This particular family has had a rough year for its patriarch to be giving thought to the matter.
Cheerful stuff! Check back next week, I promise that things will perk up a bit.
Detail from Family Man, Page 270.
This is the second page of a little scene in Family Man that I’ve been looking forward to for awhile! You can catch up over at lutherlevy.com.
A couple of years ago my good friend, the writer Sara Ryan, did the world a favor when she put together a blog post series called “How NOT to Write Comics.” (Post one, post two, post three.) It’s a useful collection of tips and anecdotes to help aspiring comic book writers, with most of the information drawn (haha) directly from comics artists who have suffered at the hands of inexperienced or incompetent writer-collaborators.
These posts were needed in part because comic books are still not a very dominant medium in the English-speaking world. Travel to France or Japan and you’ll witness a very different culture, where plenty of cartoonists rank in the creative elite, producing work that is both widely read and taken seriously by critics and scholars.
Yet many people in my part of the world still don’t really know how to read comics, much less create them. Sara’s posts provided a useful sort of “Goofus and Gallant” appendix to the ever-growing body literature on how to create compelling and readable graphic narratives.
However, one group wasn’t served by “How Not To Write Comics,” because this group is not interested in writing comics per se. They are interested in writing about comics – or their editors are forcing them to try. Because now that comics have infiltrated the mainstream book trade (and the reading lists of grownups) in the form of graphic novels, memoirs, and trade collections, an increasing number of critics are faced with the task of reviewing the damn things.
The results are, shall we say, mixed.
For every column inch of well-considered and well-informed discussion, there are fifteen yards of lazy, confused, condescending, clueless, unhelpful, and sometimes even frankly hostile copy.
Some of these critics are just jerks who resent that their editor has torn the galley copy of the latest Houellebecq novel out of their hands and replaced it with some stupid book with pictures in it. Pictures. Only Umberto Eco gets to use pictures!
I can’t help those people. I just feel bad for them, because they’re going to miss out on a lot of wonderful and important books.
This leaves all the critics who are just beginning their journey into comics reading, or who have yet to be entirely won over to the medium but want to keep an open mind (perhaps due to peer pressure: I remember a literati cocktail party where somebody near me anxiously muttered “I guess we’re all supposed to read graphic novels now.”) These brave souls are willing to give it a try, but they tend to make a lot of mistakes when they first start out.
Certain errors needlessly recur in comics criticism. Encountering one of them in a critical review or essay is an instant signal to an informed comics reader that the writer doesn’t know what they’re talking about. There might still be some excellent insights on display, but those insights are diminished by sharing the page with outright errors.
Don’t get me wrong: there is plenty of room for interesting-but-still-arguable observations from outsiders, and even room for points best described as obviously-not-true-if-you-know-your-stuff–but-shows-genuine-effort. I don’t want to discourage original thought. But the sorts of mistakes I’m after in this post are not near-misses born from attempts to take on something new. They’re just unprofessional blunders.
Luckily, these mistakes are easily avoided with a little attention. This post is intended to help you, the critic, identify those mistakes in advance so they never hit the page. So, without further ado…I present to you my own personal….
This is the second of two new pages in two weeks. It’s good to be back!
I spent most of my summer putting together the three new books I’ll be selling this fall – all in different sizes, bindings, and colors. I did virtually all of the print design and set-up myself – an arduous though always educational task, composed of 10% fun design choices, 85% eyeball-nuking detail work and frantic technical fixes, and 5% waiting for InDesign to finish saving.
My proofs arrived from the printer this week (and they look amazing), so there’s light at the end of the tunnel, but all that work did cut into my usual creative time-budget and gave me a sore arm for a few weeks.
Nonetheless I managed to have a bit of fun on the side! Here’s a sampler of some of the pieces that I snuck onto my drawing table this summer. (Did I also mention that I got to play a Vulcan in a stage production of a Star Trek episode? No? That happened, too.)
Lotsa foxes! Drawn for the Hero Initiative charity auction.
For the Portland Mercury, one of three different proposed social media apps that I think we could all actually use. I interviewed a performance artist whose work focuses on the internet, and accompanied it with some graphics of my own invention. I’ve also gotten to write a few straight-up theater reviews, which has been hugely fun.
For Jon Morris’ super-fun Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe : REDUXE project! In which artists re-draw and re-design entries from the old Marvel encyclopedia. I’ve always had a soft spot for Rogue (of the X-Men); I turned her into a bit of a surly gutter punk, which is always my mental image of her. It was fun to do very simple flat colors under a fairly realistic drawing style, a combination I don’t often try.
I have more saved up, but I’ll give myself a few weeks to reacquaint myself with the drafting table before I unleash it all. I hope my fellow Northern hemisphere dwellers had a lovely summer!
