Yesterday, Tuesday, June 2, my English 333 class practiced drawing very quickly, discussed readings from Schulz's Peanuts and Brunetti's textbook Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice, and then took Schulz and Brunetti as departure points for a larger consideration of style in comics, with Joseph Witek's 2011 essay on comics "modes" (found in the book Critical Approaches to Comics, ed. Smith and Duncan) as guide. I did a lot of lecturing. Finally, I showed the class some minicomics created by past 333 students, and ended our session by assigning a one-sheet minicomic response to our next major reading, Spiegelman's Maus. This was another busy, productive session, though to my mind perhaps a bit too busy, i.e. too crammed, to allow for deep discussion. Already I'm feeling the time pressure of the six-week summer term. Whew.
We began with rapid-fire doodling exercises inspired by Week 1 of Brunetti's text. In lieu of our usual, Lynda Barry-inspired attendance cards, I gave out greenbooks (i.e. exam booklets) to serve as impromptu sketchbooks, then asked everyone to draw themselves again and again, in ever-decreasing increments of time (three minutes; a minute and a half; 45 seconds; 20 seconds). We discussed what happens as you draw the same thing again and again, more and more quickly. What changes in the drawings, and what stays the same? What identifying features of "you," as a character, remain constant? My thinking here was to focus on what happens when, as a cartoonist, you have to repeat yourself again and again, and to build on Brunetti's idea that drawing something very quickly, rather than fussing over it, is likely to bring you closer to the essence of that thing (I should have referenced Schulz's famous remark that doing a comic strip is "the art of doing the same thing over and over again without repeating yourself").
From there we discussed the readings, looking at particular Peanuts strips along the way. We talked about Peanuts's depiction of children, its tone, its changes over time, and some of the surprises in the selected strips I assigned (for example, the unusual artistic choices in the 1954 continuity that pits Lucy against grownups in a golf tournament). I sought to tie this into Brunetti. Many students had recognized a link between Brunetti's aesthetic of simplicity and his reverence for Schulz.
In the second half of class, I sought to put Brunetti's aesthetic into context by pointing out that there are other styles or modes of comic art. Here Witek's distinction between the "cartoon mode" and the "naturalistic" mode proved useful. I made this distinction the springboard for a long talk on different traditions and styles in comic art, what genres and storytelling tendencies we expect from those different styles, and some of the historic sources of those styles (i.e. what other traditions in visual culture helped inspire those ways of drawing comics?). My lecture/slideshow began with the Robert Kanigher/Alex Toth comic "White Devil...Yellow Devil" (from DC's Star Spangled War Stories #164, Aug.-Sept. 1972). It went on to include examples by Schulz, Segar, Herriman, Richard (Cul de Sac) Thompson, Watterson, Randall (xkcd) Munroe, Foster, Raymond, Caniff, Eisner, Stan Drake, Neal Adams, JH Williams III, and Alex Ross, plus Isaac Cruikshank, Doré, and N.C. Wyeth, plus detours into caricature, history painting, illustration, deep focus cinematography, and vaudeville (plus a cameo by King Kong). Whew again!
Probably too much information, eh? I also discussed the concept of remediation, and returned to a point I had made on the first day of class, that "comics aren't movies," though I also complicated that by trying to show how much they had been influenced by movies and other forms. To complicate things still further, I gave out Wally Wood's famous "22 Panels That Always Work" (as assembled by Larry Hama), and used that to talk about composition:
Probably too much information, eh? I also discussed the concept of remediation, and returned to a point I had made on the first day of class, that "comics aren't movies," though I also complicated that by trying to show how much they had been influenced by movies and other forms. To complicate things still further, I gave out Wally Wood's famous "22 Panels That Always Work" (as assembled by Larry Hama), and used that to talk about composition:
I concluded by anticipating the way Spiegelman's Maus might blur or confuse our sense of comics' different "modes." That was the teaser for our next class!
Well, part of the teaser, anyway. There was also the matter of setting up a special homework assignment based on Maus. Using the One-Sheet Workshop website built by Nomi Kane, and the one-sheet comic template provided by Beth Hetland, I demonstrated how to fold a single sheet of paper into an eight-page zine, and assigned students the task of responding to Maus in that very form. That's due in a little over a week.
Er, whew again? Another very full session.
Er, whew again? Another very full session.