Creating anything takes a certain amount of egotism. I mean, I can barely manage to string a coherent sentence together when I'm trying to talk seriously to someone, but when I sit down to write, I'm convinced that the stories I tell are so good, I should not only be getting paid for them, but I should also be getting them published in nationally distributed magazines.
That this has actually happened more than a dozen times just encourages me, and I even managed to get Tor Books to pay me money for a novel I wrote a couple years back. On top of that, I've been getting up in front of people twice every weekend for more than 20 years now with my guitar and singing to them, and since they keep giving me money and asking me to come back, somebody must be enjoying it.
So I'm apparently convinced that I am creative, that I have something to say, something other people should listen to, and more than that: that they should give me money for the privilege. And if that's not egotism, then I don't know what the word means.
But even with all that, I don't think I could manage to do a "journal comic." I mean, fiction is easy in the sense that it has to make sense. Real life, though, well, real life is tricky and messy and doesn't adhere to proper plot structure. Which is why I try to avoid reality as much as possible.
Some people, however, seem to enjoy drawing comics about their real lives, and in this third essay, I'll be looking at three such "journal comics" that are entered in the Daily Grind contest.
Judging from her comic, Jennie Breeden is a short, feisty woman in her mid-20s who has an equally fiesty family and an art degree, lives with her boyfriend in Atlanta, works in a comic book store there, and makes comics of her own that she both sells at comic cons and puts up on her website. I mean, I already know more about her than about many people I've known for decades!
She's been chronicling her life in comics' form every day--more or less--since October 8, 2001, and while some of her adventures make me wonder how close to real life she's being, I don't suppose there's a standard for this sort of thing. After all, making regular life into humorous anecdotes is something people have been doing for thousands of years. The hard part, it seems to me, would be knowing how to edit the raw material of life into something that still seems real but is still interesting.
Breeden succeeds in doing this admirably. Whether this comic is completely true to life or not, in reading it, I find that she has interesting friends, meets interesting people, goes to interesting places, has cats that do funny things, and isn't afraid to make herself look silly or petty or, well, like a real person. She has talks with both Jesus and the Devil every once in a while; she puts up a single panel strip some weekends of "Famous Last Words" and another of "What Not to Say in the Bedroom"; and every Sunday, she puts up scans of what appear to be paintings she's done. It's just pretty much a full-service comics' website.
That all being said, I don't know if I could read just four panels of this every day. It's good stuff, but life--at least as Jennie Breeden seems to live it--is a continuing adventure, and each day's strip just isn't a "satisfying chunk," to use the phrase I've adopted from Heidi MacDonald and discussed a bit in the Todd and Penguin section of my First Essay. Reading four years of archives in the course of two or three days has kinda spoiled me, I think, and I want to follow the arcs of Breeden's life at this same larger rate. This'll go on my list of "check 'em every week or so" comics.
And, yes, I'll admit it: Natasha Allegri and Jennie Breeden are going into the same essay partially because they're the only women still involved in the Daily Grind challenge. But since Allegri's Normal Life is also a "journal comic," I think it's more or less legitimate to compare and contrast them here.
And in a way, Allegri's title is the best place to start. Hers is a "normal life"--at least as she's presenting it in her comic. She goes to school. She talks with her boyfriend and her friends. She wonders what she's gonna do in her comic today. She does a few little spins at fiction now and again, presenting a strip here and there that doesn't feature her or her friends, but even there, it's small, short-term storytelling.
So if Breeden's life is a continuity strip, Allegri's is a "gag a day" strip, and I, as the sort of reader I am, I find that a lot less satisfying. Because the lack of continuity means that I don't know Allegri yet even after almost 4 months of Monday through Friday strips.
For instance, at the end of May/beginning of June, she uploaded all her weekly strips at once--some very nice stick figure comics, actually, a form I really enjoy: John Campbell's Goodbye, Foom was one of my favorites before he was forced out of the Grind for economic reasons--telling us that she was on a plane to Europe. She said nothing about why she was on a plane to Europe, didn't say where she was going, and now, several weeks later, I still don't know: is she in Europe now? She said something about being gone for a couple months in that big week's worth of comics, but she hasn't mentioned it since.
Now, of course, she doesn't hafta tell me. It's her comic, after all, and she can present whatever she wants in it, but, well, I for one find travel to be interesting--I mean, I rarely get up the road to the next town let alone off on an airplace to Europe....
Still, as I mentioned above, there's no webcomics academy to set rules for how much of a person's life she must reveal when doing a journal comic. It's entirely at the creator's discretion. But I would find Normal Life more interesting if Allegri got more specific about her particular life--a life that, I'm guessing, would prove to be every bit as "abnormal" as anyone else's and would therefore prove to be much more interesting. One truism of writing is: the more personal a story, the more universal it is. Everyone has an abnormal life, and if Allegri would let us in on hers, I think her already very fine comic would get even stronger.
But like I said, it's entirely up to her. I'll check in now and again, though, to see what she's up to.
First off, I'll continue using Mike Stevens's own spelling of "hieroglyphics" throughout this essay. I just wanted to point that here out so I don't hafta put a little "[sic]" after it each time.
Secondly, when I first started work on this essay, I was gonna review Philippe Gaboury's The Big Three-Oh as the third after Breeden and Allegri's. But then Gaboury dropped out of the Grind, so I went looking for a journal comic that didn't have a large backlog of archival strips to read. I'd already noticed Stevens's name in both Breeden and Allegri's archives--he did the "April Fool's" strip in The Devil's Panties, and he and Allegri are both involved in something called Found Hat Press--I haven't investigated their website, so I'm not exactly sure what it's all about.
But the connection to both my other subjects was all I needed. So here I am writing about Modern Heiroglyphics.
Now, I hope what I'll be writing here doesn't sound condescending because, well, I had a very positive reaction to Stevens's comic. In fact, my only real complaint is that the lettering in his word balloons is awful small and rough on my poor old eyes.
But the thing that really struck me about Modern Heiroglyphics is the wonderful sort of high school angst feeling the whole thing has. See, 25 years ago, I was finishing up my freshman year in high school, and I'd spent that year--as I would spend the next two years--as the editor of Flotsam & Jetsam, the school's literary journal. So during those three years, I had to read a lot of writing filled with high school angst: poetry about death and despair, stories with misunderstood protagonists trying to make sense of an unfeeling world, artwork that conveyed a sense of desolation and estrangement, all that sort of stuff.
One thing I learned from the experience is that, while most high school angst art is pretty dreadful, some of it is pretty good. And if Mike Stevens had submitted his work to me back then, I would've printed it in a heartbeat. His stories of dealing with his own rage, of obsessing over video games and stray remarks people make, his whole saga about tracking down his own evil twin, the series he's doing as I write this essay where he's a ninja tracking down and disposing of the people who've already dropped out of the Grind, his sense of humor combined with his underlying earnestness make for some high quality high school angst art.
The problem is: I don't know how old Stevens is. I'm guessing from the comic that he's in his late teens/early 20s, and if that's right, then I don't feel so bad about making all the high school comparisons. If, on the other hand, he's getting on toward 30...
But I choose to believe that he wasn't even born when I was reading the submissions for my high school's literary journal. I choose to believe that he's still growing, still getting to know the world and getting the feel for what he wants to do with his art. And I'll definitely be stopping by every week or so to catch up on his stuff.
So I guess I enjoy journal comics to a certain extent: I seem to have taken a shine to these three, at least, with certain reservations...
I'll look at some regular ol' fictional comics next week, I think.
The possibilities are nearly endless on this world wide web thingee, so consider the following links merely as suggestions: the Fourth Essay, the Second Essay, the main Book Reports page, and the Main Page for my Daily Grind comic.