I was having a really bad day, and then I drew this tiny angry face and felt better for a while.
Xiao Mao's Things: TCAF: The place to be
Like the first sunrise after a long Arctic winter, TCAF’s arrival filled me with hope. I’m not even sure where to start writing about it, but take note! This is the Plato’s Apple of conventions, the comic convention in its ideal form. Here are just some of the good things about it…
I guess I know where I’m going next spring!
Optical Sloth has a review up of the NERVENKRANK preview minicomic.
Thanks, Kevin!
He was one of several people at SPACE who asked for review copies, which I was happy to provide. Strangely enough, although Stumptown was 2-3 times bigger than SPACE, not one person at Stumptown asked me for a review copy. I can’t imagine why.
He brings up some questions I probably should’ve answered in the book itself, but since I didn’t, I’ll try to clarify them here.
- NERVENKRANK is going to be a graphic novel, probably a long one, possibly in two or more volumes. Exactly how long I don’t know, because I’m still working on the script, but my storytelling style leans toward the decompressed and I plan to cover the years 1915-1933, so… it’s likely to have a pretty fat spine.
- It’s about John Heartfield. Here’s the capsule biography I wrote for the back cover:
John Heartfield (1891-1968) was born Helmut Herzfeld in Berlin. After a childhood riven by trauma and an unhappy sojourn in the German army during World War I, he became a founding member of the influential Berlin Dada group, along with his close friend and collaborator George Grosz. Later he gained international fame as a designer of book covers, posters and stage sets, but his greatest achievements were his political photomontages of 1924-1945, which brutally satirized and railed against Adolf Hitler, the Nazi Party, German warmongering, and the injustices of capitalism.
- The May 2012 preview, which I sold at SPACE and Stumptown and which you can buy here (for the price of a latte!) contains the first 8 pages of the book, plus some sketches and background material.
- I’m going to debut a longer version of this preview (about 15 pages of story, plus extra stuff) at SPX in September. (I had hoped to have all 15 pages done for the April cons, but early 2012 was unfortunately eventful and it didn’t happen.)
- I am not planning to serialize the entire work. Of course, plans do change, but right now I’d like to find a publisher and go straight to GN. It seems less headachey.
- It’s not strictly a biography. I’m sticking to facts where I have facts, but there are a lot of gaps in the record of the life of a guy who was born 120 years ago. Lynda Barry calls ONE HUNDRED DEMONS autobifictionalography; I guess NERVENKRANK is bifictionalography.
- The word nervenkrank is German for mentally ill. Heartfield (who was still Herzfeld at the time) was drafted into the German infantry at the outbreak of WWI. He declared himself nervenkrank to his company commander in 1915, and was sent to a military mental hospital, where he spent several months. His brother Wieland visited him and found “a pale man, who spoke haltingly and attempted to scrape the leaves in the garden into a heap with a rake.” Nobody knows specifically what happened to Heartfield in there, but it can’t have been nice.
"Thus, a great work of art that had been all but lost to us, hanging in a private Norwegian home for more than a century, made a brief public appearance and then was sold off to another private owner, probably to disappear for another 100 years. We will likely never see this work of art again in our lifetimes."
This is why I stopped trying to sell paintings and went back to making reproducible things.
This is the photo I referenced for panels 4 and 165 of NO ONE IS SAFE. My dad is on the far right side, in the middle ground behind the barrier, walking towards the right.
I finally made myself a web store
NERVENKRANK is $3, big prints of NO ONE IS SAFE are $29.95.
Sarah and I went to Stumptown and here is the proof. I’ll post my travel journal tonight or tomorrow (still gotta polish it a little).
(Source: Flickr / oceanyamaha)
Studies, sketches, handmade books, uncategorizable things.
"Cento" Copyright © Andrew Brinker 2011.
