Will Eisner Week in Metro Boston

The Million Year Picnic comics shop, Stephen Weiner of the Maynard Public Library, the Cambridge Public Library, and folks from the Boston Comics Roundtable are collaborating on a local celebration of Will Eisner Week.

On Thursday, 6 March, the Cambridge library will host a conversation between two comics creators about Eisner’s art and legacy:

• Paul Hornschemeier, creator of Mother, Come Home; The Three Paradoxes; and the New York Times best seller Life with Mr. Dangerous, among other titles.
• Denis Kitchen, “underground comix” cartoonist, founder of Kitchen Sink Press and the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, and Eisner’s literary executor.

That event is said to be scheduled from 6:00 to 8:00 PM at the library. This will be followed by a signing at the Million Year Picnic in Harvard Square, which has a weeklong sale of Eisner books. (I just bought one using another discount.)

On Saturday, 8 March, several local comics creators will lead comics workshops for kids (and interested adults who bring kids along) at the Cambridge library. Those creators are Jef Czekaj, Josh Dahl, Bob Flynn, Dan Mazur, Dan Moynihan, Braden Lamb, and Shelli Paroline. Those workshops start at 12:30 PM and run for two hours. Afterwards, there will be another signing at the Million Year Picnic from 3:00 to 5:00 PM.

Illustrating Picture Books versus Drawing Comics

Toward the end of his conversation with Skottie Young on the Stuff Said podcast, artist Gregg Schigiel asks about Young’s experience illustrating his first picture book, Fortunately, the Milk by Neil Gaiman. (A lot of Schigiel’s interviews seem to be digging for career counseling, but that’s another story.)

Young sounds almost amazed as he reports how much easier illustrating a picture book was compared to drawing a comic. Jef Czekaj said the same thing on a panel I moderated a while back. I wouldn’t be surprised if other artists who’ve worked in both fields feel the same way. That’s not to say picture-book illustration is easy; but relatively it seems to be a more pleasant experience.

For one thing, picture books don’t require so many pictures. A 32-page picture book might require 20 separate images, which could fill as few as four pages of standard comics. True, those images have to be bigger and more detailed so that they reward multiple readings. On the other hand, they don’t have to be so tightly squeezed together on a page with captions and word balloons impinging on them.

More important, however, is how picture-book publishers treat artists. Editors and art directors choose an artist based on his or her past work and reputation, and they see their job as assisting the writer’s and artist’s visions come to fruition, not to move the corporation’s larger story along. They don’t try to exercise so much editorial control. They set more generous deadlines.

Schigiel’s book experience has come with licensed titles (i.e., those that are part of a corporation’s larger story). So he starts out asking Young what his Art Director told him. But Art Directors for picture books are far more hands-off than people with the same title in other parts of publishing. Young found himself surprised at how few “notes” he received back on his sketches.

The biggest difference between the mainstream book business and other forms of publishing is visible on the covers. On a book, the author’s and illustrator’s names are almost always the biggest; on Fortunately, the Milk, Gaiman’s name is huge, Young’s rather small. But the publisher’s name is usually smallest of all, slipped onto the bottom of the spine and the back. In a comic book or other magazine, the magazine’s name is the biggest; its employees are in charge, and its intellectual property and reputation is what mainly drives the sales.

It’s Pronounced “Check-Eye”

I’m just back from moderating the Foundation for Children’s Books celebration of “New England Voices.” This year’s session featured three talented and friendly authors with three very different types of books and types of presentations:

• Melissa Stewart showed classroom activities she uses to teach kids about the amphibia in her nonfiction picture book A Place for Frogs.
• Jef Czekaj presented his comics-style picture book Hip and Hop, Don’t Stop! with background beats.
• Kevin Markey read from his manuscript for the next volume in his Super Sluggers series of baseball novels for middle-graders.

And then came the question session. I always think the best questions for a panel of three authors address the work of two or ideally all of them. So where’s the common ground?

Um, wasn’t it hot today?

Did you like dinner at Tartufo?

Where do you get your ideas?

But in fact there are some areas of overlap. First, the baseball team in Super Sluggers is haunted by ecological disasters: thunderclouds over their slumping hitter, unseasonable winter, plagues of locusts. A Place for Frogs talks about how changes in habitats affect animals. Kevin and Melissa were thus able to discuss the environmental awareness of today’s kids, how the idea of ecological trouble is now part of our world-view.

Second, the picture-book authors are using text in non-traditional ways, not just a single thread of third-person narration that an adult can read. A Place for Frogs has three levels of text: a simple main text, additional information about each species, and a more complex description of an effort to save that habitat. Hip and Hop is in comics style, with speech balloons in addition to the narration.

That opened the door to Jef talking about how comics techniques have become acceptable in picture books; he used to write his stories as comics, then convert them to traditional picture-book forms, but now he doesn’t have to. Melissa and audience members talked about how kids can process different levels of texts, particularly when reading together (PDF download).