Episode 495

September 19th, 2006

Here’s th’ latest episode. Trying a new technique for posting it here. Let’s see how it goes.

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it’s a mystery

September 17th, 2006

The UK edition of Fun Home was just released, and got a nice review in the Times. Thanks to Pam Isherwood for alerting me to it. I don’t understand why there needs to be a separate UK edition, though. It’s not like it has to be translated. Unless maybe they threw in some spanners or torches. Or puddings maybe.

Another thing I don’t understand is these bugs that keep appearing in my basement. They’re some kind of ants that crawl up through cracks in the floor, metamorphose into winged bugs every night, and in the morning they’re all dead.

Fall Tour: space-time coordinates

September 17th, 2006

I’m leaving in a week for another book tour. I thought making a map of where I was going might help me to pre-emptively (god, that word is ruined forever) adjust to the psychic displacement entailed by serial air travel. In case you can’t decipher it, here’s the text version, too.

Fun Home Fall Tour

Austin, Texas
Sunday, September 24, 2006, 3:00 pm

BookPeople
603 N Lamar Blvd.
Austin TX 78703
(512) 472-4288

Atlanta, Georgia
Tuesday, September 26, 2006, 8:00 pm

Outwrite Bookstore
991 Piedmont Ave. NE
Alanta, GA 30309
404.607.0082

Miami, Florida
Thursday, September 28, 2006, 8:00 pm

Books & Books, Miami Beach
933 Lincoln Rd, Miami Beach FL
305-532-3222
Co-sponsored by Miami-Dade G&L Chamber of Commerce

Asheville, North Carolina
Friday, September 29, 2006, 7:00 pm

Malaprop’s Bookstore and Café,
55 Haywood St. Asheville, NC 28801
828-254-6734

St. Louis, Missouri
Saturday, 30 September, 2006, 7:00 pm

Left Bank Books
399 N Euclid Ave, St. Louis MO 63108
314-367-6731

Washington, D.C.
Monday, October 2, 2006, 8:00 pm

Politics and Prose
5015 Connecticut Ave NW, Washington DC 20008
202-363-7663

Cleveland, Ohio
Tuesday, October 3, 2006, 7:00 pm

Joseph-Beth Booksellers, Legacy Village
24519 Cedar Road, Lyndhurst OH 44124
216.912.1981

Oberlin College
Wednesday, October 4, 2006, 4:30 pm

I’ll be giving a lecture about Dykes to Watch Out For and Fun Home for the Comparative American Studies program. But anyone’s welcome to come. It’s in the Craig Lecture Hall, Science Center, 119 Woodland St., Oberlin, OH

University of Michigan
Tuesday, October 10, 2006, 7:00 pm

The School of Art & Design and the Office of LGBT Affairs is bringing me in. I’ll be speaking at the East Quad auditorium. This is a National Coming Out Day event.

Toronto, Ontario
Wednesday, October 11, 2006, 7:00 pm

Pages, ‘This is Not A Reading Series’
http://www.pagesbooks.ca/

I’ll be having a conversation with Ivan Coyote and Zoe Withall.

Gladstone Hotel Ballroom, 1214 Queen St W,, Toronto.
Wed, Oct 11, 7:30-10pm (doors 7pm), free

Coming up:
London and Paris at the end of October

NY ComicCon in February

analyze this

September 11th, 2006

Whoa. Guttergeek, The Discontinuous Review of Graphic Narrative, just posted a lovely, academic review of Fun Home by Michael Moon, a professor at Emory. It has some interesting psychoanalytic insights. If you like that sort of thing. Which I do.

Take for example the amazing picture (top of p. 44) of her child-self in silhouette, observing her father laboring in his embalmer’s role over a bearded and naked corpse from which he appears to have extracted heart, lungs, stomach and bowels through a gaping hole in the front of the body….Here is meticulous, Thomas Eakins-like physical detail, in both drawing and writing. But here too (although we may overlook it) is probably the book’s most harrowing visualization of Bechdel’s worst fears about her father: that he lacked, to a radical degree, some kind of crucially important interiority.

Episode 494

September 11th, 2006

Man. I’ve been trying to get this up since last week. Still having trouble with displaying the large-print version. In the meantime, click here or the image below for the large version on Flickr, and take your chances. Apologies if it doesn’t work with your browser.

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Paper Play: The Movie

September 10th, 2006

Phranc and I made this little movie yesterday about our art show. I wish I could embed it here, but you have to go to YouTube to see it. It’s about three minutes long, with a live impromptu soundtrack by Phranc.

“Paper Play,” my art show with Phranc

September 9th, 2006

Phranc and I had the opening of our show “Paper Play” at the Pine Street Art Works in Burlington yesterday. It was part of the Art Hop, this big crazy weekend of open studios and bands playing and thousands of people walking around looking at art. That first picture is of me cutting out my giant lifesize drawing of Phranc. And here’s the finished cutout, next to the real Phranc.

Phranc exhibited some of her luscious paper clothing.

And I exhibited these giant drawings I’ve been making all summer. Since I spend all my time making tiny, carefully planned drawings for my comics, I gave myself an assignment to do one giant drawing a day, unpremeditated and freehand. I got 4 foot wide roll of Kraft paper and a sheet of plywood for an easel. And every day (more or less) this summer I made a drawing. So I picked the best ones to put in the show. My friend Val sewed hems in the tops and bottoms so I could put dowels in and turn them into scrolls. Then I hung them from a cable. Here’s my friend Linda looking at the installation.

And being a compulsive anal-retentive geek, I also compiled a little movie on YouTube of the entire series of 70 drawings in chronological order. Anyhow. Doing these monumental spontaneous drawings was really fun. And it really freed me up. I feel like my drawing has gotten more confident.

Phranc says I’m bloghappy. She’s staying with me and just went to have her shower. So I better sign off. But oh, here’s a video podcast of Phranc you should check out. She demonstrates how she makes her cardboard & paper clothes.

Attn: Persons in Proximity to Burlington

September 8th, 2006

Katie here-

The Art Hop is this weekend, so come and see Alison and Phranc’s show, “Paper Play” at Pine Street Artworks. It’s open from 5-10pm today, Sept 8th, and from 10am – 4pm tomorrow, Sept 9th. You may recall the original entry about this show. Alison’s been hard at work creating huge foam and paper people-in-action for phom Phranc has created intricate paper clothing. I’ve witnessed these figures lying around, dissected and awaiting Phranc’s haberdashery. Don’t miss Alison and Phranc’s show and the SEABA South End Art Hop in general!

A long, detailed podcast interview

September 8th, 2006

Here’s a conversation I had with Edward Champion, of the Bat Segundo show, about Fun Home when I was in San Francisco in June. He’s a funny smart guy and asked a lot of good questions. Uh…it’s pretty long, though. So wait until you have some time to kill, or something really tedious that you can do at the same time.

Answers

September 5th, 2006

My flight’s delayed, so I’ll see if I can answer Straight Girl Fan’s questions (in the comments on my 9/3 post) about Fun Home before my battery runs down. (forgot to bring that crucial little piece of the $&%^ power adapter, the little white plug part)

“Mom, how come you never go outside?” “I told you, I’m a vampire.” Did this really happen, or is this you putting Addams family words in your family’s mouths?

Yes, my mother really said this. Often. She’s always been very averse to sunlight.

Why would putting a kid in an old-fashioned cookstove be less macabre than a modern oven?

Because in those old stoves the firebox would be, like, closed off from the oven compartment. And they’d have yet another compartment further from the fire where you could just keep stuff warm. Like a small child. I guess.