I’m going to be in Charlotte in about a week, doing the Indie Island thing at Heroes Con. Unless things go awry, I’ll have a preview copy of Set to Sea to look at! But not to sell, just yet.
Have you ever had the experience of cracking open a hard-boiled egg, only to find that it’s partway turned into a baby chicken inside? I hadn’t seen that before today.
I’m working my way through Tatsumi’s A Drifting Life (Tatsumi’s a manga artist with a career that stretches back almost to the beginning of the medium – especially known for pioneering more adult manga in the 60s and 70s.) He presents himself as a dopey, broad-faced naif – though of course, since he’s the artist he’s calculatedly making the decision to present himself thus. His avatar has a strong family resemblance to the naif-types that appear in his 70s stories, who inevitably get drawn into an inexplicable world of strange compulsions and degeneracy. I like the relationship arc he has with his brother, who I didn’t realize was also a manga artist – I’m sure you can imagine how that played out in their childhood.
The life of a mangaka as a neverending grind; the small questions of style that become the basis of bitter factionalizing; the exhaustive presentation of stories made in terms of publication details and page count (the content of the stories is usually only briefly mentioned): I find it weirdly inspiring. I know several other cartoonists who’ve said the same. We’re a weird, masochistic lot.
May Inventory:
Read: Swift’s A Tale of a Tub, Clowes’ Wilson, Tatsumi’s Black Blizzard, about 1/12th of Boswell’s Life of Johnson.
Watched: projected on a sheet in a friend’s backyard: Real Genius, Back to the Future. At the local artehaus: The Secret of Kells, that Babies movie.
Eaten: A lot of Indian dal-type dishes. Two or three outdoor potlucks.
Drunk: Some homebrews at the homebrew club meeting, a whole lotta Yuengling.
Somebody commissioned me to draw them a beastie recently, here’s how it turned out!
(Edit: Whoops, too big for my layout. Please click for the normal size!)
