New in the shop:
I wrote a zine last year about my experience designing The River at Night, the hardcover version that came out in 2019. A print version (which you can buy (and should, it’s good and the way this was intended to be read) by clicking here) is now ALSO available.
This electronic version (PDF) has many extra pages not in the print edition.
You can read some excerpts here.
See below for how to buy the electronic version, or see here for everything else that is also available.
(This is a chat log that turned into a blog post.)
Re: ADHD, etc. I really do struggle with being distracted all day, but I have never been able to get diagnosed as something because my self-evaluation is always like "I'm fine"
8:29
the therapists and counselors have been like "you're fine" (they’re wrongly impressed/distracted by my productivity, publishing books, my introspective qualities, my “fun job,” and I seem generally happy and good humored) and so I wonder if I'm just deluded about what is normal. (this is humblebrag territory?) (I have met people diagnosed with ADHD where it’s clearly messing their lives up and it often seemed like deep family-related (double-bind) anxiety.)
8:30
[A cartoonist I look up to] told me he allows 45 minutes to "warm up" before he draws for the day, and that helped me.
8:30
45min-1 hour 30min is what he actually said.
You’re reading this on a screen right now, and part of a whole ecosystem of material and activity, blah blah blah (post-despair) meta comic.
8:32
and I think like Lynda Barry teaches, it helps to trick myself by doodling and playing games at the desk, like making spirals or drawing monkeys smoking or whatever amuses me, and constantly indulging myself so that I am having fun.
8:34
I have for a long time noticed how people like Dan Zettwoch, people who do a lot of work, who seem happy and good humored, are able to have something on the TV in the background to half-pay attention to, to keep him company, like a baseball game or a movie, and I try to do that too but I haven't found the formula yet. And I often turn everything off and sit in silence. *
8:36
I know some cartoonists listen to Howard Stern when they draw (I'm unable to do this myself, too sensitive to this cruel (good?) humor.)
8:38
the only thing that seems to work for me is either replaying M——- movies over and over or M——— documentaries, or P——-, of all movies I've tried this is the only one that works so far, but I have to turn the sound off.
8:41
and "Moving Art" on Netflix, which I've watched a million times (sound off), and is great because there are long slow takes. Sometimes I need more stuff going on around me in order for me to have stable focus at the desk. Sometimes I need absolute silence. As early morning or late night are the only silent times in the noisy city, of any duration, I’ve had to use various kinds of sound or music or ambient noise to block out the day’s sounds, neighbors, yapping dogs (the guy across the street has a dog that yaps literally constantly all day) construction, demolition! delivery trucks, loud cars, the voices of people on the street (the city!) or through the walls. Our neighbors are pretty good about loud music, and I use headphones, mostly. Density automatically leads to noise and to anxiety. I started watching nature documentaries on the small TV by my desk, because I feel better over the long run if I’m looking at “natural forms” (there’s research on this, I guess.) Moving Art is like watching moving photographs, background ambient images.*** You are hovering in the air. The sequences with people are strange and problematic to critical analysis, but I’m used to it, I’m over it. Other nature docs have too many cuts flash flash corner of my eye if the cuts are too frequent. (Louie Schwartzberg also directed Fantastic Fungi, which I also have watched over and over as I work).
*My troubles seem to be elsewhere, like not wanting to finish the thing at all, wanting to do something else, start something else, work on something else that’s unfinished, a perversity in my work ethic. I recently texted a different person about this and said I struggle with time-blocking because of a deeper problem, Present Me doesn’t want to have to listen to Past Me.
**Recently I’ve come up against several situations where someone said something to me and I perceived it as cruel, and got upset, etc., and then when I reacted back that “this what you said seemed cruel to me,” they said they were “just joking,” and it threw me into non-plussedness and confusion. I wondered about what my sense of a joke was—like, is that funny? What am I missing? I hate to miss a chance to laugh. When people laugh, what is that? I think “friends” feel like they can be more cruel to each other, and especially family members think this—often siblings do, I imagine, though my sister wouldn’t do this...
Is cruelty something external to me, that I can point to, if it’s just me scowling? or does it just appear so to me, alone? Unless I consult an outside judge (who?) the cruelty exists completely subjective, in me.
I am not telepathic. In a sense I’m projecting it outward, I’m creating it? Is this the idea? Is this like The Secret? (This reminds me of my problem with some British comedy, which also (from what I’ve seen) leans toward cruelty more than I handle, anymore. I suppose the Simpsons and Larry David and Letterman etc. are also cruel, in their ways, but maybe my American eyes are attuned to miss it. Io thinks Joe Pera is too cruel to be funny(!) and prefers Somebody Somewhere.
Or if we think of the underground cartoonists, or MAD…or the 90’s cartoonists?) In my experience I notice and feel alienated from the cruelty of the joking around certain types of people, but mostly around “masculinity” and men. Certain kinds of men. (There’s a kind of non-man (non cishet I mean) meanness too, and that can also be shockingly repulsive to me as well. It’s worse, maybe! What is the unit of measure? On the other hand I don’t want to be that guy, “I hate everyone equally,” so…I don’t know. This is a red flag, coming up, a boundary line, maybe. The whole line of thought is crumbling around me.)
The way I read it is that many men think because “we are all friends here” the cruelty is meant to be playful and ironic, just joking around. “Can you imagine if I really was like this?” I get that, and I have done that too. I admit it. It’s a form of legitimate and advanced comedy, maybe? Thought of as playing dangerously at the boundaries of the social situation, acrobatics, peek-a-boo. But I feel suddenly alienated because I’ve become more and more sensitive to status issues. This is empathy, and it sucks! (haha just kidding).
The ribbing is really like play fighting (which I’ve also always struggled with). Or it’s a way of being like, “get over it,” “be tough.” I understand. It’s a certain kind of “friendliness” that tries to signal intimacy by saying something cruel but “as a joke.” I’m sure it’s a compensatory thing, natural within social groups, etc. Whoever is put upon… and the crown is always the heaviest burden, etc.
Or it’s self-directed cruelty at first, (“deprecation” is an ugly word and I won’t say or write it), it’s self-hatred, outwardly expressed, an impatient snarl, with a small “I’m just kidding around” escape-hatch if others snap back. The release of tension in a joke is a good move…a letting go move… As long as everyone is laughing, you keep with it. We workshop our material on our friends, and of course the material doesn’t always work…I can think of a lot of this, growing up, and I remember doing it a lot in high school, and cringe to think of when this was actually perceived as cruel or mean. In my late twenties I think I finally saw this and have been trying, over time, to do it less and less, and without snarling at anyone else whose doing it—meta-snarling.
This is a “TV Bank.” Right now I’m typing on a TV Bank model Apple iMac Retina 5K, 27-inch, Late 2014.
It’s a form of joking, and there are better or worse jokes, but the form is divisive, and attention-getting-because-outrageous, etc. and it’s easy to lose sight of who is laughing less and less and then not at all. I also don’t like “prank” shows, etc.
***I wish I knew how much electricity the ambient music and the ambient screens were drawing, were burning, and then I might turn them off. (The fact that we don’t have “gas gauges” for more energy use, and it’s an inscrutable hidden “gas meter” is a choice, feels like ideology, like no cameras in the slaughterhouses.) It’s an obvious waste of energy and if the electricity is from burning stuff. It’s obviously polluting. Why aren’t there energy gauges on everything? They just send us a bill every couple of months.
At first, you learn: OK, a different guy wrote this than drew it. This made sense to you on one level, but on another level you had read the story as a portal to another world, naively, as one thing. You look at the credits.
The guys (more than one!) who drew it, colored it, they were credited as “pencils, inks, colors” etc. in that order. A different guy put the words in the word balloons? He wrote the words by hand, that was his whole job?! This was a production team, which must have necessitated a certain amount of coordination. That must be the editor? OK, so this is how comic books are made!
Then you learn that even though this method seemed to be how many, many (most?) of the comic books were made, sometimes one guy does the whole thing! Or like one guy with a little help. Or like one guy but then someone else takes care of all of the publishing stuff. You realize you hardly know anything about how publishing works. You picture giant printing machines like the ones that make newspapers in old movies. But some comics it’s one guy who does all of the work, including the publishing stuff, what otherwise in most comic books takes a team of like 5-10 people!. That seems crazy but also kind of cool, maybe. Simple and all the money goes to one person (you). Who figures out how the money gets divvied up on comic books? What a strange math equation that must be. Makes your head spin! So ignore the money stuff for now, and just think to yourself, Can I do all of those things? Sure, how hard can it be?
Glossary:
DIY = Do It Yourself
NYDI = No, You Do It (Jesse Reklaw.) AKA division of labor (doing). Normal
DIHTDEAH = Do I have to do everything around here
