Capturing Life in Colors: On Daniel Clowes's Patience

The kinds of books that hit me the hardest are the ones that tackle the full range of life. I like to see my fictional friends in public and in private. I want to know their earlier thoughts and their later decisions. Really, I like understanding what makes their fictional hearts tick and their minds process. These kinds of narratives usually appear in the form of a massive tome that occupies a certain—extra durable, solid, and near-the-bottom-of-the-bookshelf—shelf, but, as the grand and timeless colloquialism reminds everyone now and then, big things can come in small packages. And 2016 has delivered one of the greatest small gifts under 200 pages that I’ve ever received: Daniel Clowes’ beautifully written and spectacularly drawn graphic novel Patience.

Clowes opens his graphic novel just like how life begins—with conception. It’s 2012, and Jack and Patience, the young couple who serve as dual protagonists, are going to be parents. After receiving the news, Patience says to Jack, “I never thought I’d ever be happy.” Her kind of reaction is both exciting and upsetting. She has a promise of happiness, but it’s a promise that is probably unable to be kept. After all, I ask, can having a child really give a grown adult self-fulfillment?

For Patience, life is difficult. She grapples with difficult ideas about what could happen to her and her family. Patience asks, “Do you worry about the future? Like, what if global warming gets really bad?” She continues, “We’ll be dead before then, probably, but what about the poor baby?” And again, “I don’t want her to feel like a loser all her life.” Patience is a perfect example of a young American woman edging closer and closer to some kind of early-life crisis. She is so honest about her fears and her dreams, but her honesty serves as a kind of shield that keeps her separated from actually living her life. She’s been too present in a world of technology and worry. The hyper-reactive world has worn her down.

For Jack, life doesn’t seem as difficult. He’s a young person who is stuck in a mindless and seemingly endless job, but he’s going to be a father. He has the hopes of a bright future. Until, suddenly, he doesn’t. He comes home to find Patience dead—killed. She and the couple’s unborn child have been brutally murdered.

Patience’s death is not a spoiler. It happens too early in the book for it to be considered such. What unfolds after her death is beautiful and powerful to unravel. Instead of Patience standing as a graphic novel about a new family burgeoning on adulthood and adapting to the required changes, Clowes’ work turns into a psychedelic, science fiction, vengeance-bound love story that somehow—miraculously—manages to be hopeful and, yes, romantic.

After finding Patience’s body on the floor, Jack appears in split panels, saying first, “I couldn’t move for what seemed like hours, like I was stuck in drying concrete. Probably just a trick by my DNA to keep me from bashing my brains in.” Then, he says, “The fact is, I didn’t want to kill myself. My memories were all that was left of her. I couldn’t bear to snuff those out too.” His honesty is striking, but the emotional sentiment behind his words is downright tear-inducing.

Jack sets out to find who could have killed Patience and why someone would have wanted to commit such an atrocious crime. He travels ahead to 2029, and he goes back to 1985 and 2006. Each section of time shows Jack becoming more and more determined to understand the woman he so loved. As Jack encounters Patience in these different time periods, he approaches her with ease and kindness. He tries to help the woman he loves, but he always tries to respect the past that made her. Jack works a delicate balance in shifting from past to future, but he never falters on his reasoning for giving up his life to understand how someone could end the one he held the dearest.

The images populating Clowes’ graphic novel are totally immersing. The colors pop, as Clowes uses sharp, bright coloring. They, in their naturally kind tones, work to illustrate the fact that Patience, even with its scene of murder and moments of revenge, is foremost a love story.

Clowes uses a variety of approaches in his drawings. In most of the more contemplative and internal segments, the panels appear closed off and centered. These images appear bolder and with a more focused vision. In other sections, the ones set in different times and the ones with a more boisterous narrative occurring, the drawings often become larger and more playful. The edges are more varied, with shapes less defined.

Yes, Patience is a short piece of fiction, but it’s one that spans decades and captures life in all of its glory and pain. Patience examines happiness, hurt, guilt, power, and hope. It’s a masterwork of the genre.

Daniel Clowes knows life. He writes about it and draws it so authentically. Patience is an extraordinary testament to how beautiful and selfless life and love can be.

We All Become Consumed By One Place Or Another: On Eric Drooker's Flood!

I have a precarious relationship with place. When I moved to Boston in 2004, people asked me, “Are you from New York?”

New York was the first real city I’d ever seen. We’d visited at least twice a year since I was eleven or so, but I couldn’t say I was from there. “No, I’m from Pennsylvania.”

“Oh, you’re from Philly?” they’d ask.

I’d grown up an hour north of Philadelphia, but had only ever visited once. Even then, we didn’t see much of the city and, although other people I knew would have answered, “Yes,” Philadelphia felt too far away and too large to know in any qualitative capacity.

“No, I’m not from Philly.”

“Oh.” Here, they’d pause, confused. “You’re from the south, then?”

Whitehall — the runt town where I spent my first nineteen formative years, an exurb known for having malls long before malls where thought of as malevolent, malls so regionally popular that the gentleman who interviewed me at the only college my father had allowed me to apply to (back when I still thought I might go to college at eighteen) said, “Oh, the Whitehall Mall!” in tones of such reverence and beloved recognition that I internally cringed while outwardly beaming because I wanted to make a good impression — is north of the Mason-Dixon line.

“No. I’m not from the south.”

Where then was I from? My hometown felt defined more by the corporations who rented its land than the physical plot itself. That bothered me for years because I wanted its geography to be a static certainty. I wanted it to be clear, if not to me, than to everyone else, that I was from a place that felt definitive. But I couldn’t even articulate that until I started thinking about it in reference to other places. New York was my only other point of reference. Though it was two hours away, it felt close and familiar enough to use as a gauge for my disdain over everything that Pennsylvania wasn’t. I didn’t want to live in New York (and wouldn’t, for years), but it served as my model for what a place should make you feel: alive and worthwhile, despite the wretched things that often happen in a city.

In the year before I left Pennsylvania, when I was steadfastly, seriously preparing for what I unironically thought of as “the rest of my life,” I first read Flood! A Novel in Pictures. A book entirely dependent on place, Eric Drooker’s biography of New York begs the reader to inhabit it. A white ladder leads from the edge of the first frame to the roof of a shadowy building, either an entry for the reader or an exit for the protagonists, or both, a link between them and us. Thereafter, we’re among Drooker’s denizens. In his New York, the setting feels indicative of all human life while remaining distinctly itself. It only makes sense that we follow a single figure who could be us or anyone or everyone. A single panel filling an entire page — seventy-five percent of which is brick wall, the remaining quarter the interior of an apartment — shows the figure asleep in front of a television. He sleeps and wakes in front of a monitor before eventually leaving for work. Surely we recognize the activity if not the figure.

When he arrives to work and finds the place has been shut down, our protagonist becomes a tourist in his own city. He walks aimlessly for pages and Drooker’s backdrop becomes the focus as the figure falls away. The place is what matters and the place includes all the parts of Manhattan that people love and fear — the seedy districts, the glitz, the drugs, the promiscuity, the anonymity, the beggars, the duality, the dark. What joins it all together is the rain. New York has distinct scents in the rain. In the summer, it smells of garbage and kosher salt; in the winter, it smells of wet wool. Even the street grates smell in the rain. The rain, natural as it is, clean as it theoretically should be, always leads to people smells. It always smells like industry or commerce, transit or waste. Traces of people. Therein lies the connection. People fill the streets of New York and, therefore, the pages of Flood!. They’re plotted within the grid of each series of panels until they look, on one page, as if they’re each stuck inside a building, one person per each individual window of a looming, blackened skyscraper, each of them divided and reduced, made smaller and weaker until they all blend together as part of the city itself.

That’s what I wanted from a place. To be so deep in it that it practically swallows me, which is where the main figure ends up. At the end of the first half, he gets caught up in his own subconscious desire to have a city that accepts and welcomes him, then wakes up to find the city he’s in is not the city he has in mind. It’s more dangerous, more unfortunately threatening and lonely. But in the second half, the figure becomes the artist at his desk, drawing what we assume is the book we hold, enfolding us once again into the book and, by proxy, into the city.

In Luc Sante’s introduction to Flood!, he mentions that “the book comes directly out of a historical moment — the upheavals of the city of New York in the late 1980s and early 1990s — that marked [Drooker], and me, and a few million others forever, but Flood!has wings that send it soaring above and beyond that moment.” Flood! A Novel in Pictures’s strengths remove the book not just from time, but from place. Somewhere in the middle, the story becomes less about New York and more about America, and one city’s consumption of its citizens is simply one part of several identical parts where we all become consumed by one place or another.

An Interview with Dina Gachman

Dina Gachman is the founder of Bureaucracy for Breakfast, a blog that pokes fun at the crazy shit rich people do (because we all need a hearty laugh now and then, especially when the economy is put-put-puttering along like a broken train). Ms.Gachman took a bad experience (getting fired from her job) and transformed it into a writing career that now includes a web comic and a book agent. We’re all kinda jealous.

* * *

Angie Spoto: Why did you create Bureaucracy for Breakfast? How do you think your blog eases some of the pain for those most acutely experiencing the recession?

Dina Gachman: I got laid off from my job as a development exec in film in 2010 and out of frustration one day the words Bureaucracy for Breakfast popped into my head so I wrote them down. Then I pitched the idea of writing a few posts about unemployment to the editor of the site Lost in a Supermarket and he said go for it. We were just going to do five but now we’re at twenty-six. I guess I created it because I needed an outlet for what I was going through being newly unemployed and reassessing my next steps in life, and then the audience started growing so . . . I kept writing.

It started off as a comedic look at unemployment but then turned into a comedic look at the economic divide in general, which most people can relate to. Laughter always helps during tough times and I’m a big believer in combating frustration and fear with humor. My hope is that if someone is feeling down because they can’t afford a mansion or a yacht like Jay Z, or a garden pizza oven like Gwyneth Paltrow, they can read the blog and laugh about how ridiculous those things really are, and feel a little better about their situation. We’re all in it together I guess.

AS: What did you ideally want to result from Bureaucracy for Breakfast when you started . . . and how has that ideal since changed?

DG: I really just wanted to write – I didn’t really have time to write for two years while I had my development job so I wanted to take advantage of the time and get back to what I really loved. I thought it would be five posts and then I could build up a portfolio and figure out the next project or job, and then it just grew, and cheesy as it sounds I really found my voice as a writer through Bureaucracy for Breakfast.  It’s changed because of the readers I think, plus I spend a lot of time building the audience through social media. It’s tedious but it’s necessary. I’ve gotten emails from all over, from so many different types of people from places as different as Iceland and Nevada. Then it started getting covered by Marketplace in NPR, AOL News, it got a mention by Chelsea Handler’s Borderline Amazing Comedy site, which all led to where it is now. I signed with a book agent recently and the proposal based on the blog is on submission to publishers now, which is never what I expected to happen when it started. It’s exciting but also extremely nerve racking!

AS: Some might say you’re living the dream life of a blogger. Would you agree? Any tips for those aspiring to become successful bloggers?

DG: I wouldn’t say I’m rolling in money and blogging as I sip Krystal, but doing what you love and having people respond and relate is a writer’s dream in a sense. My blog is a little different too because I don’t post several times a day, but more like several times a month. The posts aren’t quick hits with an image and some hash tags, they’re longer and take a while to generate so if you can post more often that I do – do it. I would say find your topic/tone and stick to it, rather than randomly throwing out posts about things that aren’t related and seem haphazard. You should spend a lot of time trying to connect with other writers, doing freelance posts for other sites who will link back to your blog – basically build your audience and get yourself out there.

AS: How do you promote yourself?

DG: I spend half the day writing and half (at least) promoting via Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, etc. I was anti-Twitter before the blog and then I gave in, thankfully. It’s such a great way to get your writing out there especially if you can’t afford a PR machine to promote your work. I do a lot of freelance writing, and I go to a ton of events. I stick Bureaucracy for Breakfast postcards all over town – it’s a huge part of the job.

AS: Your comic, Fling Girl, is a dating guide for single women in L.A., am I right? How did you come up with this idea?

DG: It’s the story of a newly single girl learning how to navigate the dating world again after a long-term relationship, it takes place in LA which is notorious for its crazy dating scene, but anyone who has dealt with relationships / breakups can relate. I did NaNoWriMo in 2010 on a dare and wrote the novel (or novella) version of Fling Girlthat November . . . and then it just sat there. I’d worked with the artist Amy Saaed a few times and one day we were talking about it and the idea of turning it into an online comic book was born. Neither of us knew it would pretty much take over our lives at that point, but it has. We love doing it.

AS: Do you have any past experience writing comics?

DG: Not really. I went to film school and creating comics is a lot like making films in a sense. We’re producing something each month, creating storyboards, telling a story visually. I wrote a comic book about Elizabeth Taylor for Bluewater Productions which comes out this fall, and when I got hired for that job (about six months ago) I had no clue how to write a comic, what the structure was – I barely knew what a panel was. Then you learn. It’s a good exercise in saying a lot with very little. Those restrictions force you to get creative with your storytelling.

AS: Can you explain the comic creating process for Fling Girl? How did Fling Girl go from an idea in your head to a real-life web comic?

DG: It’s based on the NaNoWriMo book but very loosely, so each month I’ll write the script and suggest images, then sent it to Amy. She’ll take some time with it and add her ideas, and then she’ll map it out as far as the architecture of the issue, how many panels on each page etc. Then –my favorite part – we meet and hash it out, add / change / collaborate until we’re both happy with the issue. It’s a fun process. Then she holes up and creates the panels which is a huge amount of work. In the meantime we’re doing a lot of other things as far as site giveaways, content, reaching out to potential sponsors and partners and then – when we’re both exhausted – the issue goes live and we take a breath. Until the next one. . . .

AS: Convince us, in one sentence, why your comic is awesome.

DG: It’s entertaining, fun, fresh and relatable – it’s Wonder Woman but our main character’s superpower is being able to conquer things like cheating ex-boyfriends or lame guys in Ed Hardy.

AS: We hear time and again writers who call the Internet the devil and social media its spawn. We experienced the rise of Amazon and the “death” of small presses. We actually debate about the death of the book as we know it. As someone who’s seen success due largely to the Internet, what’s your opinion about all this?

DG: I’ll always be a fan of holding a book in my hands, keeping it on your bookshelf- I’m the nerd who likes the smell of old books. What’s unfortunate to me is that a lot of publishers, agents, and managers care more about how many Twitter followers you have than about what you’re actually writing, and a lot of “journalism” now consists of making lists (I’m guilty, I’ve written my share of lists for people but you have to get your writing out there).  So, yes I agree the Internet has cheapened writing in a way. On the flip side though things like Twitter can get your writing out to people all over the world – it’s really democratic and if you work it right it can be creative as well. I’ve gotten a lot of ideas from things I’ve randomly Tweeted, and a lot of phrases in my writing come from something I’ve spouted out into the ether in 140 characters. It can actually be a great writing tool, almost like a free write (as long as you’re not Tweeting about what you ate or how bad traffic is).

AS: What are you working on next? Not to sound too much like a job interview, but where do you see yourself (and your writing/blogging career) in the next five years?

DG: Besides Fling Girl and Bureaucracy for Breakfast, I just finished the first draft of a comedy pilot so I’m about to dive into rewrites for that. In the next five years I would love to be making a living as a writer, and working in comics, film / TV and working on a novel. One at a time though! I would love to see Fling Girl as an animated series as well, fingers crossed.

AS: Is there anything else you wanted to add?

DG: I guess just my favorite quote about writing, from Paddy Chayefsky: “Stop thinking of writing as art. Think of it as work.” And write every day.

And I Hope It Rains Forever

A phrase without context, one I've written a thousand times and will write thousands more, in every language I know, backwards, forwards, inside out. It's been in me for years and I've chased after it, even built a novel around it just so I could see it, feel it, be it. But it's still here, elusive.

i am the moon tonight

this is the last night in my body

there are better worlds than this

 Words. Phrases that haunt me and I can't place them. They may be mine, but likely they're not, though they now are. They possess me and so I must push back, bend them to me, consume and integrate them, find a whole through the neverness. And then there's the phrase I know I stole but has become so integral to me that it's neurologically deep.

i remember you

There are so many things I should be doing today, like preparing to leave this country I've called home for the last year [ten more days?], packing my life into a suitcase again. 90,000 words into editing/rewriting a novel staring at me, challenging, singing, screaming, Finish me.

Instead I've spent the day watching cartoons -- The Boondocks -- looping this and this and this, wandering the internet, where awesome things like this exist. It's been one of those days: scattered, incoherent, languid. Just me and my laptop, the mountains past my window, the rainbow of leaves, the skeletal trees. And pizza. I'll miss these bizarre Korean pizzas.

It makes me restless, knowing there are so many things to be done, like finishing the novel, writing about my travels for my friend's site, writing about ten e-mails, figuring out how to get to the national pension office, finding a place to sleep in Tokyo, but, instead, I'm living on cartoons, dropping pizza on my keyboard [which is, apparently, not terribly easy to clean], and thinking about images.

The problem of publication, even just the howevermany stories I have floating out there, is that some of my friends want to know more, and I find that awkward. But people want to know where your ideas come from, what drives you, what compels and feeds this disease. I know I do. When I read or see or hear the sublime, the desire to know grabs me. Where did this world come from? How did she ever think to use language this way? What makes a sentence into a character, a misheard song lyric into a novel?

This is where ideas come from for me: Images, visions, more than words or sounds. It's the image that floods and then the words are just the way I translate because, despite all my best efforts and years of trying, I just never was very good with my hands, drawing or painting or molding, and my mother never bought me a camera like I always wanted, so I rely on a medium of communication I find crippling, because words are made to fail. But, yeah, images. That's what today's about and what, I think, has caused me to do nothing that I'm meant to be doing, spending the day lying down, emptying myself into the air, flooded by this and this and an epicene singing her stories over a man caught forever dreaming. And it leads me to comic books or graphic novels, whichever the preferred term is, and how I'm trying to get two underway, but, because of my artistic limitations, I'm collaborating with two of my friends who will make the images, which I'll respond textually to, which is, apparently, backwards, but it's the way that makes sense to me.

I've never been one to collaborate as I'm kind of artistically controlling and probably never would've considered it, but my sister asked me to write a book for her soon to be born son, her first, my godson. I thought it would be better as a picture book and then the world sort of opened up and I realised I could do that all the time, if only I had someone to produce the images.

And then Angie Spoto's post last month solidified it for me, made it all shine a bit more, turn from an idea to a compulsion, showed me this medium I've [accidentally] largely ignored my whole life really has a unique and special quality to it. The way text and images not only exist together but the way they interact and affect one another keeps turning over and over in my head, opening possibilities that didn't exist here before. And so I contacted two of my friends about joining me on a collaborative book project.

Another problem with collaboration, however, is that one must wait.

But then I came across the work of Natsumi Hayashi, The Yowayowa Camera Woman and everything kind of clicked. All these images, the nebulae, the floating woman, and then they tied to these words I hold within me and it's all I can think about, how this could be a way for me to make the collaborative novel I want to make, driven by the language of visuals, housed by the language of english. And so I'll take what exists millions of lightyears away, the peculiar self-portraits of a japanese woman, and the ghosts of me to make something, maybe, worth holding.

Comics Do It Better: Becky Cloonan's Wolves

Comics can do things traditional writing cannot. After all, humans were pairing words with pictures long before even the Greeks carved up the Parthenon Marbles, which, if you think about it, is a form of ancient comic storytelling. The artwork of a comic can accentuate the tone of the script, captions allow the reader to access the thoughts of the characters, and reader pacing is manipulated by the spacing between panels.

Never read a comic? Never fear. Becky Cloonan’s “Wolves” is a short and sweet introduction to the world of sequential art. Although Cloonan has written for Marvel Comics, her self-published comic book is a dark, expressive foray into a simple but compelling fantasy world, not a blow-stuff-up-while-wearing-spandex superhero comic. This short twenty-page comic in which the readers follow the story of a hunter on a mission that will change his life syncs gorgeous black and white artwork with a memorable script.

In only using black and white (and greys in between), Cloonan’s artwork emphasizes the tone of the story: dark, sharp, stark.  With the black and white limitation, she dynamically uses white space to tell her tale. The shadows, a natural result of the lack of color, create a fantasy world that is primeval and melancholy. The forest world of the hunter is depicted as chilling and harsh by severe diagonal lines throughout.

A combination unique to comics of first-person captions with third-person artwork always thrills me. It makes comics such as these so personal yet comprehensive. The readers can understand the feelings and thoughts of the characters, but exciting techniques such as dramatic irony can still be expressed. In “Wolves,” we read the hunter’s anguished thoughts through the captions, yet still have a view detached enough to see this anguish expressed in his posture, eyes, and proximity to other characters.

Cloonan rarely uses dialogue, but reveals the depth of the characters through first-person captions and compelling full-panel close ups. Attempting to express character emotion through a pair of eyes filling the panel is risky. A bad artist will not be able to convey the emotion with a set of 2D irises, but Cloonan pulls it off.

Cloonen’s panels are expressive as well. Square panels enclose events happening in real time, rounded panels, the past. The space between panels, called “gutters” by comic writers, are used to express leaps in time and control the reader’s pace. Cloonan effectively uses the gutters, increasing space between panels to draw out a scene and pushing panels closer together to increase tension on the page.

“Wolves” employs sophisticated techniques unique to comic books. So if you’ve never read a comic, just know that basically, comics can do it better.