The Kids!

Oh, the kids.

The one on the top right is Freddy in Space, in case you were wondering.

I'm taking a break from doing my daily strip this week because I am substitute teaching! I'm an art teacher for the week at the K-8 school that my mom teaches at. It's awesome so far. And it's only been one day and I'm exhausted. I have no idea if I'd be able to do this all the time...I've kind of been trying to figure that out. But really I should just enjoy it, and not make it into a existential crisis.

Today I taught kids how to draw Freddy and Frank, and then they came up with some of their own characters. I was feeling weird about just having kids copy my work, but then I realized how essential copying is to cartooning, and that you can learn so much from it. Just seeing that I make Frank the dog from just a bunch of scribbles, and that they can do it too, is empowering to them, I think. It makes having a real book seem not so far away. One kid even made a whole scribble world after I showed him how to draw Frank.

AND speaking of copying, Chuck and I started a tumblr on Saturday night called Redrawn. In my previous post I showed that Amanda Vahamaki page that I redrew, which was inspired by Chuck's James Sturm page, which was inspired by Michael Litvin's Tatsumi page, etc. etc. Also, Tom Hart had been doing this project for a while; picking a random page from a comic and redrawing it. So we decided to collect them all on this blog, to encourage more people to do the same. Anyone can submit. DO IT. I think I'm going to do another one soon.

The Junc

For my thesis project this year at The Center for Cartoon Studies, I'm working on a bunch of short comics journalism type pieces about White River Junction, VT, the town that I have lived in for the past year and a half, where CCS is located in the old Colodny Surprise Department Store. I lived in this town four years ago as well, when I interned for CCS.

There's something special about this town. I'm still working on getting at what that really is. In the end I think I'm going to have some stories of my interactions with local people at the Gift Shop/ Convenience Store where I work, selling a lot of lottery tickets, cigarettes, and coffee. I've also recorded a couple of interviews with people who live here. I'm really influenced by Studs Terkel's work. I've also been reading a lot of Duplex Planet, and listening to Radio Diaries. (You should definitely hear this one.)

I'm still in the process of figuring out how this is going to come together. Now that I've done a lot of observing and interviewing (though I'm not nearly done), I'm getting antsy to start drawing. So here's a page a drew, to get down on paper some of the things I've found out, and what my focus is going to be. It's not just about WRJ as a town, but about the people in it, and the specific stories and details that make them all unique.

Tom Hart is my advisor. He is AWESOME. Check out his comics on Act-i-vate!