Fifty two pages into BLUE. Some days I still have energy left for the sketchbook.

I’m pencilling the first 50 pages of my book at the moment. It’s agonisingly slow. I’m eight pages in, and I’ve lost hope of ever seeing light the end of the pencil-work tunnel. The word ‘drawing’ is all too apt if you ask me. I’m hunched over the drawing table with my claw hand furiously moving over the picture plane literally coaxing the shapes that I want out of a tangle of leaden lines. I am a country fisherman. There is a lump of rotten meat attached to a string, which I am slowly drawing toward myself in the hope that the gnarled form of a comic-book yabbie might be lured from the graphite murk on the bottom of the dam. Pencilling comics takes patience, physical stamina and the ability of defer self-loathing.

I stay sane by playing little games with page composition and trying to make things formally interesting. This provides a small amount of respite from the unbelievably tedious project of drawing pictures but in the end I have to grit my teeth and return to what is, without doubt, a horrible job.

It all eventually pays off because late this year I will allow myself the pleasure of inking these pages. Laying down ink is pleasurable for a number of reasons. The first is the simple tactile pleasure of using a brush. The mechanical pencils I draw with feel like uncooked spaghetti, the waxy non-photo blue pencils are like cheap cheese gone hard but my Winsor and Newton Series 7 is like rich, smooth chocolate mousse, freshly made with the best ingredients. A good brush, good ink and smooth ivory board make magic together, and they make magic most often when I’m working over really tight pencils.

The second kind of pleasure, and perhaps more of a lasting one, is the feeling that the agony of drawing is finished. The brush works as an eraser as well as a mark-maker as it rubs-out all traces of indecision and insecurity that are implicit in my pencil drawings. With the brush in my claw I make everyone believe that I had always known the exact arrangement of light and dark, that the vision came to me complete. Laying down the ink is so intoxicating that it for a while I forget how difficult drawing is for me. I make myself believe that the pencil-work was the effortless game of a distracted genius.

Drawing with a pencil is about finding new ways to see. Inking over a drawing is about convincing yourself that you’ve always seen that way.

Sometimes I worry about myself. It’s just not healthy for a cartoonist to be this impressionable.

When I’ve been reading Tom Gauld I want to make panels large and characters small. When I’ve been reading Crumb I want to draw neurotic lines with a rapidograph. When I’ve been hanging out with my mate Michael Fikaris I want to try and render the haphazardness of stoner conversation in comics. When I’m reading Jason Lutes I want to try to draw something impossible, like what it feels like to live in pre-war Germany and hear jazz for the first time. As an artist I’m a vile, parasitic sponge. I soak up anything I lay my eyes on and then try feebly to squeeze it back out of myself. Although there are a lot of elements in this pathetic comic-nerd malaise the thing that worries me the most is the thought that I might come off like a Chris Ware wannabe. A poor-man’s version of my hero. An unbelievably poor-man’s version. A hobo’s even.

I’m sure this happens to other cartoonists and there are some really fertile grounds for discussion around this problem. I feel like there’s a genuine tension in the development of the art form that must have arisen in the 40’s and 50’s after Eisner and in the 60’s after Kirby.  When we live in the shadow of great cartoonists like these we are compelled to recognise that the language we are working with has been changed forever and we have to choose how to behave when we find ourselves staring at that next blank piece of paper. The question shouts out at us: Do we use the storytelling tools that these contemporary masters created? Or, do we choose not to use them for fear that our work will look, in the short term at least, like a cheap rip-off? I guess that depends on what sort of cartoonist you are.

Observe these two cartoonists. They share a studio in Footscray:

Mz Tibbetts likes art comics. She’s interested in outrageous unruly comics that offer a window into someone’s lonely phychosis. She likes Sammy Harkham, Jim Woodring, Martin tom Diek. She thought Spigelman was better before Maus and she bought Kramer’s 7 on pre-order.

Of course she loves Chris Ware. He’s a classic insane genius. How could she not be seduced that bleak American Midwest that lives outside Ware’s studio door and what appears to be a fathomless self-loathing? She loves how Ware manages to channel his neuroses and furthermore, she see’s the perfection of those diagrammatic pages as an indication of genuine obsessive compulsion. As far as Mz Tibbetts is concerned Chris Ware is among the finest of fine artist. She knows about that sort of thing. She grew up in Fitzroy.

Mz Jobberts, the other cartoonist, is a different sort of fish entirely. She came to comics because she is one of those people who lays awake at night aching just to communicate with other human beings. It doesn’t matter how. She’s tried poetry, prose, clarinet but comics have a certain communicative ‘pop’ that attracts her. Her favourite comics tend to be the master storytellers, creators that have interesting things to say before they even sit down to write. She likes Eisner, Sacco, Satrapi, Shaun Tan and she’s owned three different copies of the complete Maus. She’s just as interested formalist aspects of cartooning as her friend, Mz Tibbetts, but her interest in form lies in her appreciation of careful deliberate communication. She likes Chris Ware for these reasons even though she’s not really interested in much of what he has to say. She’s a bit bored of stories about the cruelty of children, the loneliness of modern life, and the bleakness of modernity but, having said that, every time Chris Ware approaches this material she gets a flutter of excitement purely because of the way has communicated these things.

To sum up their differences in a sentence, Mz Jobberts finds comics more rewarding when they communicate clearly and deliberately and Mz Tibbetts finds them more rewarding when things are more muddy and uncertain. They both love Mr Ware despite these differences.

Mz Tibbets spends her time trying to channel her own kind of madness through a lack of structure. Strange and profound things happen when she draws because the never thought to follow the rules. Mz Jobberts is the exact opposite. As far as she’s concerned the rules and the structure are there to help her realise a well thought out intent. She often goes back to the masters for reference, to see how they dealt with a certain problem, which is something that Mz Tibbetts scoffs at because Mz Tibbetts prefers it when problems aren’t dealt with in the most tried and true approach.

Here’s what happens though. Mz Tibbetts finds a copy of Chris Ware’s book Quimby Mouse at the City Library and takes it back to the studio. She leafs through it with great pleasure but after running her eyes over those pages she goes back to her work with the same approach she always takes. Her way of making comics. Her work hasn’t really been affected by the book. The story is different when Mz Jobberts leafs through the book, however. When Mz Jobberts devours Quimby Mouse the results are truly seismic. There aren’t many comic books in existence that contribute more to the lexicon of cartooning language than this book and when she sits down at the drawing table a little bit later her approach has been irrevocably changed. It’s not that she looks at Ware’s pages and says to herself, “I want to do that”, more that she realises that the vocabulary of comics at her fingertips has just expanded and she want to use these new additions to her cartooning lexicon to communicate her own message. She is now working in a post Chris Ware environment and she can’t pretend that the language of cartooning has not been altered forever. That would seem to her to be a sort of dishonesty. One thing is certain: The city library will write multiple overdue notices pertaining to that beautiful volume before they see it again.

Mz Jobberts’ next comic strip comes off of the press and Mz Tibbetts comments with a perceptible scorn that the work feels a bit like a Chris Ware strip. It is clear that in Mz Tibbetts’ eyes this comic is somehow less pure because of the obvious influence. Mz Jobberts blushes. She felt she made an honest approached to the strip but sees now, how to others it might come across as dishonest or uncreative. The area between adopting cartooning techniques and stealing style is a grey one.

I’m a bit closer to figuring this whole thing out now. Mz Jobberts’ conundrum is possibly better perceived when given a historical context. There must have been moments in the short history of cartooning like the aftermath of the great Kirby earthquake for example, or the seismic events known as the Underground Comics Movement, when accusations of style-biting came far too easily. The first people to adopt new innovations were seen as try-hards and imitators, and perhaps a lot of them were, but as time passed the innovations became less a part of the style of Kirby or Crumb and more a part of a broader practice of cartooning. If you draw a panel border without a ruler these days you’re not likely to be thought of as a Crumb imitator but maybe you would have been had you drawn it in 1969.  This is how our language evolves. This cycle has made cartooning great and will continue to improve it. It’s unfortunate that those that are the quick to recognise and employ a new cartooning vocabulary are the ones who find themselves at the mercy of the style-biting inquisition.

I’ll finish up with one last thought. One of the fundamental technologies in the evolution of comics is the development of the moment-to-moment transition at the hands of Rudolphe Topffer in the 1800’s. Without this technology comics would not exist. Now, imagine yourself an art critic at that point in time. You could be forgiven for thinking that the moment-to-moment transition was really Topffer’s thing, his style, his inventive genius. You could also be forgiven for thinking that the second person that you saw employing a moment-to-moment transition was a blatant imitator, a rip-off artist, a style-biter, a dirty Topffer wannabe. But then a third artist took it up, then a fourth, then a fifth, and all of a sudden a gaggle of “imitators” became a movement that laid the foundation for cartooning and comics. 150 years later the moment-to-moment transition is woven not only into the way human beings read but the way we perceive a world full of screens and panels. If the artists of the time, terrified of the “copycat” stigma, had chosen not to play with this transition then maybe Topffer’s technology would have remained his and died when he did. That’s not what happened though. Artists used moment–to-moment transitions and risked being dubbed Topffer imitators because they couldn’t resist nor ignore the implications of this new language. They saw that the world had changed and they changed with it.

When I think about these things I feel a bit better about my comic-nerd malaise. I’m actually a bit like Mz Jobberts. I’m not largely interested in the thematic content of Ware’s work and while I understand why he has settled into that modular drawing style, I’d never dream of trying to draw like that. I don’t want to be Chris Ware (Lord knows who would!) nor do I want to do what he does, but I’m sure as hell going to go on using the things that I’ve learned from him for the rest of my life. The line between taking influence and downright copying is a hard one to draw, and everyone is free to place that line where they choose. I know this, so if I get accused of style-biting then I’m happy to cop-it quietly.

There are two things that most like to do during these achingly long January days. I like to write and I like to do jigsaw puzzles.

I’ve never understood those writers who claim to have the entire plot of a story mapped out in their minds before they sit down to write. You often find these sort of characters among genre writers and also among writers of genre comics. I believe these people are one of two things: bullshit artists or hacks. Those that are the former use this claim of narrative clarity as a way of selling a story that hasn’t yet been, and may never be, written, those that are the latter always turn out to be re-packaging a story they are already familiar with. Either way, I am suspicious of anyone who tells me how well they know their story unless they’ve tried telling it.

When I’m trying to come up with a narrative I feel exactly the way I do when I’m working on a jigsaw puzzle. I sit down with this jumble of thoughts scattered all over the table, I push them all around with my hands for a bit, then I set about the tedious task of sorting them. Edge bits first. Then pink bits, black bits, funny textured bits and bits with eyeballs or faces on them. The first stage is so difficult because while I have an Idea of what the story will be like, I haven’t got a bloody clue how all these little thoughts will fit together. At this stage the job is time consuming, frustrating and the rewards are pitiful. When you are sorting your own ideas you feel like you’ve spent hours in front of the screen writing, but because you still can’t see any of the picture yet, you feel like you’re not writing at all.

You keep plugging away at the puzzle story though, and if you’ve sorted your thoughts properly they’ll start connecting into pairs, and soon they’ll start to snowball until you have these little clusters of story floating around on the table. It often seems to me that the more tedious the work is at the start of the writing the more ecstatic the feeling is when two or three clusters of story connect and you finally have a sense that there is actually a narrative in there among all of the chaos.

If you’ve never done a really big jigsaw puzzle you’re probably not sure why it’s fun. There’s a wonderful burst of pleasure when you get two pieces of coloured cardboard to fit together perfectly. It’s a sort of tactile satisfaction that also feeds a desire some of us have to find vision through organisation. We push the pieces together, tap them in with three consecutive taps and let out an inaudible gratified sigh. As the puzzle gets closer to completion finding pieces that fit together becomes easier, the flares of pleasure come closer and closer together and any drudgery associated with the sorting stage fades into the past. Usually the puzzle is finished in a frenzy of activity, and when the last piece pushed in and tapped three times, it comes with a special kind of triumph. When doing a puzzle with my mum, a crafty competitor in all manner of nerdy pursuits, I sometimes resort to hiding a piece of the puzzle until all the rest were in place to make sure it was me who got to put the last piece in and make those three jubilant taps.

Like a jigsaw puzzle, the pleasure of writing a story builds to a crescendo as you work but, unlike the puzzle, the moment of ecstasy comes well before the very end. That moment comes when you’re washing the dishes or pruning your toenails and thinking about the story and you get floored with an “Aha!” moment. Two or three large chunks of story just click together and now you have a veritable continent of story that if you’re lucky will connect nicely to the frame of edge bits you’ve almost finished assembling. You can feel the excitement welling up from beneath your diaphragm. You can actually see the story.  It’s there! All that remains is a frenzy of activity as you find all of the loose ideas that you still have scattered around the table and use them to fill in the gaps in between the well braced chunks of the narrative.

So the process of jigsaw puzzle writing goes.

A problem that I foresaw in using this unwieldy puzzle metaphor was this: A puzzle comes with a picture on the front of the box, and the method of finding a narrative through writing comes with no such convenience. Later I realised that the unwritten story does come with something like a picture on the box: my desire as a writer to create a certain experience for a reader. I know what sort of stories I want to read. I know what I want to feel when I am reading. This is my guide when I’m trying to create a narrative and find myself overwhelmed by the anarchic mess of little ideas scattered on the table.

This works within the metaphor because the doing of the puzzle and the finding of the story changes the way we see the subjects we are working with. Someone who has just finished the puzzle knows every element of that image with an offensive intimacy such that, in most cases, they don’t really care to look at the thing again. Ever. They set out to create a picture that looks like the one on the box and the tragedy is that when they have achieved it they are unable to see the picture they once saw. All they can see are the seams between the pieces. Similarly, if you’re a good writer, the story that you have found through writing might perfectly resemble the one you desired to read when you started out, but you’ll never be able to really read it. You will only be able to brush your eyes over the connections between all those tiny little ideas. The only time I ever see my own story from the reader’s perspective is the day I sit down to write it.

How does jigsaw puzzle writing apply to comics though? I think it can apply to all forms of storytelling, but having said that, I’m not sure that there are many cartoonists that write like this. Sometimes I worry whether I’m really a prose writer trying to pass myself off as a cartoonist, like Michael Jordan trying to play baseball, or Arnie trying to play politics. I think this way of finding narratives is useful for comics because when stories manifest from a nebula of thought particles, an amorphous mass of puzzle pieces, we find stories that have a structural balance to them. These stories are spherical, not in the sense of a narrative vector, but in the sense of a narrative constitution. Spherical stories of tend to have better structural integrity than this shoddy scaffolding that are the load bearers in stories created using the make-it-up-as-you-go method that a lot of cartoonists use.

And that’s all I’ve got to say about that. My summer puzzle has been finished after a late night session working on a harrowing block of solid black sky with my friend Adam. Thank god I’m not one of those losers who glues the finished puzzle to board so it can be hung on the wall.

I suppose that the first order of business would be to set a tone for this blog.

I have another website which has served me well as the vehicle for my persona here in the information super-highway, but lately it’s grown to look like the website of a gentleman who primarily makes comics for boofhead surfers. This is of course, because for the last 12 months I have been primarily making comics for boofhead surfers. But you needn’t worry. My head, though extraordinarily large and full of corners, is no more boof-ish than it was before I came under the employ of the surfing magazines.

While labouring away over intricate drawings of breaking waves and trying to find a place in the narrative for an obligatory pair of exposed breasts I’ve come to the conclusion that what goes on at the drawing table, under the weary gaze of the cartoonist, is really pretty profound. A lot of clever people are writing about comics these days. Everywhere you look you can find Literature Wonks, Cultural Studies losers, Social Theory try-hards admitting that first and foremost they were comic nerds. This is great. The more smart people that write about comics the less cartoonist will feel obliged to make dumb comics. But I’ve noticed that not many of these comic book critics have even the slightest clue about how comics are made. A lot has been written about the things going-on between the eyes of the reader and the comic book page as the language is deciphered, but not much about the things going on at the drawing table. So my project here is to write about cartooning rather than comics, everything that happens before the comic book comes off of the press to land, warm and fragrant, in our comic-nerd laps, and how those things inflect upon an amorphous poetic of the comics.

There’s my entry point right there. I plan on working my way into it, wiggling around for a bit, and hopefully finding some room for myself in this obscure academic discipline they call Comics Studies.

Oh, and I hope you like the décor. Maybe I should tell you about it.

When you work with a brush or a nib you have to clear the excess ink from the drawing tool every time you dip. I usually use the nearest bit of scrap I can find. More ink ends up on the scrap than on the drawing and sometimes, depending on the job, the scraps are more interesting than the comic. These bits of paper sit next to me for months and they often become informal records of a development in cartooning process. They document things like a transition from quill to brush, the changing of inks or even one-off things, like the day I bought my first rapidograph or the time I mixed that perfect watercolour palette that I never managed to mix again. These scraps of paper accumulate dust, half formed ideas, measurement calculations, daubs of white gouache and friendly thickets of  thick black lines. There’s something about them I like.