Today on the site:
We are lucky to have Ron Rege interview Dame Darcy on the occasion of her essential new book, Meat Cake Bible. It's a doozy.
Rege: This is not a graphic novel by any means. You’re a cartoonist from the pre-graphic novel era, which isn’t that long ago.
Darcy: Yeah, and all the kids do this manga thing now. Everyone does anime and this anime style. It’s fine, especially in my genre, Gothic Lolita. It’s all this anime goth. I’m Gothic Lolita too, but I have nothing to do with anime. All the millennials are super into anime and they need to expand on that, you know.
Rege: I think eventually they’ll absorb it and do it in their own style or something like that.
Darcy: I hope so because I’m kind of getting sick of it. You know, you’re drawing really great, but you’re drawing just like anime. Come up with your own thing guys! I’m going to do a skill share video series teaching how to self-publish and do your own comics, and coming up with your own style is the main part of it! [laughter]. You’re not learning anything if you do that. You gotta go into your soul and come up with your own look!
I taught sequential art at the School of Visual Arts, and I’ve done lectures with PNCA and SCAD and Columbia and stuff like that, and one off things at public schools. I’ll volunteer. I did a little comics course for kids in the inner city schools in LA. I did it here for summer camp in Savannah. I’m all about it. One of the first things I say is, ‘Okay what’s you’re spirit animal? What’s your favourite stuff? What’s your favourite colour? What’s your favourite food? Combine it all in to a character, that’s where you’re going to get your style!’
Rege: That’s cool.
Darcy: Yeah, they come up with the cutest, hilarious stuff. I just love teaching people how to tap into their pathos. That’s what it’s really about. Just inspiring people with your work to be themselves, and to tap into their pathos. Like, be yourself so brazenly!
I love how when Obama became president he was like ‘yeah, I know there’s never been a black president before, but my reality and my confidence is so strong that I changed reality. I made it so there was a black president even though there’d never been one. In my world there could be one, and so now there is.’ I love that! That’s the key to manifestation and magic. Just alter reality so that it becomes your reality!
Rege: Oh my god.
Darcy: Seriously. I wanna be as big as Snoopy or as mainstream as Hello Kitty or some shit. Really I do.
Elsewhere:
Monday night I attended Dash Shaw's NYC premier of My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea, which I absolutely loved. It's beautiful to look at, funny, and suspenseful. I was blown away, really. There are visual effects in there that I've just never seen before. If it's playing anywhere near you, go see it.
I also wanted to mention, since I've gotten a few emails asking about it, that all the installation photos from the Ben Jones exhibition at The Hole are now online. Ben's new show was fascinating because it was a rare instance of a cartoonist making comics that function as narrative drawing in a contemporary gallery space. These are not enlarged images (e.g. Shrigley), murals, or groups of drawings (Pettibon), but rather straightforward canvases that take a new approach to the comic medium. The show consists of oil stick-on canvas 3 by 3 foot cartoon panels assembled into narrative blocks (or 6 by 9 foot “pages”). They manage to feel as intimate as his notebook-sized comic strips and yet take on a new, somewhat ominous meaning — their dumb subject and large size a visual equivalent to, say, the comedy of Eric Andre or Will Ferrell. On a technical level, the work functions because his line is distinctly warm, his cartoon forms basic, and his sense of space and scale adaptable to large spaces.
There’s a strange and digressive history of how comic art has been shown in museums and galleries (this is leaving aside cartoonish art, like Peter Saul). Usually a cartoonist like Clowes or Barry or Crumb exhibits the original drawings for their publications. Every so often (particularly in the 1940s and 50s) a cartoonist will make paintings or, in the case of a young artist like Aidan Koch, sculpture.
But mostly it’s original pages on a wall. Even Jim Shaw generally shows his “dream" comic book pages as if they were made for publication. And of course there’s the legacy of Pop: It’s rote by now to discuss Roy Lichtenstein's use of comic book panels as material for paintings. Less well known is that contemporaneous cartoonists, notably Al Capp (Li’l Abner) made “pop art” prints of their own work, complete with enlarged ben-day dots and the like, as if to compete with the men they considered “thieves”: Lichtenstein, Mel Ramos, Erro, et al. And younger contemporary artists have toyed with the comic strip as a source for material, like Jayson Musson, who exhibited his own versions of Nancy-cartoonist Ernie Bushmiller’s renditions of modern art, circa mid-20th century.
That's all. Just a few thoughts on this great show.
Still more:
Speaking of art and comics, here's a full look at the Mould Map show.
BK Munn sketches out a history of the Cartoonist's Guild, which I hope he expands on.
I always like to link to Leslie Stein's latest.
I may have posted this many years ago, but I ran across it again. The classic live cartoon/art film, Fat Feet.
Here's Jim Rugg over at Clocktower radio.
It looks like SPX has posted quite a few videos from last month's programming.
Here's Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez interviewed by Bill Boichel:
