Category: Graphic Novel

Tuesday’s “Lesson learned…”

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Well, yesterday was definitely a “monday of mondays”…but thankfully time marches on and it is now Tuesday. So without further ado, here is this week’s “Lesson Learned in England…” Enjoy!

or An Overabundance of Sauce(iness)

Since my graphic novel course was in Craven Arms, it was more efficient for me to fly into Manchester than London, thereby shaving an hour or so off of the train ride from the airport to Shropshire. I didn’t get to spend any time in Manchester my first day in England, as the course started that evening, so that entire day was spent traveling. However, the class ended on a Saturday and, as my flight out wasn’t departing until Monday, I booked a room using Air BnB and decided to spend my extra time exploring Manchester. (Initially I had hoped to go to London and meet up with Sarah Lightman, but she and her husband had driven up to Edinburgh for a holiday so that was out).

It turned out that Manchester is a great city and I was staying a mere 15 minute ‘tram-ride’ away so ’twas easy to get downtown (though getting back to my ‘house’ was a completely other story–one you’ll hear in next week’s “Lesson…”). A fellow student had recently visited Manchester to see “Dark Matters: Shadow_Contemporary_Art” – the Whitworth Art Gallery’s current exhibit and, at their suggestion, I decided to check it out. After taking the tram into the city center, it was about a 40 minute walk down to the gallery–at one point fearing I had walked 30 minutes in the opposite direction, I asked a policeman how far away the gallery was, only to be informed that “yes” I was headed in the proper direction, but that since it was about 20 minutes away it was “quite a bit of a walk”–the new yorker in me was unphased.

I won’t go into detail about the exhibit (yet) but it was really neat! Afterwards though, I was starving–for some reason looking at art always makes me hungry. Leaving the gallery (their café was a bit expensive for me), I retraced my steps to the campus of the University of Manchester in search of a more ‘college friendly’ priced meal. Luckily it didn’t take too long to find a place, so soon I found myself sitting down, after ordering a sandwich, waiting for the waitress to bring it over.

Now, usually there’s “nothing special” to a café table–you’ve got your napkins and maybe a salt & pepper shaker. However, the first thing I noticed upon sitting down, was a bowl filled with condiments–and not just the usual foil packets of ketchup and mustard (or if you’re lucky, mayonnaise).

No, we’re talking 6 or 7 different types of sauces, each with their own coloured wrapper, making the bowl look as though it were filled with large pieces of confetti! Curiosity piqued, I upended the bowl, spilling the entire pile of packets onto the table, forming a small mountain of flavours–the waitress bringing over my sandwich surely thought I was a bit ‘touched in the head’ as I sat there picking through the packets, marvelling at such a wealth of options to choose from–French or British mustard? HP Sauce? Salad Cream? or perhaps Malt Vinegar? The permutations and combinations seemed endless…

And a bit overwhelming…somehow I found the strength to resist taking 1 of each, as I figured that if by some miracle I didn’t end up smushing them all over my new bag, I’d get stopped at the airport out of sheer incredulousness of motive–“You have all these packets in your bag because you’re a graphic designer?” Somehow I didn’t think such reasoning would fly with the airline security people. Instead, gobbling up my tasty sandwich (wish I remembered what it was) I quickly sketched the sauce packets, gathered them back up into their bowl and left the café to explore more of Manchester…

Tonight–Tuesday 22 Nov!

Remember Dan Piraro will be appearing at Museum of Comic & Cartoon Art at 7pm (19.00hrs). He’ll be discussing and signing his new book “Bizarro Heroes.” General Admission is $12, while MoCCA members get a discount. Check out the MoCCA website for more info.

Hope everyone has a great Thanksgiving! are you cooking anything?

 

What to do this weekend…19 Novembre

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Sorry to be a bit late posting this…if you haven’t already made plans for this weekend, there’s a ton of interesting things to do, read or see…I believe I am going to start doing this each Friday from now on, so check back weekly!

To go…

• The Art of HOWL with works from Allen Ginsburg & Eric Drooker–at Museum of Comic & Cartoon Art NYC–continues through 31 Jan 2010
• Artists of Batman including work from Frank Miller, Paul Pope & Neil Adams–at Museum of Comic & Cartoon Art NYC–continues through 31 Jan 2010
• Williamsburg Art & Gallery Crawl–starts at 4PM at the Black & White Project Space–19 Nov (one day only)
• Graphic Details: Confessional Comics by Jewish Women is at Yeshiva University through 15 April 2012

Also, if you’re lucky enough to be in England, Thought Bubble UK will be winding down this weekend after a full week of (according to all the tweets posted) extraordinary events, including a successful panel discussion of Graphic Medicine: Visualizing the Stigma of Illness

To see…

• Bryan Talbot’s Discussion about the Anthropomorphic Tradition in Comics–he also gave this discussion at my Graphic Novel course and it’s quite interesting, in fact I rewatched it last night
• Bryan also spoke recently on BBC’s Book Café Radio program regarding the 25th Anniversary of Maus
•  England’s Ch. 4 interviewed Nicola Streeten about her debut graphic novel Billy, You and Me which chronicles her toddler son’s death and its impact on her (thanks to Graphic Medicine for providing the link)

To read…

I’ve just about finished reading “From Hell”–Alan Moore & Eddie Campbell’s Graphic Novel about Jack the Ripper–tis quite a bit of work and not a quick read–but I mean that in a good way, I was compelled to closely examine Campbell’s intricate drawings (starkly all black & white) while Moore’s writing weaves a very intriguing tale of royal cover up, Masonic tradition and personal responsibility gone awry.

To do…(in 2012)

For all my francophile friends–Randomly stumbled upon this listing for an upcoming course in Jan 2012 at Idlewild Books NYC– French Intermediate: Comics & Conversation: 10 week evening course–students will read 3 graphic novels (au francais) and then discuss– I am very excited about this!

 

Well, that’s all for me, also a rather exciting piece of news, I got my first comic ‘accepted’ to a website–not a very large one, but it’s always thrilling (though a bit nerve-racking) to send one’s work out into the ‘world wide interwebs.’ Also, hope to be sharing some more glimpses of the projects I’ll be scrambling to finish in time for the holidays….

The long and winding road…

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or “How I became interested in Comics & Graphic Novels”–Part 1

 

If you remember from last week’s post many people assume that graphic novels are just really long comic books; so the thinking follows, everyone who reads graphic novels must also be into superhero comic books, such as The X-Men or Superman…This, my friends, is simply not true—in fact, many of the people at the Arvon course were not ‘superhero comic fans.’ A few had grown up reading comic books, but there were many, like myself, who got into comics via a more roundabout path.

Now I don’t mean to say that I was never into superheros; in fact, some of my fondest memories are of playing action figures with my brother and sister on the floor of his room–for a while there was some contention over who got to be “Storm” (I ended up getting “Rogue”)–and of course, I grew up with both the Adam West Batman as well as the slightly less campy Batman the Animated Series. Still, I was never a huge comic book hero fan per say, prolly due to their un-relatable portrayal of female characters (though that’s a separate post). Suffice it to say, when my brother went to the local comic book store, I usually looked at the latest Archie Digests with my sister. I did, however, always love the newspaper comics or “funny pages” as my grandfather called them. I remember crawling into his lap while he read them to me at the breakfast table–adding his own commentary on which were his favourite and which were “too grown up” for me at the time (Beetle Bailey, “yes”, Apt. 3G, “not til you’re older”).

Sundays were also especially contentious in my family, as my siblings and I would argue, on our way to church, no less, about who got what page of the comics first. I think if I hadn’t had those fond memories of reading the comics with my grandfather or fighting over them with my brother and sister, I wouldn’t have continued to read my favourite comic strips as long as I did. Even in college, I’d search through the discarded papers in the common area looking for the comics section. And of course, I also LOVED Calvin & Hobbes (yes, all caps were necessary )–I spent hours reading and rereading the Calvin & Hobbes anthologies, eagerly awaiting the ‘denoument’ of Calvin’s latest scheme–would he ever get his transmorgifier to work? would this trip down the hill in the wagon be his last? One of the important things that Calvin & Hobbes taught me (though I didn’t realize it at the time), that comics didn’t always have to rely on slapstick gags to be successful and sometimes didn’t need to even be “funny” at all (Ex: when Calvin loses Hobbes or when their house if broken into) Like millions of readers, adult and children, I was gutted when Bill Watterson announced he was ending Calvin & Hobbes, though as I got older, I learned to respect and moreover appreciate his decision to keep artistic control over his creation.

So, as you can see, I’d been a fan of comics from the early days, but it wasn’t until I was about 12 that I unwittingly discovered the graphic novel on a family vacation one summer. Twice a year my family would pile into our mini-van and drive 14 hours to a small town in Florida–miami party-ers, we were not. We’d spend a week biking, cooking and sunning (or in my case, crisping) on the sand. When not on the beach, one of my favourite places to hang out was a small bookstore called Sundog Books. Owned by a very sweet couple, they allowed my siblings and I to sit in the back of the bookstore and spend hours reading and reading, til our mom usually had to come find us (though, come to think about it, sometimes I think she was hoping we’d stay there forever). It was that bookstore that I discovered the many adventures of Tintin–the first one I read was Cigars of the Pharaoh and it is still my most favourite one of all his exploits. Over that first summer I prolly read about half of the store’s collection, and over subsequent vacations, read almost all of his adventures, until my family stopped vacationing in that small town. Thus I dipped my toe into the waters of the graphic novel genre, though it would be many years before I returned to reading them…but that is for Part 2.

(Side note: I am a francophile so in a way it is extremely fitting that my first foray into graphic novels was through the famous Belgian detective and his cute pup “Milou”).

 

This week’s “Lesson learned…in England”

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…In America they haven’t spoken English for years! ~Professor Henry Higgins, My Fair Lady

 

Leading up to my trip, I assured myself that, although I would be going to a place I had never been before and moreover, I wouldn’t know anyone when I got there, I would at least be able to speak “the language.” Oh sure, I knew there were some slight colloquial differences–”boot” for “car trunk”; “wellies” for “rain boots”; and quirky expressions such as “Blimey,” “Blast it all,” or “Bugger.” But ultimately it’s all english, right?

Not quite–as I quickly discovered, whilst conversing with my fellow ‘Arvonites.’ Although we were all speaking ‘english’ sometimes they might as well have been speaking latin to me, since I couldn’t make heads or tails of what they were saying…This definitely caused some quite humorous moments, and as a result, I’ve put together a very elementary primer of “Britishisms.”

Lesson 1: The British have a lot more swear words, and seem to have a lot more fun saying them.

“Bollocks, Sod off, Shite, Twot***” So much more emphatic than the “limited” American vocabulary of swear words… (***a note about “twot”: I actually misheard this–the proper term is “TwAt” and it may or may not be worse than the “c” word (which, by the way, means the same thing on either side of the pond).

Lesson 2: British slang can easily throw you for a loop.

I quickly learned that if I didn’t want to completely lose the thread of a conversation, I’d better swallow my pride and confess my ignorance of a certain word or phrase.

Here are a few bits o’ slang:

Quid–Pounds (akin to the American slang “cash” for “dollars”)

Cheers–not just used for toasts but also when saying goodbye or thanks

Ring me up/Give me a ring–means to call someone up on the telephone or ‘mobile’

A school night–refers to any night when one should be sleeping due to work in the morning

Lesson 3: There are sometimes where the word is the same, but the meaning is completely different.

The Bill–Britain: the police; America: the check

Pants–Britain: underwear; America: what women wear when not wearing a skirt or dress (the British call them “trousers”)

Suspenders–Britain: garters (worn under a dress to hold up a woman’s stockings); America: worn over the shoulders to hold up the pants

So there you have it, three easy peasy lessons for talking with your British friends. And even if you accidentally make a fool of yourself by saying “I wish I’d worn pants today, since it’s cold (whilst wearing a skirt)”–just remember that Brits experience the same confusion when coming to America, so you’re not a complete “burk.”

Yet another “Lesson learned…in England”

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Hope everyone is having a great week so far and has adjusted to the time change. Here’s this week’s edition of: “Things I learned in England.”

“Big D!”

As in most cases, whenever meeting new people, the question: “So where are you from?” arises (unless you’re in New York, where usually the question “How much is your rent?” pops up first). I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this already, but as I was 1 of only a few Americans who “crossed the pond” for the Arvon Graphic Novel retreat, this question was, I suppose, especially interesting to people.

While I live in New York (and love it!), I am originally from Dallas, and, like all Texans, mention this whenever people ask where I’m from…Usually people, make some crack about Texans and guns or a political joke (trust me, I’ve heard them all). This time, however, I received the rather unexpected response:

Oh, like [Dallas] the TV show!

Now growing up, I remember hearing that Dallas is/was known for 2 things: 1.) it is the place where JFK was shot and 2.) it is where that eponymous, long running TV sitcom starring Larry Hagman was set. Yet, while I’d always heard this, I’d never encountered people actually saying it! But, truth to tell, pretty much every time I mentioned where I was from, the response was invariably the same.

The first time it happened I was a bit perplexed but amused…by the 9th time, I realized it was a pretty standard response…So, yup, I hail from that glorious city where JR schemed his way to success, but no, I do not have big hair….or a horse.

Also, speaking of England, Thought Bubble is happening in Leeds from 14 Nov–20 Nov. Among the really great events, be sure to check out the Thom Ferrier organised panel discussion: Graphic Medicine: Visualising the Stigma of Illness featuring Andrew Godfrey on Cystic Fibrosis & the inspiring Katie Green speaking about eating disorders and sexual abuse. Also, Arvon tutor Bryan Talbot & his wife Mary will be there to promote their new graphic novel collaboration “Dotter of her Father’s Eyes.”

Have a great week, y’all!

Update!

The wonderful Paula Knight will also be speaking as part of the Graphic Medicine panel at Leeds–I had thought that she was going to, but missed her name on the schedule…whoops.