Orphan Works

I wish I posted more often and regularly, but I've been awfully busy and blogging takes time, what with the thinking and writing and all. My site stats say a bunch of you check in regularly and I appreciate it.

"Orphan Works" is a topic that's really riled up my cartooning and illustrating acquaintances. Senate Bill S2913 is the Shawn Bentley Orphan Works Act of 2008 and HR5889 is its counterpart in the House. If the legislation passes, it will dramatically change copyright law in the U.S., and not for the benefit of creative types. I'm trying to educate myself and haven't actually yet read the text of the bill, so my comments are tentative and based on what others tell me.

As I understand it, Orphan Works are creative products--books, articles, essays, photos, artwork, cartoons--that somebody wants to reproduce but can't find the original copyright holder to pay or ask permission. As the law stands now, you'd be a criminal fool to say "what the heck" and use it anyway; someone owns the rights to the work even if you don't know who. If the Orphan Works bill passes, it would make it legal to do a diligent search for the work's original owners and, if you can't find them, not only go ahead and use it but register it for protection under your own copyright. What exactly constitutes a "diligent search" isn't defined.

Here's part of the problem: before 1978, if you created something and wanted to copyright it, you had to pay a small fee and register it with the U.S. Copyright Office. But in 1978 the law changed so that creators obtain copyright to their work the moment they create it without doing anything at all. You don't have to register or pay a fee; if you made it, you automatically own the legal rights to it and get to decide what happens to it. (If you want, you can still register with the U.S. Copyright Office, which does leave a useful paper trail. But you don't have to.) From the creator's point of view, that's great. It really cuts down on the hassle and expense. The drawback is that it doesn't create an official record for someone else to follow.

So let's say you wrote or drew something a few years ago. Maybe the publisher went out of business, maybe your signature or byline isn't legible, maybe your work is clearly marked “©1989 Bob Smith” but there are a million Bob Smiths in America so good luck finding the right one. Maybe you've got an old family photo posted on the Web. Or maybe you created one of those memes that just floats around the Internet. Next thing you know, someone else could take your work, register it as theirs, and crank out t-shirts, posters, books, movies and breakfast cereals based on your stuff. They could even prevent you from using it. And there's nothing you could do about it.

You can understand where the outrage comes from. Some artists call it legalized theft. Some imagine giant corporations laying claim to all the work they can find and bulldozing any creators who come out of the woodwork to object. Some fear the establishment of a registration clearinghouse--essentially a return to the pre-1978 situation--that could put them out of business (imagine being a magazine cartoonist creating 50 gags a week and having to register them all at $20 a pop).

I can actually see both sides of the issue. As a writer, I'm a very vigorous defender of copyright and I'd be outraged if someone took my words, art or characters and used them without my permission (if there's any exploiting to be done, it'll be by me!). I created 'em, I say what happens to 'em. I really despise the whole modern song-sharing software-pirating mash-up-media "information should be free" ethic. It's disrespectful. As I've written before: especially in a society that produces so few material goods anymore, the most valuable products we have are ideas; if you think my ideas are good enough to steal, you ought to think they're worth asking permission or paying for.

On the other hand... I'm working on a project now that incorporates bits of old artwork. One was copyrighted by General Motors in the 1940s, so I wrote GM (they've got a whole department for the purpose) and paid them a fair fee to license its use. Another was produced by a now-deceased artist in the 1950s, so I tracked down his estate and got their permission to use it. But there are other pieces done for publications long defunct by obscure artists long dead who as far as I can tell left no heirs. They're terrific work I'd really like to use but I can't and won't. That's a shame, and it also seems contrary to the original spirit of copyright, which was to give creators a reasonable time to profit from their work before freeing it for use by everyone (that's called "public domain," which is why anyone who wants to can write a Dracula or Sherlock Holmes story). Instead, the work is locked away and nobody benefits.

Still, it seems clear to me that the current Orphan Works bill is an abomination that ought to be stopped. It's an overkill solution to an insignificant problem. I'd urge you to write your legislators blah blah blah, and I have, but I don't really expect you to. I just thought you'd like to know what they're up to and why your favorite cartoonists may seem grouchy lately.

My copyright registration for Mom's Cancer.
So don't even think about trying any funny business.

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Ollie Johnston

I'm lifting my head above the surface of work and deadlines to note the passing of animator Ollie Johnston, the last of Disney's "Nine Old Men." Walt Disney himself gave the group its name--though most were only in their thirties at the time--in deference to their pioneering work in the earliest days of the studio, when they refined a new art form beginning with Snow White and progressing through about the 1970s.

Johnston began working for Disney in 1935 and animated movies ranging from Snow White, Fantasia, Bambi and Pinocchio to The Rescuers. He retired in 1978. In 2005, President Bush presented Johnston the NEA National Medal of Arts in recognition of his career. Late in life, he and his partner Frank Thomas--the second-to-last "Old Man"--experienced something of a renaissance, as younger audiences remembered and honored their work. They became the subjects of a popular documentary film, Frank and Ollie, and won much well-deserved recognition. Among Johnston's new generation of fans were director Brad Bird, who used caricatures of Frank and Ollie in The Iron Giant, and the people at Pixar, who put them in The Incredibles (also directed by Bird). It was nice to see.

Johnston in Iron Giant (top), and Frank and
Ollie in The Incredibles, voiced by themselves

There are far more knowledgeable Disney experts and animation historians who can talk about Johnston and his colleagues' artistic contributions. Jim Hill is one. What Ollie Johnston meant most to me was that he and Thomas wrote The Illusion of Life, an inside look at the art and process behind Disney's classic films. Though ostensibly about animation, I think it's also an excellent book for cartoonists and even writers, and one of the first I recommend when asked.

The Illusion of Life is a beautifully illustrated coffee-table "How To" book. I'm sure it's one of the first that a serious student buys when they get to animation school, but I think it's more than that. What I got out of the book was less about how to do the work than how to approach it, and those lessons apply far beyond animated cartoons. I was amazed by how much thought went into the apparently simplest of things. How much analysis lay behind structuring stories and building characters. It's hard, and it's supposed to be hard, but if you do it right it looks easy--even inevitable, as if it were impossible to imagine turning out any other way. I use insights from this book every time I draw.

When I pulled my copy of Illusion of Life off the shelf this morning, I found tucked into its pages a few sheets of paper I printed off the Web more than 10 years ago summarizing advice from Johnston as passed on by Pixar's John Lasseter. Luckily, the same list is still available online. The 30 tips include technical notes that only an animator would need, but also some good advice for anyone creating characters in any medium. For example:

• If possible, make definite changes from one attitude to another in timing and expression.


• It is the thought and circumstances behind the action that will make the action interesting. Example: A man walks up to a mailbox, drops in his letter, and walks away. OR: A man desperately in love with a girl far away carefully mails a letter in which he has poured his heart out.


• Concentrate on drawing clear, not clean.


• Everything has a function. Don't draw without knowing why.


• Does the added action in a scene contribute to the main idea in that scene? Will it help sell it or confuse it?

Solid gold principles to write and draw by. More information about Johnston is available from Disney and at the official (and not recently updated) Frank and Ollie website. The Associated Press has written a nice obit as well.

Edited to Add: New links to nice tributes by animator Brad Bird and writer/animator John Canemaker.
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The Denial of Something Essential

Last weekend I read a Q&A column by San Francisco Chronicle movie critic Mick LaSalle, in which a reader asked why modern film actresses don't get the same loving attention to lighting and cinematography that, for example, Von Sternberg lavished on Marlene Dietrich. The reader asked, "What's missing?"

"Black and white is what's missing," LaSalle replied. "The denial of something essential (like color) creates a longing in the viewer, which translates into an arresting image."

I think exactly the same thing happens in cartooning. It's all about "the denial of something essential," distilling characters and situations into the fewest words and lines possible--just enough to communicate an idea. When information is missing, readers fill in the rest--they yearn to fill in the rest--and the less the cartoonist gives them, the more invested they can become. Paradoxically, the more abstract a story, the more real it can seem. Somehow, a few squiggles of ink become a boy waiting by a mailbox for a Valentine's Day card that never comes. A few squiggles of ink can make you happy or sad. That's amazing.

I've mentioned this before, but I got a modest glimpse of this with Mom's Cancer when I heard from a few readers who said, "I'm not like you, my family's not like yours, and we weren't dealing with cancer, but it's just like you were in our living room." None of the details fit but somehow it still hit home in a way that felt very specific. That's also amazing.

Even more than black-and-white film, I think cartooning demands that its readers do their share the heavy lifting. That's one reason the characters in Mom's Cancer didn't have names: if I don't tell you what they're called, maybe their name is the same as yours. That's also why my editor and I didn't want to put a family photo in the book: it would've turned those abstract characters who maybe sort of resemble you and your family into real people who don't look anything like you at all. The more details I give, the more opportunities you have to find differences between us. I've thought a lot about how and why cartooning sometimes seem to tap directly into a reader's brain, and I think that's close.

I really like LaSalle's "denial of something essential" formulation. Of course for that to work, you also have to provide something essential and meet the audience half way. Otherwise, you've denied them too much to make any connection with the work at all. I think that's the difficult and rewarding (when it works) give-and-take conversation that the best writers, artists and cartoonists have with their readers or viewers.
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Storming the Canon

Deadlines. Lots and lots of deadlines. Your loyalty is appreciated and feared.

Rod McKie is a British cartoonist, critic, and Internet buddy of mine, and one of the early supporters of Mom's Cancer who encouraged me to seek publication. He's got a blog I like in which he wrote a recent post about graphic novels that opened with, "Okay, I think I can just about stop doing the nerdy 'graphic novels' air-brackets." Rod argues (if I understand him right) that graphic novels have proven their worth as literature and it's time to quit explaining or apologizing for them. Writes Rod:

Often, a novel is full of impossible, trite and inapt descriptions that seek to convey, for instance, a sense of place. They work in absence of a visual image, employing metaphor and simile and symbolism, and almost always speak of comparison, which is of course one of the constraining limits of language itself. A graphic novel, on the other hand, still uses the same language, but the image is often there, on the page, where 1,000 or more words of descriptive text would be. The written text then, the words on the page, can be more sparse or even non-existent. It seems that when this is the case, the literary critic cannot understand how to 'read' the work, and so, one assumes, how to judge its literary value.

Rod hits on a point I've made before, which is that a good graphic novelist needs to have all the skills of a good writer plus the ability to draw. In any case, Rod then goes on to look at the graphic novels Persepolis, From Hell, Road to Perdition, Blankets, and Houdini the Handcuff King with an eye toward how they might fit into the literary canon. I commented:

That's a nice, insightful essay, thanks for writing it.

I think I'm coming around to the view that the graphic novel's yearning for literary respectability is hardly worth the fight. There's something faintly desperate and pathetic about it, banging on the clubhouse door begging to be let in, and it's an argument that can only really be won by creators doing one excellent job after another for a long time--building, as you suggest, a canon. In this, I think we're sometimes our own worst enemies. I've met comics fans who argue with a straight face that Watchmen is the best work of literature they've ever read. The only possible answer for that is that they need to read a lot more. Too many readers' standards are too low.

In point of fact, I think it's inarguable that graphic novels haven't yet produced anything on par with the best of Dickens/Twain/Joyce/Hemingway/Orwell/Literary Giant of Your Choice. They just haven't. I'd like to think that graphic novels have that potential, but I sometimes wonder if there's something inherently limiting in the medium. In any case, what I'm getting at is that may be the wrong comparison to make. I suggest we worry less about bashing in the door of the other guys' clubhouse than building our own. If, in time, ours becomes interesting and impressive enough, they'll come to us.

It's late at night, that's off the top of my head, and I may change my mind tomorrow....

Well, it's morning and I still feel that way. But it's a topic on which I'm open to argument and willing to be swayed. I look at it like this: let's take a graphic novel that everybody agrees is great: say, Maus by Art Spiegelman. Certainly one of the Top Five graphic novels on almost anyone's list, a Pulitzer Prize winner that crossed over to the mainstream and is taught in college classrooms. (If you don't like Maus, substitute your own favorite.) Great. But is Maus one of the best five books in the library? Not even close. Top 50? Not on most readers' lists. Top 500? Maybe.

Could some hypothetical graphic novel become one of the best five books ever written? As I replied to Rod, I'd like to think so but I'm not certain the medium has it in it. The only way creators and readers will find out is by aiming higher. Even if they fall short, there's a lot of uncharted territory to explore and the results will be interesting.
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; !

Yesterday's New York Times had a nice little article about my second-favorite punctuation mark, the semicolon. The lede of the story is that a new subway placard, reminding riders to throw away their newspapers, properly--even elegantly--used a semicolon. Such a marvel! The article then touched on the use and misuse of the shy but intimidating character.

My favorite passage in the story: "David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam serial killer who taunted police and the press with rambling handwritten notes, was, as the columnist Jimmy Breslin wrote, the only murderer he ever encountered who could wield a semicolon just as well as a revolver."

I mention the article here even though I don't expect anyone else to follow that link or care. That's part of the story's charm.

What? Doesn't everybody have a second-favorite punctuation mark?
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Odd Ends

I've been busy lately--very, very busy--and likely to remain that way for a while, which explains my dearth of blogging but does not ease the guilt gnawing at my soul. I appreciate the loyalty of everyone who checks in once in a while. I'll try to make it worth your while soon. Meanwhile, here are some Internetty things I've come across that I've found interesting:

1. Successful science fiction writer John Scalzi posted 10 tips titled "Unasked for Advice for New Writers About Money." Although aimed at aspiring, inexperienced, or struggling writers, I found much wisdom there for any sort of self-employed freelancer type (which I've been for about nine years, completely independent of cartooning). Scalzi's aim is to wipe the romantic stardust from wanna-be eyes and tell some hard truths: Treat it like a business. Don't quit your day job. Don't undervalue your work. Your income is half what you think it is (there's no automatic paycheck deduction to help pay those quarterly taxes). And my favorite, marry someone with a real job. I have little argument with any of it, although the comments raise some interesting counter-examples and objections.

2. Comic book writer Steve Gerber, creator of Howard the Duck, died today at age 60 after a long fight with pulmonary fibrosis. Mark Evanier broke the news and wrote a nice obit in his blog. I liked Mr. Gerber's work, which was intelligent and witty, but mention him here mostly because he wrote a blog himself. In it he discussed current comic book projects but also his illness, and his archived posts describing successive set-backs with a mix of hope, frustration, courage and fear reminded me very much of my mother's. It's good to remember once in a while.

3. Something lighter? Drawn is "the illustration and cartooning blog" that always gives me a dozen new ideas and two dozen talented people to be jealous of, while io9 is a new blog that delivers news about science fiction and speculative tech in a breezy format that consistently scores one or two hits a day with me. And every month or two I find time to listen to the JCB Song. I can't help being a sentimental dope; having kids'll do that to you.

4. Something lighter still? There's no going wrong with a Monty Python Video Wall.

More and better later. Thanks.

Two Newspaper Stories

Tim Kane of the Albany Times Union in Albany, N.Y., wrote a nice piece on the "LitGraphic" exhibit at the Norman Rockwell Museum, of which several original pages of Mom's Cancer are the least interesting part. The article quotes curator Martin Mahoney (hey, I know him!) and provides a nice historical perspective on graphic novels/comics, tracing them from their 19th-century roots through the underground sixties, Will Eisner, R. Crumb, and the modern move into mainstream films such as Sin City, 300, and V for Vendetta. An excerpt:

Adjacent to the permanent collection of traditional Rockwell illustrations, the bold irreverence and iconoclastic spirit of "LitGraphic" is only magnified. they can be dark and political or mystical and outright humorous; a number of artists have used the form for bracing works of social commentary.... Nothing is out of bounds: Sexual orientation, racism, feminism, fascism, violence, war, famine and health care fuel intricate narratives and stirring graphics.

Guess I'm the "health care."

For yesterday's New York Times, Motoko Rich wrote an interesting story titled "Crossover Dreams: Turning Free Web Work into Real Book Sales," which looks at exactly that. The article features the best-selling children's book Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney (hey, I know him!), quotes Abrams editor Charlie Kochman (hey, I know him!), and cites the recent publication of Shooting War, a new webcomic-to-book success story, by Anthony Lappé and Dan Goldman (hey, never met 'em!).

I'm not mentioned. Charlie said he told Ms. Rich all about Mom's Cancer and its status as the first webcomic to cross over to mainstream publishing (we think; if anyone has a counter-example, let me know, I'm happy to give credit where due). She didn't take the bait and that's cool. I've been a newspaper reporter and know you can only cram so much into a story, especially a little 1200-word feature. No harm no foul.

Nevertheless, the article touches on a topic of great interest to me: the decision to publish stuff in book form that readers can already get free online. The article offers two examples of different approaches and I offer a third.

Wimpy Kid was first posted to the Website funbrain.com and is in fact still there--all 1300 pages of it. For the book and its sequels, Jeff and Charlie are breaking it up into 200-page bites and, I think, doing significant rewriting and editing. Still, if someone wanted, they could read the entire Wimpy Kid saga right now. And yet the print version has spent 33 weeks on the NYT best-seller list. What's up with that? The article quotes Abrams CEO Michael Jacobs (hey, I've met him! and that's the last of those, I promise): "I think books are still things, thank goodness, that people want to own. The package of the book and the way it feels is something apart and separate from being able to read it online." I think that's right and at least part of the answer.

The authors of Shooting War used the Web as a tease, posting the first 11 chapters in a Web magazine while hoping and intending them to lead to a book deal. They rewrote some parts, added 110 pages, and ended up with a book very different from the introduction that's still available online. That strategy worked for them.

I serialized Mom's Cancer online because I didn't know what else to do with it. I never thought of it as a webcomic per se, but as a comic that happened to end up on the Web. It would be disingenuous to claim I wasn't thinking about print; in fact, I hoped it might become a book from the start. I just had no idea how to do that, and in the meantime I wanted to get my story out.

I stumbled into a good synergy. The many people who read it free online caught the attention of the Eisner Award folks, which probably would have opened some publishing doors regardless. However, in fact, the Eisner nomination hadn't yet happened and Editor Charlie wasn't aware of the webcomic when he accepted my proposal. Still, the fact that I could say "Umpity-thousand people have read this story in the past few months and my readership continues to grow" helped Charlie and me make our case to the publishing-house bean-counters that printing my story was a risk worth taking.

He Who Steals My IP Steals What Exactly...?
So why did I take it offline? One reason is that my publisher Abrams requested--not demanded, but requested--that I do. But I'll step up and say I honestly had no qualms about doing it. The way I looked at it, my publisher and I were entering a business partnership to publish and sell a book. It was in our common interest to make the best book possible and sell as many of them as we could. My partner was making a big financial investment and shouldering considerable risk; my personal risk was negligible. Worst case, if we didn't sell a single book, I wouldn't lose a dime. So it seemed to me the very least I could do to minimize my partner's disproportionate risk was not offer a directly competing product--my Web version--free of charge. I thought it was the professional and right thing to do. One of my proudest days as a writer was when my editor told me the book had broken even. That's when I felt I'd fulfilled my obligation.

I also think an important difference between Mom's Cancer and Wimpy Kid is simply length. My story is about 110 pages, Jeff's is 1300. You can read mine in one sitting; Jeff's takes a few days. Reading Wimpy Kid on a monitor is a significantly different experience than reading it as a paperback in bed or on the playground; mine less so. I don't know where to draw the line--200 pages? 600?--but given Wimpy Kid's size and audience, it seems to me that the risk of free competition is much smaller with Jeff's book than mine.

So I took it offline. Some people were disappointed. If anyone wrote and said, "I'm going through the same thing right now and would really like to read it," I gave them access to the Web version, especially before the book was published. Very rarely, if someone writes from a country where the book is otherwise unavailable, I still do. Otherwise, I've got no problem asking potential readers to pay $12.95 for my book. My mother's Afterword alone is worth at least $12.94.

The reaction that surprised me, and I still don't understand, was hostility. A small number of people seemed really angry, and not because they cared so passionately about my work. I think they're consumers used to getting their reading free, their music free, their games and entertainment free, and they somehow assume a profound philosophical right to get everything they want for nothing. Their rallying cry is "Information Should Be Free!" and they seem deeply offended by being asked to pay money for content or respect a creator's right to control what happens to their own work.

But...in an Information Age society--and in a country that doesn't forge steel, sew clothing, or build cars anymore--what do we produce of real value except the creative output of our minds? Indeed, why shouldn't good, creative ideas be the very things we treasure and protect the most? They're certainly rare enough. Honestly, my story is worth $12.95. It contains at least $12.95 worth of writing, drawing and ideas. I think it's worth a movie ticket and box of popcorn. If you don't, don't buy it. But don't tell me my work has no value and I have some social or moral obligation to let you take it and do what you want with it. Nope. My stuff's better than that.

And hey, you know what? If I make a few bucks and my publisher makes a few bucks, maybe we can do something else again. But neither of us can afford to do it for nothing.

Writer Harlan Ellison has had a reputation for offering strong, loud, controversial opinions on professionalism and creators' rights for about 40 years. The interview below was taken from an upcoming documentary about Ellison and captures some good thoughts much more passionately and (fair warning) profanely than I could. It's a worthwhile 3 minutes and 25 seconds. Although I have to admit I hope I'm never on the other end of a Harlan Ellison phone call.


(Note: there's no irony in my posting a free video clip from a commercial film on a free blog. This clip was released by the film's producers with, I presume, Ellison's OK.)

Oddly Ends

Oddly Normal creator Otis Frampton had posted some thoughts in response to my October 22 post in his own blog. While I touched on the idea that too few "mature" comics actually aspire to provide mature characters, plots and themes, Otis comes at it from the other direction: too few comics that should be for kids actually are.

Good point. While some sigh in frustration that comics aren't taken seriously as adult literature, it's worth remembering that they're still a terrific medium for juvenile literature--and there's no shame in that. As I replied to Otis, creating quality juvenile literature is hard and important, and I have great respect for people who do it with integrity and responsibility. Comics are big enough to embrace both--or should be.

Can't Think of a Good Segue to....
Family, friends, and regular readers know of my fondness for "Star Trek." Less frequently mentioned is my affection for Monty Python. I hope I'm forgiven, then, for finding the clip below irresistible. Thanks to my friend, cartoonist Mike Lynch, for the lead.




Sorry. I feel happy....
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Eddie Campbell + A Bonus Tirade

I broke a rule. Turns out it's more of a "guideline" than an actual "rule," but I wanted to explain myself anyway.

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In a few long-ago posts I wrote about my tiny collection of original cartoon art. Knowing that I could easily get carried away and bankrupt my family, I established my rule: I would only acquire art from friends or artists with whom I'd developed a relationship. We don't have to be buddies forever; just a couple of e-mails or a nice 10-minute conversation will do. The point is that when possible I'd get pieces directly from the artists themselves and have an emotional connection to the work that conjured a good story or nice memory. Right now I've got Irwin Hasen, Raina Telgemeier, Otis Frampton, Ted Slampyak, Charles Schulz (acquired way before I made up the rule but still a nice story) and Winsor McCay (also pre-rule--but I would have broken it for him anyway).

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And now I've got Eddie Campbell. Here's the original Page 80 from Mr. Campbell's recent book, The Black Diamond Detective Agency.

Original p. 80, Black Diamond Detective
Agency, by Eddie Campbell. Captions and word
balloons were added in production.

I broke my rule for Mr. Campbell. Never met him, never corresponded with him. I saw him at ComicCon last July and almost approached his table, but he looked too busy and I never got back to him.

Eddie Campbell is probably best known for drawing From Hell, a retelling of the Jack the Ripper story written by Alan Moore. He's the creator of a long-running series titled Bacchus about the Greek gods living in modern times; a few semi-autobiographical works including The Fate of the Artist, which I thought was terrific; and The Black Diamond Detective Agency, based on an unproduced screenplay about a deadly train explosion in 1899 Missouri and a Hitchcock-esque man-on-the-run framed for it.

On paper, I'm not a particularly devout fan--haven't seen much Bacchus and didn't actually care for From Hell, which I found unengaging, overwrought, silly, and lurid in a Bret Easton Ellis "let's carve up some women for fun" sort of way (I concede that if any subject cries out for carving up some women for fun, it's Jack the Ripper). However, Mr. Campbell's contributions are, I think, always excellent. Both his writing and artwork are interesting, witty, well-researched, and thoughtful. His confident, relaxed impressionistic style is built on a rock-solid foundation of craft. He's comfortable with ink, paint, collage, multi-media, typography: whatever he needs to get the effect he wants, he's not afraid to put it on the paper. He knows which rules to follow and break, and why. Everytime I read his work, I come away inspired to try two or three things I'd never thought of. In addition, I always get an absolute sense of integrity from his work.

Reading his blog for a while, I've also gotten a sense for Mr. Campbell as a person and I like the cut of his jib. He seems to be one of a small number of grown-ups working in the comics/cartooning/picture book/graphic novel business, and now I need to go on a little rant to explain what I mean by that.

Here's the Tirade
Comics are in an interesting, tricky place right now. First, there's the problem that much of the general public thinks comics are for kids. Some creators are striving mightily to have their comics taken seriously as literature, while others deliberately wallow in their low-class outsider status and confirm every slander against the entire medium. Others just don't care. Every few months for the past couple of decades, some reporter does a story with the headline "Pow! Bam! Comics Aren't Just for Kids Anymore!" Some of them have been about me. Every comics convention has at least one panel discussion on the topic of when comics will finally enter the mainstream. I've been on some of them.

As comics have been taken more seriously, they've drawn critics, students, analysts, theorists, and cranks. Much of their discourse happens on the Internet, though it occasionally spills over to print. There are people dedicated to making rules, defining terms, arguing what is or isn't a comic, deciding who's in or out of the club. Is it a comic strip, a comic book, an illustrated book, or a graphic novel? There are people who question whether "Prince Valiant" is a comic because it doesn't use word balloons or whether "Family Circus" is a comic because it doesn't show the passage of time via sequential panels. (Answer: they're comics. If your definition of comics excludes them the problem is yours, not theirs.) Webcomics spice the debate with arguments about what is or isn't a digital comic.

There are people who confidently declare that there are only eight kinds of this or four ways to do that, and whenever I hear that I immediately think of three other kinds of this and two different ways to do that, and then I realize what a waste of time it is. It all reminds me of a Victorian gentleman's butterfly collection in which the point isn't to appreciate butterflies or advance science, but to pin the right label on every specimen so it ends up in the proper cabinet drawer. That's the sport of it: getting the taxonomy right. And the way some of these guys talk, if they don't have a drawer for your butterfly, it might as well be a lemur.

In response to such as that, Mr. Campbell once assembled a tongue-in-cheek "Graphic Novel Manifesto." All 10 points can be read at the end of Mr. Campbell's Wikipedia entry; I'll just provide the first and last:

1. "Graphic novel" is a disagreeable term, but we will use it anyway on the understanding that graphic does not mean anything to do with graphics and that novel does not mean anything to do with novels.

10. The graphic novelist reserves the right to deny any or all of the above if it means a quick sale.

Yes! If I could be so bold as to sum up Mr. Campbell's perspective in one sentence, I'd say it's "Just shut up and make the things as best you can!" Don't worry about fitting into someone else's definitions or rules. Don't fret over whether its Number 6 or Number 7 on somebody's list of the only 12 things it could possibly be. It doesn't matter if it's a cartoon or comic or graphic novel. Like the shoe commercial said, Just Do It. If it's good, people will find it. None of them will care what it's called.

This was brought home to me in a small way at the San Diego Comic-Con last July, when I had dinner with Jeff Kinney, author of Diary of a Wimpy Kid. We were on our way to watch me lose two Eisner Awards and had a short chat about whether Jeff's book would be eligible for Eisner consideration next year. It looks like a comic--it's got little cartoon drawings with words coming out of characters' mouths--but, on the other hand, most of the book is typeset text (in a font made from Jeff's hand printing), so maybe it's more of an illustrated book or novel with pictures. As we were having this discussion, I realized two things: first, it was a ridiculous conversation that had absolutely no impact on what the book actually was and who would buy and read it; second, this was almost the only context in which that conversation had any merit whatsoever. The only people who should ever care are award administrators who need to decide which trophy to give you and bookstore clerks who need to figure out which shelf to put you on. It's otherwise useless, irrelevant, and probably counter-productive.

Anyway, in the weeks to come, we did figure out what to call Jeff's book: "Bestseller." Now with 26 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List for Children's Chapter Books, including a stint at Number 1.

I've never liked the term "graphic novel," though I accept its practical utility. When I was making Mom's Cancer, I thought of it as a serial comic strip. In light of the rant above, then, I've been especially delighted that it's gotten some recognition from the American Library Association, the German Jugendliteraturpreis, and others as a work of youth literature. I didn't know I wrote a kids' book. Never intended it, my publisher never positioned it as such. It not only broke out of the graphic novel drawer others put it in, but the drawer I put it in. I think that's just wonderful.

Here are some questions I ask when reading anything--even a graphic novel. Does it reward my time and attention? Does it introduce ideas I've never had before? Is it skillfully made? On its own terms, does it accomplish its goals? Is it worth the $2, $12.95, or $200 I paid for it? Is it good?

Some people in comics/cartooning are doing excellent, ambitious, high-quality work. But far too often, based on what I see (which is far from the whole industry), a lot of creators demand literary respect but do little to earn it. They want to sit at the adult table but don't know how to use a knife and spoon. They have no idea what makes great literature great or why theirs falls short. They're their own worst enemies. Not all, but some. Many. Maybe most.

(What's funny is to read someone's high-minded academic defense of their comic as art and literature just as good as anything ever done by Hemingway or Joyce, and then go look at it and find an artless scrawl about a video-gaming slacker with a time machine and wise-cracking dinosaur. You're not part of the solution, dude, you're part of the problem.)

That's what I mean when I say Eddie Campbell is a grown-up. He not only knows how to use a knife and spoon but also a finger bowl and the funny little fish fork (metaphorically; I have no idea what his actual table manners are like). He's cranky. He's sat on too many panels dedicated to dissecting what graphic novels are and when they'll be respected as real books, and he's tired of it. Instead of endlessly debating, he works. He makes books with words and pictures that reward the reader's time and attention, introduce new ideas, accomplish their goals, and are worth the money people pay for them. Even more than his work, I appreciate and respect his attitude toward his work. It's worth breaking a rule--or bending a guideline--to have it in my home. It makes me happy.

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On Economy

Phil May's Self-portrait

Finally, and by complete happenstance, I've discovered the source of a quote that has been a cornerstone of my cartooning philosophy but which I could never track down. I first heard the story decades ago and long ago forgot where. Now I know.

Phil May was born in 1864 and died in 1903, only 39. He was one of the great British cartoonists of the late 19th century, contributing to Punch and other periodicals. In 1885, May went to work for the Sydney Bulletin in Australia, where he came across an editor who thought he wasn't getting his money's worth out of May. Evidently believing he was paying by the line, the editor asked if May could produce more elaborate and detailed drawings. Replied May, "When I can leave out half the lines I now use, I shall want six times the money."

That's what cartooning is all about to me: distilling a thing to its essence, so that nothing but the information needed is presented, and everything that is presented provides essential information. May's reply reminds me of my all-time favorite quote about writing by mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), who concluded a long-winded letter with, "Sorry this post was so long, I did not have time to make it short."

I work on that. In both writing and cartooning, my first inclination is to do too much. If I'm writing a 3,000-word article or 100-page report, I'm very happy if my first draft goes 10% to 20% over because I know subsequent drafts will only improve with tightening. Same with cartooning, I think. I'll draw something several times, figuring out what I can get rid of and what needs to stay, trying for fewer lines and less clutter in every iteration, working hard to make it simple. I always fall short but it's an interesting and worthwhile target to aim for, I think.

When I can leave out half the lines I now use, I shall want six times the money.
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Empathy and Characterization

Sometimes I think bringing characters to life so that readers empathize with them is the hardest feat in literature. Other times I think it's deceptively easy. It seems to me that readers want to be drawn into stories, want to identify with characters, want to fill gaps left by storytellers. I think our brains are hard-wired for it. All a writer has to do is meet us half way.

I got an inkling of that in Mom's Cancer when I received e-mails from readers saying that although they'd gone through completely different events with entirely different people, it was as if I'd been spying on their lives. None of the details were the same, yet somehow the overall story was true. They reconciled the differences ("Gee, except for the mother, the son, the daughters and the disease, this is just like us!") and, in a very real sense, became participants in the story.

(Incidentally, that's one reason my editor and I decided not to put a family photo on the back cover of Mom's Cancer. As cartoon characters, we were abstract representations--mother, son, daughters--that readers could map to their own lives. We thought showing our real selves might break that spell.)

Any time a book, song, poem, movie, television program makes me feel something, I try to go back and dissect how it did it. With respect to cartooning, I'm especially interested and impressed when I'm moved economically, with a minimum of words and pictures. I think this is a skill at which Charles Schulz, for example, excelled: within a few panels we not only knew a character but cared about him. I'm still trying to figure out how that magic trick works. Some examples from different media:

Example 1: Here's the very first Calvin & Hobbes comic strip by Bill Watterson:

Those four panels deliver a lot. Not only do you immediately get to know and like Calvin, his father, and Hobbes, but you're also dumped into Calvin's first pith-helmeted adventure. You want to find out what happens next. And it's funny! One of the great things that Watterson did very well was design his strip and premise so that a new reader could walk into it almost anywhere and very quickly understand the characters and their relationships.

Example 2: I recently heard the Gordon Lightfoot song "Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," in which a lyric goes:

When suppertime came the old cook came on deck
Saying "Fellas it's too rough to feed you."
At seven p.m. a main hatchway caved in,
He said, "Fellas it's been good to know you."

Lightfoot doesn't tell us the old cook's name or what he looks like. But can't you just see him? Don't you care about what happens to him? In less than three dozen words, Lightfoot painted a portrait of a steadfast seaman who worked below decks all his life, did his job through a lot of close scrapes, and now faces his perhaps not unexpected fate with calm courage and wit (and see how that's the content I bring to the song as the listener?). I love the old cook, and I don't think the song would be half as effective or haunting without him.

Example 3: Luxo Jr. is a character in one of Pixar's earliest movies, a 1986 short film that marked John Lasseter's directorial debut. Meant partly to show off the capabilities of that new-fangled computer animation, the film has no dialogue yet still conveys a charming story about young desk lamp Luxo Jr. and his patient father (Luxo Sr., I suppose). Through their movement, interaction, and body language, they tell a touching tale with no words at all. The picture below is of literally nothing but two desk lamps shining on each other, but even without animation it very effectively conveys emotion and personality. We, the viewers, give it meaning.

Example 4: There's a possibly apocryphal story of Ernest Hemingway boasting in a bar that he could write a novel in six words. The challenge accepted, Hemingway penned:

Baby shoes for sale, never used.

Now, I won't quibble over whether that constitutes a novel. But as a lesson in immediately and economically drawing readers into a story and inviting them to fill in the blanks with details from their own lives, I don't know of better.

The trick is figuring out how to do it at will instead of maybe accidentally tripping over it once in a while.

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Style Over Substance

I enjoy writing. Maybe even more than drawing, writing provides the satisfaction of creative problem solving. It's very gratifying to "get it right" in both writing and art, and both offer endless opportunities for improvement. But writing feels like a deeper challenge to me. When it comes to cartooning, I draw well enough to illustrate pretty much any story I can think of; the hard part is the thinking--which is to say, the writing.

I very much believe that good, clear writing equals good, clear thinking. Conversely, I believe that someone who can't clearly communicate an idea probably hasn't thought it through very well. If I were a freshman English teacher, I think the first thing I'd do is strip my students' prose of all the baroque ornamentation and sparkly tricks that smart kids think make for good writing (and successfully bamboozle teachers). I'd force them to explain themselves in short, simple, declarative sentences. Then I'd slowly introduce complexity, and finally--when they demonstrated they could form a coherent thought and express it so anyone could understand it--I'd allow them to fold in some quirks that might constitute an individual "style." Break the horse before hitching up the cart.

One of the fun parts of knowing and working with people who write for a living is talking about style. In a journalistic setting, editors and publishers often impose a house style so their publication speaks with a characteristic voice pitched for their readers. "Scientific American" doesn't read like "Readers Digest." They sound different in your head. Digging deeper into the weeds, publications often have stylebooks that set rules for using words, abbreviations, punctuation, acronyms, titles and honorifics, etc. Most newspapers use the Associated Press Stylebook as their Bible, while larger publications often have their own guidelines. Smaller publications sometimes draft lists of supplemental rules that apply to local issues, landmarks, businesses, and people. Then comes the best part: arguing about them.

What inspired this post was my discovery that a monthly newsletter titled "Style & Substance," intended for the internal use of Wall Street Journal editors and reporters, is available online. This is where people who make their living with words hash out how to use them, debating the difference between "try to" and "try and," the origin and usage of "trans fat" (it shouldn't be one word but is of course hyphenated when a compound modifier, e.g., "trans-fat oils"), and whether you should capitalize "iPod" or "eBay" if they happen to fall at the start of a sentence (yes). The newsletter also points out misdirected pronouns, disjointed appositives, and embarrassing blunders that appeared in the Wall Street Journal's own pages, which speaks well for its dedication to self improvement and helps writers who wouldn't make the same stupid mistakes as those fancy-pants WSJ reporters feel better about themselves.

A similar online resource I enjoy is "The Slot," a blog written by Bill Walsh, copy editor for The Washington Post. Walsh wrote two books, Lapsing into a Comma and The Elephants of Style, that are similar in content and tone (and, I believe Walsh snarkily argues, superior in content) to the surprise bestseller Eats, Shoots & Leaves. The "Sharp Points" section of Walsh's website offers short essays, while his infrequently updated blog provides briefer insights. He's a pretty thoughtful and witty guy.

The best of the rulemakers acknowledge the arbitrariness of laying down the law in a frontier as messy as language. You'd think the job would attract humorless by-the-book pedants, and it sometimes does, but more often they seem pretty good-natured and open-minded. In that respect, they remind me of scientists who realize they're using imperfect tools to craft rules that are good enough for now but may have to be changed later. They hunt a mobile prey.

I love this stuff.
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Graphic Novel Reviews 2

Before diving into my thoughts on the three graphic novels below, I'd like to apply the first two paragraphs of my previous post here as well. I'm not an expert on graphic novels nor a professional reviewer. I'm just a guy who wrote one, and who has some thoughts on a few good ones.

Also, as I mentioned in a recent post, I'm very uneasy recommending anything to anyone. I don't like that responsibility. If you buy a book I like and discover not only that you hate it but that my judgment and sanity are marginal at best, there's a fair chance you're right and I'm wrong. But I won't refund your money.

Pyongyang by Guy Delisle. Born in Canada and now living in France, Delisle is an animator who worked for two months in North Korea, where he supervised a squad of anonymous artists with the laborious task of drawing cartoons for French television. Pyongyang is a wonderfully observed look at the country that shows both keen compassion for the people and horror over the oppressive bubble in which they live.

The adjective "Orwellian" is overused, too casually applied to anything vaguely authoritarian, nationalistic, or propagandistic. Pyongyang presents a rare case in which no other word will do. I can only accept Delisle's word that the one book he took along on his trip was Orwell's 1984, because no writer would dare invent a detail so "on the nose." The North Korea he describes is 1984 realized: a country of institutionalized paranoia where neighbors vanish in the night, foreigners aren't allowed outdoors without a handler, portraits of Dear Leader hang in every room and stare from pins on every lapel, and monstrous monuments to ego consume all the meager energy and resources the country can muster. Delisle sketches a portrait of a Potemkin Village of impressive facades, empty boulevards, unfinished grand hotels, and magnificent subways to nowhere, all built to impress a world that never arrives.

Delisle has a good ear for truths that remain unspoken. Riding with his guide, he realizes he's never seen a handicapped person during his stay. His guide replies that there are none. Incredulous, Delisle reasons with him: Some small percentage of humanity everywhere is handicapped. "We're a very homogenous nation," replies the guide. "All North Koreans are born strong, intelligent, and healthy." As far as Delisle can tell, his guide believes it. Delisle doesn't have to ask and cannot answer the question that lingers in the lie: what happens to all the imperfect people?

I very much appreciated Delisle's eye for the telling detail. He knows an important foreign delegation has checked into his hotel because the lights in the lobby are on and the restaurant has fresh melon. He notes the many "volunteers" doing absurd manual labor. Studying the toothpicks in a restaurant, Delisle deduces that they're individually hand-carved. In a visit to a museum documenting the glory of Kim Il-Sung, he notices that a miner's pick displayed on the wall is not the same one shown in the photo taken at its supposed presentation, and realizes the futility of asking about the inconsistency or expecting a sane answer.

Pyongyang also captures Delisle's stir-craziness as he visits the few people (all foreigners) he's allowed to see, eats and parties at the few establishments (again, all for foreigners) he's allowed to visit, and tries to make sense of a country and people that defy rationality and are either too indoctrinated or cowed to admit it. He's going nuts after a couple of months; what must it be like to be born and raised there? In an insightful passage Delisle echoes Orwell when he writes,"At a certain level of oppression, truth hardly matters, because the greater the lie, the greater the show of power. And the greater the terror for all. A mute, hidden terror."

Despite the evident mind-bending authoritarianism, Delisle never fears for his own safety. He's an honored guest. The only dread in Pyongyang arises when Delisle realizes how his playful prodding puts his handlers, whom he regards with sympathy and affection, at risk. He loans his copy of 1984 to a man who returns it, badly shaken. Near the end of the book Delisle manages to ditch his translator and take a solo stroll through the city. He's surprised that his obvious alienness doesn't attract any attention until he realizes that everyone is afraid to be seen speaking to him. When he returns, his translator is a wreck; the penalty for losing his charge for even a few minutes is clearly dire.

Delisle's grayscale artwork (the grays look like pencil or charcoal but could be wash, it's hard for me to tell) is well done and appropriate for his subject. He uses his animator's skills to bring motion, mood, and life to simple drawings that clearly communicate their point without extraneous detail. To my mind, that's what cartooning is about. It occurs to me I haven't mentioned how funny a writer Delisle is; I very much appreciated his wry, dry sense of humor in the face of the dark absurdity of North Korea. Delisle is a good traveling companion and I enjoyed Pyongyang very much.

Epileptic by David B. Epileptic is perhaps the best marriage of form and content I can recall. Born Pierre-Francois Beauchard, David B. is a French cartoonist who tells the story of growing up with his sister Florence and older brother, Jean-Christophe, whose epilepsy dominates David's youth and proves impossible to escape as an adult.

The artwork in Epileptic is really remarkable, if probably not to everyone's taste. Stark black and white, with grays achieved only through cross-hatching, David B.'s drawings carry uncommon narrative weight. Some look like woodcuts hacked from blocks with an urgency and anger that matches the passages they illustrate. Others are delicate and detailed. Able to draw with great clarity and tenderness, David B.'s hand turns abstract, surrealistic, dark, dense, jumbled and ugly as his life does the same.

Epileptic is an ambitious, challenging, difficult book that I think is worth the effort. It has 361 dense pages (full points to David B. for endurance!) and I'd be hard pressed to describe what exactly happens in at least 200 of them. David B. dedicates a lot of room to conveying haunted mood, internal musings, and fevered memories rather than advancing his plot, but that's clearly by choice. When he does turn to plot--as when describing his parents' heartbreaking attempts to help Jean-Christophe via a series of quacks and gurus, or his struggles to escape Jean-Christophe's suffocating shadow and find his own identity in art school--he does so very effectively. And David B.'s honest depiction of his own fear, jealousy, loathing, compassion, cruelty and humor in the face of his brother's illness is remarkably brave and self-aware. He's not afraid to show himself in a very unflattering light.

I first read Epileptic perhaps a year ago, and find that it's one of those unsettling stories that won't quite lie still in my mind. Every so often a memory or image from the book bubbles to the surface and draws me back for a second look. Somehow, Epileptic always floats to the top of the pile of books beside my desk. The good ones do.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney. Two conflict-of-interest disclosures: First, this book is put out by my publisher Abrams, so I'm shilling for the home team. Second, I met Jeff at last year's San Diego Comic-Con, we've corresponded since, he may be the nicest guy on the planet, and I consider him a friend.

Through our mutual editor Charlie I was able to read an early proof of Diary of a Wimpy Kid, which is enjoying its debut at the New York Comic-Con this weekend. Printed in Jeff's hand-lettered font and illustrated with his simple but clean and evocative line drawings, Diary tells the first-person story of middle-school student Greg Heffley and his family, friends, and tormentors. Jeff developed Diary online at Funbrain.com, where it drew an enthusiastic following of young fans. His story, structured as a series of incidents loosely built around the school year, grew to more than 1300 pages (!) that Abrams plans to publish in three books (I believe the online material was significantly edited for print).

When Editor Charlie introduced me to Diary I was a bit puzzled. He told me very little except "Check this out," and I approached it as an adult expecting a faux-naive adult take on young teens, but it wasn't as knowing or arch (or "ironic" in the currently fashionable meaning of the term) as I anticipated. It was sweet and mildly subversive, meandering good-naturedly from one episode to the next without a lot of jeopardy or drama. It was understated and sincere. I didn't get it. Then Charlie explained that its fans were kids and the book would be aimed at the youth market, and everything clicked. Diary of a Wimpy Kid is too good for grown-ups.

Which is not to say there aren't layers for an adult to appreciate. What really makes Diary's story and characters work for me is how well Jeff observes and remembers the unthinking narcissism of that age. When friends take the rap for offenses actually committed by Greg, his response is unreserved relief that he didn't get caught, without a trace of guilt, responsibility, or urge to "do the right thing." Indeed, as far as Greg is concerned, his unjustly punished friends did the right thing by "taking one for the team"--the "team" being Greg. Greg's universe revolves around Greg but, because there's not a molecule of malice in his heart, he remains a very sympathetic, likeable character throughout. It's a very tricky characterization to pull off and I think Jeff does it remarkably well. Making it look easy is the mark of a skilled and thoughtful cartoonist.

As a former boy myself, Diary felt true and right to me. There's no accounting for taste and hardly any way to predict what the public will take to its heart, and less so when that public is kids. But I believe Diary of a Wimpy Kid has the potential to really catch on and become the start of a terrific series of books and more for Jeff. If it realizes the success I hope it does, it'll be well deserved.

UPDATE: On February 22, the Publisher's Weekly website posted a very nice article about Jeff and Diary of a Wimpy Kid. It even quotes Editor Charlie and mentions me, which I appreciate very much. Good stuff.

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Graphic Novel Reviews 1

Someone e-mailed to ask what graphic novels I'd recommend. I appreciate the question and, since I wrote a graphic novel, might be expected to have a ready answer. In fact I read a lot of books, but don't confine myself to graphic novels by a long shot; if one happens to catch my eye and make it into the rotation, I read it. But I miss most of them and don't consider myself a student of--or, heaven forbid, an expert on--the form.
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I also think I'm harder on graphic novels than some of their readers are because I don't condescend to them or only compare them to other graphic novels, but to all the great and terrible books I've ever read. I never think, "This book is good for a graphic novel," and I have yet to find a graphic novel that's earned a place in the Pantheon of "Best Books I've Ever Read." My standards are high. With that caveat, these are my thoughts on a few good ones.

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Fun Home by Alison Bechdel. Beginning with the hardest.... In an earlier post I wrote that I liked Fun Home but maybe not as much as everyone else seemed to; I had some reservations about it. In another post, I explained my policy of refraining from saying negative things about other people's creative work. In contemplating this review, I wrestled with that. But Fun Home is a book that deserves to be wrestled with, so I hope the thoughts that follow are read with the understanding of how much I respect Ms. Bechdel's accomplishment.
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Fun Home is Bechdel's autobiographical story of growing up in a smart, talented, damaged family. Her father is the local funeral director who is revealed to his adult daughter Alison to be gay, and whose possible suicide closely follows Bechdel's coming out as a lesbian. It's a powerful, well-drawn tour de force, buttressed by Bechdel's meticulous attention to detail which in turn draws on journals she kept during her teen years.
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The story is organized into chapters, each of which captures a particular theme or thread, so that over the course of the book the same event might be shown two or three times. Some reviewers have complimented this approach for allowing the reader to look into the prism of Bechdel's life through different facets, each adding layers and depth. Perhaps the repetition reflects Bechdel's changing perspective throughout her life. I understand that.
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Yet I thought Bechdel's chapter divisions were simply the most straightforward way to tell those particular tales within tales, and while reading Fun Home I was struck by how powerful it might have been if her narrative threads had been woven throughout the story as a seamless fabric to deliver the same richness in one pass, instead of as stitched-together patches worn threadbare through repetition (and now I'm done with that metaphor). We discover the secret of Roy the babysitter twice, and I didn't learn any more the second time than I did the first. On the other hand, Bechdel waits until more than halfway through the book (Page 135 out of 232) to introduce her childhood obsessive-compulsive disorder, a fascinating insight that would have enriched material that preceded it.

I also found the shifts in time occasionally confusing--is Alison in elementary school now, or college?--with insufficient cues to keep my bearings. Easy reply: if I can't keep up, that's my problem. Yet I'm a motivated, attentive reader, eager to meet Bechdel halfway. I'm also a writer from the school of thought that anything pulling readers out of the story and interrupting their flow is a flaw, not a strength. My flow was interrupted.
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A lot's been written about the connections Bechdel builds between her family and literature, notably the work of James Joyce and to a lesser extent Camus, Proust, and others. To a point, that's great: literature was the foundation of her family's intellectual life and there were surely times when she really was reminded of literary themes and characters. The references add texture. But through no fault of Bechdel's, I think reviewers are too impressed by this; I'm nagged by the suspicion that they like the Proust, Camus and Joyce stuff because it makes them feel smart.
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In fact it's a short cut, and a fine one. I used it in Mom's Cancer when I put my father in the role of Philip Nolan in Hale's "Man Without a Country." If you write a story about two boys and explicitly compare them to Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, you want your readers to map the relationship of Twain's characters onto yours without doing the heavy lifting yourself. You hope the juju rubs off. But drawing parallels between your story and Joyce's doesn't make it Joycean (not that that was Bechdel's intent, but it's a claim I've seen some make). Again, I'm only mildly critical of Bechdel's over-reliance on Proust, Camus and Joyce--just a bit too much salt in the soup for my taste, and surely more impressive choices than, say, Jacqueline Susann--and it's to her credit that it's not an embarrassing over-reach. But great literature is great because it leads, not follows; it is not that which cites, but that which is cited.
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So my first gripe was a difference of opinion about structural choices (the reviewer's biggest pitfall: reviewing the work you wanted instead of the one you got?) and my second gripe was really more with Bechdel's critics than her. My third gripe is entirely a matter of taste and where I may be on shakiest ground. There's a style of autobiography that just chafes me, in which the protagonist is the most sensitive, perceptive person who ever lived and no one ever experienced life quite as deeply as he or she did. And there's some of that--even a little goes a long way with me--in Fun Home, particularly when Bechdel discovers sex.
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Bechdel's early relationships are not just the sometimes sweet, sometimes hurtful, sometimes embarrassing episodes of discovery they are for everyone else on Earth. They are literally mythic adventures that conjure Odysseus in the Cyclops's cave, Scylla and Charybdis, and eye-rolling ruffles and flourishes. And because Bechdel is a lesbian, she imbues her romances with tremendous political, historical, and literary significance as well. It's all way too much weight to rest on the shoulders of two girls just gettin' it on.
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As I say, a matter of style and taste. I don't like "overwrought" and tried very hard to avoid it in Mom's Cancer, in which I portrayed the worst thing that ever happened to my family with the awareness that it was not the worst thing that ever happened to anyone ever. In fact, it was routine and banal; the fact that suffering is so unexceptional is partly why it's so sad. Most people navigate life's setbacks and joys without accompanying thunderclaps from Zeus. From my perspective, Bechdel fell into snares I worked to skirt.
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Finally, Fun Home confronts an issue to which I'm sensitive: the autobiographer's responsibility to tell their story as they honestly see it versus the pain such honesty can cause. I've read interviews in which Bechdel acknowledges that her mother and family were very hurt by how they were portrayed. In addition, Bechdel's book outed her father to his community and speculated without proof that he killed himself when he was unable to respond on either count. I am genuinely ambivalent on this question--meaning I really don't know how I feel about it.
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I know for certain that if my mother had been unhappy with or distressed by Mom's Cancer, I would have killed it. No question. If my sisters or father had been hurt, I would have tried my best to be fair and address their concerns. I might have agreed to take them out of the book. I think at the very least you owe your subjects--who are at their most vulnerable and never asked to be characters in your by-definition-narcissistic story--the humility of realizing that your perspective is as biased and limited as theirs. I never thought my right to tell my story or the world's need to read it trumped my family's rights to dignity and privacy. It just wasn't that important; it wouldn't have been worth it. Was Fun Home worth it? I don't know, but I'd sure love to hear Bechdel's mother's side of the story someday. Problem is, she's too dignified and private to tell it.
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Am I saying I'm right and Bechdel's wrong? No. Only that I faced some of the same questions she did and arrived at different answers. Hence my mixed feelings. Maybe she's just a better journalist than I am.*
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Such are my reservations, explained in good faith as best I could. I liked Bechdel's two-color ink-and-wash artwork very much. Despite patches where I think she made dubious choices and over-cranked the melodrama, I do recommend Fun Home as a good, smart, sensitively observed portrait of an interestingly twisted family and an exemplar of some of the best qualities graphic novels have to offer.
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* Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.
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--Janet Malcolm

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Next: Three much easier and shorter graphic novel reviews.

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One Strike and You're Out

Blogger was messed up for a while but seems to be back on track now....

I read something in the newspaper today that, combined with my previous post on writing, reminded me of an informal mental checklist I maintain. It’s a collection of little phrases or tricks that as far as I’m concerned every writer should be allowed to use once, and only once—preferably before the age of 25—and then never again.

What set me off this morning? In connection with fires now burning in southern California, the words “wind-whipped flames.”

I used “wind-whipped flames” once as a young reporter covering a grass fire at a dump, where it really was windy and the flames really were whipping. An editor flagged it and told me it was a pretty poor cliché (I thought I’d invented it), and I’ve been alert to it since. Television news readers are worse offenders than newspaper reporters, probably because “wind-whipped” is fun to say. It's almost poetic.

“Predawn darkness.” Another one I was surprised to learn I hadn’t invented. I believe I got away with it, but immediately started reading and hearing it everywhere. Again, it’s kind of poetic. I think it evokes the sense of still anticipation when the sky just begins to lighten in the east. But it’s poor journalism—how much more accurate to write that an event happened under clear skies at 4:15 a.m., if those facts are relevant at all—and, as a cliché, poorer prose. Remove it from the quiver.

Others off the top of my head that catch my eye or ear:
* Combing or sorting through charred rubble.
* Densely wooded area. You mean a forest?
* Firestorm of protest.
* Rain failed to dampen (a party, a game, a protest, spirits).
* Anything moving a step closer to reality.
* Closure. If I’m ever in a situation so unfortunate that a writer or reporter asks me when I think I will “get closure,” I hope I have the presence of mind to punch him or her in the face.

“The story about the story.” This is pretty common, even among writers who are otherwise professional and exemplary. In my case, it worked like this: my newspaper editor noted that a Friday the 13th was coming up and wanted a little feature about it. No one else wanted to touch it, but I had an inspiration and volunteered. I would write a story about how hard it was to write a Friday the 13th story. I confess it was kind of cute: I wrote about calling the contacts on my beat—mayors, city council members, the fire chief—and asking if anything bad had ever happened to them on that date. For the most part nothing had, and that non-story was my story. My one misfire was a councilman who said yes, in fact, his daughter had died on a Friday the 13th. Crap. Of course I apologized and left him out of the article, as journalistically suspect as that might have been (a good reporter would never dismiss evidence that disagreed with their thesis. Tough cookies.). I thought myself quite clever and original until, again, I started seeing the device everywhere. It’s not clever and original; in fact, it’s desperate and sophomoric. So get it out of your system when you’re a sophomore.

It’s hard to avoid using clichés if you don’t know they’re clichés, and everybody falls into the trap sometimes (perhaps even by writing things like “falls into the trap”). Cliches serve a literary purpose as shorthand that instantly communicates a concept that may be otherwise hard or clumsy to explain. If you twist them a bit, they can even be rejuvenated (“It’s a gift horse. Don’t look in its mouth.”).

The cliches that really grate on my brain are the lazy automatic ones that people use without considering what they mean or if they provide useful information. They are combinations of words that no one would ever say in real life. Every word should serve a conscious purpose; that’s the ideal I always aim for and will always fall short of.

Readin' and Writin'

Yesterday my wife took me to see "The Holiday," a film in which Kate Winslet (above left) and Cameron Diaz play women who try to mend their broken hearts by swapping their homes in England and Hollywood for two weeks over Christmas. It's what some would call a "chick flick," a genre for which I actually have some tolerance, and I think I spoil no surprises by revealing that hearts are indeed healed with the help of Jack Black (above right) and Jude Law. I appreciated the fact that the emotional arcs for the Winslet and Diaz characters weren't mirror images of each other--they start out in different places and end up in different places--and I think the filmmakers even pull off the improbable use of Black as a semi-romantic lead.

What really impressed me about the movie, and the reason I'm bothering to write about it, is something hinted at by the full bookshelf behind the characters in the photo above: it is a love letter to writing. Winslet's character is a newspaper reporter and Law's is a book editor. Houses are full of cabinets that are packed with books (I noted that the set decorator seemed to have a fondness for Jonathan Franzen). And in what my wife and I agreed was the best subplot in the movie, Eli Wallach plays an elderly neighbor of Winslet's who was one of the great screenwriters in the Golden Age of Hollywood, his dusty study studded with honors and Oscars (and books). Winslet befriends him and tries to convince him to accept the gratitude of younger generations of writers who revere the words he wrote. I thought theirs was the most warmly satisfying relationship in the film. This through-line of literary appreciation was an unexpected pleasure and added depth to what could have been a pleasant but routine romantic romp.*

Reading and writing have always been important to me. Writing is how I've earned a living for about half of my adult life. I knew I was going to buy the house we live in now when I walked into the family room and saw that the owner had surrounded the fireplace with floor-to-ceiling oak bookshelves. One of the two big rules my wife and I made when we had children was that if either of the girls asked us to read a book with them we'd drop whatever else we were doing to do it. (The other big rule was that we'd never contradict each other's discipline or permission decisions even if we privately thought the other was wrong. "Divide and conquer" never worked on us.) As the girls got older we pretty much bought any books they wanted, which can get expensive but was still cheaper than the clothes, cars, make-up, music and bail money their peers demanded from their parents. I can't guarantee my child-rearing tips will work--in fact, I'm increasingly convinced that babies emerge pretty much as the people they're going to be, and if either of my girls had been wired to become a delinquent moron I don't know how we could've stopped them--but I'm ecstatic at our results.

I don't like recommending things. Any things. It's too much responsibility. I'd feel terrible if I advised someone to spend their time and money on a movie, book, restaurant, CD, piece of hardware, piece of software, or barber and they hated it--and worse, doubted my taste and sanity for inflicting it on them. So I'm not recommending "The Holiday," just mentioning something about it I enjoyed and appreciated. If you decide to see it it's your fault, not mine.

.

*I tried real hard to think of another word here besides "romp." Couldn't do it. Sorry.

More Like Guidelines than Rules....

Over Christmas my brother-in-law teased me about how nice and humble I seem in my blog compared to how nasty and arrogant I am in real life. He has a point: I'm not all that nice or humble. But I do have a few guidelines for how I conduct myself on the Internet, and was just acutely reminded why those guidelines are a good idea.

Although I don't spend a lot of time online, I do participate in a couple of forums and newsgroups that talk comics. In one recent discussion I poked some sarcastic fun at a particular syndicated feature and very quickly received an e-mail from the cartoonist who does that feature thanking me for the recognition, complimenting me on my own work that he'd been following since I went online, and congratulating me on my success.

What a gracious response! My original comment could've been taken as an insult, although it wasn't really meant as one and the cartoonist didn't see it as one--or perhaps chose not to. Instead, he won a fan for life. But the little tingle of "Oh crap!" that ran up my spine when I found his name in my In Box reminded me why I try to live by some pretty high standards:

Don't write anything about someone that I wouldn't say to their face. The anonymity of the Web is intoxicating. But you never know who's reading, and Web archives last forever. I try not to write anything I'd ever have to apologize for or be embarrassed by.

A corollary: Don't write anything uncomplimentary about the creative efforts of others. The fact is, I have an innate respect for almost anyone who creates anything, and a lot more respect for anyone able to make a living at it. The worst I'll say about something publicly is that it doesn't work for me; I'm not its audience. That makes it my problem, not yours. I'm quick to admit I might be wrong. Now, that doesn't mean I don't have my own opinions about terrible work and talentless hacks. I do, and if you and I are friends or colleagues splitting a pizza I might share those thoughts with you. But not here.

I learned two things from making Mom's Cancer: 1) It is much, much harder to create something--anything--than to sit back smugly tearing down the work of others, and 2) One cruel criticism stays with you longer than 100 kind compliments. I fairly commonly come across aspiring cartoonists online looking for critiques of their work. If I see something I like or have something genuinely constructive to contribute, I speak up. If not... well, maybe I just didn't happen to see it. Good luck to 'em.

No politics or religion. In particular, no evolution or conspiracy theories. I sometimes regret this guideline and am tempted to break it. Such topics encompass a big, interesting part of life and I wouldn't mind sharing my thoughts on them. In fact years ago I used to, but adopted the guideline when I realized I had never once changed anyone's mind about anything. All that my online arguing accomplished was to keep me awake nights drafting clever retorts in my head that were invariably undone by my opponents' blind inability to accept the inescapably self-evident beauty of my impeccably reasoned conclusions. This guideline has nothing to do with timidity or manners; it's pure self-preservation. Otherwise you'd all drive me nuts.

Go easy on family. With the obvious glaring exception of Mom's Cancer itself, I try to keep my personal life private. That's partly an editorial decision based on the type of blogger I want to be. I do mention my family once in a while, but this ain't Erma Bombeck or Anna Quindlen. Let's just assume we all glimpse the majesty of the universe in a baby's smile and move on. I also want my wife, children, sisters and friends to feel free to live their lives without worrying about Brian broadcasting it to the world. Frankly, after doing that once already, I think I owe them. Forever.

These guidelines create a little wall between us--me the writer and you the reader--that I sometimes regret but is just about a thickness and height I can live with. Some bloggers say whatever they want and let the chips fall where they may, and I see the value in that, sometimes admire it, and recognize it as one reason blogs exist. Just not this one.

Since I don't plan to post again before the start of 2007, maybe you could find a New Year's resolution in here somewhere worth adopting. Couldn't hurt.

Pitching to the Stars

I wrote about my great affection and appreciation for the original "Star Trek" a while ago, but in fact my relationship with the series goes a bit further than that. This is a story I don't tell very often--mostly because it ends in abject failure--but I did talk about it during my Comic-Con Spotlight Panel and I think it gives some insight into how I approached the writing of Mom's Cancer.

The 1960s' "Star Trek" was followed by another series that began in 1987 called "Star Trek: The Next Generation." It ran for seven seasons. I enjoyed the show as a fan, though never as passionately as I did its predecessor, and around the beginning of season six I heard from a friend that the show would consider scripts from unagented writers. This policy was unique in all of television and the news hit me like a thunderbolt. In a few weeks I came up with a story, figured out proper TV screenplay format, and sent off a full script with the required release forms. Shortly afterward, I followed with a second script, the maximum number they allowed.

I don't know how much later--surely months--I arrived home to a message on my answering machine. "Star Trek" wanted to talk to me. Neither of my scripts were good enough to actually shoot, but they showed enough promise that they were willing to hear any other ideas I might have. Would I care to pitch to them?

Yeah. I think so.

Paramount sent me a three-inch thick packet of sample scripts, writer's guides, director's guides, character profiles, episode synopses: all the background a writer would need to get up to speed (not that I needed them--I'd been up to speed since 1966). I spent several weeks coming up with dozens of ideas, distilled them to the five or six best, and made the long drive to Paramount Studios. Just getting onto the lot was a small comedy of errors: the guard at the gate didn't have my name on the list and I'd neglected to ask which office I was supposed to report to. Unlike anyone who's worked in Hollywood in the past 30 years, I wore a tie and sportcoat--a bad idea on a hot day when I was already inclined to sweat prodigiously. But I eventually made my way to the office of producer Rene Echevarria and threw him my first pitch. He stopped me after two sentences.

"We started filming a story just like that last week."

Crap. That was the best one.

Pitches two, three, four and five fared no better. After desperately rifling through my mental filing cabinet for any rejects with a hint of promise, I was done. In and out in less than 30 minutes, weeks of work for naught.

Still, I went home satisfied that I gave it my best shot. I wrote Rene a letter thanking him for the opportunity and expressing a completely baseless hope that he might give me another chance someday.

I got the next call a few weeks later. Rene had gotten my letter, looked over his notes, and decided that, although none of my pitches were good enough to shoot, I merited another shot.

Months later came my second try. Luckily, by now I was smart enough to spare myself the drive and pitch by phone. If I remember correctly, Rene liked a couple of my stories enough to take them to his bosses, but by this time the series was into its final season and the available episode slots were filling fast. In anticipation of the end of "The Next Generation," Paramount was already producing a successor series, "Deep Space Nine." In my last conversation with Rene, when it was clear "The Next Generation" was done with me, I asked if he could arrange for me to talk to "Deep Space Nine."

"Why would you want to pitch to those guys?" he asked, bewildered.

Nevertheless, I soon had an appointment to pitch to those guys, got another thick packet of blueprints and biographies, and started writing. I parlayed that opening into several pitches over the show's seven-year run, most to the very professional, generous and kind writer/producer Robert Hewitt Wolfe. And when Paramount started production on the next "Star Trek" series, "Voyager," I tried my old trick on Robert.

"Why would you want to pitch to those guys?"

So I got more packets of cool stuff, more experience, and more rejection. Although they liked some of my ideas enough to mull them over, I never got close. It was exhausting. At last, after eight or nine years and forty or fifty stories, "Star Trek" and I mutually agreed we'd had enough of each other and parted ways.

Lessons in Writing
Here's my point (and I do believe I have one, eventually): even as a complete failure, my experience pitching to "Star Trek" made me a better writer. What I realized was that the stories they quickly rejected focused on some science-fiction high-tech premise or plot twist, while the stories they liked focused on the characters. If I said something like, "Captain Picard begins at A, goes through B, and as a result of that experience ends up at C," I had their attention. I had to be hit over the head several times to realize that a good story isn't about spaceships or aliens or ripples in the fabric of space-time, but about people.

That sounds blindingly obvious, but I realized how unobvious it was as I talked to friends and family about the experience. As soon as someone realizes you have a distant shot at actually writing a "Star Trek" episode, they can't wait to share their idea with you (never mind how fast they'd sue if you actually used it). And literally without exception, every idea I heard from someone else was about a spaceship, alien, or ripple in the fabric of space-time. Not one that I recall even mentioned a character, how they'd react to the situation, or how they might be changed by it. Once I learned to look for it, it was striking.

These were lessons I internalized as best I could and took into the writing of Mom's Cancer. I realized early that my story couldn't be about the medical nuts and bolts of cancer treatment. First, because there are too many treatment options for anyone to cover; second, because I knew such information would be obsolete very quickly; and third and most importantly, good stories are about people. My book isn't about radiation and chemotherapy and cancer, but about what those things do to a family. If something I scripted or sketched didn't drive my mother's story--if the plot didn't serve the characters--I cut it.

Whatever success Mom's Cancer has had and will have, I think that was the key. With all due gratitude to all the Treks.