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excellent fun home parody

August 19th, 2011

I keep meaning to post a link to this funny sci-fi takeoff on Fun Home, Space Home. One of the artists, Laurel Leake, alerted me to it last month. It’s an episode of Wilson Parker’s webcomic, Unwinder’s Tall Comics. As Laurel puts it, “We shamelessly gave your memoir’s authorship to the son of a recurring character, Gary P. Rastov, a C-grade sci-fi novelist from the 70s who ground out volume upon volume of stories that managed to turn impossibly vast interstellar conflicts into painfully mundane lists of statistics.”

It’s pretty funny. I got confused though about all the layers of fiction and reality. Is Gary P. Rastov a real person or a fictional one? I can’t keep track of much of anything lately except the pen nib moving before my eyes.

Jerome, thanks for the link to this in your comment on the last post—that nudged me to finally put this up.

working

August 13th, 2011

Ever since my memoir about my dad, Fun Home, was published in May of 2006, I’ve been working on another graphic memoir–this one about my mother. Why is it taking so long? You can find a partial explanation in this little video clip.

But the good thing is, after many years of writing and fretting and throwing things out and starting over, I’m finally, actually drawing. (this movie was actually shot in April, which is why the news in the background is talking about the government crackdown in Syria.)

Pekar tributes

July 12th, 2011

Jeff Newelt at Smithmag made this nice post about Harvey Pekar today, on the anniversary of his death. There’s a very nicely done video of a live reading Jeff did of a Pekar strip, illustrated by Sean Pryor.

Here’s a tiny Harvey sketch from a piece I illustrated for him 22 years ago. No one ever drew such expressive stick figures.

change of plans

June 28th, 2011

My editor had an intervention with me last week…remember the book I’ve been working on for the past five years? Well, I finally really have to turn it in. By the end of the year. So my editor suggested gently that considering how much work I have left, perhaps going to Chicago for the fall semester was not the best idea, and could I maybe switch my visit to the spring?

Fortunately this seems to be okay with the Chicago people.

I’m working hard, though. Here I am posing as my therapist for a scene I have to draw.

Today June’s fascinating gay bar series on Slate takes an in-depth look at Stonewall. Plus there’s a funny slide show about gay bar names.

I can’t seem to blog any more

June 27th, 2011

But I wanted to tell you about our pal June’s series about gay bars on Slate this week. In part two, she collects stories from a bunch of lgbt writers about their first time in a gay bar. I have a little squib there about my frightening visit to Satan’s in Akron, Ohio.

June could not have asked for a better hook for her piece than the image of people at the Stonewall Inn over the weekend, cheering the passage of same-sex marriage in New York. If that’s where the modern gay rights movement began, perhaps that’s where it ended too. At any rate, if we continue racking up civil rights like this, it’s hard to imagine the institution of “pride” persisting much longer.

i’m a fellow!

June 8th, 2011

No, I haven’t transitioned.
But I will be transporting myself to Chicago for the fall to be a Mellon Fellow at the new Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry at the University of Chicago.

(old file photo of me and Hol in Chicago, just for atmosphere)

This is pretty cool. The whole idea of the Center is to mix up practitioners and theorists in various fields. There’s an architect and a physicist, for example. A choreographer/dancer and composers. And me, a cartoonist, paired with my friend the comics scholar Hillary Chute. We’re going to teach a course on autobiographical comics.

I will also be drawing like crazy to finish the book I’ve been working on for the past forty years, a memoir about my mother.

It feels a bit daunting to have all of this stuff colliding, but I feel like I’ve come out of the woods on the book, so maybe it’ll be all right.

I’m kind of psyched about getting to be part of an academic community. I have a recurring dream that I get to go back to college, and it’s always a very pleasant feeling.

geekout

May 4th, 2011

A guy who’s teaching Fun Home did a very interesting post on his blog Parabasis about the panel transitions in Fun Home. He explains the six types of transitions that Scott McCloud outlines in Understanding Comics, and finds that the vast majority of transitions in FH are scene-to-scene, as opposed to the more usual action-to-action.

I’ve been going back and looking at Fun Home to see how I put it together as I struggle with the new memoir I’m working on. I worry all the time that I’m not sticking enough to simple dramatic action, but maybe that’s okay.

postprandial walk in spring, Best American Comics

April 22nd, 2011

Ramps (wild leeks), forest cat, trout lilies, brook, melting snow, raccoon print, some kinda furry pussy willow kinda things on a fallen branch.

I’m the guest editor of Best American Comics 2011, which will be coming out this fall. The amazing Jillian Tamaki drew the cover—she just posted the art on her blog, along with some discarded ideas. I really love the final drawing.

It’s interesting to read about her experience doing sketches on the Cintiq. This is a very fancy digital pen system that enables you to draw right on your computer screen, thus obviating the annoying distance problem of graphic tablets in which you draw here, and your line shows up over there.

my little bro

April 14th, 2011

Look, my brother John and me got mentioned in this list in the Village Voice of “The Ten Best Musician/Comic Artist Friendships!”

I remember once going to a record store with John when I was twenty and he was sixteen, and the clerk being so impressed with the stuff he was getting. I think it was a Kraftwerk album. I was proud to have such a discerning little brother. In recent years, a fan of his work with Ministry has shown up at a couple of my readings. This makes me feel very happy and connected.

We’re number 10.

Mapping Memory

April 10th, 2011

If you’re in the Boston area, come hear her supreme awesomeness Lynda Barry and me talk with comics scholar Hillary Chute at Wellesley on Friday night.

I’ve been reading Lynda’s new book about drawing. It has been immensely inspiring as I slowly grind into gear to begin drawing the memoir about my mom that I’ve been fussing over for years now.