Fun part of the job
Apr. 3rd, 2008 01:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
grinninfooleTonight, I went to Amherst College, where Alison Bechdel was giving a talk. She impressed me with her low-key friendliness and lack of pretension. Mostly she talked about Fun Home and how she went about creating it, and then she took some questions. The she went out into the foyer of Converse Hall and signed books, right next to where I was set up selling them. (and we sold about twenty. Score!) Then, entirely of her own volition, she signed every single unsold one.
It's strange to me that I found myself most interested in HOW she works and other cartoonists who influenced her. For any loved work or author, those questions naturally arise sooner or later, but I'm not a comics creator myself, so for me, it tends to be later. But Fun Home, in particular, is a tour de force of subtle technique. There are no virtuoso/show-offy splash pages, no sudden shifts in tone, no bravura bits of dialogue, but everything is just right, just as it needs to be sort of the way Jeeves is just where he needs to be. There's no other comic quite like it, and I was intrigued, but not surprised, that she is, apparently, not steeped in comics lore. She has influences, Howard Cruse in particular, but she didn't grow up reading Lee & Kirby (which shows in her art) or Crumb, and so her comics work has a sui generis quality, like Conrad's prose, perhaps, and like Conrad, her personal idiosyncrasy is part of what makes the work (and the person) so interesting.
I have to confess though, that I'm jealous: the odds are very low that I shall ever win an Eisner Award which will be handed to me by Neil Gaiman.
It's strange to me that I found myself most interested in HOW she works and other cartoonists who influenced her. For any loved work or author, those questions naturally arise sooner or later, but I'm not a comics creator myself, so for me, it tends to be later. But Fun Home, in particular, is a tour de force of subtle technique. There are no virtuoso/show-offy splash pages, no sudden shifts in tone, no bravura bits of dialogue, but everything is just right, just as it needs to be sort of the way Jeeves is just where he needs to be. There's no other comic quite like it, and I was intrigued, but not surprised, that she is, apparently, not steeped in comics lore. She has influences, Howard Cruse in particular, but she didn't grow up reading Lee & Kirby (which shows in her art) or Crumb, and so her comics work has a sui generis quality, like Conrad's prose, perhaps, and like Conrad, her personal idiosyncrasy is part of what makes the work (and the person) so interesting.
I have to confess though, that I'm jealous: the odds are very low that I shall ever win an Eisner Award which will be handed to me by Neil Gaiman.
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Date: 2008-04-03 07:16 am (UTC)