The Balloonist

2011:

2012-01-15T00:00:00.000-08:00

Ganges #4
The Body of Work

Leon Beyond strips (22)

with Dan Z:
Brain Dump
Factual Healing

anthologies:
Nobrow #6
Kramers #8

out in 2012:
Gloriana

bullseye bristol

2012-01-14T11:04:00.000-08:00

Dan Zettwoch's new graphic novel, Birdseye Bristoe, is a masterpiece, and is previewed over at Drawn and Quarterly's blog. (link)

The Half Men

2012-01-12T21:00:00.000-08:00

I redrew this old comics story for Kramers Ergot #8, which I guess is coming out soon.

It came from Mysteries of Unexplored Worlds #8 (1956) and is named "The Half Men."* The GCD credits list only a penciler (Bill Molno) and an inker (Sal Trapani). I would imagine that someone out there has an idea who might have written it. I didn't look as deeply into that mystery as maybe I should have. Please let me know if you have some idea who might have written it.

Sometimes when an cartoonist redraws an old story it's called a "COVER," as in the blog and obviously as in bands covering songs. It's perfect for the blog -- for redrawing covers -- but I don't really like that term for stories, which are, you know, not covers. "I covered a story." "Huh?" I hope that doesn't catch on. I like calling it a "REDRAW," as in, "I redrew this story." But I don't know, maybe there's a better term. I enjoyed doing it, and I hope to do more in the future.

*in the Kramers contents the story is named "Mysteries of Unexplained Worlds" which I wish I could say was on purpose.

000

2012-01-09T08:52:00.000-08:00

from The Wild Kingdom

F

2012-01-04T10:46:00.000-08:00

some links

2012-01-04T09:10:00.000-08:00

command-click links to open in new tabs (I think)

but also it’s a move of taking the non-art, the infra-art, and just moving it across a line... commerce becomes Culture, the mass produced aura-less product becomes the one-off, aura-full handcrafted object ready for the art market

--blissblog (link).

Though overshadowed by Mary Cassatt and relatively unknown to museum-goers today, Beaux's craftsmanship and extraordinary output were highly regarded in her time.

--cecelia beaux @ wikipedia. (link). I had never heard of her before.

--toilet circuit (link).

It’s also true, as Eli Pariser has eloquently explained, that both the deliberate infrastructure of online information and the unintended practices arising from our collective use of it, is actively excluding or hiding some information through a progressively tighter series of feedback loops.

--easily distracted (link).

The conservative believes the excellent person is a kind of mountain climber, a moral athlete who is constantly overcoming or trying to overcome his limits, pushing himself ever higher and higher.

--corey robin (link). On Ross Douthat, David Brooks, Dan Savage.

We come to love the look of a comic, and the feeling expands to a general one of enjoying the way comics are drawn and composed, and even of the ink and paper. We want to make one. And having made one we're not entirely happy with it. Let's say that we've taken a notion to introduce a naturalistic element. So we base our figures on people we know. But the problem is that the things they're saying and doing are not quite authentic. So let's base these aspects on actual situations that we have observed. And so by increments we've put ourselves in the work.

--eddie campbell (link). This really resonated with me. I often think of how writers/artists and readers/reviewers/critics often come to a work from opposite directions, and want different things from it, and read controlled by different habits of thought.

Could we have invented a way of living that is more phantasmagorical and absurd than the all-powerful cruelty of the gods, the caste of priests and princes ruling enslaved peoples, the obligation to work that is supposed to guarantee joy and substantiate the Stalinist paradise, the millenarianist Third Reich, the Maoist Cultural Revolution, the society of well-being (the Welfare state[4]), the totalitarianism of money beyond which there is neither individual no social safety, [and] finally the idea that survival is everything and life is nothing?

[...]The tornado of short-term profit destroys everything in its path; it sterilizes the earth and hardens life so as to extract useless benefits. Humanely conceived, life is incompatible with the economy that exploits man and the earth for lucrative ends. Unlike survival, life gives and gives itself.

–interview with Raoul Vaneigem, with comments by Bruce Sterling (link).

focus app

2011-12-29T15:30:00.000-08:00

2011 Books of Earth

2011-12-28T22:46:00.000-08:00

^ loved reading

# did not like

FICTION

The Great Gatsby ^

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Swann's Way

by Marcel Proust

Game of Thrones ^, Clash of Kings, Storm of Swords ^,

Feast for Crows, Dance of Dragons #

by George R.R. Martin

The True Deceiver

by Tove Jansson

The Pale King ^

by David Foster Wallace

Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives #

by David Eagleman

The Metamorphosis and other stories

by Franz Kafka

(Sammy Harkham edition)

The Looking Glass Book of Stories ^#

by Various, ed. Hart Day Leavitt

Also: New Yorker stories, and misc. short stories in collections which I didn’t finish.

The Sisters Brothers
by Patrick DeWitt

Obviously the list is short this year because George RR Martin dominated with 5 giant books. I’ll admit that I loved escaping into the unpredictable and empty plotlines, but I wish I had spent a lot of that reading time on better, meatier stuff. They’re candy. But it was easier to read these books while I was in the middle of Ganges #4 and in the hangover period after than to read more demanding books; it can be dangerous letting something rewire your brain in the middle of a big project. That’s what I told myself. Still, I wish I had read more Proust or Kafka instead. (Did not like the show.) Sisters Brothers is a weird western -- very fun to read, you'd like it.

NONFICTION

Emergence

by Steven Johnson

Pulphead ^

by John Jeremiah Sullivan

Moonwalking with Einstein

by Joshua Foer

The Memory Chalet ^

by Tony Judt

Moby Duck

by Donovan Hohn

Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline ^

by Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton

All of the books in the nonfiction category are more or less recommended. (Lousy abandoned books are not listed.) I learned a lot. Moonwalking with Einstein is a terrible title. I finally read this after an article by Foer first introduced me to the idea of memory palaces in an article back in 2007. I've been obsessed with the idea and the meta-idea ever since. Memory palaces was a theme this year: Tony Judt used memory palaces to help him compose the essays in The Memory Chalet, which are wise and moving. This may be the first year in a while that I didn’t read anything about climate change — a conscious choice -- though Moby Duck was somewhat eco-apocalyptic. Cartographies of Time is great. I knew when I saw Saul Steinberg in the first few pages that it was going to be great. I can't recommend it highly enough, if you're interested in that kind of thing.

SELF HELP

The Creative Habit

by Twyla Tharp

Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection ^

by John T. Cacioppo & William Patrick

Find Your Focus Zone #

by Lucy Jo Palladino

My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey ^

by Jill Bolte Taylor

Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware

by Andy Hunt

The self-help category is comprised of books I found at the library when I’d wander around on a break from writing or drawing. The self-help section at this library is huge, many times the size of, say, the painting section. I got a lot of help from Loneliness — one of the most significant books of the year for me. My Stroke of Insight taught me (finally) to understand and begin thinking in the right/left brain model. Creative Habit and Pragmatic Thinking also both have a lot of good stuff in them. There were some lousy books too, but those aren’t listed here because I barely read them. You can tell pretty quick with this type of book whether it's going to be good or not. Focus Zone is listed because I actually read it, and it was somewhat helpful, even though it wasn't very special.

IDEAS

What Do Pictures Want? ^

by WJT Mitchell

On Trust: Art and the Temptations of Suspicion ^

by Gabriel Josipovici

The Book of God: A Response to the Bible ^

by Gabriel Josipovici

Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing? #

by Leszek Kolakowski

The Grand Design #

by Stephen Hawking and Leon Mlodinow

What Technology Wants

by Kevin Kelley

This blog post here got me to read two books by Gabriel Josipovici, for which I’m very grateful. They’ll be with me for a long time. I had read WJT Mitchell’s other books in college (I have re-read Iconology, though — 3 or 4 times!) and one day I was like, “oh yeah...what is he up to?” I really enjoyed the riffing and thinking in What Pictures Want (2004), and recommend his work to any intelligent comics reader who likes thinking about the nuts and bolts of these things, or really anyone who likes thinking and reading. What Technology Wants was a good sprint through a generally optimistic argument about technology, and humanity, but it was maybe too optimistic for me. A lot to chew on. I'm going to have to think more about it before I figure out what I think. The Grand Design didn't really grab me, and Why Is There Something was an unremarkable intro to philosophy.

* * *

In terms of pure reading enjoyment, for me The Great Gatsby was #1, followed by Josipovici, then WJT Mitchell. Proust and Kafka are in their own category of, I don’t know, “the sublime” or something. Other books, like Loneliness or My Stroke weren’t masterpieces but did teach me big ideas that will probably stick with me and improve my life (“technologies!”). I liked Cartographies and Book of God so much that I bought them after reading library copies.

Many of these books were found at the library, either on the book sale shelf, or just browsing around.

I started a few other books that I never finished -- you know how it is. Maybe next year. I'm not listing comics or graphic novels because they should get their own post, as should Internet reading. (Also, for the record, I'm not listing the research reading I did for various projects.)

____

UPDATE 1/1/12: It just occurred to me that the title What do Pictures Want? contains a play on the word "want" (desire/lack -- Mitchell points this out himself several times), but What Technology Wants does not contain this double meaning, and reading that book you can see how it couldn't. I'd love to see Mitchell review and play with the ideas and ideology of Kelley's book.

Also, I had somehow forgotten about Cartographies, so I added that.
____
UPDATE 1/7/12
Forgot Sisters Brothers!

octopress

2011-12-28T15:46:00.000-08:00

Digging through old files, trying to do some end-of-the-year cleaning, I found this -- I drew it a few years ago for Small Beer Press. Not sure if I ever posted it before.

gg

2011-12-28T15:32:00.001-08:00

Amazing Facts -- Nov/Dec

2011-12-22T09:18:00.000-08:00

The Fallen Egglord Family Tree

Tongue Diagnosis

Weird Leaf Roundup

Faces and Names in 2011

Sweet Sleep

2011-12-21T17:28:00.000-08:00

-from Bizarre Books, by Russell Ash and Brian Lake. <---A very entertaining book.

cube jokes

2011-12-18T19:38:00.000-08:00

isovist

2011-12-15T12:45:00.000-08:00

A single isovist is the volume of space visible from a given point in space, together with a specification of the location of that point. (wikipedia)

afraid

2011-12-06T15:47:00.001-08:00

=-=-=-

2011-12-06T15:30:00.001-08:00

-

2011-11-25T18:50:00.000-08:00

"Maybe I should get groceries on the way home," thought Glenn.

Mukumaka

2011-11-24T10:59:00.000-08:00

The Airy Tales

by Olga Volozova

Cruel Fate

2011-11-23T20:01:00.001-08:00

Mickey Mouse Vol. 1

GNBCC

2011-11-22T07:24:00.001-08:00

The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists

by Seth

:

2011-11-12T15:25:00.000-08:00

In Stores

2011-11-10T11:59:00.001-08:00

Ganges #4 in stores now.

Click here to find a store near you

or:

Buy from Fantagraphics (link)

Buy from me (link)

Weekly Review

2011-11-10T11:53:00.000-08:00

-

2011-11-09T07:09:00.000-08:00

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2011-11-06T12:50:00.000-08:00