One of my favorite parts of the last two MOCCA festivals I've attended has been stopping by the tables set up by The Center for Cartoon Studies, a school for hopeful cartoonists and comic creators in Vermont, to pick up their
Sundays anthology. The anthologies, which look sort of like what would happen if you crossed a hand made minicomic with something about the size of
Kramer's Ergot 7, aren't completely made up of "great comics." In fact, I'd say about half of what ends up in there is only a bit removed from any random self-published mini you can find at a record store.
In the two I've read, I haven't seen anything I'd call out and out "bad" work—just stuff I'd rather not read again, comics that were amateurish and simple; boring, young work. Of course, I think that's to be expected. These are, after all, not comics that are going to end up in a lot of stores, they aren't comics that are designed to sell themselves, they're designed to sell potential—the potential that the cartoonist who turns in a particularly intelligent or curious piece of work could do something more if helped to find a larger canvas within which to work.
That's not to say that overall, the anthologies themselves don't have a level of quality to them, but to say that it reads more like the photography books that get dropped off at my office on a regular basis. Those books have art in them, sure—some of it extraordinarily exceptional art—but the book is there so that I'll want to hire that photographer. The art they provide for me and my co-workers to look at doesn't have anything specifically to do with the job-at-hand—I'm expected to look at it and see if this artist is somebody who should be brought on board to do some commercial work.
Those photography books are big, heavy books—part of any good agency's budget is devoted just to paying the messengers who will ferry these beasts around the city whenever companies like mine are on the look-out. Part of the reason they're so big is because they have to do two things: they have to show that the photographer can do the commercial work we'll be paying them for, and also that they have an individual artistic eye that gets brought into play when doing the work they do for themselves.
As far as I can tell, that's about as close as the life of a photographer is to a cartoonist, beyond the basic classification of "artist" that they both enjoy. The types of art they do, the type of money they can make, the type of acclaim they receive—eh. Not really a part of this column, so let's just acknowledge that it's "different" and move on.
When I read
Sundays, one thing that struck me about it was that it did seem like a bit of a limiting prospect, and it's one I was reminded of last year when I sat and watched a couple of super-hero comics heavyweights, Brian Michael Bendis & Robert Kirkman, argue about creator-owned work, dressing like hobos, and being all around entertaining. I was reminded because
Sundays provides a great opportunity for companies like Drawn & Quarterly or Fantagraphics to look and see whether or not it was time to start up another sequential alternative comic, or hire a new cartoonist for a bookstore-friendly anthology like
MOME, or maybe, just maybe, publish another big old graphic novel like
Blankets.
But that was it. As much as I enjoy, and hope to enjoy more of, anthologies like
Sundays, I can't pretend that there wasn't much in there that told me whether or not these were people that could produce some commercial work, be that the work-for-hire stuff that pays bills, or the type of illustration that can be found in countless catalogs and magazines. Now, before you take this to be some kind of cruel judgment, rest assured: I'm fully aware that the primary purpose of
Sundays is not so that the cartoonists of the CCS can get work. I'm fully aware that a big part of the program is for these artists to also publish their own individual comics. Most of all though, I'm fully aware that CCS does a lot more for young artists than help them publish anthologies and mini-comics—they've got a staff made up of cartoonists who have found relatively stable footing in the real world of paying bills and drawing comics, they've got a mentoring program that opens the door for a young artist to ask an older one how to get some medical insurance…in broad terms, what they've got is fantastic.
The only complaint I might have, because I've always got at least one, is that they can't do more with what
Sundays looks and feels like, which is like the yearbook anthology representing the recent class. That's what it is, sure, but it reads like a comic made for a specific reader—and I think it could do more. I think it could be something a bit more emblematic of the potential that these young artists have to offer beyond the pittance they'd make selling a few thousand copies of their serialized magnum opus—basically, I want both. I want a comic that isn't just going to entertain and interest a degenerate snob like me, but is also something they can slap down as a major part of their resume when they seek out the work-for-hire or commercial illustration work that can fill up their ATM card and pay off their student loan.
(I used the word "
can't" based off my own personal dealings with a few students from CCS. From what I've been told, I can't imagine that the school doesn't already do as much as they possibly can to prepare their students for a career that is, even at its best, not easy.) That's not to say I really care to add more work-for-hire to my collapsing bookshelf, or that I'm interested in framing illustrations tossed off for the gutters in
The Believer, but I am interested in knowing that a young cartoonist has medical insurance while he's working up the next issue of
Big Questions or the replacement for
Or Else.
That same desire for more is what led me to meet with the people from the Savannah College of Art & Design at the recent New York Comic Con. Out of all the various things I did, this was one of two that I actually did some preparation for. My interest in the majority of the press releases and public relations manifestos that ended up in my email box over the last few months lived somewhere between contempt and loathing—I can imagine that it might be funny in some awful, cruel way for a guy like me to waste a few minutes of some voice actor's life while I try to feign an interest in some bone-jarringly stupid cartoon about rats that can tell time, but the difficulty inherent in writing a column about something that doesn't interest me in the slightest killed that idea in the womb. No, SCAD was it—I work with some SCAD graduates, I was in Savannah back when Sandra Bullock got 86'd from a local dive bar, and the program they were promoting at the convention was an interesting one.
SCAD has offered classes for cartooning and comics for a long time, with some courses dating back 15 years, and they currently teach the whole shebang—be it super-hero, manga or down and dirty autobiographical comics about sexual inadequacy. (They're also one of the few places where you can get a Masters Degree in Sequential Arts.) The faculty members that I got a chance to talk to, Shawn Crystal and John Lowe, were an amiable group who were pretty open to the few questions I had for them, most of which stuck to the background information on their collaboration with Walker Books.
Walker & Company is the publisher responsible for the recent spat of
Twilight Zone comic adaptations that you might have seen at Barnes & Noble—after all, that's how I first found out about them. The books, most of which clock in around the 70-80 page mark and are sized the same as your standard super-hero trade, consist of one shot story adapted from old Rod Serling episodes of
The Twilight Zone by Mark Kneece, a comics-writing professor from SCAD. The art varies, with each story paired with a specific student or faculty member from SCAD's Sequential Art Program.
The program was actually initiated by Walker, and while they have the same sort of approval process one might expect from a publisher, all four of the volumes I've seen so far—
Walking Distance,
The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street,
The After Hours and
The Odyssey Of Flight 33—credit John Paul Lowe as the one responsible for "pairing the right artists with the right stories." (Which is a pretty nice statement on Lowe, considering he could have taken full credit for that, except that I wrote down his response to the specific question "who picks the artists?" as having him say "The faculty, I'm a part of the process.")
The comics themselves aren't really my thing, to be frank. There's a level of skill to all of them, but I have to beg off as never being that interested in the
Twilight Zone. But it's undeniably an interesting project to me, nonetheless.
See, before ever knowing anything about the program, I'd seen these things in stores. They've got a tri-colored spine design in various neons and pastels, a font that pops out amongst the sea of graphic novels about Barnes & Noble, covers that call back my memory of the time when everybody I knew was reading Christopher Pike's teen-reader books about axe-murders or the time when I was older and watched my little sister freak out over the
Goosebumps series run by R.L. Stine—without ever flipping through a copy, I immediately knew who these things were for and why they were there.
Classic stories, comic book art, low prices and nothing too overtly grotesque to keep them out of the hands of their target audience. It's a good idea, and finding out the background of it is born out of a desire to put new artists into the marketplace makes it an even better one. Would it be preferable for me if I liked the comics? Well, of course. But like the
Sundays anthologies, I don't think that it's too much of a slight against them.
Sundays,
The Twilight Zone books… they aren't comics made by people in the blooming explosions of the profession. They are, for the most part, coming from people who are just getting started, and while that certainly sways my ability to gauge these works objectively, everybody has to start somewhere.
I left the SCAD booth feeling pretty excited by the experience—the people there were clearly intelligent, motivated individuals, and the manner in which they spoke about the project was one that left me happy it was in such good hands. It was a bit of a disappointment for me to find out that it wasn't a project that was really to my tastes—but after last week's column on
Slam Dunk, I'm pretty okay with that. Comics already produce work that I like quite a bit—I'd say there's probably one solid "gotta get it" for me every single week.
But there's a whole lot of people out there who aren't served by what I find tantalizing. There's a whole lot of people out there who don't care to keep up with basketball manga, who don't want to read super-violent satire, who don't care at all about super-heroes—and maybe Twilight Zone is for them. I hope that's the case. The idea that somebody could find an opportunity to experience the prospect of working with a publisher, professional editors, all to end up with a product that gets shelved alongside stuff like the Immortal Iron Fist and Love & Rockets at a nation-wide chain—the idea of that happening for a young, hopeful cartoonist fresh out of art school?
Whether the something they produce is for me or not, the fact that there is a "something" at all is worth being a little bit happy about.
I mean, that's what I think this feeling is. It might be a tumor.
Tucker Stone's writing may be found in print in Comic Foundry and online at The Factual Opinion, where he frequently reviews new releases.
This Ship Is Totally Sinking is © Tucker Stone, 2008
