Blog

  • La Belle Dame Sans Merci, continued

    I’ve posted today’s update of the new comic “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”. This piece was drawn throughout the spring of 1999, my first semester at UC Berkeley, right after finishing Reminiscence. This poem was a favorite of mine from high school lit, and I’d often pictured adapting it into visual form. Around the time…

  • La Belle Dame Sans Merci, by John Keats

    Today I begin posting a new Meditations piece up at my webcomicsnation site. This one is entitled La Belle Dame Sans Merci and is a visual adaptation of the John Keats poem. I greatly enjoy adapting (and writing) poetry to visual language, and this one was one of my favorites. Several months after I completed…

  • Naming the System

    I’ve been thinking lately about the differences between “visual language” and “comics”, and why no one has really made the separation between the two before. It struck me that our culture has never really identified there being a system of graphic communication. We name the process of creating something visually (the act of drawing). We…

  • Shojo Manga

    I went to an exhibit today on Shojo (girls’) manga, hosted by Masami Toku, who does research on art education, especially concerning manga. I have corresponded with her for several years now, so it was nice to finally meet her in person. The exhibit itself was fairly interesting, and had a nice cross-section of manga…

  • New story, coming soon

    Today’s Meditations page is the penultimate segment of Karuna, though its essentially the finale. I drew the mouse’s legs in that panel just as I remembered them – sticking out all crazy like with a great leap. I’ll be starting a new story next week, an adaptation of a John Keats poem.

  • America, yours and mine

    Tonight, I joined thousands of people across the globe to protest the Iraq war on its third anniversary. Here in Chicago, we marched down Michigan Ave’s Magnificent Mile, next to the river, and down to the Daley Center. It was an odd feeling to have such an event framed by one of the most emblematic…

  • Bound by Law?

    In the non-fiction comic department, this is a well done piece explaining copyright law. I think it makes a good argument for the place of copyright limitations and freedoms have in society.

  • Books Galore

    I got my first shipment of Meditations books the other day (outside of my proof copy), and I must say, I am quite pleased. The printing turned out awesome. The blacks are very black and the greys are very grey. Sa-tis-fac-tion! So, I’ll confirm it again: for graphic novels wanting to do print-on-demand, BookSurge is…

  • Probing “art” and “literature”

    I belong to a “comics scholars” listserve that has been discussing whether there needs to be an established “Comics Studies” field (I say a resounding “no”). This has had me thinking about disciplines in general, and what it is that various fields actually study, despite their names. I had a thought about the oft-stated presumption…

  • Too Many Twos

    I’ve got a short new piece up at Comixpedia for my ongoing “Comic Theory 101” column called “Two Many Twos.” This one continues my series of short pieces where I try to illuminate issues involved with the intersection of “comic theory” and linguistics, here probing into the quandary called the “Problem of 2.” Like the…