tuning

in

In keeping with yesterday's clean break with the past and much of the present, I started something new today – and loved the process. Indeed, much of the impetus behind the great split / divide / whatever was a desire to bring my now-quarter-century-long writing practice in tune with the beginner's mind lent by my new practices of cartooning, drawing, and metalwork by banishing most if not all of my previous attachments and intentions: gone are the designs and hopes and dreams on and of a career, the designs on anything; I want to view whatever I write moving forward not as a stepping stone but as a thing that was written – like each day's Informality, like Miggy or Weldo – nothing more than another means of expression and communicating whether I'm heard or not: if I'm to be a tree alone in the forest, I'm going to fall where-, how-, and why-ever I damn well please.

Chris Ware on (lack of) perspective

in

I avoid the use of perspective because I don’t think it effectively translates the way we remember physical space into the two-dimensional form of ­comics. Isometric projection, which keeps coordinating axes at the same degree, seems to key in to my felt memory better than any mass of as-seen conflicting angles does. Japanese narrative art embraced this approach thousands of years ago. Plus, perspective simply makes the page a mess, and in comics, composition is paramount. 

Art Spiegelman has defined comics as the art of turning time back into space, which is the best explanation of the medium I think anyone’s yet come up with. The cartoonist has to remain aware of the page as a composition while focusing on the story created by the strings of individual panels. I think this mirrors the way we experience life—being perceptually aware of our momentary present with some murky recollections of our past and vague anticipations of where we’re headed, and all of it contributing to the shape of what we like to think of as our life. I try to flatten out experience and memory on the page so the reader can see, feel, and sense as much of all of this as possible, but it’s really not much different from composing music or planning a building.

in

Continuing on with the Fictions, but also with one eye and one or more braincells focused on transitioning to more of a balance between prose and cartooning / comics. If I were being honest with myself, I'd tell you that my goal is to shift entirely to cartooning but, alas, I'm too chickenshit to go all the way without a bit of a fallback (and, I can't forget that the medium is the message, right, Marshall?); suppose it’s moderately poetic that it only took me 35 years (and will probably take a couple more) to get to where I wanted to be when I was eight.