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Saturday, November 21, 2009. New Comics were 3 days ago

 

"It had to be something worth revisiting" : APE 2008 Panels

By Kristy Valenti

Monday November 10, 2008 09:00:00 am

The organizers of the 2008 Alternative Press Expo (APE), held at the Concourse in San Francisco, packed Sunday, Nov. 2 with their big-gun programming. The central idea I brought away from the Spotlight on Chris Ware, the Making of Kramers Ergot 7 and the Bay Area's Young Cartoonists panels was that there's been a return to narrative in indy cartooning this year.

Publisher Alvin Buenaventura said, regarding the upcoming 16" X 21" Kramers, that "this one was focused on being all narrative stories." Editor Sammy Harkham later explained,

The reason I also didn't want any art, only comics, in this issue [...] I thought this way — there's no art — as much as I would have loved to have included art, it's like, you don't include art, you're making a connection between this work and what Frank King was doing, and Winsor McCay.[1] It becomes that much more apparent when there's nothing else there. So someone like Leif Goldberg, or Paper Rad, you're connecting that tradition.

Chris Ware (Acme Novelty Library), whose piece "Actual Size" is in KE7, thought it was a "smart choice to make" for this format. To this end, Buenaventura said, "[…] a lot of the artists had to turn in their things two or three times, or even not be included with the book, because it just didn't fit." During the Bay Area Young Cartoonists panel, the voluble Thien Pham (Sumo) opined that there's been a return to storytelling; people are tired of $40 books that only have awesome images.

To be sure, all of the panels I attended that Sunday had their highlights. Though Chris Ware's panel, wherein he fielded questions put forth by McSweeney's Eli Horowitz, was basically a slide show and animation presentation, it was worth attending for the context it provided for Ware's work — he read a lot of sci-fi growing up, his mom and grandfather worked for the Omaha World Herald, his grandfather got thrown out of college for playing a prank on jocks, while his mother got kicked out of college for selling dark beer in Pepsi bottles to freshmen — and insights into Ware's work and creative process. (Plus, APE 2008 was only his second con.)

Regarding Rusty Brown: there's a long history of characters with the "Brown" surname in comics; the six characters represent the six sides of a snowflake; there's a website in real life in which men menace women dressed like Supergirl. Regarding the literary anthology McSweeney's 13, he wanted to use it to introduce bookstores to comics as literature for thinking adults.[2]

When he moved into the animation portion of the panel, he said that he customarily was not good at collaborating, and turned Ira Glass down the first time the latter approached the former about animating This American Life. Because of their working methods, they "did almost end up punching each other at one point," but Glass taught him about editing down and finding what was important in a story.

Ware said that, for him, cartooning was always about content, rather than form. He's trying to make it clear on the page how we see things, and that comics are a way of finding that mechanism.[3] He described his comics as not a "style," but a way of seeing. However, he worried that his use of the first person functioned as a filtration. Ware also doesn't think of what he does as "drawing," but rather as a weird form of symbolism. (He later clarified that his sketchbooks were "from life," but that his comics were "from the brain.")

This extends to his color palette for the story he's working on now (in context, I believe he meant Rusty Brown). He only uses "a hundred colors or so." He thought his colors were "pretty naturalistic, like the way if you blur your eyes […], it's how you would see everything in front of you, and the black line of the comic is what your brain has internalized about everything you've learned in your life up to that point then it superimposes it back on it and tells you what you're looking at."

As for the storytelling aspects of color, he uses it not only for mood but to link, contradict and draw out aspects of the story. When Horowitz inquired about how "pretty" Ware's comics looked, Ware admitted he was a little concerned about that, but remarked that the "[world] looks perfectly composed to me, where I'm looking." He uses the attractive art to contrast with his despairing stories, not to inspire hopelessness, but the opposite. On a technical level, Ware plots his stories out in his mind and on paper, but doesn't sketch his page out first: rather he just starts in the upper corner or in the middle.

What was most fascinating about the unwieldy KE7 panel, composed of Alvin Buenaventura, Sammy Harkham, Chris Ware, Dan Clowes, Jaime Hernandez, Ted May and Eric Haven (and moderated by The Believer's Andrew Leland), other than the aforementioned discussion of the narrative trend, Harkham's brief history of Kramers, the cartoonists' tales of grappling with the format and the apparent apocalyptic themes that kept cropping up in the artists' submissions,[4] was the attention given to the human rights issues involved in printing overseas.

Buenaventura told a story about visiting Malaysia, where KE7 was handbound. He said, "it's definitely not a sweatshop," but compared going from Singapore to Malaysia "as going from San Diego to Tijuana. It completely changes." He said that the workers "lived there and they come from Thailand and other places and they come to this place and they're treated really well and live there for months. And they send money back …"

Ware also shared his experiences: since Jimmy Corrigan had been misprinted several times, about eight years back he visited his printer in Shenzhen. Ware said many of the people working collating the paper were teenaged girls, but the publishers assured him that this was one of the only places in China where women could get "respectable" work, not prostitution or agricultural.

Buenaventura then recovered, and assured the packed room "that they had all the same labor laws and everything […], and it was nothing like that. There were no young girls, but obviously, the minimum working age there was 16. It was interesting to see, but it wasn't a sweatshop."

Ware observed that the small-press explosion had a lot to do with cheap printing, citing McSweeney's and TWP as an example. He called printing in the States "hideously expensive," and then verbally painted a picture of thug-like printers he had once worked with in Chicago, who printed his comics badly and overcharged. "If we have to go back to that," he half-joked, "it's the end of our little self-indulgent comic book fun time."

The Bay Area Young Cartoonists was frankly stolen by Thien Pham, who was in turns silly, sharply observant and affecting. Other panelists included Briana Miller (still, simple),[5] Rina Ayunyang (Namby Pamby), Andy Hartzell (Fox Bunny Funny), Andy Ristaino (The Babysitter) and Jason Thompson (The King of RPGs).The panel was moderated by Andrew Farago, gallery manager of the Cartoon Art Museum.

Though he was not there, Gene Yang (American Born Chinese), with whom Pham is collaborating on a project, loomed large: he was responsible for securing Miller and Pham jobs at the same Catholic school he teaches at. Perhaps the most pertinent information[6] garnered from the panel was about minicomics distributor Globo Hobo: Hartzell and Pham were some of the original founders; there was much discussion of "prongs" at this point, but it all boiled down to, once webmaster Jesse Reklaw left, the endeavor was basically dormant until Eli Bishop took over the site.

Also of value were the cartoonists' recommendations for what was out on the selling floor[7], updates on their upcoming projects and especially their take on how the economy might affect small press/minicomics. Pham observed that this year's APE didn't appear to be that affected; he chalked that up to lower gas prices. Hartzell noted that comics started in the Depression. Ayunyang said that people are creative by any means necessary, even if that takes the form of minis and self-publishing.

Kristy Valenti currently works for The Comics Journal and Fantagraphics Books, Inc.

Uncharted Territory is © Kristy Valenti, 2008

 

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