Check out my review of Jen Vaughn's Menstruation Station: Menarche Aboard! at inkstuds.

picture of a deformed head here

Nobody is writing anything good today, it is sunny out and I am in, my head hurts, and and and

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Doesn't it seem like sometimes everybody else is doing great projects but because of various disabilities on your part you can't join in? That's how I am feeling. Though I am about to embark on the MLS project (a commitment of many kinds), I've got all this summer juice percolating in my brain and no tall, condensation-smudged glass to pour it into. While time may not permit the metamorphosis of all my thoughts from liquid to solid I'd still like to take a crack at it.

Did we say that we were going to do some projects? Ok, let's do them.

Until then, I'll be napping in my room.

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Contest entries and pictures of amazing things are appreciated.

Buddha 1 & 2 by Osamu Tezuka

A friend who wanted to get me into manga master Tezuka’s work gave the first two volumes of the Buddha biography to me as a birthday gift. I read each thick volume in one or two sittings.

Tezuka uses two styles to tell the Buddha’s story—a finely detailed, naturalistic style to show the lush Indian backgrounds, architectural edifices and certain animals and a big-eyed cartoon-y style for the characters in the story. It was the latter that distracted me from the story. The character treatment, while it works in the action sequences that are shoehorned in to fill out the Buddha’s world, distanced me from the characters. I felt little investment in their fates. Also, the female characters look very much alike. Tezuka depicts many of the characters topless for much of the time. Strangely, he only draws nipples for them part of the time. I can’t explain why this bugged me so much, but it did.

The dialogue is childish and stilted, which may because of the translation, but seems to be a result of trying to put modern idioms in the mouths of centuries-old characters. The relationships between the characters, especially the romantic ones are equally superficial and don’t really create any tension.

While I enjoyed the books as a way to pass time on the train and waiting in waiting rooms, I didn’t feel the urge to go out and buy the rest of the volumes. Partly this is a reaction to the price of each, even the Strand’s discount didn’t bring them under ten dollars. Ultimately, though, it was a matter of Tezuka’s lackluster character design and writing.

Tezuka is considered a master of the form and I respect that. I guess I’ll just have to see more of his work before I can decide what I think of his stuff.

Reminder

You have one week left to enter the Summer 09 Contest. Send in those entries!

The Tent by Margaret Atwood

I hated this book. Almost every minute of reading the bloodless short shorts and poems within it I spent waiting to get to something strong and vivid and Atwoody. Instead the stories are vague and unmemorable and are almost entirely in one of my least favorite voices: the mythmaker.

The mythmaker voice is almost always a distant first person and uses the word “we” a lot. The rhythm is slow and sing-song, all the better to lull one to sleep:
“The young look up at you, wide-eyed. Or maybe they look down at you: they’ve become very tall. How young are the young these days? It varies. Some of them are quite old. But they are still credulous, because you were there, once upon a time, and they weren’t.” (“Winter’s Tales”)

“The Heritage house is where we keep the Heritage. It wasn’t built for that—it was once a place where people really lived—but the way things need to be done was cumbersome, what with the water coming out of the well, and the light coming out of oil lamps and tallow candles, and the heat coming out of a stone fireplace, and then there were chamber pots to be emptied and the tin bathtubs to be filled.”” (“Heritage House”)

“But who are we now, apart from the question Who are we now? We all share that question. Who are we, now, inside the we corral, the we palisade, the we fortress, and who are they? Is that them, landing in their illicit boats, at night?...It’s a constant worry, this we, this them.” (“Post-Colonial”)

This voice is usually employed when there is no real story, and the author wants to add weight to a story that’s clichéd, characterless, or just plain boring, or wants to write an essay, but doesn't have enough facts. I realize that this entire short work could be taken as an exercise, but that doesn’t mean that I want to read it. Even I in a mood more indulgent toward such wifty tales, the themes matter and none of Atwood’s take on themes in The Tent—including aging, aging as a woman, the problems of modernity--did much for me.

The only good of this collection is its high object value. The cover and design are beautiful and it’s a great size for toting around. Why you’d want to I’m not sure.

The Alchemy of Stone by Ekaterina Sedia

While most of the stuff on io9 concerns poorly made television shows and gossip about films I have no interest in, I must confess a love of editors Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders. When Annalee rustled up a list of books that will make you think differently about robots, I was intrigued. I am in a place where I think I need to think differently about robots so I thought I’d check out a few of the suggestions. Luckily the library had both of the ones I was interested in.

The Alchemy of Stone is a steampunk affair, without the punk. The story concerns a housekeeping robot-turned-companion named Mattie and her painful relationship with her creator, Loharri. Although she is emancipated and has her own alchemy work making potions for apothecaries and lost lovers, her creator has the only key to her clockwork heart and lords this fact over her when he feels powerless against her ambition. The alchemists and the mechanics, of which Loharri is part, run the city, which is also looked after by a dying race of gargoyles. Mattie’s newest commission is to help the gargoyles while the people who do its dirty work threaten the order of the city.

A machine-girl is an interesting idea, but I found Mattie to be an uninteresting character. Her naiveté, explained as resulting from her short time out of Loharri’s care, comes off as grating, especially when applied to the unsubtle anti-discrimination theme of the book:
“And yet, she couldn’t shake her anger as she walked downhill. Not al Ilmarekh but at those who chose that life for him—just like the anger she felt when the soldier on the metal mount called her a clunker. There were these people—she wasn’t sure exactly who they were—who kept telling them what they could and could not be. And Mattie was quite certain that she did not request her emancipation just so she could obey others beside Loharri.” It’s the “quite certain” that gives away the prim simplicity of the book’s take on race relations (and to some extent, gender relations).

In fact, it is primness overall that makes this book forgettable. “Mattie thought that she had never yet seen Iolanda like that—so energetic, so giddy, crackling with some hidden excitement. And the fact that she was here and undressed… she decided to ponder the implications later, when she wasn’t so distracted.”

Despite the requisite bit of Victoriana present in the book, I just couldn’t believe that a former blank slate, made by a flawed and dark creator and exposed to the ugliest of human emotions on a daily basis would evolve such an earnest do-gooder personality. While the questions her existence asks—what is emancipation, what is bondage, can a mechanical thing love—are compelling, nothing complicated can be pinned to such a blah character, and relieves Sedia’s exploration of those topics of any weight. Sedia never goes past Mattie’s limited perceptions (except during the aggressively italicized passages in the gargoyles' voice, who speak like forgotten royals struck with a fever of vagueness), to really mine the themes she has set up and is instead content to write a chaste romance novel with a steam and metal wrapper.

I hope the other book I got from the list is much better.

bits of good

Some thoughts on internet persona and anonymity by bug girl. Work, passion, Darwin and Tootsie all make an appearance.
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Michael Schaub is back at bookslut. Hooray-a-thon. He is hilarious and smart.
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The excellent Matthew Cheney talks about books on a particular shelf over at Strange Horizons. The only downside to the essay is that he opens with a confession of bookshelf voyeurism and I wanted to know more about what he's gleaned about others from their display.
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Cure for the rainy-month blues:
spicy vegetarian chili
iced tea with garden herbs
books set in Seattle, Scotland, Jupiter or beneath the earth
cotton blankets
Maniac Cop

Coast City Comics

When JetBlue hands you a sweet deal, sometimes you just have to overpack, underdress and barely prepare for a rainy vacation in Maine.

While I was there, Coast City Comics in Portland opened. It seems to be a more superhero and toy-oriented scene than I am into, but an employee assured me that there would be more local stuff and minis to come. If you love mainstream floppies and paraphernalia, this is the place.

Here are some pics which showcase my deteriorating photo skillz. Eye redaction for everyone!

The welcoming crew
One part of the massive back issue selection
Employees, one with smile, one without
The satisfaction of a job well done

As part of the celebration various prize packs were raffled off to lucky winners. Imagine my surprise when our hostess, formerly known as Mary Millwhistle won one of three mystery packs! She'll be well-stocked with bulging biceps and rocket boobs for months. (Also comics history):




For much better pictures, see here later, probably...

Back again from the land of blueberries and beards (sorry Mary). I'll have some new stuff for you soon. Ok? Ok.

I have a new review of Runx Tales #1 over at inkstuds.

I have a review of Papercutter 9 featuring Aron Nels Steinke, Hellen Jo and Elijah Brubaker over at inkstuds. Enjoy.

Some things about MoCCA

1) I can't believe that I missed Kate Beaton.
2) I saw a ton of oversized minis this year. It's a neat idea, but if I can't carry it home with me from the con without crushing it then maybe it's not such a good idea, you know?
3) There weren't many prints this year--good for my wallet, bad for my walls.
4) Speaking of my wallet, I overspent by almost twice my budget in a handful of hours. That's how much good stuff there was.
5) The armory was an interesting space, at the least, even though the giant openness lent a trade-show feeling to the affair.
6) The sketch tables were poorly positioned and advertised so I didn't even know what was happening there until SEC was toiling away behind the tables. A lot of people missed out on great sketches by her and many others.
7) I saw Jason, all by himself, drinking a Diet Dr. Pepper on the corner. I stared at him; he looked away.
8) I had fun with the Indie Spinner Rack guys. Their new book looks really good.
9) Madison Square Park is an excellent place to take a post-con nap.

My haul (above), B's below

I didn't stay very long at the show either day, didn't interview anybody, didn't take any pictures and actually enjoyed myself. Working during conventions isn't fun for anyone... but if you want to chat, drop me an email.

Did we meet at MoCCA?

Drop me a comment!

Before I head off to MoCCA, I wanted to share some pics from my rain-weary garden:

The first lily! A lollipop lily to be exact.

Herb garden

Yellow digitalis (foxglove)

Impatiens and ferns and bleachy sunlight

"Handle (with care!) the taxidermied squirrels!"

I am getting that feast or famine feeling here in NYC. This weekend is MoCCA, a million parties, some cool readings, a ton of one-day-run films and this:
The Morbid Anatomy Library will be open from 1-6 on June 6th and 7th, as part of the 2009 Atlantic Avenue Artwalk.

I've been there and it is great. The library is small, but includes a ton of books and objects to tickle the fancy of any oddity-lover.

heads, tails, links

A Vermont locale, a collection of comics, zines and ephemera, and treasures from that archive posted on a nicely written blog. What more could you ask for? The Charles Schulz Library
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Some gorgeous photos of people's private oddities.
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Kate Beaton has a wily mermaid tale in the works.
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Do you have an idea for the summer contest yet?

I have a review of Sarah Oleksyk's comic series IVY over at inkstuds. Go leave comments!

Interview: Sarah Oleksyk

From the first cartoon of hers that I saw in Papercutter #4, I knew that 31 year-old, Portland-based cartoonist Sarah Oleksyk was an artist I had to learn more about. Thanks to her graciousness, I was able to interview her about her life and her newest project, IVY, over the last few months. Enjoy.

C: How did you end up in Portland?
S: I moved to Portland in 2001, after taking a week-long trip out here to scope it out. I was living in Portland, Maine at the time and I didn't want to stay there, but I knew I couldn't afford living in NYC (where I went to school), so I was looking for a new place. When I came out here I just felt it was the right place to be - not too small, not too big, pretty and inexpensive. And here I am.

C: Do you think that living in a place full of cartoonists has affected your work? How? Has it affected your work on IVY?
S: When I got here there was definitely an artists' community, but in the 7-8 years since SO MANY CARTOONISTS have moved to town. And it's great! I end up running into people I know at most events or even just out on the town, and I always have someone I can call to go out for coffee and draw with. Certain people have had comics-themed events at their houses or at their stores, or just informal get-togethers where we're working on our projects and talking about our experiences. I've had friends hook me up with jobs, gallery shows, all sorts of things. The support and connection I get from the people in town is really amazing, and through my friends here I've met a ton of other creators all over the country, because of comics shows and traveling. Seeing other peoples' working processes, hearing their complaints and encouragement, all of that has made me both feel like a part of something bigger, and made me feel more like a professional. Plus it lights fires under my butt to get my book done, because everyone wants to know how it ends!

C: I certainly want to know how it ends! "It" is IVY, your most excellent comic about an arty teenage girl waiting to get out of her Maine hometown and famillial responsibilities. Even though the story is set in Maine, it feels quite universal. Did you set out to write a Maine story?
S: I did set out to write a Maine story. It's where I grew up, and it hasn't been mined very deeply as far as pop culture goes. Maine is such an isolated (though less so nowadays) and strange microcosm of back-woodsiness and do-it-yourself, get-off-my-land mentality. Most people only know about Steven King and lobsters. It was a spare and beautiful place to grow up - you had to find your own entertainment.

C: Is Ivy based on anyone? She and her friends are amazingly real--how did you do that?
S: Ivy started out just being my stand-in, but over time I've allowed her more dominant traits (anger, impatience, narcissism) to really come out and shine. I was really shy and submissive as a teenager - I let a lot of people walk all over me. I guess Ivy was sort of the me that was seething inside, allowed to come out in full vengeful bloom. Ha! The rest of the characters - well, a few were originally based on specific people, but as far as all my characters go, they begin to take on their own behaviors and personalities. I like to have opposing characters jut up against one another to see what sort of sparks arise. It's all that makes interaction interesting - the conflict!

C: In Chapter 1, Ivy meets a cool guy at an art college fair. They begin writing letters to each other and have a wee romance. The look and content of these letters gave me severe 90s flashbacks. How did you decide on the tone of their correspondence? Why did you make this a part of Ivy's story?
S: The letters Josh sends to Ivy are a key clue to his mindset and psyche. I actually have letters written to me from teenage boys when I was a teenager (in the 90s), and when I look at them now, I'm amazed both by how romantic and trite and juvenile they are, and also by how much they made me feel special and loved. Ivy loves Josh because he gives her attention and makes her feel important - she has someone OUT OF STATE (intriguing!) who has focused on her as being worthy of attention. I think that sense of being important to someone at that age eclipses even who that other person is. The nature of the letters themselves, being smeary and doodled-upon and shifting subject without warning, is an early clue as to who Josh is. It's a part of the story because to a teenager who doesn't have the physical presence of her crush object available to her, the letters and little gifts become as important as the other person himself.

C: In one of my favorite comics of yours, “Fifteen Variations on the First Day We Met,” love is viewed very optimistically. Optimism towards adult love seems to be missing from IVY, especially with regard to Ivy's mom. The kids are all horny and crush-y, why not give them a relationship to look up to?
S: I never viewed the love in Fifteen Variations as being particularly "optimistic", though now that I go back and look, it is. The first time you meet someone, and the ensuing "honeymoon period", is just that - idealized, starry-eyed, a rush. Hard times come later. Ivy was based a lot initially on my own home situation growing up, and while I changed the outward nature of a lot of the characters over time, the fundamental distrust of adult relationships is still there. My parents weren't together and in all honesty I didn't, and haven't, seen a lot of mature relationships that were functional and happy. Maybe it's my own lack of imagination, but I don't have a lot to draw from in the way of writing a stable, working, happy family dynamic, and so I wrote what I knew. Many books about children focus on their problems in the environment of a presumed functional, two-parent family, and I don't see a lot of narratives where the adults' relationship problems directly impacts the childrens', so here was my chance to reflect that as well.


C: Yeah, stuff written about teenagers usually falls into two camps--either super sleazy and exploitative or really simplistic. I often avoid reading stuff about teenage girls (coming of age? shudder!) for that very reason, and as a teen girl I always felt condescended to if I did. Did you think about those cliches while creating IVY?
S: I very much held all the things i DIDNT want to do in mind while writing Ivy, perhaps even more so than what I DID want to do. I think the key for me was never to think of this book as a "coming of age" story, or really any genre of story at all. It was mostly just a character study and slice-of-life tale where a lesson is learned. I remember vividly being a girl Ivy's age and not feeling much different than I do now - I was a person in my head, living in my situation, and not a collection of cliches and roles and "supposed-to"s that I feel a lot of teenage female characters are diluted down to. That expectation of what a teenage girl "should be" or "should think" is a very real force in a lot of real girls' lives, making them doubt themselves and their desires and reactions and personality quirks and all the other things that make them individuals. I wrote a story about an individual going through a difficult situation, and it just happened to be a teenaged girl at the end of her high school gauntlet. I tried very hard never to rely on cliche, just to pull out the threads of reality and weave them through each scene, wrapped in as much emotional honesty as I could remember.

C: And, for the gear heads: What tools did you use to create IVY's fluid, beautiful, B&W art?
S: I use a single Utrecht brand natural sable #2 watercolor brush. That's it, all the linework comes from that brush. I occasionally buy pencils but I find them on the street all the time (I live near a high school, those sidewalks are a goldmine for dropped pencils). All the grays are added in Photoshop with a tablet. I do all the cleanup in Photoshop as well, since it looks a lot cleaner and is so much quicker than using ProWhite.

C: Anything else coming up that you want to talk about?
S: I have a few plans in mind for shorter projects while I form the next full-length book in my head. I have two concepts for full-length novels after this, and a few mildly erotic fantasy short-stories to have fun with while I round the longer stuff out. I'm also planning to make more silkscreen prints - smaller, more affordable ones in series. It's good to have more than one thing going on so the long, endless projects don't drag you under!

AND, IVY #4 is out now and I can't wait to read it. MoCCA Ordering from her website can not come soon enough.

Airplane books

I’ve been traveling recently. It seems that every month requires contact with all manner of conveyances—some making me feel like a noirish femme fatale, others like a puke-tinged tabloid queen. The worst is the airplane. Packed in with a hundred or so farting unfortunates, it’s hard to ignore that to-the-slaughterhouse feeling, no matter how many tomato juices you suck down. The longer the flight, the worse it is.

Not surprisingly, I avoid the movies and audio programming on the plane even more vigilantly than when earthbound. Choosing between Marley & Me and an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond is not a choice I care to make. Enter the airplane book.

The perfect airplane book must match the tension of hurtling through the air and transform it into something pleasurable. For me it helps if the setting is long ago/far away—such attributes add to the escapism of the activity. Alien infiltration? Good. Dads dying? Bad.

I’ve chosen pretty wisely recently, never again to repeat the mistake of reading The Autograph Man while on a six hour flight, premedication.

Here are some of my favorites:
Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters- airplane book extraordinaire. Old-timey, sex-filled and funny, with a satisfying conclusion. It’s also available in many airport bookstores.
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke- A world unto its own.
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson- treasure and code cracking, with enough annoying quirks to keep you het up about those and not your seatmate.
The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf by Kathryn Davis- A million things going on, beautifully written and no airplanes
PopCo by Scarlett Thomas- for all of its problems as a novel, it is smart and fast-paced and fun
Half Life by Shelley Jackson- alternate near-future at its best
Jamestown by Matthew Sharpe- alternate past-future at its best
Anything by Muriel Spark

Edited to add:
Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith
Perdido Street Station by China Mielville
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon

What are yours?

Summer 09 Contest

The task:
Turn this spam headline into something entertaining:
Police end funereal striptease acts.

The format:
Short story, comic, photo essay, pop tune, whatever, as long as it is bloggable

The prize:
A box of awesome from tryharderland sent straight to your door!

The deadline:
Friday, July 3

*Previous winners are not exempt this round, so make with the summer fun, folks.*