Hi! Thanks to everyone who came out to Desert Island yesterday afternoon for such a fun party. Tomorrow I will go to the Strand and speak, and then I will duck down in my house and not come out for another year while I make a couple new comics. I feel anxiety and total lack of touch with making comics. This whole summer has been a bust for making anything, that's depressing to even write. But August I'm going to disappear and hopefully get some good work done on Calamity, (the sequel to Girl Stories).
Good closure for all of this, however, will be going to the Strand and talking about the Goddess of War tomorrow.
Teaching Comics, Anxiety and the Heat
Hi again. I should really blog more frequently, but right now I am in non-stop teaching mode. I'm teaching high school students at the amazing revolutionary SVA pre-college program. We get forty students from around the world who are the best cartooning kids in the country. Then we force them to do 10 pages in three weeks. And the results are amazing! Keith Mayerson, who designed the program and sets up this totally positive learning environment says they always succeed because they don't know it's hard. And it's true, I hem and haw and try to perfect things, but all of this fear keeps the work from flowing. These students don't have any time to be fearful, and their minds are like sponges, so they suck up knowledge, and spit out cool comics.It's always a thrill to be able to hand a kid who comes from somewhere in Kentucky a brush or a g-pen or a crowquill, and two seconds later they are going to town. And you can see that super satisfied smile that learning a new tool always provides. It's also cool to be a supporter of a student's deep cosmology that's been growing inside their brains since they were in fourth grade.
Some nights I teach adult ed too, and I like those classes, because I always feel I am touching base with that optimistic high schooler that has remained semi-dormant inside the adult needing an outlet.
Some days I'll be teaching 9.5 hours a day. So I haven't had much time to make comics but my mind is very creatively restless. I keep thinking of stuff for Calamity, the sequel to Girl Stories that I'm working on, but I gotta put the pedal to the metal on that comic. I wake up each morning with a sense of anxiety about getting work done, all day it hangs in the background.
While all this was going on I forgot to pay the heating bill and our heat got shut off, that meant no hot showers or really clean dishes. So then I paid the heating bill and the guys came to turn the heat back on, but then they turned our gas stove off because my landlord was paying for our cooking gas on a separate line, and had it shut off not knowing our gas line was attached (we didn't know it either). So now we have to get a new gas line. The guys left, assuring us the heat had been turned back on, but actually, in real life it had not. So we're taking cold showers, which is invigorating, and Tim's grilling delicious things like corn and tuna. Did you know that grilled corn is the best food?