Jesse Lonergan, Kids, and the Human Condition

From the Comics Alternative interview with Jesse Lonergan, author-illustrator most recently of All Star:

When I first got into [making] comics, the only ones that I was really into were comics that were based in some form of reality, and I was pretty disdainful of everything else. I was very much taken with the low-concept idea of narrative. The kind of stories where people would ask what it was about, and the only thing I could say was, “It’s about life!”

As I’ve gotten older that’s changed, and now I find myself more interested in high-concept ideas. I find myself returning to the things I liked in childhood. I, like most kids, wasn’t so concerned with the human condition then.

Ironically, All Star is set in the sort of small Vermont town where Lonergan was a kid. It’s very much about life. But his new projects are about larger-than life rock bands, Formula 1 drivers, and mythical figures from the Old West.

Greatest “Between Good and Awesome”

Back in April, Brian Gardes at the Stumptown Literary Review provided a very nice review of The Greatest of All Time Comics Anthology:

As with most anthologies there were some stories which were more successful than others. However, under the careful eye of editors Dan Mazur and Jesse Lonergan, these variations in quality fluctuate between good and awesome. . . .

While it is often a risk to purchase an anthology, I cannot recommend The Greatest of All Time Comics Anthology enough. It has a solid creative line up, great production values (twenty color pages in a small press book?!?!), and an enjoyable read from cover to cover!

Braden Lamb and I collaborated on one story in that collection, “The Greatest Spy of All Time.” Braden and his wife, Shelli Paroline, won Eisner Awards this summer for their work on Adventure Time, so I can’t argue that this publication was the highlight of the past twelve months for him, but I certainly enjoyed it.

Ninth Art Press’s next comics anthology will be about subcultures; here’s the call for submissions.

The Awesome

I heard this week that Jesse Lonergan’s graphic novel All Star, about high-school baseball in Vermont, is complete and on its way to the publisher. Good news!

While waiting for the final volume, Tony McMillen interviewed Lonergan for Dig Boston, a conversation that produced these observations:

Robocop is awesome, so is Indiana Jones. Star Wars is the best.

I went through a period starting in high school and continuing through college where I was only interested in the critically acclaimed and respected, which very often is not the same as the awesome. I would be all about those realistic 1970’s movies that start out at depressing and then grind their way to completely hopeless.

Now, I’ve kind of gone back to the twelve-year-old me. He’s right.

The fifteen-year-old me, however, he was clueless and a liar. He said, “I read Gen 13 for the story.”

I Am [in] “The Greatest”!

A story I wrote makes its debut today in a new anthology from Ninth Art Press: The Greatest of All Time Comics Anthology, edited by Dan Mazur and Jesse Lonergan.

Opinion is divided as to whether this should claim to be the greatest comics anthology of all time, but it definitely collects twenty stories in 124 pages clustered around the theme of “The Greatest.” Topics include the greatest rock band of all time, the greatest conspiracy theory ever, and one creator’s argument for the greatest bruise. Most of the book is in black and white, but two stories are printed in full color.

I was very fortunate to have as a collaborator Braden Lamb, currently sharing the art chores on the Adventure Time comic book with his wife, Shelli Paroline. (I’m also impressed that Braden got to do some colors on Teen Boat!)

Our story is titled: “The Greatest Spy of All Time.”

You Had to Be There

Right-handed comics creator Jesse Lonergan is gave his left hand a workout sketching people at the Boston Comics Roundtable meeting. The results are sort of like the spot illustrations in British mid-twentieth-century reprints of classic novels.

Last among the recognizable faces on that page is Ben Prager, whose webcomic is Bazzelwaki.

Cold Wind and the Limits of the Superhero Genre

Cold Wind is a short adventure comic written by Dan Mazur and drawn by Jesse Lonergan, independently published by Mazur’s Ninth Art Press.

I saw this story grow from a script that Dan shared with the Boston Comics Roundtable to its final form. Dan writes in screenplay format, not breaking his story into pages and panels. Often he draws his own art, so that’s obviously not a problem. In this case, he left it up to Jesse—who’s scripted his own Flower and Fade, Joe and Azat, and other tales—to divide the screenplay into images. Yet another approach to collaboration.

Dan’s told me a couple of times how he’s no longer a fan of superhero comics because of their repetitive themes. He reads one Spider-Man story, learns that “With great power comes great responsibility,” reads another story—and learns the same thing.

As former Marvel editor Jim Shooter has commented:

Comic books have become like opera. You go to see a particular performance of an old story, not a new story. How will this performer handle that familiar role...?

That familiarity is part of the appeal of a series, or a genre.

At the last roundtable meeting, Dan wondered aloud if Cold Wind is a superhero comic. I said it qualified, despite his ambivalence about the genre. It’s a pumped-up action story taking place against a fantastic landscape. Its characters are largely symbolic, and they work out the fate of the world through violence.

But Cold Wind reflects Dan Mazur’s take on the superhero genre, with the theme that things don’t change significantly. For all the adventure’s sound effects and fury, its surviving characters achieve only a short pleasure before the world spins on.

Cold Wind is on sale today at the MoCCA Festival, in the better Boston-area comics shops, and over the web.

(Not) At the Boston Comic-Con This Weekend

Because I’ll speak at the SCBWI New England conference this weekend, and don’t have the option of an alternate life, I won’t be at the Boston Comic-Con. Physically, that is.

In spirit, I’ll be represented by two publications. First, the Boston Comics Roundtable has issued Hellbound II, its anthology of horror comics, as a handy paperback. Heretofore the collection was available only in an “art edition,” with handmade paper covers and box. The new paperback has all the chills of the first state at a fraction of the price.

Among the stories in Hellbound II is “RobMeBlind.com,” by me and Andy Wong. Formally I’m the scripter and Andy’s the artist, but this was a true collaboration. The inspiration was an anecdote that Andy told at a roundtable meeting. I went home and wrote a script spinning off that. Andy drew my script, turning four pages into five. I suggested ways to clarify the word balloons and darken the art, and Andy inserted what worked for him. (And finally I used my leverage as the book’s proofreader to push for the last page to be hidden by a page turn.)

Jen Vaughn at the Center for Cartoon Studies’ Schulz Library just reviewed the collection, and I’ll quote my favorite passage:

Often the failing of a horror anthology is that you you read WITH the intention of being scared and thus, thumb through the pages bravely. A well-written comic is not necessarily terrifying until at night, it twists itself in the dark of your room, and you can suddenly recall images.

A particular story that follows that logic is RobMeBlind.com, which is about thieves who utilize location-based smart phone apps to figure out when people are gone from their homes. The clever crafting by J.L. Bell and Andy Wong left me awake blinking at my ceiling (possibly at the easy ability people have of giving away information for temporary celebrity). And the dark woodcut panels of E.J. Barnes in Patrick Flaherty’s story The Plague exemplify a great use of comics to set the mood for the story. Hellbound 2 is perfect for the horror fan or lover of hand-made objects, especially if those objects are a skin suit made from their victims.

Also at Boston Comic-Con, Jesse Lonergan will be offering a samizdat collection of images of robots from Boston Comics Roundtable members and other friends. I sent him a sketch of a robot singing, “R. U. R. or R. U. Ain’t My Baby?” Cartooning is outside my comfort zone, but how often will I have the chance to honor Karel Capek and Louis Jordan in one image?

The Beauty of a Do-Over

On Tuesday cartoonist Jesse Lonergan (Joe and Azat, among the notable titles listed in Best American Comics 2011) provided a précis of his writing process. It adds more detail to what I typed out after I met him at the Boston Comics Roundtable:

I'll plot out the story roughly in a notebook. In the case of this book, which I think will be around 100 pages, I wrote two pages of notes. I then sit down with a sketchbook and go. I draw a six panel grid on every page and fill the panels, no thought given to layout at all. The goal is just to get the images down. . . .

All these pages were numbered and scanned. I'd like to think that there is a purpose to numbering the pages, but I think I do it mainly because I like using my little number stamp to mark the pages.

Last fall Jesse shared the results of a wilder creative method: each day drawing a comics page in a notebook without planning the story at all. Some of my favorite pages of that sequence were actually dead ends, where Jesse decided to give himself a do-over.

You can really see the creative process at work.

Or not.

At one point I thought Jesse was using this exercise to work out ideas for his new graphic novel. But that book will be about high-school baseball in Vermont. So now I think one motivation for these little pages might have been the opportunity to use the little date stamp.

Finding Inspiration for Hellbound II

Hellbound II is an anthology of independent horror comics being published by the Boston Comics Roundtable. It’s currently available in a “Limited Art Edition,” and later will appear as a conventional paperback. The deluxe version consists of two softcover volumes in a box, both covers and the box itself made from handmade paper with silkscreened cover art by Jesse Lonergan.

Andy Wong and I created a story in Hellbound II titled “RobMeBlind.com.” Here’s a bit from a joint interview by Steve Cartisano, one of a series with Hellbound II creators:

John, what inspired you to write this story?

At a BCR meeting, Andy Wong was chatting with a small group—Lindsay Moore, Carl Tsui, and me—about a website called StealMyStuff.com. That’s a real website which works a lot like the one in our story, connecting people’s Facebook updates about going out of town with their street addresses as a warning to manage your privacy settings. I joked about how that could lead to something worse. That evening I typed out a first draft of the script to send back to the little group. Andy said he wanted to draw it, which struck me as right and proper because he’d served the ball to begin with.

Andy, is that what drew you to this story?

I enjoyed the fact it spouted from a conversation I had with John. I wanted to try my hand at the horror genre, since I usually draw silly slice of life comedies. There was also this growing hunger to draw some crazy monster designs.

It looks like StealMyStuff.com is no longer active, but you can get the same idea from ICanStalkU.com. Or this New York Times article about the personal information embedded in some digital snapshots. Isn’t it wonderful how the modern world offers opportunities for chills that previous generations never knew?

Okay, Break It Up

Artist Jesse Lonergan is offering silk-screened prints of this battle royale at SPX this weekend.

Among the combatants, visible toward the middle of the right edge, is the Tin Woodman.

For a closer view that allows one to pick out Astro Boy, Spaceman Spiff, Deadman, Beetlejuice, Graham Chapman as King Arthur, and a California Raisin, among many others, visit Lonergan’s blog.

Boston Comics Roundtable Shows and Tells

The Boston Comics Roundtable has just co-published another anthology, this one on education. It’s titled Show and Tell: A Collection of Comics About Teaching and Learning, and comes out to coincide with the New England Comic Arts in the Classroom Conference in Providence.

Publisher Ninth Art Press says:

In these twenty short stories set in and around the classroom, independent comics creators explore the drama and humor of teaching and learning… or at least trying to teach and learn. From elementary school to college, from the perspectives of teachers and students, these tales touch on some serious issues of education, but their main goal is to make you laugh, cry, or cringe.

The press offers sample pages from Show and Tell, showing the range of styles and approaches. For example, “Iruma,” by Ben DiMaggio and Len White, is an anecdote about teaching English in Japan.

Marek Bennett takes a more theory-driven approach to “Multiple Intelligences and Comics Education,” as excerpted at right.

And Jesse Lonergan depicts the challenges of substitute teaching in a form reminiscent of daily strips, as you can see in samples of his contribution here.

Weekly Robin Dance Party!

Last month I had the pleasure of meeting Jesse Lonergan, the cartoonist behind the image above. And Lonergan had the wholly unrelated pleasure of seeing the Comics Alliance site praise his ongoing dance party of pop-culture characters, including boogieing figures from the DC, Marvel, and Star Wars mythologies.

Lonergan has created the graphic novels Joe and Azat, about a Turkmen and a Peace Corps volunteer, and Flower and Fade, a love (?) story, both from NBM.

One Thursday in February, Lonergan brought one of his filled-up sketchbooks to the Boston Comics Roundtable and left it on the table for anyone to look at. Under questioning from a pesky audience member (okay, me), he described his method of creating rough drafts.

Some author-artists write out a full script before designing pages. For example, Bryan Lee O’Malley says here: “I was thinking that I should write more visually, but it fizzled.” And here: “Last time I didn’t quite make it to the end of the script, and I think it hurt the story overall. I had some delusions about how I would write the book in sketches and thumbnails, but that just didn’t work for me.”

In contrast, Lonergan has found he gets the best results by starting with a six-panel page and then sketching out the action and dialogue. As with any draft, a lot changes in revision. Panels disappear, or expand. Dialogue gets edited. Scenes shift. But these stories start out in visual form.

I’ve heard prose novelists discuss their equally variant ways of working: plotting and plunging, starting in the middle versus starting at the opening, focusing first on character or on plot. All that matters is how the story comes out, not the route the storyteller took to get there.

I’ll close with another image of rockin’ Robin, from Bill Walko at Titans Tower. Walko is providing a series of nostalgic looks at the Teen Titans of different eras. This group comes from the mid-1970s, for example. Walko’s renderings have won attention from Comics Alliance and Every Day Is Like Wednesday.