Me and Moebius, San Diego Comicon Circa 1987!

Now it can be told.

So here I am at 13, having my first  nerdgasm, getting my copy of Upon a Star autographed by none other than the late great Jean Giraud, AKA Moebius! Photo courtesy of Josh's mom.



So lets see: it looks like a plate from the now extremely rare City of Fire portfolio Moebius did with then unknown, Geof Darrow is hanging behind him. Wish I bought that. You might be able to get it for a grand now on E-bay. I don't remember him having a beard. Look at those jacked up bangs! Clearly my mom cut my hair. Couldn't she have sprung for Supercuts?  The knit shirt and likely, corduroy pants were typical of my attire of that era. To think that I would have been a hipster if I looked this way in the late 90s. I imagine my much more fashion savvy friend Josh wore feathered hair, jeans and a Cramps t-shirt, so my look does seem to have weathered the years a little better than his.  What cruel, cruel irony. Girls always liked Josh. I remember then being fond of the Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson song, "Say,Say, Say," if that gives you any indication of my musical tastes. Josh liked The Cramps and Stray Cats. At the time, Josh was developmentally about 18, and I was about 8. Together we made one 13 year old kid.

That was back when Comicon was for the most part actually about comics, and maybe a little sci-fi. In fact, speaking of sci-fi I remember seeing Walter Koenig AKA Chekov from Star Trek in the hallway. I pointed at him and said like a huge spaz, "It's Walter Koenig! It's Walter Koenig!" He turned around, looked at me and said, "Stop pointing at me, it's annoying," before turning his back on me and walking away. I felt completely deflated. I loved Star Trek. It was before all those other Star Treks so to the Trekkies, he still ranked high in the pantheon, and Comicon was their temple of worship. But Josh was less impressed. He said, "What a dick. He should be glad you even know his name," which made me feel a little better. He should have, dammit! I  even pronounced it correctly! Moebius, on the contrary, was extremely polite, and accepted my spazziness with grace.

Nerd Stuff

Moebius was the highlight of my trip, and eclipses all the other guests in my memory, but I do still have the program somewhere and recall a few others, like Kirby and Eisner and good old Stan Lee. I did wait in line to see Stan Lee, but by then, it was already starting to be popularly recognized that Lee had unfairly taken the lion's share of the credit, so he had already lost a bit of his shininess in my eyes. Still, Lee was the definition of avuncular if ever there was one, and you can't help loving the guy. He has this art of talking to everyone in this intimate, just you and me, kid, way. One of the dealers had given me their 70s copy of Bring on The Bad Guys to have signed by him, and I remember in exchange for the favor, the dealer gave me a copy of any comic I wanted on his table. I chose this book called "Ex-Mutants" an X-menish knock-off drawn by future 90s fan favorite Ron Lim, for anyone keeping score. What's Ron Lim doing these days?

Even Nerdier Stuff

Oh, there was Paul Chadwick somewhere in there, and I was just starting to become a fan of Concrete. Somehow I seemed to miss a lot of the other big personalities. This wasn't the Comicon of today, so what I mean by "big personalities" was Sergio Aragones, not Quentin Tarantino. You also didn't run into quite so many Stormtroopers. There were costumes, but costumes weren't as much the thing. It was mostly lots and lots of comics nerds, and meeting the artists and buying back issues was our main objective. That was before E-bay, so comics conventions were the best places to find those rare books you were looking for. But I did discover and fall in love with Jan Strnad and Dennis Fujitake's Dalgoda, with very Moebiusesque art by Fujitake, but something was lost when the series went into outer space with issue 2. That first well worn double-sized issue is one I still treasure, and there also that great looking Kevin Nowlan back-up that still looks pretty gorgeous. I got Ted Mckeever's first book, Eddy Current. I remember talking to Paul Kupperberg for at least an hour, because he was one of the few guys who was willing to talk to me, even though I hadn't read anything he had ever written. But then, not many people were coming to his table, which was a little sad. I mean, he'd written quite a few comics for DC. But I nerdgress...

And in Conclusion...

Aren't you never supposed to write, "in conclusion in your conclusion? So I still have my Moebius-signed copy of Upon a Star. It's pretty beat-up, and it's got a big ink stain on it from sitting on my drawing board so much while I was trying to learn how to draw. Josh used to always give me a hard time about how I treated my comics--I had lowered their precious "mint" status to something below "fine" or worse, and they would surely fail to increase in value. Little did he know that most of the 80s comics we bought back then can be foundon e-bay for about the same price we paid for them then. In fact, I've bought back a number of the comics I got rid of  back in the 90s, after college. I'm still buying 80s comics that I felt like I missed out on, Like Aztec Ace and everything published by PC unless it was by Neil Adams, with the exception of the so bad it's brilliant Skateman.

After about 18 years I caught up with Josh again recently at a coffee shop. He brought his 15 year old kid, who had inherited Josh's maturity, if not his worldliness. I always liked his parents His dad was this amazing sculptor.And I still love Moebius, who died before he really was supposed to, which I still think is unfair. Thanks Mia, for the great photo! Oh the memories...

Easter Image Complete!

So here's the finished easter image, done with the help of my six year old neighbor Ella who was kind enough to model for me!

I'm experimenting a bit more with my use of space. One of my favorite illustrators, Lizbeth Zwerger is fantastic at using white space and big areas of emptiness, something I've been trying to o a lot more. There's always that sense that the white space needs to be filled just because it's empty. So here I thought I'd activate the edges and make the image less about what's planted in the middle, as so often tends to be the focal point in my images. I'm anxious to experiment with this way of working more.

Wednesday Figures

Two twenty minute poses. 

Two posts in one day! I think that breaks the rules or something. I thought about posting this tomorrow, but once I had it all scanned, I figured, why not? 

Another Easter Girl, Using the Computer as a Compositional Tool

Here's another Easter girl, inks for a new image I'm working on. In another one of those painful cropping decisions, this one got cropped out at the waist, so this will be my only opportunity to show off her pretty braids..

The Computer as Compositional Tool

With some of these self motivated pieces my initial plan for the composition is a little buttery. I have a basic idea, but then after I ink the figures I start moving them around to see if they fit in better places than where I had originally planned them. This was one of those cases. It requires a bit more work, since I'm cropping out parts of the figures that I wouldn't have had to ink with better planning, but it's a process I enjoy when time allows. Often it provides new discoveries and new possibilities that wouldn't have occurred to me in the initial thumbnail stage. Of course, this is no way to work on deadline or in a collaboration, but it's one advantage that the computer allows with self-motivated work.

Often when people refer to the computer as a drawing and painting tool, they don't mention how much of an amazing compositional tool it can be. Moving stuff around, cropping, taking risks on a whim that you wouldn't be able to do with traditional media. When I fully render a figure like this that may or may not be cropped, or even omitted from the composition altogether--I get to act as a kind of studio photographer.  When figures are rendered, they don't always have the same character as your sketches.You may lose some of the freshness of original sketch, or you may discover something new, but the composition itself can be another opportunity to add a fresh an spontaneous approach to the image.

Of course, there are limits, and it's important to make sure the figures work in the perspective I've created--you do want to make sure their feet are planted in the right place! Since it isn't an actual three dimensional space, but an illusionary one, the figures do have to line up with vanishing points, though sometimes you can even adjust for this. Otherwise, I can move them around, or crop them freely, if within reason. But again, its not a chess board, and it's not stage direction. You don't want your picture to look like it's composed of paper dolls. If you really have to and it's of genuine benefit to the image, redraw the figure to fit the image! I know it's a bit of a backward approach, but this is, of course, only for when you're on your own agenda and time allows.

 So when I finish this piece in the next day or two, you'll see where this one ended up, just one of many figures that did a lot of moving around on the picture plane before I was satisfied, since the picture plane--a horizonless field of grass--gives me more flexibility than usual with perspective. 

Another Easter Girl

Here's another figure, this one inked, for my Easter egg hunt image in progress. I'm finding hair one of my favorite things to ink--drybrush is so perfect for hair--so I had fun drawing this little girls hair falling over her face. 

I joined an online writing workshop recently with a small group of excellent writers where I'm developing my adult science fiction short stories. It's a great experience, and I'm getting some great feedback, and I hope to try and get some of these suckers in print in the near future, perhaps under a pseudonym, if for no other reason than to distinguish them from my kid friendly material. The idea being, that if I happen to write a science fiction novel for adults, and someone is looking for more books by the guy who did Ladybug and Gentleman Beetle, it won't cause any confusion. Two of my favorite cartoonists use a similar strategy to distinguish their kid material from their adult material,  Renee French and Dave Cooper, but this may be a little over ambitious at this point for someone who has yet to have one book in print, let alone two under different names. Still, it's a fun notion to play with. I always liked the idea of having a pseudonym. 

Easter Hunt Kid

Pencils for a figure for a piece I'm doing about an Easter egg hunt. 

This is a side project, just to get a little more practice drawing kids. My neighbor, Ella who's six six years old, was kind enough to pose for this one. There's really nothing like a real kid to capture naturalistic kid-like gestures. There's only so much your imagination is going to allow you to do, and though I try not to render the photo, I do try to capture the gesture.

 Been getting some interesting non-children's book related offers lately, one of which might prove lucrative. More new on that, soon. 

Fox Box Inks

Preview of an inked drawing for part of an illustration I did for Red Fox Literary's first anniversary.

Cropping an Image

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So recently I completed an image for my book in progress, Ladybug and Gentleman Beetle. I wasn't completely sure about it, and sometimes its good to have a second set of eyes, so my friend and fellow illustrator Kris Aro McLeod Had a few suggestions. For one, she thought the knot in the wood was a little distracting, So this was the first version:

I gave it some thought. I had fallen a little bit too in love with that tree, and I liked the knot, but she was right. I also thought that maybe it would be better to have the figures of the beetles larger in the frame, since, as an early reader book with smaller pages than a picture book, they would print very small otherwise. So as much as it pained me, I cropped in a little more, but I didn't want to lose those leaves, so I moved them in a little closer. And here's the result: 

Oh, the pain. All of that wonderful detail! But you have to do what you have to do to serve the image, so that nothing distracts too much from the focal point. 

So here's the full image. I usually give myself a little extra room on the edges just in case, but never quite this much room, because I didn't anticipate the crop. I work pretty hi-res, so it's not an issue to make the image larger, and everything was drawn considerably larger anyway.

So this was the original shape that I cropped into. It's simply a shape I painted in ink and darkened on photoshop.  With some photoshop magic, I was able to make the image conform to the shape. Maybe I'll describe that process in another post, but right now I have to put some ice on my back. I'll probably be better by monday!

New Ladybug and Gentleman Beetle Piece!

So here's the new piece, which leads into the other two posted in an earlier post:

I haven't been posting, or getting much done in general this week outside of writing, (which I've been doing quite a lot of) because I've been having trouble with my back. But not to worry! It happens about twice a year, and after a few trips to the chiropractor I'm  back in tip top shape! This image was completed last weekend, and I"ll be posting a more extensive blog entry about the whole project in the near future on the Red Fox Literary blog.

 While recuperating, I even wrote a new short story, my first attempt in a long while at an adult science fiction story! It's called, The Good Fight, about a war fought remotely from home, like a video game by soldiers who live with their parents. I don't know if I've ever had so much fun writing a short story, and as generally is the case, my science fiction inevitably turns out to be satire. I got a fair number of hits from my last short story post, Klesmer Vampires Steal Christmas (available for *free* in both text and audio form) but haven't gotten much reaction outside of a few close friends. So I'm glad to post these things, as long as someone out there is reading them. 

Why "In The Night Kitchen" Made Me Want to Make Books

In The Night Kitchen made me want to make books.

In fact, you may notice a little similarity between Mickey, here, and the little boy above, floating in his umbrella, and I would have to admit that this is probably no coincidence.

Lately I seem to be in the habit of writing about artists who have made an impact on me after they die, and I'm beginning to think that maybe I'm waiting just a little too long to say what they mean to me. One thing that surprises me in this particular instance, is how the death of Sendak doesn't sadden me at all. I can't claim to know his mind, but from recent interviews, it seemed like he was ready. He seemed content to  have had the opportunity to meet the people he grew to love in his life, and to have had the opportunity to write and illustrate books that he felt had meaning. He got to do most of what he set out to do. Not only did he write and illustrate books, but he designed theater sets and costumes for musicals and operas for both adults and children. Of course his life was not exactly without hardship. But I don't feel a loss. I know I'm supposed to, but I don't feel it, no matter how much affection I have for his books, or for the person that I imagined him to be.

In the Night Kitchen made me want to make books. I didn't say "Maurice Sendak made me want to write books," because he didn't. As far as I'm concerned, In the Night Kitchen is my book, not his. The fact of its author isn't what makes me love the book. When I discovered the book I had no idea--or care--about who Maurice Sendak was. I was curious about Doctor Seuss, and what kind of doctor he might be, but otherwise, the author of a book would have been easily forgotten trivia to that kid who loved In the Night Kitchen.

When I say "make books" I mean everything about a book. A book with a binding, and with pictures, and with stories inside. I remember having a copy of Where the Wild Things Are that was falling apart, and seeing the sewing of the binding, one piece of the mystery of how it was made. I was always fascinated by the mystery of things that were manufactured, and somewhere, by somebody, books were made. The first book I made that I can remember, was a book about Santa Claus, also a person of a great fascination to me. I  drew all the pictures on colored construction paper,and stapled it at the side. I must have figured out that this would leave one blank page before each picture, just like a picture book, so that's where the words would go. I couldn't write yet, so I dictated to my brother what words I wanted written on each page, and he wrote them.

It's one thing to have a book read to you, and another to truly experience it for yourself, by yourself, and I remember when this happened with In the Night Kitchen. I remember it was very early in the morning. I remember feeling that somehow the book knew me and what I felt and wanted. The author, as he should not be, was not my book. It was my book, and mine alone. I looked a lot like Mickey at that age. With no modesty whatsoever, I will admit  that I was an extraordinarily adorable child. I looked like Max, and I looked like Mickey, and so these books very much felt as if they were about me. In the Night kitchen was pure sensation. It was about the feeling of night, and about the feeling of milk, and about the feeling of dough and of flying, and of saying "Cock a doodle doo!" and I really don't care to try to figure out what it was about or means, because what it was really about was me, the kid, and how I felt and who I was.

Maurice Sendak died at 83. My Dad will be 88 in August. Maurice Sendak was an Ashkenazi Jew, second generation immigrant, and so was my dad. My dad's parents were socialists, and didn't practice, and as a secular and enthusiastic celebrator of Christmas and Easter, I didn't even know my dad was Jewish until I was about ten. My dad grew up in East Orange New Jersey, and as a teen, like Sendak, he lived in New York. he used to tell me stories about going to the movies for 25 cents, though my dad was more a fan of Flash Gordon serials than Mickey Mouse, the inspiration for Sendak's Mickey from In the Night Kitchen.


When my mother left my dad and took us from the small town where I grew up in Pennsylvania to California, more than anything, I missed my dad. I didn't have much connection to my mother, and my dad was my home. As I grew into my teens, I began to discover who Maurice Sendak was, and in my mind he became a connection to my dad and my childhood. Of course this man who made this book would be like my dad. I also discovered Sendak's other inspiration, Windsor McCay. McCay spoke to me as a teen as Sendak spoke to me as a little boy.  And sometime in my teens I decided I wanted to make comic books and picture books--and this was what In The Night Kitchen was--not just a picture book but a comic book, with word balloons and captions and a little boy who looked as much like me as he looked like McCay's Little Nemo.

As a teenager, I discovered Selma Lane's enormous book, The Art of Maurice Sendak, and hunted down every book I could find that Sendak had illustrated or written. I was surprised how few books he had actually written. The best of them: Where the Wild Things Are, In the Night Kitchen, The Nutshell Library, and The Sign on Rosie's Door. Some of my favorites that he illustrated: Grimm's Fairy Tales. The Griffon and the Minor Canon. Little Bear.  I loved that rich, engraving pen and ink style, and I remember working hard to try to emulate it.

Sendak's first book was by Ruth Krauss, A Hole is to Dig. Krauss and her husband, Crockett Johnson, served as mentors for Sendak, and as a 13 year old, while spending a very brief time in juvenile hall for a life changing but minor infraction, I discovered a rare paperback of Crocket Johnson's Barnaby on the book cart. It proved to be a great comfort and enduring favorite.

Maurice Sendak is a part of my family. Not the part that I was born into, but the part that I chose. I am a great believer and endorser of choosing your family if you ever have the option, and this, to me, includes people I may never meet and may never know who have gotten inside me and made a deep and indelible impression.

Now I'm 38, and I am so glad to be an adult, and I am so glad that I discovered In the Night Kitchen and so many other books by Sendak, and I'm so glad that now, I'm finally making picture books. So maybe it's selfish, but I can't say I'm sad at all that Maurice Sendak is dead. I'm glad that he was alive, and as far as I'm concerned, he still is. I haven't lost a thing. 

How to Motivate Yourself to Write

These suggestions are geared primarily towards fiction writing, but they can apply just as well to any form of writing. Some of these tips I've learned from others, and some are strategies I've learned through practice and trial and error. You may have heard many of these suggestions before in one form or another, but it doesn't hurt to be reminded, so here's one more reminder you might find helpful.

Always Stop Writing When You know What's About To Happen Next

You're on a roll. You're excited about what you're writing. You want to keep writing until you've gotten all you're ideas down. This may seem counter intuitive, but this is exactly when you should stop: midway, while you're still excited. Make notes of your ideas, and you'll find that excitement will continue to the next day, and if you continue this strategy you can sustain this excitement far beyond that initial inspiration.

When You're Not Writing, You're Thinking. This is Good


So you've stopped right in the middle of that inspiration. You've left yourself hanging, and you're bursting with ideas. But now you have time to ruminate over those ideas. Those ideas will serve as the seeds of other ideas, but they need time to grow. You may not even realize that you're thinking about them, but as soon as you get back to writing, you'll discover that that initial inspiration has turned into an even greater windfall. Like anything, this won't always happen, but it's more likely if you stop writing while you still have that seed.

Write Every Day

This is the most common suggestion that writer's make, but this is for good reason. Inspiration wains and you have no idea what to write, but the longer you put it off, the more you lose momentum. If you write a sentence, you're still writing. Even if you only only have the intention of writing that sentence, now you've gotten started, and starting is half the battle. You might end up writing something you know you'll get rid of later on, but it keeps the momentum going, and it makes it that much easier to start the next day.

 Keep yourself to a minimum word count, but keep your ambitions reasonable. What can you realistically write in a day, considering your other responsibilities and your pace? Keep your minimum at the lowest you can expect of yourself. When you exceed your minimum, it feels like you're really jamming, but when you write less, the times when you do write more should make it easier to forgive yourself when you don't. You're still on track. The high days of productivity make up for those low days.

Keep a Regular Schedule

Routine is key. I write every morning around the same time. I also stop writing around the same time. Maybe your time is the evening or the afternoon, but give yourself a general time line and target time. There's always time for writing. You're never too busy to meet your minimum, as long as your minimum is reasonable.

Allow Yourself Uncertainty

There are going to be times when you feel like you've screwed up, that you've ruined the whole thing and you need to start from scratch. This is healthy. Doubt means you're looking at your work with a critical eye. I usually find that I'm always walking a tightrope between feeling like I could screw everything up, and that maybe it's just working. The best answer to this, is to keep writing. Whether your practice is to chuck the bad writing after the first draft, or as you go, if you keep moving forward, inevitably you're going to write something you feel good about. I'm more of an excise as you go writer. I find that a certain amount of ruthless chopping in the early stages of a manuscript can be motivating, rather than discouraging. Don't get too ruthless--you can save that for the final draft. If there's a passage that you're unsure of but feel may have potential, put it in it's own file. You may never look at it again, or you may end up using it, or portions of it later, but putting it out of sight can help to reinforce your resolve.

Have the Resolve to Finish

There's no end to confidence you'll build by actually getting to the end of a manuscript. This doesn't mean you should never give up on a story, but only give up after you've developed the confidence that you can finish something if you're determined to. As you finish more projects, while at the same time, developing an increasingly rigorous editing process, you'll be well on your way to writing not only more frequently and more confidently but more effectively. Writers need to write, and you have to get a ton of bad writing out of your system before you can write well. Even if you're a very attentive reader and have read widely, the exercise of writing and writing regularly is extremely important.

Should I Make an Outline?


This, again, is a question of personal approach, but I don't tend to. Outlines tends to reduce a character's actions to plot points. If you're going for a character driven story, you may end up having your character artificially adhere to these plot points in a way that is contrary to what the character has become. Of course there is always a risk of taking too many digressions, or going off on tangents, but this is something that I think can be taken care of in the editing process. The other problem with an outline is that you deny yourself the discovery that comes with the writing process, of discovering a new twist or turn in the story that you could have never anticipated. Not that you shouldn't write with a plan, but if you have too much of a preconceived idea of where the story is going next, you may end up feeling like your writing by the numbers, executing the next scene in your outline as prescribed, denying yourself the excitement of that next eureka. This, to me, is what keeps writing engaging and current. I also believe it's what makes the reader want to turn the page. If you're not sure what happens next, neither are they. But avoid writing yourself into a corner--not knowing everything isn't the same as not having options. This falls nicely into the idea of knowing what's going to happen next before your next writing session.

Should I Keep a Blog?

I only write in my blog after I've accomplished my other writing for the day. It's great practice to write a blog, to write anything on a regular basis, but if you're a fiction writer and your blog doesn't contain fiction, the blog could prove to be a distraction. Opinion or autobiography requires a different skill set than fiction, and though any writing can be helpful, you've got to be writing in the mode of your chosen discipline if you want to get better.

Thanks for reading, and happy writing!

Sentiment vs. Sentimentality in Children's Books

Sentiment is feeling. It's emotion that's immediate and genuine. But "genuine" is a loaded word. There's no universal measure of what's genuine and what isn't. What is authentic to us, rather than manufactured when it comes to emotions, is purely intuitive. You can talk around what's authentic but you can't define it. You might say to yourself, "I know it when I see it," and there might be some concensus to back you up among people you respect, but that's about the best we can do. So what I'm going to say here about sentiment is  my own subjective view. I can't tell you what sentiment is, but I can attempt to describe, at least on some level, what it isn't, and I can try to talk around it in such a way that at least points towards what I'm trying to express.

Sentiment is Not by Definition Romantic

Sentiment is often associated with romanticism. Intuition, love, aesthetics, are all thought to be romantic ideas, but I would contest this. Romance is idealism, but ideals cannot be achieved, they can only be strived for. People with a literal belief in their own ideals tend to run at windmills, and can never be satisfied with anything they achieve, because what they want is fundamentally intangible. A little romance, and a little idealism is healthy, but too much is self-destructive. Romance and idealism represent sentimentality; they're the stuff of revolutions, and unfortunately, most revolutions don't end well. 

The Prince Charming Myth

Girls often are attracted to the princess archetype. Princesses are special individuals who receive attention for their station and beauty. It's a great romantic fantasy for girls. It does tend to reinforce gender stereotypes, but I don't think it's necessarily a harmful fantasy. What is harmful, is the prince charming myth. 

Prince Charming is charming. He's charming, and romantic, and handsome and, well, not much else really. He's as simple an embodiment of the romantic idea as you can get. He's not a person, he's an object not only to be revered, but to come to the rescue. The fantasy of prince charming is that he will provide everything that the princess needs to be happy. He will provide love. The only problem is, little girls don't quite know what "happy" is. They're still learning how to have friendships. They're still learning how to love. 

There's the love of your parents and family, which, under the best of circumstances, is unconditional, and then there's the love you have for your friends, which is entirely learned. Again, this is an intuitive process, a non-rational process, but it's still a function of the intellect. There are aspects of friendship that contain logical concepts that can be taught in a straightforward manner: to express mutual respect, kindness, generosity--the behavior can be taught, but the understanding behind the behavior comes with time. Love must be modeled, and experienced, and cannot be explained.

So girls are given this false archetype of love, and it's very attractive. Its an archetype of pure sentimentality--it's not an experiential kind of love, but an intangible idea of love, intangible for a very good reason: it doesn't exist. The problem is, many girls never learn the difference. It's an important developmental step for girls to recognize this ideal for what it is. And of course, boys aren't immune either. The heroines in boy stories are objects of beauty, not to be rescued, but to be attained, which is essentially the same thing. This is why I think romantic relationships have no place in stories for early readers. Kids aren't developmentally ready for them, and romantic relationships can be easily misinterpreted by children.

Stories of Friendship and Real Sentiment

This is why stories of friendship are so important in children's lit. Real stories of friendship that contain real sentiment are invaluable to the process of learning how to be a good friend, and how to have good relationships. The best children's stories about friendships, like Winnie The Pooh, Babar the Elephant, and Frog and Toad Are Friends, are not sentimental. The love in these stories is genuine and immediate. It's not a nonexistent romantic ideal, and it's not nostalgia, it's an expression of the understanding that comes with acts of kindness, generosity and mutual respect, and it's an expression that takes place in the present of the story. It's not simply being, but doing. It's not reflecting, but experiencing.

Objects of Antagonism in Children's Stories

Unsympathetic villains, objects of antagonism, are no better than objects of imaginary romantic love. They carry no weight. In their own way, they're a kind of romantic ideal. Bad guys are to be condemned and vanquished, and when kids are still learning about friendships and real love, this kind of condemnation of another human being is just as confusing. They end up confronting the people in their lives, both in person and in media, and thinking, "is this a bad guy? Or is this a bad guy?"  Now there are certainly people that it's best for kids to stay away from--bullies or anyone at all who might cause them harm, but the bad guy archetype is often applied a little too indiscriminately. People are complex. In life, we don't stand at the gate and ask, "friend or foe?" As we grow older, we tend to have complex feelings about people. Kids also deserve this opportunity. Kids deserve to see that there are reasons that people do things, and though some people might behave in a way they don't agree with, it's not always black and white. This is a lesson every bit as important as learning about love and friendship; to empathize with people we don't necessary like or have a connection to.

Sentiment in My Own Writing

If I accomplish anything in my writing, I want to achieve this: to make sure that my characters are presented with sensitivity and insight. That they're people, not objects of idealism or malice. I'm not going to be able to achieve this with every story I write, but when I'm at my best, this is what I will try to offer.

Illustration by Gustave Dore

Ladybug and Gentleman Beetle Sequence, Illustration vs. Sequential Art

Two vignette samples for Ladybug and Gentleman Beetle. Here Ladybug is telling Gentleman Beetle that she saw something that scared her in the garden, and Gentleman Beetle pours her a cup of tea and reassures her.

This is intended as an early reader book in the tradition of Frog and Toad Are Friends. I anticipate a lot of sequential action like this, scenes that really make the characters come to life and you can take advantage of some of the more subtle aspects of their expressions and body language. This is, in essence, comics to me, or at least, what I call comics. 

Why I Don't Reuse Art Work

the furniture and rug are not reused artwork, but carefully light boxed and retraced. It's subtle,but I still think it has a different feel that people notice, at least on an unconscious level. I really like sequential action, where figures are moving in front of the same or a similar background as if in animation. You particularly used to see this in old newspaper strips. It can really bring the characters to life. Cutting and pasting a background or any repeated element outright is so easy now with the computer, but can really make the scene feel static. A lot of cartoonists I know who do small press comics are anal about this, and I used to fight it, but now I get it. No matter how precisely you duplicate the image, it's going to be just a little bit different, just enough for it to have a little bit of life. There is no good objective reason why this is better, but it works for me. 

Sequential Action in Comics and Picture Books

Sequential action is comics, and Frog and Toad are Friends, is comics. The Cat in the Hat is comics. The Invention of Hugo Cabret is comics. Panel borders, word balloons and captions do not a comic, make. It's about pictures and words that are completely dependent upon one another to tell a story. You can call it comics. You can call it sequential art, you can call it a graphic novel for all I care, but it all amounts to the same thing. 

Why does this distinction matter? Illustration, by its nature, elaborates in some way on the text. In the early days, when manuscripts were decorated with images by the monks who hand copied the text, it was called "illumination," and I think in a different way, this is a very apt description of what good illustration is. It illuminates and brings out the text, rather than simply ornamenting it. But this isn't the same as sequential art. In sequential art the words and text are combined almost seamlessly to the point where the two are so closely associated that the images are the story. If the very nature of the way the story is told, of how the story is expressed through the images, make it hard to conceive of anyone else drawing it, that's as good a measure as any that it's sequential art. 

Thomas Kinkade: a Reevaluation. Or: What is Kitsch and Why is it Bad Exactly?

Or is it bad?

As you probably know, the popular painter Thomas Kinkade died a couple of weeks ago. Popularity on the scale of Kinkade is something few artists experience, but most artists I know hated the guy, or at least, resented the hell out of him. 

The first thing I noticed when he died was how carelessly the obituary on Yahoo had been written. More accurate information could have easily been found on Wikipedia. The author of the obit described Kinkade's paintings as,  "brushstroke paintings," whatever that means. As far as I know there are few other ways to paint a painting than with a brush, unless digital media has become so prevalent that the author felt that a distinction had to be made, but I doubt it. Maybe they meant impressionist? Though his paintings weren't entirely impressionistic either.  But "brushtroke paintings" was simply lazy.  The article ended with how much his paintings sold for, "$100 to $10,000" except this wasn't how much his paintings sold for at all. He didn't sell his paintings. He sold his prints. He sold them in his own chain of stores in malls all over the country. You probably all ready know this, at least the part about his chain of stores, but the author of the article couldn't be bothered. It wasn't even logical: how could the most successful painter in the U.S. sell his original work for $100? So even though I didn't care for the guy's work, I felt that Yahoo had done him an injustice. He deserved better.

Why did people hate him? They hated him because he appeared to be an mercenary opportunist. He  was unapologetically arrogant. I once read a New Yorker profile about him where he described his resentment for art academia, and how they had rejected him. He thought he should be in all the greatest museums in the world, and that time would show his true value as an artist. He once said, "The concept that an artist would be revered by popular culture is an immediate dismissal of his relevance as an artist." I can't deny the essential truth of this statement, at least in contemporary art academia. And time has won out for a lot of popular artists. Through his pictures, Norman Rockwell invented an undeniably unique portrait of american culture that has become such a powerful argument, that his work has entered both the popular and academic vernacular to describe a particular vision of American culture. However you feel about his work, his impact on our collective imagination in undeniable. Kinkade loved Rockwell. He once said, "We've found a way to bring millions of people an art they understand." Supposedly, one in twenty American homes contain a piece of Kinkade's work, so maybe he had a point. One out of twenty people can't be wrong.  People like what they like, and to say that it's because they lack sophistication is too easy. "These paintings are easy to call insignificant by a critic, but they are precious to the people who bring them into their home," said Kinkade, another difficult point to argue.

I don't doubt Kinkade's essential sincerity. If he capitalized on his work, it was out of his own faith that it had value. He knew how to exploit it, and he did. The kind of success that he generated was equal parts artistic ability and business acumen. He used every opportunity to sell his work in every venue possible. There were dish towels, and commemorative plates. There were even TV movies and housing developments. This pissed a lot of people off. Not only did they feel his work was kitsch, but he was making a bundle. Success on this scale has a way of justifying what you do, of proving, on some level, that your work, and by extension, you, are loved. But it didn't seem quite enough for Kinkade. He didn't only want to be loved by the people who loved his work, he wanted to be legitimized by the cultural elite. Clearly this was a point of huge contention with him.  

 He was a deeply, almost aggressively religious man, and he considered the work he did an act of reverence, and that his inspiration came directly from god. Who can argue with that kind of conviction? If god is your muse, who cares about the cultural elite. But apparently Thomas Kinkade, did. At least enough to be vocally resentful about their perceived rejection of him. 

In the last few years, since I've been doing children's material, I've been reassessing what I think about the idea of kitsch. The polish author, Milan Kundera once defined kitsch as "a denial of what is unacceptable about reality." He used the concept to describe the failure of communist idealism, and of idealism in general. One of my favorite books of Kundera, Life is Elsewhere, is about a communist poet who tries to live every aspect of his life by what he supposes to be his ideals, but can't get beyond his own vanity. The gap between what he wanted to be and who he was, was inescapable, and since he could not accept who he was, he became a living example of the concept of kitsch. I don't know if this applies to Kinkade personally, but it's one definition of Kitsch, and Kinkade's work can be easily argued to be Kitsch.

This is pretty typical of the kind of work we associate with Kinkade:

Quintessential Kinkade

 I'm not going to deny that there's something about it that's very enchanting. Intellectually, I want to reject this thought immediately, but there is a part of me, the part of me that liked Disney's Snow White as a kid, that is very attracted to the image. On a technical level it's competently painted. Kinkade is no amateur. His paintings take quite a bit of skill to execute. But it's not simply the way they're executed that's appealing, and there are many other painters who have more technical skill than Kinkade.

Everything in the picture is arranged in a way that reminds me of a manicured and very cared for garden. When I see people with a garden like this I don't think kitsch, so much as, "wow, they really take care of their garden." The cottage is about as enchanting a cottage as you could imagine. It's got a thatched roof, arched door, and cobbled stonework. There is not one, but two smoking chimneys, which seems a little impractical for the size of the house, but its cozy size is also appealing. It is the kind of place you might expect a little elf to live. The bridge, too, is the image of a quaint little bridge. You've got a stream, you've got a little serpentine pathway, and of course, Kinkade's trademark glimmering light and misty background. The whole scene is surrounded by brilliant pastel colored flowers and blossoms. It's a collection of charming and idyllic nouns, all crammed into one painting.

It's hard to see images for their own merits. We tend to pick out the nouns. Tree. House. Car. When we look at a picture, nouns are the first things we think of. Aside from simple expressions of desire and affection, simple nouns are the first things we learn when we learn about language. Our conception of these nouns is elaborated on over time as we learn more about "tree," and "house" and "car." Our collective understanding of a given noun is called it's schema.  Each of these symbols has its own schema and cultural association, and these associations are similar if you share that culture. Kinkade succeeds in evoking a psychological response of quaintness and nostalgia by tapping into that collective schema. Someone who has not been exposed to our cultural idyls will likely not have the same response. There's little denying that Kinkade is very good at this. By effectively illustrating these symbols in combination, he's able to evoke an emotional response, whether or not, intellectually you would like to have that response. I think it's this involuntary emotional response that causes even more resentment in people who don't like Kinkade's paintings. It's like when you watch a movie that you know is emotionally manipulative, that you know is pressing your emotional buttons, but you can't help but feel what the movie is trying to make you feel. When I see a movie like that, afterwards, I feel ripped off. I feel lied to. But as mercenary as Kinkade seems to be as a businessman, I don't think his intentions as a painter are mercenary at all. He doesn't intend to manipulate. I think, by combining all of these elements, he's pleasing himself. It makes him happy to paint this stuff, and he can see that it makes other people happy too.

When I look at Kinkade's paintings and enjoy them, part of me feels like I'm looking at something elicit. It's enchantment porn. But then I go from being enchanted, to feeling ripped off again. I once read pornography described as something that's only purpose is for you to want it.  I think there's some of this in Kinkade's paintings, but to say that this is their only aim is an oversimplification. But he's not Norman Rockwell. While Rockwell illustrated his world view by telling a variety of stories in a variety of ways, Kinkade tells the same story over and over again. Obviously it's a story people like. To enjoy his paintings, you have to have a willingness to allow yourself to feel the feelings of enchantment and nostalgia that these paintings evoke. All it takes is the willingness, and a cultural affinity for the symbols he uses. It's hard for me, personally, to be so willing, seeing the paintings as I see them. Intellectually I can't allow myself to suspend my dislike for this kind of emotional manipulation, even if it's not cynical or calculated. It's also a very traditional and conservative kind of nostalgia, what my wife would call, "grandma." It's the kind of naive charm that we associate with an era less cynical, and perhaps our cynicism denies us the simple pleasure of what Kinkade has to offer. 

Disney, My Own Work, and How Kitsch is Too Kitsch?

I've discussed in earlier posts my ambivalence for and admiration of Disney films. My ambivalence stems from their aggressive charm, similar to that of Kinkade, and my admiration comes from both the craft of them, which goes far beyond what Kinkade ever achieved, and the naturalism and expressiveness of the best of Disney's character animation, most of which happened prior to the 70s. But this character animation, too, can be aggressively charming and aggressively endearing. I find the best Disney films both an inspiration, and a caution. I look at them and think, what in this seems manipulative, or insincere to me? When I talk about insincerity, I don't mean intention. I'm sure the intentions of the animators were very sincere, even if that intention was to cajole. They did whatever it took to make their characters appealing. But sincerity, to me, is to invest in these characters something that goes beyond Kinkade's nouns. Insincerity, to me, is when, over all else, the intention is plainly to evoke emotion, rather than to express character and the subtle commonalities in human beings. When it's no longer about "bridge" but about a specific and unique bridge. 

In recent years, I've thought more about audience than I ever have before. I'm telling stories, and I want the reader to experience identification with the characters. There is also a marketplace that I have to consider. Books have to be sold. I try not to be mercenary about my approach to that marketplace, but I do know what kinds of images are going to make it difficult for me to succeed in that marketplace. It would be disingenuous to say that I haven't catered my work, in part, to what I know I can sell. Illustration is a business, but also an occupation. I want to tell stories in the most effective way I can, but I can't be very effective if no one is buying my work. So to survive in that marketplace, I have to make certain compromises, but the last thing I will ever compromise is my sincerity. 

Without being particularly self-conscious of it, I try to avoid making pictures that are driven by the kinds of nostalgia nouns and specific emotional objectives that I've described. So far this hasn't proven to be much of an obstacle. Generally I do the work that pleases me, with the intention of telling whatever story I'm trying to tell in the most effective way I can. Is it my attention to charm? Absolutely. But charm is secondary to narrative. And if I'm doing my job right, it's the story that you come away with, and not enchanting nouns, or generic emotions. 

Beetle Inks

Here's an inked figure (so to speak) for Ladybug and Gentleman Beetle, the book I'm working on. This is, of course, a part of a bigger composition, but as usual I'm inking in pieces. Drybrush and ink. 

Messiah Stories in Contemporary YA Fantasy

1.

Protagonist is born with a special talent because of his/her lineage. His/her parents may be keeping this secret from the protagonist, or they may be dead, or he/she may be adopted, or one parent may be absent, and the absent parent may have a special power or may otherwise be a stand-in for God. Of course, specialness can take on many forms, and doesn't necessarily involve superpowers, but generally, it does.

2.

Protagonist discovers said talent when they come of age, and are initiated by a mentor or mentors. Protagonist discovers that he/she must use said talent against the forces of evil, usually one particular antagonist. Despite the awesomeness of their circumstances, the protagonist is at first reluctant to take on this new responsibility, but eventually they give in. They may be fulfilling some prophesy, or they may be the world's only hope. If the author has decided to just screw it and nail the point home by hitting it square on the nose, the protagonist will be referred to as "The Chosen One."

3.

Usually the evil antagonist is exceedingly boring and lacks complexity. Usually wears a cape. May or may not be horribly disfigured. The disfigured are bad. The color black, is bad. 

4.

Insert love interest here.

5.

When called upon to do so, the protagonist rises to the occasion, conquering the evil with not just their power, but their cunning. 

6.

Repeat for as many sequels as you can draw the sucker out for. 

And no I'm not only talking about that book, the book that must not be named. I'm sure you can come up with at least a dozen others that follow the same pattern, even if you don't read young adult fiction. YA isn't the only guilty party. But seriously, I think we can do better. 

What Would Jesus Do?

So Jesus starts out with circumstance number one, but rather than a stand-in for God, it's God himself. Then there are those missing years. Jesus may have had a mentor. Who knows? What we do know is that he had magic powers, but he didn't exactly use those powers to fight the forces of evil. Jesus mostly just talked a lot. He preached. He told people to be humble, and to be nicer to eachother. And what happens in the end? Does he conquer the forces of evil? Well, not exactly. The Gospels really aren't about the devil. It's a more complex, richer story for its ambiguity. It doesn't take the low road by presenting us with easy villains. People are flawed, and Jesus acknowledges that even he, is flawed.

 There's your messiah story, but it's just not exciting enough. Where are the capes? Where's the love interest? 

I'm not a religious person, but I will say, as messiahs go, Jesus makes for a more intriguing and complex messiah than Harry Potter, or Luke Skywalker, or any number of others. 

No More Villains and Messiahs Please

It's harder to write a compelling story without a villain, but that doesn't mean it's impossible. You don't have to preach to your readers to give them something other than black hats and white hats. Your protagonist doesn't have to be Jesus or any other messiah. You can have all the spaceships and dragons you want--who doesn't like spaceships and dragons? But you can still rewrite the script. That doesn't mean eliminate conflict, but not all antagonists have to be quite so antagonistic. People are more complex than that. People are people. Villains are plot devices. So please, please, write something different. Your readers deserve it.

Writing: The Audience is Everything

When you write, the audience is everything.

The biggest problem with not only beginning writers, but writers in general, is that they forget to be readers. There's always the risk of falling in love with your own words, of congratulating yourself for how clever you are. And maybe you are clever. Maybe you've written a fantastic metaphor, or a great description, but great descriptions and metaphors aren't a story.

There are millions and millions of books and short stories for people to choose from. The reader has chosen yours. This doesn't mean your book is the best they could choose, but for whatever reason, they chose it. There is a lot of emphasis in commercial writing on "the hook," the simple high concept that pulls the reader in, but the hook, isn't the story. A good hook is not what makes a story compelling to read, it's what compels the reader to pick up the book in the first place, to choose your book. This is valuable in selling a book, but not necessarily the most important way to engage the reader.

The beginning of a story is an invitation, or at least, it should be. That doesn't mean that it should be expository. That doesn't mean that it should be "the hook," though it doesn't hurt if it is. A hook is a promise, and the story is the fulfillment of that promise, but all stories don't begin with a bang. The best stories don't necessarily pull the reading in, but lead them. You give them a trail to follow. Once you've invited them, it's time to let go and give the reader something to do, but giving the reader too much to do too early on intimidates them. You're requiring them to work too hard, which isn't particularly generous. In the beginning, work for them, don't make them work for you, but after that, try not to do all the work for them.

Too much exposition is hand holding. The common maxim that you hear over and over is, "show, don't tell," and in the beginning, what you choose to show them should be what makes them want to read on. If you don't give enough in the beginning--and I don't mean exposition--you put the reader out to sea. In the beginning you need to anchor them. Sometimes anchoring the reader means putting them off balance, but not so much that you lose them. When I say, "putting the reader off balance" I mean leaving something for them to do, such as leaving out information that will make them want to continue in order to discover more, but you still have to put them somewhere grounded. Maybe it's an actual place, and in describing that place, the reader is intrigued. Maybe it's a piece of dialogue that implies, but doesn't reveal. But whatever the implication, the place or piece of dialogue has to be given context, and relatively soon. The more you wait to tell the reader what's going on, the more you leave them out to sea.

Don't Give Up All Your Secrets 

When I write, I think about one person, and I'm writing to that person. Of course that person is always me, even if it's a letter, not because I'm selfish (well, maybe a little), but because when I write, I'm alone. When I write, I have to fool myself into thinking that I have this intimate relationship with this invisible person. I don't assume that they can read my mind, that they know what I intend, but I also try not to underestimate them. I assume they are smart, that they will get my jokes, that they will be able to infer what I imply, as long as they have context to do it. I want to engage them, so I don't give them everything. I hold back. I carry secrets. I know more about the story than they do, and when I can, I suggest, rather reveal. If you're writing about characters, all characters have a secret inner life and a history, and these are aspects of the character that the reader can never know fully. If the reader knows everything they can possibly know about the character, if they know everything you know, you give up your secrets, and deny the reader their imagination. What we imagine is more compelling than what is true, but the writer still has to know the truth so that they can suggest it. Give the reader hints, but don't give up all your secrets.

Fantasy and Science Fiction: Showing and Not Telling when World Building

This is often the problem that I have with sequels. Often with a sequel, the writer runs out of implications, and all their secrets slowly unravel until there's nothing left for the reader's imagination. In the fantasy and science fiction genres, there's this concept of world building. What some writers think this means, is to explain as much about the world they invented as they can. When I was a kid I loved the tabletop role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons, but most of all, I loved The Monster Manual. It was a catalog of monsters for the game, and featured a description and a little story about each character. These stories were by their nature incomplete. They told about what the character could do, and what their habits were, but the story they inhabited was entirely left to your imagination.

So in a fantasy story, the writer fills in that blank, but if they fill in all the blanks, we're back to that essential problem: they've revealed all their secrets. Star Wars was best when we didn't know exactly how Darth Vader became who he was. We were thrown into a story that had a million implications, and given just enough to imagine a much bigger world. When Lucas made all those sequels, he began filling in every gap, exposing all his secrets and in effect, killing the viewer's imagination.

And why is the audience everything? Don't some writers say that they write just for themselves? I never believe people who say this. Even if they're their only audience, they still are writing to an imaginary person. If it's a diary, that person is your future self, even if you never read it. Writing is language, and language is a vehicle for communication, but communication is only communication if it is received. So even if no one ever reads it, even if you don't read it, At one time you were writing for an invisible person, for an audience, for your future self or whomever you imagined might read it, but it's always for someone. So be generous. Be gracious. When you write, you imagine that somewhere there is a person who is willing, out of all the choices that they have of things to read, to spend their time reading what you've written, a real person instead of an invisible one.

You Are the Reason I Write. 

So thank you for being that person. You're smart, and you get get my jokes and you make me feel understood. You really contribute quite a bit to my self-asteem. So thank you, thank you, thank you. It's good to be alive.

Wednesday Figures

This is a 5 minute pose:

A 10 minute pose:

New Business Cards and Mailers

 Jennifer L. Meyer recently posted her gorgeous new business cards, and so I thought I would do the same! Here are my new business cards and a couple of recent mailers. I apologize for the poor quality of the photos. 

Ladybug Character Design

Here's another character design for my beginning reader book in progress.

I have to say, there is a fine line, when anthropomorphizing insects, between creepy and cute. It took about a week to resolve these two designs so that I was happy with them. There's no telling how many times I'll have to draw these guys, so I took my time getting it right. 

Someone on Google+ asked me about my process in designing a character, and this was what I answered:

Thanks! Well, looking at pictures of beetles, of course, looking at pictures of dapper gentleman, looking a little bit at illustrators from the past, like Grandville and Beatrix Potter, and just trying to give the drawing life and character. My object was to make it not too anthropomorphic, but not too creepily insect-like. I wanted to do something that didn't look like "A Bug's Life," but also didn't quite look as realistic as Grandville. So I suppose figuring out what I didn't want to do was as important as figuring out what I did want to do. I wanted it to have as much real bug anatomy as I could get away with while still keeping him relatable.

The best way, I think, is not to think too much about what other people have done--it's good to look at other people's work, but you have to think about who the character is. In this case he's a polite, dapper, old fashioned guy. There's a sweetness to him as well. When he starts resembling that guy, you're on the right track. Just trying to come up with a cool looking character will probably lead you down the wrong path. Sometimes you get so caught up in making the character look cool, or cute, or whatever, that you forget to make it human. Don't forget who the character is. If you start thinking about other people's characters you're going to draw their character instead of your own. But that's essentially what I keep asking myself--does he look like he could be this guy? What would make him look more like the guy in the story?

Edit: Description of character is for the character is the previous post, as I was addressing an earlier comment.