I avoid New Year’s Resolutions. I don’t think them utterly hopeless and arbitrary, nor do I think them the last refuge of procrastinators, persons without resolve otherwise and the overly-optomistic. However coincidental a moment it might be on our annual calendars, I can’t knock it for being a far more pleasant catalyst for change or personal improvement than horrific accidents or worst-case-scenario visits to the doctor. It’s just that as with anyone else, my habits are what they are and I find new ones difficult to forge.
I run, and will continue to beat the sidewalks and wear my shoes thin long after the treadmills are free of their January burdens. I don’t read enough, and chances are I’ll still be lamenting the fact when another winter hunches my shoulders.
Still, I can’t help but succumb to the promise of erecting bridges between new notions and manifested actions–of doing a few new things or doing a few things differently. And though I want to read more, write more, correspond better with others, and so on, all the things I would like to spend more or less time on may be boiled down to something like the following: “Don’t loaf around watching ESPN so much,” partly because doing so delays any real foray into my evening, and especially because stories about middle-aged quarterbacks and well-paid men in pinstripes just anger me for no good or easily articulated reason.
Here’s one thing: I need to draw more comics.
Not because I don’t draw enough (though I arguably don’t), but because I too often treat drawing as I do most of my other hobbies–irregularly, sometimes ineffectually. In the way that I scarcely outline academic papers, or the way I don’t start a blog post with a set length in mind, or the way I begin sentences without much consideration for how I might punctuate them, I start drawing without knowing what it is I want to draw and/or thereby “say.” It’s a wonderful, spontaneous release but hardly a work with purpose beyond the temporary alleviation of personal stress.
If I spend too much time and too many words, though, variously loving and criticizing my tendency to draw unplanned images, then the drawing of comics represents one of the few times I wholeheartedly donate my brain to a litany of questions centered around words like narrative, frame, space, duration or grid. Language, syntax and the building blocks of expression as I know them.
The panels of a strip are like the lines or verses of a song: there is a meter, a rhythm, a grammar to the thing that can tell a moment or a life in just two drawings and a space between them that we readers/lookers bridge with our minds as certainly as we immerse ourselves in the world of a motion picture, novel or video game–if the writing’s good. That beat between the drawings may be a comedic pause, à la Mark Twain on stage, or a rest as silent and jagged as a quarter rest on a score on a music stand, but either way it is a tool of expression I’ve neglected while tinkering with drawings of strange geezers and women with even wilder hairdo’s.
Here's something I just kind of drew.
Should a word bubble go next to the head or above it? Should I use one at all or let the words sit, compactly arranged, with nothing but a dash to indicate who is speaking? How much of the head or hand should be in the image–within the frame, or the camera’s eye, as it were? One spontaneous image doesn’t introduce me to questions like these.
It is through the drawing of comics, too, that I tread anywhere near a term like “theory,” where “grid” may suddenly become grid–a word around which entire books, philosophies and histories of historians thinking about history may turn. I might have three panels and the slender, blank spaces between them. I can draw an introduction, a set up, and a gag, as expected with any kind of narrative joke, or I can put the punchline of the strip in the middle instead of at its end, and make the strip a stage upon which a joke takes place.
I can make a triptych, a rose window between apses, a strange piece of comedic architecture akin to theater where the first and third panels are a set like Bob Cratchit’s humble home instead of a setting like the apartment in Get Fuzzy (not to say that Darby Conley tells better than Dickens or vice versa). I can turn three panels into frames of stop-motion animation.
A comic strip can be Muybridge, Albee or Schulz. I know this and scarcely act on these possibilities.
Prelude?
So here’s a start–or a sketch, at least. We’ll see if anything comes of it.
19 Cartwheels 