drew weing dot com

•I’m sort of in-between paying gigs right now, since I’m still beating my head against my next big comics project, Margo Maloo. So if you’ve been looking to hire a cartoonist / illustrator / colorist / letterer / graphic designer – hey! drew at drewweing dot com

•Athens band Elf Power used one of Eleanor’s sketches on the cover of their forthcoming LP, you can check it out over at Pitchfork.

•There’s an early, positive review of the Set to Sea book at the Daily Crosshatch, which is nice. It does have a small misunderstanding in it, though, which I’ve heard from a couple people. So, even though it’s kind of a bullshit move to come rushing in as the author to correct people’s interpretations, here I go: The main character in Set to Sea is not a pirate, nor is he on a pirate ship! He was shanghaied onto a regular old merchant clipper ship, as happened frequently in the wild and woolly tea trade of the 1800s. It seems important to clarify – if you come to the story expecting the main character to be a pirate, you might be disappointed by a distinct lack of piratical activities.

Happy Bloomsday. If you haven’t read Ulysses, you can go read Richard Thompson’s version, you won’t even need the reader’s guide.

More thoughts about teaching art:
One of the kids in our class was an almost disturbingly canny 12 year old. When I sat down with him and looked at his comics, I learned pretty quick that he was onto any hint of false positivity, even though he drew pretty much as well as any of the kids his age. I would say something like, “Hey man, these poses look great! They really capture a lot of energy!” and he would raise his eyebrow and say in a pitying fashion, “You really think these are great? They’re just stick figures.” Most of the other kids – even the older ones – as soon as I sat down next to them, would be thrilled to describe the action happening in their comics blow-by-blow (useful, since it was hard to puzzle out sometimes.) This kid would just sort of embarrassedly mumble that it was only some guys fighting. He had a sketchbook of carefully copied Naruto pictures, but would only draw stick figures of his own creation. He actually drew less and less as the class went on. Eleanor said that in one of her sessions, he said to her, disappointed: “I thought you were going to teach us how to draw cool.”

He might have been one of the smartest and most self-analytical kids I’ve met, and he will never be an artist.

Eleanor and I were talking about what makes some kids into artists and some not, and the concept of early and late bloomers. Almost all kids start out as little sociopaths who live inside their own heads, but at some point most start becoming normal adults with empathic responses and an idea of how they fit into the world. I was definitely a late bloomer, socially – I think I was still running around in the woods shooting lasers at imaginary enemies until early high school. And somehow I kept drawing into adulthood. So I’m speculating, is there some sort of critical hump in late childhood, where most kids would start comparing their drawings to peers (and professionals,) realize they weren’t up to snuff, and drop the whole thing? And late bloomer types, by sort of sailing obliviously over this hump, actually put in the needed hours and hours of drawing time to become good at it?

Hopefully, you do bloom at some point, though. Maybe today, it’s Bloomsday after all.

So I just heard that Buenaventura Press (publishers of beautiful prints and publications such as Kramers Ergot #7 and Comic Art Magazine) went out of business a few months back, which is upsetting. I guess there’s some sort of legal trouble involved, which I’m not sure is better or worse than plain old financial hardships. If it was just a cash flow problem, I suspect the “comics world” would’ve rallied with a fundraiser or the like. Anyway, it’s hard to imagine that Alvin Buenaventura will be out of the comics world for long, even if his capacity changes.

“But what does this all mean for alternative comiiiics???”

On another note, Eleanor’s and my comics camp wrapped up. It was, once again, a nerve-wracking but fun collision between the somewhat leaky Ship of Eleanor and Drew’s Vague But Idealistic Philosphy of Art Education, and the Rocks of Actual Kid Behavior. Our takeaway this time: Even though this would be putting the cart before the horse for almost all of our students – next time, we should spend more time teaching kids more about anatomy, poses, proportions, shading, inking techniques, etc. Many of the kids have trouble constructing even single images that are decipherable to an outside observer, much less a sequence of them… but to them, exercises in storytelling and clarity are just insanely boring. They want the cool poses right away.

See, Eleanor and I have had this sort of Hippocratic Oath when it comes to comics. Having both gone to SCAD, I know that somewhere along the way, these zealous little grade schoolers who have absolutely no problem sitting down and drawing dozens of pages of comics with no self-consciousness at all, are going to turn into surly young adults who have to be prodded to draw one page, even though they’ve chosen comics as a career path, supposedly. That was our big surprise last year, seeing just how much these kids loved to draw – it wasn’t work for them, it was play. So Eleanor and I (who both struggle and beat our heads and have artists blocks for months on end, just like anyone else) looked at each other and said “What the hell are these kids’ art teachers doing? Who’s sucking the joy for image-making out of these kids?” And so we took this typical lefty stance of simply trying to encourage the kids’ creativity and not telling them any one way was right or wrong.

But that’s exactly what they want! The “right” way to draw hands, faces, poses. And I’ve been coming to this realization that the loss of simple joy and obliviousness is inevitable – because it’s a byproduct of the increased perspective and empathy that are part of becoming a normal adult. Up to a certain point, these kids exist in their own little words, They become aware that others are observing and judging them, and they start to want to fit in and do things correctly and for a lot of kids, it changes their relationship with art. Which is kind of sad, but then again – the flipside to the surly, excuse-filled kids I knew at SCAD (and was, to an extent) were the oddballs who drew countless pages about some sort of private internal world where everybody was a magical sexy animal-person.

COMICS REMAIN STRUGGLE, STORY AT 11:00