Comics

Spring/23

My Very Own Library brings an author and icon to a neighborhood school.

“During this event we are not allowing any pictures,” Karen Calloway, principal of Hyde Park’s Kenwood Academy, announces to the middle schoolers gathered in the auditorium. “I know. I’m sorry.” Calloway, who’s wearing a Kenwood Broncos sweatshirt, manages to sound firm, warm, and enthusiastic at the same time. “We expect that you-all will listen with your ears and your eyes,” she says, and be respectful, “as you have been already this morning.”

This is no ordinary assembly. It’s a book launch event with activist and former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick and his coauthor Eve L. Ewing, AB’08, associate professor in the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity. Colin Kaepernick: Change the Game (Graphix, an imprint of Scholastic, 2023), their graphic novel with art by Orlando Caicedo, is aimed at readers 12 and up. It focuses on Kaepernick’s senior year in high school, when he felt pressured to play baseball—and to fit in with his adoptive White family.

Change the Game is Kaepernick’s second autobiographical children’s book. Last year he published a picture book, I Color Myself Different (Scholastic, 2022), which became a New York Times bestseller. Ewing’s many publishing credits—setting aside her academic work—include a middle-grade novel and the Ironheart and Champions series for Marvel Comics.

As well as students from Kenwood Academy’s middle school, the audience includes groups from Chicago’s Kozminski Elementary, Shoesmith Elementary, and the UChicago Charter Woodlawn Campus, with other students watching via Zoom from around the country. The in-person attendees all received a copy of Change the Game courtesy of Scholastic and My Very Own Library, UChicago’s literacy initiative, which provides books to students in public elementary schools.

UChicago assumed leadership of My Very Own Library in 2019. Since the program’s 2011 founding, it has given more than two million books to students in Chicago and other American cities as well as in the Dominican Republic. My Very Own Library also has a YouTube channel with authors, including Ewing, reading their work.

Calloway introduces the two emcees: ninth grader Josie Singleton and senior Isaac Saffold—a football player and future presidential scholar at Drake University, Calloway notes with pride.

Singleton’s first question, directed at both Kaepernick and Ewing, is about “your hair journey from when you were younger.”

In the book, hair is an important signifier of culture and belonging. The cover illustration, for example, shows a short-haired teenage Kaepernick holding a baseball and a catcher’s mitt. But the shadow he casts is of a grown man in bulky shoulder pads, holding a football and a helmet, with natural hair: “the magnificent ’fro,” Ewing describes it, as Kaepernick laughs.

The first chapter centers on Kaepernick’s desire to grow his hair, to his parents’ frustration. “And I’m getting cornrows,” 15-year-old Kaepernick asserts as he storms out of the kitchen. His mother turns to his father: “He’s getting what rolls?”

Wearing his hair the way he wanted “was part of embracing my culture,” Kaepernick tells his young listeners. “Embracing our culture.” In Change the Game, he and Ewing wanted to underscore that “we don’t have to subscribe to Eurocentric or White beauty standards,” he says. “How your hair grows out of your head is beautiful.”

Saffold has a few sports questions. How did it feel to get your first Division I offer? he asks. “I don’t remember,” Kaepernick answers, smiling. He was heavily recruited for baseball but had no interest.

Two weeks before final signing day, he was called out of class. It was the University of Nevada’s head football coach on the school phone: “We want you to come play football, … but you have to commit to not playing baseball,” Kaepernick recalls. “And I was like, ‘Done.’” Ewing has heard this story before—it’s how the final chapter ends—but breaks into laughter anyway.

After Singleton and Saffold have asked all their questions, a screen at the back of the stage lights up: students attending remotely have questions too. What was your first experience with racial inequality? a young man from Newark, New Jersey, wants to know.

“This is me putting my professor hat on,” Ewing says, gesturing as if she is putting on an invisible hat. “Our first experiences with racial inequality happen before we’re born.” The design of cities, the availability of jobs and transportation, the quality of schools and health care—all are defined by inequality. “When we say ‘systemic racism,’ that’s what that means.

“But in terms of what I actually remember,” she continues, “I was called the N-word for the first time when I was maybe 6.” She was riding her bike; a White woman “who was struggling with mental illness” yelled at her. Ewing didn’t know what the word meant. Decades later, as a doctoral student, she had a near-identical experience in Harvard Square. A woman “called me the N-word, and she called me a cockroach,” Ewing says matter-of-factly. “It’s not fair that we should have to deal with that.”

Perhaps because of his upbringing as a transracial adoptee—Change the Game chronicles numerous painful moments of unintended parental cluelessness—Kaepernick can’t remember a first moment. “Oftentimes when we’re younger, we might not even know,” he says. “But we know it feels wrong.”

“How many of y’all have faced racism?” he asks the audience. Around the auditorium, children raise their hands. “And to Eve’s point,” he says, “those of you who don’t have your hands up, you’ve faced racism. You just may not exactly know how it’s affected you yet.”

What inspires you to create books that empower Black people? a young man from UChicago Charter Woodlawn asks. “Because I love us,” Kaepernick says, to thunderous applause.

“In education we say a book can be a mirror or a window,” Ewing says: it can reflect your own experience or show you someone else’s. While Change the Game tells Kaepernick’s story—being an athlete and an adoptee—many parts are universal, like having a first crush and standing up to your parents. “The things that bring us together are so much more powerful than the things that tear us apart,” Ewing says.

At the end, Calloway returns to the stage to talk up Kenwood’s basketball champions and its spelling bee winner—and, to the audience’s amazement, relents on the picture ban.

Kaepernick makes his way to the edge of the stage. He shakes the hands of middle schoolers and middle-aged schoolteachers alike. He smiles in selfie after selfie.

University News

Books

Football

Charter Schools

Alumni Weekend 2022

rsmith — Thu, 11 Aug 2022 14:13:47 +0000

rsmith Thu, 08/11/2022 - 09:13

(Illustrations by Peter and Maria Hoey)

Summer/22

Reunited, and it felt so good.

View a PDF of this comic as it appeared in print.

University News

Alumni Weekend

The best medicine

rsmith — Thu, 26 Oct 2017 16:17:10 +0000

rsmith Thu, 10/26/2017 - 11:17

Image courtesy Shirlene Obuobi

Laura Demanski, AM’94

Fall/17

Pritzker student Shirlene Obuobi takes a comic approach to medical school.

In ShirlyWhirl, M.D., a comic drawn by fourth-year Pritzker student Shirlene Obuobi, an autobiographical doctor in training navigates the pressures of medical school, universal ones and those that especially affect traditionally underrepresented students. The comics address serious issues with unflagging levity and have a following of medical students around the country. “The most fun,” she says, is “when people tag their friends and say ‘that’s me.’”

Obuobi was born in Ghana, her family moving to the United States when she was 6. She spent part of her childhood in the Chicago suburb of Hinsdale and graduated from Washington University in St. Louis. She plans a residency in internal medicine. The Magazine spoke to Obuobi about Shirly Whirly, M.D., balancing art and rounds, and her future plans.

This interview has been edited and adapted.

When did you start drawing?

I was definitely a doodler as a kid. I didn’t really start drawing comics specifically until high school, when I drew a strip for the high school newspaper. Then in college I actually had a little comic drawing club called KaPOW that I think still exists. I look them up every now and then. We got people who love to write and people who love to draw together and tried to make little graphic novellas.

When I came to med school, the comics went the way of those experiences. I was initially only sharing them with my classmates. After a little while my roommate was like, you should make this into something available for everyone.

The comics are very honest about how medical school is experienced by women and people of color.

I was pretty intentional about making the main character me, and making her a woman and black. Part of the intention of that was to humanize the profession, in general, and humanize the experience. So I have things that everybody can relate to strongly, regardless of background and identity. And I have things that might be relatable if you’re from my background but might open your eyes if you’re not. Those are things I plan on going into even more as the comic goes on. I want people to talk and share experiences, while maintaining the levity of the page.

Have your readers done that?

For sure. Now my classmates are a pretty small proportion of my regular viewers. They can tell me in person what they think—and they do on a frequent basis. It’s been interesting to see how other people who go to other med schools interact with it.

How did you get interested in medicine?

I have a pretty boring origin story. Basically, my mom is a doctor, so I grew up in a culture of medicine. Something like 50 percent of med students have a doctor parent. I think it was always at the back of my mind that it was something I could want to do. When I got a little bit older, it was the typical “I want to do something that helps people,” make a direct impact. The other part of it is that I really like talking to people, and talking to them day to day. When I thought about my job in the future I tried the whole sitting at a desk thing and it wasn’t my thing. I like to be on my feet and talking and thinking things out loud. So it kind of just fit.

Will you continue the comic as you move on to your residency next year?

Yes. There’s a whole field that I didn’t know about until recently called graphic medicine [that uses comics for medical education and patient care]. Physicians and health care workers, and I think a few nurses and physician assistants, are involved. They translate their experiences and experiences of others, even patient experiences, through comics. It’s a medium where you can communicate a lot, not just through words but through visual things, and it’s also really accessible for a lot of people. Not everyone wants to sit down for six hours and read a book on something. You can get a lot of emotion and visual information from a comic.

Now that you’re in your last year, what do you think of Pritzker?

I really enjoyed my time at Pritzker, and I’m a little bit sad seeing it come to a close already. Pritzker makes med school, which is intrinsically stressful, as unstressful as it possibly could be, which I really appreciate. They try, especially in the preclinical years. They try really hard. They’re all about wellness. I’m all about wellness because I’m drawing a bunch of comics all the time. And I’ve really enjoyed it.

Image courtesy Shirlene Obuobi

Read Shirly Whirly, M.D. on Instagram at @shirlywhirlmd and see Obuobi’s other art at gurlshark.tumblr.com.

Science & Medicine

Pritzker School of Medicine

Medicine

For cartoonist Daniel Clowes, LAB’79, every page is personal

jmiller — Fri, 08 Apr 2016 15:32:36 +0000

jmiller Fri, 04/08/2016 - 10:32

Artist Daniel Clowes (left) talks with lecturer Daniel Raeburn (right) at the March 29 event. (Photo by Jean Lachat)

Susie Allen, AB’09

04.08.2016

The Ghost World author and Hyde Park native opens up about his creative process.

“I grew up blocks from this very space,” cartoonist Daniel Clowes, LAB’79, told the crowd gathered at the Regenstein Library. Clowes now lives in Oakland, California, but to this day, Hyde Park’s street names float through his dreams. “When I wake up, I still think I’m in ninth grade and I have to walk down Woodlawn Avenue to school.”

The March 29 event, held in honor of the opening of an exhibition of Clowes’s work in the Special Collections Research Center closed a circle that began in childhood, when the University of Chicago, “both the campus and the institution, was central, almost overwhelmingly so, to my formative life,” Clowes has said.

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_original","fid":"3435","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","height":"333","typeof":"foaf:Image","width":"500"}}]]Self-portrait sketch for Mister Wonderful, ca. 2008–11. (Daniel Clowes Archive, University of Chicago Library. Copyright Daniel Clowes.)

Clowes’s parents, an auto mechanic and a furniture craftsman, divorced when he was two, and he spent much of his time with his grandparents. His grandfather, James Lea Cate, PhD’35, was a scholar of medieval history and historiography. (His stepmother, Harriet Clowes, also had University ties; she worked in development at the University of Chicago Library in the late 1970s.) Clowes’s papers—from which the exhibition is drawn—are held in the Library’s archives, alongside his grandfather’s.

The hometown-boy-done-good, known for his oddball, loner characters and eclectic visual style, is widely considered one of the most important cartoonists of his generation. Clowes’s new graphic novel, Patience (Fantagraphics, 2016), is earning raves, with reviewers calling it “stunning” and “Clowes’ most confident and clear-headed book to date.”

During a free-flowing conversation with Daniel Raeburn, lecturer in creative writing at UChicago, Clowes revealed the painstaking creative process behind his comics. He begins with outlines and sketches before moving to illustration (“I always just wanted to draw—that was my goal all along”), laborious hand lettering (“a slog”), and coloring (in the case of Patience, “a full year of living hell ... at the end of the year I was literally having dreams in Photoshop”).

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_original","fid":"3436","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","height":"333","typeof":"foaf:Image","width":"500"}}]]Character sketches for The Death-Ray, ca. 2003–11. (Daniel Clowes Archive, University of Chicago Library. Copyright Daniel Clowes.)

Through it all, Clowes said, he hopes to create a holistic and intimate experience for readers on each page. “It has to all be me. I can’t allow any other input,” he explained. That’s why he eschews computerized fonts. “There would be some slight input from a machine or a programmer in Silicon Valley. To me, it’s about getting the essential, the personal onto that page.”

Clowes was always attracted to comics. “I read them all,” he said. In his teens, he consumed the lowbrow, the highbrow, and every brow in between, but he soon developed a more critical eye: “I realized at 18 I didn’t need to read Richie Rich anymore.”

In art school, Clowes was disappointed to discover his instructors’ disdain for the medium of comics—and its practitioners, whom they dismissed as “weirdos and degenerates … with no other source of potential income.”

Yet he’s never been able to abandon the medium. In his attempts at writing fiction, “when I sit down to describe a character’s room, I think, ‘I could just draw a picture of it.’”

Comics remain, in Clowes’s eyes, a medium that facilitates “the perfect one-to-one relationship from an artist to a reader,” both created and consumed alone. “Where else in the world do you have complete control?”

“Exhibition Highlights Artistic Process of Cartoonist Daniel Clowes” (University of Chicago News Office, 03.03.2016) “University of Chicago Acquires Papers of Cartoonist Daniel Clowes” (University of Chicago News Office, 04.30.2015) “Chicken Fat” (University of Chicago Magazine, July–Aug/12) “Drawn to Comics” (University of Chicago Magazine, Jan–Feb/11)

Browse the Library’s Daniel Clowes web exhibition Follow @DanielClowes, @UChicagoSCRC, and @UChicagoReg. Join the campaign and enable the Library to expand its print and electronic resources, to make them accessible in new ways, and to help students and scholars to use them on campus and around the world.

Of superhuman bondage

rsmith — Wed, 29 Oct 2014 17:23:41 +0000

rsmith Wed, 10/29/2014 - 12:23

(Photography by Sharyn Morrow, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Noah Berlatsky, AM’94

Nov–Dec/14

Noah Berlatsky, AM’94, uncoils the rope that ties Wonder Woman to traditional male superheroes and to Twilight’s Bella.

Driving my son and a carpool full of boys to school, the conversation naturally turned to superheroes—or more precisely, superpowers. Which ones would you pick for yourself? Flying, superstrength, and invisibility got mentions, followed by a long, involved conversation about whether shape-shifting meant that you could fly, be superstrong, and be invisible, or whether that was illogical or (more importantly) unfair.

Whether illogical or unfair, though, I think my carpool was onto something. The battle between good and evil in superhero stories, and even really their plots, often seems beside the point. The fun bit, the part you go to the theater to see, is all those awesome powers powering away. Doing good is OK, but the real fun is in doing good by blasting bad guys (or whoever) with your repulsor rays (which shapeshifters may or may not be able to duplicate). It is, as my carpool cheerfully suggests, a stereotypically boy-centric vision of narrative, in which what happens is less important than who’s stronger and how.

That insight is hardly original. Psychologist William Marston was saying the same in 1944, only a few years after the original Superman started to power up. According to Marston, “It seemed to me, from a psychological angle … that the comics’ worst offense was their blood-curdling masculinity. A male hero, at best, lacks the qualities of maternal love and tenderness which are as essential to a normal child as the breath of life. Suppose your child’s ideal becomes a superman who uses his extraordinary powers to help the weak. The most important ingredient in the human happiness recipe still is missing—love.”

It’s a bit of a stretch to imagine my carpool debating the relative merits of love versus shape-shifting as a superpower. Nonetheless, Marston’s added ingredient turned out to make for extraordinarily popular superhero comics. His character, Wonder Woman, arguably the first female superhero, sold staggeringly well during World War II, when comics could move hundreds of thousands of copies a month. They aren’t necessarily dated either; my son read them and thought they were great.

To some degree, those original Wonder Woman comics don’t seem to stray far from the standard boy model of superheroism: we’ve got lots of powers and we’re going to blast you with them. Wonder Woman is superstrong and superfast (she outruns a car in one of her first appearances), plus she has nifty weapons like a lasso of command that makes you do whatever she says. She does fight bad guys, and bad girls too.

But blasting someone with heat vision is one thing; wrapping them in a rope that compels obedience is something else. The original Wonder Woman comics don’t involve long violent battles in which bodies go flying and property damage escalates, as in the final city-destroying über-punch-fest in Man of Steel. Instead, Wonder Woman ties people up and commands them. And then, quite often, the villain manages to get her rope, and tie her up, and command her. And then she gets it back, and commands them. The comics are more about this playful vertiginous round than they are about violent struggle and permanent defeat. In Wonder Woman No. 2 there’s a two-page sequence in which an “Oriental dancer” named Naha binds Wonder Woman with her own rope and leads her around town. Supposedly this is to throw off the police, but really the comic seems to see the spectacle as a pleasure in itself.

In an interview, Marston explicitly said that Wonder Woman’s lasso was “a symbol of female charm, allure, oomph, attraction.” There are scenes of bondage—of people being tied up with that symbol of female allure—on virtually every page. Wonder Woman comics consciously replace violence with flirtation.

It may seem like the erotic approach to superheroes hasn’t had much long-term traction. Superhero comics and superhero movies tend to be devoted to explosions, not to bondage games. Wonder Woman’s recent comics, written by Brian Azzarello and drawn by Cliff Chiang, are awash in blood and guts. The upcoming Batman V Superman film, in which Wonder Woman is supposed to have a cameo, is directed by Zack Snyder—say no more.

Still, despite the popularity of violent superheroes, one of the most successful multimedia phenomena of the past decade is a superhero story in which love is the greatest superpower: the tween vampire romance series Twilight. And not coincidentally, like Wonder Woman, its protagonist is a woman.

Admittedly, Twilight’s Bella isn’t usually seen as a superhero. But there’s no doubt that in Stephenie Meyer’s final book she gains superpowers, becoming a vampire with superstrength, superspeed, and superinvulnerability. Moreover, the series strongly suggests from the very first book that Bella is a potential vampire in waiting. She can smell blood when she’s still a human, and her telepathic vampire boyfriend Edward can’t read her mind. Most superhero stories are about powers, so the hero gets those powers at the beginning of the narrative. Twilight, though, takes its time—three whole books—before handing over the superness.

Meyer is in no rush to make Bella super because in Twilight the powers are secondary to the romance. The series is all about the sexy ancient/young vampire Edward and about the sexy, virile werewolf Jacob. The ups and downs of those relationships are the focus; superpowers are there to add tension and excitement to the romance, not to the violence. In the very last scene in Twilight, vampire Bella reveals to Edward that she now has the ability to let him read her mind. The ultimate, most awesome superpower is not shape-shifting, as my son would have it, but the ability to join minds with your husband for all eternity.

When I told a college class earlier this year that Bella might be a superhero, they were as skeptical as my carpool would be if I suggested that mind melding with your spouse might make a desirable superpower. Bella, the college students argued, was whiny, ineffectual, mopey, and boring. She didn’t have exciting adventures, and she certainly didn’t stake evil vampires the way that other superhero Buffy did.

The students were right. Bella isn’t heroic the way Buffy is. If superheroism and superpowers are defined in terms of the destructive power of Iron Man’s repulsors, or how much Hulk can smash, then Bella—and the early Wonder Woman—aren’t very impressive as superheroes. But as fun as it is to blow things up and stake evil through the heart, it’s worth considering other kinds of heroism too. As my son shape-shifts on up through adolescence and beyond, I hope he’s strong and brave and able to fight for what he believes. But I hope, for my sake and his, that one of his powers is the ability to love.

Noah Berlatsky, AM’94, is the author of Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics, 1941–1948, due out in early 2015 from Rutgers University Press. He edits the comics and culture website the Hooded Utilitarian and is a contributing writer at the Atlantic.

Arts & Humanities

Alumni Essay

Wow! Pow! Prizes!

jmiller — Tue, 12 Aug 2014 01:33:39 +0000

jmiller Mon, 08/11/2014 - 20:33

Hillary Chute. (Portrait by Ivan Brunetti, AB’89)

Elizabeth Station

Carrie Golus, AB’91, AM’93

08.12.2014

Enter the world of comics—and win a book about how they’re made.

If you could choose a cartoonist to draw your life, who would it be? If you could leave your daily grind and step into a graphic narrative, where would your story be set?

Dash off an answer to those questions and leave it as a comment on this blog post by 5 p.m. (CDT) on Friday, August 15. Hillary L. Chute, author of Outside the Box: Interviews with Contemporary Cartoonists (University of Chicago Press, 2014), will pick a lucky winner to receive a signed copy of her book.

Chute, who studies comics as a literary form, is an associate professor of English at UChicago. In her book she dives deep into the world of cartooning with artists like Lynda Barry, Chris Ware, and Art Spiegelman. You can read an interview with Chute about the work and find out which cartoonist was her tweenage crush.

But before you do that, leave a comment with your entry. We’ll do our best to offer some comic relief.

The winner will be announced Monday, August 18.

* * * * *

From the editors: And the winner is ... Anthony Ruth, AB'03, AM'07.

Here is his winning entry:

“I’ve often thought I’d like to write a comic about living with my retired greyhound. Then I quickly realize it would basically be Garfield, but with a dog and a gay man. So I guess my observed answer is Jim Davis, but my desired answer is something like a combo of Roz Chast for her hilarious depiction of anxiety, William Haefeli for his dry take on modern gay life, and Alison Bechdel for her unflinching self-reflection (and propensity to inspire Broadway musicals).”

Feedback from contest judge Hillary L. Chute:

“There are some good ones…. I love the scientist and the ants…. but I choose this one, an updated Garfield with an elegant explanation.”

Thanks to everyone who entered.

“Chute Goes Outside the Box in New Book on Contemporary Comics” (University of Chicago News Office, July 28, 2014) “Chicken Fat” (University of Chicago Magazine, July–Aug/12) “Drawn to Comics” (University of Chicago Magazine, Jan–Feb/11)

Five things I learned from the Sun Bros.

jmiller — Tue, 18 Feb 2014 16:57:31 +0000

jmiller Tue, 02/18/2014 - 10:57

Panels from Monkey Fist. (Courtesy of the Sun Bros.)

02.17.2014

Wesley and Brad Sun on comics, Kickstarter, and their latest collaboration, Monkey Fist.

Wednesday lunch at the Divinity School, held in the wood-paneled portrait-lined Swift Common Room, is one of the best-kept secrets at the University.

For five dollars, you get a vegetarian lunch, a smidgeon of wine if you want it, and a lecture by someone who’s doing something interesting. At Div School lunches, I’ve learned about a Hyde Park synagogue that ripped out its lawn to grow food for the hungry and how writer Anne Ford, AM’99, finds the subjects for her Chicagoans interview series.

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_original","fid":"1144","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","height":"259","typeof":"foaf:Image","width":"460"}}]]

Last week, lunch was a goat cheese tart and Brussels sprout slaw (sounds unpromising, but I could have eaten a mixing bowl of that stuff) while the lecture topic was comics as art objects.

Wesley Sun, MDiv’08, director of community engagement at the Div School, has been collaborating with his brother Brad on comics since 2011. Wesley is the primary writer, Brad the cowriter and artist.

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_original","fid":"1146","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","height":"259","typeof":"foaf:Image","width":"460"}}]]

They’ve self-published two books so far: Chinatown (2012) and Apocalypse Man (2013). A Kickstarter campaign for their latest, Monkey Fist, an adaptation of the Monkey King story from Chinese literature—albeit set in the fast-food restaurant Fishy Burger—has nearly reached its $14,000 goal. They’ve raised $11,500 from more than 200 backers.

So here are five interesting things the Sun Bros. had to say:

1. While painting is clearly an art object, and a reproduction is an inferior copy, comics present a more complicated picture. Brad has shown his comic-book art in a gallery setting, but “in my opinion, it’s the printed book that is the true art,” he says. “The pages are just the component pieces. The true art is the mass-produced object.”

2. The dimensions of a standard comic book were determined by the size of a broadsheet newspaper, folded in quarters. “It was not an art decision,” says Brad, “it was a practical decision.”

3. While Chinatown was printed in color on high-quality paper, Apocalypse Man was printed in black and white on inexpensive paper—not to save money, but for aesthetic reasons. The Sun Bros. wanted it to have the same feel as the 1980s newsprint Ninja Turtle comics they loved as children. The printer pointed out that newsprint tends to smear, so they settled on “the cheapest paper that doesn’t smudge,” says Wesley.

4. Unlike novelists—who often have no say in the production of their books, even what the cover will look like—self-publishing comics artists are heavily involved in design and printing. Decisions about page dimensions, paper stock, and ink color are all a part of what they’re trying to do: “We use the different elements as storytelling devices,” says Wesley.

5. According to their write-up on the Kickstarter site, backers who pledge $300 or more to Monkey Fist are entitled to “a customized drawing of you by Brad beating up anyone you want. You tell us who, provide reference photos, and Brad will do the rest.” So far, four people have signed up for this option.

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_original","fid":"1147","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","height":"259","typeof":"foaf:Image","width":"460"}}]]

Comics city

jmiller — Tue, 22 May 2012 15:17:00 +0000

jmiller Tue, 05/22/2012 - 10:17

Above (L–R): Hillary Chute; Charles Burns; Dan Clowes, U-High’79; Seth; and Chris Ware. (Photography by Jason Smith/Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry) Below: R. Crumb panel. (Courtesy Hillary Chute)

Elizabeth Station

05.22.2012

An interview with UChicago’s Hillary Chute, who convened an all-star lineup for a conference on comics.

For many, the big draw in Chicago this past weekend wasn’t the NATO summit but a three-day conference called Comics: Philosophy and Practice. The gathering brought together 17 giants of the genre—from Robert Crumb to Lynda Barry to Chris Ware—for an often hilarious, always illuminating look at graphic narrative. The conference mastermind, Hillary Chute, author of Graphic Women and Neubauer Family assistant professor in English, talked about the event.

How did you get all those people here, in one place, for the whole weekend?

I knew almost all of the participants, and I knew how much they were interested in each other’s work. So the list of invitees started to snowball, and the guest list just started filling out because people were so excited to have the chance to talk to their colleagues in this format.

What were some of your favorite moments of the conference?

One of my favorite moments was when there was actual disagreement happening, because to me that’s the sign of a good conference and not just a fun conference. Françoise Mouly and Robert Crumb were having a disagreement about his rejected cover for the New Yorker, and it got a little bit tense. But it was so exciting for me because they were talking about a real issue that came up throughout the whole weekend, which was this issue of comics assimilating into the mainstream.

Crumb may have put it a little starkly or harshly when he said, “Once you start doing covers for the New Yorker and you’re thinking of other people’s taste, you might as well cut your dick off.” (laughs) It was a moment of real disagreement around the cultural spaces of comics. I thought that was thrilling, even though some people thought it was upsetting that they were having such a vociferous disagreement.

It was funny, but a little shocking.

That’s exactly what I wanted to have happen in this conference: to have someone as interesting and as powerful as Françoise Mouly, who’s been the art editor of the New Yorker for 20 years, and someone as powerful and interesting as Robert Crumb—who’s really set the terms for the field and inspired every single person in attendance—be at odds about cultural venues for comics and trying to take stock of this awkward, emerging field of comics in the mainstream.

Not only were famous cartoonists present and speaking, but they were in the front rows of the audience, listening intently and piping up with questions and comments. Is that something you encouraged and expected?

Honestly, that was my dream for the conference and exactly what I hoped would happen. I talk to these people; I know them; I collaborated with Art Spiegelman on MetaMaus; I interviewed Aline Kominsky-Crumb; I am collaborating with Alison Bechdel this quarter. I have relationships with these cartoonists as individuals. And my intellectual fantasy for the conference was to have a platform where the students and faculty and cartoonists could talk to each other, but also where the cartoonists could respond to each other’s work.

So I was thrilled when Robert Crumb was piping up from the front row, and when Seth was asking questions of Aline Kominsky-Crumb.

Were there any amazing behind-the-scenes moments?

All of these people have never been together before, so there was something amazing about getting all 17 of them together for a group photo. Robert Crumb didn’t want to be in the picture at first, but Aline convinced him. I think that everyone just had such a blast.

After the conference was over, Lynda Barry came up to me and said, “It’s so amazing to be with some of my colleagues who I've never even met or had the chance to talk to before.” I can remember Lynda telling me about when she first read Crumb, and how she would copy his comics, and I think she mentioned this in her panel. And she said to me, “Do you know what it was like to have Robert Crumb sing a monkey song to me at a panel?” And then she burst into tears.

It was also really meaningful to put together all of these people who influenced each other in so many different ways. I know Lynda Barry influenced Ivan Brunetti [AB’89], and Robert Crumb and Gary Panter influenced Lynda Barry. And there they all were, on a panel together. I think all of the panelists actually found that really moving.

Was the fact this took place in Chicago significant, since the participants also influenced so many audience members who make comics?

Absolutely. That was one of the parts of the conference that I tried to conceptualize from the beginning, and I think it worked out really well. I invited several Chicago cartoonists specifically—people like John Porcellino and Laura Park, younger cartoonists in Chicago whose work is really amazing—and I know that others came.

Were there moments that showed why convening a conference can be better than just meeting up online?

The panel that Hamza Walker [AB’88] moderated Sunday morning, called “Lines on Paper,” was unbelievable. Hamza did an amazing job; he was the perfect interlocutor—and speaking of behind-the-scenes moments, he gave Lynda Barry the T-shirt off his back at lunch, a Raymond Pettibon T-shirt from a Renaissance Society show a few years ago. He took it off and gave it to her because she loved it so much.

The panel was great. Hamza sang, then Lynda sang, and the panel ended with Robert Crumb singing. And then there was a standing ovation. So being in the room you could really feel how electric it was.

What was the impact of the NATO summit happening at the same time?

I think that NATO affected the number of people who could actually make it to the conference space. For weeks I’d been stressed out with the idea that there literally wouldn’t be enough chairs in the auditorium for all the people who wanted to come. As it turned out, there were more empty seats than I had anticipated; I thought that there would be no empty seats at all because registration was actually overbooked and totally full.

I was disappointed about that because there was something really special about being able to share physical space with the cartoonists. On the other hand, I’m so thrilled that practically the entire weekend was webcast. People were able to watch online; we had people writing in from Argentina and Greece on Twitter. Someone traveled from Israel, so we had international interest.

Pulling this off makes you a rock star. How do you feel about that?

Oh (laughs), I think it’s the people who came who were the real stars. For me the coup was to get people to trust me enough to want to come to a conference I was organizing. On the opening night I read part of a postcard that R. Crumb had sent me expressing some of his reservations. But he came and he participated—sometimes without raising his hand—in an engaged and enthusiastic way the whole weekend.

One funny moment was when Hamza Walker was talking about DIY; that is, the do-it-yourself movement in art and publishing. And Crumb turned to someone and asked, “What’s DIY?”

I remember that. Of course he’s one of the godfathers of DIY, even if he doesn’t know it. He put out Zap Comix by himself in 1968. When his wife was pregnant, they stood on the corner and sold it out of a bassinet on Haight Street in San Francisco. So that’s the definition of DIY (laughs).

These people really helped create a lot of the culture that we now take for granted. Underground comics, do-it-yourself, and left-wing publishing really laid the groundwork for zines to happen in the US. Comics also laid the groundwork for all sorts of taboo shattering that we now take for granted. Crumb doesn’t know the linguistic commonplace, but he’s one of the people who helped make it happen. That was a fascinating cultural and generational moment to me.

How about that moment when Crumb referred to a young women who asked him a question as a “cute thing”? The audience laughed nervously, and Lynda Barry started going, “Boing! Boing!” But he seemed unaware of the effect he had caused.

That was a live issue throughout the whole conference, and it made things tense but also, I think, really productively interesting. A lot of these people go to universities and give lectures and are, in a sense, part of academic discourse and contributing to it in a way that’s very obvious to them.

Someone like Art Spiegelman gives lectures all over the world at universities and taught a course on comics at Columbia a few years ago, so he’s part of this world. But then there are others who are actually counter-cultural people. And they don’t necessarily care about expectations for an academic conference.

What’s interesting is putting people with all sorts of different levels of comfort with, and interest in, academic discourse into a conference space at a university. That’s really enacting the whole idea of the Mellon residential fellowships for arts practice and scholarship and the Gray Center, which is to ask, where do arts and inquiry meet up?

Sometimes there were tense moments, like Robert calling a young person a cute thing when she stands up to ask him a question. But that’s what happens when you bring actual artists into this environment. You can’t just clean everyone up and sanitize them in the way you might when everyone there is a practicing professor or scholar.

Watch this space for videos of conference panels.

“R. Crumb Stars at U. of C. Comics Panel” (Chicago Tribune, May 21, 2012) “Thought Bubbles from the Comics Conference” (Chicago Tribune, May 21, 2012)

Chicken fat

jmiller — Thu, 17 May 2012 20:07:37 +0000

jmiller Thu, 05/17/2012 - 15:07

(Portraits by Jessica Abel, AB’91)

Jessica Abel, AB’91

July–Aug/12

The Comics: Philosophy and Practice conference at the Logan Center for the Arts drew 17 cartoonists and hundreds of observers, in person and online, for three days in May of intense discussion of the field.

Download the pdf to read the entire story.

Arts & Humanities