the online process of Matt Slaybaugh
If you’re looking for something to light your fire, here’s a decent place to start.
I used to spend a ton of time making big, long lists of my favorite everything – books, music, movies, etc. – and I took great joy in keeping those lists up-to-date. If you poke around on this site, you can find remnants of all that.
Anyway, in 2011, I was passionate about a few things. Here are some of them. [Read more…]
Kevin Huizenga is one of my 3 favorite makers of comics these days. His methods mix accessible pictures, science, philosophy, history, and autobiography all together in a form much like David (Reality Hunger) Shields describes here:
The lyric essay asks what happens when an essay begins to behave less like an essay and more like a poem. What happens when an essayist starts imagining things, making things up, filling in blank spaces, or leaving the blanks blank? What happens when statistics, reportage, and observation in an essay are abandoned for image, emotion, expressive transformation? There are now questions being asked of facts that were never asked before. What, we ask, is a fact these days? What’s a lie, for that matter? What constitutes an “essay,” a “story,” a “poem”? What, even, is “experience”? For years writers have been responding to this slippage of facts in a variety of ways–from the fragmentary forms of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry that try to mimic this loss to the narrative-driven attempts by novelists and memoirists to smooth over the gaps. The lyric essay, on the other hand, inherits from the principal strands of nonfiction the makings of its own hybrid version of the form. It takes the subjectivity of the personal essay and the objectivity of the public essay and conflates them into a literary form that relies on both art and fact, on imagination and observation, rumination and argumentation, human faith and human perception.
Douglas Wolk does Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, explaining “what beauty is, what art is, and why people like stuff” … in 5 minutes … with pictures of Wolverine.
All hail.
Everyday I walk by this mural, which reminds me of Ezra Jack Keats.
But just a little bit.
The first time I visited Philadelphia, I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. (Actually, it was the second time I’d been here, but I was only 12 years old for the first trip, and all I remember is the homeless man sleeping on the sidewalk as people walked over and around him. I have no idea what part of town we visited, we didn’t even see the Liberty Bell up close, as far as I recall.)
We were visiting a dear friend, and though she took us to nice places (including a coffee shop we now pass everyday) it was the dead of a very bitter winter, and no one was on the streets, and it just looked like a desolate kind of urban wasteland. Despite my best efforts, I was not impressed.
Well, this time around it’s quite different. [Read more…]
Jeff Lemire, creator of the fantastically melancholy Essex County dropped a list of his faves for ’09. If you can’t trust a comic auteur of his skill, you can’t trust anybody for this.
(Relevant question: Can you name a great artist in any medium who has/had horrible taste in art from that same medium?)
I read several rotten comics tonight. Urgh. Dark Avengers!? Unbelievable.
Secret Wars II? Horrible.
Daybreak started out as a big mystery to me. I picked-up the second issue, recognized that the art was obviously my style, and so I bought it, at the same time ordering the firs issue. I waited till I had both to read them, and I was glad for it. These two issues have left me ready for more.
Brian Ralph lives in Baltimore, Maryland with his wife, Megan, and their son, Miles. (That’s what I want to name my son.) (Someday.)
Ralph posts various illustrations on a blog he shares with 12 other talented people. Daybreak, which has had two physically published issues, is a story he’s been posting in pieces. Those two issues get you through part 38, which ends with a cliffhanger. If you dig through the blog (seriously, guys, a little navigation help, please), you’ll find he’s up to #53 thus far.
Isaac Butler’s diablog response to my Essential Reading post on Kevin Huizenga’s work is right here.
In it he details not only some of the reasons he digs Kevin H., but also the one major shortcoming he finds in Huizenga’s work. A couple of quotations from his post sum it up nicely.
What happens in one issue has only cursory bearing on another. Glenn Ganges is in many ways like a bulletin board that Huizenga uses to pin whatever he wants to talk about to.
…
I’m unsure what the stakes are within Huizenga’s world, and I’m unsure what my relationship to his characters are supposed to be.
Isaac then asks…
Is it wrong for me to have this quibble while enjoying rather profoundly each individual Huizenga story? … Should I just relax and quit my bitching and enjoy the riches that are there? Do you think Huizenga is deliberately playing with how character is represented in narrative? Do you think I’ve totally got my head up my ass here? And weren’t we supposed to talk about Ganges #2 which Douglas Wolk called “the kind of thing I want to hand to people who ask ‘what kind of comics do you like?'”
So, in order … No, maybe, sometimes, kind of, and yes we were.
