The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

How many of you experienced that sort of nervous, involuntary half-laugh when it transpired that the poor otaku who died during a recent earthquake in Japan might have been killed by his mountain of manga?

Hearing that he had his collection of manga in 6ft-high towers probably makes one unfamiliar with the world of comics think he was a truly obsessive collector, but it is worth bearing in mind that manga isn’t 36 or 32 or 24 pages thick with no real cover to speak of; on the contrary, manga can be very substantial. You get, in comic book terms, as our American cousins’ say, ‘a lot more bang for your buck’. So in that sense a single 6ft-high tower of manga would not have to comprise very many books; I mean, all the volumes of Golgo13 would probably make a few pretty high towers on its own. All the volumes of say, 2000AD, as thin as it is, would also reach a substantial height, if you were of a mind to build such a monument.

I suppose, if you know very little about comic readers and collectors and cartoonist, you might think, ‘wow, talk about excessive’, but if you do know something about comic readers and collectors and cartoonists, or if you are one of that group, or fall into more than one category or even all the categories, you’ll probably secretly be thinking, ‘there but for the grace…etc’.

I think the one advantage that obsessive collectors and cartoonists, or cartoonists who are also obsessive collectors will have had over this poor chap is that every comic book they own will be categorised and orderly and shelved and many will be tucked away in an earthquake-proof wrapping; not piled high in a wall of titles. In other words, being nerdier than an otaku is what will one day maybe save our cartoonist from being flattened like a bug.

Me, I don’t even put much on display. What I’ve done, over the years, is spread things around so that only I know exactly where they are. This is, I think, a defence mechanism that I taught myself after my mother threw out my childhood collection of comics, including X-Men #1, in case, I suppose, there was ever an earthquake and they fell on top of me.

Now, I’m pretty sure my story about my mother’s clear-out is not unfamiliar to quite a few of you, but what can you do? It’s their job after all (protecting us from a wall of comics crashing down on us in the event of an earthquake), and as Dan Collins has pointed out, if our mothers hadn’t destroyed the things, the remaining copies wouldn’t be so scarce and therefore so valuable. Talk about irony.

Of course it wasn’t really comic books our mothers were throwing away, was it? It was the memories wrapped up in the pages of the comic books. Or so we often tell ourselves. They seemed to not just contain our memories of being young, of not worrying about life and love and death and all the other baggage that comes with growing older, they seemed to allow us to relive that period when we held them in our hands. But hang on, the memories haven’t really gone away, have they? We can conjure them up whenever we like. They are still there, and still accessible, despite the comic books not being around as an aide-memoir. Despite not having the comic book at hand, we can still be transported back to that state, either with the aid of a reprint or just a quiet moment.

So are those memories, which are so unlike others that do need a trigger like a particular song or a distinct smell to be activated from the dark recesses of our mind, different from other memories? Did we read those comics differently because they formed part of our ‘play’ rather than the chore of reading for learning? Did the fact that we consumed them in a different way, help us capture those acts of reading as a sort of snapshot – an image burned into our brain? Well, that’s one of the areas that Lynda Barry explores in her new book ‘What it is’, published by Drawn and Quarterly:

What it is works in several ways; it is great fun and it looks fantastic, but more importantly it looks, to a child as if it’s a project they might have been capable of making themselves. What it is examines the creative process, but it also works as a trigger for that process and, in keeping with my favourite metaphor about cartooning, it will surely function as a cartoon created by a cartoonist to create another cartoonist – because as sure as eggs are eggs, What it is will inspire some creative little souls, and even some bigger ones, to go on and create artworks of their own. It will come to be seen, I am sure, as a very important book.

(all images from What It Is, published by Drawn & Quarterly and (c) Lynda Barry)

You can hear Lynda Barry explain a little about the book, the process, the Medusa section above and about herself and some of her teaching methods in this downloadable lecture provided by the Philadelphia Free library at this link. Born in Wisconsin, where she currently lives, Lynda Barry moved to Washington as a youngster and attended the same high school as Charles Burns. It was at The Evergreen State College in Washington that she studied under Marilyn Frasca, and where a fellow student, Simpsons creator, Matt Groening, would first published her creation, ‘Ernie Pook’s Comeek’ in the school paper, without her knowledge.

( “Future Past and Meanwhile”, art and (c) Lynda Barry )

Barry’s books include The Good Times are Killing Me, which was also made also made into a play, The Greatest of Marlys (there’s a website here showing some of the comics and also selling original Lynda art – Joe), The Freddie Stories, Cruddy: An Illustrated Novel, One! Hundred! Demons!, and, most recently, What It Is. You can find details of her popular workshop, Writing the Unthinkable, where she teaches the process she uses to create all of her work and which she uses in What It Is, online at Betty Bong’s Myspace page.

Rod has a regularly updated blog which you can check out, and for more information and a glimpse at some of his many works visit Rodtoons and enjoy browsing the gallery.