Three more "journal comics" this week, partly because I found three that I hadn't looked at yet, but also because, well, Dean Trippe, author and artist of the fine webcomic Butterfly and a former competitor in the Daily Grind Contest, made some comments in this thread of the Daily Grind Message Board after reading my Third Essay. He felt that I was conveying a sentiment he found "pretty dang creepy": that "a 'journal comic' must be intensely voyeuristic".
His remarks set me to thinking--always a dangerous circumstance--and here's what I came up with. I'm not saying I strictly believe the position I'll be trying to explain here, but it's where my thoughts led me. So what if...?
What if all of human civilization exists in the interaction between exhibitionism and voyeurism? Why else would we have developed language? I mean, yes, I'm sure language comes in handy for commerce and legislating and like that, but before our ancient ancestors got into all that stuff, I can see several more basic concerns that language would be indispensible for dealing with, questions like: who's that guy over there? What's he doing? Does he know who I am and what I'm doing?
So I go over, and I tell this guy who I am. I tell him some of the things going on inside my head, and what happens? He turns right around and tells me the things that're going on inside his head. And a lot of the time, it turns out that there're totally different things!
Thus, culture is born. For if the two of us find these differences to be interesting, we go on to create dialogue. And if we find our differences to be infuriating, we go on to create warfare.
In this way of thinking, then, every story ever told, from The Iliad and The Odyssey up through Cervantes and Shakespeare, George Sand and Henry James, "Big Brother" and "Survivor," it all becomes an act of both exhibitionism and voyeurism: "Look at me! Look at me!" the one guy shouts, and the other guy shouts back "I'm lookin'! I'm lookin'!"
Let's say we trace the one impulse back to egotism--a topic I glanced at in the Third Essay that sparked all this thinking--and the other impulse back to curiosity, both of which seem to live at the core of the human brain...regardless of how creepy they may seem. And that sets me to thinking about the thing that caps both egotism and curiosity, the thing that keeps exhibitionism and voyeurism from running amok, the thing that forms a smoothly-running society: the public persona.
'Cause I'm firmly convinced that all of us--and when I say all of us, I mean all of us--we wear masks, so to speak, whenever we deal with anyone. It's not that I think people are phony or that everybody's got something to hide or anything along those lines. It's just that we've all got a lot going on inside our heads, and I for my part find that it's just more convenient to use a short-hand version of myself when I'm dealing with the outside world.
The folks who come into the library to check out the latest Adam Sandler DVD, for instance, they don't need me to be anything other than the polite guy on the other side of the counter who collects their dollar and hands them the DVD while noting that the thing'll be due back tomorrow. This establishing of a public persona works as a check and balance to egotism and curiosity: different levels of egotism and curiosity are appropriate under different circumstances, and these personas allow us to display whatever levels we want to.
It can all go awry, of course, as witness the Daily Grind Message Board and any posting there by D. J. Coffman. The way he deliberately messes with the whole idea of what persona is appropriate for the situation causes--oh, let's call them "reactions." He's transgressing, and in doing so, he seems to have gotten a lotta people pretty darn mad at him.
And this all, of course, ties into journal comics, the ostensible subject of this essay. See, different artists use different levels of public persona when constructing their comics. No artist gives us a complete picture in a journal comic--or anywhere else. There's no canvas infinite enough to express the vastness of a single person, the multitudes we all contain.
No, all I see when I look at a journal comic is what the individual artist chooses to show me, nothing but the persona the artist has decided to display. Some I find more interesting than others, and those are the ones where the artist's level of egotism is working hand-in-glove with my level of curiosity.
And this, this all is the sad, sad result of me thinking. All in all, I'd rather be reading comics, so let's just get on with it here!
I figured I'd better read through Brandon Lewis's MouseWax as quick as I could since he was talking last week on the aforementioned Daily Grind Message Board about dropping out of the contest.
As of this moment, though, he's still in, and I for one am glad of it. 'Cause this is a pretty silly comic all told, and well-done silliness is always a good thing.
When Lewis started MouseWax back in July of 2001, he kept things focused largely on the adventures of Hamsterman, a hamster in a blue mask, but he updated pretty sporadically--maybe a dozen or so strips in each of the first two years, for instance, and taking all of 2003 off--till the Daily Grind Contest started this past February. Then, Hamsterman took a back seat to Lewis's own semi-fictional adventures with his friends, something similiar to what Eric Poole is doing over at Darkside Bluezz, actually.
What really struck me about MouseWax, though, is Lewis's willingness to take a simple joke and work it out to wonderfully strange lengths. For instance, one strip has Jesus--who lives in the back room of Lewis's apartment--watching daytime TV till his head explodes. A simple enough, four-panel idea. But Lewis takes it and runs with it: go read the archives and see what happens--I don't want to spoil the storyline by discussing it here.
One more thing I like about MouseWax is the persona Lewis has created for himself in the comic--I mean, I wrote all that stuff at the beginning of this essay; I might as well use it. He portrays himself as this well-meaning but slightly eccentric everyman, and for the most part, he shows us this character's odd adventures rather than focusing the spotlight on whatever his actual life might be like.
It's a method a few of these journal comics use, and Lewis does it both amusingly and effectively. And while I doubt that I'm getting any glimpse at all of the "real" Brandon Lewis by reading his comic, that's not what I'm after here any more than I expect to learn anything about the "real" Hunter S. Thompson by reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I want to get to know the character of Brandon Lewis that appears in the comic, and that's what I find when I read MouseWax.
If Nobody Likes Me, Why Am I So Popular?
Edward J. Grug III--if that's his real name, and apparently, it isn't; he's just a persona, if you will--is another of those guys who does a mix of journal comics, one-shot stories, and longer pieces. They're all really quite fine, and if you haven't read them yet, you should leave off my nonsense immediately, take the link above, and start journeying through the wonderful world of Grug.
Still, since I feel obliged to fill out the page here, I'll point out that Grug's also another of those with multiple web sites: the link above takes you to his LiveJournal, but he's got this new site, too, also called If Nobody Likes Me, Why Am I so Popular? that he's still putting together over at Joey Manley's WebComicsNation.
I chose to start with the LiveJournal 'cause I'm looking at these comics in chronological order, but with the transition to storing his stuff at WebComicsNation, all his entries from March were missing their actual images when I went through the LiveJournal last week. For someone just interested in reading Grug's stuff, the WebComicsNation site might be the way to go, but there are still some comics on the LiveJournal that don't appear on the other site. So just read 'em both, and you'll be fine.
As with Jamie Dee Galey, I enjoy Grug's plain story comics more than his journals, so I'm more than happy that Grug does at least as much storytelling as he does journaling--his "talking animal" stories especially are a breath of fresh air to a guy like me who writes and reads a lot of that anthropomorphic stuff. And the persona of Edward J. Grug III, semi-hapless bearded Australian, that comes through in the journals is clear and funny with a very good eye for what parts of his life would make good comics.
Anyway, go read.
And speaking of hapless bearded Australians, we come now to Ive Sorocuk.
Sorocuk also mixes types of comics, and while his focus is definitely on his journal, be sure not to miss his story comics when you're paging through his archives: "Sidekick on a String" is just too fine...
But I found myself laughing out loud more than a few times while following Sorocuk's journal--I mean, he has a running gag about realizing that he's somehow managed to spend another whole day without leaving his apartment, and he makes it work each and every time.
My only guess about why I enjoy this so much is the persona Sorocuk offers us through his comics: confused, endearing, more than slightly foul-mouthed. The forces of exhibitionism and voyeurism just plain balance out for me in The Non-stop Sketchbook, and I hope he does manage to keep it going.
My only complaint lies in the difficulty of reading his archives from oldest to newest the way I'm trying to do for these reports. Maybe I just missed it, but Blogspot doesn't seem to have a "calendar" option the way LiveJournal does, doesn't seem to have a way for me to choose a particular date, then click through from that date to the present. Instead, all I could get was an entire month of comics on a single page with the oldest inconveniently located at the bottom of this page.
Which meant I had to move up the page till I found each day, then move down from there to read Sorocuk's comments and comics for that day. And with the dates displayed in black against a dark brown background, I had a hard time telling where one day ended and the previous day began. If I hadn't been enjoying the comics so much, I think the layout of the archives would have put me off....
But the comics here are worth it.
See? That's what I like! Three positive reports!
The obligatory links at the bottom of the page here include the Tenth Essay, the Eighth Essay, the Book Reports main page, and the Comic's Main Page. Use them in good health.