Bad Camper
Are you feeling bombarded by domestic comics yet? I’ll stop tomorrow, I promise, and go back to my usual slack ways. This is just my keep-sane-in-the-summer-holidays strategy. Although it’s probably driving me a bit batty – I blog in order make myself do something and also to start conversations with people, but that gets me in a hideous technology loop of checking social media to see if someone’s responded. I should probably just keep these comics in my journal – that’s how we used to do it in the old days! Why do I insist on sharing?
Talking about the weirdness of social media, I just read this article about going viral and this article about making yourself write. I like the idea of writing. I haven’t written prose since I finished my novel and I miss it. I think I might have to install Mac Freedom and start getting up at 6am to scratch that itch – the question is can I do that without my kids waking up too and demanding attention? Can I push through my nagging fear that nobody cares if I write another word or not? I think I have post-3rd-novel syndrome.
The bourgeois dust bunnies
There you go. My bourgeois confession. This is what happens when you set yourself the task of writing domestic comics for a week. I didn’t actually get a cleaner until I was working with 3 children, if that makes it any better… My mum also had a cleaner when we were young. Her name was Mrs Barnett and we used to dread the day that she came. My mother would make us clean with the same threat as I now give. After she’d cleaned and ironed, she’d sit at the table with my mother drinking tea and telling stories about her Cyril and the holidays they were going to take in their caravan. I don’t drink tea with Catherine, although she does give us Christmas presents and I try and wish her happy Chinese New Year in my very bad Mandarin.
The Lonely Giant
Another one in my series of small domestic comics!
Skink
I thought that I might try doing a series of small-scale domestic comics for a week… let’s see how far I get! I still have 3 weeks until my middle child goes back to school (I have 3 kids at 3 different places now!) but my youngest has returned to kindy today, which makes it feel much quieter.
Big Day Out
Yesterday I did a rather random thing – I sat in the Metro pop-up tent and drew people who wanted to be drawn. Not all of them – I wasn’t as fast as I thought I might be.
I sketched about 60 people, and they were quite pleased with the results, although none of them thought it looked exactly like them. One man (Iggy) even complained – ‘You’ve made me look old!’
Perhaps it was more of an exercise for me rather than them – a getting my eye in exercise. I also opted to take their photos rather than drawing them from life, because I thought I wouldn’t feel quite so cringey and self-conscious.
My payment for my hard labour was a chance to see Arcade Fire, but I was almost too worn out to last the distance. But I did, thanks to my little lunch boxes of roasted almonds and left-over pizza. And I’m glad I did – they were wonderful, and I was particularly taken by Régine Chassagne, the curly haired, silver frocked multi instrumentalist. She did great fancy dancing and marimba playing, and even shook ribbons around as she danced.
Radio (part 4) and a bonus comic
I recently read Vanessa Berry’s Ninety9, which explored the 90s alt music scene in Sydney, Australia. It struck a lot of chords! And it’s a beautiful little book.
Talking of music, on Friday I’m going to be at the Big Day Out in the pop-up Metro tent, drawing cartoons of people. Come in and say hi and get a free portrait if you’re there. I bought a stack of paper and pens.
You may know that it’s school holidays at the moment, so it’s quite difficult to draw comics. I drew this one at night and tried to colour it today, but Violet complained that she wanted to colour a comic too, so I drew one for her. I think maybe I’ll be able to employ her as a colourist in a few years…
Radio (part 3)
Do you remember how I started a comic about the radio last year? One of my new year’s resolutions is to finish the things I start! Here is part 1 and here is part 2. You may recall that at the end of part 2, I found myself at a Straitjacket Fits, The Clean and Chris Knox gig.
I was once told that you should never include specific music references in your writing because it alienates the reader. But because this is the internet I can show what I’m talking about! Here’s a link to a Straitjacket Fits song with Shayne and Andrew, and here’s a link to the Jean Paul Satre Experience song I was listening to at night. For good measure, here’s the Smiths song and the Dead Kennedys one.
My other new year’s resolution is to finish my Katherine Mansfield book and to get my Let Me Be Frank issue 5 ready before I go down to the writer’s festival in Wellington and hopefully meet Alison Bechdel. I’m definitely lining up at the signing table. I’m sure people try and foist comics on her everywhere she goes and her first question is where is the paper recycle bin… sigh… Oh, and my final resolution is to get a job and earn some money! If only people could keep on paying me to draw comics. Do you guys have any resolutions? What about any things you’d like to see more of from me?
Talking about the radio, here I am talking about creativity with Noelle McCarthy on Radio NZ.
I bought a bunch of boxes from the $2 shop and I was trying to figure out what to put inside them. Jewellery would be good. So would truffles. But since I couldn’t be bothered making either of those, I drew a comic instead. I think I had Keith Haring in the back of my mind. I am suffering from that interzone that afflicts you when you’re meant to be having a holiday after a long period of intense working. I can’t quite yet relax – possibly because I haven’t actually finished all the things I need to do before I can relax – but nor can I bring myself to attack my to-do list so that I can properly relax. So I’m just sifting around, tidying things away, drawing comics in circle panels and eating the ends of things – crusts, pea pods, plums pecked by birds.
Rooms with views
My residency is almost over – although theoretically I could work to the end of the year – but school’s finished and the children are complaining that I haven’t been paying them enough attention so maybe it is the end. You may be wondering why I resist going to Devonport. It’s because it’s quite a long commute. I can take the train and the ferry for a 2-hour round trip, or else I can drive and risk being stuck in one of Auckland’s traffic jams for 40 minutes. The ferry and train are best – that way I get to read and slowly ease myself in and out of the writing/drawing mindset. Also I get to admire the view – the view! Auckland central is so much prettier when you’re speeding away from it on the water.
I haven’t got nearly as much done as I wanted to do but I have filled up 3 journals with scribbles about Katherine Mansfield, and my own intersecting experiences. I have way too much material, and my next task is figuring out how to shape and cull it. And then – dammit – redraw it. When I don’t feel like thinking about how to tell a story I draw passages from Mansfield’s letters and journals. She describes everything so precisely and vividly – all the colours, flowers and materials named – in a way that perhaps you had to when you didn’t have a phone or camera to record things.
When I do read her letters and journals carefully I find that I can put a whole room together. Here she is visiting JD Fergusson – although I have to concede defeat because I didn’t manage to get the light to fall how she described – there’s only so far messy watercolours can take you. But the internet is a glorious thing – I found the pictures she was describing so could approximate them.
I’ve been hanging out elsewhere on the internet: here’s me answering reading questions over at Unity Books, and here’s me talking about comics at Pikitia Press.
Getting back into it
I drew this comic as a way of getting myself back into the headspace of drawing my Katherine Mansfield graphic novel. It’s a bridging comic – first I limber up by pretending to myself that Katherine Mansfield’s hanging out with me, my inner critic manifested, and then I get back to the book.
Talking about inner critics, I read this funny NY Times article today, which was about the inner critic being the dominant voice inside the writer’s head – the writer in residence, a kind of autoimmune disease, rendering the act of writing akin to lighting matches in the rain.
Have I mentioned this book? From Earth’s End: The Best of New Zealand Comics? It’s written by talented cartoonist and blogger Adrian Kinnaird, and it tells the history of NZ comics, as well as showcasing 30 NZ cartoonists, yours truly included. It’s a beautiful book and if I didn’t have my own novel to pimp I’d implore you to buy it for Christmas presents.
Oh, and if you were wondering about Katherine Mansfield’s twitter and facebook accounts….
LET ME BE FRANK 