Our Comics, Ourselves

Hello! My name is Anna Sellheim and I will be curating the Our Comics Ourselves tumblr this week. I write comics about mental health and progressive politics. This will be a mix of both comics that were important to me growing up and helped shape my creative voice, as well as work that I find particularly exciting now.

THIS IS IT! THE FINAL DAY! LET’S DO THIS!

People have called my work brave. As mentioned above, my work often deals with my mental health struggles (anxiety and depression). I’ve not only done solo work about it but I’ve been part of projects like @sweatypalmszine. Or my work is political. Again, I haven’t just done my own political comics, but I’ve been part of other projects like @comics-for-choice. I am a very open book, I’m willing to write comics about almost any part of my life…

except loneliness. 

Loneliness is a subject that I find too painful to acknowledge in my day to day life, let alone sit down for hours to draw a comic about it. Two zines I picked up this con season talk about loneliness in a totally raw, honest manner. I find both of these zines took a lot of bravery to create. 

Mary Shyne’s Incompatible looks at Mary’s abysmal dating history, talking about 12 different romantic encounters, each corresponding to a different astrological sign. You see Mary in all sorts of horrible situations, because she’s insecure and afraid of being alone. She talks about unrequited crushes, dealing with jerky older men, men that use her, etc. It’s a brutal book, but if you’ve felt the insecurity and loneliness that so many young 20 something single people do, you totally understand why she’s getting into these situations (even if you handled it the opposite way like me and coped with those feelings by avoiding dating pretty much completely for fear of being rejected). This book would be beyond depressing but Shyne saves it at the last moment, giving us a little bit of hope. This zine is my favorite thing I picked up at SPX and is the reason I agreed to write posts for this exhibition. 

SPEAKING OF LONELINESS AND HOPE, LET’S MOVE ON TO ANNA MCGLYNN!

(I am going to warn you straight up- these shots are crappy phone photos because when I tried scanning pages they looked CRAZY).

Can You Believe We Only Get One Life is a collection of diary comics from McGlynn’s summer. It is my favorite zine I picked up at @micexpo (and let’s be real here, I picked up a LOT of good stuff at MICE). I am not a fan of 90% of diary comics out there, it’s hard having something worthwhile to write about in the day to day. McGlynn’s comics show the day to day drudgery of life but the comics feel full of hope and very much ALIVE.

They are all honest and real. Some are really funny (^”Cool! What a great feeling it is to be loved and driving”). 

(^ Let me tell you, as someone that makes a 3 hour drive to see her boyfriend  every weekend and just has time to sit and THINK, the second panel is ON POINT). 

Others just show the experience of having lonely moments, but there’s hope in all of these strips. Sometimes you have good days and sometimes you have bad days, and McGlynn’s comics show us both and there’s a real beauty in that. 

Anyway, two cool brave ladies doing cool brave comics. A good thing all around. You can follow Shyne at @citygrump and her website is here. Anna McGlynn at @annamcglynn . I’m on here @annasellheim and my website is here. 

MY GOODNESS! IT’S OVER! Thanks for reading ya’ll! I hope you check out the stuff I’ve talked about this week! Time for me to go draw my own comics again.

xx

-Anna

Hello! My name is Anna Sellheim and I will be curating the Our Comics Ourselves tumblr this week. I write comics about mental health and progressive politics. This will be a mix of both comics that were important to me growing up and helped shape my creative voice, as well as work that I find particularly exciting now.

On to the final leg of this week, today and tomorrow’s posts will be about zines that I have found this past year and have really loved. Today’s zine is What Is A Glacier by Sophie Yanow. 

This book addresses global warming in a way that is accessible and personal. It discusses global warming with the possibility of it being the end of the world along with other “ends,” specifically the end to the author’s romantic relationship and her relationship to mortality. Global warming, to me at least, is this distant, abstract concept that feels unreal but at the same time overwhelmingly terrifying. Yanow’s book makes the reader acknowledge global warming, but because it frames it as another possible end in a series of endings that are commonly experienced in day to day life (ending of relationships, mortality, moving from one country to another) the catastrophic nature of global warming is grounded. It feels more real and tangible than when the news covers a massive government report about it. 

This book is one of the few pieces of media that talks about global warming that doesn’t scare me half to death. It is a very personal book, and as such it has truth and a bit of a universal feel to it. This is a strength of Yanow’s, she is a master of doing personal autobio comics that also touch on larger societal themes the are seamlessly woven together. Our individual lives are all impacted by larger topics that make news stories, Yanow has a knack for highlighting that. 

This book is  a powerful piece of work. You can buy it here and you can follow Sophie at @situology . Her website is here. You can follow me @annasellheim and my website is here.

WELP, THAT WAS A SHORT ONE! Straight to the point I suppose. Tomorrow’s will be short too because it’s about zines and I am so close to being done with this week that I can taste it. I want to get back to drawing my own comics already!

See you tomorrow

Hello! My name is Anna Sellheim and I will be curating the Our Comics Ourselves tumblr this week. I write comics about mental health and progressive politics. This will be a mix of both comics that were important to me growing up and helped shape my creative voice, as well as work that I find particularly exciting now.

I’m not 100% sure how to start this particular post. With all my previous posts, it was easy because I knew what I liked about the comics I was writing about and they all sort of fall in a similar indie vein. If you read my work you certainly wouldn’t think that Whomp is my favorite comic going and has been for years. I don’t know how to articulate why I love it so much. But I’m in the middle of reread of the entire archive this year, and I need to fill up an entire week of posts, so let’s see if I can pull off an article that articulates my love for this comic other than, “This hits Anna’s humor sweet spot.”

(These are all screen shots from my iPad by the way because I’ve been saving all my favorite strips and spamming my boyfriend with emails full of them. I’m not sure how happy is about that but he loves me so he has to deal). 

Whomp is a comic strip that stars a fictional-esque version of Filyaw himself (from now on, I will be referring to the character in the strip as Ronnie and the author by his surname). Ronnie is a cartoonist that struggles with his weight, anxiety, depression, loneliness, the grind that is creating comics (hmmm… if you know me and my work there might be more similarities here than I originally thought).  I think the difference is that Whomp is hilarious in a way my work isn’t.  

Whomp has a lot of the self deprecating humor many web comics have, as well as a lot of mainstream nerd cultural appeal which is popular today that I personally don’t relate to. But Whomp is really smart and has a lot of elements that make it unique.

It’s primarily slice of life but then has fantastical elements that are woven into the comic seamlessly. For example, Ronnie’s absent father is literally Santa Clause. My favorite fantasy character is Motivation Dude (M Dude) who is a physical manifestation of Ronnie’s motivation and is incredibly cruel and unforgiving.

(To call myself out a little bit, I say I don’t relate to nerd culture but I do have a dragon ball tattooed on my left breast. But I stand by my original claim because I regret it). 

Whomp is primarily a single a day gag strip but there actually is quite a bit of world building that happens over the course of it. You find out the believable in world explanation for M Dude, you find out quite a number of ways that Ronnie having a magical father like Santa Clause impacts his day to day life, you find out why Ronnie’s pet panda disappears after three appearances years later. 

Filyaw is also a very competent artist. Many of the gags wouldn’t work if he didn’t nail a particular concept or an expression (he has an incredible knack for expressions).

So in conclusion, Whomp is a unique gem of a comic. It’s hilarious and relatable and I hope I did a decent job of conveying some of the reasons I love it to you all.

You can follow Ronnie Filyaw on Twitter and here is his website. You can read Whomp here. You can follow me here @annasellheim​ and my website is here.

THIS WEEKEND: I stay on my snobby indie brand and discuss three zines that I came out this year that I’m really into!

BYE!

Hello! My name is Anna Sellheim and I will be curating the Our Comics Ourselves tumblr this week. I write comics about mental health and progressive politics. This will be a mix of both comics that were important to me growing up and helped shape my creative voice, as well as work that I find particularly exciting now.

It is time for me to move past the comics that influenced me and start writing about comics I’ve been impressed with recently. Today and tomorrow I will be writing about webcomics, and then this weekend I will be writing about some zines that have come out this year that I love. 

I often used to say that I stopped reading comics once I went to grad school. It was then pointed out to me that I read just as many comics as before, it’s just the type of comics I read had changed. I used to read only graphic novels, but in the last few years I have transitioned over to reading primarily webcomics and zines (I also tend to make only zines- zines4lyfe!). One of the webcomics I finally got around to reading since it completed earlier this year is Girls With Slingshots.

****SPOILER ALERT**** The main reason I love this comic is because the ending is so well done, so I will be going into that quite a bit. If you don’t want to be spoiled, read no further. But if you haven’t read GWS yet, go do it already!

GWS is about a group of friends living in a small hip town. It’s mostly slice of life, but there are some fantasy elements such as a talking Cactus named McPedro . It is in comic strip format, usually with a gag at the end of the strip. And there’s a lot of sex jokes. 

The thing that I like most about the comic are the diversity of the characters and the variety of relationships portrayed between them.

You have characters that come in all different sizes, races, sexualities, etc. There’s characters with disabilities, fat characters, characters that battle illnesses such as breast cancer. All of them are treated with dignity and are believable. Some are side characters but they get quite a bit of screen time.

The above strip stars my favorite couple, Jamie and Erin. Erin is asexual and Jamie certainly is not, but they make it work. They are in love and it works for them. The above strip is dealing with Jamie being hesitant to tell Erin about another potential partner in their open relationship. Erin can’t fulfill Jamie’s needs sexually, so Jamie goes through the process of finding other partners that can. Anyway, long story short, as a fat woman somewhere on the asexual spectrum, finding representation of both of those things in one couple? It is a great thing to see!

You have other relationships too, some that don’t work out. Zack and Hazel love each other, but Hazel is not ready for the responsibility of building a life with another person. 

(^ This strip is the one that stays with me the most out of the entire series. I know it’s going to influence a comic of mine in the future, I just don’t know how yet). 

You not only have a diverse cast of characters in the traditional ways listed above, you have a group of characters that are all friends, all in the same age group (late 20s/early 30s), but they are all in very different levels of maturity and in different stages of their lives. And the great thing about having 10 years to let the strip progress is you get to see the characters grow at different speeds in different ways, and it all feels completely natural. 

The strength of characterization of the cast is really brought home in the conclusion of the strip. 

You have Jameson and Maureen, happily married, have a child. Jameson becomes the owner of a business. You have Jamie and Erin strengthen their relationship, with Erin finding a calling to be a baker after spending years in grad school for biochemistry. You have Clarice, after years of being alone, find love with a man that accepts her and the fact she is a dominatrix. 

And then you have Hazel. After visiting her father that walked out of her life when she was young, her father that never really accomplished anything and uses people, Hazel gets some closure on that relationship and grows up. She’s a writer of a popular column and is approached to do a book. She avoids even considering it for over a year. After seeing her father again as an adult and experiencing this moment of growth and clarity, she finally knows what she’s going to write that book about. I am a HUGE sucker for stories where characters end up ok without having found love. She doesn’t get back together with Zack, she is going to be ok on her own. 

All of these characters are entering a new stage of their lives, and that means different things for each of them. GWS is a truly amazing body of work.

You can find Danielle Corsetto on Twitter.  You can start GWS here. Danielle is reissuing previously black and white strips in color, and the website updates everyday with commentary. Find that here. She also has a new project called Stuck at 32. You can find me @annasellheim and my website is here. 

I think I’m finally getting the hang of this. Stay tuned tomorrow for something completely different.

Hello! My name is Anna Sellheim and I will be curating the Our Comics Ourselves tumblr this week. I write comics about mental health and progressive politics. This will be a mix of both comics that were important to me growing up and helped shape my creative voice, as well as work that I find particularly exciting now.

After only consuming manga from the grades 4-8, when I turned 13 I rebelled HARD and decided that I was sick of the stuff and I needed to broaden my comic horizons. So, for my 14th birthday, I walked into @bigplanetcomics​ and was greeted with Quimby the Mouse by Chris Ware. 

This image only begins to scratch the surface of the beauty of this oversized gold foil book. Chris Ware is a master draftsman, and his work is incredibly intricate regardless of the size. 

This book collects comics that Ware did in the early 90s and was released after his 2003 classic Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, which was seen as a break through of what graphic novels are capable of. Ware actually says in the first page of Quimby not to buy the book because it doesn’t reflect his current strength as a cartoonist. Ware is known for being self deprecating and I’m writing this so he doesn’t get a say in this case. 

I bought the book and was blown away.

Ware is known for playing with layout. One of the pages in Quimby has 128 panels in it. The pages mimic old school animation (he’s a mouse- get it???). While I picked up and bought the book because of the art, I stayed for the stories the pages told (I am very much someone that only gets invested in comics if the stories are compelling and wary of people that like a comic solely for it’s art). Quimby is a collection of individual strips dealing with different themes, the two most common being a depiction of a toxic relationship Quimby has with a disembodied crying cat head Sparky and a conjoined twin mouse pair where one of them is in rapidly deteriorating health. 

Showing both the mix of emotions that comes with having a sick relative is what was compelling to me. You see here one of the twins resenting his brother (?) but there are moments where you see the healthy mouse coming to terms with his twin’s inevitable death. The strips are mostly very sad, which appealed to depressed 14 year old me. Most of Ware’s work is pretty somber and melancholy, his newest work Building Stories being the most positive (which isn’t saying much, but it’s an AMAZING piece of work).

Quimby the Mouse was really my first foray into reading indie comics, which are the kind of comics I now create. While our work is very different, the somber aesthetic my work sometimes has is a direct influence of Chris Ware. I would say that he and Lynda Barry are the two biggest influences.

Chris Ware is another cartoonist I picked who does not really have a social media presence but you can find out more about him here. You can follow me @annasellheim and my website is here.  This is the second book I’ve written about that’s out of print, but unlike Deep Girl you can actually buy Quimby the Mouse used for as cheap as $7 on amazon.

WELP! I have no idea what I’m writing about tomorrow. What an exciting time to be alive! Come back tomorrow to see what I can come up with!

Here’s a picture of Sparky to portray my current emotional state for not having planned this out in advance!.

Hello! My name is Anna Sellheim and I will be curating the Our Comics Ourselves tumblr this week. I write comics about mental health and progressive politics. This will be a mix of both comics that were important to me growing up and helped shape my creative voice, as well as work that I find particularly exciting now.

I first discovered Ariel Bordeaux when reading From Girls to Grrlz by Trina Robbins as a middle schooler in 1999 (Yes, I’m not old in the grand scheme of things but I am old in terms of tumblr) which highlighted Ariel’s book No Love Lost. I fell in love with it immediately. It is a fictional story about a bad relationship but mostly about the power of female friendships and their importance. It received poor reviews but I genuinely believe it’s because the subject matter was seen as trivial in the 1990s due to sexism. 

So cut to 2 years ago, I buy Deep Girl at a zine show in Providence Rhode Island.

I just starting to do autobio comics seriously at the time, and had just dealt with some sexist faculty over the summer at my grad school. Deep Girl was a revelation to me. It was funny and raw and unabashedly feminist.

(I actually own the original of  this page ^). Ariel talks about things like screwing up potential relationships in high school, horrendous roommate situations, and body insecurity. Every topic is tackled in total honesty, often making Ariel the butt of the joke, but in a way that is relatable. Even the fiction in later issues is used has a universal quality to it. There’s a particular fictional story about two women growing apart that is very well done. 

Unfortunately Deep Girl is out of print and Ariel has virtually no online presence, but if you can find an issue or two I highly recommend you get it. And No Love Lost is available used on Amazon for less than $3. 

You can see Ariel’s abandoned tumblr at @arielbordeaux and you can find me @annasellheim . I will leave you with a message from Ariel herself:

Hello! My name is Anna Sellheim and I will be curating the Our Comics Ourselves tumblr this week. I write comics about mental health and progressive politics. This will be a mix of both comics that were important to me growing up and helped shape my creative voice, as well as work that I find particularly exciting now.

So the greatness that is Lynda Barry has already been addressed on this blog literally in the last post, but I am going to talk her earlier fiction work here. The Greatest of Marlys is a book that I discovered in a crappy beach front tourist book shop when I was 14. It is a collection of Barry’s long standing alt newspaper comic Ernie Pook’s Comeek.

Marlys started out as a bratty stuck up nerd that was hated by her cousins, Arna and Arnold. Originally the strip consists of the dynamics between them and occasionally other kids in the neighborhood. Basic things like going to school, popularity among various cliques, Arna and Marly’s dreams of growing up to be beautiful teens, etc. were covered in early strips. These comics are strong in and of themselves because when they portray the perspective and feelings of these kids, they feel legitimate and authentic. 

As the strip goes on, it gets less humorous and a lot darker. There’s extreme parental neglect, death, illness , abandonment, and other heavy topics that are addressed in the course of the series. But there’s beauty in these stories and the characters all come away with dignity, even at the worst moments.

The Best Of Marlys is just one collection of these kids’ stories, there are quite a few collections out there (such as The Freddie Stories; be warned this book will break your heart).

Lynda Barry has been doing genius level work for decades and I am so glad that she is finally being recognized as the titan of the industry that she truly is. Her work is all heart. I’m going to end this with my favorite comics of Lynda Barry’s ever, some of the comic strips that I think about most regularly:

You can find Lynda Barry at on tumblr here (Do not ask me why this site won’t let me tag her correctly). I am @annasellheim and my website is here.

Alright, this is going to be a hell of a week gang because all of my books are in storage and I love so many comics I have no ideas which ones I’m going to cover next! STAY TUNED!

This post concludes my week of curation! I hope you enjoyed these blogs as much as I’ve enjoyed writing them– you can find more of my work on instagram @athena.naylor, or here on tumblr at athenanaylor.tumblr.com. Thanks to Our Comics Ourselves for having me, and enjoy this post on Lynda Barry!

-Athena

“What It Is” is the first book by Lynda Barry that I ever owned, and it messed with my head in the best possible way.

How does one even categorize this book? It’s certainly not a straightforward comic or graphic narrative, though Barry intersperses autobiographical comics throughout the text.

“What It Is” claims from it’s subtitle “Do You Wish You Could Write?” to be a kind of guidebook for writers, and it is true that the reader can find exercises and writing prompts at the back of the book. But as a whole, this work more accurately represents a  creative manifesto, a philosophy text composed of dense collages and thought-provoking questions.

Reading this book for the first time forced me to reinvent what the act of “reading” meant. How does one approach one of these collaged pages? Barry certainly composes this book so that the reader’s agency is at the forefront– there’s not really a “wrong” way to engage with the work. For myself, I found that I had to ingest this book slowly– each page felt like it forced me to practice being present, to be a “close reader” of images. Which makes sense, since the entirety of “What It Is” attempts to answer the question “What is an image?”

“What It Is” reflects Barry’s commitment to engendering creativity in people at all levels. The autobiographical comics scattered throughout trace her own relationship to her creative practice from the time she was a child to the present day. It would be fair to say this book is the first of a series that connects closely to her current status as a professor at the University of Wisconsin Madison, where she teaches comics and participates in research about the psychology of creativity– particularly how hand-drawing and hand-writing information impacts how we interpret and remember it– and how different disciplines incorporate images into their practice. 

Other books that Barry has produced in the same strain as “What It Is” include “Picture This” and “Syllabus,” the latter of which documents her experiences teaching at UW Madison. But “What It Is” definitely remains my favorite of these three in how it tackles the abstract questions that confront why creativity is so necessary to the human experience.

I don’t know if I can answer precisely what a memory is or how it works, or where a story resides before it manifests in a physical translation, or even if I know what in fact an image is. But I definitely feel the better for taking the time to contemplate the question, and I have Lynda Barry to thank for that.

You can keep up to date with what Lynda Barry is teaching in her classes at her tumblr: http://thenearsightedmonkey.tumblr.com/

My first introduction to Alison Bechdel’s “Fun Home” came from the 2006 edition of Houghton Mifflin’s series “Best American Comics,”  which printed an excerpt from Chapter 5. This chapter has a nice smattering of the themes that run through the rest of the book, such as death, sexuality, dysfunctional family dynamics, etc.

But it’s also the chapter that details young Alison’s obsessive compulsive tendencies, and this is the aspect that really stood out to me.

I particularly clung to and connected with Alison’s daily struggles with her diary due to her increasing uncertainty about her own objectivity.

As a child I was not as compulsive as Alison, but did go through a phase where I felt distressingly doubtful and anxious over what was real and what was not (less due to any form of OCD, rather more the result of depersonalization/dissociative panic). I had tried to relate these experiences to peers with little success, and suddenly here I found myself in high school reading a comic that so clearly nailed down the kind of mental angst and apprehension I had experienced. I was astounded. 

“The troubling gap between word and meaning”– I forgot that I had circled that caption in my copy until looking at this scan. That kind of associative gap represents so much about what Bechdel’s book is about: unreliability, in spite of our best efforts. Beyond this chapter, “Fun Home” spends much of its time fore fronting that unreliability by questioning, archiving, and layering information in order to uncover any patterns to explain lived experience. In doing so, Bechdel takes advantage of all the tools of juxtaposition that comics has to offer.

I’ll admit that “Fun Home” is such a monumental work in the comics community that to talk about it at all seems redundant. Hasn’t enough praise been showered on this achievement? We know Alison Bechdel was the first cartoonist to get a MacArthur Genius Grant, we know her groundbreaking strip “Dykes to Watch Out For” made the “Bechdel Test” part of our cultural vernacular, we know “Fun Home” has been made into an award-winning musical—we get it, Alison Bechdel and “Fun Home” are great! 

But I sometimes think it’s possible to take “Fun Home’s” exalted status for granted. Recalling that moment of initial connection I had with this work, now a decade ago, I know that I would have always remembered this comic, even if it hadn’t grown into the phenomenon it has. Truly, I did not even recognize that the excerpt I read in “The Best American Comics” was part of a bigger narrative until years afterward, which seems crazy to admit now. Bechtel innovated how we look at memoir and comics, and we better not forget it.

-Athena Naylor

I once lent my copy of “Skim” to a friend and was appalled when she returned it and explained that it had made her sad. I recall literally jumping out of my chair and resisting the urge to cheer loudly when I finished the book for the first time. Reading this comic felt like a revelation.

This book was my introduction to Jillian Tamaki, a well-known cartooning and illustrating powerhouse, and also represents Jillian’s first collaborative work with her writer cousin, Mariko Tamaki (I will be referring to each with first names to avoid confusion). The story follows protagonist Kim “Skim” Cameron, a sophomore in highschool with a recently broken arm who is casually exploring Wicca and is about to have one hell of a semester.

I’ll admit that in a lot of ways I can see how this book could have made my friend sad. Heavy stuff occurs—one of the first critical events of the story is the suicide of a boy named John, and a lot of the plot is directed by how classmates and the school administration react to his death. 

Then Skim falls in love with her teacher Ms. Archer, which doesn’t end great because of Professional Ethics and Power Dynamics and All That Good Stuff. Sexuality becomes an undercurrent within the story not only as Skim becomes enamored of Ms. Archer, but as rumors about John having been secretly gay begin to circulate through school.

On top of this is the usual teenage angst associated with coming-of-age stories, a general sense of not really belonging, which is emphasized by the artistic choice of representing the main character as reminiscent of traditionally illustrated Japanese beauties while the rest of her classmates are white girls with early-90’s hairdos. (Skim, like Jillian Tamaki herself, is half-Asian, and the complications and difficulties that come along with this identity are touched upon within the book).

But this book never felt overbearing with all of this arguably serious subject matter. The teens are funny, along with being insensitive and angry and moody. And with the first-person narrative Mariko Tamaki does so well at writing diary entries that are endearingly dramatic in teenage way. You can’t help but laugh while simultaneously feeling for our floundering protagonist.

And besides the humor, I consider the ending of this story to be a happy one. The first half recounts an ill-fated affair with a teacher, but the second half shows Skim moving past it and befriending John’s ex-girlfriend Katie Matthews, who has also obviously been going through shit:

Everything I appreciate about the plot of “Skim” is only enhanced by the excellence of the artwork—god, the artwork.

I often think of “Skim” as a mood piece. The way Jillian Tamaki draws the woods where Skim retreats to at various points in the book is beautiful and wild. The details of life in the 1990s is on point. Teenagers’ postures and behavior are well documented. When you open the book you are transported to a world very specific to the Tamakis’ vision of teen life in 90’s Canada. It’s immersive and affective and I will never be able to rave enough about it.

Nor will I be able to rave enough about Jillian Tamaki, whose other books are well worth the read and whose work can be found at her website: http://jilliantamaki.com/illustration/

Jillian collaborated again with Mariko for the 2014 book “This One Summer,” which was deemed one of the “Most Challenged” books of 2016 by the American Library Association for “profanity, drug use, LGBTQ characters, sexually explicit content, and mature themes." 

So, you know it’s good, too.

- Athena Naylor

Hi! My name’s Athena Naylor, and I’m a cartoonist and recent graduate of the George Washington University currently living in D.C. I’m excited to share some of my favorite cartoonists on the blog this week!

My initial reason for noticing Sarah Glidden is a bit superficial—she uses watercolors for her comics, and watercolor is also often my medium of choice. And it’s one I don’t see cartoonists often committing to.

But after this first cursory impression, I became invested in Sarah Glidden’s work because of how it approaches journalism and tries to inform readers on current events in approachable and transparent ways.

“Transparent” is a bit of a loaded term. When I write “transparent” here, I mean to say that Glidden is direct in revealing the inherent subjectivity of her reportage comics. She forefronts the difficulties journalists (and she herself) encounter with ethics, and relates these issues to the way we try to construct any story. Our perspective is always going to skew things, no matter how much we try to remain impartial. This complicated balance between telling an engaging story and retaining objective truth lies at the core of her acclaimed book “Rolling Blackouts.”

In “Rolling Blackouts,” Glidden follows two American journalists as they travel to Turkey, Syria, and Iraq. She documents her journalist friends as they interview refugees, officials, and as they try to crack a story about an American friend who fought in Iraq but refuses to be forthcoming with all aspects of his experience. Throughout the book, Glidden emphasizes how human experience imparts new perspectives on macro political events, and how her own limited understanding can only illustrate a very small piece of a very complicated puzzle. In a time where journalism and journalists are under attack and being accused of untrustworthiness, a book like “Rolling Blackouts” is remarkably timely (it was published just last year).

Glidden also just published a new short comic on The Nib last week about how artwork impacts our consideration of war. I’ll admit that with my degree in art history I couldn’t help but appreciate this comic– gotta love meditations on how we interact with art.

I would recommend looking at all of Glidden’s work on the Nib, which has commented on many political events of this year. More of her work can be found at her website: sarahglidden.com

And in relation to “The Art of War,” I would be remiss to not share this other comics-related book from 2016:

“Disaster Drawn” by comics-scholar Hillary Chute considers how the drawn image uniquely communicates the horrors of war. Like Glidden in her comic on the Nib, Chute considers Goya and other artists that have documented political violence, before engaging with iconic graphic narratives such as “Maus,” “Barefoot Gen,” and the reportage comics of Joe Sacco. For those out there with a more academic bent, “Disaster Drawn” is a compelling read, and all of Chute’s books are interesting investigations as to how and why comics communicate personal narratives as well as they do.

Hi! My name’s Athena Naylor, and I’m a cartoonist and recent graduate of the George Washington University. I currently live in D.C., and I got involved with Our Comics Ourselves while the exhibit was at George Mason University this fall. I’m excited to contribute to the blog this week!

The next artist I want to highlight is Kate Beaton, another cartoonist I first began to follow online who has expanded her output to include books and children’s stories. Despite her forays into children’s illustration, though, I think Beaton still remains most associated with her literary and historical gag strips, which are consistently hilarious and satirical.

It was hard to choose a favorite collection of Beaton strips to share, but I went with this one because Joan of Arc is one of my favorite historical/cultural characters and Beaton uses her story to highlight current discussions about women so well and so humorously.

Besides obviously being funny, I’ve always admired how Kate Beaton’s career represents comics’ accessibility for both readers and creators. Beaton did not go to art school– she studied history and anthropology and drew on the side. After graduating from college, comics became her medium for communicating her passion for history and her unique sense of humor. Kate Beaton’s success is like a case study on the benefits of being generous with your interests and for choosing your own career path, even if it means diverging from preestablished routes. (Admittedly, Kate Beaton’s success is also a case study for the immense power of the internet).

Besides being one of the only cartoonists who can actually able to make me laugh out loud, Beaton is also great because she can tackle more extensive narratives. Today I also wanted to showcase some of her personal comics.

While Beaton’s comics are always characterized by a loose and expressive line, I like how her autobiographical comics look like she literally cannot wait to express what she needs to say. Her quick lines delineate what is essential and nothing more, and it makes for not only an accessible reading experience but an affective one. In this comic “Night Shift,” she describes unfortunately familiar workplace situations women have to deal with, but within the isolated setting of a Canadian mining site, which further dramatizes the circumstances. It’s a little inexplicable for me, how she clearly illustrates the uncomfortable feeling of not-belonging with so little visual information. For whatever reason this one has always stuck with me. I think it’s also been on my mind because of all the recent discussions about the kinds of harassment women deal with daily in our culture.

Beaton details more of her time working at the Tar Sands at Fort McMurray in her autobio series “Ducks.” I know she has mentioned a desire to write more about her upbringing and life in Canada, (again illustrating the popular possibility within comics of making a living from mining your own experiences and interests), and I hope she publishes a collection of her autobio work one day!

I’ll leave it at that for now. As a closing recommendation: if you don’t already own Kate Beaton’s current collections of comic strips, I don’t know what you’ve been doing!

Check out more of Kate Beaton’s work at her website: http://www.harkavagrant.com/

Hey, Athena here again! If my last post on Carolyn Nowak’s “Girl Town” and “Diana’s Electric Tongue” indicate anything about my preferences in comics, it’s that I love stories that juggle absurdity and humor while retaining emotional depth. I think OctopusPie may have been the first comic that showed me how that balance could be achieved with extraordinary results. I feel like many cartoonists consider Meredith Gran’s OctopusPie a kind of comic masterpiece, and I can’t help but to echo the sentiment. It was one of the first webcomics I began to follow dedicatedly, and after a decade it finally came to a close this year.

(The first comic introduction of our cantankerous protagonist, Eve Ning)

Superficially, OctopusPie is one of those ubiquitous “cast of characters in New York navigate their twenties” narratives, but as a person in her twenties this kind of story still hits home for me. The duration of this webcomic also aligned perfectly with my own life— I began to read it as a senior in high school, and as I grew, so did the comic. Gran herself has discussed how when she first made the comic she was excited to write a story about a bunch of witty characters older than her. But as she began to live through her twenties and move beyond the age of her characters, the tone of the comic shifted. Not to say that the story became less funny— the wit and humor that initially drew me to the comic never fell away, and in many ways Gran became even more comfortable with incorporating absurdity into her storylines (in one strip someone turns into a car as a punchline… don’t ask, just read the comic). But emotional undercurrents began to direct storylines more, and when Gran hired a colorist a few years back, the emotional impact of each strip increased drastically.

Over the years of producing OctopusPie Gran also consistently pushed the envelope for what online comics could do in terms of format– take for instance the collaborative gif comics she did with Lacey Micallef for a storyline from 2013:

Or this more recent, cinematic, scrolling comic that broke the internet a little when it debuted in 2015 (click here for a link through to the entire page)

Gran has an animation background that ensures that her lines are clean and clear and that her sequences feel really engaging and active. The drawings also allow room for hilariously exaggerated expressions. 

Yet this cartoony style never makes these characters feel distanced from real life—if anything, they feel more relatable because of their simplified designs. OctopusPie, though it was a ten-year long webcomic, did not accumulate a ton of fan art, and I have a feeling its because Gran’s characters feel too much like real, actualized people. It would be like making fan art of your neighbor—kind of weird and non-intuitive.

OctopusPie has been collected into book collections that I would also recommend, but the comic in its entirety still remains online. I always encourage people to check it out! octopuspie.com

Hi! My name’s Athena Naylor, and I’m a cartoonist and recent graduate of the George Washington University. I currently live in D.C., and I got involved with Our Comics Ourselves while the exhibit was at George Mason University this fall. I’m excited to contribute to the blog this week!

The first cartoonist I want to highlight this week is Carolyn Nowak, whose recent work has been on my mind ever since this year’s Small Press Expo. 

I first stumbled upon Nowak’s work here through tumblr, particularly when her comic “Rungs” achieved some notoriety through the reblogging circuit. But it’s really her mini-comics that stand out to me. I picked up “Girl Town” at Small Press Expo in 2015 and quickly fell in love with Nowak’s cartooning and storytelling style.

 Nowak’s characters, along with the world she pens in around them, are endearingly strange. In “Girl Town,” the main characters are women who were rejected as astronauts because they were considered to be “too distracting” for their male counterparts (too painfully typical and relevant), and now they live together in a grungy community of outcast women.

This soft sci-fi set up, however, is really a backdrop for the tale of a crush between our nameless narrator and the source of her romantic obsession, Betsy, her next-door neighbor.

Betsy is not a typical love-interest. She and her roommates are mocked as “lunch-ladies” for their looks, and besides her common-place appearance Betsy’s personality is hardly warm or welcoming. Unlike in many love stories where female romantic interests are portrayed as soft and vulnerable, the narrator of “Girl Town” is enamored most of Betsy’s bold and blatant rage. I don’t know if I’ve ever read another story quite like this where a woman’s anger is cast as her most attractive attribute, rather than a “bitchy” or “shrewish” personality trait. I kinda love it.

I think the sequence that really sold me on Nowak’s story was the one below: any cartoonist who incorporates a line like “her nipples rattled against the windowsill in an odious rhythm” has earned my upmost admiration and respect. How can anyone not pause and grin after this scene?

Nowak’s most recent mini-comic, “Diana’s Electric Tongue,” only shows how much her work has progressed.  “Diana’s Electric Tongue” won an Ignatz Award at this year’s SPX, and the initial plot seems fairly straightforward: a woman buys a robot boyfriend, shenanigans ensue. It sounds like a comedic premise, and Nowak’s work does always maintain an undercurrent of humor. But what I did not expect was how much heartache this comic made me feel.

The real driving force behind “Diana’s Electric Tongue” isn’t how Diana navigates a relationship with a robot, though that is certainly explored. The focus is instead on the main character’s motivation for buying the robot. Diana is dealing with the aftermath of her previous relationship, which closely coincided with a disastrous motorcycle accident that caused her to lose her tongue (thus the title). The story becomes more a meditation on heartbreak and how the impact of relationships can be insidious and encompassing, all while suggesting parallels between emotional loss and physical injury. It’s the kind of story I would want to write—one that finds its narrative tension in well-timed disclosures of information and the accumulation of small details that snowball into a final emotional punch. Every time I pick up the book I find new layers to contemplate and I become engrossed, even though I know the story by heart.

Besides all this, Nowak’s artwork with all its organic, fluid linework and pastel candy colors (props to Nowak’s coloring assistant Lisa DuBois) is completely captivating.

I’ll leave it at that since I don’t want to spoil anything else. Know that these review blurbs I’m posting below are correct and that I highly recommend the book.

More of Carolyn Nowak’s work can be found at her website: www.carolyncnowak.com