Today on the site, we present Rina Ayuyang's interview with Eric Haven, the creator of Tales to Demolish and the upcoming collection, Vague Tales.
After three issues of Angryman, I learned the hard truth: I’d never make a living in the comic business. I gave it everything I had, even quit my day job at the sake factory in order to fully commit to the art. But when I received the royalty check for the first issue - the princely sum of $100 - I realized my folly. In addition, seeing my comics out in the world started to fill me with dread. All I could see were the mistakes and the awfulness.
I stopped trying to produce comics for publishers at that point. Instead, I made mini-comics. That way I could still make terrible comics, and nobody but a few friends would see them. I could spend time flailing around and experimenting without fear of judgment. It was almost 10 years of mini-comics making before Tales to Demolish came out.
Meanwhile, elsewhere:
—News. The National Cartoonists Society announced the winners of the annual Reuben Awards. Among others, Ann Telnaes won outstanding cartoonist of the year, and Lynda Barry won the Milton Caniff lifetime achievement award.
The Montreal webcartoonist Sophie Labelle was forced to cancel a promotional event and go into hiding after a series of transphobic threats.
“This kind of thing happens to any trans person who’s visible and trying to raise awareness of trans issues,” Labelle, 29, said by phone from an undisclosed location on Friday. “In this case, the organizers had received threats that people would come and disrupt the event, so we decided to be on the safe side.”
Something used with particular virulence against Labelle has been the practice of doxxing. One of those cyberspeak words that is rapidly entering the general vernacular, it refers, in Labelle’s words, to “having personal information leaked with the purpose of undermining somebody. In the past I have exposed some of the groups that have been posting threats on my Facebook page, and Facebook has deleted most of them, and I think that’s what made it escalate to the point where they doxxed me and published my home address. They hacked into my website to get that information.”
—Commentary. Chris Ware writes about Saul Steinberg.
As a cartoonist myself, I am dismayed that there’s little in the show I can steal, the crossover in the Venn diagram of the image-as-itself versus as-what-it-represents being depressingly slim. I am painfully aware that in comics, stories generally kill the image. But Steinberg’s images grow and even live on the page; somewhere in the viewing of a Steinberg drawing the reader follows not only his line, but also his line of thought. Describing himself as “a writer who draws,” Steinberg could just as easily be considered an artist who wrote; as my fellow cartoonist Lynda Barry puts it, his “drawing went not from his mind to his hand but rather from his hand to his mind.” Or as Steinberg himself declared at the beginning of a 1968 television interview, “[my hand explains] to myself what goes on in my mind.”
The UK cartoonist Hannah Berry writes about her decision to leave comics (or at least graphic novels) due to financial considerations.
To make a graphic novel takes me three years of blinkered, fanatical dedication, and I realised while working on Livestock that I just can’t do it again. I’m done. I’m out. And from quiet talks with many other graphic novelists, ones whose books you know and love, I can tell you that I’m far from being the only one.
This is the problem with making graphic novels in the UK today, and it’s one we need to address: the numbers do not add up.
Douglas Wolk reviews a slew of new books for the NYT Book Review's Summer Reading issue, including comics by Emil Ferris, Jason Shiga, Gabrielle Bell, Igort, Guy Delisle, and Jillian Tamaki.
If Tamaki (the illustrator of the Book Review’s By the Book feature) has a favorite storytelling strategy, it seems to be dreaming up some kind of odd artifact of mass culture and then examining the way people react to it. “Body Pods” concerns a cult movie adored by some of the narrator’s friends, and their reactions as its stars begin to die. “Darla!” is an oral history of a (nonexistent) short-lived pornographic sitcom from the ’90s. (“It was a different time,” the narrator deadpans. “You could never make something like it now.”) And the Borgesian “1. Jenny” begins by imagining a “mirror Facebook” whose users’ profiles begin to diverge from their real-world counterparts,’ and goes on to follow one woman’s obsession with her alternate self’s love life.
—Interviews & Profiles. The Millions talked to James Sturm about a new edition of his 2001 book, The Golem's Mighty Swing.
Most of the book’s Jewish characters are immigrants or first-generation Americans — they fled from pogroms, hostile empires, and emerging nations. They desperately wanted to believe in the ideals of America. For the team’s black player, Henry Bell, his view of America is far different — his family came to America in chains. A baseball story set in the 1920s is especially susceptible to evoking that rose-tinted strain of American nostalgia. I did want the book to challenge this view. I keep coming back to the present political moment and this creepy notion of “making America great again.” Talk about rose-tinted glasses! Who was it great for? And if so, on whose backs was that “greatness” generated?
Pedro Moura interviews comics scholar Maaheen Ahmed about her new book, Openness of Comics: Generating Meaning within Flexible Structures.
I did indeed deliberately avoid titles that had already been well analyzed, but I also wanted to try and get a more transcultural perspective on comics by including works from different regions and genres. Since I also wanted to better understand the rise and establishment of the graphic novel phenomenon, I thought it might be more productive to start with Eisner’s Contract with God which can be said to bridge the more mainstream idea of comics and the basic implication of a graphic novel as being a novel. This was also the reasoning behind including Pratt’s long, novel-like Corto Maltese adventure, The Ballad of the Salt Sea as a European counterpart to Eisner’s graphic novel to start the next section.
I did indeed want to include more works (e.g. Aristophane’s Faune from 1995 and only recently re-issued by Frémok, to name only one of the many fascinating, experimental comics published in Belgium). Their absence however is due to more practical concerns of space (since the analyses are kept descriptive in order to provide a well-rounded ‘picture’ of each comic) and structure (of the book itself). I would’ve also liked to include a much larger section on the relationship between (experimental) comics and artists’ books – so much still needs to be done in that area!
The CBLDF podcast speaks to Gilbert Hernandez, Virtual Memories talks to Seth, and Process Party talks to John Porcellino.
