The Prodigal Daughter Returns

Comics: Philosophy and Practice Auditorium

I’m back.

The past few months have been intensely busy, and my time has been filled with an exciting, but exhausting internship at a political campaign. In the few hours I haven’t been interning, I’ve been applying to graduate school in Latin America, writing papers for conferences, and preparing to take terrifying tests. And that left very little time for comics. I’ve been back almost three months, but only just today checked a comic out of the library.

But, to be honest, it wasn’t just the lack of time that caused this distance from comics. After a year of studying, I wasn’t able to enjoy them anymore. I was burnt out. Contributing to this malaise was the fact that during two of the past three months unhappiness from leaving Argentina, unemployment (I’m an unpaid intern), and the intense and painful introspection that comes with thinking about the future put me in a foul mood. I though, maybe, the comics period of my life was over. (Yes, yes. A bit dramatic, I know.)

But this past weekend’s Comics: Philosophy and Practice, a three-day long academic comics conference at the University of Chicago, reinvigorated me. First of all, I was volunteering and got to meet a bunch of thoughtful, like-minded comics fans. Then, the conference included panels and interviews with some of my favorite illustrators, like R. Crumb, Alison Bechdel, Chris Ware, Lynda Barry, Seth, Daniel Clowes, Joe Sacco, Charles Burns, and Aileen Kominsky-Crumb. And finally, the conference gave me hope that I might find a way to pursue comics academically. The organizer, Hillary Chute, is a professor at the University of Chicago and writes extensively on graphic novels. An academic field exists for studying comics, and given the good turnout, I think it will be growing in the near future.

So, inspired by comics, I write again. 

Conferences, comics and politics

Okay. I’ll admit it. I’ve been neglecting this blog like it was a pile of dirty dishes. A lot of exciting things have happened in the comics world (to me, at least), so I’ll discuss them in order:

Dibujados:

Dibujados was an enjoyable event, mainly because it was filled with lots of comics and people I like. It was held in a hostel and was set up really well for selling, mingling and signing, but not for the lecture series it hosted.* The lectures were given in an open hall and there were a lot of people talking in the background, so I couldn’t hear much. In terms of my Spanish skills, I still haven’t mastered the ability to understand fragments of lectures. (I am proud to say that I am getting better at overhearing conversations. The other day I heard one street cleaner say to the other “He wanted women, but he could only find transvestite prostitutes.”) But I enjoyed the event because I bought a bunch of comics and saw my friends, so I give it four stars.

University of Palermo’s “9º Jornadas de Diseño de Historietas:”

The Jornada offered a series of lectures that dealt from all points of view from the creation of a comic to its eventual sale as a book. You can see the impressive series of lectures here. I attended the second half to learn about the part of the comics creation process that I hadn’t learned about through my interviews, like the printing process, sales in comics stores and magazine topic selection.

Seminar paper for “Artes secuenciales:”

The theme for my paper for Laura’s class dealt with how the economy has an impact on the ability for comics artists to live off their work. I turned it in on Tuesday and met with Laura on Friday for my oral final. Overall, I really enjoyed the final product, though the process of writing a paper turned me into a lunatic. (Makes me wonder how I ever maintained friends in college while turning in a 10-page paper every month.) I got an 8 out of 10, a good grade considering the fact that I wrote it in Spanish. Hopefully, I will translate some of the content for my blog and eventually turn it into some sort of paper.

Interview with Andrés Valenzuela and article in Cuadritos:

Andrés Valenzuela, comics journalist and generally awesome person, interviewed me for his blog Cuadritos. We met in the most silent bar I’ve ever been to in Buenos Aires and talked for about 30 minutes. Fortunately, we did the interview in English, so I don't end up sounding like a raving idiot in the article. The paper I wrote for Laura’s class helped me organize my ideas, so that when I talked about my grant my proclamations were focused and clear, looking at the larger picture instead of a few small details. Anyway, if you want to read the interview, you can find it here: “Los últimos ocho años beneficiaron a la historieta argentina.” ("The last eight years have benefitted the Argentine comic") As the title implies, I talk about economic stability in Argentina during the last eight years. During the past eight years, both Nestor and Cristina Kirchner were in power. Coincidentally Argentina had elections today in which Cristina Kirchner won.

Anyway, next week I’m going to continue with interviews and transcribing. I will be publishing piece by piece an interview I did with Diego Agrimbau. And, most importantly, I'm going to find a costume for Halloween.

*I complain about space a lot in this blog. Maybe I’m anal retentive or excessively bothered by everything, but I think layout can make or break an event. And other people have commented similar ideas to me in interviews or personal conversations, so I’m not the only crazy one.

Weekend in Lobos

The banner outside the Club Social Lobense

My project is both amazing and terrifying at the same time. Amazing, because I get to study and talk about comics all the time, and terrifying, because my project requires being social. At the Fede Pazos show, for example, I went in without knowing anyone and hung out until someone started talking to me. Now, don’t get me wrong. I love being social. I have no problem going somewhere and starting conversations with random people. But meeting a lot of new people at once can be extremely stressful. Sometimes this social aspect of my project made me feel so nervous that I almost wished I had a job working in a lab, like one of the other Fulbrighters. The EHH conference was a relief. As my description of the weekend shows, the people I met in Lobos were kind, funny, and interesting.

Friday night was sort of a bummer. I arrived at 4 pm and had to leave at 9:30pm because returning to Buenos Aires was cheaper than renting a hotel room. Laura refused to let me do that on Saturday and so I agreed to stay with one of the invitees. The one highlight of Friday night (besides the actual event) was that I got to meet Gustavo Sala and Lucas Varela, two comics creators that I have been reading (and have been continually disturbed by) since coming to Argentina in 2008. Varela, although claiming an affinity with Paolo Pinocchio, seemed to be a nice, relaxed guy. Sala was entertaining and seemed to have a lot in common with his comics. I was so sad when I had to leave, but knew I was coming back on Saturday.

I arrived at 4pm on Saturday, a few hours before the conference started, to meet up with Rosty (a friend from Laura’s seminar) and Paz (Rosty’s friend), two of the few fans that had arrived from Buenos Aires. We took the mandatory visit to Juan Peron’s childhood home and walked around a bit. Eventually, we wandered over to the Sociedad Española and I ran into Fran López, comics creator, rapper, and the only person I talked to at Fede Pazos show. We mosied on over to the Club Social Lobense for the round table discussions. (I’ll write about that part of the weekend in a later post.)

After the conferences, a few of the artists signed books and drew pictures. I hung out and ate fruit with Paz while Rosty walked around greeting artists. He had been after a drawing by Eduardo Risso for months, but Risso had refused every time. And with reason, Risso is meticulous. After conceding to Rosty’s request, Risso first sketched with pencil, then traced with pen, and finally filled in the shadows, taking at least fifteen minutes.

Meeting Risso was exciting. Before coming to Argentina, I read the work of two Argentine artists: Quino and Risso. Risso is the artist of 100 Bullets and is probably the only person I can mention in the United States who will make comic fanatics jealous. So, goaded by Laura, I finally asked Risso to draw me a picture of an evil character. Risso drew with such precision that everyone had left for dinner before he finished.

I was allowed into post-conference gala dinner because the cartoonist Eduardo Maicas confused/sweet talked the doorman into letting me into the building. The dinner was a monthly community fundraiser hosted in the main room of Ayuda a la Familia y al Niño’s boarding school. I was lucky enough to sit next to Sala and Maicas, and across from Noe and his wife. Throughout the night, children begging for drawings accosted these three artists and I got to see their creation process. Sala had been drawing pictures of a woman licking her own breast, so when a pigtailed muchkin approached him with a notepad, I was a bit apprehensive. He drew a cat jumping on a trampoline. *whew*

At the end of the night, we finally got around to the topic of where I was going to spend the night. It was decided, seemingly randomly, that I was going to stay at a cabin in the middle of nowhere with six men that I had just met: Federico Reggiani, Angel Mosquito, Fran López, Fabian Zalazar, Max Aguierre, and Hernán Cañellas. I was not afraid in the slightest (uncharacteristically) mainly because these men thought I was terrified and tried to calm me by repeatedly telling me not to be frightened. If I felt any apprehension spending the night with six random men, it disappeared completely when we got to the cabin and played…dominoes. The least scary game. Ever. And at the end of the night, they ended up giving me an entire room to myself.

The next morning was so relaxing, I’ve decided to become an Argentine artist in my next lifetime. They hung out, talked about cars (a conversation I could follow only because they inserted funny anecdotes), and made an amazing asado. One of the most interesting parts of my stay was the discussion we had about comics. We had to name our top five comics and then suffer the ridicule or approval of the others. Maus and Corto Maltes were two of the most popular choices. Being in a group of people where the participants can even name five comics is a rarity in my life, so hearing a lively debate about the merits of certain comics was like being in heaven.

During the day, I talked with Federico Reggiani and Angel Mosquito about “Tristeza,” a comic they are currently publishing in Fierro. “Tristeza” is about a world where a disease that causes people to become sad has decimated the population. Years later, the survivors have formed a semi-stable society. I am fascinated by the way that Reggiani and Mosquito imagine the details of the daily life of the survivors. The TV is a cardboard frame with drawn-on dials. Condoms have expired, making sex an obvious risk for pregnancy. Children from the neighborhood create the newspaper’s cartoons. Most of the post-apocalyptic comics I’ve read touch very little on how people would actually live, instead focusing on fighting, gore, or interpersonal power plays.

At the end of the day, they drove me back to Lobos so I could attend the closing of the conference. We stopped at Juan Peron’s childhood home to walk around and take pictures of Peron’s family relics. The guys left and as I wandered around the town, I realized Lobos is extremely boring when you are not hanging out with people. And so I took the next bus back to Buenos Aires.

ehh: Audience

Lobos is a small town in the provinces of Buenos Aires, birthplace of Juan Peron, and capital of ice cream. It is also a pretty random place for a comics convention. Although located only an hour and a half outside of Buenos Aires, Lobos is a prohibitively hard location to visit. Cheap, local busses stretch the ride out to 4 hours, while smaller, private busses are expensive. Most of the people that came to the convention were invited guests, locals, and a scattering of fans. To my knowledge, I was one of the few fans that managed to arrive from Buenos Aires and the only international visitor. The artists and writers that attended were either hosted by the city of Lobos or came to support their friends.

The citizens of Lobos made up the majority of the attendees. The talks were filled with an eclectic mix of children, sullen teenagers, families, and the elderly. I think many of the locals attended the conference not because of any sort of fanatical devotion to comics, but because it was a big event in a small town. Families with children were quite common at every talk. Rosty, a friend from Laura’s “Artes Secuenciales” class, pointed out a mother nonchalantly handing her son copies of El Asco by Diego Agrimbau and Estupefacto by Lucas Varela. If you look back a few posts, you might remember that these authors produce comics with very adult themes. Very adult themes. Shocked, I wondered out loud why, exactly a mother would think that was appropriate reading material for a child. Rosty reminded me that most adults think comics are primarily for children, and she probably had no idea what she had just bought for her son. But, as one panelist pointed out, getting children interested in comics (in whatever way possible) is beneficial because they are all potential future readers. In that sense, listening to the panelists speak and reading their work might be the beginning of a lifetime of readership.

Each talk was attended by a smattering of teenagers. They mostly hung out in the back and tried to look cool, but you could see that a few of them were really interested in the topics. An art class from a local high school visited a Q&A session made up of Diego Agrimbau, Gustavo Sala, and Lucas Varela. The teacher excitedly asked the panel what sort of career her students might be able to pursue in the arts. Their suggestion: If you want to make money, don’t go into comics. Although this is a depressing truth, just learning that writing and drawing comics is an actual profession is sort of revolutionary. I read comics in high school, but didn't know how they were made until college.

So why, exactly, is something like audience composition interesting? I want to know who the target audience is for these events, the potential for generating new readers and sustaining old ones, and perceptions of comics held by the mainstream. At this conference I was a mere observer, but at Crack Bang Boom and Viñetas Serias I might conduct an informal survey.

Overall, the turnout was not disappointing. The auditorium was filled during the round table discussions and there were always people looking at the comics exhibit in the Casa Española. As long as this conference keeps hosting such famous and important comics creators, I think this event’s reputation will grow and more people will come. Once, of course, they figure out how to get to Lobos.

Encuentro Nacional del Humor y la Historieta

I came across an announcement about the “Encuentro Nacional del Humor y la Historieta” (EHH) in some small corner of the online comics universe. Although it was the fourth EHH, there was no information on the Internet about the first three. In Lobos, I learned that the conference was revived after thirty years of indefinite suspension. The transformation that occurred in the gap years was featured in the wide range of guests— Horacio Altuna, Lucas Varela, Diego Agrimbau, Noe, Gustavo Sala, and many more. Some of the guests had attended the first conferences, while others had been children at the time. This combination of past and present was fascinating. What better place to learn about the trajectory of Argentine comics than a meeting of creators from different eras?

The conference consisted of a small exhibition in the Sociedad Española and a few round table discussions at the Club Social Lobense. I wish I could provide a broad summary of the events, but I am just to focus on a few small aspects that I found interesting. In the next few blog posts, I will write about the audience for the conference, who I met, and the talks. So stay tuned, dear readers.